by Jax Miller
“I’ll warm it up.”
Peter waited across the room. If looks could kill. “Where’s Ethan?” Mark yelled from the bathroom.
“At your mother’s for the night,” I kept my eyes locked with Peter’s. “Just until this hellish flu passes over.”
“You mean some fucking peace and quiet, finally?”
I spoke so only Peter could hear. “Something like that.” But perhaps out of habit, I turned the oven on, despite there being no dinner for probably the first time in our marriage. Nor was I expecting peace and quiet.
“You’re throwing up?” Peter whispered from the couch, where Mark left his police duty belt on the arm.
I tilted my head, holding his gaze. Are you really going to make me say it?
He sighed, and I read his mind. That’s why you’re telling him…
“Where the hell is dinner?” he asked as he unbuttoned down to a wifebeater and dove into the fridge for a beer. “And no more Heineken?”
“Matthew drank it all,” I said as I sat back on a stool. “Mark. We need to talk.”
“C’mon, I’m not even in the door for five goddamn seconds.”
“You have so. I just want to talk.”
He opened the small cabinets above the stove and grabbed the emergency stash of Maker’s Mark. He took a long, loud swig from the neck wrapped in red wax. He sat down on the stool across from me; the liquor made his cheeks start to blush. But for the dirty blond hair, he was the spitting image of Matthew, or rather Matthew was the spitting image of him. “Well, spit it the fuck out, will ya?” He spoke with his hands. And I did.
“I’m pregnant.”
He crooked his head with a grin, that same grin as Matthew, the grin of their mother. And no wonder, they only crawled from the same swamp that was her vagina. I think I held my breath in the silence between the statement and his reaction.
Mark had barely touched me since the birth of our son, the last time a good six months ago. That’s what this marriage had become: Mark getting his jollies off everywhere else, me staying home, embarrassed because everybody knew and pretended it was a big secret to me. And he always had a temper, even since before we were married. Always the signature temper of the Delaney family, and in all honesty, I think it was also half the reason I found him so attractive all that time ago: the neighborhood badass, the respectable job as a cop, the one all the other wives wanted…and, well, they had.
The stools flew out from under us as he grabbed me by the back of my hair. And I’d have been a liar to say that I was surprised; he reacted more than once with his hands. A slap here, a sock to the gut there, a lot of broken furniture in between. It’s hard to believe I was that woman, all those years ago. Weak. I never stood up for myself. Always the fucking victim. He pinned me to the kitchen floor, knee, with all his muscle behind it, pressed to my stomach. I pleaded, I begged. His eyes went black, his face filled with blood. He screamed through his teeth, but I couldn’t hear anything with all the life I had pulsing in my face and ears. In the corner of my eye, the lights of the Christmas tree faded to black, my vision closing in on this monster. This is going to be the last thing I see of this earth, this fucking face.
He dragged me across the floor and toward the stove like a rag doll. God, did I scream bloody murder as he opened the oven door and pulled my head up by the hair. Mark was going to put my head in the oven.
And then the shot.
I pushed off the inside of the oven door just fast enough so as not to get burned. The room spun around me; my ears rang with the sound. Mark fell beside me. The blood. God, the blood. Nothing like you saw in Hollywood. It seemed to paint the walls from the exit wound at the side of his head. And when I finally caught my breath, I poked my head around the island counter.
Peter, the smoking gun in his hand, so to speak.
I raised my hand, my palm facing him, trembling in the air, “Just put it down, Peter.” I hush. His eyes twitched and neck jerked, like it does when he gets nervous. He let his limp hands drop Mark’s police-issued firearm and fall on his lap.
Don’t ask me. To this day, I’ve no idea how Peter managed such a shot in that condition. It was chance. Pure fucking, brilliant chance.
I went to him and pressed his head to my stomach, stroking his hair. “It’s OK. It’s going to be all right.” But I got the feeling that he too knew it was bullshit. The jerking of his head on my gut was painful after Mark’s knee. I grabbed the Glock from the top of his thighs. Suddenly, the thundering of Matthew’s truck pulling up in the driveway. I heard him hit the garage door, a sure sign that he was already drunk, thank Christ. I had to think fast. I put the gun in the back of my pants and draped the police belt over my shoulder. “We don’t have to make this any worse than it already is, Peter.”
And with every ounce of emotion that had been nonexistent in me in the days prior, I acted. No time to think, just react, and at a pace that even surprised me. I ran back for the stove, where Mark’s blood pooled in front of the sink. The island counter, the only thing that would block Matthew’s view from the front door. The heaviness on the porch, the scuffs of his construction boots. “Keep him in the living room for two minutes; say anything you have to.”
I grabbed Mark by his wrists and turned the corner to the hallway just as Matthew was stumbling in. Running on pure adrenaline, I dragged 190 pounds of dead weight all the way to the bathroom, a trail of blood following. I locked the door behind me. I heard Peter: “You hear about J-J-John’s latest escapade down at Herkimer’s?” One limb at a time, I managed to get all of Mark into the shower, throwing the duty belt in after him.
Before I reached the front of the hallway, I saw Peter sweating from a mile away. It was the first time Matthew had seen me since the rape. He sat on the couch, grabbing the remote to turn on the TV, elbows to his knees, chips of paint from his camouflage pants all over the carpet. “Jesus Christ, I need to piss,” he said as he rose. He acted like the rape had never occurred, it just never happened.
Peter tried to speak, but the words couldn’t make it to the surface.
I hurried past the kitchen, fetching the Maker’s Mark off the counter, and to the living room, where we bumped into each other. “Whoa, what’s your rush, sweetheart?”
Don’t let him look to his left. Don’t let him see the blood.
I waved the bottle under his nose, anything to keep him distracted from seeing his brother’s brains splattered all over the kitchen. But he knew I barely drank, so I had to act drunk. “Just getting my drink on.” I tried to maneuver him into the living room. But he pushed back, hard enough that I had to walk backward to keep from falling.
“All right, just let me drain the main vein, Ness.”
He shoved me farther than I thought and before I knew it, we were at the bathroom door. He reached behind my back and twisted the doorknob. With all my might, I knocked him against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, grabbing his crotch. “Allow me.”
I kissed him, grabbed him by his belt buckle, and led him back down the hall. “You’re killing me,” he slurred. If only you knew.
I stopped in front of him, grinding my ass against his hard-on. “Tell me how fucking bad you want me,” I said as I took one of his hands and put it up my shirt. With the other, I guided his fingers inside me. Anything to keep this fucker turned on. I took his fingers out and sucked on them. “Tell me how bad you want me.”
“I fucking love you, Ness,” he said as he kissed my neck, still throbbing from his brother. “I’ve loved you since I met you and I want you in every possible fucking way.”
On the way to the bedroom, I avoided Peter’s eyes. He’d suffered enough; he didn’t have to see my face as I led his brother into the bedroom to let him have his way once more.
Behind closed doors, I faked ecstasy. We drank Maker’s Mark. And I waited for him to fall asleep after drowning him in nearly a fifth of whiskey, enough that he was too limp to fuck anymore and fell into a coma.
�
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It was an easy arrest for the cops. I had the bruises. I had the bloody clothes. I’d given my kid to my mother-in-law “because it was premeditated.” And everybody knows that when an officer gets killed, especially murdered, the rest of them will stop at nothing to seek justice. Even if it’s the wrong justice.
“I’m not the one you should be arresting, damn it!” I screamed at the cops. “The guy who did it is passed out drunk in the bedroom!”
Peter pleaded with officers. “I shot him! I shot the son of a bitch.”
But the cops heard none of it. They wanted to get the guy who killed their fellow brother in arms, even if it was me, even if it was the wrong person.
But I wouldn’t let Peter be charged for this crime. And in all honesty, I didn’t think I would be either. “Oh, yeah?” I said before all the cops. “Then where’s the gun, smart-ass?” But Peter didn’t have an answer.
My name is Freedom and I watch the sun rise on the lake. Behind me, a row of log cabins, nearly empty as tourist season fizzles out for winter. Adirondack chairs at the water’s edge look lost without the bodies stained by summer. Sun umbrellas form a graveyard across the way. The sky, spectacular. But I wonder if it shines on Rebekah, if she’s dead or alive. I can’t help but think of the same sun shining on her rotting corpse somewhere. I don’t mean to think this way.
I hate how still the water is, how beautiful the sky is. It’s like God’s rubbing it in my face, a reminder of how fucked-up everything is, how chaotic. Why did this happen to me? Why did I have to be punished for being raped, for the death of my husband? More than anything, why did I have to be away from my children? I rip at fistfuls of stones and dirt; I have to ruin this picture of still waters. I want to rip the sun from its sky. I roar with every piece of the earth I chuck into the lake, the mallards flying away. I try to rip an Adirondack chair to pieces, but I only end up with splinters in my hands.
The lights turn on in the cabin. The receptionist’s dog barks. My screams tear the silence in half.
The men from my cabin come to the porch, I can feel them, even with my back to them. Mason. Peter. The ATF operation, which includes Joe and a scary-looking skinhead. As I stab the shallow water with a rusty umbrella pole, Mason runs up behind me. He pulls me into a bear hug and squeezes. He doesn’t call me Freedom. He doesn’t call me Nessa. He doesn’t call me Mom. He just tells me that it’s OK, that I have nothing to be sorry about. I realize that in my screams, in my cries, I’ve been saying “I’m sorry” the entire time.
My whimpers die out as he squeezes to hold me from collapsing. As I lean on his chest in his arms, he and I look out to the sunrise that I failed to single-handedly destroy. And like I did to him twenty years ago in the last time I was happy, he buries his face in my hair and holds me tight. “You’re stronger than you think,” he tells me, while the other men return to the rented cabin.
“We’ll see.”
—
The cabin buzzes with intention; focus turns to static around me. I feel recharged, refreshed, reared, and ready.
“Quit being a perv.” I smirk at Peter as I’m about to take my shirt off.
He smiles. “I’m no perv,” he says as he turns his wheelchair around in the cramped cabin, joining Mason to face the wall. “I’m just human.”
“I have to ask,” says the skinhead, enjoying the sight of me in my bra a little too much. “How the hell did you manage to get access to this place?”
“FreedomInJesus,” I tell them. “I’ve been following his sermons for as long as I can remember.”
“I know that name,” says Joe. “We all just thought you were some kinda crazy. Clever, I’ll give you that. Clever.”
Silence. “I just wanted to see my children.”
Behind me, Joe speaks with a wire in his teeth, equipping me with a transmitter in the back of my jeans. “You remember the safe word?” he asks.
“I want immunity. If I’m doing this for you, I need any charges for me dropped: the cop’s gun, stealing the cop car, the motorcycle, all of that.”
“I told you you’ll get it.” Joe steps in front of me, pressing to secure the tape that holds the wire to my chest. “Now, what’s the safe word?”
I chug on the last of my gas station coffee. “Get the fuck in here and save me from these assholes.”
“Freedom…”
“All right, all right,” I say as I put my shirt back on. “Looks like a storm’s coming.”
My name is Freedom and I gear up to walk the crushed white clamshells that make up the narrow roads in this corner of Goshen, Kentucky. The black metal gates of the Paul farm shelve frost. The ties that hold the posters and boards to the palisades shiver in the wind, the kind of wind that sounds like the sharpening of steel that might whistle through an arctic hell, the frostbiting kind that stings my cheeks and makes me tear.
Up ahead, a crowd made up of about a dime and a half protest against the cult, a chant that rolls over the hills, “Burn in hell, Burn in hell!” Tall picketers bounce up and down in the air, like they’re poking heaven with a stick in the hope that their gods might react. Outside our car is a poster as tall as me that displays a list of four names in white, all with a line through them:
Manson. Koresh. Jones. Applewhite.
A fifth one, in bold red letters, reads:
Paul.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Mason asks from the passenger’s seat of the ATF surveillance van pulled over at the side of the road and out of sight from the protesters.
“I’m our only shot.” I stare at myself in the side-view mirror. “What’s with the fucking lynch mob?”
“Don’t worry about them,” says Joe of the ATF, the undercover who last saw Rebekah, as he taps the microphone through my shirt. “They’re nothing but Bible thumpers. Crazies, but harmless.”
The sweat makes my armpits itch; it pools to a tarn at the sides of my snatch. On the other side of this gate is my only shot at redemption, my only shot at giving my life just a mustard seed of purpose, my one shot at finding the daughter I only knew for two minutes and seventeen seconds. “There’s no turning back,” I say under my breath.
“Just have a little faith, Mom,” says Mason, the first time I hear the word fall from his lips since he was a child. But I have to wonder if it is only to encourage me as I ready myself into foreign farms of Jesus and quasi-forms of religion.
“Faith…” I trail off. “I don’t need any more crutches.” I press on the mic under my shirt to fasten the adhesive and turn to Joe. “If they make me sign over my car and milk cows or some shit, promise you’ll get me the hell out of there.”
“You’ll be fine, just remember what we talked about. Looks like a storm’s coming.” Yeah, yeah, I know. Throw myself to the wolves, listen, find out what terrorist act they’re planning to channel their zeal and self-righteous delusions of martyrdom. I get it, you redneck. Sub rosa.
“Ready?” And I can see it in his eyes, the expectance of some emotional tell-my-kids-I-love-them bullshit good-bye. “Take this with ya,” Joe says and hands me a Bible.
“Ah, the better to roll my cigarettes with, my dear.” I leave the van.
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
—
The aftertaste of antibiotic flavors the watering of my cheeks and my upper lip carries the scent of a stale Pall Mall. And as I hold my breath and walk the half-mile stretch toward the front gates, I see a coyote, a coyote that looks identical to the deaf and domesticated one named Aleshanee back in the Snake River Plain of Idaho. He weaves through the woods, a dance with the birch trees. He walks with me from a distance.
The chants’ subject changes from fire and brimstone into something about the Rapture, the Second Coming of Christ, and whatnot.
A pain to the side of my face, exacerbated by the cold. I bring my fingers to my right cheekbone, under my eye, pulling runny egg from my face. The voices of the crowd turn to white noise as it circles around me like a bunch of hunters sur
rounding wounded game. I see people’s fangs, mouths shouting something pertaining to Jesus, something pertaining to love. In the front, I see a butch woman with dirty-blond hair with only one tooth on the bottom and one tooth on the top, a carton of eggs cradled in her arms. And while I’m outnumbered, I still act on instinct. I walk to her. And when she flashes her two remaining teeth in jest, I use all the rage inside to kick her in the kneecap. I hear something crack; a flutter of nausea ripples in my gut as she falls to the ground. I scrape against the shelly gravel when I straddle her, breaking every egg, even already-broken ones, over her face.
“Stupid fucking bitch.” All these words come to the surface, not sure if any one of them makes sense. I’m too busy egging her to hear my own words, each syllable cried as I ram an egg on her face with the force of a punch behind it.
Shock, gasp, disgust, goes the crowd. Sure, make me the bad guy now. Wasn’t so bad when you were on the offensive, right? Hypocrite fucks. A flashback to the Corona bottle and a Viper’s nose back at the Whammy Bar. Behind me, a scream rings through the air, and when I turn back, a woman falls toward me. A man at her side grabs his own head and crouches to the ground. And like the event that took place at the Whammy Bar, leave it to a cop to save the day.
“Back off the lady.” The man in light blue hits one more protester with his nightstick, causing him to fall to the ground. “Let her alone,” he yells. He pulls me up by my arm with a jolt, off the top of the horse. I can feel the warmth of his body as he holds me close by the waist and uses the baton to strike gatherers out of the way, heading for the entrance of the gates. I look over my shoulder, past the crowd, to see Mason and Joe. They’re reentering the van. I guess they were on their way to save the day, my capeless crusaders. Instead, I get this redneck with a receding hairline. I barely understand his accent, something about the reverend, something about expecting me, something about keeping this little incident to ourselves. With each word I pretend to understand, the smell of chewing tobacco emanates from his stuffed bottom lip.
