A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “What was I going to say, Jackie?” He was getting worked up again. “That I couldn’t handle it? That I didn’t know if I had the strength? I spent all that time working with those guys trying to feel like I was as good, and what was I gonna do? Admit that they had me whooped?”

  She didn’t say anything to that. She understood him, and she felt for him even, but it was almost as though it didn’t matter.

  “Michael’s tried cocaine, you know,” he went on. “He had some on him tonight, but he never fell into it, and what does that say about me? That I couldn’t resist? What could I say that wouldn’t make me look weak?”

  You could have said you’re human, Terry, she wanted to say, but she kept quiet. She didn’t see the use in going on. He tried to cuddle her and she refused him. Then he turned from her fast to face the wall as if she had been the one to break her word. A part of her wanted to console him, but she didn’t know the answer to the question. What did it say about him that he didn’t know whether he could trust himself? What did it say about her that she was hanging on to a man who was barely upright himself? She found no relief in the fact that he’d gone in and fared well this time. Instead it made her more wary, as if the fact that the temptation still lived inside him necessitated its coming out, its unfurling into something hard and mobile, something that would carry him away.

  Terry woke up the next morning even more apologetic than the night before. He swore it all off, drinking, that group of friends, and Jackie let on that she believed him. They settled back into their routine, but she stopped being able to sleep altogether. They’d moved T.C. back to his bassinet, and sometimes she’d walk over to him, stare at him with tears in her eyes. She didn’t know why she felt so certain tragedy lurked in his future. Everything was fine now, and she tried to remind herself of that. She’d grip the edge of the bassinet and wipe her eyes, but the early grief wouldn’t budge.

  She’d wake up late and frazzled and barely make it to school before group playtime was over. One morning during circle time she realized she’d left the assessments she’d need for the parent-teacher conferences in her kitchen. She told Mama to feed T.C. a bottle and she hustled back home during her lunch hour. She remembered where the pages were; she’d been reviewing them as her pasta boiled and when it was done, she’d stacked them in a pile on the counter. She had only an hour before her kids woke up, so she’d run into her apartment, grab them, and be on her way. She was rushing so hard she didn’t notice the front door to her place was unlocked, and she wouldn’t have noticed that the television was on either if she hadn’t seen Terry sitting directly in front of it. His white jacket with his name tag, lewis, pharmacist inscribed on it, lay crumpled on the carpet beneath him.

  He started talking as though he’d been expecting her.

  “I lost my job,” he said, but his words came out fast and frenetic, as if he were telling a good joke and if she just listened a little while longer, he would get to the punch line.

  “What?” The word came out flat though. Jackie wasn’t as angry as she was resigned, as though the doubt she had been warding off had won the final battle and could now take residence in her heart.

  “They have a pool of company cars. On the days I didn’t drop you at work, I’d borrow them, take them for a spin during lunch, just to get out of the office more than anything. I wasn’t used to sitting in a cubicle all day. I had more interactions with the patients at the VA. That made it more fulfilling. This was just clocking in more than anything, and I’m not complaining, it felt good to hand you a check every two weeks, it felt . . . normal, but also not normal at the same time.”

  “So, what?” Jackie asked. She sat down across from him and sighed. “They found out you were taking their property?”

  He shook his head, sighed. “No, not at first. I’d take the car out to Bourbon Street, park if I could. I’d even see some people I used to score with. I didn’t speak or anything like that. I didn’t even get out of my car. I felt stronger somehow for being able to stay inside it. I felt like I was locking in my sobriety, if you will, and it helped me to face the rest of the day. I’d get so caught up in being there, in the rush of knowing I could be there without using, I’d lose track of time, get back to the office ten, twenty minutes late.”

  “So, what, they got rid of you for being a few minutes late, Terry?” Jackie asked as if she was bored by the story, and in a way she was. She already knew the ending.

  “Nah.” He waved her question away. “Nah. It wasn’t that. Most times they didn’t even notice.”

  “Then what happened, Terry?”

  He shook his head.

  She heard her voice rising. “Goddamnit, Terry, what happened?”

  “I took the car again a few days ago. It was after we had that argument, and I was on edge. I’d been at the bar the night before and you were right, I never should have gone there, it was like it unlocked something in me, woke a part of me up that I would have sworn was dead.”

  Jackie couldn’t bear to hear the rest. She sat there, she listened to half the words he said, smatterings of phrases, like my friend from the VA, not Michael, but the one I was closest to, and I didn’t expect to see him on Bourbon Street, that’s not where he used to go, and I was so surprised I just got out of the car. I didn’t even lock it.

  She sat forward, but she didn’t let it seep inside her. Instead she thought about the time, that she had ten minutes before she’d need to leave to make it back to the nursery, that she still didn’t know how she was going to tell the Bradley mother that she might want to have her son tested for speech delay.

  “When I caught up with him, he was so happy to see me, he just passed me a pipe. I didn’t even have a chance to say hello, how are you, and it was in my hand. I hadn’t held one in months, but it all came rushing back, that buzzing in my ears that I’d get right after a hit, that sense of being outside myself in the best way possible; even the paranoia, I could sense it would come too, but I wasn’t afraid.

  Jackie stood. “I’ve heard enough of this bullshit.”

  But he followed her, gripped her wrist. “Let me finish, Jackie. I didn’t do it. I held it, I put it up to my lips, I closed my eyes, and I imagined how good it would feel to just let go, not even for the high itself, but so I could stop fearing another relapse. I was so close to just walking back out to the other side.”

  “You expect me to believe you didn’t smoke it?” She was shaking her head, trying to reach the door, but he caught her, held her in place.

  “I didn’t, Jackie, I swear I didn’t, I turned around, and I headed back for the car. But.”

  “But what, Terry? But what?” she repeated.

  “But it wasn’t there. I thought maybe I had forgotten where I parked exactly and I retraced my steps for an hour, but it wasn’t there. Finally I called the police, waited for them to arrive and take a statement, then I took the bus back to the office. When I didn’t show up with the car, I had to hand them the police report. They saw where I’d been, knew I didn’t have any business in the French Quarter, and fired me on the spot. I got a call just now when I got home. The car is back, no damage to it either, but they don’t care. They can’t trust me anymore, they say. It wasn’t a good fit.”

  They were still standing in the hallway now, her back arched and pressed against him, his hands around her chest. She stood up, wiggled him off of her, sat down again. She figured she had five more minutes. She would get back to those babies on time. After everything he’d taken from her, he wouldn’t take that. He walked to the sofa opposite her and sat too. Then he folded his hands on his lap, bent his head into them and began to weep. She watched him for a while before she got up, then she walked over and rubbed his back with the palm of her hand, up and down, up and down, the way she’d seen her mother rub her father’s so many times over the years. Mama had told her once that Daddy had wanted to be a doctor like Jackie’s gran
dfather, that he never got over the fact that he didn’t make it happen. No matter how much success your father grabs, he’ll never feel like a man, not all the way, she had said. And that was the way Jackie felt about Terry now, as if the blank look in his eye at this moment preceded this firing, as if he’d lost a part of himself when he started those drugs and it wasn’t a part he could simply restore again.

  She shook that thought out of her head.

  She told herself to focus on the now.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said every few minutes. “We’ll get through this,” she’d repeat, but the words came out flat because she wasn’t sure she meant them.

  She sat with him a little while longer, as long as she could before the clock struck twelve. If she didn’t get back, she’d be late. She apologized over and over for going, and when she got back to work she called to check in. He said he was fine, but all the while she painted with the babies, pushed them in the hammock and read them The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby, she could only conjure his face, that blank wall of defeat when he’d looked up to watch her leave, that seemed as if it were in the middle of crumbling.

  Jackie usually felt nervous before the parent-teacher conferences. It was only her second one; she still hadn’t caught up on the jargon, and once she’d led a conference for five full minutes before she realized she was referencing the wrong child. It wasn’t only that, the parents could be cruel. Last time she’d had to tell a mother her son lacked impulse control, and the woman had filed a complaint against Jackie, said without the proper certification Jackie wasn’t in a position to judge a bathing suit contest.

  Now Jackie wished one of these people would, but they were all sweetness and light this evening, praising Jackie for the strides their children had made. “He says please and thank you now every single time,” or “She hasn’t had an accident in weeks.” And Jackie would have carried those compliments with her through the rest of the year, but the words just streamed over her head today. The one thing she needed to be successful at had failed and there was nothing she could do to right it.

  As if the day hadn’t dragged on enough, her sister tiptoed into the nursery as the last conference was ending. She snuck into the kitchen, trying to fix a plate without disturbing the meetings, inching the drawers open so they wouldn’t creak, setting the plates down on towels so they wouldn’t clatter. Jackie just ignored her, and when the last parent had gone, she packed her bag, grabbed the baby who’d fallen asleep in Mama’s arms, and headed for the door.

  Her sister ran over to her, her heels clacking, and gripped her by the wrist.

  “I came over to see you,” she said.

  “It’s not a good time, Sybil.”

  “Oh.” Her sister stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you must be tired with the baby and all that. I was just thinking about you this week, since the party and everything, and”—she paused—“I wanted to apologize about everything with Terry.”

  Jackie wasn’t too far gone to grasp the enormity of her sister apologizing. Even with everything that had happened that day, she wanted to spread the moment out. “What with Terry?” she asked.

  Sybil shook her head, sighed. “Everything,” she said. “I saw you with him the other day, I saw the baby, and it’s obvious that he’s trying, it’s obvious that you’re happy. After everything you’ve been through, you deserve that. The baby deserves a proper family.”

  “Oh,” Jackie said, too stunned to think of much else to say. “Well, thank you,” she stammered finally. “That means a lot to me.” She started for the door, then turned back. It wasn’t more of her sister she was wanting, it was that Sybil always possessed such good judgment and maybe her perspective here was something Jackie could inhabit too.

  “How can you tell?” she asked. “That it’s real this time?”

  Her sister was halfway across the floor near the railroad table Daddy had just built for the toddler classrooms, but she stepped back again.

  “Just watching you at the party,” she repeated, shrugging with her head down, seeming uncomfortable in this new role. “For one, he looks great; he looks clean,” she stressed. “I don’t know, Jackie, I was telling Mama, it seems different this time. Some of my clients are lifetime junkies but a few come out of it. They hit bottom and they tell me they’re never going back. Something about the way they say it, the steel in their eyes, makes me believe it. That’s how I felt about Terry the other day.” She paused. “I think you made the right decision.”

  Jackie didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded and turned away. Her sister reached out and rubbed the baby’s head, then she kissed Jackie on the cheek. Jackie smiled, but she also felt as though she might sob, and she turned fast for the door so her sister couldn’t see her face.

  Sybil stopped her again before she reached her car. “Jackie,” she called out. “I had a rough day. Maybe I can come back with you, spend some time with the baby, apologize to Terry. I was going to call, but I think I need to say it face-to-face.”

  Jackie didn’t have the energy to decline, and once she was in the car she was glad for the company. Sybil talked the whole way home. She had secured the Taco Bell contract, finally, but now they were trying to give her the runaround on the terms they’d agreed on, the 20 percent of the settlements they had offered had dwindled down to 15. It didn’t matter; she was going to fight them until they came back around, because at the end of the day she didn’t need that job. She’d made plenty enough on her own.

  Jackie just nodded and smiled, delivered of a lot of Umhmms and I know that’s rights. She thought about what Sybil had said back at the nursery, and she repeated the words to herself. Sybil wasn’t the type to say something she didn’t mean, and what was it Daddy had always encouraged her to ask herself? What would her sister do? Here, she’d said she’d do exactly what Jackie had done. That was cause for a celebration, but for some reason Jackie couldn’t manipulate her heart into matching that tone.

  She wasn’t expecting Terry to be home when she walked in. Any other day he would have been, but she felt somewhere inside her today would be different, and because she couldn’t anticipate how long the difference would drag on, how she would respond to it, she was grateful Sybil was beside her. She bathed the baby, really washed between the folds on his neck where milk tended to gather, greased his entire body with Vaseline. He had more hair now, and she’d taken to playing with it at night, giving it the attention she would if he were a daughter, combing her fingers through the curls until he cried. Then she latched him on her breast. People had started to ask how long she would nurse him, but she couldn’t imagine stopping, as if the gulf of emotion that had been building in her over this last year would break forth once she was finished, force itself out of her body in powerful heaves, and she didn’t know what form that would take. When it was midnight and Terry still hadn’t come back, Jackie asked Sybil to stay over, and without asking why, Sybil obliged. Jackie placed the baby in the bed beside her, just like old times, and she caught herself watching the clock throughout the night. 2:49; 4:28; 6:42. Still nothing. She woke up to her alarm sounding, and he hadn’t come back. He wouldn’t.

  She dressed the baby as if she were going to work though she knew she’d never make it a full minute there today. Still she just needed to keep her mind busy, her body distracted. She didn’t bother dressing herself, or brushing her teeth or washing her face, just walked to the living room where Sybil was sleeping on the couch, a night scarf still tied at the back of her head.

  Sybil sat up in the bed like she slept on sofas every night. “Hey, girl.”

  “Hey,” Jackie said back. “I was going to make some coffee. You want something?”

  “The same,” Sybil said.

  In the kitchen, Jackie realized she hadn’t done the dishes the night before and she didn’t bother to start them now, just poured water into the pot. She knew it was only a matter
of time before her clothes were spewed on the sofa, and old food was stacked on TV trays again.

  Sybil didn’t ask where Terry was, and for the rest of her life Jackie would be grateful for that, that she didn’t make her spell it out. Sybil only took the baby from her, held him up to her own shoulder, and chanted in a baby voice Jackie couldn’t have imagined coming from a more unlikely source, “Mama’s not feeling well but she’ll be back, she’ll be back, oh yes, she’ll be back.”

  Jackie didn’t bother to correct her, to point out that something about this time felt permanent, felt as if she’d been driven down to the bottom of a hole and wasn’t capable of feeling her way out of it because it wasn’t just about missing him this time, or missing out on the family she had banked on. It was about knowing that whatever pain had driven him out had managed to touch her too, and she didn’t have crack to deliver her from it.

  She didn’t correct Sybil though; she just poured her coffee, sat down on the sofa and stared ahead at the TV screen. She flipped it on. The Price Is Right had just started; someone was betting on a two-seater sofa, a nice leather one Jackie knew she could dress up with pillows and throws from Macy’s, but the woman on the show was betting too much, $999 when a sofa that size, nice as it was, wouldn’t go for more than $500. Jackie wanted to intercede, cry out, Don’t set your sights too high, girl, it won’t hold, but she just sat in silence. If she was listening, she would have heard the sirens building in the distance, then leveling off, meeting their target, but as it was, her mind was as focused as a tide breaking, ready to crash. On what, she didn’t know.

  T.C.

  Winter 2011

  Going back, when T.C. thought about it, was just like getting out, anticlimactic. His aunt had whittled the sentence down to three years, but he didn’t think about it like that. He just thought about who he needed to be nice to to get an old TV and what CO might let him play ball a half hour longer. The second time was easier in that way. He didn’t have to learn the system. He knew most of the people in there either from his last stint or just from the street. Some he had been close with at home, and they weren’t happy to see him, as much as they were comforted by a familiar face.