Freedom's Child: A Novel Page 13

  When the lightning strikes, I catch a glimpse of movement from the corner of my eye. Someone walks toward me. But as I try to continue to crawl, I can’t breathe. My heart races. It feels like something in me has exploded and my blood cells are made of fire and razor blades, trying to rip through my skin and out of my body. I can feel my throat close up. Everything gets blurry and I can’t move a damn muscle.

  The figure stands over me, but my brain isn’t working right. I can’t make sense out of anything. I’m delirious, confused. Through the lightning, I see a man. He looks down at me, a sideways look. He shakes something over my head, but I can’t see what. “Hy-ya, Hy-ya,” he barks, but his voice is soft and smooth. “Hy-ya, Hy-ya,” he almost sings. In his other hand, a lantern that squeaks, yellow light painting the right side of my body.

  “Please,” I try to tell him, but I don’t think the words ever make it from my mouth. “Don’t kill me.” I can’t move one damn muscle, no matter how hard I try. Not one fucking finger. I’m paralyzed. “Help me,” I try to plead. He says something, but I can’t understand. It’s a language I’ve never heard. It’s not English, it’s not Spanish, it’s not anything I can figure out.

  The man takes my ankle and starts to drag me toward his house. I wheeze to breathe, my back scrapes against the dirt while I still try to get the rainwater in my mouth, but I can’t even open it all the way. The man’s slow in his steps and there’s quite a way to go. I fear I’ll be dead by the time I reach the house, and perhaps this is a good thing.

  I start to panic. While my insides thrash in me because I can’t breathe, I only show so much of this on the outside. I feel the man drop my leg, here, in the middle of the desert. Is he abandoning me? Is he going to shoot me in the head and leave me for the birds? He kneels down beside me. With the lightning, I can see two long, silver braids.

  He takes off my jacket. He’s going to rob me.

  He takes of my pants. He’s going to rape me.

  He rattles an object over my head again. He waves it over my body as he speaks some lyrical language, like he’s singing a soft lullaby as I lie here dying. This man is fucking insane. The glint of a knife that he pulls from his side catches the lightning, catches my eye. He slices my leg with the blade, the pain making the muscles in my neck constrict even more. I find myself praying to a god I hardly believe in. He lifts my leg close to his mouth. I think he’s drinking my blood. I want to beg him to stop, to not do this. But I am powerless. I am more dead than alive. I am defeated.

  I’m so sorry that I couldn’t save you, Rebekah, I think to myself as I fade out of consciousness. I’m so sorry for everything I did and didn’t do.

  Rays of sunshine warm the large bedroom full of handmade quilts and lace doilies. The smell of banana bread fills the house, a reminder to any southerner of their childhood. In the corner of the room, Carol Paul sits in a rocking chair, waiting for Michelle Campbell to wake up. She hums “God Bless America” as she double-knits a pink cap for the new baby. She thinks, It’s almost hard to remember when Magdalene was this small. She checks the clock on the shelf so that she’s not late for Virgil’s dumplings and fresh-squeezed lemonade after he returns from the grounds with some of the other guys who are cleaning up what the storm left behind.

  Michelle stirs in her sleep, heavy-eyed and heart racing. The light that turns the room of the Pauls’ home into gold seems to make Michelle nauseated. The shadows stretch farther across the room with the passing of the afternoon. Her throat and chest burn like fire and her vision is blurry. Carol rises from the rocking chair and takes the ceramic bowl from the side of the bed, where Michelle vomits. Carol rests the bowl on her lap and holds her hair up. “Let it out, there you go.”

  “How long will this last?” Michelle cries.

  “Not long now,” says Carol in her most comforting tone as she inspects the Cesarean incision right above her pubic bone. “This is common after childbirth. Especially a rough one, like you had.”

  “Every time I throw up, it feels like the wound’s opening back up.”

  “It’s not, but it’ll be sore for a bit. It’s healing nicely.”

  “Can I see my baby now?”

  “Let her sleep.” Carol helps Michelle back to the pillows. “It’s been a long few days for her too.”

  “Her name is Rebekah.” Michelle’s words are tired and faint.

  “What’s that you say?”

  “I want to name her Rebekah,” Michelle pants. “Rebekah was my best friend.”

  Carol says nothing about it. She tucks the blankets around Michelle’s sides. “I’m going to go and make you soup. You need the strength.”

  “Please, no,” she tries to protest. “I can’t even think about food right now, Sister Carol.” But Carol leaves anyway.

  As Michelle hears her footsteps go out to the kitchen and the fresh breeze that carries from the window, young Magdalene sneaks into the bedroom, talkative, as she always has been, just looking for a friend. She jumps up to the foot of the bed, her legs dangling off the edge.

  “Theresa sure is pretty, Sister Michelle.” Magdalene practices the cat’s cradle with a black piece of string tangled around her fingers. “She looks like a porcelain doll, only a real porcelain doll, ya know?”

  “Theresa?” but she’s almost too weak to speak.

  Magdalene glows. “Your new baby, you goose!”

  Tears of frustration and confusion escape her eyes and trickle down to her temples. “Her name is Rebekah.”

  “Like my big sister?!” But Magdalene doesn’t see her distress.

  Michelle starts to sob. “I just want to go home.”

  “You don’t have to cry, your home’s just out the window here.” Magdalene zips to the window and opens the lace curtains. “See? I can see it from here. Just lift your head!” She becomes disappointed when she sees that Michelle won’t even try to look up. “Are you sick or something, Sister Michelle?”

  “Magdalene, now, what did Mommy say about bothering Sister Michelle?” Carol says as she returns.

  “Sorry, Ma,” she offers. “I was just going to show her my cat’s cradle.”

  “Maybe later, dear.” Carol brings a tray with soup and water on it. “You can help me feed the baby in a few minutes. I’ll be right out.”

  Magdalene starts to leave but stops at the door. “Can I lay hands on Sister Michelle and say a prayer for her first, Mommy?”

  “A quick one, but then you have to leave.”

  “Very quick, I promise.” Magdalene runs up to the side of Michelle and places both hands on the top of her sweaty head.

  “Dear Jesus, I say a special prayer for Sister Michelle during these trials from Satan. Please help her to feel better so I can show her the cat’s cradle and so she can see her baby again. And make sure she eats all her soup so she doesn’t go hungry. In Jesus’s name, Amen.” She starts to run off, but halfway to the door she turns around and resumes her praying position. “Also, Jesus. Please bring my sister, Rebekah, back home because I miss her very, very much.”

  Carol walks over and quietly shuts the door behind Magdalene. She looks at Michelle once more. “Now we’re going to eat as much of this soup as we can so we can get you better, right?”

  But Michelle doesn’t answer.

  Carol goes to her and checks her pulse through her neck. It’s faint. She’s more dead than alive. She looks at her medical bag; she contemplates helping Michelle. Instead, Carol goes back to humming her hymn. And waits for her to die.

  The scent of Lysol is enough to burn Mattley’s eyes. As he signs in, a man in the corner eats square, wooden Scrabble tiles. “He thinks the vowels have nutritional value,” says the nurse at the sign-in desk. Officer James Mattley can’t imagine any place being more depressing. He waits near a window and looks down to the courtyard where nurses suck nicotine through wrinkled lips and gnaw on their cell phones. None of them seem to mind the sleet and rain on this nasty morning, as long as they get their caffeine fixes for the day
.

  Mattley’s eyes water from a mix of the Lysol lingering thick in the back of his throat and too much yawning, his body sluggish from overexhaustion and barely any sleep last night. He pinches the palms of his hands for any kind of stimulation that can keep him awake right now. A parade of elderly patients in full diapers drag on into the common room, waking from sedated trances and hangovers of sleeping meds and antianxiety candy. This is more like the fucking loony bin. Mattley observes yet doesn’t stare. He watches them line up for an orderly, take a pill, and begin to assemble around Wheel of Fortune and chew their medicinal potpourri.

  “She’s in room number twelve, right over here,” the nurse points. He’s on his toes, cautious around the woman’s room he walks into. “I’ll be right over here if you need me.”

  “I know you,” Mimi exalts. “You’re my son!”

  “No, no,” Mattley shushes her. “I’m Officer James Mattley. I met you the other night at the fire.” The room is painted a shocking yellow, an eyesore to visitors who don’t have the luxury of being medicated like these fine folks.

  “Fire?” She looks around. “What fire?”

  “The other night, remember? There was a fire that started in your home. We took you in an ambulance. Remember now?”

  “The fire didn’t start in my house.” She stands from her bed and adjusts a pink fleece robe over her. “It started in Freedom’s house, from those men who were looking for her.”

  “What men?” Mattley suddenly wakes up. “Who was looking for Freedom?”

  “The crazy-eyed kind,” she says as she looks in a handheld mirror tacked to the wall as if she doesn’t recognize her own face. “Three of them. They hit me. They started the fire.”

  “Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

  “I told Freedom in the ambulance. I figured she would.”

  Mattley pulls out his phone and scrolls through his contacts until he reaches Newbie. He sends a text:

  Get report from fire chief, should have been ready by now. What was cause of fire? Don’t tell Cap’n I’m asking.

  “What can you tell me about these guys?”

  “What guys?” She forgets already. “Where’s Freedom? Where am I?” She begins to panic.

  “Just take it easy, Mimi.” He tries to assure her and direct her back to her cot. “Freedom’s close by. You’re safe.”

  “I don’t want to be here,” she screams. “I want to go home. I want to go home!” The scene is heartbreaking as she curls up at the head of her bed and sobs into her hands. A syringe-happy nurse runs in, with white leather loafers and a red curly Afro, like something cartoonish.

  “Give me a minute,” Mattley shouts as he stops the nurse. He grabs Mimi’s arms and looks her in the eyes, stays quiet so the nurse can’t hear. “Mom,” he calls her. “Mom, it’s me.” And Mattley feels terrible at having to do this, having to resort to such cruelty.

  “Son?”

  “Yes, Mom, it’s me.”

  Mimi smiles through the tears and falls into his arms. “It’s about time you came to see me.”

  “I know, Mom, I’m sorry.” He nods at the nurse to leave. She sighs with disappointment. With Mimi’s head in his chest as he rocks her, he looks over to various pieces of mail scattered at the foot of the bed. One envelope is addressed to Nessa Delaney. Mattley softly pulls back from Mimi while she calms down and reaches for the envelope. “Nessa Delaney?” he asks her.

  “I never heard the name.”

  Mattley notices it’s addressed to Freedom’s apartment number. He opens it.

  Dear Nessa, or should I call you Mom?

  There is so much to say; there’s so much to take in. I’ve so much to tell you, but so little time, as I hide here in the shed of my church. I look back at my life. I wonder how’d I not see it, and looking here at your photo, I can see it, I can see it all.

  For ages, I’ve been praying for a way out. Praying God takes me far from here. But in all this time, I’ve had nowhere to turn. There’s Mason, but I need to be farther. I have to get away from here, I can’t tell you why. Please, trust me. Trust in God. Because he sent your letter to me.

  I will contact you in a few days when I reach Oregon.

  Rebekah

  Mattley reads the postmark and sees it’s from Goshen, Kentucky. He itches while he waits for Mimi to go with a nurse out to the lounge.

  Five minutes later, the frozen sleet stings his cheeks, the biting wind sounds like the sharpening of steel. In Oregon, while early, autumn seems to have ended. He lets his truck warm up; the ice tings on the windshield when his phone vibrates from his back pocket.

  He reads a text from Newbie:

  Report came in yesterday. Came from Freedom’s apartment. Arson.

  With the weather report on AM low in the background, Mattley whispers out loud, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” He thinks about his son, still at his mother’s for the week, thinks about what good could possibly come of it. But who the hell else was there to look out for Freedom? Mattley shivers in his red flannel shirt. He rubs his hands together and sees his own breath. To his right on the passenger’s seat is a duffel bag full of his belongings. On top is his personal gun.

  Mattley drives to the Amtrak station to save him a good fifteen hours of traveling. His destination: Kentucky.

  After waiting forty-five minutes for a handicapped-accessible taxi to arrive, having sent two regular four-doors away, Peter finally checks into a Louisville motel. It takes him two hours to do his best with bathing himself and changing his clothes. He finds his muscle spasms are more severe today, as he attempts nearly half a dozen times to call Freedom. But the phone keeps jumping out of his hands. There’s no answer, anyway.

  Peter sets up his laptop and connects to the motel’s Wi-Fi. What Peter lacks in motor skills he compensates for in technology, as it’s all that occupies him as he hides in his bedroom back at home. Playing stupid lets him get away with so much more than he should.

  It takes longer than usual to maneuver the computer in spite of his hands, but he opens up several windows and starts his research. He starts with the Pauls.

  A person can compile almost anything that’s left a digital trail if the person they’re looking into has an account on any social media outlet. And such is the case for Mason and Rebekah Paul. And it takes only a quick Google search to learn that Mason is some hot-shot defense attorney and that Rebekah has been missing for a good part of a week.

  He continues with Virgil. It goes into his seminary training, his church’s website and podcast. Peter even watches a past sermon, one that would make his eyebrows raise, if he had such control over his facial expressions. And then he looks into Carol Paul, who once upon a time was named Carol Custis.

  Carol Custis, unlike the rest of the Pauls, has a rich history. Peter learns of Carol’s twin sister, Clare, who made the news as a minister’s daughter who hung herself in her home one morning back in 2009.

  “Clare Custis,” Peter says out loud as he searches the name on the Internet. And through that, he finds Adelaide Custis, the mother of Carol and Clare, who’s been missing the past four years. “No wonder this bitch turned to Jesus,” he says in regard to Carol and her messy family.

  According to Mr. Gerald “Ger” Custis in all the local news programs’ archives, his wife left one afternoon to go to the local post office and was simply never seen again. Her car was found a week later in the Ohio River.

  Peter clicks away, stores all this information on a USB drive that he keeps tucked away in one of the leather pockets on the inside of the wheelchair’s arm. Crumbs from his brother’s welcome-home cake fall on the keyboard. The neighbors in the next room are arguing about something. The daylight heats the room; it’s warmer in Kentucky than it is up in New York.

  He tries to turn the television on with the remote, but his hands just don’t want to work. It takes him fifteen minutes to put it on. Of course, it’s the local news. Virgil and Carol Paul plead for any information regar
ding the whereabouts of their daughter. And when they show Rebekah’s picture on the screen, Peter is amazed at how much she looks like Nessa.

  —

  “I appreciate this,” Peter tells a Good Samaritan who offers to help him grab a few things from a nearby Walmart.

  “Not a bother,” says the morbidly obese woman in a ride-on electric cart. That’s always pissed Peter off. Fat fucks like his mother who get dibs on handicap parking spaces and ride-on carts because they’re lazy. Meanwhile, Peter’s the one with the real disability, a congenital condition he would do anything to get rid of. But these people? They did it to themselves, and whose tax dollars do you think pay for these lard buckets to sit at home and watch Jerry Springer instead of working because they’re eating deep-fried everything in a fucking trough?

  “I feel your pain, I know what it’s like.” She uses a cane to hit the wheels on her ride-on. Are you fucking kidding me? “Got the diabetes and a bum foot.” The Samaritan uses a long-reach gripper to pull a bottle of Diet Coke from a shelf. Her muumuu exposes a ton of underarm fat that swings with her wheezing. He feels sick. Oh, my fucking God. But Peter plays nice, pretends not to notice.

  After Peter pays for a large bottle of water, granola bars, apples, and a Salisbury steak TV dinner, he waits near the entrance next to the gumball machines and Halloween display table. From there, he can see her buy a carton of Pall Malls and pay for her junk food with food stamps. On days like this, Peter regrets being an American.

  While waiting, he studies the wall: fliers for babysitters, car stereo installation, churches, firewood, you name it. And on the top is a row of black-and-white pictures of missing people.