Freedom’s Child. Jax Miller
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High School Sweetheart
Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,
To pick up where I left off last: ah, prom, yes. 1989. If you recall from my last letter, I think I was still floating on cloud nine after Mark Delaney had asked me, that bad boy of William Floyd High School I was assigned to tutor in English in the after-school program. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart—quite the opposite, in fact—but he spent too much time smoking under the bleachers instead of actually in class. I remember my mother laughing at me because I sat, perched on the kitchen stool next to the phone, just waiting for Mark to call and cancel. I wish you guys could have known my mother; there was nothing not to love about her. Except cancer. You can’t love cancer.
Anyway. Oh, God, I’d nearly forgotten about that dress, something with pink silk and black lace; I think I was going for Madonna’s “Material Girl” meets Desperately Seeking Susan. I wish I still had that old thing. It was the last dress my mother made for me. Consider yourselves lucky, to have missed the biggest embarrassment of our generation: fashion trends of the ’80s. I still cringe at the thought.
When Mark came to my door, my mother didn’t like him right away. He wore one of those tuxedos printed on a black tee with a leather jacket, smelling like an ashtray. His naturally dirty-blond hair was dyed black. What kind of respectable man wears eyeliner? Mother would shake her head and read her Vogue magazine, Estelle Lefébure was on the cover that month, I remember. Mother’s sweet tooth was for fashion, a gene that’d skipped me, apparently. Believe me, I’ve been referred to as a lot of things, but fashionable was never one of them.
I sat in the front of the Dodge Colt, with Matthew, Luke, and John sardined in the backseat, ready to crash prom and spike the punch with Absolut. Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” in the cassette player. It was a big deal back then, to still be in high school and have a car, that wasn’t your mother’s, with a cassette player.
Mother would worry that Mark only wanted to ride my coattails of good grades and being valedictorian into college, and would constantly warn me that if he ever knocked me up, she’d kill me, cut off his pecker, and then kill him too. This point was made quite often.
On the way to school, the brothers passed around a joint. I declined, earning the comments of being a priss, that I was probably glued at the knees, that Mark should have stayed with that easy bitch of a cheerleader named Donna. I can’t smell marijuana or Love’s Baby Soft today without thinking of that night. From the backseat, Matthew kept pulling at my curls (reminder: huge hair was the in thing). Matthew always pulled at my curls. He had that Billy Idol thing going on, the spikes, the leather, fingerless gloves. The bleached hair. He even practiced curling his lip in the rearview mirror and faking a British accent. Ah, to be seventeen again.
Between the comments, Mark would look over at me from the driver’s seat with a particular look, a look that said he couldn’t keep his eyes off me, a look that said he thought he was falling for me, a look that made me weak in the knees. My heart pounded so hard I literally thought I might get sick. And in that moment, I knew I was looking at the most beautiful person in the world.
When we arrived, Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” echoed into the parking lot. The others disappeared somewhere into the side doors of the gymnasium, being that they weren’t in our graduating class. Mark thought it’d be romantic if we stayed outside, always the outlaw. When he pulled me close and began to sway, my body felt weightless. Toward the end of the song, he made a hook of his finger and lifted my chin. It was my first kiss—yes, at seventeen, embarrassing and pathetic, I know. But the times were different then.
And while I’d love to tell you that we entered prom and danced the night away, we actually never made it inside.
Today
My name is Freedom and I keep seeing images from twenty years ago, images of Mark’s brains splattered on the kitchen wall back in Mastic Beach.
Anyway, I plan to kill myself soon. Not today, but soon. I’ll wait until the jar is full to the brim with my pills. I pull my script out of a white paper bag. I never eat them. They make me nuttier than I already am. I can’t even pronounce them, why would I take them? I live just fine with the voices. Well, at least until the jar’s full with my pills. I hold it up and try to estimate how many are in there. Two hundred? Three hundred? I don’t know. I’ve never been all that good with numbers. But when I do, when I’m good and ready, I’ll send these letters to Goshen, Kentucky, to my children.
The sun hides behind the comforters I’ve tacked over the windows. The sounds of daytime television scream from behind the walls, from the apartment of Mimi Bruce. It sounds like The Weather Channel. What’s the point in monitoring the weather? She never leaves the house anyway. I look at the clock. 9:13 a.m. Have I really been sitting at this same spot at the table in darkness this whole time? The tips of my nails are dull after tapping them in the same spot for the past six hours. I walk to the kitchen sink and splash water on my face and rub the sharp pieces of sleep from my eyes into the skin of my cheeks and the side of my nose. Near the sink are the remains of that one photo that survived, the one of my dead husband, Mark. If he were alive today, I’d kill him. Again. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
The smoke alarms go off and I already know why. Mimi. If one smoke alarm in the complex goes off, they all do. I run to the front door, the sun blinding me as I step outside and hurry down the shared balcony to Mimi Bruce’s apartment next door. It’s locked. I step back and kick it in, surprised by my own strength. It makes me feel like I’m in an episode of Law & Order. I see the smoke in the back of the apartment. Mimi continues to watch TV with a cup of coffee in the front living room. She smiles at me. Why smile at a person who has just kicked in your front door? Her dementia’s getting worse. I run into the back where the kitchen is.
Eggs crushed in their shells burn in a frying pan with flames trying to pull the pan down. I grab a pot holder that hangs from the oven door. Black smoke collects on the walls and ceiling above the stovetop. I chuck the pan in the sink and run the water; not as bad as it could have been. But when will it be? is the question. In the corner of the sky-blue counter, coffee drips onto the hot plate, the pot not in its place.
“George Clooney called me.” Mimi walks into the kitchen, oblivious. She says his name like she’s a naughty little schoolgirl. But she’s an eighty-something-year-old, abandoned by the government in this good-for-nothing place because she can’t afford assisted living or anything of the sort. The economy ate her pension, along with her Social Security and medical benefits. Living the motherfucking American dream.
“What did he say to you?” I ask while I take a butter knife and scrape the blackened chicken fetuses from the pan into the sink.
“Who?” She forgets what she said ten seconds earlier.
“George Clooney. What did he say when he called you?”
Mimi stands, confused, in her underwear. She puts her hands in the air for no reason, the loose skin hangs from her arms and she starts to sing, of all the songs in the world, she begins to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” There’s no song on this planet that I resent more. Sharp white hairs poke from her armpits, and liver spots dance with the beat. And even through the tune, I hear the battery of her hearing aid ring.
I give up on the pan and help her put her arms down. “Let’s go get you dressed, Mimi.” She follows me to her bedroom, neat with photos of her deceased husband and other family members, the ones who never come by to see her. I pick out clean clothes from her dresser and maneuver them around her paper-thin skin. She hums as the polyester covers her face.
“Is George Clooney the one who spins the wheel on Wheel