Jax Miller - Freedom’s Child

“Luke!” she shouts across the house.

“What,” Luke whines from the kitchen.

“Grab me my hair spray off the dresser here.” The yells cause her to be out of breath.

“Get Peter to do it. He’s closer to you.”

“Peter can’t do it. Peter’s retarded.” Peter eyeballs his mother’s grotesqueness from his wheelchair. Lynn continues, “Just get me the fucking hair spray, goddamn it.”

“Fuck sake, Ma.” Luke storms up the hall to her bedroom and tosses the hair spray that was sitting only three feet away from her.

The fat under her arms jiggles as she uses the ol’ Aqua Net, the lighter fluid with a shelf life of ten thousand years, in her nappy gray curls. From the kitchen, John and Luke scream together at the Yankees game, the cracking of Heineken cans from the freezer. Peter smells the fish off his two brothers after they had spent the day down at Cranberry Dock.

It wasn’t uncommon: grown men living with their mothers in these parts. Could be blamed on a shitty economy, but it’s usually overbearing mothers who need house funding and/or lazy men, and there was a shortage of neither in Mastic Beach.

“Ungrateful little bastard,” Lynn says behind Luke’s back.

“Hey, Ma, Matthew’s pulling up!” John screams.

“I’m fucking coming.” She pumps the last of the generic wine from the box and sifts through a pillowcase full of prescription pills until she finds a Xanax to chew on. She plucks the clumps of mascara from her blue eyes, rubs her lavender nightgown straight, and burps as she turns off one of her reality judge shows.

She totters and flounders to climb aboard Mr Mobility, the poor scooter that carries her overflowing body down the hall. Peter follows in his wheelchair. She rolls down, past the crucifixes and photos of the boys when they were actually still boys. At the end of the hall next to the entrance of the living room, a small table that serves as a shrine to her dead son, Mark: a framed photo of him in his NYPD blues, smiling around burned-out tea-light candles. She kisses her hand and touches the picture of his face. She worships the dead. Many in that dirty town do. They pour the first sips of all their drinks to the ground, they get married with speeches of the greatness of lost loved ones, even if they were scum. That’s just the way it is. Praise the dead, turn the scumbags into heroes. Beside Mark’s photo are three red candles, one for each of Lynn’s miscarriages. And though she lost them before their genders could be determined, she knew, she just knew, they were all daughters and named each one, respectively, Catherine, Mary, and Josephine.

An Irish Catholic, Lynn’s made a lucrative living abusing the welfare system and five sons with as many different fathers who took her name instead of Uncle Sam’s. Delaney, a name attached to trouble and whiskey tolerance. It’s a joke around the neighborhood that even the mailman gives the Delaneys’ mail to the cops, since they’re bound to be there sooner or later. As the car pulls in the driveway, Peter watches Lynn inspect her sons lined up by the front door.

First is the youngest brother, Luke, the most charming and promiscuous of the Delaneys. Even when all the girls knew he was responsible for spreading chlamydia to some of the locals, he was still irresistible to them. With blond hair and green eyes that can pierce holes into yours, and rumors of having a porn-star-size cock, he toyed with the idea of becoming a model a few years back. But he never went anywhere with it and opted to hang drywall for a living instead and spread his seed all over Long Island. Six kids that he knows of, at least. Peter curls his upper lip at the overwhelming stench of his cologne attempting unsuccessfully to cover the smell of fluke fish and sweat.

Next is John, a stout man with all the recessive genes: green eyes, red hair, and a temper that can make the streets shake. He has a silver cap for a front tooth and a face full of red hair. He speaks very little, always has, and always seems to dress in heavy clothes, even flannels in the summer. Known as Mastic’s loan shark, John goes nowhere without his baseball bat. If you can pay him back, he’s the best there is. And if you can’t, just change your name and skip town. While everyone knows that he’s not a mute, not one person outside of his family can recall one time they ever heard him speak. Lynn scratches his beard. “Why must you always hide this pretty face?”

Peter is the one in the wheelchair with cerebral palsy, who everyone assumes is mentally retarded, even his own mother sometimes. Peter is Lynn’s excuse to collect a disability check from social services. Unlike his brothers, Peter prefers to stay in his room with pirated movies and books online, staying out of trouble, so to speak. Peter hates his mother. She talks to him like he’s a child, makes him eat the things she knows he can’t stand, and always steals the money he’s entitled to from the government, instead opting to spend it on stuffing her own face while Peter gets the scraps like a junkyard dog. And the term junkyard is fitting, given that the home is kept like a hoarder’s paradise.

His mother smooths out his loose Spider-Man tee, uses her spit to fix his black hair, and pretends not to notice when he jerks away from her. He tells her to fuck off, but no one hears him, or they don’t want to.

In one uniform motion, as if the dam breaks, they all go out to the porch to meet with Matthew. Matthew screams with a smile into his brothers’ arms as he steps out of an old Buick, a clear plastic “personal belongings” bag trailing him. Headlocks and punches in the arms and thighs are the traditional greeting of the Delaneys. And, of course, what kind of reunion would this be without the stares of the nosy neighbors, the same ones who call the police every time the Delaney household gets a little too loud in the middle of the night? Luke is the first to break out the beer.

“Let’s take it in the house,” Lynn shouts from the doorway.

Matthew holds the beer up against the light of an overcast sky. “Christ, eighteen years in the joint, this is certainly overdue.”

“What’s it like not getting laid for eighteen years?” Luke jokes on the way into the house. Lynn smacks him on the arm.

“Almost worth it, after tonight.” Matthew laughs. “Sorry, Ma.”

Inside, Metallica plays in the background as they spend the morning catching up. But the time’s come to talk about the very topic that has brought such a cloud over the family for so long: Nessa Delaney.

Find her.

Find her kids.

Bring them home.

Make the family complete once again.

* * *

The spines of the other Delaney brothers surge with currents of electricity when around Matthew and their mother. With the back doors open, leading to a small backyard, the kitchen smells of wet autumn leaves and marijuana. It’s impossible to tell where the October fog begins and the smoke ends.

“Eighteen years is a lot of time to think. To collect. To dream,” says Matthew, between sips of his Heineken. He tilts his head to the side. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want the cunt dead,” his voice always smooth and velvety, like a song at a funeral. As he says the words, he swears he can detect Nessa’s scent. How could he possibly explain his love for her to his family? Who would understand? And despite being caged like an animal for nearly half his life, his eyes always smile, like he’s dying to tell the world all the secrets of the universe. The rest of the guys fidget in their seats around the kitchen table. They nod and pretend to understand, out of fear.

“She murders Mark. Your brother. My son,” Lynn begins, stoned on her Xanax-and-cabernet cocktail. “She takes my grandchildren and hides them away so that we can never see them. The children of Mark.” She absently picks the red nail polish from her fingernails. She feels the blood in her body start to curdle. She feels her feet start to swell, start to retain water from not being back in bed, decides it’s because she needs sugar and proceeds to stuff an orange Hostess cupcake into her cheek. “And then she frames you, my innocent Matthew, and sends you to prison for eighteen mother-fucking years.” Lynn shakes her head with a smile, citrusy crumbs falling in the folds of her neck. She crosses her hands, those fat little sausages with red tips like she’s ripped through someone’s flesh. “Nessa Delaney.” She sticks her tongue out and cringes, resents the fact that they once shared the same last name. “The audacity of the cunt. She must pay.” Lynn begins to sweat with the efforts of chewing and swallowing. “And we must find her children. After all, isn’t that what family’s all about?” Her sons recognize that gleam, the flames behind her eyes starting to ignite with ingenious plotting, often seen right before she shoplifts or rips a guy off from Craigslist or sends her sons to get something she wants but can’t have. “I wish we did this twenty years ago.”