Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

After the first relapse, her parents urged her to kick him out, but it was impossible to leave the man she had become an adult with, the captain of the football team who had chosen her for reasons she couldn’t explain. She waited it out for a few years, tossed between his bouts of renewed sturdiness and his collapses. She was ready to defer to her parents until she found out she was pregnant. She told him, hoping the child would be the motivation he needed, and he was clean for the first few months. Terry came home every night, he was the father she’d always imagined he’d be, then one day without warning, he left for coffee she had in her own pot on the counter and didn’t come back.

With him gone, she didn’t think about the hollow ghost who’d occupied her house the last few years, just the way her sixteen-year-old self would lean into the phone receiver for hours, twiddling the cord around her thumb, the way he’d press his hand into her back and lead her into a room, the way he’d soothe her when someone talked down to her, If they don’t see you as who are you, that says more about them than you, Jackie Marie , and even now she’d repeat that to herself when she needed strength. But it seemed as though she still couldn’t regain her footing. His addiction had blindsided her, and she’d been looking down at the ground while she walked since then, on the verge of falling off a cliff that she wasn’t sure existed.

She pulled up to Stately Grove, got out the car, lifted the baby. The elevator wasn’t working, so she braced herself for the walk. She opened her apartment door, walked inside, shut it, and slumped against it; she could hear her neighbors upstairs fussing already.

“You been calling bitches? Answer me, mothafucka, you been calling bitches?”

It started like this around dinner, low-grade rumbling that escalated by bedtime, and last night Jackie had almost called the police until she remembered she was stuck at Stately Grove — the last thing she needed was an indefinite enemy. The man yelling just now carried a gun; she knew because she’d glimpsed it creeping out of his peeling brown belt one morning, and then there was the woman downstairs with the gold jewelry and bright red lipstick whom Jackie had heard might be a lady of the night.

Jackie passed by her bedroom window, which she hadn’t bothered to drape; police cars framed the block like trees lined her old neighborhood, like potted plants had guarded the fresh lawns. Maybe she could just run downstairs and report the noise, which was steady building; she’d be upstairs before anyone could see her. Then again, the streets had eyes sometimes; the last thing she needed was somebody retaliating, calling the police on Terry one night.

The nightly wail of sirens started as she ran T.C.’s bathwater. But she put them out of her mind as she fell into her evening routine, bathing him, toweling him clean, especially the rolls around his neck where milk tended to gather, greasing his belly and legs with Vaseline, plucking a clean onesie from the hamper, then settling him down beside her. She used to fold clothes; hell, she used to wash dishes and mop floors too, but that was over now. No, she’d nurse him one more time, then they’d sleep until five.

“You’re blessed,” her mama had said one night. “You didn’t sleep through the night until you were nine months old. Sybil neither.”

Jackie appreciated compliments like those, but she didn’t need any reminders that her son was an angel. After Terry left, she wouldn’t have made it without him.

The noise from the couple upstairs picked up along with music from a boombox outside. Rap music, she guessed. I came in the door, I said it before. I never let the mic magnetize me no more but it’s biting me.

“You mothafucka low-life piece of shit, I nearly died for you and you threw me away for that bimbo.” This from upstairs. Jackie wondered what the man had done to rile the woman up so. She wanted to go and ask her about it, tell her nobody was worth her dignity, but she reminded herself not to get involved. She’d hoped initially that she was just at Stately Grove temporarily but she was saving only $500 a month and Terry was sick as ever — it was starting to look as if she might be walking her son to school from this broken-down parking lot, the sign in its center leaning and chipped. Her daddy had offered to put a down payment on a place in the East.

“I have more than enough, darling,”

And he did. He hadn’t finished college but he’d hustled through the rest of his life. His ease had been slow coming — there was a package liquor store that went bankrupt, a cleaners that got held up, and years of selling old cars in crooked lots — but Jackie and Sybil always wore winter coats from Maison Blanche, and when Jackie won homecoming queen, her daddy bought her a Lincoln. Still she refused him. Her whole life she had been dependent on a man. She met Terry in high school and grew up beside him. And it was only after he was gone and the garbage needed to go out and the bills needed to be paid by a certain date that she realized she was only halfway grown, like the little girls she saw downstairs some mornings, mismatched foundation caking their face, half shirts revealing their too-taut bellies.

Jackie settled the baby on his stomach as her mama had taught her. He’d slept in her bed the last few months. She told her mama it was him, that he didn’t get a good night’s rest in his crib. But the truth was, she’d lay awake all night if her son wasn’t beside her, the wail of police sirens winding like a snake inside her brain. Without tying her hair or changing out of her daytime clothes, she turned on the television, switched out the light, prayed her eyes would soon close. There was a special on the news about drugs, and while she faded she heard snippets: crisis, hands on horror, a threat to every suburb in America. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know blacks were being handcuffed, carted into cop cars. Funny, the way they were describing it, when she’d seen protesters up and down South Claiborne last week crying out, The War on Drugs is a War on Us.

Jackie didn’t know whose side she was on. She was still teetering between her narrow options when she heard the knock.

Nobody ever came by unannounced, especially not at this hour, so she stayed where she was; it was probably some residual noise from upstairs. She didn’t think the man beat the woman, but she sometimes heard bangs and crashes indicating something had been thrown. Another knock, louder this time.

She knelt slowly, felt around in the dark for the baseball bat she kept under her bed, held it up to her shoulder, tiptoed to the door, afraid to breathe for fear the person on the other side would hear her. She still wasn’t sure what she would do when she arrived.

Just then a man’s voice rang out. “It’s me, baby.”

Jackie opened the door, stepped backward, and watched Terry ease into the living room like butter pouring. He was all brown skin and height: There hadn’t been many boys in high school who stood taller than Jackie, but he was one of them, even at fourteen, and her head only reached his shoulder in their wedding photos.

“It’s me, baby,” he repeated, with his fresh fade and shaved face, which was full again as though he’d been eating.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she forced the edge into her voice. It might have been there on its own had he shown up yesterday, but after her talk with Sybil she’d developed tenderness toward him.

He started to explain. “I’ve been staying by my mama,” he said. “I went to rehab again. I guess I hit bottom, I don’t even remember, but”—he shook his head—“there’s nothing like a mother’s love, let me tell you. I got myself together. I’ve been out a month. I wanted to come and see you and the baby right away, but Mama held me back, said don’t go in there unless you’re prepared to stay. So I did. I’m sorry to scare you,” he said. “I just got so excited. I went to my meeting and they gave me this.” He held out a green chip. “I know it’s not much, I know two months is not that long, but for me, I never thought I would hit a week, you know, so it feels like something. It feels like something. You’re the first person I wanted to share the news with. Guess I just got caught up thinking about my own excitement. I can leave if you want.”