Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

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 Umhmm s and I know that’s right s. 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.