Читать книгу Freedom’s Child - Jax Miller - Страница 10

I am a boy. This woman’s arms protect me from the vastness of the ocean, blue as far as the eye can see until it forms a gray line dotted with ships. I bury my face in her neck; her laughter moves my small body. But I don’t know who she is. I look up at the sky through her red hair; pockets of sunshine flash spellbindingly through wet locks. Her body, warmer than anything I’ve ever known, a blanket in the coolness of the waves. Her skin smells of coconut and lime. The sounds of seagulls roll in my ears, and I know I love this woman, I just don’t know who the hell she is. “Who are you?” I ask. She never answers in these dreams, just a straight row of blinding white from her mouth. I can’t wake up and I’m not so sure that I want to. She turns so the waves crash into her back, screams of delight in my neck. I wrap my legs tighter around her waist. And during the stillness between the wallops, I trace the tattoos on her shoulders, pick grains of sand from the ends of her hair, and tell her I love her.

“Where is your sister?” she asks.

Mason Paul wakes, shivering in his own sweat, the air still thick even hours after making love, her taste still on his lips. What makes this recurring dream a nightmare, he doesn’t know. He uses his thumb and index finger to gently grab the bones of Violet’s wrist, moving her arm from his stomach. Mason grabs a pack of cigarettes hidden in his sock drawer and sneaks outside, his movement delicate so as not to wake her.

Still too warm for an October night in Louisville, Kentucky, Mason stands naked at the double doors of his balcony, unsure whether his shoulders are an inch higher because of the satisfaction she left with him or with trepidation from the dream. Behind him, Violet snores, sprawled on top of silk sheets the color of her name. He pulls on the Marlboro and watches the stars that glow orange to correlate with the nearing of All Saints’ Day. He pours a bourbon Manhattan with a splash of butterscotch schnapps. It smells like candy corn. It smells like Halloween. These dreams, you’d think I’m some damn mental case. He clears the phlegm of a mild hangover from his throat.

The branches of black willows swing in the large backyard of the Victorian home, a Queen Anne architecture of ivory with black fringes, one that probably housed masters and slaves more than a century ago. He brings his silver necklace to his lips, warming the cross with his breath, but it’s just habit. In recent years, Mason decided it might be less disappointing to consider God as a loosely thrown noun instead of something profound. But it reminds him of his younger sister, Rebekah, the only member of his family who hasn’t shunned him. He misses her greatly. The bourbon doesn’t help.

The home was born of old southern money from Cavendish tobacco fields that line the property’s edges, well-to-do bankers who made lucrative investments when the American economy was at its golden peaks. And now Mason, a promising twenty-four-year-old with a possible future in one day becoming the state’s most successful defense attorney after sticking his foot in the door of one of the most profitable law firms in Kentucky only weeks after acing the bar exam. Impressive at his age, but not entirely unheard of. Currently an associate at the firm, rumors of him being the next senior associate attorney swirled around the offices, which would make him the fastest to reach such a position. The result of a lot of interning, many many hours, and being smart as a whip. He flicks the cigarette down to the grass when he hears Violet turn in her sleep and pretends not to notice her.

A moment later, she wraps her lanky arms around his bare chest from behind. “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” Mason hears her smile bleed into the question. I always knew I’d end up with one of my coworkers. Of course, she’d be a corporate lawyer embroiled in the campaign against big tobacco companies.

Cicadas shrill in the distance and bullfrogs croak in the nearby swamps and weeping willows. Mason smirks. “Who, me?” The Manhattan glistens in the moonlight as he places his hand on hers, his gaze still in the backyard.

She squeezes him and breathes onto his back. “I can feel your heart racing with my lips.” She kisses between his shoulder blades.

“Another dream …” He takes a long draw from the martini glass.

“It’ll be OK,” but she worries her attempts at comfort fall on deaf ears.

Mason walks out of her arms and into the bedroom, sitting down on the ottoman with his bottle of Maker’s Mark, his laptop, and papers on the floor around his feet. He goes to his fake Facebook account, Louisa Horn. Thoughts of his sister Rebekah swim through the furrows of his brain. No word in days is odd for her. Hope she finally got the sense to get out of that place. Mason tries to distract himself with the pile of papers that form a cyclone around him. He shuffles through the work, breathing the vapors of bourbon between each page. He feels bad that he can’t make love to his girlfriend because of the distractions of his sister not writing and the rape case finally about to end tomorrow. It’s always that kind of stuff that gets to him. Who could get a hard-on with siblings and court trials on the brain?

“You’re still working on the Becker case?”

“Just double-checking that all my ducks are in a row for tomorrow, is all.” He looks up at her and smiles. “Otherwise, you can forget about Turks and Caicos.”

“Not a chance in hell.” Violet stretches and yawns.

He studies the photos from Saint Mary’s Hospital, the victim’s rape exam. Tender patches colored eggplant branded under her eyes and between her thighs stir something that merits another sip. Behind him, Violet looks down at the same thing.

“How many times do you have to look at those?” she asks.

“Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.” He traces the edges of the paper with his fingertips. He sometimes wishes he could become desensitized, lose all sympathy toward the victim like some of his colleagues. “It’s just until I can become senior at the firm, love. Maybe partner, in a few years.”

“Sell your soul to the devil?”

“More like renting it out.” From an envelope, he pulls out a photo and hands it to Violet. He speaks low onto the rim of his glass. It was the only opening in a good firm back then. It was where he was needed. But he wants to get into a different area of practice soon enough, maybe white-collar or real estate, something like that.

She examines the picture. “Where the hell did you get this?”

“An anonymous tip.” He takes the photo from her and examines it. “This is what’s going to win the case. This is what’s going to make me partner at the firm.”

“Paint the victim as a whore …” She trails off.

“I know.” Mason takes a deep breath and rubs his brow.

“It’s perfect.” Violet kisses the top of Mason’s head and walks off. “You’re going to be a fucking star.”

He watches her walk out into the hall, enjoying the way the naked skin of her backside rocks before him, something akin to the artwork painted on the inside of a virtuoso’s dream. As she disappears down the staircase, he washes the image down with another sip. His eyes wander back to the photos, the one Violet approved of: the victim, topless and laughing on his client’s lap the night of the rape in question. The Maker’s Mark gives him confidence, a little more hope than he might have if he were sober: if he can just win this case, he can move into any area of law he wants and never again have to defend another scumbag criminal.

“Where is your sister?” The question of the redheaded stranger from his dream reverberates between his ears.

“That’s a damn good question, lady,” he answers to himself as he goes back to the laptop. “Hopefully as far away from Goshen as someone like her can get.”

It doesn’t sit with him well, Rebekah not contacting him. He knows she’s naive, a bit gullible, traits that can be confused for being slow, but can be chalked up to southern hospitality. Mason clicks to her Facebook page. The inactivity is out of character—she usually posts devotional scripture daily. The last post reads: Galatians 5:19–21.

After years of having it shoved down his throat, Mason still knows the quote without having to look it up. “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

Below the scripture is a photo of Rebekah and their little sister, Magdalene. But Mason never met Magdalene—his mother was just pregnant with her at the time he was shunned from their church, disowned by the family.

Mason created a fake Facebook account, Louisa Horn, to stay in touch with his sister. He wonders if his parents finally worked out that Rebekah was in contact with him behind their backs. From what he understands, Rebekah was able to keep their father’s suspicions at bay by telling him that Louisa Horn was merely somebody interested in their church. Mason knew of the church’s newly added techniques of preaching in front of department stores and such, trying to lead the lost into salvation, notches in the Bible belts … and the fictional Louisa Horn was just another prospect.

Had Mason known that wanting to become a lawyer, even the mere thought of leaving home, would warrant a sudden severing of contact, he would have been more cautious. But over the years, the wiring in his dad’s brain seemed to shift and loosen from that of a normal-enough evangelistic preacher into something else, something more fanatical. None of the rumors credible, Mason could just laugh them off. But with his father’s transition only developing when Mason was a teenager, and the four-year age gap between him and Rebekah, the fervent dogmas of his father were mostly in hindsight, changes progressing after Mason left home and his family chose to have nothing to do with him.

Mason sits back, rubs his chin, and squinches his brow. He white-knuckles the neck of Maker’s Mark. The red wax coating that covers the glass makes it look like his hands are bleeding. Stigmata, he thinks, remembering an elderly lady in the community who went to his father once for guidance, convinced that she bore the wounds of Christ. But that was a long time ago, back in Goshen. Never a shortage of religious zealots there. Mason rereads the Galatians scripture from his laptop once more. He gets a shiver and thinks to himself, Run, Rebekah, run.