Читать книгу Freedom’s Child - Jax Miller - Страница 16

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 of Fortune?” she asks.

“Yes.” I line the buttons up right. “He’s a hottie, isn’t he?”

“I don’t kiss and tell.” She winks at me and I wink back. I decide not to explain to her the need to have the coffeepot in the coffee-maker when she turns it on. I decide not to explain to her the need to get dressed after she wakes up. I decide not to explain to her the need to not leave pans and pots burning on the stove. You can explain these things only so many times before you have to just give up. I’d complain to the super, but he’s useless. And the calls to her snot-nosed daughter are even more useless, her business skirts so tight that they apparently choke off the blood to her conscience.

“Do I have kids, Freedom?” She remembers my name this time. This makes me sad. I think of her son and daughter, the ones who come by only to raid her medicine cabinets and pillage her jewelry boxes. I warned them once, trying to do Mimi a favor, but it backfired. And now they never come by.

“No, Mimi. You don’t have kids.” I envy her ignorance. There is a piano in her bedroom, the only room with the space in the apartment to hold it. And despite the dementia, she can always remember the right notes to play. I lead her to the bench, an attempt to put her chaotic mind at ease, before she starts talking like a porn star, before the demons of dementia possess her head.

“Do you have children, Nessa?” I never told her my name was Nessa. She flips through a songbook like it’s written in hieroglyphics.

“Nessa … why did you call me Nessa?” I straddle the bench right next to her.

“Who is Nessa? You’re Freedom.” There’s no use asking her anymore. She has the attention span of a tsetse fly, not her fault. But I thought I was more careful than that around her. When did I slip? Twenty bucks says it was some night when I was striding the apartment’s balcony in a drunken stupor. I’m Nessa Delaney! I let it go. The ringing from her head catches my attention once more. I help the hearing aid out of the side of her skull and speak loudly to her.

“I’ll pick up some batteries from the pharmacist this afternoon.” I flip through the pages until we get to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I put the book upside down on the music stand, for no other reason than selfish entertainment on my part. But Mimi impresses me. She plays it by ear, and I have to wonder how much of it she can actually hear. I take advantage of the somber melody and her deafness.

“You know, Mimi. There will be a day when I am gone, and that day will come before yours. And I’ll not be here to clean the eggs from the stove and to get you new hearing-aid batteries. And it saddens me, to imagine you dying in this home because you won’t know what the sound of the smoke alarm indicates.” I watch her hands create perfect sounds. In my head, I ask God that Mimi takes the whole apartment complex with her. And then I turn to the side of her face. “And when I lie dying next door after swallowing my suicide jar, I promise to think of you. Because I believe you were a good person, a good person who deserved better than what you got in this life. A kind soul, you were. And in some ways, I think you should consider the dementia a blessing. What I wouldn’t give not to remember anything about my life. And after the paramedics take me away, I take comfort in knowing that you will never think of me again, despite me being your only friend in this world.” The music fades with a few of the same notes interrupting the silence. Her hands curl into weak fists down to her lap.

“Would you care to have a cup of coffee with me, Freedom?” Mimi smiles. I appreciate her charm. “We can find that George Clooney on The Weather Channel, if we watch closely.”

“I’d like that.”