When I reached my street, I breathed a little easier with a cigarette as I caught my breath. I squatted down and leaned against a tree on the side of the road, when lo and behold, guess who sped around the corner … and by speeding, I mean about thirty-five miles per hour, but fast enough that the mail truck’s engine sounded exhausted from the reckless speed. But I didn’t move. I smiled as he throttled in my direction. I waved. You stubborn asshole.
The truck swerved all over the street with the loud pops of firecrackers going off in the back. And for a second I imagined a scene from some kind of old Prohibition-era film. Smoke poured from the front and back, a gray that matched the layers of fog that hovered over Painter.
The only problem with this was that I probably just broke a million federal laws.
Took a lot of paperwork on the whippersnappers’ part and a thousand angry lectures from them to get out of it. It was nothing a little fake crying and a push-up bra couldn’t fix, but I got the warning.
Later that afternoon, after they’d removed the smoldering remains of the mail truck, I walked by with a bottle of Johnnie Walker to head to Sovereign Shore, my favorite place to hide. On the way, I found a stray envelope on the street. I grabbed Mason’s letter from a puddle and tucked it in my bra.
I never got Rebekah’s letter back. But I’d signed the letters Nessa Delaney instead of Freedom Oliver and addressed them to the Paul household so that if they never made it to Rebekah and Mason, the parents couldn’t suspect their faithful servant FreedomInJesus.
At the Whammy Bar, I crack my neck and think about how I should have done more to keep my children, how I didn’t try hard enough. But it’s better this way, at least for them. That’s what I keep telling myself. But the grief still makes me sick to my stomach, even twenty years later. All the milestones I missed out on. At least someone else got those opportunities, to watch two great kids grow up before their eyes. I guess.
Two Nights Ago
Darkness fills the restroom of the truckstop outside Goshen, Kentucky, where Rebekah Paul cries into a dirty mirror with each chunk of hair that falls into the sink. Her own heavy-handed snips of the scissors send whimpers echoing through the greasy, dim stalls behind her. “God, be with me,” she repeats over and over again, the muffled roars of the truck engines outside rolling in her ears. The sounds of hair slicing are loud near her cheeks; her heart races like it will break through her sternum.
The yellowed lamps over her head buzz with the dying insects they devour at two in the morning. She doesn’t recognize her own reflection, her hair bleached and chopped to the scalp. In the shadows of the restroom, the spots of blood on her collar seem black, similar to the spots on her diary back at home when the pens would leak ink. She looks down, uncomfortable in jeans and a white, tight-fitted Jack Daniel’s tee. She kisses the cross around her neck for the last time with a split lip and tucks it under her shirt so no one can see it. She grabs her backpack. “Lord, forgive me.”
The cool air feels good on her eyes as she walks out to the parking lot; the smells of autumn leaves and oil surround her. At the corner of the lot, Rebekah makes her way toward the Bluegrass bar, an old and grungy pub, as a few big rigs thunder past. She doesn’t recognize the music, something bluesy with guitars, tunes she was forbidden to listen to, the music of the devil.
She has to use both arms to pull open the wooden doors to the pub and is met by a wall of stale cigarette smoke and dirty sinners. Bearded men in suspenders with frothy mugs all turn to stare at the skinny girl, her head down, feeling the cross on her chest through her shirt. She looks around, finds an empty table in the back corner, and goes straight to it, her head aimed at her shoelaces the entire way. She can hear the whispers already, undertones of unspeakable acts they want to do to her, words that shame the Lord and secure them seats in hell right next to Satan himself. She uses her short sleeve to dab the tears from her face, the cotton painful on her skin.
“I know that hurts worse than what it looks,” says an unfamiliar voice. Rebekah looks up to see a thin and ragged man with a nicotine-stained beard and mustache and long, oily hair tucked behind a New Orleans Saints cap, black with a gold fleur-de-lis. “Here, sweetie pie, this oughtta help.” He places a tall glass of beer in front of her.
Rebekah sniffs it. “I’m not allowed to drink,” she says to the glass. “Drinking is against God.” She doesn’t even realize that it’s illegal to drink before twenty-one years of age; the subject was just never brought up at home.
“Naw, sweetie pie, you ain’t gotta worry ’bout that.” He sits close to her in the booth so that she has to move over. “Fact is, God sent me here to look out for ya. A prophecy, ya know?” It isn’t uncommon to hear such talk around Goshen.
She smells the alcohol on his breath and shifts in discomfort but listens anyway. “You’re a prophet?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says with an incomplete smile. “Our Savior told me that you’d be here, ’n that I needed to com’n getcha outta here and help ya turn from yer evil ways and turn back to the righteous path of God. That’s what He said.”
“He did?”
“Yes’m.” He looks back over his shoulder. “Why are you running away from home? God told me you was running away.” She looks at him in astonishment—perhaps he really was sent by God. But then she looks down and doesn’t answer. “Where are ya tryna go, sweetie pie?”
“The West Coast.”
“Why, hell, that’s where I’m goin’ too.” He keeps tonguing the sockets of missing teeth in his grin. “I can give ya a ride if you want.”
Rebekah gets a bad feeling and looks around the bar. The man leans in close, pressing the front of his body against her side, and breathes heavy enough to make her ear wet. He rubs her knee. “Come with me, sweetie pie.”
She turns her head but can’t get away as he starts kissing her neck, the fog of liquor about to make her sick. God, if you want to send someone, send someone else. Please, God, she thinks to herself. “You’re too close, mister.” She tries to push him away, but she’s too weak against his weight.
“Hey,” a second man yells behind him. She breathes easier when he’s pulled away from her. “You best just leave her alone.” Rebekah sees a young man in a soiled apron that’s supposed to be white, in a stance that says he’s ready to fight. “Now, I ain’t messin’, Joe, you just get on out of here, ya hear?”
“It ain’t like that, me ’n the girl was just talkin’, is all.” He puts his hands up.
“I’ve seen enough of what you call talkin’.” The cook takes the man’s hat and throws it hard into his chest. “Now I suggest you be on your way, I ain’t playing around.”
“Fine, fine. I’m leaving,” he says as he grabs his cap and drags his feet. Rebekah watches a few men from the bar start to gather around the cook. “But you ain’t seen the last of me, kid.” Eyeballed by almost a dozen other truckers who show signs of backing the cook up, the man leaves. When he’s out the door, the men go back to their spirits. Rebekah finds herself crying again, alone with the tall glass of beer he left behind. She doesn’t know what comes over her, but she puts the foam to her lips to taste it. The bitterness of it makes her cheeks water. Forgive me, Lord. She throws her head back and chugs the first beer of her life, breathing only out of her mouth in between