Page 12 of Longing for Liberty

Jeremy wasn’t the jealous type, but he was the protective type. I didn’t want to ignite that part of him when there was absolutely nothing we could do to change the situation. So for now, I wouldn’t share any details of my time at the Penthouse. Instead, I held his free hand with mine as we ate.

After dinner, we met Rebecca and Stanley for a walk.

The chit-chat was rote, and when Rebecca asked me with concern in her eyes how the job was going, I assured her that my day had been fine.

I couldn’t express to anyone in words the strange, powerful effect of Amos Fitzhugh’s presence.

Hopefully, the feeling would lessen and subside over time.

The four of us sat in a patch of grass between the garden and orchard as the heat of the day began to dissipate.

“I don’t think we’ve ever heard how the two of you met,” Stanley said.

Jeremy and I shared a smile, and he nudged me to tell the story.

“Okay,” I said. “I was supposed to meet friends at this bar my freshman year at college. We’d heard that they served underage, so I was in line for a drink, and this guy came up next to me—not Jeremy—some not-so-nice guy who’d been drinking too much already.”

Rebecca and Stanley were a rapt audience as I remembered the scene.

The guy slightly swayed as he stood there, staring down at me with this lewd, wet smile.

“You’re coming home with me,” had been his first words.

I had laughed straight in his face out of sheer surprise, and then because ew .

Not because he was ugly. He looked like a beefy football player and had a nice face.

So maybe his aggressive approach worked with some girls, but it wasn’t what I was after.

He didn’t appreciate my laughter and wasn’t accepting a possible no.

He’d grabbed his crotch and said, “You’ll want this, believe me,” before reaching down and cupping hard between my legs, digging his middle finger up into the soft fabric of my leggings and yanking me toward him with his other hand around my waist.

I’d let out a scream that got swallowed up in the packed, loud bar.

I tried to step back, shoving at his chest, but the guy had had a hold of me, and it hurt.

Two of his friends were standing close and cracking up with amusement.

I was about to go into megabitch mode when Jeremy was suddenly there.

He’d been wearing a backwards baseball cap with wavy brown hair sticking out.

“Dude, let go of her,” he’d said to the guy who probably had fifty pounds on him.

The guy grinned in Jeremy’s face, his hand digging deeper and making me jump with a yelp .

What happened next was so fast. Jeremy punched the guy twice.

Bam. Bam. His arm had moved so quickly that I couldn’t even see exactly where the guy had been hit, only that there’d been a squelchy crack , and he was suddenly letting go of me as his head snapped back.

It had seemed like slow motion that his eyes rolled in their sockets and he teetered backward before crashing down on a bunch of unhappy people behind him.

“Come on.” Jeremy grabbed my hand and pulled me to the exit, not stopping until we were around the corner outside, both of us leaning against the brick wall of the bar.

I was breathing hard, panic rising in my chest now that the shock was wearing off.

Jeremy had looked me over in a careful way. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I told him, catching my breath.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

A situation like that would normally send me into a full-on attack, but his presence was so calming. I visualized him punching that guy again, and a bubble of laughter rose up, making him give me a small, inquisitive grin.

“What’s so funny?” he’d asked.

“Do you always go around knocking people out like that?”

He shrugged and readjusted his hat, the dimple in his cheek coming out to play as he smiled.

“I do a little amateur boxing. But it’s been a while since I hit someone without gloves.

That was…whew.” He shook out his hand. I looked over his grungy white T-shirt with a tear in the middle and bottom edge, and his filthy jeans and work boots.

I’d later learn he was in town as part of the construction team working on the new building on campus.

I’d picked up his hand and looked at his knuckles, which were reddened. I brought that total stranger’s hand up to my lips and kissed his knuckles. “Thank you for helping me. I’m Libby.”

“Yeah, no problem.” He’d squeezed my hand. “Jeremy.”

Coming back to the present, I finished the story and smiled at Rebecca and Stanley, who may as well have had cartoon eyes.

“And I pretty much knew I wanted to marry him that night,” I admitted.

I’d been in awe of the handsome carpenter with his mountain man accent and smart, self-taught brain.

Jeremy was two years older than I was and had never attended college.

He was a voracious reader, mostly nonfiction, and could converse on just about any topic.

Stanley clapped his hands together, and Rebecca said, “I never knew you boxed.”

Jeremy waved it away like it was nothing, but he had been good .

He started at twelve and boxed in a lightweight division until he was twenty-five, when I got pregnant with Summer.

I’d watched so many rounds of him in the ring as I’d held my breath, even covering my eyes at times.

But when it was time for him to be a family man, he decided it was time to stop knocking people out. And that was that.

The four of us got quiet, a lull filled with unspoken memories—memories we would have shared if things were different. Jeremy and I didn’t ask about how Rebecca and Stanley had met, and they didn’t offer to share whatever story they’d made up for others.

A scream came from somewhere nearby in the neighborhood, and the four of us shared wide-eyed glances before we stood and ran toward the sound.

The scream morphed into the sobs of a woman and shouts of a man.

We turned the corner and saw a couple. Other people were coming out of their homes to see what was going on, too.

The woman, just a girl really, was on the ground, scrambling backward away from her husband, who was shouting over her about burning their food. Rebecca and I immediately went to the woman, who had blood running from her lip, while Jeremy went to the young man, putting a hand on his chest.

“Okay, brother, hold on just a sec,” Jeremy said in a soothing tone. The guy scowled down at his wife with an anger that twisted my stomach.

I urged Rebecca to go stand back with Stanley while I helped the girl to her feet. Thankfully Rebecca didn’t argue, though her face looked like she wanted to do the bam, bam knockout punch to the husband as she walked further away from him.

Two State forcemen came running over, making the crowd step back.

“What’s going on here?” one of them said, his voice sounding too young to be someone of authority. To make matters worse, a stupid drone sped over and hovered to capture the scene, filling my ears with its incessant buzzing.

The girl clung to me, trembling and repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had to go to the bathroom. It was an accident.”

Everyone, including the forcemen, remained still and listened.

“Well, your stupid accident burned my dinner,” the guy said.

“We’ll share some of our rations,” Jeremy suggested.

“That’s not the point,” the guy said. He made an aggressive move to grab his wife’s wrist, but when she flinched away, I instinctively moved to stand in front of her. The guy bucked up, stepping into my face.

“Mind your own business, lady.” He glowered down at me, and I started shaking as the ashes stirred within my soul.

“Libby,” Jeremy said softly. I realized I was standing tall and scowling back at the kid. I quickly checked my face and loosened my posture to my usual meek self.

“We’re a community,” I said gently. “And we’re here to help each other.”

“Well, we don’t need your handouts.” He reached around me and grabbed the girl by the arm, yanking her to her feet.

“Are you going to take care of this?” the older forceman asked the husband.

“Yes, sir, I’ve got it,” the husband assured him, souring my stomach.

“Good, because we can’t have her disturbing the peace again. Let us know if we need to put her in the stockades.”

I gritted my teeth hard as the husband nodded at the forcemen and pulled his young wife into the house like a naughty child, slamming the door behind them. But the look the girl had sent me over her shoulder, begging me for help, would haunt me.

“That’s enough,” the enforcer said to all of us. “Go back to your business.”

Without a goodbye to Rebecca or Stanley, Jeremy took my hand, and we went home in silence like everyone else.

I wondered if any of our neighbors had the same urge I did at that moment to let loose a primal scream of rage.

All night, I thought about a time when we lived in a different kind of neighborhood. Our last Fourth of July. It seemed so distant now, like just another fictional delusion.

* * *

“Cheers to getting to have a drink together!” I’d raised my pineapple hard seltzer and tapped it against Paola’s raised mango one, and we both let out elated Woos before drinking.

In the past four years as neighbors with the Baker family, one or the other of us had always been pregnant.

Now we stood in our cul-de-sac with babes—hers on her hip, mine strapped to my chest—having a drink together in red folding camp chairs under a pop-up canopy that looked unstable.

The sun was hot that day, bouncing off the asphalt where the guys played basketball.

Denari and Jeremy took turns lifting the kids so they could “slam dunk” the balls.

Half the time, they still missed from a foot away.

We were highly amused. The sun glistened off Denari’s sweat-slicked dark skin, and Jeremy’s shoulders were already turning red.

“Babe!” I called. “Let me reapply the sunscreen!”

“Nah! I need to get my base tan!”

Denari had a good laugh at this, and Paola rolled her eyes, amused. The men turned on a sprinkler in the yard, and we laughed more watching the kids run around screaming, especially when the Baker toddler’s diaper filled with water and he waddled with his little butt crack showing.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Summer was out of breath as she came to a skidding halt beside me with Gabriela right behind her. Both girls were holding their dolls. “Can we have watermelon now?”

“Of course, honey.” I raised the lid on a container for them.

“Don’t eat the whole thing, Gabby!” Paola scolded. “It’s for everyone.”

“There’s plenty,” I told Gabby with a wink.

“Mommy,” Summer said, slurping down a chunk. “Miss Pow-la said she would teach me Espanol.”

“Oh, really?” I raised my eyebrows at Paola. “That’s so nice of her.”

“Yeah, she said if I came to stay one weekend, I could learn because she would only talk to me in Espanol the whole time.”

“Nothing like immersion learning,” I told Summer, smoothing down her braid. “It’s the best way.”

Gabriela piped up. “And we can speak Spanish at recess so the boys won’t know what we’re saying.”

“Watch out,” I warned. “They might know Spanish too.”

“No, they don’t,” Gabriela assured me. “Because when I said something on the bus to a new girl who doesn’t know very much English yet, the boys told me to go back to Mexico.”

I bristled and looked at Paola, both of us frowning.

Summer huffed. “And I told him she is from America just like him, and he should go back to the neanderthal cave.”

Oh, dear.

Paola pinched the bridge of her nose, trying not to laugh, but I was disturbed.

“Honey, I want to talk to you about this more, later, okay? Kids shouldn’t be talking like that and being mean to each other. Let me talk to Mrs. Paola. You guys go play.”

The girls ran off with the container, and I looked at Paola.

“Did you know about that?”

She shook her head. “Tale as old as time.”

I scoffed, my foot bouncing in its flip-flop as I rubbed Asher’s back. “I’m going to talk to the bus driver. And the teacher. I’m not having that.”

She gave me a small smile, and I stewed as we sat there finishing our drinks. I squatted and pushed my hand into the icy cooler, pulling out two more and popping them open for us.

“I’m serious about having Summer over for a weekend,” she told me, accepting the dark cherry can. “Only if it’s okay with you, of course.”

“Of course!” I took a drink. “I might come so I can learn too. Mine is rusty.”

“You all need to come to Panama with us when we go next summer to see my grandparents…well, if we go. Denari’s not so sure with everything he keeps hearing at work.”

My stomach turned a little, and I bounced in place as Asher wiggled. I knew things were bad after all of the protesting and disappearances, but with such little news I let myself hope that good people working for the government were trying to make things right behind the scenes.

“What has he heard?” Denari worked for the government after a stint in the Army. He and Jeremy spent a lot of time sitting out on either of our porches these days, talking.

She shook her head, and her gaze went unfocused as she watched the men playing. “He said there’s talk of changes…departments combining, layoffs. Hundreds of contracts expiring and not being renewed. Lots of secretive projects with huge budgets. Just weird stuff that they can’t make sense of.”

Jeremy had been quieter than usual lately, lost in thought a lot.

I knew he didn’t want to stress me out since I had my hands full.

I knew all of the big news, and that was all bad enough to digest and deal with.

But whatever rumors Jeremy’s brother Aidan and Denari were hearing through their federal contacts must have been really disturbing to have both of these normally chill, gregarious men in their feelings so much lately.

Did I want to know? I should have. I really should have. Maybe if I’d been better informed, I would have insisted on leaving sooner. Maybe I could have talked Paola and Denari into leaving, too. Instead, I stuck my head in the sand, and I hoped for the best.