Free by Lauren Kessler

Author:Lauren Kessler [Kessler, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781412959193
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

It was a warm, bright afternoon in late July. They stood together on a small, indigo-dyed rug set on the front lawn of the house they rented on a quiet street in northeast Portland. They faced each other, holding hands. He was wearing baggy white Bermuda shorts and a bright blue shirt. She was wearing a lemon-yellow sundress. Her canvas deck shoes were the same blue as his shirt. She had dyed the crown of her dark hair a brilliant chartreuse. There were flowers everywhere. Friends, neighbors, and family, maybe sixty people, were amiably crowded together in the yard, some standing, some sitting on folding chairs, the kids on blankets. Her parents stood on one side of them; his mother, brother, and sister on the other. Today was their wedding day.

The guy in the white shorts was Arnoldo. He had, by then, been out of prison for one year and ten days. The woman in the sundress was Nicole, an academic turned activist. He grew up in a Texas border town, the son of a man currently serving a fifty-year sentence for murder and a woman who did what she could to hold the family together. She grew up the child of California hippies, followers of Gurdjieff, the philosopher-mystic who taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep.” He had spent his high school years in juvie and his twenties and most of his thirties in prison. She had attended private schools and earned a PhD from Berkeley. A more unlikely couple would be hard to imagine. And yet there they were, connected in ways that transcended stereotypes and defied expectations. And there was Sol, eleven months old on this day, the child that had come both too soon and at exactly the right time. Just like their relationship.

Karuna, the prison chaplain, was officiating this afternoon. She had known Arnoldo for years but had only recently met Nicole. The day they met, Karuna had brought fresh peaches, and the three adults watched as Sol had a total body experience with the fruit, smearing it all over his face, his hands and arms up to the elbows covered in juice and pulp. It was a mess, which no one cared about. What Karuna thought, in that moment, was that the joy and intensity of the relationship she would soon be blessing was right there in front of her, expressed in, as she put it, “this sweet little person.”

Now Karuna stood in front of the couple, lighting a bundle of sage, explaining how it was part of a spiritual ritual to cleanse a person or space, to promote healing and wisdom. She handed the sage to Arnoldo, who smudged Nicole. Then Nicole waved the bundle over him. The couple walked in a tight circle around their families, smudging that space, then a larger circle, acknowledging the community that had come together on the lawn that afternoon. The ceremony that followed had been built from the ground up, pieced together from many traditions, carefully scripted.

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