Breaking Night (31 page)

For the next three weeks, I kept telling myself I was going to visit Ma. I really was, but it became hard not to be distracted by the little things, like how I coaxed Carlos into a real estate office, where we finally filled out forms and made appointments to see places. We wanted a two-bedroom in a quiet building in Bedford Park, just like we had planned, nothing too ghetto. In the meantime, I tried to make our living space as nice as possible. I made our beds, tucking in the corners just the way the maids had when we first moved in. Since we always trashed the rooms so bad, we’d hung “do not disturb” signs on the doors permanently. Sam helped me chase after garbage, several fast food containers per person per day. When we stopped at the corner store, I picked up one of those plug-in fresheners, potpourri scented, for $1.89.

Using gum, I tacked up our Chinatown pictures to the motel mirror, next to all the love notes I’d been writing Carlos. I wrote a fresh one and drew a cartoon frame of hearts around it that I colored in with a red pen. I hung it up beside our pictures.

Carlos, being with you has made me happier than I’ve ever felt before.

You are my purpose; you have been there for me when it mattered most, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, you made me laugh when it all seemed pointless. I love you dearly.

Liz

I wrote Carlos little love notes like these every day. But over the course of those few weeks in the motel, the theme of the letters turned from gratitude and affection to me expressing that our relationship was worth salvaging, and how glad I was that we were getting past our problems.

One day, while Carlos was out visiting an old friend, a big guy they called Mundo on the block, Sam and I used about ten dollars he had left behind to pick up a few things at the store.

We attempted discount makeovers. Sam selected two jars of glitter nail polish and an oversized can of hairspray. Following the advice of a teen magazine, which we propped open on the radiator in the bathroom, we got four packs of imitation Kool-Aid, and tried, unsuccessfully, to dye our hair Quirky Purple and Very Berry Pink.

“Is it working?” I asked Sam, lifting my head out of the bathroom sink.

“Um, I dunno. I guess I can see some purple, but I’m not sure if it’s just my imagination. How’s my head?”

I laughed out loud at the pinkish streams of water running down her face, between her eyes, dripping off the tip of her nose. Her whole scalp, clearly visible through the inch and a half of hair on her head, was pink.

“You look fab,” I said sarcastically.

The only thing we dyed was our skin and our T-shirts, which, splashed on their original white, appeared tie-dyed.

We kicked back, letting our hair and nails dry, and watched
I Love Lucy
reruns, waiting for Carlos to return so we could all go grab dinner. Six o’clock came and went. Eight. One. Four a.m. It occurred to me to call his cell phone, and then I realized he’d never bothered to give me, or Sam, the number. Carlos paid the front desk nightly for the following day, and I was sure he hadn’t paid in advance. I wondered what would happen if he didn’t come back by noon tomorrow, checkout time. I looked out the window all night, asking Sam over and over if she thought something might have happened to him.

“Yeah, his mother dropped him on the head when he was a baby, that’s what happened. Don’t worry, he’s not in danger. He’s just an asshole.”

In the morning, I begged the hotelkeeper not to throw us out, using the phone to explain that Carlos would be back to pay any time.

“I’m sick of guys leaving their hookers here. This is not some flophouse.”

“We’re not prostitutes!” I snapped at him. “He’s my fiancé,” I lied.

“This is a business, lady, not a drug haven, not a whorehouse. Pay up or go.” And he hung up.

We bartered with him, using the only thing of value in sight: a gold watch Carlos had picked up on the day I visited Ma. The cold found its way into every crevice of my clothing as we walked to the front desk clutching our sweaters to our necks for warmth, Sam trailing behind me.

I spotted the person behind the nasty argument, a short, stubby, fifty-something Italian man. He held either side of Carlos’s watch, lifting it up to the light. “This will get you until tomorrow,” he said.

“But he paid a hundred and fifty for it, it’s brand-new,” I protested.

“Well,” he said, slipping the watch into a backpack on his side of the scratched Plexiglas, “it’s not worth the shirt on my back. I’m doing you girls a favor.”

By nightfall, we folded. Sam and I got out the trash pail and started digging through it in search of any salvageable leftovers from the last few days. We split rubbery hamburgers, stale strawberry shortcake, and a funky-smelling turkey sandwich. The water from the bathroom tap tasted poisonous. For hours, Sam and I took turns racing to the toilet and checking the window for Carlos. The bad food made bubbles rumble through my midsection; everywhere I walked, I felt sick.

At sunrise, we flopped down on Carlos’s and my bed, the one nearest to the door, and lay on our stomachs to look through the window together, out into the bright parking lot. We grew sleepy, watching how the morning sun gleamed gold off the windshields of parked cars and sparrows populated the frosted bare branches of a nearby tree. Neither of us said we were afraid, but under the layers of blankets, Sam grabbed my hand and held on tight. Every so often, when the wind howled on the other side of the thin windowpane and a cold draft kicked up through the crack between the door and the floor, she squeezed my hand harder.

I woke up to her nudging me, less than an hour later. When I opened my eyes, her finger was drawn to her lips, telling me to be quiet. My first instinct told me the hotelkeeper was nearby, ready to evict us. But then Sam motioned to the ground. There, between the foot of the bed and the ancient motel radiator, I saw them: a family of mice, a big one and four little babies, scavenging through the leftovers we’d declared far too rancid to risk eating.

We watched in total silence as the greasy takeout bags shifted and wiggled under the weight of the five mice darting in and out. Their cuteness immobilized us both. They were gray, not much lighter than the motel carpet, with pink noses and glistening black eyes. Remaining totally still, we discovered, as the biggest one carried food back and forth, that their nest was in the radiator, somewhere near the reverse side of the slits that ran along the top row of the vents.

“So that means they can see us from there all the time,” I whispered to Sam. She gave a small nod; her eyebrows were bent upward with affection.

“I like the babies,” she whispered back.

“Me too,” I said, softly, “they’re the cutest.”

We watched them until the sun was fully up and the motel’s overnight visitors vacated their rooms, opening and slamming car doors, starting up their engines. Dozens of times, the mice zipped in and out of our take-out bags, startling themselves with their own bristly movements, quickly retreating back into their hideout, only to peer through the vents and inevitably venture out again.

I was the first to hear his cab pull up. I felt it had to be Carlos because a hip-hop beat blasted, growing louder as the car approached. The door opened, then slammed. Sam looked at me.

“I don’t know whether to be calm or angry,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I told her. I realized then that I didn’t know because I was waiting to see what
he
felt first. I was used to that, sensing my own feelings only in relation to others. If he was content, then so was I. Carlos had been calling the shots all along, because I let him. I caught myself at this moment, ready to do the same, and it sickened me.

We stayed still and waited for his heavy footsteps to come close. Then his keys were jingling in the lock. My heart jackhammered in my chest. Carlos entered whistling.

“Hi,” he said casually as he came in. His face appeared worn, eyes drooping, bags underneath them. He looked different somehow. I wondered if he might have been up all night since we last saw him; I wanted to know what he was doing. He sat at the foot of Sam’s bed, smelling strongly of cigarettes. “Waz up, shorties,” he said, playfully. “I’m ready to pass out.” He avoided my eyes and sat, unlacing his boots.

“Where were you, Carlos?” I asked, as though it wasn’t in any way controversial to question him.

“I told you, Shamrock. Mundo’s house. I ain’t seen that fool in years.”

“Why didn’t you call?” I made sure he sensed the anger in my voice. I was not taking his crap today.

He moved around the room, needlessly arranging things, the TV antenna, his boots under the bed, our hairspray can on the bathroom shelf, ignoring my question.

“Carlos, do you hear me?”

He banged shut a drawer in response, opened another, removed a set of boxers from inside, slammed that one harder.

“The least you could have done was call.”

“Where is my watch?” he asked, cool as ice, looking straight into my eyes for the first time since he’d come in. A stab of fear went through my chest. Sam looked at me.

“Where is your watch,” I repeated stupidly.

“
Yes
. Where. Is. My. Watch?” His eyes were glassy, no tenderness behind them at all.

“We sold it to the hotelkeeper for a night’s stay when you left us here. That’s where it is!”

After a pause, Carlos cocked his leg back and kicked the trash pail, sending it sailing across the room, where it crashed against the wall and then onto the ground. Sam and I shot straight up and drew close to each other. I was shaking.

“Why would you sell
my
watch?” he asked through his teeth. I’d never seen him like this; he was possessed.

“You left us here.” I hadn’t meant to sound so whiny.

“Well, I am not responsible for you!” he screamed.

“Responsible for us? Is that how you feel?” I knew it was true, and I felt both angry and embarrassed when he highlighted it. “We had real estate appointments yesterday.
You
missed them.” Now I was crying.

“Don’t give me that shit!” he screamed, punching the wall beside the mirror, once, then twice, shaking loose my tacked-up love letters and sending them fluttering to the ground like leaves. Sam clutched one of the pillows, which was stained purple from dye. Together, we watched Carlos storm into the bathroom and slam the door.

He ran the sink and shower full force, and didn’t come out for over an hour. For a moment, Sam and I sat in bed together and were totally quiet. I needed something to happen. I got up and turned on the TV for distraction.

“What the hell was that?” I finally said, crying, pointing to the bathroom, my hand shaking. “He’s never acted like that.”

“I don’t know what that was,” she whispered. I’m not sure which of us was more afraid. But we didn’t leave, we just waited, hoping that when he came out he would be normal again, take us to a diner, crack some jokes, even if it meant ignoring what he had just done.

When Carlos finally came out, his hair wet, his face cleanly shaven, he tugged a blanket from Sam’s empty bed and went to sleep on the floor without saying a word to either of us. I was glad he didn’t come near me. On the opposite side of the room, it took me forever to relax.

“Sam?”

“Yeah.”

“Walk me to the bathroom? I don’t want to go alone.”

We stepped over Carlos’s huge sleeping body. In the bathroom, his things were scattered all over the filthy pink and cream tiles—his army pants heaped into a mound on the floor, that wad of money poking out from them, a disposable razor. Little hairs were peppered all over the sink. Using the mirror, I washed pink dye streaks from behind my ears while Sam peed.

“I got this stuff everywhere,” I told her.

“Yeah,” she said, swiping her hand over her fuzzy head. “Mine’s going to be easier to clean off. Can you pass me some tissue, Liz?”

“Yeah.”

I leaned down and lifted one of the two rolls from under the sink, when my eyes caught sight of something shiny. It was a small, silver cut of tinfoil, the exact size of the dime bag packages Ma and Daddy left scattered around our kitchen on University. Without taking my eyes off the foil, I passed Sam the tissue and crouched down.

In the center of the foil, ever so faint and small, I found tiny specks of white powder.

“Sam! Sam.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t flush. Be quiet and look at this. . . . He’s on coke.”

The discovery of Carlos’s hidden habit transformed him for me from an eccentric, hilariously original person to a junkie with a personality disorder. For the two nights that followed, I stayed away from the parties he started up again in the spare hotel room. All throughout those nights, music blasted from the party and cabs arrived, unloading person after person: Fief and his cousins from Yonkers, people from Bedford Park, Jamie, Mundo, and countless others. Sam passed from one room to the next, doing her best to keep me company. My absence from those parties was a form of protest. I sat by myself, planning the letter I would write to Carlos telling him I knew his secret, and if he kept using drugs, I couldn’t be his girlfriend.

I could just see us if he didn’t stop using: we’d end up living in a Bronx apartment, a high school dropout and a cokehead. We would be one step away from Ma and Daddy’s life. What was the difference?
Hookers
, the hotelkeeper had called us. Maybe you could be a prostitute without knowing it, I thought. Maybe all it took was compromising yourself for the sake of gaining something in return. I was sick of my dependence on Carlos, tired of our sick lifestyle.

I fell asleep drafting different versions of my letter, with my notepad open on my lap.

Dear Carlos,

We’ve come to a crossroad . . .

The next morning, I woke up to the pounding before Sam and Carlos did, someone’s fist slamming against our door, rattling the chain, a man’s voice calling on the other side. The two of them were sleeping through it. Still foggy from sleep, I pulled open the door to a guy in his mid-twenties. His fist was lifted, ready to knock again. Sam came up behind me; we’d slept past checkout time.