Breaking Night (7 page)

“It’s not working. What do I do?”

Lisa tried to muffle her laughter. Then, before I could think to do anything, our parents’ voices sounded in the stairwell. Lisa quaked with laughter, holding her sides, savoring my horror. In that one awful moment, I realized that it had all been a joke at my expense. She’d completely tricked me, again.

Lisa grabbed my arms to prevent me from undoing her work. Her laughter followed me as I broke free and slammed the door to my room. I clamped my hand over the fake petals and tore every last one from my head.

I pulled the doll’s dress off, ran over to the window, and threw it out angrily. The barrettes followed behind, falling noiselessly down to the street. In the next room, my parents rustled in with plastic bags. I slammed my body into my bedroom door to hold it shut. On the other side, Lisa used her weight to combat my resistance. With one hand, I unraveled the braids, while holding the door shut at the same time. Then I moved out of the way at just the right moment so that she fell through the door and flat on her face. I stood, looking down at the bright red roses spilled around my bare feet.

“What’s going on?” Ma poked her head through the door. I burst into tears.

“What happened? Lisa, what did you do?”

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything! Lizzy said she wanted me to do her hair. Now she’s crying. I don’t know why.”

“Get out!” I screamed.

“Lisa, tell me—” Ma started.

“Get
out
! Idiot!” I snapped even louder.

Lisa picked herself up and left without another effort to torment me.

Crouching down, Ma opened her arms and engulfed me. I dissolved in her warmth.

“What’s wrong with my baby? Tell Mommy what happened.”

She combed her fingers through my hair and wiped my tears away with her thumbs. Ma kissed my cheeks and forehead, her eyes so sympathetic I thought she was going to cry, too. In her arms, my anger evaporated.

“Talk to me. Shhhh. Don’t cry, pumpkin.”

But the crying was what kept her close to me; there was no stopping it.

The world was filled with people who were repulsed by me. Only my mother knew that I deserved to be held. So I let her embrace me and demand over and over to know what was wrong, just so I could hear her voice, feel it vibrating in her chest and humming against my whole body, lulling me into a sense of safety. I buried my face against Ma’s neck, trembling and gripping her shirt each time I suspected she might pull away.

I tried to be a good student. I really did. I wanted to be one of those kids who raised her hand in class, knew the answers, and handed in all my work. Like Michelle—during story time she was the best at reading out loud to the class. Or like Marco, who knew the right answers to math problems. I tried to be a good student like them; tried to get good grades. It just didn’t work out that way. There was too much going on.

Maybe getting more sleep on school nights would have helped. But I wasn’t getting sleep; no one made me. Nearly seven days a week, I bore witness to the endless traffic streaming through our apartment. Ma and Daddy flowed in and out of the house like tireless joggers, all night long. Their need for drugs had become more urgent and out-of-control than ever, and their habits played out in a routine that took up all the space in our apartment. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a calendar, pointed directly at a given day, and guessed ahead of time exactly what would happen, and when. They became that predictable.

Six or seven days into each month, Ma and Daddy blew the SSI check and ran us broke. Then, if there was no money because the check was spent—and it always was—Ma would shake down regulars at the bar for a few dollars, over at the Aqueduct or McGovern’s. There was an assortment of older men from whom she’d get one dollar here, two dollars there, loose change from a broken five or ten spread out across the bar. Sometimes she’d beg for a couple of quarters to play the jukebox and instead she’d pocket them. Other times Ma took the men to the bathroom or out in a back alley, and after a few minutes alone with them she could earn even more.

Ma did this until she gathered just enough for a hit. The minimum was five dollars for a “nick’s worth” of coke, though this was a cheap high, a junkie’s high. Returning from the bars, Ma reported straight to Daddy: “Peter, I got five dollars. Petie, I got five.” Then he’d quietly slip on his coat in their room, before trying to sneak away, in case Lisa was still awake.

Daddy knew he’d never hear the end of it if Lisa caught him leaving to buy drugs while we went hungry. There’d be no way to avoid the insults, curses, tears, and shouting.

“You can’t spend the money! We need food! I’m starving, my stomach burns. We didn’t eat dinner, and you’re going to get high?” she’d scream.

Listening to Lisa fight Daddy and Ma, I knew she made perfect sense. There was no excuse for them to spend our last few dollars on drugs when the fridge contained only a jar of rotten mayonnaise and an old, watery head of lettuce. Lisa had every right to be angry.

But things weren’t always so clear for me, not like they were for Lisa. Ma said she needed drugs to help her forget the bad memories that haunted her, the thoughts of her mom and dad that caused her to suffer all day long. And even though I wasn’t sure what exactly in his past Daddy got high to forget, I knew it must be something very painful, because if Daddy didn’t get high, then he would spend days collapsed on the couch in a withdrawal-induced depression. In that state, he became unrecognizable to me.

Lisa’s request of our parents was simple—all she wanted was a hot meal and for them to do better by us. I wanted the same. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that if we hadn’t eaten a hot meal for the entire day, Ma and Daddy hadn’t eaten a hot meal in two or three days, either. And when I needed a new winter coat, my eyes kept finding Daddy’s sneakers, which were cracked and held together with duct tape. One way or another, Ma and Daddy were always making it clear that they simply couldn’t give me what they didn’t have.

They had no intention to hurt us. It wasn’t as if they were running off during the daytime to be better parents to some other kids and then returning home at night to be awful to us. They simply did not have it in them to be the parents I wanted them to be. So how could I blame them?

I remember one time when Ma stole five dollars from me on my birthday. It had been a gift from my father’s mother, mailed from Long Island. The crisp bill had arrived in the mail taped neatly inside a glittery card right above my grandmother’s signature and her handwritten birthday wishes. I tucked the bill away in my dresser and planned a trip to the candy store. But that never happened. Instead, Ma waited for me to leave my room and then took the money to buy drugs.

When she returned home half an hour later with a nickel bag, I was furious with her. I demanded that she give me my money, and I shouted mean words at her that are hard for me to think about now. Ma said nothing back. She snatched up her works—syringe and cocaine—from the kitchen table and stormed to the bathroom. I trailed behind her, shouting harsh things. I assumed that she was running away from me to get high in privacy, but I was wrong. Instead, from the bathroom doorway, I saw Ma throw something into the toilet. Then I realized she was crying, and what she had flushed down the toilet was her coke. She’d thrown away the entire hit—despite her desperation.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes, “I’m not a monster, Lizzy,” she said. “I can’t stop. Forgive me, pumpkin?”

Then I was crying too; we both were. We ended up on the bathroom floor together, hugging each other, her syringe resting on the surface of the sink, directly in my view, my mother’s arms riddled up and down with aging needle marks. In the softest voice, she kept asking me for that same simple thing: “Forgive me, Lizzy.”

So I did.

She didn’t mean to do it; she would have stopped if she could have. “It’s okay, Ma, I forgive you,” I assured her. I forgave her in that moment, and I forgave her again two months later when she went into the freezer and took the Thanksgiving turkey we’d gotten from the church and sold it to a neighbor so that she could buy another hit. Forgiving her didn’t mean that I wasn’t devastated. I was heartbroken and deeply hurt whenever they left us hungry. I just didn’t blame Ma or Daddy for my hurt. I wasn’t angry at them. If I hated anything at all, I hated drugs and addiction itself, but I did not hate my parents. I loved my parents, and I knew they loved me. I was sure of it.

At night, Ma would take breaks from shooting up to visit my bedside and tuck me in, sing to me, just one verse of “You Are My Sunshine.” She’d smile at me, rubbing her fingers through my hair. She’d kiss my face and tell me her children were the best thing that ever happened to her. “You and Lisa are my angels, my babies,” she’d say, and I knew I was loved. The smell of her Winston cigarettes and the faint, sour smell of coke always lingered—scents that lulled me to sleep.

One winter night, around four a.m. when Daddy was exhausted, he gave in to my demands for a walk around the neighborhood in the virgin snow. The early-morning hour and the new snow, which sparkled like a bed of bright diamonds beneath the glow of Bronx street lamps, insulated us, and made it seem as if the crunching underfoot was the only sound for miles. The more I pressed him, the more we walked. He told me stories of his psychology studies in college; he taught me things he’d learned there, insisting I would need them someday. “I love you, Lizzy,” he told me. We walked for miles that night without seeing another soul in the empty, snow-covered streets, until it felt as if there really was no one else; as if Daddy belonged only to me and the world belonged only to us. And I knew I was loved.

Drugs were like a wrecking ball tearing through our family, and even though Lisa and I were impacted, I couldn’t help but feel that Ma and Daddy were the ones who needed protecting. I felt like it was my job to keep them safe. There was just something so fragile about them; the way their addiction made them barrel out of the house in total disregard of their safety, at all hours of the night, despite the many news reports about neighborhood rapes, muggings, and cab drivers being shot for their earnings within a ten-block radius of our apartment building.

As though she were impervious to harm, and as though she weren’t legally blind, Ma bounded up University Avenue, fearless, throughout the night, even though her vision made it tricky to navigate the darkened Bronx streets. Ma was blind enough to pass someone she knew on the sidewalk—even her family—without recognizing them. But she was familiar enough with shapes and movements to distinguish a moving vehicle from a parked one, or a person approaching her from one walking away, and even a green traffic light from a red one. Still, that did not stop her from encountering dangerous situations.

A handful of times, Ma was attacked in our neighborhood. These incidents horrified me and I pleaded with her to stay home, but nothing could stop Ma when she wanted to get high. One night she was robbed at knifepoint. More than likely, she had been unable to see her attackers targeting her, something an average-sighted person could have spotted. She came home with a black eye, a busted lip, and a story about how the mugger had gotten furious when he found nothing of value on Ma, and had taken it out on her face.

Another time, she came home making her typical single-minded dash from the front door to kitchen with her bag of coke, and it actually took a moment for me to notice the foot-long rip down the side of her jeans and her bloody leg. Ma told me she was hit by a car.

“Nothing serious, Lizzy. It wasn’t going that fast, I got right up. Same thing happened when I was a bike messenger. I’m fine,” she said, cutting her story short to ask Daddy for her syringe. Ma was either oblivious to the fact that these moments were brushes with death, or she didn’t care. It was hard to tell. The only thing that was clear was that when Ma was bent on having something, she was willing to do anything for it.

Blind as she was, Ma had spent three weeks in the seventies working as a bike courier on the busy streets of Manhattan. Of course, they didn’t normally hire the near-blind, but Ma needed cash and didn’t tell her employer about her impairment. Instead, she borrowed a friend’s mountain bike, and because they paid her by the package, she plowed into traffic at life-threatening speeds. Ma had given up on the job after her second accident, but only because her friend’s bike was totaled and she had no replacement. That’s just the way Ma was, unstoppable when she was determined to get something; unafraid and seemingly unaware of how fragile her life could be.

Daddy wasn’t much better at taking care of himself. On drug runs, he would race up University Avenue through gang territories, the dangerous streets of Grand Avenue and 183rd. Once, he’d returned home badly injured, fresh blood spilled over his face, down onto his neck and shirt. A man had beaten Daddy’s head into the cement just down the block, and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, his addiction was so strong that he gambled with his safety night after night, seeing only the destination ahead of him and not the hazards around him. That destination was the blue door on Grand Avenue, where he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma’s crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealers in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents’ world.

Sleep on school nights was impossible. Somebody had to watch the windows and time how long they took to come back. Somebody had to keep them safe. If not me, then who? Thirty to forty minutes for a drug run was about the average time it took. Too much longer and that meant there was trouble. “9-1-1,” I’d think to myself as I leaned out the window to watch Daddy trek the avenue, shrinking over the curve of University, on his way to another pickup. If he ran into any trouble, I had my plan set. We frequently lost our home phone to unpaid bills, but I could be down at the corner pay phone in moments.

But my responsibilities for the evening did not end there. As Ma and Daddy made their endless drug runs, I passed the hours alongside my parents, searching for other ways that I might be helpful. Ma and Daddy were willing to include me in their activities, and I was thrilled to be a part of them. One way I figured I could be most useful was to help Daddy sneak past Lisa, who was sure to protest if she caught him on his way out. Given that her room was right beside the front door, leaving the house undetected was always tricky for Daddy. That’s where I stepped in.