Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (52 page)

Coco scanned the cabin. “Oh, I didn’t know they could bring a radio!”

“It’s the counselors’,” Beth said.

“I don’t wanna go,” Mercedes said.

“What’s wrong, Mercedes?” Coco asked.

“Mercedes, we can go to the—” Beth started.

“I said I don’t wanna go,” Mercedes said.

“Ai, Mercedes—” Coco said.

“I
ain’t
going. I am going with my mother,” Mercedes declared. She gulped down a cry. Coco mouthed to Beth over Mercedes’s head, “Can she be with her sister? She’ll be okay if she can stay with Nikki.”

“Mercedes, your sister won’t be far away. It’s time for your mother to go,” Beth said. Mercedes shook her head. Other staff members, sensing impending trouble, joined them as they walked toward the sing-along. Out of earshot of the counselors, Coco whispered, “How about a bribe? Mercedes, when you get home, I’ll try to get you anything you want.”

Mercedes stopped. She stared at her mother, tears still wet around her eyes. “I don’t believe you,” she said, considering.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Get ready to go now. The longer this goes on, the harder it is,” Beth warned.

The counselors trailed Coco, who followed Mercedes, who headed for Nautica, who had planted herself in a sandbox. She’d wet herself. Coco lifted Nautica and headed for the car. Mercedes rushed toward Coco, and the counselors picked up speed. They trotted beside Mercedes, listing all the things that camp meant you could do: pick strawberries (and eat as many as you wanted), go to the play center and build with blocks, take boat rides on the lake, eat dinners of burgers and fries.

“I ain’t staying,” Mercedes called back over her shoulder. “I am going with my mother.”

“Your mother is going to go now,” Beth said, panting.

“I ain’t staying.”

“Bye, Mercedes,” Coco said. Mercedes dove for Coco’s leg like a shortstop grasping for a ball. The counselors pinned Mercedes to the ground. Coco broke free and ran. Nautica bounced and looked back and forth at her wailing mother, her screeching sister. Clumps of sand fell from Nautica’s wet butt.

Coco glanced over her shoulder and saw Mercedes kicking and bucking in a human web. “I guess that’s what they do, they hold them in a hug,” Coco said, pausing to catch her breath. Her voice cracked. Wrenching herself away from this vision, she broke into a run again, flying past the trees. When she reached the parking lot, she cramped up and plopped Nautica down on the hood of a car. Coco placed both palms flat on the hot metal, her chest heaving, tears pouring down her cheeks. She could hear Mercedes wailing through the woods. Leaving Mercedes was the hardest thing she’d ever done. With the exception of those nights she’d left her with Lourdes as a baby, it was the first time Coco and her daughter had ever been apart.

On the way home, Coco stopped at Price Chopper and bought Serena a cake to celebrate her graduation from middle school. Milagros hadn’t planned a party; she felt that parties were for birthdays. Coco thought the special day should be acknowledged. She decorated Serena’s cake with a tube of blue frosting. Serena ran over as soon as she spotted Coco. Coco held out the cake; Serena had anticipated a gift. She silently read the homespun message and scrunched her face in disappointment. Coco dropped the cake in Serena’s hands. “That’s life!” Coco said, wounded. She turned her back on Serena and ran into her house.

Coco filled the first uneasy day of the girls’ absence with music and the smell of King Pine. Cleaning gave her a sense of control. Frankie swept. He wiped up a sticky puddle of soda that had been inside the refrigerator door for months. Coco scrubbed the dishes, then the sink. She tossed away piles of papers and stray toy parts and sorted through clothes. She emptied drawers. She did load after load of laundry.

Pearl liked to lie on her back on the floor beneath the glass table from the Rent-A-Center, watching her mother move about the kitchen. Every few laps, Coco would bend over the tabletop and Pearl would look up, as though she were gazing at a star. Coco would try to get Pearl to speak. She’d raise her arms and say, “Say, ‘I’m a miracle. God bless me, I’m alive.’ ” Pearl, smitten, would throw her hands up in the air.

Ordinarily, Coco hung her laundry indoors, even on gorgeous days; sometimes she just felt too rotten about the marks on her skin to be seen. Plenty of folks shunned the indictment of daylight and stepped out for fresh air only in the forgiving dark of night. In warm weather, Coco avoided tank tops and short sleeves. But that day, she felt good enough to wear her T-shirt and to hang the wet clothes outdoors. Nautica trailed her. Pearl clutched the railing near the steps. Coco playfully clamped clothespins
over Nautica’s jumper, making her into a contented porcupine. One by one, with determination, Nautica passed the pins back. “Mommy’s little helper,” Coco said. Nautica grinned into her neck with feigned nonchalance.

Coco dragged the baby pool to the sidewalk. Pearl grabbed on to the edge and watched it fill. She loved water. Whenever Pearl’s sisters were in the tub, she crawled in and joined them—a few times, fully clothed. Now Coco plunked her in the pool, and she splashed with pleasure. Frankie chased Coco with a hose. Pearl was so excited to see her parents playing that she threw herself backward gleefully, and sank. Coco rounded the corner just as Pearl slipped under. Coco scooped her up.

After lunch, the girls napped. Frankie went off with his friends. Coco wrote Mercedes and Nikki letters (she’d already written each girl twice the night before). The laundry dried beneath the sun. A lawn mower buzzed in the distance. A dog barked. Coco listened to her talk shows and organized her prized photographs of her children in an empty box of baby wipes.

Frankie came home early with a movie appropriate for children, a gesture Coco appreciated. Coco cooked and everybody ate and watched the movie together on the living room floor, which had been mopped and spread with fresh sheets. Coco always rested better with Frankie beside her, especially since Pearl had joined them. Once, he’d saved Pearl’s life. She was having a violent seizure, and he’d woken up to her head slapping against his leg. That night, they all drifted off to sleep together, Pearl’s oxygen machine hiccuping predictably.

A few days later, Coco ripped open Mercedes’s first letter. It had been dictated to a counselor onto a donated pharmaceutical memo pad:

Dear Mom,

I miss you and I miss home, even though I like it here. I love boat riding! I like learning center. We had a party, and we ate ice cream, and we played a game called, “What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?” with all my friends. We are going boating again tonight. I love you, and want to see Frankie. This letter is for him Frankie. I miss Pearl. I will love you forever (even when you are mad at me). We played Frisbee, too. My favorite song is “Boom Chicka Rocka Chicka Boom.” I will sing it for you. I want you to call me. I have friends here.

Love, Mercedes

Toward the end of the week, Frankie declared that he was going camping himself. Coco was suspicious. He was uncomfortable changing clothes in unfamiliar places. She couldn’t imagine him undressing in the woods.

Frankie lugged his boom box upstairs. He pulled dried clothes from the radiators and doorknobs. Coco tracked him through a garden of her daughters’ underwear—California Raisins, Winnie-the-Pooh, Three Little Kittens, Beauty and the Beast. On the waistband of his boxers, she’d written
Coco and Frankie,
a firm tug at his thickening waist.

“And there ain’t no girls.
Right,
” she quipped. She followed him downstairs. He headed back up. She flung herself onto the couch and clicked to the Weather Channel. The forecaster predicted a severe thunderstorm for the afternoon.

“You so stupid, camping, my ass, in weather like this?” Coco said. “What he need three pair of boxers for?” she asked Nautica and Pearl. “Girls!” Coco said, answering herself. Frankie ignored her on his way out and kissed the girls good-bye. The screen door slapped. A friend stepped out of the passenger seat and let Frankie in the waiting car. Coco bolted to the door. “Frankie, you—” she called out.

“Whatever, Coco, whatever,” he said.

“Why don’t you take the rest of your things, you fucking asshole!” she shouted.

“Because I don’t want to,” he replied coolly, his face expressionless.

“I hope that lightning
strikes
your ass!” she screamed. Her hair was still wrapped in a towel, her hairline irritated from picking. Frankie’s friend glanced at her and smirked. She slammed the door and yanked the curtain shut and slid down into the couch. She did not want Frankie’s friends to see her, but she wanted them to hear: “They going to the Bronx, I know it!” she hollered almost maniacally.
“Camping my ass!”
Somebody in the car turned up the volume of the music. “Why you talking like that, you yelling at my daddy. Don’t do that,” Nautica said.

Pearl made a snorkeling sound. Coco ripped the wrapper off Pearl’s medication, dragged the machine to the socket, and jammed the prong into the plug. She lifted Pearl and roughly arranged her on her lap and gave her two treatments, back to back, to make up for the ones she’d missed. Pearl was being weaned off oxygen, but she still needed her asthma treatments. She shuddered. Coco stewed. Eventually, the two of them relaxed.

Night fell. Pearl fidgeted. Coco couldn’t sleep. Crickets chirped.
Coco spoke quietly. “If I leave Frankie, will another man want me and my girls?”

First thing next morning, Coco called her sister, Iris. She wanted to know how Foxy had found the courage to leave their father, Manuel, who was unemployed at the time and addicted to heroin. “You remember with Mommy, how people said that Daddy died because she kicked him out?” Coco asked anxiously. Iris believed that their stepfather, Richie, had given Foxy the courage necessary for the final split. But the trouble had gone on for years beforehand, and the beatings for as long as Iris could remember—Iris still recalled the horror of the time their father tied Foxy to the bed and raped her, and how his parents, with whom they were living, pretended not to hear her mother’s desperate screams for help. Manuel’s violent outbursts terrified the entire family, but everyone attributed them to the drugs; no one knew yet that he was schizophrenic. Police came to the house so often that they would say, “Manny, come on, you know the routine.” Once, he’d even robbed the house clean, after Foxy had kicked him out. Eventually, she took him back, but he beat her again and ended up in jail.

It was during Manny’s incarceration that Foxy met Richie at a children’s birthday party, although Richie recognized Foxy from the neighborhood. She had passed by him on her way to a cosmetology class she was taking at Wilfred Academy. Richie immediately noticed her long, blond braid; next, he noticed the black man she was walking with. “A good-looking Puerto Rican white girl going with a black guy, that makes me sick to my stomach,” Richie said. At the birthday party, Foxy assured him the black guy was just a friend.

Foxy would invite Richie over, and he’d tell her he was broke, and she’d offer to pay the fare for the cab. His living situation at the time was precarious. “I wanted a roof over my head, she took care of me—cooked, cleaned, clothes,” Richie said. He fell in love with the children first.