Breaking Night (14 page)

One thing that helped to make the tension easier was watching other patients: the sweaty Chinese man who stuffed all the checkers into his pants in slow motion, or the old woman with pursed lips who paraded the “runway” through the ward’s halls, or the man who faced the wall and let a continuous strand of drool spill out of his mouth. Whatever planet these people were on, I knew Ma would be doing ten times better in just a month or so, with medication. Her illness came in bouts, not like these people. Watching the other residents, I counted on the difference I could trace between them and Ma; it assured me that things could be worse, that Ma would come back from this.

“Ma, listen, when you come home, we’re going to McDonald’s.” I’d been searching for a place in the conversation to tell her about my new job.

“Yeah, Lizzy. No problem.”

“No, Ma, I wasn’t asking. I was
saying
; we can get McDonald’s when you get home. It’ll be my treat. I got a job.”

“What, pumpkin? Really? You know, I used to work on a farm when I was a kid, for only a little while though. It was part of one of my foster care placements for like six months.”

She was sane again, safe. I could hear it in her voice.

“We milked cows, it was dis-gus-ting. But everything tasted fresher than when you buy it at the store, ya know? You have no idea how old canned string beans really are.”

“So you’re coming home soon, right? You’re well enough to come home, I can tell. You sound good.”

“Soon, Lizzy. Tuesday, the doctor said. Tuesday.”

“
Really?
Promise?”

“Sure, pumpkin.”

“Okay. So that means you’re coming home this week no matter what, right?”

“Yeah, Lizzy. Hey, I love you pumpkin, put Daddy on the phone now, okay?”

“All right, Ma. I love you, too.”

Daddy took the phone and released a heavy sigh into it, keeping his eyes on the TV. “Hi, Jean,” he said. “Don’t worry. Yeah. Yup. Yeah.”

While they spoke, I skipped over to Lisa’s room and pushed my way inside, calling out her name.

Seated on her bed, Lisa quickly clutched a blanket, covering up her chest. She was shirtless. I immediately stepped back out the door.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Could you watch it, Lizzy, I’m getting dressed,” she snapped.

A crinkled plastic bag lay on the bed near her; the center of the bag read
YOUNG WORLD
in rainbow letters.

“Sorry. It’s just, Ma’s on the phone. She’s getting out.”

“Give me a minute,” she said, avoiding my eyes, “and close my door.”

“Okay,” I told her, backing away.

The door shut and bounced open just a crack, so that it bled light into the dim hallway and still provided a view into Lisa’s room. From down the hall, I could still hear Daddy “uh-huhing” into the phone every minute or so. I pretended to take a few steps away from Lisa’s door but remained close, watching. After a moment, she lowered the blanket, revealing a pale pink, lacy bra half drawn across her chest. The sight of it shocked me. She’d never mentioned anything about a bra before. Though the other day, I remembered her fishing for coins between the couch cushions and counting out some singles she’d saved. Ma owned only one dirty bra herself. Up until just then, I hadn’t given much thought to the idea that we would both need to buy them one day, too.

Lisa pulled either side together and pinched her fingers on a small, plastic bow in the bra’s center, fumbling to close it. Her thick hair was held in the teeth of a hairclip, high up on the back of her head. The bra popped out of her grip twice, and she started over again, until finally it clicked into place. Seeing her topless, I almost backed away. Nudity had become strange around the time we stopped taking baths together, when I was three and she was five. But the bra was too mysterious; her relationship with it too intriguing not to watch. She was becoming a woman, I thought, like Ma. I felt betrayed, like the first time I’d spotted a box of tampons on her nightstand. Maybe if we were closer, if we spoke to each other more than a handful of times each month, then maybe she’d trust me with her secrets.

By my behavior, my wearing shorts and T-shirts, and especially my body, I thought, I might as well be a boy. Climbing trees or getting filthy with the guys, I was often called “tomboy” by other kids. It was a term that made my face hot and my heart beat fast. Just because I was active and enjoyed being physical, I didn’t see why this got me compared to a boy. Yet I felt nothing like the girls who wore frilly dresses that left them sitting motionless, legs folded, gossiping on chairs and other clean surfaces all day long. Still, I didn’t feel male, either. I was neither one, I thought—an outsider. A girl-boy. Watching Lisa made me feel even more displaced.

Lisa took off the bra and pulled a T-shirt over her head. Then she took a wire hanger out of her closet and hung the bra up with care. Her walls were covered with posters from teenybopper magazines, airbrushed boy pop stars and feathery-haired female teen idols. Lisa took a small, broken piece of mirror and walked back to her bed, puckered her lips at the glass, and batted her eyes.

I leaned against the wall and looked down at my own chest, which was as flat as Rick’s or Danny’s. I was wearing a Ninja Turtles T-shirt and black, high-top sneakers. My hair was tangled in several large knots. Inside, Lisa began applying lipstick. It was a bright pink, which she lightened by pressing her mouth over a napkin. She plucked at her bangs and smiled wide for the mirror.

I reached out and almost knocked on her door, but stopped when I realized I had no idea what I would say. Instead, I just stood for another moment or so, staring at my big sister.

I was jolted out of sleep on the couch by our front door slamming. I looked up to see Ma storm through the apartment, teary-eyed, distraught. She tossed Lisa’s winter coat onto a chair near me and plopped onto her bed. I got up to shut the TV off and went to see what was wrong.

As I stood in the doorway, Ma shut off the light in her room and began crying. She did not acknowledge my presence.

“What’s wrong, Ma?”

“Lizzy?” she asked, in a tone that implied she was surprised to find me in our apartment.

“Hey, Ma . . . what’s wrong? You okay?”

“Nothing baby . . . I’m having a bad night,” Ma said, kicking off her shoes in the dark. “This guy . . . I thought I could trade him . . . I was going to use Lisa’s coat, but they wouldn’t. I walked all that way there and I didn’t even get a bag.” She burst into tears, wailing in pain on her bed. Hearing it broke my heart. I hated that there was nothing I could do to make her better when she was this way.

“This guy” that she was talking about was one of the local drug dealers, and the “trade” Ma was referring to was Lisa’s coat for a small bag of cocaine, a type of bartering that was typical for Ma. On a regular basis, when Ma had no cash, she scoured the apartment for all manner of semi-valuable objects to present to local drug dealers for bartering consideration. Gun-wielding, illegal-drug-trade-working, criminal-record-having drug dealers around our block became so used to Ma showing up and badgering them to trade her drugs in exchange for everything from old shoes to alarm clocks that they gave her a nickname—
Diabla
, Spanish for She-devil—to capture her relentlessness.

As though she had no idea the dealers were dangerous at all, Ma waited in line behind paying drug customers, and when it was her turn, rather than set down cash on the dealer’s table for her purchase, Ma fearlessly placed down whatever item she had managed to dig up: VCR, video games, toys, groceries. And she began making her case, unwilling to leave, even as the drug dealers threatened her. I have no idea why they didn’t harm her, or if they did and she just didn’t tell me. But I do know that a dealer familiar with my parents had once asked Daddy to make sure to come get the drugs for the two of them, and leave “
Diabla
” at home, she was bad for business. Sometimes, the guy told Daddy, they gave Ma just a small hit to make her go away.

On this particular night, when Ma attempted to sell Lisa’s winter coat, the drug dealer had refused, not based on the value of the coat, but on principle.

“Yeah, everybody’s got a high horse apparently,” Ma said. “He gave me
this
crap,” she said, handing me a strange coin in her frustration, “and he preached at me . . . Like he’s so good.”

Seeing that the coat was the size of a child’s, the drug dealer handed it back to Ma along with the single large coin, and he told her to go home to her kids, which made Ma livid. Ma would later explain to me that it was one of those coins people got in Narcotics Anonymous for reaching a given number of days in their sobriety, as a symbol of their progress so far and for struggles yet to come. In no way did Ma seem to appreciate the irony of being given the coin by a drug dealer. Collapsed on her bed, shaking from withdrawal, she was just consumed with pain, hurting from the need to use.

I stayed with Ma until she fell asleep, then I went into my bedroom and got under the blankets, where I turned my attention to the coin as I lay in bed. Later on, I would keep the coin tucked away in my dresser drawer for years. From time to time, I’d take it out just to run my thumb over the engraving and to marvel at its mystery, the “Serenity Prayer” on back:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
.

While I didn’t exactly get the meaning, I recognized the music of this prayer as familiar to me from Ma’s countless NA meetings. There was a structure to the meetings: Addicts always recited the serenity prayer in unison, clasping hands together in the basements of urban churches while their children, Lisa and me included, rummaged through the free donuts and too-sweet lemonade. Once at the beginning of the meeting, and then once more at the end,
God grant me the serenity
. . . It was a staple of all NA meetings, along with the testimonies from those who had forsaken addiction, those who had “worked the steps” and “beat drugs,” the testimonies of those who had “made it.” Standing in front of the room, each recovering addict’s story took on a familiar shape: there was a lifestyle that wreaked havoc on self, family, and loved ones; the redemption that brought them successfully through NA; and in between, a dark and frightening low—one moment of demarcation between old life and new, characterized by the person’s absolute bottom.

These former addicts who “had recovery” would sometimes make their way over to Ma after meetings. They wanted to help her, and I could feel them using me and Lisa as a way to reach Ma. One man stands out in my memory, a white guy with green eyes, impossibly tall. He crouched down to look me in the eyes and asked if I liked cookies. With several in my hand and one stuffed in my mouth at that very moment, I couldn’t discern if he was being playful, or if I felt accused. I stared back stupidly. He smiled and stood to talk to Ma about sobriety. She chain-smoked and eluded eye contact while he spoke, shifting back and forth (a side effect from her schizophrenia meds), as he tried futilely to connect. Ma was fresh off another release from North Central Bronx psychiatric ward at the time, and her sobriety was hitting its predictable threshold. We would end up accompanying her to the drug spot right after the meeting that night. But for a few moments this man’s message was as clear and powerful as it could be to someone who was unwilling to listen.

“You know how you know for sure when you hit bottom, miss?” he asked. “You know you hit bottom when you stop digging! That’s what my sponsor told me.” His attempt at eye contact was earnest, but his words just couldn’t get to her.

Later that night, Ma sold the toaster and my bike for a hit.

After years of experience, I knew that there were a few existing versions of Ma, roughly five personalities in total. There was crazy Ma, drugged-and-drunken Ma, sober-and-nice Ma, check-day-happy Ma, and pleasant, fresh-out-of-the-hospital Ma. This last one was maybe the most appealing version, though she had a lifespan of roughly two weeks.

Back home, at the outset of this alter ego, she would entertain us with hilarious stories about other people on the psychiatric ward, each anecdote making her laugh in a breathless way, the edges of her mouth turned down, her fist slamming the countertop as she doubled over at her own jokes. She still carried the smell of that hospital-assigned soap on her skin and hair, something I loved to smell when she hugged me so frequently, having just come home to us. This Ma smoked less; she fussed over the symmetry of the living room curtains. She might pass through the apartment humming, and then pause at the couch to kiss me on the forehead on her way down the hall, just because. Simply being home was enough to make this version of Ma happy.

But this time was different. This time, the hospital sent us back a stranger in Ma’s place, one that did not seem to fit any of the previous versions. They dressed her in the same clothes, delivered her to the right address, familiarized her with our names and her surroundings—only they forgot part of her personality. The first thing I noticed was her absolute stillness, the way her limbs carried her too steadily through the front door, like a model balancing a stack of books on her head. None of her usual fidgeting; the jumpy quality was totally removed from her mannerisms.

Ma went through all the motions, extending limp hugs to us one at a time. She managed a smile, though most of her face wouldn’t cooperate. “Are you taking a different drug?” I asked as she unpacked in the most awkward silence.

“I don’t know, Lizzy. I might be.”

Lisa was more aggressive; she came with question after question. Ma said little, and walked away from Lisa mid-sentence, her eyes searching the wall, the ceiling, the floorboards, anywhere but Lisa’s eyes. Daddy was obliging, or else Ma was; they shared a bed for almost a week. Then Ma returned to the couch, or she took a seat by the window, where she could sit for hours, wide-eyed, hair pulled back, her body steady, frozen in her rose-colored robe, like one of the mannequins in a Macy’s window, a picturesque display of sadness. Outside, the weather seemed to match her mood.