A Deeper Love Inside (43 page)

I gotta follow Momma, make sure she’s okay
, I thought.

“What if we get captured? A prison is one of those official places we’re not supposed to go, and we don’t even have ID,” Siri said.
She was sitting beside me now. I felt bad that she had to hide from Momma.

“
I have to go
, Siri. We’ll reach there after Momma, but at least we’ll be in the same area where she is, and we can all come back together.”

• • •

When scenes of the city were no more, it was the same as going from Earth to Neptune, I imagined. As farms and farm animals, land and more land, winter-brown grass and naked trees appeared in front of us, I began to feel even more uneasy. It felt like a trip back to a place where I never wanted to return. It didn’t feel familiar like the green orchards of NanaAnna’s where everything blossomed and clear water streams flowed freely.

We were headed to a place where men are stacked in steel cages with iron bars, with no one to look at except themselves, with no love, and cold floors, no privacy, and no promises, with no furniture, and no future.

As I counted cows and horses I wondered what men who lived like Poppa would feel and act like. I wondered what they would do day to day inside of there, and how different it might be from what they would have done if they were not in there at all. I guessed a heated hate would grow in their hearts like it grew in me when I was trapped. It would be hatred so heavy they couldn’t stand up straight. All of their backs would curve towards the floors like animals. They wouldn’t be cows or horses, though. They would become beasts like the little girls I dormed with. They couldn’t do nothing but attack each other. The biggest beasty-est ones are the guards, though. The head beast is the warden who drags her long hairy tail down the hallways behind her and has the nerve to manicure her claws. Her eyes were made of fire and her mouth was nothing but a hole where deadly stink-filled gasses escaped, the type of gasses that should only be kept in an ass.

“Wake up, wake up . . .” Someone was shaking my shoulders.

“Have some water. Were you having some kind of nightmare? Where’s your mother?” The woman was pressing her face between the slight space between two bus seats.

“She’s in the back,” I lied. “I’m okay. No, thank you, I have water,” I lied again.

It didn’t matter what I told her. I have money. That should fix anything. Seats that were empty when we first left Columbus Circle in Manhattan were now filled.

“Last stop before Niagra Correctional Facility,” the man-voice announced.

• • •

In a crowded waiting room, busloads of women, some teens and kids and babies waited to be “processed.” There were signs everywhere reading do not leave your children under 18 unattended. Me and Siri sat next to two women who had kids, to act like we’re part of their bunch. Momma wasn’t in here. She must have already been processed and visiting with Poppa. I’d wait out here.
Being “processed” is the official part
, I told myself.

After more than an hour it seemed like none of the women and children who approached the area to be searched and processed were coming back out here. The crowd where we were was shrinking.

“They’re going out some other door,” Siri said. “After they meet their husbands they’re exiting elsewhere. What if you missed Momma?” Siri asked me. I felt panicked. My butt muscles and my jaw muscles tightened and my fingers were becoming stiff.

• • •

“Every week there’s at least one,” the guard standing over me said. “Now, you’re too young to be alone, and too old to be lost. What’s your excuse?”

I shrugged my shoulders. My tongue was dry like beef jerky or pork rinds that they used to sell in the corner store back in Brooklyn when I was seven.

“Let me see some ID,” the guard said.

“I don’t have none,” I said truthfully.

“Who did you come up here to see?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. My aunt came up here to see someone. She made me sit and wait alone.”

“What’s your aunt’s name?”

“Everybody calls her Lucy,” I said swiftly.

“Lucy what?” the guard asked. I thought of the last name I heard the most ever.

“Lucy Jackson, but I think that’s her other name,” I said.

“Other name?” the guard asked.

“Before or after she got married again,” I said.

“Forget all that. What’s your name?”

“Ivory,” I said.

“Come with me, Ivory,” the guard said.

The guard walked me to the counter where more guards were standing behind a thick closed-in glass. She unclipped a tag hanging on her guard shirt and placed it against the glass. The heavy door clicked, then opened. Two guards looked over the high countertop and down at me.

“You got another one?” one of the guards said.

A drop of pee squeezed out of me. I felt it spread in my panties. I stood behind the guard as she removed her gun and checked it at the counter.

“Headed for the other side,” she said to the other guards. I felt bricks on my head as I tried to figure if “the other side” was a good or evil place?

“Teach her mother a lesson. How many times do we have to tell them we’re correction officers, not babysitters.”

“You know I will,” the guard said.

Small drops of pee kept falling and sliding a crooked path down my leg inside of my jeans then drying around my ankles.

“This is not a place where you should ever want to be,” the guard said as we walked and walked down a slim corridor where there was nothing but officers and workers. I could not see even one prisoner or one cell. That would’ve been something, to get a glimpse of Poppa. But this must’ve been the guard’s secret passageway, I thought. Again she placed her pass on a thick glass window. A heavy door clicked.

“Lucy Jackson!” she announced to a room filled with women and some kids packing, putting on coats and jackets, boots and sneakers, and pocketbooks. If I were Lucy Jackson, I wouldn’t have answered the guard either. She called out that name like, “Come get your ass whooping!”

“Lucy Jackson,” the guard’s voice boomed again. Sweat rushed out of my pores and spread onto my face until I was nothing but sweat and piss.

“Last call for Lucy Jackson! Ladies check around and see if you lost any of your kids!” The guard was criticizing them all.

“Oh!” a lady said. “She’s on the bus with me.”

“We rode up together.” From her voice I could hear she was the lady who was seated behind me, who woke me out of my nightmare. I walked over to her and held her hand.

“I’ll take her. Her mother’s probably on the bus going crazy looking for us,” the woman said.

The guard looked at us both suspiciously.

“It ain’t like none of y’all would be asking for no extra kids, so go ahead,” the C.O. said sarcastically. When we exited my remaining pee blasted out.

“You can let go now,” the woman who got me out of there said. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in, but I wouldn’t wish that place on my worse enemy,” she said, and walked away.

“I’m looking for the express bus,” I said to another woman walking beside us. She didn’t even look at me, just kept walking and looked at her watch.

“It’s gone. It leaves a half hour before the big ones pull out.”

My heart dropped into my socks. I tried to take deep breaths and blow air out to calm my panic.

As I looked back through the barbed wire fences at the cement castles and the guards on the rooftops weighed down with weapons to kill, I struggled to climb the bus stairs.

“How long till we get back to New York City?” I asked the driver.

“Seven hours including all stops, same as coming up, going back.”

***

A stray dog on the midnight Brooklyn streets followed me from the subway stairs toward the underground. I didn’t hate him. I didn’t love him either. He kept trying to smell me. He wasn’t growling or foaming or looking like he wanted to attack. I stopped and stood still. He pushed his black nose into my private space and sniffed, sniffed, sniffed.

“I know. I stink,” I said to him. He started wagging his tail like he thought we could be friends. Once I realized he wasn’t a threat, I started walking faster to get back to Momma.

• • •

Momma left me one thing, the Motorola Startac cell phone from Elisha. Her Gucci dress and heels, all of the new clothes I purchased for her, the dopest shit Mr. Sharp bought for me; my kicks, shoes, and Gucci backpack, the chain, lock, and cuffs were all gone. Even the gold earrings that Poppa bought for me and placed on the tip-top of my money tree were missing.

“It’s okay. We were growing out of some of those clothes anyway,” Siri said to me. “It will be fun to go shopping for new stuff.” I guess Siri didn’t know that I missed Momma more than any item. I was being mugged by grief and slowly drowning in pain. All I saw was black before I collapsed on the cement stairs.

Chapter 40

Seven days before my fourteenth birthday, I had now served more time with Momma than my time served in prison. Still, I wasn’t sure which sentence was worse. I didn’t know whether to celebrate or slash my throat. In fact, I know less now than I knew when I was eight, nine, and ten in juvy. At least in there, I had the pride and certainty of being a Santiaga, the deep and true love and intense loyalty to family. Back then I let that love fight for me
and win
. I risked everything for that love, definitely my freedom and even my life.

Now it was too hard for me to figure, understand, or accept what was happening with me. No one else seemed to know or say anything about it. No one asked or cared enough about me, except Elisha. Other people cared, but not enough. In fact everyone who knew me knew so little about me, even less than I knew about myself.

On the block where I lived beneath the ground, and everywhere I went as myself, people said I was beautiful, gorgeous, attractive, the bomb, the shit, the brick house, the ten, the dime, the baddest, the best, the top and the bottom bitch. They used words like
mysterious
,
elegant
,
exotic
,
sensual
,
sensuous
,
young
,
firm
,
soft
,
sweet
,
powerful
; I heard them all on a regular. None of those words moved me even a millimeter.

I had never spread these pretty dancer’s thighs for anyone. The more I ignored, the more I said no, the more I resisted, the more interested they were. Problem was, I wasn’t interested at all. I was the pretty girl with five holes in my heart. The holes were so deep and so painful, I couldn’t give love to anyone. I felt even if I gave in and gave my whole heart to Elisha, all he would be getting is Swiss cheese. Plus, I was afraid to love him. Momma said, “Never give your whole heart to any man. You’ll end up loving him ten thousand more times than he’ll ever love you.” Everything Momma ever said mattered the world to me, even the meanest, most evilest words Momma said counted a lot.

I did make one decision: I was leaving the underground, the space
beneath the floor with no windows and no sunlight. I would leave in a body bag or I would walk out on my own. Either way, I would be gone. Fear flew away one dark night screaming and kicking, while locked in the beak of a black raven; the fear of me not being in a space where Momma might return. That’s it, plain and simple.

That’s what I mean about my life. It didn’t make sense. I have $50,000 dollars in a heavy locked safe in the wall space at Mr. Sharp’s place of business. I had a hundred thousand chances to leave the underground, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t. I was always waiting on Momma. There was also the little detail of my being both a juvenile and a fugitive, no ID, no Social Security number, no working papers, no rights. So Big Johnnie’s underground space was the hideout, where the longer I stayed, the more money I hustled up and earned.

Big Johnnie was like an uncle to me now, Mr. Sharp like a father. He even said he would put me in the charm school, and when I reached sixteen, I could debut in the debutante’s ball. He wanted to escort me in the place of Poppa. My neighbors and the local business owners were like distant relatives raising me, feeding me, keeping my secrets, not asking too much.

I made money like a money machine. Everyone said I was so smart, useful, hard-working, well mannered. I even hit the number 1111, and got my five-thousand-dollar jackpot. Riot had paid me back my four thousand dollar investment plus four thousand in earnings from flipping it. The eight thousand—she labeled the eight thousand a “buyout.” She said it wasn’t an end to our friendship, “just an end of our deal.” She had something major to do, and she had to do it alone.

People said I was lucky. All I could do was smirk at that. “Lucky.”

Elisha’s mom said I had wings like an angel that only special eyes could see. She said she saw them the first day she met me in the aisle at the organic market. I guess so. I sure couldn’t see my wings.

I didn’t know why there was no substitute for Momma, Poppa, Winter, Mercedes, and Lexus. I don’t know why the people who looked out for me the most couldn’t fill up even one of the five holes in my heart.

I came close with Elisha. Really close, really, really, really close.

Of course, what happened between Elisha and me all happened in scenes, like in any great film that has never been made yet. And,
of course, everything in his life started with two words:
my mother
. Everything in my life started the same way:
my momma
.

SCENE 1

Age twelve, my momma stole everything except the cell phone Elisha bought for me. She even took my two heavy duffle bags, the chain, and the lock. I guess she needed them to carry my belongings out and to keep others from stealing them from her. Of course my momma could not steal my $20,000 that I had earned up until that point, to get our new apartment and take care of her. My money was stashed in Mr. Sharp’s safe even back then.

Completely crushed for three weeks, I worked all my jobs, but wouldn’t talk to Elisha. I felt too ashamed and bruised. When I finally called him, he wouldn’t take my call. I went looking for him. I was twelve. He was about to turn fourteen.