Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (28 page)

“Serena, what are you doing?” Jessica asked.

“I was outside watching the boys go around on the Big Wheel.”

“Are you with anyone?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

The truth was that Serena preferred to be outside.

Milagros had stood back as each girl spoke to Daddy George when he called, and she had brushed away their disappointment after he’d failed to deliver a promised pile of Christmas gifts. She’d tolerated his mockery about her love life, and his cruel insinuations about her need for a man. But Milagros reached the end of her patience when Rita deposited Serena in the lobby of the building following the Florida trip: according to Milagros, Rita had simply rung the buzzer and left Serena there. The building was dangerous. Junkies shot up in the stairwells and crackheads smoked in the halls. Serena was a child. Rita’s behavior went beyond lack of courtesy; it threatened Serena’s safety. Jessica could call herself
Mrs. Anyone, but for Milagros, the days of Daddy George had come to an end.

Serena returned to the summer camp Milagros had saved for. Police barricades barred traffic so that the children had room to play on the street. The counselors, two middle-aged women from Milagros’s building, smoked and chatted the day down on chairs near a dripping hydrant, beside a cooler full of soda that the children weren’t allowed to touch. Children crawled in and out of an abandoned car. Serena didn’t say much about her visit to Jessica, but she did tell her friends and cousins about the swimming pool and the Big Wheel and the toys in the children’s room.

Back in Florida, Jessica mulled over the visit, trying to remember every detail. At one point, Serena had whispered, “Mommy, can I axe you a question?” But then she’d retreated. Just before she’d said good-bye, Serena had tried again. “Are you okay?” she asked her mother. “Do they do bad things to you in here?”

“That’s jail on television,” Jessica assured her.

From now on, Jessica would be careful to mail Serena photographs that made prison look like a place of friends and fun. She sent one along in which she cuddled a fluffy puppy. In another, she posed by a stretch of sand out of view of the security fence. Prison looked more inviting than the street.

Jessica called Serena to wish her a happy eighth birthday. “Is that a beach where you take the pictures?” Serena asked.

“It’s a beach and it’s a pretty beach and there is a pool and I have fun here,” Jessica lied.

“If you having so much fun why don’t you come here instead?” Serena asked.

B
ack in the Bronx, in their frilly bedroom at Milagros’s, the twin girls sat on their beds excitedly. The beds were rafts. The girls’ thoughts floated, bound for Coney Island, where they were going to celebrate Serena’s birthday at the beach. It was the first year all the girls had lived together and shared a bedroom without worrying that their big sister had to stay behind, or leave. Below them, on the linoleum floor, were their purple summer clogs from Payless, capsized shoe-boats, decorated with turquoise and yellow hippie flowers.

Brittany and Stephanie were six, still twiggy, with prominent brows on moony faces that tapered upward to wispy topknots, giving their heads the shape of tulip bulbs. Milagros had given them home-style bangs that accented the mournful expression of their heavy-lidded eyes. But the twins were actually lighthearted and agile, squealing as they chased one another. Serena shared none of their breeziness. She was only slightly bigger, but her bearing seemed much heavier. The morning of her eighth birthday, she slept late; Brittany and Stephanie wished she’d wake up. They sat on the side of their bed, watching her, their four skinny legs swinging impatiently.

Serena rolled over, her legs spread across the sheet’s flat faces of Beauty and the Beast. Her long hair fell in tangles. She didn’t usually sleep well. The street noises scared her. The music, the sirens, the hollering and shooting from the after-hours club on University, sounds on top of sounds. Serena blinked, then slowly pushed herself up. She rubbed her eyes.

Serena’s half-brother Lucas, Trinket and Puma’s two-year-old, made a brief appearance in the doorway. He was the child in Puma’s arms the night he was gunned down. Serena glanced at Lucas dispassionately. Strapped to his stroller, he’d propelled himself forward by violent jerks. Milagros’s fat arm swept him away.

“Happy birthday, Serena!” Stephanie said.

“Yeah, happy birthday!” Brittany added.

Serena swatted away their attention as she yawned. She inspected a stick-on tattoo heart on her arm. Milagros boomed, “Brittany-StephanieSerena! Come eat!” Serena dropped off the bed. “Come on,” she instructed her sisters, leading them into the hall.

“You didn’t say happy birthday to Serena,” Brittany reminded Trinket, who was clicking around the apartment hurriedly in her high heels, late for work. Trinket came to a dead stop, placed her hands on Serena’s shoulders, and backed her into the bedroom. “Happy Birthday” wafted out. Serena emerged with a shy smile and, on her cheek, a lipstick kiss. Except for the beds, and a few chairs, Milagros had no furniture. The children squeezed into tiny plastic chairs at a pint-size table that they had already outgrown. Serena served her siblings the pancakes Milagros had prepared.

Elaine bustled in with her two spotless sons and recalcitrant husband, Angel, in tow. Angel had stopped using drugs, but Elaine hadn’t forgiven him. Just that morning she had been reminded of the camera that could have taken Serena’s birthday pictures if it hadn’t been hawked for dope. Once, he had sold off all her furniture; luckily, Jessica had given them a bedroom set from one of George’s apartments, following his arrest. Elaine had needed money so badly that year that she’d even milled some of George’s drugs under his guidance from the MCC.

Angel parked the cooler in Milagros’s kitchen and joined Kevin on the floor; Kevin, who was ten, was watching a bootleg video of the gang movie
Blood In, Blood Out.
Lourdes had promised she was coming, but only Serena actually expected her. Coco surprised everyone by arriving on time.

“Títi, look,” Serena said, leading Coco into her room. She handed her aunt a school notebook opened to a page where the words
I wish
were followed by a blank, in which she’d written, “I wish there were no drug in the world, that would be nice.”

“Thass good,” Coco said, but she preferred to keep the day upbeat. Birthdays should be happy; they were the biggest events of the year. “Now, why don’t ya’ll sing me a song? Mercy, show your cousins the song I taught you. I sang it when I was your age, ‘Kind Kind Mother.’ ”

The twins started, and Mercedes and Serena and Nikki joined in; Nikki’s eagerness transformed her unintelligible words into a respectable gurgling sound. Coco clapped and nodded with each syllable of every plodding verse. It was a song that Foxy’s older sister, Aida, had learned while she was in the youth house and had sung to Foxy, which Foxy had taught her daughter, in turn:

I had a kind kind mother

She was so kind to me

And when I got in trouble

She held me on her knee

That night when I was sleeping

Upon my mother’s bed

An angel came down from heaven

And told me she was dead

That morning when I woke up

I found my dream come true

Now she’s up in heaven

That’s why the skies are blue

Now children obey they mother

Especially when they small

Cuz if you shall lose your mother

You lose the best of all!

Finally, the adults were ready. The children assembled in the hall. “Did Mommy close the window?” Serena asked Kevin, pushing the button to the elevator.

“I dunno,” he said. The elevator door clunked open. Stephanie hopped over a puddle of urine. There were puddles in the lobby, too, but these were pungent with King Pine. The super was hosing down the walls for his morning mop-up. “Hello!” he called out to the train of children.

“Hello!” each one shouted, ducking through the missing panel at the base of the security entryway.

“Dios bendiga tu barriga,”
he said to Coco. God bless your belly.

“Thank you,” Coco said. She didn’t speak Spanish, but she understood common phrases. The super wiped over a tattered copy of “Respect Thy Neighbor Commandments” stuck on the wall. “Help Thy Neighbor” and “Get to Know Thy Neighbor” were the only commandments not too pen-stabbed to be illegible. Outside, the sidewalk warmed. Angel pushed the cooler, which he’d strapped to a shopping cart, as far as the subway and said good-bye to the women and children.

At Coney Island, the wind made it too cold to swim, but the children ran in the sand and splashed their feet in the waves. The group trooped up to the boardwalk for lunch. On a picnic table outside the boarded-up Freak Show, everyone except Elaine’s sons munched on Elaine’s chicken and rice and beans. Her boys weren’t hungry because Elaine had earlier spirited them away and treated them to McDonald’s, on the sly.

Damp clothes made the children shiver. Their lips were blue. With the gusts of wind, it was impossible to light the candles on Serena’s birthday
cake, which was soon dusted with sand and ripped apart for a cake fight; Milagros tossed the remains in a garbage can. Serena spent the rest of her birthday lifting her sisters and cousins in and out of the seats of baby rides. For the long trip back to the Bronx, Serena, exhausted, sank into the subway seat next to Coco. Brooklyn passed in a rush. Serena watched the rooftops of the houses. “I want to live in a house,” she said.

“Me, too, Mami,” said Coco. “When I get my apartment, I want to get it big enough for Mommy Jessica to come and live.”

Serena pointed out a fence. “A pregnant lady couldn’t get over that fence,” she observed. She distractedly brushed the sand from the soles of her sneakers. “My best birthday was my sixth birthday.”

That was the summer before her mother went away. Jessica had rented a community center in the projects and threw Serena a big party. All of Serena’s friends and family came for the celebration, said Serena, “even people from Florida.” Streamers and balloons draped the tables and bags were stuffed with candy. Jessica had hired a DJ, and a clown who painted the children’s faces. Even Lourdes showed. Serena still had the pictures of herself and her grandmother, cheeks pressed together, beside her layered Minnie Mouse birthday cake.

Two years later, Serena sat on the subway, contemplative and sticky with sand. Nikki sucked her thumb and leaned cautiously against Coco’s big belly. Mercedes confidently plopped her head in what remained of Coco’s lap.

“Old people should think like children,” Serena whispered cryptically. Coco nodded. It was advice that, at nineteen, she easily took to heart. Coco covered Mercedes’s shoulders with a towel and tightened her grip. The F train turned northward and jerked underground toward the Bronx.

Coco was having a difficult year. First, Cesar had gone away for Mighty’s death. A few months later, Coco’s mother, Foxy, had a nervous breakdown and spent three weeks as an inpatient at a public psychiatric hospital. When Foxy was given a day-release pass, she came home, but after less than an hour, she called a cab to take her back. Home completely overwhelmed her. On the psychiatric ward, she rested. A new beau named Hernan had been visiting; they’d talk for hours and make out on her bed until the nurse would interrupt them and tell him he’d have to leave.

After Foxy was discharged, she’d spend the days with Hernan and his friends in a nearby park, or in front of the Oval Pharmacy, where she had
her new antianxiety and antidepressant prescriptions filled. She would tell her family that she’d been at an appointment at the hospital. Foxy said, “I did not want to go back home.” But Coco didn’t like living there without her mother; the ordinarily chaotic house felt sad and bleak. Iris and Manuel had moved out, and her stepfather, Richie, seemed desperate. Coco’s little brother, Hector, had been expelled from junior high for shooting a gun into the air near his school. When Foxy returned at night, Richie and Foxy would start fighting, and Hector would inevitably get involved. Sometimes Coco took the girls down the block and went to Milagros’s. But more often than not, Coco found Milagros’s boring—or, if Milagros was high, uncomfortable. Then Foxy and Milagros started hanging out and partying: Coco complained, but they paid her no mind. Coco couldn’t escape to Lourdes’s. Lourdes had been evicted again and was living with a Dominican drug dealer, who scared Coco, and worse yet, sometimes provided Foxy and Milagros with their drugs.