Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (39 page)

Wishman’s last letter had mentioned his release date. The attempted murder charges had been dropped. He was due out soon and wanted Coco to visit him at his mother’s house. Coco no longer dressed as she had when they were in puppy love; all her money and effort went into her daughters. Yet she knew from the letters that Wishman was still attracted to her. She vowed that she wouldn’t visit Wishman alone. She knew Wishman’s sneaky ways, and she did not trust herself.

But the next thing she knew, there he was, at her Thorpe House apartment door, smiling, his blue-green eyes on her, handsome and interested, smelling of soap. She prepared a dinner. They flirted while she fed Nautica and put her to sleep. She settled Nikki and Mercedes in front of the TV in the living room. When she and Wishman stepped into the bedroom, Coco felt the heavy burdens lift.

At curfew, she escorted him outside. Coco and Miss Lucy, the security
guard, watched his tight body lope down Crotona Avenue. They watched him disappear into the darkness, headed toward Tremont.

“He fine, Coco,” said Miss Lucy.

“He just got out of prison,” Coco said.

Coco felt guilty about the rendezvous with Wishman, but she also wanted to see him again. However, within three days of their meeting, he found himself another girl; Coco heard that she was a virgin. But he and Coco continued to speak occasionally on the phone. The conversations reminded her of those she’d shared with Cesar after his release from Harlem Valley—Wishman’s voice brimming with direction, using big words she didn’t know. He asked her what she planned to do.

“I’m gonna move, then the summer comes and I’ll hang out,” she said.

“What you planning for the
future
?” He wanted her to think ahead.

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.

“Girl, you gotta start planning now.” He’d enrolled in Bronx Community College. She mentioned her tattoo. He scoffed. At first, she thought Wishman was disappointed that she had Cesar’s name on her, but his reaction came from something more flattering than jealousy: he wanted her to better herself. Tattoos were for street girls. “You got a whole life ahead of you. You don’t got to listen to me, but remember you is young,” Wishman said. Coco wanted to keep the conversation going. She asked if he’d thought of getting a tattoo with his baby daughter’s name.

“Why? I’m supposed to join you?” he said mockingly.

The Morris Heights Health Center was a gossip zone. Coco almost always ran into people she knew there. Luckily, that spring, when she took Mercedes and Nikki in for a checkup, there was no one she recognized to overhear her whispered request for a pregnancy test. The receptionist informed her that she had to schedule an appointment of her own. Coco was unlikely to ask twice for help on such a touchy matter. To return, she would need to find someone to watch the baby again, and she worried about being spotted by someone from her mother’s block or Lourdes’s. She’d once seen Giselle at the clinic. “I don’t want to be seeing that girl around, because she’ll start talking rumors,” Coco said.

Cesar had a hunch that Coco had been intimate with Wishman. He recognized the pattern of avoidance and omission that emerged when she’d done something she felt terrible about. She had stopped sending
him pictures, as though she hoped to disappear, and she wasn’t writing much. What made him more than suspicious was Coco’s behavior when she visited that spring. She and Rocco rode the Prison Gap for Cesar’s twentieth birthday.

Coco tended to be subdued around Cesar’s friends, but Rocco had relaxed her during the six-hour ride with his mugging and joking. He’d shaved his head, he said, because “there are so many problems in the world, who has time for hair?” His bottom teeth were gold. He flattered Coco about her mothering: “I don’t know how you take the three of them, I give it to you, Coco.” He and his wife had only a seven-month-old daughter and parenting still left him beat. Cesar had been feeling slighted by Rocco because he’d asked him to be Mercedes’s godfather, and Rocco hadn’t arranged the baptism. Rocco couldn’t afford it; he’d unsuccessfully tried to explain to Cesar the essence of life as a working man with a brand-new baby—being broke. Cesar blamed Rocco’s wife, Marlene.

Coco certainly understood. It may have been her empathy for Rocco that put her at ease. Whatever it was, Cesar noticed she wasn’t self-conscious when she went to get his food from the vending machine. There was something vaguely confident about her short, squarish profile—maybe the way she held her head as she waited for the microwave to heat his barbecue chicken wings. He couldn’t pin down the difference until later, in his cell. Her complexion was clearer. She seemed comfortable in her body. He became convinced she was pregnant when he received her next letter. Instead of signing “Love, your Wife Coco,” she scribbled, “Coco the bitch.”

Cesar’s suspicions turned out right. This time, however, he didn’t rage at Coco. He wrote a letter to Foxy instead:

Dear Foxy: Hello! How are you and your loved ones doing? Fine I hope and pray. As for myself, I’m fucked up right now. . . . Foxy I already know that Coco is pregnant. Don’t tell her I know. I ain’t going to write her because I don’t have anything to say . . . But I want to ask a favor of you. Please don’t let Coco have that baby.

If Coco has that baby it’s going to effect all the girls up mentally . . . I really love Coco and I wanted a family. But I guess that’s not what she wanted. I’ll live through it, though. What hurts me the most is that I gave her another chance and she did it again. At least she could’ve used protection . . . I really want a lot of pictures of Mercy and Naughty, especially now that I won’t be seeing them.

Cesar believed Coco was foolish to think Wishman cared for her. Cesar and Wishman were friends before Cesar met Coco, and Cesar had known Nikki’s father, Kodak, too. Cesar surmised that Wishman might have gone after Coco to get at Cesar as payback for stealing Coco from him in the first place. Wishman wanted Coco to get an abortion so his girlfriend wouldn’t discover that he’d cheated. Coco later said, “Ain’t no one going to tell me what to do with my baby.”

Coco knew that she no longer stood a chance with Cesar—the shameful pregnancy had put a stop to their exhausting back-and-forth. With Cesar gone, she could only hope that Wishman would come around. Coco had already reviewed the evidence of Wishman’s potential as a father: he liked her daughters, and babies had a way of bringing out the best in people, of softening hardness, of gluing broken things. In his letters, Wishman had criticized Nikki’s father for neglecting Nikki, and Wishman had mentioned how much he missed his other daughter, how he would have been there for that girl if the mother hadn’t run away to Philadelphia. Coco wasn’t going anywhere.

She invested a lot in small signs, such as the time he recently stepped aside to rub her stomach during a game of basketball. But she couldn’t completely avoid the negative signs, either: when she and Wishman playfought, he played a little too rough around a belly; when they made love, she sometimes felt as though he hated her. Sunny, Wishman’s mother, assured Coco, “I know when you have the baby, he’s going to be after you.” Sunny couldn’t know, of course, but she sounded willing to be a good grandmother. She told Coco, “At least this grandchild I’ll see.” Coco wished she could speak to Jessica.

A
s soon as it became clear to Jessica that Lourdes would never make it to Florida, she requested a transfer to a facility nearer home. In March of 1994, just as Milagros was packing her things to move upstate, the authorities shipped Jessica to a maximum-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut, an hour’s trip from the Bronx. Jessica would serve the remainder of her term there. It looked like a high school with barbed wire, atop a rolling hill. Geese contentedly waddled about the large and manicured lawn. The floors shone from inmates’ constant waxing, same as her old unit in Florida; the buildings had the same cinder-block walls—except here the paint was salmon, not beige. FCI Danbury had formerly been a male prison facility, and was still in transition. While the renovation was being completed, Jessica was temporarily assigned a cubicle in the gym. The inmate “cube” facing hers belonged to a young Brazilian woman named Player, who recalled watching Jessica unpack her property. “She was an extremely white-skinned person,” Player said. “Lots of tattoos.”

Jessica was assigned to a job at the compound’s power plant, where she trained as a lagger, learning how to wrap pipes with fiberglass. She switched to the night shift. A Dominican correctional officer named Ernesto Torres supervised her. There wasn’t much to do during the long nights in the boiler room. Torres did not believe in “bright work,” the idle assignments that made up a fair share of prison jobs—mopping floors that were already clean, polishing gleaming copper tubing with steel wool, polishing shining brass railings, painting over paint. It bothered Torres that some of his fellow officers treated the women so harshly; the male inmates, he said, would never have put up with such insults and abuse.

The inmates Torres supervised reminded him of women from his old neighborhood. Torres had been raised in a poor community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His first day on the job at Danbury, he’d run into a childhood friend—the friend was an inmate. He believed that the punishment was the prison term, and that officers should keep their opinions to themselves and do their job. So, when he could, Torres let the women be. He spent his shift in his office at the rear of the plant, and the women spent their shifts doing whatever—sitting and talking, writing letters,
flirting, napping, listening to the radio. If Torres brewed fresh coffee, he shared it. He left his locker open so the women could use his cooking utensils and cassettes. To enliven the routine, he occasionally brought treasures of free-world food—Kentucky Fried Chicken, cranberry juice, doughnuts. “Mr. Doughnut” became his nickname. Every act of generosity was a violation of staff rules. Among the inmates, as in the ghetto, kindness was a risk. Even more baffling, Torres didn’t seem to want anything in return.

Torres was accustomed to flirting; it was a chronic condition of an officer’s life at a women’s prison. Both the officers and the inmates were tremendously bored; the mood was a lot like the end of a long summer of the same people on the same street. Some of his colleagues regularly brought condoms to work. Torres probably got more attention than most guards because he was emotionally in touch with the women. He was also handsome, with fine features, impossibly long eyelashes, and brown-black eyes. He was short, but compact, and in the time warp of that environment, almost hip. He wore a tiny gold hoop earring and slicked his longish hair into a neat ponytail. Minus the ponytail, he shared an uncanny resemblance to Boy George.

Jessica responded to Torres’s edgy appearance. She danced for him—in the supply room, in his office, on the catwalks around the boiler, provocatively unzipping her prison-issue coveralls. “There were other ones that did it,” Torres recalled, “but she was very good at it.” She serenaded him with ballads by Celine Dion and by Boyz II Men. He noticed her generous mouth when she laughed. She asked him for a birthday kiss, which he granted—not knowing that her birthday was still months away.

Soon, Jessica and Torres broke night talking. He told her about his two children and confided that he and his wife were having problems. Jessica told him about her daughters, especially Serena, who recently turned nine. Jessica recounted her own unhappy childhood, expressing sadness that Lourdes hadn’t paid enough attention to her. She also told him that she had been molested for years. Torres clipped a magazine article about child abuse and gave it to her. She told him about Boy George and showed him the tattoos she planned to erase with laser as soon as she got out. Torres prepared linguine with clam sauce on his hot plate and surprised her with ice cream for dessert. He let her listen to his special house tapes. And he brought her a bottle of DNA, her favorite perfume.