Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (41 page)

The first day of July, Coco’s brother Manuel’s girl Yasmin gave birth to a baby boy. Their intense happiness took up space in Foxy’s overcrowded apartment. By the end of the week, armed with a small entourage, Coco ventured back to Prospect; her crew included her three girls, Wishman’s two younger sisters, Hector’s gaunt friend Weedo, and Weedo’s girlfriend, Lacey. (Weedo had earned the nickname because he was always smoking blunts.) Coco had been baby-sitting Wishman’s sisters to give his mother a break, but they were wearing Coco out: she had to watch them every minute. They’d taught her girls curse words. Earlier, at Foxy’s, Coco had walked into Foxy’s bedroom and found the older one, who was rather plump, lying on top of Nikki. Coco went crazy; her hands started shaking, and she’d had to call Hector to intervene. But Weedo and Lacey were easy: they were fourteen and in love and hunting for privacy. Coco was also afraid to stay in the apartment alone.

When Mercedes heard that Weedo would stay overnight, she folded her arms across her chest and glared at her mother. “You said no boys in the house!”

“Mercedes, he can come in, but just once,” Coco said.

“No!”
Mercedes said. “You said no boys, only girls in the house!”

“This will only be one boy, for one night, because he’s Lacey’s friend,” Coco said. “Don’t you like Lacey?”

“You promised!” Mercedes said. Her upset wasn’t the usual frustration she directed toward her mother before Coco caved in to her demands: this anger had a lower, despairing pitch.

At Prospect, the children played in one bedroom. Weedo and Lacey jumped into the shower. Their laughter trailed Coco as she roamed through the stifling apartment, trying to create fresh air. Their joyful noise made her happy. “Reminds me of me and Cesar when we was young,” she clucked to herself. Most of the windows were misaligned and many had been painted shut. She fought one open—no breeze. She ripped the plastic covering off the couch. She wanted to preserve it, but she also
wanted her guests to feel comfortable. She left Weedo and Lacey her only set of sheets.

Coco put the girls in their big room and retired to the tiny one, but soon they clustered by her door. They didn’t want to sleep alone. She dragged her mattress onto the floor and they climbed on.

“Mommy suck my thumb?” Nikki asked. Coco had been trying to break Nikki of the habit, but Coco’s directives, however well-intentioned, often got lost in the day’s landslide of minor catastrophes. Coco shared with Nikki a story about Daisy, Jessica’s cousin and old clubbing pal, who had a boyfriend who once complained that Daisy still sucked her thumb. The moral of the tale was eclipsed by Daisy’s bravado, which was more inspiring. “Daisy do that and she’s grown. She told her man, ‘Take me like I am!’ ” Coco said. She peered over the mattress, down at Mercedes. “Your daddy sucks his thumb, too,” she added kindly. Mercedes smiled. Wishman’s sisters immediately placed their thumbs in their mouths.

Lacey peeked in, her pale body wrapped in a towel. “Why you all in the same room?” she asked.

“My girls aren’t afraid to sleep on their own,” Coco lied. She also didn’t mention the flimsy kitchen knife beside her bed. The knife was a habit Coco had acquired from her mother, although it wasn’t strangers but Coco’s father whom Foxy had feared.

The children drifted off, but in the next room, Weedo and Lacey started arguing. Weedo had a violent temper. Coco fidgeted on the uncovered box spring beside Nautica, who pumped her pacifier, asleep. Coco could barely breathe. She worried about Nautica’s asthma but didn’t dare open the door because of the rats. She finally cracked open the window over the fire escape. Still, it was unbearably hot. Sweat dripped onto the plastic mattress cover. Lazy conversation from the sidewalk punched through the dead air. An alley cat cried without much conviction. Weedo, however, was hollering at Lacey with the whole of his raging heart. “I’m getting the fuck outta here,” he yelled. She encouraged him to do that. “I’m going the fuck home,” he shouted. She told him to do that, too. Coco was grateful that her girls slept through the next several rounds.

Coco hoped it didn’t get physical; she’d have to get involved. In fact, Coco got involved whenever she saw other people—even strangers—fighting in front of little kids. She attributed this to the time that Nikki’s father, Kodak, had gone after her in Foxy’s courtyard. Mercedes was only two. The courtyard was packed with kids, teenagers, and adults. Kodak
drove up in a fancy car with a new wife and demanded, “How come every time I come around you ain’t with Nikki?”

“She’s with your mother,” Coco replied. “If you came around more often, you’d see me with her.” Coco remembered that Kodak had gone berserk. Even with Mercedes screaming wildly for someone to help her mother, no one had intervened.

Recently, Coco had inserted herself into the middle of a fistfight a guy was having with a woman near Thorpe. She didn’t know either of them, but she’d courageously told the man, “You a grown man. You want to do that? Take it in the house.”

Finally, Coco dozed. Around three o’clock in the morning, she bolted up; she smelled smoke. Voices—men’s voices—sounded awfully close, as though they were on the fire escape. She rolled over to look. What she saw made her leap—the tip of a sneakered foot on her windowsill, two hands tugging up the frame. She plopped Nautica on the mattress into the twist of sleeping girls, scrambled under the box spring she’d been sleeping on, hoisted it up on her back, flipped it against the window, then body-slammed herself against it to hold it up. The voices murmured. One man cackled. Eventually, they left. Had they wanted to, the men could easily have pushed their way in.

Coco jimmied the window shut with a screwdriver and returned the box spring to block it, pressed her back against it, and slid to the floor. She cradled the knife against her swelling belly. She tried to break night but nodded off. Once, she startled, but it was only Weedo or Lacey laughing in the next room.

By morning, the bedroom was hotter than a greenhouse, the children a tangled vine of arms and ponytails and legs. Mercedes moaned softly. Nautica gasped. Nikki, who had a sinus condition, snored raspily. Weedo and Lacey slammed the busted door behind them, and the noise woke Nikki up. She crawled over to the window and watched them go, her chin in her hands. Above the grubby street, Lacey’s blondness dissolved into the summer haze. A garbage truck halted. The young lovers crossed over Prospect Avenue, looking disheveled, and headed south to catch the Tremont Avenue bus back toward University, the same bus that Coco used to ride from Cesar’s to her mother’s house.

Back at Foxy’s, Coco and Foxy fought the way they had when Coco was a teenager. Coco complained bitterly about Hernan. “She don’t want me with nobody,” Foxy said. “She’s got to let go.” During one argument, Foxy threw a glass at Coco; after another, Foxy took extra prescription pills to
knock herself out. Coco brought Mercedes and Nautica upstate to visit Milagros and let matters cool. Nikki was spending a few weeks with her father in Baltimore. When Coco returned to the Bronx, she announced that she was considering moving to Troy. The small city was boring, but it was pretty and quiet and the children had all kinds of space to play. Foxy kept her fingers crossed. “The girls need an environment. . . . Wishman’s not gonna do shit for her. She’s got to do what she’s got to do on her own.”

Coco and Wishman still got together, and Wishman continued to publicly deny that Coco’s pregnancy was his doing. “I leave him alone,” Coco said. But she hoped for a son.

At the end of August, Hector’s Iris gave Hector his baby boy; they named him Lil Hector. A few nights later, Coco went dancing and met up with Wishman. Afterward, they went to a room he rented from a lady in a building around the corner from his mother’s house. They made love three times; Coco later wondered if he was trying to hurt the baby. She had to go to the bathroom, and dressed for the walk down the hall. But when she stood up, a rush of blood came out. Wishman dialed his mother; Sunny dialed 911.

In the meantime, Wishman ushered Coco to the bathroom and helped remove the bloodied clothes. Then Sunny barreled in; Coco felt woozy; paramedics arrived; she continued losing blood. While two EMTs strapped Coco to a gurney, another was trying to get information from Wishman—Coco’s name, birthday, and address. Wishman nervously kept repeating, “She’s a Sagittarius.” This amused Coco later on, when she was at the hospital.

The next few days were a jumble of emergency room visits. Coco continued bleeding heavily and was finally admitted to the hospital. For a week, the doctors tried to stop the bleeding; at one point, Coco was told, incorrectly, that the baby was dead. Finally, they wheeled her in for an emergency C-section at 3
A.M
.

If Coco could have held the new baby, it would have fit into the palm of one hand. Its spindly legs were not much larger than a frog’s, but they didn’t kick; they just hung down. And it was another girl. Ruby Diamond Pearl was three months premature and weighed in at 636 grams, her veiny skin punctured with tubes the size of cocktail straws. Her chest heaved up and down; it was smaller than a chicken breast. Coco felt so undone that she wanted to believe they’d switched her child with another by mistake. “She actually looked like a crack baby would look,” she said, mortified.

While the baby struggled in neonatal intensive care, Coco spent an
anxious week on another floor of the hospital. Foxy snuck Mercedes in; Wishman didn’t visit; Sunny did. The gossip had already started:

Wishman must be using something, Coco.

Someone doing something. That baby isn’t right.

All of Coco’s other children were healthy, so Coco called Sunny and asked if Wishman was using drugs. He only smoked weed. Wishman also assured Coco, and put his last name on the birth certificate. Coco was discharged and returned to Foxy’s, and Pearl stayed on in the hospital.

In the midst of the crisis, Coco decided to make the move upstate. She felt that no good would come of staying in the Bronx. She rarely saw her sister, she couldn’t pin down her own mother, and perhaps the distance would renew Foxy’s interest in Coco and her kids. Coco also wanted to escape the neighborhood, which she felt was full of hypocrites—people pretending good while saying nasty things about her, and now, about her baby. Wishman had only visited the hospital once, and he’d brought along his new girl. Foxy condemned Wishman for abandoning a sickly infant, but Coco believed that he would eventually come around. “If it was hard for me and I gave birth, think how he must be feeling worse,” she said. In the meantime, Coco reminded her mother that she’d raised her girls without two fathers, and she could do just as well without three.

Foxy agreed to oversee Pearl’s care in the hospital while Coco went through the shelter in Troy and settled down. Richie agreed to keep an eye on the apartment at Prospect. Richie’s brother had lent him enough money to get out of the shelter and rent an apartment, and Richie would use Coco’s furniture until he could afford his own. In the meantime, Coco packed the important things she could carry with her—the girls’ best clothes and her photographs. Richie promised to safeguard the toy chest Cesar had made for Mercedes until she came back for it. A friend offered to give her a lift to Troy.