Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (46 page)

Serena and the twins ran to her and hugged her. Brittany and Stephanie drifted toward a dollhouse they’d spotted, but Serena hovered by her mother. Jessica tried to defuse the awkwardness between them by showing what she’d made: two sweaters for the unborn twins, a cloth-covered photo album for Elaine for Mother’s Day, and, for Serena,
a peach-and-yellow coverlet that matched a skirt set she’d sent her long ago.

“That’s one good thing about being locked up,” Coco mumbled encouragingly. “You get all creative.”

With an eye on the guard, Jessica slid out a sheet of plastic from one of the photo albums. It was a copy of her most recent sonogram. She introduced Serena to her brothers. “See, Baby A, that’s his head, his eyes, the ears.” Jessica carefully traced the body with her fingernail. “There’s Baby B. His eyes there, his ears? You can’t really see him on that one, but there’s his head. They real big, right? That’s what the doctor said, they got big heads.”

Jessica untied Serena’s straggly ponytail and combed out the knots with her fingers. She scooped up the strands and twisted a perfect topknot on the crown of Serena’s head. Her hands moved unconsciously, expertly. Serena loved to be touched. She leaned into Jessica’s side and bit her lip. Jessica rested a hand on her large belly. Serena lifted it and placed her own hand beneath.

“Mommy,” Serena whispered. She reminded Jessica of what had become their special ritual since their visit in Florida—sharing a bagel from the vending machine. Jessica helped Serena count change and, holding hands, they walked over to the bank of food. Serena slipped the coins in the slot and pressed the button; inmates were not allowed to touch money.

The click-click—the inmate photographer—suggested they take a picture outdoors. Ordinarily, Jessica loved having her picture taken. When George was in the MCC, he would say, “Baby, take a roll of thirty-six.” He sent her magazine pictures of poses for her to copy. In prison, on picture days in her unit, she and her roommates planned and traded outfits. They styled their hair and experimented with makeup and choreographed each pose as if they were on a fashion shoot. Jessica never went into debt for food in prison, but she often borrowed money for toiletries. That day, however, outside the camp’s plain entrance, Jessica seemed uncertain. Instead of turning to the side to show off her profile, as most pregnant girls did, she faced the camera with an expression of apprehensive resignation. She removed the clunky prison-issue eyeglasses she detested and stood beside a prickly bush.

Serena never liked being photographed. At birthday parties, she had to be dragged to join her sisters and her cousins and cajoled to look pretty, to be sexy, to unpeel herself from the wall. Now she looked as though she wanted to hide behind the bush’s scratchy branches. “Come on,” Jessica
said quietly, hugging her in. She clasped her daughter’s hand. Serena placed her other hand on her hip and tried to smile.

Children born to women in federal custody must be taken by family within forty-eight hours of their birth, or they become wards of the state in which the mother lives. Jessica gave birth to two baby boys in a local hospital near the prison. Some inmates were required to give birth handcuffed, but Jessica’s doctor wouldn’t tolerate it. He had no say over the armed guard, though, who stood watch during the labor. Right up to the delivery, Jessica had held on to the hope that Torres would come to see their children being born, but she didn’t hear anything from him. The birth had been his cutoff date. “Whatever I felt for him, it all turned dead when he didn’t turn up in the hospital,” she said coolly the following afternoon. She claimed she’d named the boys Michael and Matthew out of affection, but the impulse seemed closer to longing and spite. Michael was Jessica’s father’s name. Matthew was the son of a prison friend whom Jessica had met earlier in the MCC; the friend had been released, but Jessica then coincidentally befriended Matthew’s sister, who was serving time at Danbury. Jessica and Matthew talked a lot on the telephone. He and Jessica were becoming closer as Jessica became more disenchanted with Torres. “I’ll never regret my sons,” she said stonily.

She hardly saw them in the hospital, however; the guards on duty weren’t always willing to walk her to the nursery. When they finally agreed to let her peek at them, she inched slowly down the hall, the guards flanking her as she pushed her rolling IV. She tried to engage in small talk, perhaps to defuse the embarrassment of the stares of the other patients. She complimented one guard on her diamond engagement ring.

In her room, the guards jotted down notes of Jessica’s conversations with visitors. Handcuffs lay on the table at the foot of her bed, beside a rose that Matthew had brought. He also surprised her with some Crabtree & Evelyn lotion from the hospital gift shop. He later returned with Lourdes and Elaine to collect the babies, and Jessica was discharged from the maternity ward. She managed to sneak the Crabtree & Evelyn lotion back into prison, but the female officer assigned to escort her confiscated Matthew’s and Michael’s baby footprints; they were considered contraband.

Lourdes promised to help raise the babies, but the burden fell to Elaine. She and her husband, Angel, had agreed to look after them while Jessica
completed her prison term. Angel had recently graduated from a drug treatment program and was maintaining himself on methadone. He worked long days at a factory in Queens. Elaine had completed her GED and volunteered at her sons’ school as a teacher’s aide. She wanted to work, but her husband discouraged it, and she felt obligated to stay home and try to bring together her scattered family.

Elaine had gone into therapy to learn how to control her temper with her children, especially her youngest son, who had Cesar’s quick energy. She felt ambivalence about the strong instinct for self-protection that might have saved her from her siblings’ fates. She’d discussed her guilt about not helping Cesar more when he was a child and also while he was on the run after shooting Mighty: she’d worried about exposing her sons to his lifestyle, and with her husband’s history of drug use, she had feared unexpected visits from police. Even though Angel now seemed to be shaping up, she was losing confidence in the marriage. She was ashamed to have a man who lined up for his Dixie cup of methadone. Elaine had no clue how she’d manage with two infants—the apartment she and her husband shared with their two growing boys was no bigger than a studio—but she also couldn’t live with the thought of her nephews in foster care.

Shortly after the boys were born, Lourdes finally appeared at Danbury. Jessica was not initially welcoming. Although Jessica had been in prison for four years, Lourdes had visited only twice. Jessica was tired of her mother’s excuses: she had no way to get there, she had no money, she was supposedly pregnant, she had husband trouble, she felt sick. Lourdes later said she couldn’t emotionally handle the lengthy visits. Jessica thought she didn’t want to be away from her block for too long, which was a roundabout criticism of Lourdes’s dependency on men and drugs; Lourdes insisted there was no dependency.

Mockery was Jessica’s way of reestablishing her connection with her mother; their wounded repartee kept a safe distance and neutralized the tension that always sat between them. Jessica spoke harshly to Lourdes, but she craved her attention and love. Now she cruelly assessed the older woman’s body.

“She finally getting tits,” Jessica said, and rolled her eyes. “Ma, you fat. You aren’t just chubby, you are fat. So tell me, what are you, pregnant, or is it a tumor, or what?”

“I don’t know, Mami,” she said beseechingly, pouting into her double chin. Lourdes told Jessica she had to leave the visit early: “I have to
go to the doctors. That’s why I can’t stay, Mami, I have to see a social worker.”

“You don’t need to see no social worker. You can talk to me,” Jessica said, giving in.

“Mami, do my hair?” Lourdes asked. When Lourdes lifted her long hair from the nape of her neck, Jessica noticed that her mother was wearing the two boxing gloves that Boy George had given her on a slim gold chain. She touched them tenderly. “He’d be surprised that I still have that,” Jessica said. “Probably thinks I sold it,” she added sarcastically. Then she launched into the questions she always asked of Lourdes, reciting a litany of lost objects, as if Jessica could never accept her mother’s failure to safeguard what she’d held for her. The purple shearling coat? The leathers? The chains? The rings?

Lourdes repeated her lines: “I don’t know, Mami” and “I told you.” She let the implication of the pauses do the work. Jessica bent forward. “Give me your earrings,” she whispered. She sat back and said casually, “Let me try your earrings on.”

“Be careful, Mami,” Lourdes warned, glancing at the guard on duty.

“One hand washes the other,” Jessica said, explaining that the guard was a “friend.”

Lourdes pursed her lips as though she’d eaten something rank. “Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

After the visit, Lourdes stood at the top of the hill overlooking the maximum-security facility below. As she waited for her daughter to be searched so she could appear in a window for a final wave, Lourdes retrieved a charm bracelet from her pocket and slipped it back over her bloated wrist. The letters spelled out
LOVE.
One of Domingo’s drug customers had offered it in lieu of cash, and Domingo had passed it along to Lourdes. “Good thing she didn’t take this,” Lourdes said. “I’d have to get another one new! See how she took my earrings like that?”

Finally, Jessica’s figure appeared in the window. From a distance, without the power of her expressive face, the sultry voice, the intelligence in her hazel eyes, Jessica looked beaten down. Lourdes waved. Jessica waved back. Both seemed diminished, small. Lourdes waved with each step down the hill toward the parking lot until she could not see her daughter anymore.

By summer, Jessica was feeling completely abandoned. First, she had lost Torres; then she had lost her boys; then she learned that her friend Matthew was spending a suspicious amount of time with Elaine. The
prison authorities placed Jessica on suicide watch. Her vicious moods alienated her from her roommates, who had enjoyed the brief reprieve of her hospital stay. They weren’t thrilled to have this particular Jessica back; the blunt impact of Jessica’s depression was hard to escape in the small room. She was clearly suffering, but suicide watch meant that a guard checked in on them every hour.