Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (64 page)

Meanwhile, Lourdes, with the fragile hope of surprising Jessica, waited underground in a nearby subway. She stood on a platform with Emilio, who hunched over her, nervous and tentative. He’d been hearing about Jessica, it seemed, forever. Framed photographs of her dominated Lourdes’s
sala
walls. For the special day, Lourdes had worn her new eyeglasses with gold trim, and a brand-new pink-and-green sweat suit. She’d even gotten a neighbor to French-braid her hair. But Lourdes had mistakenly gone to the wrong station. After an hour, she gave up. Emilio tenderly held her elbow as he helped her slowly climb the stairs.

Whatever expectations had accompanied Jessica’s homecoming quickly dissolved into the strange twilight haze of postprison existence. Jessica had physically returned to her old world to begin a supposedly brand-new life that hadn’t quite started yet. The dreary halfway house hunkered down on a gritty block just north of Fordham Road. Institutional renovations and a glossy blue coat of paint had added a fluorescent sheen to the dingy tenement, not unlike the probationary life Jessica faced: the governing rules imposed a superficial order on the old vulnerabilities, but there was a deeper sense that nothing much had changed. She attended her required Narcotics Anonymous meetings, walking past familiar drug spots that operated in a nearby park. She could have walked to the hooky house where she’d met Puma. Her children were elsewhere, her little brother was locked up, her mother was broke.

Almost immediately, Jessica got romantically involved with a fellow resident. At night, she skulked beneath the security cameras and snuck into his room. She posed for photographs—straddling his bed, squatting on the floor, her hands up against the cinder-block wall, wearing his gift of black lace lingerie. Boy George soon received news of her adventures; a member of his prison gang was stationed at the halfway house.

In her loneliness, Jessica also resorted to the pay phone, as she had so many times before. Her first call out went to Edwin, Wishman’s little brother. He was studying to become an X-ray technician and working at a Bronx hospital. He couldn’t see her—he was married and his wife was
pregnant—but his mother, Sunny, met Jessica on Fordham to celebrate Jessica’s first two-hour pass. (“I’m still the same?” Jessica asked hopefully, to which Sunny replied warmly, “You still got that fat ass!”) Ghosts of Jessica’s former life, both kind and unkind, seemed to haunt her everywhere. She ran into one of the boys from the hooky house. Lourdes surprised Jessica by showing up at the halfway house with Big Daddy, who’d lived with them on Tremont. Jessica made a snide comment in front of him about Lourdes’s continued use of drugs. “That’s right, baby—the kind that a doctor prescribes,” Lourdes said archly. “Mami, want me to pee for you in a cup?” Jessica even passed by George’s mother’s apartment. Rita still had the reversible mink and leather coat George had had specially made for Jessica ten years earlier. “To get it back I have to kiss ass. It’s not worth it,” Jessica said. George’s little brother had become a man. He’d acquired more confidence, a wife and children, and reminded Jessica of George.

But it was her children who were truly transformed: Serena was a young woman; Brittany and Stephanie had stretched into slender adolescent girls; her infant sons were now little boys. Milagros brought them all down for Christmas, which they celebrated at Lourdes’s. Lourdes set out a feast—her
pasteles, arroz gandules,
potato salad, a special ham. Jessica’s grandmother came in from Florida; Jessica’s favorite aunt—Lourdes’s younger sister Millie—came with her girlfriend, Linda; Elaine and Robert brought their children; Jessica’s cousin Daisy showed up with her little boy. Jessica surprised the children with winter coats from Old Navy. She said, “I was happy cuz I was with my kids. That was the best gift.” They took lots of pictures. In them, Jessica smiled broadly, back in the bosom of her family.

Although the job market for ex-felons was severely limited, Jessica’s release from the halfway house depended upon her finding employment. Elaine got Jessica hired at the warehouse where she worked. Elaine managed the office; Jessica took orders and called clients, reminding them in her sultry voice of overdue bills. At an office party, she met a married schoolteacher, whom she briefly dated. She gave her daughters her toll-free number: Jessica couldn’t travel upstate to see them because of probation, and Milagros couldn’t usually afford the time or money to bring them down. Serena called frequently.

In January 1999, Jessica was approved to move in with Elaine. (Her application to live with Lourdes was denied because Lourdes’s boyfriend had been convicted of a felony.) Jessica still had to pay $50 a week to the
halfway house, which was part of a court fine imposed a decade before. The day she was leaving the halfway house, Jessica ran into Talent, an old colleague of Boy George’s from the early days. Talent was being admitted, having finished an eight-year term for drug dealing. He and Jessica exchanged numbers and promised to keep in touch.

Although Jessica and Elaine were getting reacquainted, Jessica privately doubted the arrangement could last; historically, the sisters’ periods of peace had been short. Elaine now had the large life: she had a good job, a wardrobe, credit cards, a car. She was in the midst of an intoxicating romance. Jessica suffered anxiety attacks. She wasn’t accustomed to the lack of rules. She missed the daily support of her prison friends, and sometimes she felt so overwhelmed that she half-wished she could go back—at least there she knew what she was supposed to do. Her weight made her painfully self-conscious. She was in a perpetual panic about money, and she needed eyeglasses. Jessica could barely manage her court fine and her share of Elaine’s household bills.

Elaine kept a tidy house, but Jessica cleaned obsessively. She lost her patience with her nephews, who slammed the door as they ran in and out of the house and plunked their dirty dishes in the sink. Each night before she crawled into Elaine’s bed, she swept and mopped the floors, as she used to in her prison cell. The bed frame was the same one Jessica had given Elaine years earlier, from one of the apartments Jessica had shared with George. On Sundays, Jessica’s boyfriend from the halfway house visited on his free pass, but the couple had no privacy unless Elaine went out. The only bureau Jessica had was the edge of Elaine’s computer desk. She crowded it with photographs and toiletries.

Elaine relished her mentor’s role. She explained to her older sister how to budget. Jessica needed and resented her. Elaine was undergoing a sexual awakening, and it was as though she and Jessica had traded places. Elaine went clubbing, and to strip joints with her girlfriends, and away for weekends with her lover, to the Poconos; Jessica baby-sat. Serena would come to visit, and it sometimes seemed to Jessica that Serena loved Elaine more; they’d grown closer over the years of Jessica’s incarceration, and Elaine could buy things for Serena. Elaine had even kept in touch with Torres, the twin boys’ father, who was clamoring to meet his sons. Milagros reluctantly agreed to bring them down. “He just wants to get in Jessica’s pants,” she said, her voice clipped.

The initial meeting went badly. Jessica had an anxiety attack and hid in the bathroom; Milagros blankly observed Torres, who sat with his hands clasped on Elaine’s couch, while the boys ran in and out of the living
room. Elaine kept pace with them, buzzing back and forth between Torres and Jessica like a harried diplomat. But Torres and Jessica reconnected on the phone. They began having long, flirtatious conversations. He called her from the boiler plant, where he now worked nights. Jessica switched between Torres and her boyfriend on call-waiting, and some nights fielded a torrent of other calls.

She and Torres scheduled a meeting in New Haven the day of the settlement conference for the Yale lawsuit, which had yet to be resolved. By then, her lawyers had learned she was back in touch with Torres and urged her to settle, which she did—for $5,000. After the conference, she lunched with the law students and spoke to the prison clinic class. (Years later, one student summarized the lesson Jessica had taught him as “the importance of and the impossibility of nailing down the facts.”) Torres picked her up at the train station and drove her back to Elaine’s. By the end of the ride, it was clear to both of them that rekindling the relationship wasn’t likely—Torres had become a born-again Christian and wouldn’t even let Jessica listen to pop music in his car. But Jessica needed the attention and seemed glad to have men back in her life.

It wasn’t long before she fell in true love again: with a twenty-three-year-old ex-marine who walked right up the stairs onto Elaine’s porch and knocked on her door. He’d been looking forward to meeting Jessica; the colleague who was training him as a home confinement officer had described her as “Wow.” He later said he knew he was in trouble when he first laid eyes on Jessica: she was stepping out of the shower, wearing only a towel. He introduced himself; Jessica believed it was destiny that his name was George. She joked about already having his tattoos. Jessica asked him in her prettiest voice to please wait while she dressed. George didn’t tell Jessica that he had a girlfriend, whom he considered a wife.

E
very opportunity Coco seized on improved her life, but sustaining the improvements proved impossible against the backslide of poverty. The financial advantage of a minimum-wage job for a family of five was imperceptible, but the disadvantages were quickly becoming clear: Coco was the spirit and the anchor of her household, and her unpredictable absence—given the irregularity of Price Chopper’s hours—made it difficult for the family to settle into any routine. What was good for Coco—getting out of the house—wasn’t always great for her children, and Frankie made a lackluster substitute.

He’d had to quit his job at the fruit-packing plant not long after Hector moved on to a slightly better-paying job as a security guard at a nursing home. At first, another coworker gave Frankie lifts to work, but the man then started on the day shift, and the buses didn’t run late in the evenings, so Frankie was back on the street. Coco had pretty much resigned herself to Frankie’s “doing what he do out there,” but Frankie seemed increasingly demoralized. Coco worried that he might hurt himself—one of his brothers had committed suicide—but other problems vied for her attention, such as Mercedes’s ongoing trouble at school. The school where Mercedes attended third grade was having its own problems. Its test scores were abysmal and it had a reputation for not being able to control its kids. The principal had suspended Mercedes several times and had told Coco that unless she got Mercedes to counseling, Mercedes would be expelled. Coco wrote Cesar and asked for guidance; when she explained to Mercedes that the situation was serious, Mercedes seemed to understand because she cried. Mercedes didn’t often show the softer side of her emotions; her tears usually came from frustration and rage. Coco thought her difficulties at school started at home: “I think it’s Frankie, but I can’t blame her because we always having problems in front of them, and I guess she feels, I don’t want my mother to deal with that.”

Mercedes watched her sisters while her mother worked. Sometimes she sounded exactly like Coco, such as the time when Nautica pointed out the “raper” in Corliss Park—a man rumored to be a sex offender who walked around the neighborhood pushing an empty shopping cart.
“Shut your mouth, Naughty,” Mercedes said. “Don’t you say that, and besides, you don’t even know what that means.”

Coco quit Price Chopper after several weeks because of the erratic hours, but yearned for another job. “I want it so that when the kids ask for something at the store, I can say yes,” she said. Just before Christmas, she joined Hector at the nursing home where she served meals to the residents. The hours were steady—she worked the 6
A.M
. to 3
P.M
. shift—and her house benefited from the predictable schedule. To Coco’s surprise and relief, the fighting between Mercedes and Frankie calmed down.

Coco made it as easy for Frankie as possible: she got up at 4
A.M
., woke the girls and dressed them, cooked breakfast, then jumped into the shower after she’d settled them in front of the TV with their food. They ate and went back to sleep. Coco reset the alarm for Frankie; all he had to do was wake them up again, help them into their coats, and give them their bookbags, all of which she’d left on the couch beside the door. Frankie didn’t even have to step outside; he could watch from the front window as Mercedes safely ushered her sisters across the busy street and onto the bus. Frankie stayed with Pearl, and Coco was back by the time the other children got home, after which he was free to go out.