by Jaquira Díaz
Once, when we still lived in El Caserío, the two of us running wild with the other street kids, I pushed Anthony off the front steps of our building. The night before he had pulled out my hair in handfuls.
The sound of his head cracking on the concrete steps was terrifying, exhilarating.
My brother and I, we were the same: part monster, part mouse.
At the police station, every cop stopped by my holding cell, wanting to get a look at the kid who’d tried to kill her own brother.
“Jesus, I know you,” one of them said, then turned to the others, “I’ve picked her up before.”
I looked him up and down and said nothing. I was a runaway, a high school dropout, a hoodlum. I had been picked up so many times, for aggravated battery, for assault, for battery on a police officer.
I was questioned by two detectives without a parent or lawyer in the room.
The cop who said he knew me sat across the table, asking again and again, Why did you stab him? Were you angry? Did you want him dead?
“Yes, I was angry,” I said.
“Yes, I wanted him dead,” I said.
I didn’t ask, “Where is my father?” and I didn’t ask, “How is my sister?” and I didn’t tell them that for years, after every black eye, every bloody lip, every fistful of hair yanked from the roots, I had imagined the weight of that knife in my hand.
And after I was fingerprinted and photographed and handcuffed and escorted into and out of the elevator and past the lobby and out the back door and into a squad car, after I was dropped off at the juvenile detention center where I would be held overnight to await my hearing with other girls who maybe stabbed their brothers and maybe didn’t, I imagined that these cops who thought they knew me talked about me, that they called me “juvenile” and “delinquent” and “offender”—words they thought were a good fit for a girl like me.
What does it mean to rupture an eardrum? To scrape a dead mouse off the floor, save it for later. To pick up a knife, point it, thrust it. To sever a finger.
What is a finger without a child’s body attached?
What good is a pinky anyway?
It was almost midnight when we arrived at the juvenile detention center, me and two other girls, all the cells in the girls’ wing closed, all the other inmates asleep on floor mats. The juvenile corrections officer walked us to the showers, where we undressed as she watched, a juvie strip search, the three of us lifting our breasts and spreading our legs and opening our mouths. How none of us said a word as the guard poured lice shampoo into our cupped hands. Not a word as she told us to lather up our heads, armpits, pubic hair, or when she said and kept saying, Let me see, let me see, let me see.
Once we were in our orange jumpsuits, we had to braid our hair, she told us, or they would cut it off. So I braided my hair in front of the mirror while avoiding the other girls’ questions. Where do you live? Where do you go to school? What did you do?
What did you do? People would always ask that question. But I wouldn’t say, not for years, not after I got out of juvie, or after I turned eighteen and my record was expunged, or after I got my GED, started taking classes at Miami Dade College, thinking that it would change me, that it would get me off the streets and I’d be able to look my father in the face again, finally know what it felt like to have someone be proud of me.
After I braided my hair, they took me into one of the cells, handed me a mat and blanket for the floor, locked the door behind me. The room was empty, freezing, and once I was on the floor, shivering through the night, I thought, I’ve finally been put in my place.
I woke up the next morning to a new roommate. She was lying on her mat, crying, wiping her nose on her sleeve.
“Don’t eat the grits,” she said. “They put something in them to make you shit.”
. . .
The scariest part was not that La Llorona was a monster, or that she came when you called her name three times in the dark, or that she could come into your room at night and take you from your bed like she’d done with her own babies. It was that once she’d been a person, a woman, a mother. And then a moment, an instant, a split second later, she was a monster.
In a few years, after leaving my mother’s house for the last time, after my brother has become a grown man with a wife and a baby and a house of his own, after Ana María Cardona has been tried and convicted and sentenced to death, I would write to her in prison:
Dear Ms. Cardona,
I would like to hear your story. Not what the papers said or what people said or what was on the news, but the truth.
And she would write back:
Dear Ms. Jaquira Díaz,
This is not a story. This is my life.
Candy Girl
It was the fall after Hurricane Andrew, when we were still kids and Miami Beach still belonged to us, not to the movie producers or the modeling agencies or the real estate investors. It was 1992, three years before I’d stab my brother with a steak knife, before the prosecutors and police officers and public defenders stopped talking to me and started talking about me, before they’d decided to send me on a tour of Miami-Dade County Jail, as part of some Scared Straight deal, an intervention program for at-risk youth.
After my third or fourth arrest that year, when I got released from the Miami police station where I’d spent hours in a holding cell, I found my mother waiting in the lobby. Mami was pacing the waiting area, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lip. She wore a white tank top, cutoff jeans, dirty chancletas, her hair a tangle of blond, her red toenail polish chipped, mascara running. As I approached, she just looked me over and didn’t say a word, didn’t even hold out her arms for a hug, though I hadn’t seen her in several weeks. I’d been bouncing from my father’s place to my mother’s for months, and then one day, after a fight with Mami, I ran away, tossed some clothes into a backpack and took off in the middle of the night. I’d spent the last two weeks sleeping at friends’ houses or on the lifeguard stands out on the beach, skipping all my eighth-grade classes. Until the cops picked me up after a brawl with some girls outside the Omni mall.
Mami unclipped her visitor’s pass from her shirt, dropped it on the counter in front of the police officer working the front desk, a small, older woman all the other cops had called Ms. Olga.
Ms. Olga picked up the pass, took one look at me, and frowned. “I need you to sign a personal property receipt,” she said to my mother.
“I can sign,” I said. I’d done this so many times already I was used to the drill. Besides, Mami had stopped signing shit for me a long time ago.
My mother turned on her heel before I’d picked up the pen, walked through the glass doors, and once outside, lit her cigarette.
Ms. Olga put a paper bag on the counter, opened it, and looked inside. Then she passed it across the desk to me. She did the same with my backpack, empty and unzipped.
“This all you got?” she asked.
I checked. One pair of gold hoops, six dollars, one apartment key, one Bob Marley T-shirt, one hair pick, three blue Bic ballpoint pens, one composition book, one Revlon’s Toast of New York lipstick. I gave her a half-smile. “Yeah.”
She slid her clipboard toward me. “Sign at the bottom.”
I scribbled my name.
“Don’t come back here, Miss Thang,” she said.
Outside, my mother took a long drag off her cigarette.
“I won’t,” I said.
“I mean it. I don’t want to see your face ’round here again.”
I walked through the double doors and found Mami waiting for me with Benny, one of her boyfriends. He was twice her age, in his sixties maybe, mostly bald, wearing brown slacks, a short-sleeved guayabera, and a newsboy cap. The last time I’d seen him, he’d bragged about how he’d been some sort of boxing legend when he was younger, trying to impress me even though we both knew Mami only kept him around in case she needed a favor. My mother was a hustler. She got men to buy her cigarettes, or scutter, or food. Sh
e got them to give her money for clothes and shoes. She got them to drive her around, and in this case, to take her across the bridge to pick up her thirteen-year-old daughter from the Miami police station.
Outside, Mami threw her arms around me. She smelled like cigarette smoke and dirty laundry.
“I missed you so much,” she said, loud enough that half the block could hear. Nowadays all she did was smoke and party with her scutterhead friends. If I ever saw her, it was only during moments like this, when I called her for a favor, promised to spot her twenty dollars if she picked me up. Or when I was staying at Papi’s house and she came knocking, asking to borrow money, too strung out to remember it was Christmas, or the day of my piano recital, or my birthday. I remembered how back in the day, she was proud, well-dressed, and her blond hair fell down her back in heavy layers that she sometimes let me brush or braid or curl. And even though she wasn’t perfect, she’d walked us to school, always made sure there were presents under the Christmas tree.
“You missed me? That’s a fucking lie.”
She pulled back, her hands on my shoulders, the sunlight washing out her bleached hair. “Why would you say something like that?”
I brushed her hands away. I didn’t tell her how scared I’d been, spending hours in that cell by myself while the cops talked about me like I wasn’t even there, how they said that if my parents didn’t come for me, they’d have to process me, then drop me off at the juvenile detention center, where I’d spend the next month or so until my trial. Or how I had shrugged when one cop and then another stopped as they passed my cell and asked, “Where are your parents?” and I didn’t even bother correcting either of them, even though I was thinking, Mother. Where is your mother? Or how I hadn’t called Papi because he was already so fed up with me. How I’d thought maybe she wouldn’t even show up, that she was probably in jail herself. I wanted to tell her what it felt like to be the girl whose parents had stopped showing up, but I didn’t think she’d hear me.
“You hungry?” she asked, changing the subject. That’s when I realized what this was: my mother putting on a show for her man, pretending she actually took care of her kids, using me as a prop to impress some has-been boxer who was probably going to leave her anyway when he realized what he got himself into.
“Starving,” I said.
Benny had parked his rusty old Chevy Nova at a meter across the street. He opened the passenger door for my mother, and when he got the back door for me, he didn’t look me in the face. The leather seats were torn and stained and they smelled like moldy cheese and old man sweat. As we pulled out of the spot, our eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“I’m saving for a new car,” he said.
Usually I hated my mother’s boyfriends. But I felt bad for Benny, embarrassed even, that he was apologizing for not having a better car. I couldn’t remember the last time one of these men had apologized for anything, let alone looked at me like I was my mother’s daughter instead of just some dumb kid, or worse, some jailbait piece of ass.
We drove across the 112 toward Miami Beach until it turned into Arthur Godfrey Road. Benny put the windows down so my mother could smoke, the wind whipping stray curls in my face. We pulled into the Burger King drive-thru as I was tightening up my ponytail.
My mother leaned back to get a look at me, smiling. “Do you know what you want?”
I stuck my head out the window and talked to the microphone box. “Can I get a Whopper with cheese and a large chocolate shake?”
A girl’s voice responded. “Whopper with cheese, large chocolate shake. Anything else?”
“Hang on.” I stuck my head back in the car. “Y’all want anything?”
Benny leaned toward the window and ordered for them both. He didn’t even bother asking what she wanted, and when they passed him the bags, he just handed them over like they did this shit on the regular. After I got my shake and food, I went back to ignoring them. Benny drove one-handed while taking huge bites of his Double Whopper, and every once in a while, he’d glance at me through the rearview like he was going to say something.
After a while, my mother turned to me again. “So,” she said, “you must be happy to come back home.”
I wanted to remind her that her apartment had never felt like home, that it was the reason I’d spent the last three years running away. “I don’t know, Jeannette,” I said, enunciating every syllable in her name so she’d know I was no longer calling her Mami. “How was it for you, all those times you were in jail?”
She turned around, back to her food.
I didn’t check for Benny’s eyes in the rearview, but I caught how he put his hand over hers, how he tried to comfort her. Was he for real? And how was it that my mother, who usually lost her shit for scutterhead assholes, had found Benny, some regular guy. I wondered how long it would take him to snap out of it, how long it would be before he woke up in my mother’s bed at 3:00 a.m.—his wallet missing, his pockets and his dignity turned inside out—and ran like hell.
Benny stopped the car in front of our building, and I got out quickly, strapping on my backpack and shutting the door behind me. But my mother didn’t get out, or wouldn’t. I stood on the sidewalk, holding my bag of half-eaten Burger King, my milkshake almost gone, watching them. Benny tried to talk to her, pointing at our building, at his watch, like he needed to be somewhere. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me for the twenty dollars I’d promised on the phone.
But then, Benny turned the car around, tires screeching as he and Mami sped away.
My mother lived a block away from Normandy Park, in Section 8 housing, in one of two motel-style two-story Art Deco buildings with multiple layers of paint peeling off in three different pastel colors. Christmas lights were still up in July, August, September. No matter what day of the week, my mother’s building always looked like the hangover after an all-night block party, the parking lot and stairs cluttered with random shit that never made it into the trash: crushed beer cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers. You could always tell who the Section 8 kids were—the ones still riding their bikes in the street after midnight, who knocked on the neighbors’ doors to make phone calls since we almost never had phones, whose mothers sent them to the corner store to buy cigarettes with food stamps. We came from broken homes, broken English, and broke-ass parents.
I stepped into our apartment, closing the door behind me, setting my backpack down on the worn carpet and my food on the coffee table. Alaina was at Papi’s house, and Anthony hadn’t lived with Mami in years, so I had the apartment to myself. All we had in the living room was my mother’s old stained sectional, a thirteen-inch television the neighbors had left behind when they moved out, a mahogany table we used as a TV stand, and a rickety glass-top coffee table. There were empty beer cans all over the place, on the floor, where they’d been left standing next to the sofa, on top of the TV, on the kitchen counter, on the windowsill. Oh, and ashtrays. Ashtrays everywhere, all of them full. My mother collected cigarette butts. When she was out of cigarettes, she’d just search her ashtrays and find a butt with some smoke left in it. Once in a while, I’d find half a white boy and it’d be like Christmas.
Sometimes, when Mami and I weren’t fighting, when she was on her meds, when she’d stop using and having scutterheads over for weeks at a time, we had good days. We’d get in the kitchen and fry up some chicken, sit around in the living room watching novelas on the scrambled TV. It was during those days that I could ask her anything, when my mother and I could have a conversation.
What do they sound like? I asked once. The voices?
She took one long, slow drag off her cigarette, thought about it a while, exhaled. They sound angry. There’s so many of them. But sometimes, it’s just Pedro.
On those good days, I’d have her to myself, almost like I had her back. I’d watch her light cigarette after cigarette, chain-smoking until the entire living room blurred. I’d gather the ashtrays, empty them into the trash in the kitchen, think about how unfai
r it was that my mother had lost her mind, how unfair that I had lost my mother.
I hadn’t even made it to my bedroom yet, when I heard a knock on the door. I peeked out the living room window.
It was my friend Chris, who I hadn’t seen since I ran away. I got the door quickly. “Hey!” I said.
“Long time, stranger.” He looked tired, his curly hair longer than I’d ever seen it, and paler than usual. Chris was a light-skinned Afro-Boricua, but I’d never seen him look so pallid. I guessed he’d been working a lot.
“You look like shit,” I said.
“Just the way you like me, nena.” He gave me a crushing hug, then pulled back. “Where the fuck you been?”
Chris worked at the gas station bodega around the corner, which was just three aisles, a couple of coolers, and the register. Most people in our neighborhood went there to get Phillies and cigarettes and beer when they didn’t want to hoof it sixteen blocks to Normandy Supermarket. Chris was there working the register most afternoons. He was older than me, already twenty-one, but he’d been flirting with me since we met a year before. I used to go in there to buy candy, Now & Laters and Airheads and Tootsie Pops, and eventually, he just let me have it all for free. “It’s on me, candy girl,” he’d say. I’d roll my eyes but take it anyway, and he’d say something like, “Why you gotta be so mean?”
Once we became friends, Chris took care of me. He took me out to eat, bought me clothes and shoes, let me drive his car. He’d stop by with cigarettes and candy, bags of Ring Pops and Charms Blow Pops, packets of Nerds and Sour Patch Kids, Snickers bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Every day with Chris was Halloween, except without the monsters lurking around the corner—at least none that I could see. He’d park his beat-up Toyota in front of our building, and we’d sit inside, listening to New Edition with our cigarettes and our candy and our lust.