White Lines II: Sunny: A Novel

by Tracy Brown

  “Overnight?”

  “No, but it won’t take us that long to find a place. Money talks.”

  “And what about Ethan?” he asked. “I can’t just leave him behind. What about Sheldon going to school? You can’t just pull him away from his friends just like that.”

  Jada looked Born in his eyes. “I can’t stay here anymore,” she said. “Seeing them…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. Born understood exactly what was on her mind.

  She had come home flustered after seeing Mr. Charlie and Shante in the supermarket. Visibly shaken, Jada had set about making dinner while Sheldon sat at the kitchen table doing his homework. But when Born had come in from a day of going over contracts with DJ, his uncles and their lawyers, Jada had taken one look at him and dissolved into tears right there at the stove. Confused, Sheldon had looked on in silence while Born had gone to her, pulling her into his arms and asking what was wrong. He had sent Sheldon to his room, turned off the stove and sat Jada down at the table, asking what was making her cry. She told him that she’d seen Charlie, that seeing him had taken her back down memory lane to places she had hoped to never visit again. She had gotten up from the table and started packing boxes she’d gotten from the neighborhood bodega. Born understood why she wanted to run, why she needed to get away from Staten Island now, but he had to make her understand that this couldn’t happen immediately.

  “You can’t run from your past, Jada,” he said gently.

  “I’m not running.” Jada rubbed her arms as if she was cold, despite the fact that the heat was on.

  “Yes, you are.” Born sat back and looked at her dead-on. “But it don’t work that way. You can move to Japan if you want and you’ll still get reminders—”

  “It’s not about reminders, Born. I deal with those every single day. When I look in the mirror at the scars on my body from where that bitch Kelly cut me, when I look at my son, who’s struggling to be normal because I smoked crack while I was pregnant with him—”

  “Jada…”

  “Reminders are one thing. I’m talking about seeing this nigga face-to-face, having him stare at me and tell me how good I look, seeing Shante and remembering…” Jada’s voice trailed off. She thought back on the things she had done; all the degrading things she had done for the sake of a high. It had been a high so good that she had risked and lost everything and was reduced to the lowest rung on the totem pole—a crackhead.

  “It’s too much, Born.” She fought the tears, but they came anyway and she wiped them roughly, stubbornly from her face. “You said you liked Battery Park City. Let’s get an apartment there.”

  “Stop doing that,” Born said to her. It wasn’t what he had said but how he said it that caught Jada’s attention. His voice was firm and strong and she detected anger in it.

  “What?”

  Born sat forward looked her straight in the eye. “Every time you talk about that shit you go somewhere else in your head and then you try to change the subject. How do you do that, actually?” Born was being sarcastic, and she knew it, but his expression seemed genuine. “How do you go from seeing your past flash in front of you to packing up and moving to Battery Park City?”

  Born stared at the wall, fuming, for quite a while.

  “This ain’t easy for me, Jada. All this talk about crack and Charlie, Shante … it’s taking me back, too.” Born tried to push the thoughts of Jada prostituting herself, sucking crack smoke out of a makeshift pipe, stealing from him—he tried to push those memories to the crevices of his mind. He had willed himself to forget that she had been the lowest possible fiend at one time. But, lately the past seemed determined to resurface. Though he tried not to show it, tried to be strong for Jada, all this talk of her crackhead days was turning him off, causing him to want to run also. But run alone; run to protect his heart.

  Born watched Jada’s facial expression turn defensive and he felt torn inside. Part of him would be eternally angry about the lows to which crack cocaine had caused Jada to sink. His father, too. His affection for them was tainted by disappointment, shame and his inability to identify with a longing so intense that it could cause a person to abandon all decency and morals in exchange for a few minutes of tripped-out bliss. The recent reminders of how she had hurt him so deeply years ago were starting to turn his heart cold. Her refusal to address the issues head-on was only making it worse.

  “We gotta talk about this shit and not pretend like there’s nothing wrong.”

  Jada searched her mind for the words to convey what she was feeling. She was wound up inside as if there was a tightly clenched fist in her chest where her heart was. She was aware that she had been forgiven—by God, by Born, and by all the people who had watched her fall to horrible depths—but she had never fully forgiven herself. It was one of those wrongs that never got fully right again. Sometimes when she thought back on all of her transgressions she was flooded with shame and disbelief that she had allowed herself to be taken over by a narcotic.

  “You’ve been clean for a long time, Jada. And you’ve seen Charlie on the street before. Shante, too. So what’s so different this time?”

  Jada was rubbing her arms again. “That was different. I was driving past, saw them on the street. This time they were in my face, talking to me, reminding me of what I was.” She felt like there were literally ghosts all around her. Dead people in her dreams—Jamari, her mother, even Sunny’s man Dorian—all in scenes from her past. And her present didn’t differ much, with her running into Charlie and Shante and having to see Jamari’s face from time to time when she looked at her son. She didn’t know how to make Born understand that she literally couldn’t sleep at night, that she was wracked with guilt and shame. She would never get high again. She had promised herself that. Aside from what she owed Sheldon, Born and everyone else who loved her, Jada knew that she owed it to herself to stay clean and to love the life that had been given to her. Having been so close to death so many times, she knew that life was a delicate balancing act and it was only by the grace of God that she had survived at all.

  Born watched her doing it again—drifting off. He was getting tired of this.

  “So now what?” He shook his head, growing angry, and could no longer tell if his anger was toward Jada or toward the circumstances she was enduring. “I love you, and I know everything about you. I know all the shit you did. We don’t have to list it. And it doesn’t matter. The problem is you don’t talk about it, cuz that’s your way of handling it. But you’re really giving it power over you cuz that shit is eating you up inside. Every time Sheldon asks about his father, every time you see one of those fuckers on the street, you gonna run away? That’s your solution?”

  Jada didn’t answer. She wiped her tears away, though it was pointless. They kept pouring forth. Finally she sat staring at her hands, letting Born’s words blanket the air.

  Born looked around at all the boxes spread throughout the living room. “We can move if you want. We can cancel Thanksgiving and pack up everything we own, switch Sheldon’s school, and never look back.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If that’s what’s gonna make you happy, let’s do it. But Sheldon’s still gonna have questions about his father. And you might not see Charlie or Shante or any of the other idiots, but you’ll still be haunted by the memory of everything you went through. Running ain’t gonna change that.”

  Jada toyed with the tissue in her hand. She loved this man, that much she knew for sure. He knew her and loved her anyway. Born was proof that there was such a thing as second chances. She knew he was right. Moving wouldn’t give her the peace she was searching for. Jada wasn’t even sure if she believed she’d ever find that.

  “I’m not running,” she said under her breath.

  Born smiled gently at her. “Baby girl, you’re running so much I’ma call you Flo-Jo for the rest of the week.”

  She smiled through her tears.

  Their moment was interrupted by Sheldon clearing his thro
at as he entered the room. “Umm … can I talk to you?”

  “Yeah!” Born said.

  “Come sit down,” Jada invited, patting the seat beside her.

  Sheldon sat down next to his mother. “I saw you crying before, and I couldn’t figure out why you were so upset, so I waited near the stairs and I heard y’all talking.”

  Born shut his eyes, regretfully rewinding their conversation. He shook his head and looked at Jada helplessly.

  “You smoked crack?” Sheldon asked. He looked at his mother, hoping he had heard wrong. The kids in school talked about people who smoked crack—crackheads, they called them. The thought of his mother being one of those people was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

  Jada looked to Born for help and Born looked like he wanted to disappear. She felt like she had been hit by a Mack truck. The impact of Sheldon’t question left her speechless, and she stared at her son wordlessly.

  Born watched Jada dying a slow death, so he threw her a lifeline. “What do you know about crack, Sheldon?” He hoped that Jada would pull herself together while Sheldon answered.

  Sheldon shrugged. “I know it’s a drug that makes you act crazy. I heard of it before.” He thought about the movie he had watched with Born and DJ once. “Like that guy Pookie in the movie. Had got skinny and nasty looking, and couldn’t stop dancing.”

  Born nodded, making a mental note to be more careful what he watched when the kids were around.

  Sheldon was looking at his mother again, waiting for her answer.

  Jada swallowed hard. She steeled herself inside and looked at her son. She recalled the day she gave birth to him and the regret that had washed over her as she realized she had given birth to a crack baby. Her fight for custody of him, the joy she’d felt at finally being able to take him home after his father was killed. Eleven years had passed since then and finally she was being forced to pull the mask off and reveal to her son who his mother truly was.

  “Sheldon…” she began, her voice already cracking. She nodded, looked him in the eyes. “Yes.” She felt the fist in her chest clinch even tighter. “I used to smoke crack. But that was years ago, and I don’t do it anymore.”

  Sheldon’s eyes were wide, fixed on Jada.

  She looked to Born and he was staring at his hands.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I was seventeen when I started skipping school and smoking weed—marijuana—with my so-called friends. One day somebody I thought was my friend gave me some weed laced with cocaine—crack cocaine.”

  Sheldon was staring at her with an expressionless face. She had his undivided attention.

  “I smoked it, and I was hooked … I needed it after that. I had to have it and I did some really bad things to get it.”

  “You smoked it when you were having me?” Sheldon had clearly been standing by the stairs for a long time.

  Jada was stuck. She had indeed gotten high while she was pregnant with Sheldon. She had felt him moving around in her womb, kicking, and still she had smoked crack. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant with Jamari’s baby anymore, and so she had gotten high, hoping to miscarry. But the result had been that Sheldon was born prematurely, weighing a mere five pounds. He had stopped breathing four times and was hospitalized for months. He slept for only ten minutes at a time in the first few months of his life, and threw up like a faucet when he was fed. Sheldon had suffered through seizures, and had to sleep attached to a monitor. And it was all Jada’s fault.

  Born watched Sheldon closely. He knew exactly how the kid felt. Born, too, was the child of a crackhead. He knew the shame Sheldon was feeling now, the disappointment. But he also knew that, unlike Born’s father, Jada had kicked her habit.

  “It’s like a disease, Sheldon,” Born explained. “When people use drugs the drug takes over and makes them do some really messed-up things.”

  Jada nodded. “I was very sick when I was pregnant with you and when you were born…” The tears threatened to plunge forth again and she valiantly fought them. “I took one look at you and I knew that I never wanted to get high again. I was in jail when I had you.”

  She wiped her eyes and her nose, shrugged her shoulders. Fuck it, she thought, might as well tell the whole truth since she was already coming clean.

  “I was in jail because your father…” The enormity of the story was too much for Jada to put in terms that her eleven-year-old son could understand, and she realized the magnitude of what she survived.

  “My father made you go to jail?” Sheldon asked.

  “No,” Jada answered, shaking her head. How could she explain that his father had sold drugs—that she had stolen his consignment and sold it dirt cheap in Arlington, gone on a crack binge and gotten arrested trying to buy more crack in Brooklyn?

  “Where is my father now?” Sheldon had been told that he was dead, but he asked the question anyway, hoping that maybe he’d been lied to. He had always longed for a father. Everyone had one except him—well, him and Mercedes. It was one of the things that bonded them so closely. Their fathers had obviously both been polarizing characters in the lives of their mothers. The difference was that Mercedes’s mother spoke of her father with love, while Jada always looked forlorn at the mere mention of Sheldon’s father.

  “He’s dead.” Jada sounded glad about it, without realizing it. “He was shot in Arlington trying to rob somebody.”

  “Who was he trying to rob?” Sheldon’s eyes were narrowed, skeptical.

  Jada looked at Born again. Jamari had been trying to rob her. Born’s eyes told her that he knew the truth, though neither of them ever spoke of it. Jamari had held a .40 caliber to her temple and demanded the thirty-five thousand dollars Miss Ingrid had held for her for two years while Jada had been incarcerated. Jamari had wound up with his brains blown out all across the parking lot of Miss Ingrid’s building.

  “That’s not important,” she said.

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth about him?” Sheldon demanded, defiantly. “Every time I ask you about him, you change the subject. Now you start telling me stuff and everything you have to say is bad. I think you just hate him and you’re trying to keep me away from him.”

  Jada was stunned. Suddenly she was beginning to understand Sheldon’s rebellion against her.

  Born watched, helplessly. Jada’s reluctance to tell Sheldon the whole truth about his father was understandable. Jamari had been a thorn in both Jada’s and Born’s sides for a long time before he died.

  “I knew your father,” Born said.

  Sheldon looked at him. “How you knew him?”

  “We grew up together. We were friends when we were kids. You look like him a little.” It was all true. But it wasn’t easy finding good things to say about a guy who had stolen money from Born when they were just getting their feet wet in the drug game, then years later had “stolen” his lady, resulting in Sheldon’s existence. When Born had confided in Dorian that Jamari had stolen from him, Dorian had warned him, “If you let him get away with it, he’s gonna cross you again.” Dorian’s words had proven to be prophetic. Years after he had first wronged him, Jamari did it again—causing Jada to fall victim to his fuckery.

  Sheldon’s expression seemed to lighten somewhat. “He really died trying to rob somebody?”

  Born nodded. He knew the story behind Jamari’s demise, and would never reveal the truth to anyone for as long as he lived. “Yeah. Your pops—not just your pops … me, too—we used to sell drugs a long time ago. And while I was in jail, your father—”

  “What was his name?”

  Born was stunned. “You never told him his father’s name?” He was looking at Jada in amazement.

  Jada was staring at Sheldon and twisting her hands guiltily. “Jamari,” she said, through clenched teeth. “His name was Jamari Jones.” As she said his name she could picture his face so clearly, hear his voice urging her to take the crack he offered her.

  “Go ahead and take it. I’m not gon
na judge you. All of us have our bad habits. I got mine and Born got his, but he judges you. I don’t. Go ahead and take it. I got you.”

  “Your father was not a good person.” Jada said it without thinking and regretted it immediately.

  “A crackhead is not a good person.” Sheldon looked his mother square in the eyes as he said it. “Did my father smoke crack?”

  Born wanted to slap the shit out of Sheldon for taking that tone with his mother, but to his surprise, Jada didn’t flinch.

  “No. But he gave it to me to smoke. He encouraged me to smoke it and when I realized that he was controlling me, I ran away from him. But by then I was pregnant with you and … like I told you, I went to jail and then to rehab and I got clean.” She looked at Sheldon, knowing that he was hurting by all she had revealed to him today. “I love you, Sheldon. I have loved you from the second I laid eyes on you.”

  It was true. When he was born and she’d looked at him, she saw Sheldon instantly as her child, not Jamari’s.

  Yet here he was now, staring at her with clear contempt as, to him, his father sounded like the lesser of two evils. He shrugged his shoulders as was his custom, not knowing what to say as he processed all that was revealed to him today. Without another word he got up, went upstairs to his room and locked the door. He needed some time alone.

  Jada and Born looked at each other speechlessly, both of them aware that it was too late to run away now.

  10

  UNGRATEFUL

  Sunny was up at five in the morning, but she had no turkeys to baste, no collard greens to clean. She was splitting Thanksgiving between her mother’s and Jada’s homes and had no domestic duties on this day. She hadn’t just awakened. Instead, she had been up all night.

  Sunny had been back from L.A. for two days. It had seemed far longer than that. After the charity ball, Sunny and Malcolm had made love until they ran out of energy, and in the morning they ordered breakfast to their room. They lay together all morning until Malcolm peeled himself away and went to spend the day with his daughter.