Lourdes habitually responded to such accusations with righteous indignation. There was the time she said she’d found Que-Que’s works inside his boot beneath the bed, within easy reach of the children—three bags of dope, a spoon, and a syringe. Serena had seen her backhand his skinny ass across the room! But Jessica knew the routine. She threatened her mother, “The friends you’re hanging out with are going to lead you to me. Believe me, there is a bunk waiting for you.”
With no one to walk her in the mornings, Serena missed more than two months of school and failed first grade. The Bureau of Child Welfare eventually paid a visit; Lourdes gave up custody. She said she was having a nervous breakdown and was afraid that she would end up hurting the girls. Jessica agreed to move Serena to Robert’s more disciplined house in Brooklyn, where he lived near the Watchtower compound run by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He and Milagros were going to trade children on alternate weekends, to give one another a break. But the twins begged off the weekends at Robert’s and Serena cried on Sundays when it was time to leave for Brooklyn. Robert later admitted that his house wasn’t the most appealing place for a child. His marriage was rocky, and he was struggling with severe depression. After work, he headed straight for bed.
Jessica was the one in jail, but her family on the outside didn’t seem to be doing much better. No one had enough money. Jessica needed commissary for snacks and stamps and hygienes. Lourdes had nothing to spare. Elaine was scraping by. Robert sent only his religious literature. Jessica called Milagros. Milagros said, “She don’t know what it’s like out here. I’m wearing clothes from two years ago. I buy things for the kids.” Jessica’s maternal grandmother sent money orders from time to time, and Coco, too, whenever she could afford $20 from her welfare check. Jessica’s alienation from her family made it tougher for her to completely separate from George. “My mother won’t send me twenty dollars, but when the electric bill wasn’t paid or when they were going to be evicted, who got the money? I got the money. George paid,” said Jessica.
George helped Jessica keep in touch with her daughters. His mother deposited money into Jessica’s account (he’d attempted to wire money from his commissary into hers, but inmate-to-inmate transfers were not allowed). The money bought stamps and phone calls. Inmate access to telephones varied by facility. At the time, $4 to $5 was deducted from Jessica’s commissary account for each call. The calls automatically disconnected after fifteen minutes. Each follow-up call required another $4 hookup fee. The only other option was to place the outgoing call collect, which was, for the impoverished families of inmates, a tremendous burden. Lourdes had lost her phone service long ago anyway. Milagros eventually placed a block against incoming collect calls; she couldn’t cover the additional bill. Elaine, who also got collect calls from Cesar, limited Jessica to one call a month.
The situation frustrated Jessica. Her girls were too young to write. “By the time I talk to one, and she telling me what she did, and you know, that she loves me and misses me, just talks to me, those fifteen minutes are up. And I gotta call back anyway to talk to the other two, cuz they feel left out. So it’s just before you know it, you have a dollar on your account.”
The calls themselves were difficult. Stephanie would pick up the phone and say to Milagros, “Mommy, Jessica’s on the phone.” Serena stretched the cord all the way around Milagros’s kitchen counter and curled into the receiver for privacy. She whispered “Yeah” and “No” to Jessica’s inquiries. Jessica wondered how she was going to help her daughter deal with what happened to her when she was a little girl while she was just beginning to deal with what had happened to herself. “And I know there is so much more that she wants to say. And that I’m the only one she can say it to,” Jessica said.
Milagros eventually retrieved Serena from Robert’s; Robert said his wife envied the attention he lavished upon his niece. In addition to Jessica’s three, Milagros still had Kevin, and baby-sat several more, including the younger of Puma and Trinket’s two boys. Trinket had been crashing at Milagros’s; she’d testified against the drug dealers who’d killed Puma, and threats had been made against her life. Serena shared a room with her sisters. She taped her photographs of Jessica above her bed. In one, perfect Shirley Temple curls spilled down her mother’s arched back as she squinted in the sun. “To My Baby,” read Jessica’s curvy script. “Look at me, still trying to look pretty. Oh well so much for that! I love you, Jessica Jessica,” as though her identity needed emphasis. Next to them were a few photos Jessica had forwarded from Daddy George.
George sometimes phoned the girls and reported the conversations back to Jessica. He sent them birthday cards. He remembered Jessica on Mother’s Day. Lourdes didn’t; George’s mother did. Rita wrote, in part: “For a wonderful daughter-in-law. I bought another bird and I named it after you. . . . I am so sad about all that’s going on. . . .”
The prison doctor placed Jessica on bed rest after Mother’s Day because Serena’s card had left Jessica distraught. “My daughter put on the picture ‘I love you Jessica.’ My family could’ve said, ‘Serena, that’s your mommy, not your Jessica. . . .’ My face is so red, my eyes is all swolled up,” she said. She couldn’t hold down meals. “I think it’s the stress. Everything I eat, I throw up and the blood follows.” She eagerly anticipated George’s letters. “Nobody else loved me. Nobody else made me feel love.”
Prisons limit inmate-to-inmate letters to family members or to codefendants for legal purposes. George and Jessica were allowed to correspond because they were both defendants in the Obsession case. Because of George’s previous threats to Jessica, however, their letters were screened, but those parts most important to Jessica—his declarations of love—survived the monitoring. One letter he wrote with his blood. He further backed up his claims with hard evidence of his indifference to other girls: he forwarded photographs sent to him from Jessica’s old rivals—Miranda, the green-eyed table manager from the mill, serving ten years at FCI Alderson, kneeling in the yard; Gladys, the bank teller, looking fat in flannel baby dolls. He sent Jessica lots of pictures of himself. In one, he stood somberly against a prison-drawn mural of the Manhattan skyline glittering with lights. On the back, he wrote, “Here I stand awaiting you. I will always love you Jessica. I have made myself your father figure, I can’t turn my back on you, ever.” On another, he asked, “Jessica Rivera when are you going to be ready for me, and a marriage?”
In the meantime, Jessica reclaimed Mrs. Rivera as her title and used it in her return address. She forwarded pictures of George to Coco and reported, “Me and my husband George are doing well.” He promised to pay the girls’ way to visit her. Coco showed the pictures to Mercedes and Nikki, but she did not grant George a spot on her wall. She didn’t like George for Jessica. “He’s too strict,” Coco said.
During the second summer of Jessica’s incarceration, George told his mother to bring Jessica’s daughters to see her in Florida. Rita and George’s stepfather agreed to take Serena for a few days because she was compliant, but the twins were too much of a handful. Once at the prison, Serena quickly made her place on Jessica’s lap with her head burrowed into her mother’s neck, her legs tightly wound around her waist. She asked Jessica to play with her in the children’s room, but Jessica said, “Just a minute, sweetie, I’m going to talk to Grandma first.” She was catching up on the news about George.
“You aren’t going to spend time alone with me when you didn’t see me for two years?” Serena asked.
“She’s right,” Jessica recalled thinking. “What am I doing? Sitting here with this woman, talking about George?”
Rita was forced to cool her heels with her husband as Jessica and Serena spent most of that first day’s visit in the children’s room. Serena was thrilled: she had the full attention of Jessica, who happily played game after game of Candy Land. They bought a bagel from the vending machine and heated it in a microwave. Slowly, Serena warmed to Jessica’s questions. She told her mother that a trip to Coney Is
land had been planned for her eighth birthday, a few weeks away. Yes, she told Jessica, Títi Elaine and Títi Daisy wore her leather coats. Títi Coco’s belly was getting big. Jessica asked about Lourdes. Serena said, “Grandma’s taking the white medicine again.”
Rita was not pleased about the way she had been treated; taking the backseat to a child apparently made her irritable. On the second day of the visit, she and Jessica argued, as they often did. “Come over here, we are leaving,” Rita ordered Serena. Serena grabbed Jessica’s leg and started screaming. A guard asked Rita to give the little girl time to say good-bye. Jessica watched Rita and her husband escort Serena away. She called after Rita’s husband desperately, “Please, please take care of my baby girl. Please don’t let her do anything to Serena!”
That night, Jessica begged the officer on duty to let her call the hotel. There was no answer. The guard said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. You got as long as my shift.” Jessica finally reached them. She said Rita had decided to cut the three-day visit short by a day; she’d already changed the airline reservations, and they were packed to go. Jessica asked if she could speak to Serena to say good-bye. Serena had spent the afternoon by the hotel swimming pool, and playing in the parking lot.
“Serena, what are you doing?” Jessica asked.
“I was outside watching the boys go around on the Big Wheel.”
“Are you with anyone?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
The truth was that Serena preferred to be outside.
Milagros had stood back as each girl spoke to Daddy George when he called, and she had brushed away their disappointment after he’d failed to deliver a promised pile of Christmas gifts. She’d tolerated his mockery about her love life, and his cruel insinuations about her need for a man. But Milagros reached the end of her patience when Rita deposited Serena in the lobby of the building following the Florida trip: according to Milagros, Rita had simply rung the buzzer and left Serena there. The building was dangerous. Junkies shot up in the stairwells and crackheads smoked in the halls. Serena was a child. Rita’s behavior went beyond lack of courtesy; it threatened Serena’s safety. Jessica could call herself Mrs. Anyone, but for Milagros, the days of Daddy George had come to an end.
Serena returned to the summer camp Milagros had saved for. Police barricades barred traffic so that the children had room to play on the street. The counselors, two middle-aged women from Milagros’s building, smoked and chatted the day down on chairs near a dripping hydrant, beside a cooler full of soda that the children weren’t allowed to touch. Children crawled in and out of an abandoned car. Serena didn’t say much about her visit to Jessica, but she did tell her friends and cousins about the swimming pool and the Big Wheel and the toys in the children’s room.
Back in Florida, Jessica mulled over the visit, trying to remember every detail. At one point, Serena had whispered, “Mommy, can I axe you a question?” But then she’d retreated. Just before she’d said good-bye, Serena had tried again. “Are you okay?” she asked her mother. “Do they do bad things to you in here?”
“That’s jail on television,” Jessica assured her.
From now on, Jessica would be careful to mail Serena photographs that made prison look like a place of friends and fun. She sent one along in which she cuddled a fluffy puppy. In another, she posed by a stretch of sand out of view of the security fence. Prison looked more inviting than the street.
Jessica called Serena to wish her a happy eighth birthday. “Is that a beach where you take the pictures?” Serena asked.
“It’s a beach and it’s a pretty beach and there is a pool and I have fun here,” Jessica lied.
“If you having so much fun why don’t you come here instead?” Serena asked.
PART II
Lockdown
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back in the Bronx, in their frilly bedroom at Milagros’s, the twin girls sat on their beds excitedly. The beds were rafts. The girls’ thoughts floated, bound for Coney Island, where they were going to celebrate Serena’s birthday at the beach. It was the first year all the girls had lived together and shared a bedroom without worrying that their big sister had to stay behind, or leave. Below them, on the linoleum floor, were their purple summer clogs from Payless, capsized shoe-boats, decorated with turquoise and yellow hippie flowers.
Brittany and Stephanie were six, still twiggy, with prominent brows on moony faces that tapered upward to wispy topknots, giving their heads the shape of tulip bulbs. Milagros had given them home-style bangs that accented the mournful expression of their heavy-lidded eyes. But the twins were actually lighthearted and agile, squealing as they chased one another. Serena shared none of their breeziness. She was only slightly bigger, but her bearing seemed much heavier. The morning of her eighth birthday, she slept late; Brittany and Stephanie wished she’d wake up. They sat on the side of their bed, watching her, their four skinny legs swinging impatiently.
Serena rolled over, her legs spread across the sheet’s flat faces of Beauty and the Beast. Her long hair fell in tangles. She didn’t usually sleep well. The street noises scared her. The music, the sirens, the hollering and shooting from the after-hours club on University, sounds on top of sounds. Serena blinked, then slowly pushed herself up. She rubbed her eyes.
Serena’s half-brother Lucas, Trinket and Puma’s two-year-old, made a brief appearance in the doorway. He was the child in Puma’s arms the night he was gunned down. Serena glanced at Lucas dispassionately. Strapped to his stroller, he’d propelled himself forward by violent jerks. Milagros’s fat arm swept him away.
“Happy birthday, Serena!” Stephanie said.
“Yeah, happy birthday!” Brittany added.
Serena swatted away their attention as she yawned. She inspected a stick-on tattoo heart on her arm. Milagros boomed, “Brittany-StephanieSerena! Come eat!” Serena dropped off the bed. “Come on,” she instructed her sisters, leading them into the hall.
“You didn’t say happy birthday to Serena,” Brittany reminded Trinket, who was clicking around the apartment hurriedly in her high heels, late for work. Trinket came to a dead stop, placed her hands on Serena’s shoulders, and backed her into the bedroom. “Happy Birthday” wafted out. Serena emerged with a shy smile and, on her cheek, a lipstick kiss. Except for the beds, and a few chairs, Milagros had no furniture. The children squeezed into tiny plastic chairs at a pint-size table that they had already outgrown. Serena served her siblings the pancakes Milagros had prepared.
Elaine bustled in with her two spotless sons and recalcitrant husband, Angel, in tow. Angel had stopped using drugs, but Elaine hadn’t forgiven him. Just that morning she had been reminded of the camera that could have taken Serena’s birthday pictures if it hadn’t been hawked for dope. Once, he had sold off all her furniture; luckily, Jessica had given them a bedroom set from one of George’s apartments, following his arrest. Elaine had needed money so badly that year that she’d even milled some of George’s drugs under his guidance from the MCC.
Angel parked the cooler in Milagros’s kitchen and joined Kevin on the floor; Kevin, who was ten, was watching a bootleg video of the gang movie Blood In, Blood Out. Lourdes had promised she was coming, but only Serena actually expected her. Coco surprised everyone by arriving on time.
“Títi, look,” Serena said, leading Coco into her room. She handed her aunt a school notebook opened to a page where the words I wish were followed by a blank, in which she’d written, “I wish there were no drug in the world, that would be nice.”
“Thass good,” Coco said, but she preferred to keep the day upbeat. Birthdays should be happy; they were the biggest events of the year. “Now, why don’t ya’ll sing me a song? Mercy, show your cousins the song I taught you. I sang it when I was your age, ‘Kind Kind Mother.’ ”
The twins started, and Mercedes and Serena and Nikki joined in; Nikki’s eagerness transformed her unintelligible words into a respectable gurgling sound. Coco clapped and no
dded with each syllable of every plodding verse. It was a song that Foxy’s older sister, Aida, had learned while she was in the youth house and had sung to Foxy, which Foxy had taught her daughter, in turn:
I had a kind kind mother
She was so kind to me
And when I got in trouble
She held me on her knee
That night when I was sleeping
Upon my mother’s bed
An angel came down from heaven
And told me she was dead
That morning when I woke up
I found my dream come true
Now she’s up in heaven
That’s why the skies are blue
Now children obey they mother
Especially when they small
Cuz if you shall lose your mother
You lose the best of all!
Finally, the adults were ready. The children assembled in the hall. “Did Mommy close the window?” Serena asked Kevin, pushing the button to the elevator.
“I dunno,” he said. The elevator door clunked open. Stephanie hopped over a puddle of urine. There were puddles in the lobby, too, but these were pungent with King Pine. The super was hosing down the walls for his morning mop-up. “Hello!” he called out to the train of children.
“Hello!” each one shouted, ducking through the missing panel at the base of the security entryway.
“Dios bendiga tu barriga,” he said to Coco. God bless your belly.
“Thank you,” Coco said. She didn’t speak Spanish, but she understood common phrases. The super wiped over a tattered copy of “Respect Thy Neighbor Commandments” stuck on the wall. “Help Thy Neighbor” and “Get to Know Thy Neighbor” were the only commandments not too pen-stabbed to be illegible. Outside, the sidewalk warmed. Angel pushed the cooler, which he’d strapped to a shopping cart, as far as the subway and said good-bye to the women and children.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 18