Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  There were lots of things Coco didn’t dare ask Cesar in her letters, but she wondered. How could he get in a fight if he was on lockdown? Was it really an accident that Tito had shot his wife? Why didn’t Cesar rub his wrists after the guard removed the handcuffs? Didn’t handcuffs hurt? With Cesar, though, she shared only the happier parts of her colliding thoughts: fantasies of the trailers; the sex she missed; Mercedes’s latest escapades and accomplishments.

  Coco didn’t explain that she avoided visits when she didn’t have enough money to buy him food from the vending machine, and that when she did visit, she felt too self-conscious to eat in front of him. She did not admit how hard it was for her to genuinely love Justine, the daughter he’d had with Roxanne. Justine was an innocent baby, but Coco felt jealous when he bragged about Justine’s chubby arms. This failing shamed her. It also bothered her that Cesar’s desire for a son seemed stronger than his love for his already born daughters. She wanted to be the one to give that to him, yet she also worried about losing a son, if she was lucky enough to have one. Coco already had concerns about the ways in which Mercedes acted like Cesar—and Mercedes was a girl. “That boy is gonna wanna be so much like his father, and I’m scared, God forbid, he end up just like him, behind bars, and I’m gonna have to go through what Lourdes’s going through.”

  It was hard enough to be the girlfriend of a locked-up boy. Cesar’s self-absorption was exhausting; he rarely asked questions of her: “‘Howse you, Mercedes, and our unborn child? Have the baby yet?’ Thass it.” He tracked her visits as though he were a boss with a time card. He wanted sheets to match his towels, sweat suits coordinated with sneakers, nothing in black, gray, orange, or blue. If she came alone, he wanted the girls. If she brought the girls, they had to be dressed—stylishly. He constantly told her not to pay any mind to what other people said, but he also demanded that she look good for his friends. She could never be the perfect girl he wanted. And instead of assuring her that she was pretty, he shamed her for worrying. “Every letter you write to me now you’re always saying, I got small breasts, and a medium ass, so what? If I ain’t complaining, why should you?” He hated it when she broke down publicly. “I guess it’s just that he don’t want people to think that he made me cry,” she said.

  So she cried at home, in bed. “Nobody gonna see cuz it’s in the night,” she said. But her daughters did.

  “Mommy, why you always crying?” Nikki would ask in her hoarse voice. Mercedes became angry with worry. She demanded that Coco stop, and her tough love sometimes helped.

  Coco downplayed the hardship of raising her girls alone. She had whole conversations with Cesar’s letters for days after they arrived. So he was sick of his girls having different mothers? “That’s your business,” she exclaimed to her bureau. What was she going to do about Nikki’s father, who was about to get out of prison? “What I’m going to do? Put him in my pocket?” Coco asked the pay phone. Her Thorpe neighbors heard responses that never reached Cesar’s ears: “He thinks I got nothing to do out here. He don’t understand. I go to welfare. I take care of the girls. I got a life, too,” she said, although she was not always certain she did. At the same time, Cesar’s criticisms narrowed the impossible expectations of the larger world down to failures against which she could defend herself—what Cesar didn’t understand, didn’t say, couldn’t see.

  Before Cesar got shipped back to Coxsackie, Mercedes met her grandfather. Coco had taken her to Rikers with Lourdes, and had called down Cesar’s father for a visit. Mercedes sat on his lap. Jessica heard about the visit and wrote Coco, chastising her for putting Mercedes at risk. Jessica revealed that Cesar’s father had been the man who had abused her, and said that she didn’t want her own daughters near him, “neither do I want my nieces sitting on his lap, because that is how it started with me. . . . I wouldn’t want any of you to go through what I went through and is still going through.” Coco sympathized with Jessica’s feelings, but no man was going to do anything to a little girl with her mother sitting beside him. “I’m tired of my daughters having all these fake grandfathers!” Coco said in her own defense, albeit privately.

  Coco soon told Cesar about Jessica’s revelation. Fortunately, Cesar and his father were no longer incarcerated in the same prison by the time the dangerous news reached Cesar’s ears.

  Finally, toward the end of October, Coco’s sister announced, “Coco’s ready to push.” Iris didn’t meet Coco at the hospital, though; she’d already shown up for two false alarms. Neither did Coco’s Thorpe House friend Jezel. Nikki’s father had been released from prison, and she was staying with him and his wife in Baltimore. But Mercedes accompanied Coco to the hospital and waited in the hallway of the maternity ward while Coco was put in a delivery room.

  The double doors at the end of the hallway banged open. Foxy bustled in wearing overalls and carrying apple Danish and hot chocolate, with Hernan in tow. She held up the bag of food like a torch. “He takes care of me,” she said, plunking the bag on a chair. “Where’s Coco?” Then she disappeared behind a door. Mercedes threw her arms around Hernan. Mercedes snubbed Hernan in Coco’s presence, but that night Mercedes nuzzled him.

  “Hello, Mercedes, how you doin’?” he asked deferentially.

  “The cops took Mommy away,” she said soberly. Hospital orderlies had escorted Coco to delivery from the emergency room. “We running from the cops. The cops took Mommy. We running from them to get her back.”

  Mercedes dragged herself up and down a hallway rail. She and Hernan wrestled. Mercedes asked Hernan for money, and he forfeited all his loose change. Coco peeked out into the hall and Mercedes approached her warily. She kissed her mother’s belly, then her hand, like a troubadour. Coco gasped, then inched her way back into her room, and Mercedes returned to Hernan and said, with deep sadness, “I wanna lay down.” He assembled a bed of chairs and lined it with their coats. She crawled on it and stared at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Restless, she clambered down. Then she dictated an imaginary letter to Cesar, updating him on the baby and the predicament of Jezel’s son, whom Jezel had grounded at Thorpe. Mercedes held forth from the floor, where she lay on her side, making lazy arcs with her arm:

  Dear Daddy,

  Mommy’s having the baby now. ESJKLMNOP 1–2–3 My mother’s having the baby and I can’t go over there because my mother said no. . . . He’s in trouble cuz his mother no want him to go outside, that’s why he’s inside. . . . He’s gonna stay inside for a week, then he’s gonna come out for a second week. His mother hit him. She put him inside and her kick her butt.

  Goodbye Daddy

  I love him and he loves Mercedes. He hit me once for picking my face.

  Intermittently, Foxy ducked into the bathroom and smoked cigarettes. She fondly recalled Coco’s birth, and her heavenly time in the psychiatric ward. “I wish I could go back to the hospital. I feel like it is the only time I can really get a rest,” she said. Coco again stumbled out from her room and clutched the rail, groaning, “Mommy! Mommy! Mom-meeee!”

  Foxy rushed to support her, and together they hobbled down the corridor. Mercedes joined them as they paused beside a poster about dilation, as if they were on a museum tour. Foxy pointed out the four-centimeter drawing—this was where Coco was right now.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Coco wheezed happily. Foxy assisted Coco back into her room. Mercedes looked lost.

  “Childbirth, there’s nothing like it,” Hernan said nonchalantly, swinging his car radio between his knees.

  Mercedes’s brand-new sister, Nautica Cynthia Santos, had puffy eyelids and a red nose. A pink-and-white cotton cap topped her head. Mercedes had a different baby in mind—a boy—and she glanced over Nautica and eagerly searched the room. She landed her indictment on the midwife. “I thought it was supposed to be a brother,” she said accusingly.

  “You thought it was a boy, but look, it’s a girl,” the midwife said, invitingly. Mercedes stared at her baby sister. “Girl,” she said, considering. S
he smiled shyly. She patted Nautica’s head perfunctorily. “Where you get the baby, Mom?”

  “Look what your mommy did,” the midwife said.

  “Your father did this,” Foxy said slyly.

  Nautica’s tiny hands clenched in little fists. Coco beheld her new girl drowsily, murmuring, “She have her father’s bubble lips.”

  Newborns—while they were new—had a way of mobilizing people. The following day, Hernan drove Foxy and Milagros to the hospital and collected Coco and Nautica and chauffeured them all back to Thorpe. He bought a big pizza and soda and juice and they celebrated in Coco’s apartment. Foxy stayed the whole time, without coming up with an excuse to leave so she could go and get high. The next day, Foxy and Hernan delivered a crib. It had belonged to Iris’s daughter, but Foxy had bought a new mattress. Iris promised to buy the baby a stroller, if a payment from her lawsuit came through; she’d had a miscarriage several years earlier, and Foxy had, without Iris’s knowledge, filed a lawsuit under her name. The suit claimed that Iris’s miscarriage had been caused by a tumble down defective stairs at Foxy’s; Iris had reluctantly warmed to the idea. Relief sprouted from misfortune, but sometimes, as Foxy knew, you had to usher it along.

  Thorpe House’s management was built on clear expectations and consequences. Coco’s pregnancy had granted her special status and a little slack; now she was just another mother again. But, to Sister Christine’s dismay, Nautica’s birth made Coco more restless. She became sassier—almost rowdy—as though Nautica’s arrival had given Coco clearance to act street. She dyed her hair blond and blew it dry and straight, “dead like Jessica’s.” She got her nose pierced. She planned to go dancing. She dressed to go outdoors even when she was stuck inside. She bought three-inch fake-gold door-knocker earrings with the word LOVE suspended in the middle. She made announcements such as “I’m not going to go down just because I got three children,” emphasizing her point with a shoulder roll. She rediscovered the fun of scrutinizing boys: “Now that I had the baby out, I’m ready to look!” Even her comments about Cesar were cheeky. “I don’t have to listen to him, I ain’t pregnant no more,” she declared.

  Mercedes didn’t like this attitude in her mother, at least not when Coco directed it toward her father. “I love my daddy,” Mercedes would say defensively. One afternoon, Mercedes pointed to a tire-repair shack on the way to Foxy’s house. “What’s that?” Mercedes asked.

  Coco quipped, “Your father’s house!” Mercedes usually laughed whenever Coco did, but she hesitated when Coco’s comments about her father were sarcastic. Other times, mother and daughter bonded over their shared longing for the man they both adored. They belted out the song that reminded Coco of Cesar (“I Will Always Love You,” by Whitney Houston). If Coco was lonely, Mercedes would somberly say, “I miss Daddy.” If Coco mentioned her own curiosity about seeing the daughter Cesar had with Roxanne, Mercedes would suddenly claim to miss her sister.

  If Coco’s new attitude was hard on her daughter, it also robbed Coco of whatever pleasure she’d previously taken in her Thorpe House accomplishments. Before, other begrudging residents had clucked at Coco’s enthusiasm, but now she put herself down. She dodged Sister Christine; she tore down the awards and certificates she had displayed and replaced them with photographs of Cesar. On the bottom of one diploma, her favorite staffer had written, “Wish you were here more.” Coco barked, “I’m getting sick of these people, I don’t need they stupid awards, what kind of award is that? Wish-you-were-here-more award?” She continued to travel—to Milagros’s, to Lourdes’s, to her mother’s block—frequently missing curfew as a result. Coco also missed several house meetings and Mercedes missed preschool. During apartment check, Coco had a point deducted for meat juice in the freezer, and two for a bathtub ring. She acted as though it didn’t bother her, but it did. Taken alone, these violations weren’t substantial, but the Thorpe House nuns knew that the viability of Coco and her family depended on her ability to maintain consistency in the little things.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Coco’s birthday, which fell on Thanksgiving that year, did not start out well. Her old neighborhood friends had promised to take her dancing. During the weeks before, whenever she ran into her girlfriends by her mother’s, or at the clinic, or waiting for the bus, or in front of the pay phone by the store, they talked about the event. Coco had her outfit ironed and waiting three days before—a green-and-white hooded sweatshirt and a pair of baggy beige pants she’d borrowed from Hector. But that cold November night, her Thorpe friends went to Brooklyn and everyone else was broke. She briefly considered inviting out her brothers’ girlfriends, but Manuel would never allow Yasmin to go, and Hector followed Manuel. Manuel expected Yasmin to stay stuck in Foxy’s apartment even when he went to work.

  But Coco stayed hopeful. Fortune could change suddenly. Nikki had returned from visiting her father, and Foxy had already agreed to baby-sit all three girls. No matter what, Coco had to go out. She borrowed her mother’s coat and canvassed the neighborhood. She walked down the block to Milagros’s, but Milagros had Thanksgiving dinner guests. Drunken couples slow-danced in the dim living room, beside a table piled with empty plates and crumbs. Coco felt uncomfortable and peeked into the girls’ room, where a pile of children slept on the beds in the blue light of a TV screen. Serena, wide awake in the tangle, sat with her back pressed against the wall. Coco stood for a moment, and before leaving, gave Serena’s worried face a kiss. Then she walked back down toward her mother’s and visited her friend Angie. Angie had a black eye from a strict boyfriend. Angie’s baby son squatted dully in a crib; his soiled mattress had no sheet. There was nothing else in the living room, other than a Mother’s Day card that lay splayed on the floor.

  Next, Coco went to see her friend Vanessa. Perhaps Vanessa could go out. Coco waded through the knee-high trash at Vanessa’s mother’s to get to the orderly oasis of Vanessa’s room. It was crowded with girls, putting on makeup and talking about Vanessa’s dilemma: she no longer wanted to be a virgin, but she was still in school. Her friends, most of whom had already dropped out, encouraged her to wait. Virginity and school were discussed as though they were inextricably linked; the loss of one seemed to guarantee the abandonment of the other. While Coco waited for Vanessa to figure out that she couldn’t come dancing, she let Vanessa’s niece play with her keys. Then Coco heard that her friend Terry had $9, and therefore might be willing to go out. Coco found Terry in the cavernous lobby of Angie’s building, standing in a fog of somnolent girls, sipping beer from a Dixie cup. Coco’s excitement almost felt like an intrusion. The girls silently shared one cigarette.

  “Give me twenty minutes, Coco, so I can drink this and go upstairs and do what I gotta do,” Terry said. What she had to do involved drugs. Coco didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. She had tried alcohol and weed when she was younger, but didn’t like how either made her feel.

  “I’ll be back after I go visit my mother-in-law,” Coco said. Lourdes would fuss over Coco—even on regular, boring days, when Coco visited, Lourdes made a scene.

  In Lourdes’s building on Mount Hope, someone had finally had it with the rickety elevator. Even when it worked, the buttons required slamming and improvisational rewiring. Now the button panel dangled. Coco pushed what remained of the fourth-floor button and the elevator jerked her up to the fifth. She hurried down to Lourdes’s door. A cap covered the peephole—the top from one of Lourdes’s favorite juice drinks, Sunny Delight.

  Her new apartment was a tiny studio next to the building where she’d last lived. The super snuck the dark space in between the known apartments and didn’t give the landlord the rent. The airless room was crammed to the ceiling with objects that suggested former or future promise: speakers, stereos, toolboxes, car radios, an exercise bicycle, TVs, VCRs. A Honda bumper nosed out of the wall; cameras hung, awaiting precious moments; even a Nikon was resting below the feet of Lourdes’s statue of Saint Lazarus. The bed was center stage. The apartment door had to
be closed to get into the refrigerator; a pair of handcuffs hooked the handle. There was a sink and a hot plate, no stove. Lourdes mourned the lack of a functioning kitchen. She couldn’t even cook.

  But the evening of Coco’s birthday, the room had a festive air. The electricity, illegally wired through a neighbor’s, had been cut off, and there were candles everywhere. Lourdes, holding forth from the bed, explained the predicament to Coco. The neighbor was a gay man with a crush on Domingo; a single visit to the gay man by her handsome husband would restore their light. But Domingo, she said mockingly, was frightened. When he left their apartment, he ducked beneath the peephole of the gay neighbor’s door. “He’s scared of a faggot!” she hacked.

  Tucked into a space beside the refrigerator, an older man sipped from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag. Beside him, Domingo leaned against the refrigerator, pretending to ignore Lourdes’s taunts, which she hurled in English so that he couldn’t understand. Domingo worked full-time at Hunts Point unloading vegetables from trailer trucks; he moonlighted dealing drugs. A recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic, he saw Mount Hope as a pit stop, and, it seemed, Lourdes as a lover-mother, who was becoming more burdensome than useful. But he didn’t have any better place to go, nor did he want to lose the extra income from the dealing (Domingo later said Lourdes threatened to keep the business if he dared leave). His dream was to learn English and get his trucking license. Lourdes boasted that Domingo wanted her to give him his first child. She’d claim she was pregnant, then mourn the miscarriages that inevitably followed. When Jessica spoke to Elaine, she would say, “Howse Mommy? Pregnant again?”