“Candy candy candy,” Domingo sang, helping Mercedes into her coat. He ushered her into the hall. “Candy candy candy,” he continued, and led her into the elevator, then took her downstairs to Edward’s grocery, a store across the street, where Cesar and Rocco used to play pool.
Coco waited outside with the baby. “Three enough for you, Coco?” asked a neighbor.
“For now. Me and my husband are going to try for another when he gets out, but that’s nine years.”
Coco wished that Lourdes would not expose Mercedes to so much of the confusion of her relationships. Whereas Nikki enjoyed playing with children, Mercedes preferred the company of adults, and Lourdes had a way of telling stories so the violent details beelined to the heart, barely pausing at the ear. Mercedes was a lot like Little Star had been, and although Coco had been the same way, she wanted Mercedes to be a child while she was a child.
Edward’s Grocery had just reopened after being shut down following a drug raid. The new owner had revived it with a fresh coat of yellow paint. Mercedes and Domingo reappeared, a happy couple, Mercedes licking an icy and holding two lollipops in the hand that was free of his. Coco plucked one—the other was for Nikki—and stuck it in her ponytail.
That same winter, Coco finally received her preliminary acceptance for placement in housing. She should already have been settled in an apartment, but bureaucratic red tape and Coco’s own disorganization kept delaying her move. Sister Christine worried: she didn’t want Coco’s holding pattern to serve as an ending point. “It’s not that she was hard to reach,” Sister Christine later said. “She was hard to keep on track.”
Yet Coco was among the luckier tenants; plenty of the women had predicaments that were far worse—recent immigrants with violent husbands and no English; girls with violent tempers themselves; girls on drugs; girls with cancer and no family. Coco didn’t spend coked-up weekends in hotels with friends of her boyfriend’s, or ask someone to watch her kids so she could go to the store, then disappear for days. When the next-door neighbor covertly hosted an orgy, or the girls upstairs snuck out to smoke weed, Coco was the one who baby-sat. But these other women came and went, and Coco remained at Thorpe House, stuck between her future and her past.
Wishman’s last letter had mentioned his release date. The attempted murder charges had been dropped. He was due out soon and wanted Coco to visit him at his mother’s house. Coco no longer dressed as she had when they were in puppy love; all her money and effort went into her daughters. Yet she knew from the letters that Wishman was still attracted to her. She vowed that she wouldn’t visit Wishman alone. She knew Wishman’s sneaky ways, and she did not trust herself.
But the next thing she knew, there he was, at her Thorpe House apartment door, smiling, his blue-green eyes on her, handsome and interested, smelling of soap. She prepared a dinner. They flirted while she fed Nautica and put her to sleep. She settled Nikki and Mercedes in front of the TV in the living room. When she and Wishman stepped into the bedroom, Coco felt the heavy burdens lift.
At curfew, she escorted him outside. Coco and Miss Lucy, the security guard, watched his tight body lope down Crotona Avenue. They watched him disappear into the darkness, headed toward Tremont.
“He fine, Coco,” said Miss Lucy.
“He just got out of prison,” Coco said.
Coco felt guilty about the rendezvous with Wishman, but she also wanted to see him again. However, within three days of their meeting, he found himself another girl; Coco heard that she was a virgin. But he and Coco continued to speak occasionally on the phone. The conversations reminded her of those she’d shared with Cesar after his release from Harlem Valley—Wishman’s voice brimming with direction, using big words she didn’t know. He asked her what she planned to do.
“I’m gonna move, then the summer comes and I’ll hang out,” she said.
“What you planning for the future?” He wanted her to think ahead.
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.
“Girl, you gotta start planning now.” He’d enrolled in Bronx Community College. She mentioned her tattoo. He scoffed. At first, she thought Wishman was disappointed that she had Cesar’s name on her, but his reaction came from something more flattering than jealousy: he wanted her to better herself. Tattoos were for street girls. “You got a whole life ahead of you. You don’t got to listen to me, but remember you is young,” Wishman said. Coco wanted to keep the conversation going. She asked if he’d thought of getting a tattoo with his baby daughter’s name.
“Why? I’m supposed to join you?” he said mockingly.
The Morris Heights Health Center was a gossip zone. Coco almost always ran into people she knew there. Luckily, that spring, when she took Mercedes and Nikki in for a checkup, there was no one she recognized to overhear her whispered request for a pregnancy test. The receptionist informed her that she had to schedule an appointment of her own. Coco was unlikely to ask twice for help on such a touchy matter. To return, she would need to find someone to watch the baby again, and she worried about being spotted by someone from her mother’s block or Lourdes’s. She’d once seen Giselle at the clinic. “I don’t want to be seeing that girl around, because she’ll start talking rumors,” Coco said.
Cesar had a hunch that Coco had been intimate with Wishman. He recognized the pattern of avoidance and omission that emerged when she’d done something she felt terrible about. She had stopped sending him pictures, as though she hoped to disappear, and she wasn’t writing much. What made him more than suspicious was Coco’s behavior when she visited that spring. She and Rocco rode the Prison Gap for Cesar’s twentieth birthday.
Coco tended to be subdued around Cesar’s friends, but Rocco had relaxed her during the six-hour ride with his mugging and joking. He’d shaved his head, he said, because “there are so many problems in the world, who has time for hair?” His bottom teeth were gold. He flattered Coco about her mothering: “I don’t know how you take the three of them, I give it to you, Coco.” He and his wife had only a seven-month-old daughter and parenting still left him beat. Cesar had been feeling slighted by Rocco because he’d asked him to be Mercedes’s godfather, and Rocco hadn’t arranged the baptism. Rocco couldn’t afford it; he’d unsuccessfully tried to explain to Cesar the essence of life as a working man with a brand-new baby—being broke. Cesar blamed Rocco’s wife, Marlene.
Coco certainly understood. It may have been her empathy for Rocco that put her at ease. Whatever it was, Cesar noticed she wasn’t self-conscious when she went to get his food from the vending machine. There was something vaguely confident about her short, squarish profile—maybe the way she held her head as she waited for the microwave to heat his barbecue chicken wings. He couldn’t pin down the difference until later, in his cell. Her complexion was clearer. She seemed comfortable in her body. He became convinced she was pregnant when he received her next letter. Instead of signing “Love, your Wife Coco,” she scribbled, “Coco the bitch.”
Cesar’s suspicions turned out right. This time, however, he didn’t rage at Coco. He wrote a letter to Foxy instead:
Dear Foxy: Hello! How are you and your loved ones doing? Fine I hope and pray. As for myself, I’m fucked up right now. . . . Foxy I already know that Coco is pregnant. Don’t tell her I know. I ain’t going to write her because I don’t have anything to say . . . But I want to ask a favor of you. Please don’t let Coco have that baby.
If Coco has that baby it’s going to effect all the girls up mentally . . . I really love Coco and I wanted a family. But I guess that’s not what she wanted. I’ll live through it, though. What hurts me the most is that I gave her another chance and she did it again. At least she could’ve used protection . . . I really want a lot of pictures of Mercy and Naughty, especially now that I won’t be seeing them.
Cesar believed Coco was foolish to think Wishman cared for her. Cesar and Wishman were friends before Cesar met Coco, and Cesar had known Nikki’s father, Kodak, too. Cesar surmised that Wis
hman might have gone after Coco to get at Cesar as payback for stealing Coco from him in the first place. Wishman wanted Coco to get an abortion so his girlfriend wouldn’t discover that he’d cheated. Coco later said, “Ain’t no one going to tell me what to do with my baby.”
Coco knew that she no longer stood a chance with Cesar—the shameful pregnancy had put a stop to their exhausting back-and-forth. With Cesar gone, she could only hope that Wishman would come around. Coco had already reviewed the evidence of Wishman’s potential as a father: he liked her daughters, and babies had a way of bringing out the best in people, of softening hardness, of gluing broken things. In his letters, Wishman had criticized Nikki’s father for neglecting Nikki, and Wishman had mentioned how much he missed his other daughter, how he would have been there for that girl if the mother hadn’t run away to Philadelphia. Coco wasn’t going anywhere.
She invested a lot in small signs, such as the time he recently stepped aside to rub her stomach during a game of basketball. But she couldn’t completely avoid the negative signs, either: when she and Wishman playfought, he played a little too rough around a belly; when they made love, she sometimes felt as though he hated her. Sunny, Wishman’s mother, assured Coco, “I know when you have the baby, he’s going to be after you.” Sunny couldn’t know, of course, but she sounded willing to be a good grandmother. She told Coco, “At least this grandchild I’ll see.” Coco wished she could speak to Jessica.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As soon as it became clear to Jessica that Lourdes would never make it to Florida, she requested a transfer to a facility nearer home. In March of 1994, just as Milagros was packing her things to move upstate, the authorities shipped Jessica to a maximum-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut, an hour’s trip from the Bronx. Jessica would serve the remainder of her term there. It looked like a high school with barbed wire, atop a rolling hill. Geese contentedly waddled about the large and manicured lawn. The floors shone from inmates’ constant waxing, same as her old unit in Florida; the buildings had the same cinder-block walls—except here the paint was salmon, not beige. FCI Danbury had formerly been a male prison facility, and was still in transition. While the renovation was being completed, Jessica was temporarily assigned a cubicle in the gym. The inmate “cube” facing hers belonged to a young Brazilian woman named Player, who recalled watching Jessica unpack her property. “She was an extremely white-skinned person,” Player said. “Lots of tattoos.”
Jessica was assigned to a job at the compound’s power plant, where she trained as a lagger, learning how to wrap pipes with fiberglass. She switched to the night shift. A Dominican correctional officer named Ernesto Torres supervised her. There wasn’t much to do during the long nights in the boiler room. Torres did not believe in “bright work,” the idle assignments that made up a fair share of prison jobs—mopping floors that were already clean, polishing gleaming copper tubing with steel wool, polishing shining brass railings, painting over paint. It bothered Torres that some of his fellow officers treated the women so harshly; the male inmates, he said, would never have put up with such insults and abuse.
The inmates Torres supervised reminded him of women from his old neighborhood. Torres had been raised in a poor community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His first day on the job at Danbury, he’d run into a childhood friend—the friend was an inmate. He believed that the punishment was the prison term, and that officers should keep their opinions to themselves and do their job. So, when he could, Torres let the women be. He spent his shift in his office at the rear of the plant, and the women spent their shifts doing whatever—sitting and talking, writing letters, flirting, napping, listening to the radio. If Torres brewed fresh coffee, he shared it. He left his locker open so the women could use his cooking utensils and cassettes. To enliven the routine, he occasionally brought treasures of free-world food—Kentucky Fried Chicken, cranberry juice, doughnuts. “Mr. Doughnut” became his nickname. Every act of generosity was a violation of staff rules. Among the inmates, as in the ghetto, kindness was a risk. Even more baffling, Torres didn’t seem to want anything in return.
Torres was accustomed to flirting; it was a chronic condition of an officer’s life at a women’s prison. Both the officers and the inmates were tremendously bored; the mood was a lot like the end of a long summer of the same people on the same street. Some of his colleagues regularly brought condoms to work. Torres probably got more attention than most guards because he was emotionally in touch with the women. He was also handsome, with fine features, impossibly long eyelashes, and brown-black eyes. He was short, but compact, and in the time warp of that environment, almost hip. He wore a tiny gold hoop earring and slicked his longish hair into a neat ponytail. Minus the ponytail, he shared an uncanny resemblance to Boy George.
Jessica responded to Torres’s edgy appearance. She danced for him—in the supply room, in his office, on the catwalks around the boiler, provocatively unzipping her prison-issue coveralls. “There were other ones that did it,” Torres recalled, “but she was very good at it.” She serenaded him with ballads by Celine Dion and by Boyz II Men. He noticed her generous mouth when she laughed. She asked him for a birthday kiss, which he granted—not knowing that her birthday was still months away.
Soon, Jessica and Torres broke night talking. He told her about his two children and confided that he and his wife were having problems. Jessica told him about her daughters, especially Serena, who recently turned nine. Jessica recounted her own unhappy childhood, expressing sadness that Lourdes hadn’t paid enough attention to her. She also told him that she had been molested for years. Torres clipped a magazine article about child abuse and gave it to her. She told him about Boy George and showed him the tattoos she planned to erase with laser as soon as she got out. Torres prepared linguine with clam sauce on his hot plate and surprised her with ice cream for dessert. He let her listen to his special house tapes. And he brought her a bottle of DNA, her favorite perfume.
Family Day was a big event for the women prisoners. Of those lucky enough to have guests, the festival was often the only chance they had to see their families. Family Day resembled a company picnic: there were performances and games, hamburgers, hot dogs, and Sno-Kones for the children. Jessica had looked forward to the celebration for five months. She hadn’t seen Serena in more than a year; she hadn’t seen the twins in the three years since her arrest. “It was all she talked about for several weeks,” Torres recalled. Well beforehand, Jessica had sent Lourdes all the requisite forms and the free voucher for a bus that left directly from the Bronx. Then Family Day arrived, and no one showed.
Jessica was devastated. Back on her unit, she mouthed off to one of the officers, and he sent her into disciplinary segregation and wrote her up for insolence and disobeying an order. When she finally returned to work, Torres gave her a rose and a sympathy card. He offered to mail her daughters the gifts she’d made—another infraction of the rules for guards. He also improved on Jessica’s homemade package by adding treats from the outside world: candy, a Jurassic Park videotape for the twins, and, for Serena, a bottle of perfume.
Until then, Jessica had considered Torres mainly a challenge, and winning him over a distraction to help pass the time. But his kindness toward her daughters touched her. She appealed to Amazon, an inmate who practiced Santeria, and one night, they performed a ritual to help the romance along. Jessica brought an apple to the boiler room. There, they removed the core. Jessica then wrote Torres’s name on a piece of paper, rolled it up, and stuck it inside, like a message in original sin. Amazon topped off the apple with honey. Jessica hid it in Torres’s locker. He discovered it and tossed it away. He thought “the voodoo” was a joke. Only many months later did he become convinced that Jessica was a temptress God had sent to test him, and that his failure to resist her had placed him under the devil’s spell.
Torres told Jessica that she deserved better than to have quick sex with a married man in a locker room. He snuck in a self-help book—Mar
ianne Williamson’s Women’s Worth—and presented it to Jessica. She interpreted this as a sign that he accepted the girl she had been in the past and that he wanted to help her become the woman she could be. She underlined passages that reflected the way she felt and recited them back to him.
In the meantime, Jessica’s friend Player had developed a crush on an officer who supervised the recreation room. Eventually, Jessica and Player became roommates. Like schoolgirls, they daydreamed about their men. They hurried to the windows to glimpse them arriving for their shifts. They devised a secret code so they could discuss their would-be lovers freely—referring to the officers as inmate lovers, Jackie and Diane. Player’s infatuation sped up the sluggish time of prison, but Jessica really fell for Torres. She began to daydream about their future, once he was divorced and she was released.
Jessica always took her time getting ready for anything, but preparing for her shift at the power plant became an all-consuming ritual. She showered. She rubbed herself with lotion. She never had much money in her commissary, but she supplemented what she could with whatever she could borrow from friends. She slipped into Player’s lingerie, camouflaged by her olive green coveralls. She styled her hair and put on her makeup and dabbed perfume between her breasts. She always finished up with a beauty mark, dotted on the left side, above her lips, which made the cheap lipstick look lush when she smiled.
Jessica’s shift at the power plant became the focus of her life: between shifts, she read and reread Torres’s inspirational cards. She drove Player crazy, nagging her to read aloud Torres’s letters, like bedtime stories to a child; Jessica mouthed whole passages that she’d memorized. Player, who was serving time for embezzlement, saw a pipeline of opportunity running beneath Jessica’s starry love; she arranged for her mother to meet Torres in a nearby parking lot before his shift. Although Torres later denied it, Player claimed that her mother handed over black-market goodies—nail polish, colored contact lenses, Victoria’s Secret lingerie. Jessica never asked anything for herself.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 26