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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Love, Mercedes

  Toward the end of the week, Frankie declared that he was going camping himself. Coco was suspicious. He was uncomfortable changing clothes in unfamiliar places. She couldn’t imagine him undressing in the woods.

  Frankie lugged his boom box upstairs. He pulled dried clothes from the radiators and doorknobs. Coco tracked him through a garden of her daughters’ underwear—California Raisins, Winnie-the-Pooh, Three Little Kittens, Beauty and the Beast. On the waistband of his boxers, she’d written Coco and Frankie, a firm tug at his thickening waist.

  “And there ain’t no girls. Right,” she quipped. She followed him downstairs. He headed back up. She flung herself onto the couch and clicked to the Weather Channel. The forecaster predicted a severe thunderstorm for the afternoon.

  “You so stupid, camping, my ass, in weather like this?” Coco said. “What he need three pair of boxers for?” she asked Nautica and Pearl. “Girls!” Coco said, answering herself. Frankie ignored her on his way out and kissed the girls good-bye. The screen door slapped. A friend stepped out of the passenger seat and let Frankie in the waiting car. Coco bolted to the door. “Frankie, you—” she called out.

  “Whatever, Coco, whatever,” he said.

  “Why don’t you take the rest of your things, you fucking asshole!” she shouted.

  “Because I don’t want to,” he replied coolly, his face expressionless.

  “I hope that lightning strikes your ass!” she screamed. Her hair was still wrapped in a towel, her hairline irritated from picking. Frankie’s friend glanced at her and smirked. She slammed the door and yanked the curtain shut and slid down into the couch. She did not want Frankie’s friends to see her, but she wanted them to hear: “They going to the Bronx, I know it!” she hollered almost maniacally. “Camping my ass!” Somebody in the car turned up the volume of the music. “Why you talking like that, you yelling at my daddy. Don’t do that,” Nautica said.

  Pearl made a snorkeling sound. Coco ripped the wrapper off Pearl’s medication, dragged the machine to the socket, and jammed the prong into the plug. She lifted Pearl and roughly arranged her on her lap and gave her two treatments, back to back, to make up for the ones she’d missed. Pearl was being weaned off oxygen, but she still needed her asthma treatments. She shuddered. Coco stewed. Eventually, the two of them relaxed.

  Night fell. Pearl fidgeted. Coco couldn’t sleep. Crickets chirped. Coco spoke quietly. “If I leave Frankie, will another man want me and my girls?”

  First thing next morning, Coco called her sister, Iris. She wanted to know how Foxy had found the courage to leave their father, Manuel, who was unemployed at the time and addicted to heroin. “You remember with Mommy, how people said that Daddy died because she kicked him out?” Coco asked anxiously. Iris believed that their stepfather, Richie, had given Foxy the courage necessary for the final split. But the trouble had gone on for years beforehand, and the beatings for as long as Iris could remember—Iris still recalled the horror of the time their father tied Foxy to the bed and raped her, and how his parents, with whom they were living, pretended not to hear her mother’s desperate screams for help. Manuel’s violent outbursts terrified the entire family, but everyone attributed them to the drugs; no one knew yet that he was schizophrenic. Police came to the house so often that they would say, “Manny, come on, you know the routine.” Once, he’d even robbed the house clean, after Foxy had kicked him out. Eventually, she took him back, but he beat her again and ended up in jail.

  It was during Manny’s incarceration that Foxy met Richie at a children’s birthday party, although Richie recognized Foxy from the neighborhood. She had passed by him on her way to a cosmetology class she was taking at Wilfred Academy. Richie immediately noticed her long, blond braid; next, he noticed the black man she was walking with. “A good-looking Puerto Rican white girl going with a black guy, that makes me sick to my stomach,” Richie said. At the birthday party, Foxy assured him the black guy was just a friend.

  Foxy would invite Richie over, and he’d tell her he was broke, and she’d offer to pay the fare for the cab. His living situation at the time was precarious. “I wanted a roof over my head, she took care of me—cooked, cleaned, clothes,” Richie said. He fell in love with the children first.

  Coco drew the resemblance between Foxy’s exasperation with Richie’s heroin habit and her own nagging after Frankie. “I feel like I do so much like my mother,” Coco said. “I do what a man and a lady do. I feel we the same but for the drugs. Well, the drugs—but not as much, a little bit.” Weed was better than heroin.

  The morning of the girls’ last day of camp, Coco hopped out of bed before the alarm went off and dressed in an outfit she’d laid out the night before. Her hair was already styled. She delivered Pearl and Pearl’s machinery to Milagros’s. Coco dressed Nautica in a canary-yellow shorts set matching her own. She’d bought similar outfits for Mercedes and Nikki and had them neatly folded in a bag. She’d also packed their gold jewelry, which they hadn’t been allowed to bring.

  Bernie Kosberg, the director of Camp Ramapo, welcomed the parents in the dining hall. The city people looked meek against the blond wood and the bolts of natural light. Kosberg, a garrulous man in his fifties, wore an earring and a Hawaiian shirt. He listed skills the children had learned—how to sit down during meals, how to listen to one another, how to use utensils—and encouraged the parents to follow through. He emphasized the importance of predictability. Each night, he said, the counselors had explained to the children what the next day would bring. He warned the parents to keep an eye out for the symptoms of Lyme disease. Coco didn’t hear a thing. She desperately wanted to hug her girls. She sat through the rest of the greeting impatiently. Finally, Kosberg invited everyone to explore the grounds. The parents shuffled out, some blinking, looking somewhat lost. He encouraged the adults to let the children lead.

  Mercedes spotted her mother immediately. She ran to Coco and flung her arms around her. Coco cried. Her daughter’s fresh face was ebullient. The circles were gone from beneath her eyes. She smiled broadly. Nikki approached Coco tentatively. Sniffling, Coco hugged them both with one arm. With the other, she burrowed in her bags for their jewelry. Mercedes spoke excitedly about her new friends, but Coco was untangling earrings and necklaces and chains and slipping rings on their small fingers. She presented Mercedes with an ankle bracelet with two special charms—a horseshoe for good luck, and a pacifier. Coco pinned Nikki’s earlobes with earrings and clipped her necklace. She put her own rings on, too. “Mercedes was probably the most popular girl in the camp,” said Beth, the head counselor from Mercedes’s bunk.

  “Thank you,” Coco replied. “Who did your hair?” she whispered to Nikki.

  Nikki mumbled, “My counselor.”

  “For the camp people, it don’t look so bad,” Coco said reassuringly. Coco busied herself changing Nikki’s clothes. She lifted off Nikki’s Camp Ramapo shirt and held open new yellow shorts for her to step into. Nikki’s lack of enthusiasm for the outfit deflated Coco. Mercedes put on the clothes somberly. The sisters stared at one another in consternation. What was going on? Coco straightened Nikki’s waistband and centered her gold chain, then leaned back and appraised her re-dressed daughters. Then she seemed to sense the general shift in mood. She turned to Nikki’s counselor and said, “But she looks so pretty in jewelry.” No one had said a word.

  Mercedes led her sisters and her mother to the Learning Center, a space with high ceilings, child-sized tables, and shelves of books. Campers’ art covered the walls. Mercedes located her package—a large green garbage bag brimming with three weeks’ worth of art. She removed a spider that she’d created out of straw.

  “What’s that, Mercedes? Your father?” Coco laughed.

  “No, a spider,” Mercedes said, seeming confused.

  The Learning Center teacher introduced herself. She said, “One of Mercedes’s favorite books is Girls Can Do Anything.”

  “I wanna be a doctor!” M
ercedes announced. Coco looked surprised. A flash of worry passed over Mercedes’s open face. Coco smiled dumbly at the floor. Mercedes added, “I want to be a mom.” Coco went off in search of Nikki.

  The teacher tended another needy parent and, quietly, Mercedes gathered her things. Like a lawyer assembling her papers after another weary court battle, she organized her drawings and sketches. She folded the large envelope of artwork beneath her arms. Her mother was standing outside, squinting in the sunshine, trying not to cry. Coco said weakly, “I have a headache, I think cuz I’m smiling so much.”

  Nikki, who ordinarily relished performing, made a lackluster appearance in her bunk’s talent show. Halfway through the Fugees rendition of “Killing Me Softly,” she burst into tears and burrowed into Coco’s gut. The family proceeded to the picnic lunch. As Mercedes escorted Nautica through the buffet, she outlined Nautica’s choices and carried her paper plate. Mercedes made sure that everyone had enough of what they wanted. Only when everyone was eating comfortably did she fill her own plate. Nautica had a hearty appetite, like Mercedes. Nikki picked at her food. Nautica polished off her portion of chicken nuggets, then ate most of Nikki’s and eyed Mercedes’s. Mercedes handed them over—no whining, no fight.

  “Oh, but I’m not used to her like that. Oh, she changed so much in three weeks!” Coco said uncertainly.

  Mercedes assured her mother, whispering, “Every morning I woke up and said, ‘I wanna go home.’ ”

  “Give me a kiss,” Coco said.

  Coco’s discomfort lessened each time Mercedes returned to their shared, familiar ground. Mercedes clasped Coco’s hand and led her to a huge tree, beneath which sat a tall man in a silk shirt and dress slacks. A tiny boy sat on a chair beside him—his son. The boy’s shorts hung over his knees. Mercedes stood directly in front of him, as though he were an exhibit she had seen many times and was no longer particularly interested in.

  “Mommy, that’s him,” she said plaintively.

  “That’s who?”

  “That’s the boy. That’s the boy I have a crush on.” He shrugged and turned his chin into his shoulder. Mercedes turned to get a drink. He dropped onto the grass and padded after her. Coco and the boy’s father watched them. At the table, Mercedes filled a cup for the boy, then served herself.

  The campers and parents and counselors convened at an open-air stage for the closing ceremony, the all-camp sing-along. Mercedes and Nikki and Coco belted out the camp songs. They all held hands.

  The parting point was a chorus of lamentation. Counselors consoled the campers. Counselors consoled one another. The campers boarded the buses, bound for New York City, pressed their noses to the windows, and waved good-bye. Nikki’s counselor, Sarah, clung to Nikki and sobbed.

  “I can’t believe how attached they are to my daughters,” Coco said. Then Coco started crying. Sarah placed Nikki down and hugged Coco. Then Nikki started to cry. Nautica became alarmed and began weeping. Mercedes moved through the monsoon like a veteran relief worker. She lifted Nikki in one arm and held Nautica’s hand with the other. She waited patiently for Coco. Slowly, Coco collected the girls’ garbage bags of artwork and clothing and followed Mercedes, who led the way to the parking lot through the woods.

  On the ride home, Coco wondered aloud if Mercedes’s counselor had lied to her about Mercedes’s popularity. It was hard for Coco to imagine the Mercedes she knew as beloved among her peers. Mercedes was a problem child. A fighter. Nikki had always been the likable one.

  Mercedes’s obvious success at camp pointed to Coco’s failure to care well for Mercedes herself. Mercedes seemed to intuit this and began to revise her camp experience, proclaiming as boring activities that hours earlier she’d loved. She downplayed the importance of her new friends. She denounced her accomplishments, just as her mother had at Thorpe, when she was on the brink of striking out on her own. Mercedes swore she was never going back to the awful camp. Then, like a tittering schoolgirl, she called her counselor, Beth, with whom she’d been affectionate, “fatso” in Spanish. Coco laughed greedily. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, but she did, covering her mouth.

  Back at Corliss Park, Mercedes could see that her ordinarily tidy room had been occupied. Her teddy bear still hung from the wall, beside her Christmas stocking and the poster of Roberto Clemente Frankie had lent her, but the Pocahontas tent that Coco had bought Nikki for her birthday had collapsed, and the furniture that Cesar had made was covered with laundry. Someone had used the window’s tracking as an ashtray and left a small burn mark in the metal. A lucky money candle leaned against the rim.

  That night, Mercedes invited Nikki to join her in the revived Pocahontas tent while, downstairs, Coco chucked her daughters’ artwork in the garbage. She called it “extra mess.” She spared the letters and photographs. She stared at a prison Polaroid Cesar had mailed Mercedes. He’d been working out; his biceps bulked beneath his shirt as he crouched before a mural with his arm around Gabriel, his wife Giselle’s son. The next morning, Coco asked Mercedes, “Does it bother you that Daddy sends you pictures of that boy?”

  “No,” Mercedes said, and opened the refrigerator door. Coco watched Mercedes closely. Mercedes added, “Oh, that boy’s hand some.”

  “Check you out,” Coco said, relieved.

  After its hopeful beginning, Coco’s summer went from bad to worse. One night, after a serious fight with Frankie, Milagros and the kids came to keep Coco company. At 4 A.M., all the children asleep around them, Milagros said, “I’m just going to stay here, it’s too late.” Kevin’s long legs draped over the couch. Later, Coco said she woke to find Milagros snuggling into her. Appalled, but still pretending she was sleeping, Coco shoved her away; Milagros collected the twin boys and left. Afterward, the two women stopped watching movies together; Mercedes or Serena would deliver videotapes back and forth; they also would relay notes if Coco or Milagros needed rice or Pampers or milk. When Coco and Milagros did get together, the relationship felt strained. Coco said, “We even play spades with attitude.” Milagros laughed at Coco’s suspicions; she insisted Coco had misinterpreted her. They never spoke about the incident, but it had got Coco thinking about Milagros’s relationship with Jessica, and Coco plucked the photographs of Jessica and her prison friends off the wall.

  Back in the Bronx, Coco’s cousin Jesus had finally been released from Rikers. Foxy had taken him in because his mother, Aida, had died while he was in prison and Jesus had nowhere else to go, but her generosity had consequences that spread all the way to Troy. Jesus had a temper before he was locked up, but when he came out, it was worse. He could get scary when he drank, and he seemed determined to catch up on all the fun he’d missed. But too much fun always led to trouble, and Jesus was on parole. He participated in an armed robbery during which another boy got shot. Jesus fled. Coco’s brother, Hector, however, got the brunt of the law’s suspicion. Hector was staying indoors, trying to keep out of trouble, but it meant that he was always home when the detectives or Jesus’s parole officer came to call. Meanwhile, Jesus was moving from place to place. He crashed with Coco’s older brother, Manuel, and Yasmin, Manuel’s seventeen-year-old wife, who in addition to their young son was raising Manuel’s other two kids. Their mother was in and out of hospitals, and the aunt who usually cared for the children needed a break. Yasmin took them in to keep them away from foster care. Yasmin’s sister was also staying in the apartment with her two children, and she and Jesus hooked up. Soon both men were partying elsewhere and chasing girls, and Yasmin’s sister was pregnant with Jesus’s kid. Manuel started getting mouthy with Yasmin, and Hector started following his brother’s lead. At the end of her rope, Yasmin shipped Manuel’s older two up to Iris, but Iris quickly discovered that she couldn’t handle them and passed them along to Coco. The boy was always trying to follow Coco into the bathroom; both children had rotten teeth and cried constantly from toothaches. Coco would try to distract them with hours of kick-the-can. They played outside even in the rain; she was afrai
d she would hurt them, otherwise. Foxy soon retrieved the children and brought them back to Yasmin. Coco was relieved, but worried and full of guilt.

  At the same time, Frankie was hanging out with a white man who beat his girlfriend, and he’d started getting more belligerent with Coco. One morning, he demanded Coco make him breakfast, and the situation disintegrated into a fight loud enough to bring out the neighbors. When Coco started tossing Frankie’s clothes out the second-floor window, he shoved her. Nikki, usually unflappable, bolted outside to get Mercedes, and Mercedes came running: “Mommy, you okay?”

  “Look at what’s happening in front of my kids! My motherfuckin’ kids! They are not going to see this, you motherfucker!” Coco screamed, and told him to get out. Solemnly, Mercedes watched him pack. He gave her his Roberto Clemente poster and a watch. He told her that he never intended to hit her mother. “I was just embarrassed,” Frankie said. “I didn’t know how to handle it.”

  Soon afterward, Coco’s great-grandmother died. Coco felt badly that she didn’t have the money to travel to the Bronx. On the day of the funeral, Frankie came over for a visit and asked Coco if she wanted to get high. Coco surprised him and said yes. Coco hadn’t smoked weed since the one time she tried it when she was thirteen years old. Later, she admitted that she simply wanted to feel close to Frankie. The first time they smoked, she felt paranoid, but the second time was better. The third time, she fell asleep in the afternoon and slept through a good part of the night; Milagros took the babies, and when Coco finally woke up, the older children were still out in the street. Milagros told her that the stillness in Coco’s apartment had reminded her of the homes of girls she’d known who were hooked on drugs. Afterward, Coco could recall little of the episode other than at one point looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing her mother’s face. She swore she would never get high again.