Allegedly

by Tiffany D. Jackson

  “Do you love your moms?” he asks.

  He is going in a direction I need him to come back from. He is going down back roads filled with thorny bushes and poisonous fruit. I touch his temple with my index finger.

  “What you got cooking up in there?”

  He smiles and holds my hand. Even with a busted lip and bruises all over his face, he’s still beautiful.

  “Nothing, just thinking.”

  “About your mom?”

  He nods.

  Ted’s mom lives in the Linden Houses, over in East New York, not too far from his group home. But he hasn’t seen her in years. She’s never visited him in juvie. Not even on holidays or his birthday. I don’t know what’s worse. My momma visiting to make herself feel better or his mom not visiting at all.

  “Do you love your moms?” he asks again.

  I don’t know the answer to that.

  “Do you?” I ask.

  He sits up, playing with the tight curls in my ponytail.

  “I guess. Ain’t I supposed to? Moms bring you into this world with one job, to love them, right?”

  I shrug. “I guess.”

  He rubs my shoulder, grazing his thumb against the scar on the back of my neck.

  “You never told me what happened here.”

  Momma happened. She hit me with the wrong end of her belt. The buckle cut out a chunk of skin like an ice cream scooper. I should’ve got stitches, but that would’ve meant hospitals, questions; Momma in trouble and me left alone with Ray. So I wrapped it up in toilet paper and baby Band-Aids instead. It healed all wrong. Now it looks like the inside of a belly button. I brush his hand away.

  “Nothing happened.”

  Ted looks at me, but doesn’t ask anymore. He knows all about scars. He has mini moons up and down his body where his dad used to put out cigarettes. But Momma’s not a monster like that. She just doesn’t know what she’s doing sometimes.

  At least that’s what I’d like to believe.

  “What does it mean when you love and hate someone at the same time?” I ask.

  He laughs. “It means they family.”

  From the Deposition of Ms. Rachel Edwards—

  Third-Grade School Counselor

  Ms. Cooper-Addison came to my office at the beginning of the school year to talk about Mary. She said during the summer she had some issues with her hitting and biting people. I recommended she see child psychologist Dr. Reuben Jacobs. Two weeks later, Dr. Jacobs called to tell me about the visit. He was concerned. Said that Mary was silent the entire time, never said a word or colored a picture. About five minutes before the session was about to end, he asked Ms. Cooper to join them. She asked Mary, “Why aren’t you saying anything?” Mary turned to her and said, “You told me not to talk about Ray.” Ms. Cooper was apparently very angry and quickly left with Mary. Dr. Jacobs called and tried to convince her to come back for another session, but Ms. Cooper became irate, accusing him of trying to steal her money. I tried to schedule a meeting with Ms. Cooper but she kept dodging me so I called social services. They went by the house and said everything was normal, which was bull. I don’t even think they talked to Mary. After that, Mary was out of school a few days, then I got wrapped up in some other cases, weeks went by and then . . . it happened. I should have followed up or something, but I was new. And I never would have thought . . . she was just such a good kid.

  The basement erupts with applause. Kisha, standing in the middle of our circle, closes her feelings book and takes a bow while the girls cheer. Ms. Veronica wipes a tear out her eye.

  “That was a beautiful poem, Kisha. Nice work!”

  “Yo, Kish, that was dope,” China says. “You should put that in a book or something!”

  Kisha nods, pretending to be modest in a room full of starstruck fans.

  “Hey, psycho,” Marisol says to me, her long black hair curly today, clothes so tight she might turn blue. “Why you no clap for her, aye? You think you better than everybody? Estúpido!”

  I’m the only one not clapping.

  They can’t be serious? They really don’t know?

  Kisha sits and stares at me. I stare back. She shifts her eyes away, smile quickly fading because she knows. She knows I know.

  “Whatever, she stupid anyways,” she says, cutting her eyes at me.

  She knows I know the poem. I know it because it was in the book Alyssa’s mother gave to Momma that she never read. The Complete Works of Maya Angelou.

  “That’s why she ain’t gonna go nowhere! Trying to get into college and shit. She don’t even talk none,” Kisha snaps, her voice growing louder.

  “Nah, I hear her talk with her momma,” Joi says. “She sounds mad white! That’s why she thinks she’s better than everybody. Mulatto bitch!”

  The girls cackle. Ms. Veronica claps her hands.

  “Girls! Cut it out!”

  They high-five each other, bonding over their mutual hatred for me.

  “Now, today, I want to focus on some of the positive moments from our past. It could be anything. Let’s start with something, like, what’s your favorite childhood memory?”

  This is the brilliant question Ms. Veronica asks a bunch of social outcasts; a group of convicts and products of broken homes. She wants us to relive our terrible childhoods and give her the one point in our life that didn’t suck. Now I’m sure they found her off a street corner.

  “Oh, come on! Someone has to have one,” she urges.

  Tara raises her fat hand.

  “Okay! So I got, like, four brothers on my mom’s side and two on my dad’s. So one day, my brother Ty Ty came home with a busted lip, ’cause he got in a fight with this kid at his school. So my brother Kells, he just got out from doing a bid, calls up my other brothers and all seven of us went to pay this boy a visit. Yo, he was mad shook when he saw us walking down the street, in line, like an army, coming for his ass. We beat the shit out of that nigga. After that, we went to IHOP and got a stupid amount of food, then skipped out on the bill. I think that was the only time all of us ever got together. Best day ever!”

  Ms. Veronica nods, struggling to smile. That wasn’t the kind of story she was hoping for.

  “O . . . k! Good story! Ummmm . . . everyone, how about you write your stories in your feelings book. Okay?”

  I open my book and write one word: IHOP.

  When I was little, Momma and I used to go everywhere together, but the place we went the most was church. Sunday school, Sunday service, Saturday service, Wednesday Bible study, Fish Fry Fridays, and every single gospel concert, we were there, dressed alike. They would call us the “Addison Twins.” Sometimes after Saturday service, we’d stop at IHOP for breakfast. She would let me get extra whipped cream on my strawberry pancakes; that was my special treat. Then, we would take the bus home, playing “I spy with my little eye,” just the two of us. I thought I made her happy. But I guess children don’t really fill the loneliness in your heart. At night, I could hear her crying through the wall.

  That was even when she wasn’t having “a day.”

  Then, one day, she put on her red heels, did her hair all fancy, made up her face, and sat me in front of the TV.

  “I’ll be right back, baby,” she’d said and left. Four hours later, she’d come back with Ray and he never left. She’d said he was the ray of sunshine she had been waiting for. We stopped going to church since Ray didn’t believe in God. Momma is a follower, not a leader, so no more trips to IHOP. No more extra whipped cream, no more “I spy,” no more being twins after she dropped my last name and started only calling herself Cooper, as if she didn’t want to be mixed up with me anymore. Plus, Ray had sucked her bone dry until we only had pennies for the collection plate, and Momma would rather die than be embarrassed in front of all those people in the house of the Lord.

  I’ll take my baby to IHOP. If they let me.

  Interview with Anonymous Inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility

  The kid’s a fucking g
enius. And that ain’t a good thing, know what I’m saying. She’s too smart. Them COs . . . Lawd, they hated that child. They never like to let her out the cage ’cause she was always getting her ass beat. Them other young girls, they picked on her bad. She was once in the nurse’s office for like a whole month with some broken ribs. So the COs just kept her in the hole. Probably stayed in there ’bout few years. But when they let her out, you can just tell she was thinking. Ever seen those people who just think too much? Yup, up to no damn good.

  Ms. Stein sent me to the clinic with a note. I’m pretty sure she is supposed to come with me. Or maybe Ms. Carmen, but I don’t feel like asking. The clinic is in Bed-Stuy, off Fulton Street and Kingston Avenue. It’s where all the group home kids go, and everyone else who don’t have insurance.

  Not one seat left in the waiting room. Not even on the windowsill. So I stand by the door, against the chalky green wall, making room for the incoming and outgoing strollers and walkers. There are babies busy crying and coughing up germs into the hot air. The TV is muted on some talk show right above a fan sitting in the corner. A girl, who looks about my age, sits on the opposite side of the room with her swollen belly and tangled hair. The lady next to her looks like her older twin. I can’t tell if it’s this waiting room that makes her look so pissed, or the fact that her kid made the same mistake she did a few years earlier.

  Momma never liked taking me to the doctor’s. One time, I got real sick eating some spoiled tuna, starving because we didn’t have anything else in the house. I puked and puked and Momma still refused to take me to the hospital.

  “Bunch of crooks, them doctors. Always finding something wrong with you, so they can take hard-working people’s money.”

  But Momma had no money to give. Ray took it all. The coffee can above our stove was always empty.

  “I guess he needed it more than we do, baby girl,” she would say. My cramping stomach disagreed.

  That was all before Ray’s other girlfriends came banging on our door. Before he moved us to Ditmas Park, to the big house he sublet from a friend. Before we met Alyssa’s momma. Before Alyssa. Life would’ve been real different without Ray. But it’s a waste of time thinking about that now.

  “What the fuck is taking so damn long,” the girl’s mother groans. “I can’t believe this fucking shit. What did I tell you? Ain’t I tell you that nigga ain’t shit? And you go and fuck him . . . uggghh. Where he at, huh? He ain’t here, like I told you he wouldn’t be!”

  The girl doesn’t respond, just stares at the floor. Acid creeps up from my stomach to my throat.

  “So fucking stupid,” the mother mumbles. The girl and I share a look that makes my skin go cold. Why does it feel like we’re both getting the same talking to?

  Minutes tick by to an hour. My knees hurt, tired of supporting me. The girl’s mother is at the front desk now, taking her anger out on the nurse who doesn’t give a damn. The girl holds back tears. Don’t blame her; I wouldn’t want my momma here either. And the two of them in the same room . . .

  The door opens again and Ted walks in. I almost didn’t recognize him with his hoodie pulled up. He scans the crowd until he spots me on the wall.

  What is he doing here? He can’t be here! They’ll know!

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  I shake my head, pretending not to see him.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I ain’t letting you do this alone.”

  I catch the girl and her mother staring at us. The girl lets her tears fall and quickly looks away. The mother rolls her eyes and mumbles more curses at her daughter. Every muscle tightens around my stomach.

  That could be me. That was me.

  I glance back up at Ted, grateful, and don’t argue. I’d risk being caught just to be near him, just to breathe easier. He holds my hand, palms sweaty in the funky heat, and leans against the wall watching the waiting room like a foreign film, English barely spoken.

  “You scared?”

  I don’t want to tell him what I’m really afraid of. Ms. Stein, Winters, Ms. Carmen, all the people employed by the state to help me; the people who only want to take the one thing that actually belongs to me.

  “Do you really think we should keep it?”

  He stares, drinking me in. “Do you want to?”

  “No.”

  He is silent for a moment, then chuckles. “You a bad liar.”

  I look up and smirk. Kind of hate how he knows me yet doesn’t know me at all. Guess I love it a little bit too. Ted is so tall the top of his head almost touches the welcome sign a few inches above him. His eyes are so pretty and brown, a shade lighter than his skin, but always mellow, loving, and calm. He never looks at me the way everyone else has the last six years. He looks at me like he’s happy I’m alive. Like Alyssa used to. I could stare at him for hours if we ever had the time. He squeezes my hand and looks away.

  “You know I love you, right?” he says.

  I know this, but it makes no sense. How could anyone love me after what I’ve done?

  “You know I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says, real serious. “Or our baby. You know I got you.”

  His face darkens with resolve. He is thinking about the girls in the house. But they aren’t the ones he should be worried about. I’m the one who killed a baby.

  Allegedly.

  “Addison,” a nurse calls from the door, aggravated and annoyed.

  “I know,” I mumble and let go of his hand.

  My white smock has tiny dots on it. Blue ones; I’ve counted two hundred and twenty-three so far. Momma made me a dress just like this for Easter. During dinner, I dropped a spoonful of cranberry sauce in my lap and it seeped deep into the cotton. Momma beat me only because Ray told her to. She did everything he said.

  “Get in that corner! NOW!” she’d said.

  Sometimes, I think Momma used to forget who I was when she beat me. Or maybe she was just a whole different person altogether. Her eyes would go blank, face almost unrecognizably mashed up in rage.

  “Take off them clothes! You gonna feel every bit of this!”

  I’d strip down to my underwear and back into a corner, my whole body trembling, waiting for her to finish her belligerent rant.

  “How many times I got to TELL you. Lawd Jesus. How many! Huh? You don’t listen, you just don’t listen! Father God, why did you send me this little wretch?”

  She’d beat me with whatever was handy. Her favorite was the dirt brown extension cord she kept hanging on the refrigerator handle, a ready threat. It would crack in the air before biting my skin, leaving welts the size of fists all over my legs, arms, and ass.

  “Mami, don’t hit her face,” Ray would say with a smirk, sipping on the brown liquor he bought with Momma’s money. “You leave marks and those nosy bitches come and be all in your shit.”

  I thought maybe if I didn’t scream so much she would stop, but she never did. It’s like she wanted Ray to hear me beg for my life, to make him happy. She’d grunt and curse over me, working up a sweat, while I tried to block the blows. Then later, she’d complain about her arm hurting, blaming me for making her hurt herself. When the beatings started to get worse, when it was harder to explain the welts, cuts, and bruises, I thought about running away.

  But then who would take care of Momma?

  “Are you still taking your medication?” the doctor asks. His name doesn’t matter, since he won’t remember mine. He is another overworked government employee and has the same look of annoyance as the rest of them have when they see me. He does his exam with zero enthusiasm, touching me only slightly if he has to.

  “Are you still taking your medication?”

  Oh right. The pills.

  “No. I’m not.”

  The doctor scribbles some notes. He hasn’t looked me in the face the entire time I’ve been in front of him.

  I shouldn’t have been on those stupid pills in the first place. You would never think it would be so easy to drug
up a child. But Ray and Momma had found a way. For the fifth time, Ray had come into my room and tried to get into my bed. His musky cologne and stank underarms had woken me up before I felt his hairy hands, creeping, pulling back my Hello Kitty sheets, pushing my teddy on the floor, rubbing up my thighs. This time, instead of crying and kicking like a wild animal, I’d bitten down on his arm and drawn blood. Ray had left the house. Momma was so mad she wouldn’t speak to me for a week.

  He was back two nights later; I’d heard them talking about me in the kitchen.

  “Mami, I was just checking on her to make sure she was asleep. You know me, baby. I treat her like she’s my own. And she go ahead and bite me. I got teeth marks, baby. She loco. We got to get her help.”

  Next thing I knew, I was in a doctor’s office, a “friend” of Ray’s, who threw around big words like hyperactivity, neurobehavioral, comorbid, and oppositional defiant. Momma hadn’t known what any of those words meant. But she had heard one word that she could relate to: medication.

  “Look, baby girl, see, we both gonna be taking medicine every day now,” she’d said.

  I’d tried the pills, thinking maybe it’d make her happy. Maybe she’d even kick Ray out. But all they did was make me slow, sleepy, and achy. Almost too slow and sleepy to watch out for Ray. I’d spat them out like sunflower seeds. No amount of beatings would make me take them. Momma had just given up. Soon after that, she’d stopped taking her own pills. Things went downhill from there.

  They gave me more pills in baby jail, five in total. Those pills I didn’t fight. The numbness helped me breeze through prison life. But I stopped taking the pills the day I met Ted. He made me want to feel again.

  “Do you know who the father is? Do you know anything significant about his medical history?”

  “There is no father.”

  The doctor rolls his eyes.

  “Oh, sure there isn’t. Here.”

  He scribbles on a pad and rips off a piece of paper.

  “Walk down the hall and get an ultrasound. Go to the drugstore and pick up some prenatal vitamins. No smoking. No alcohol. Make an appointment with the women’s clinic for next month.”

  He ushers me out and I do what I’m told, like always, and walk to my ultrasound. An older nurse looks me up and down when I walk in the room, then checks her clipboard.