“We don’t see her a lot, Ari, you know how she is.”
“I know. That’s why I have to ask.”
Kim clears her throat. “Last time I stopped by she wasn’t around. But the kids said they had just seen her. Within the last day or two.”
Chino rubs his hands on his jeans. “She’s working a lot but she’s still there at night. She promised me she’s sleeping there.” He glares at Kim, but she won’t look him in the eye.
My stomach tightens like I just got kicked in the gut. “I know she’s not perfect, but she signed those papers with the state. She said she would take care of them. I don’t think she’d go back on that.” My hands are suddenly cold and I try to warm them in my armpits. “I need her to be there, to take care of those kids.” And me, I’m thinking, I need her to take care of me.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s going to be fine. You need to focus on yourself.” Chino looks around the room. “Focus on getting out of here. There’s nothing you can do from in here anyway.”
I look at him. “They’re my kids, Chino. I worry about them wherever I am.”
He nods and don’t say anymore. Kim shuffles in her seat. Her leather jacket squeaks against the plastic, making half the eyes in the room look at her. She don’t seem to notice.
“I wish we could help out more. That we could take them, you know? But three kids…that’s a lot. And with Chino out of work and without any money from the state, we just can’t do it right now.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to.”
“If it was one or two, maybe we could talk about it. Just the baby or—”
“No, I don’t want them split up.” I blow on my hands to warm them. “It’s too hard.”
Chino looks at me. “On who? You or them?”
“What’s the difference?” My fingers feel stiff like a doll’s, like I’m made out of plastic. “I made that mistake once before. Never again.” Chino knows the story so he don’t make me say no more. How I left my husband in the middle of the night. How I took Luz—my baby, my little girl—and walked out holding her and the bag I had in my hand. What he don’t know is that I never said good-bye to Cristo, I just pressed a flower to his pillow so he could remember how I smelled and kissed his head in the dark.
“It wasn’t a mistake, Ari. It was the only choice you had.”
I shake my head, not looking in his eyes. “I coulda done it different.”
“It’s done now, it’s over. No use beating yourself up over something you can’t even change.” Chino picks a scab on his hand. “And you left him with his father, for God’s sake. It’s not like you left him on the street corner.”
“I still left him.”
He licks the scab as it begins to bleed. “It was only six months.”
“You say that like it’s a sneeze. Try doing that same time in here.”
Chino exhales and sits back in his seat. He tries to avoid my eyes but I stare at him. When our eyes finally meet he lifts his eyebrows, a sign that he wants to squash the conversation. All the men in our family do that, but he’s the only one who waits for an answer. I shrug, letting him know it’s okay.
“Lucho told me she finally paid the phone bill,” Chino says with a smirk. “So it should be turned back on soon. Any day now.”
“Good. They let me call out once a week. On Sundays. So tell the kids to be home.” I squint to block out the harsh fluorescent lights. “You know, if they’re not doing anything else.”
“The only place they really go is the hospital, to visit Cristo’s friend.”
“Oh right. I heard about that on the news. How’s he doing?” One of the guards gave me a newspaper article when they heard I knew the kid that got shot. I pinned it to my wall but never actually read it.
“All they’re saying is that he finally woke up. I don’t think he’s talking yet, so they don’t know how much, you know, brain damage he has or whatever. But he’s alive.”
“Good. That’s good to hear.”
Kim leans back in her chair suddenly, making a loud creak that echoes throughout the room. The guard near the window stands up while the others stare at us from the door. One of them holds up her hand, telling us we have five minutes left.
“Oh, to be that boy’s mother.” Kim shakes her head. “I can’t imagine.”
“I’d kill someone if they did that to my kid. Accident or not. Family or not.” Anger rises in my chest and makes my whole body hot. My skin feels tight and all I want to do is punch the wall or run along the beach or take the biggest hit of any drug I can find.
“He wouldn’t be walking around,” Chino says. “I can tell you that much. An eye for a fucking eye.”
“Shit. You know that’s right.”
Chino flexes his bicep, making his tattoo—a picture of the Puerto Rican flag he got on his eighteenth birthday—ripple. I reach out to touch it, but the guard gestures for me to stay put. I take my hand back after squeezing him softly.
“Hey, is that teacher still coming around?”
Chino nods. “She’s the one who takes them to the hospital. And to the movies, Cristo said, and sometimes the park.” He leans closer to me, his face softening. “It’s nice of her to take an interest in him, don’t you think? It’s good for him.”
I nod because I know I’m supposed to, but I feel like saying, “Hell no.” So what if she went to college and drives a new Jetta and speaks English without an accent—why does that mean she gets to spend time with my son? I’m his mother. I’m the one who should do those things with him. What does she know about being someone’s mother? It’s not just about the good times—it’s hard fucking work—and you can’t just replace someone because they ain’t perfect.
After they leave I make a promise to myself that when I get out I’ll take him to the park, even if it’s twenty degrees and snowing, and I’ll take him to the movies, even if we have to sneak into the theater, and I’ll be the mother I never was—the one I shoulda been—even if it damn near kills me.
I’m still pissed about the teacher when I meet with the social worker later that day. She wants to know why I got a problem with her so I tell her about the letter she sent and how she thinks she knows me. She don’t say nothing, just puts a notebook and a pencil on the desk between us. The desk is so high I can’t really see her body. She looks like a puppet, her head just floating on top of the chair.
“Write her back,” she says, pushing the notebook closer to me.
“Who?”
“Miss Valentín. Do something constructive with your anger and write her back.”
I sit back in my chair. “I don’t got nothing to say.” The plastic is so smooth I almost slip off and fall on the floor. I steady myself while she looks at me.
“That’s bullshit,” she says, her face turning red. She acts like she’s got balls but on the street she’d be scared to talk to me. I laugh at her.
“You think that’s funny?”
“I think you’re funny,” I say, still laughing.
“Why?”
There’s a picture on her desk of a family in front of a fake Christmas tree. I can’t find her face in the crowd. “All white people are funny.”
“Let’s keep this about you, Arcelia.”
“Me? Okay. I don’t write letters.”
“Why not? What are you afraid of finding out?”
I pick my fingernails, cleaning out food I don’t remember eating. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“Prove it,” she says. “Write a letter to someone. Anyone. Your children. Your family. Yourself. I don’t care. But say something.” She drinks coffee from a Boston Bruins cup. From the look on her face it’s cold. “Have the courage to come clean.”
“Shit, I been clean for almost two months.”
“Come clean about your past. About who you are and what you did to get here.” She pushes the notebook toward me again, this time knocking the pencil to the floor.
“That’s a lot to write,” I say, picking u
p the pencil.
She smiles. “You’ve got time.”
She pours her coffee into a plant on her windowsill. I was wrong—it was only water. But I was right about it being cold.
“Yep,” I say. “Nothing but time to waste.”
“It’s not a waste if it helps you. That’s what therapy is.”
I roll the notebook into a tube and tuck it under my arm. I put the pencil in my hair like a chopstick, the way I see Chinese ladies do it.
“Don’t lose that pencil,” she says as I’m walking out. “That’s worth a lot in here.”
Back in my room I unroll the notebook and hide it with the pencil in my magazine. Then I put it all under my bed and don’t think about it for the rest of the week. But on Sunday night—after I try for three hours to call my house and nobody ever picks up—I suddenly need it. While the other girls are watching a rerun of Law & Order, I go into my room and lie down on the bed and think about what got me here. I want to talk to my kids and I want to talk to Lucho, but I only got myself—then I remember the notebook.
I get it out and write “Querida Arcelia” at the top of the page, like I used to write “Querida Mami” in my journal after she died. I laugh out loud when I see my name on the page, in the middle of a page as white as snow. When I stop laughing I write “Quien eres?” Who are you?
I’m quiet for a long time, thinking about all the ways to answer that question. Finally, I start to write. At first it’s a list and then I write in sentences and next thing I know I fill up most of the sheets in that notebook. I tell myself I never have to read it again if I don’t want to, but I have to write it down—all of it—without leaving out the bad parts or the parts I don’t want to remember. I put it all down, my whole life on a notebook filled with striped paper from the ACI, and then I put it back in the magazine and hide it under my mattress.
When I close my eyes I don’t see all the flashes I usually see. The voice in my head—the one I turn off with drinking and drugs and running as fast as I can—is pretty quiet and next thing I know it’s morning and they’re calling for bed check and I’d actually stayed asleep all night. The first time I did that since I got here in May.
Snowman
Providence is a dark city. Even when the sun is out you can miss something. Even in the summer when the days are long, some things just never get lit.
I am also dark, but you wouldn’t know it to look at me. I’m like a hundred-watt light bulb; I make people squint. They tell me I have a condition called leukoderma, which means I have essentially no pigment in my skin or hair. Translation? I am completely white, except for a few patches of brown on my hands, knees, and elbows. Freaky, huh? But that’s not the only thing that makes me different. My eyes are a light blue you would find in the waters of the Caribbean, not on a black kid from South Providence. Toni Morrison was wrong—I have the bluest eyes.
Some people don’t know what to do when they see me, so they look away. Others stare at my skin like it’s parchment covered by some ancient text they’re trying to figure out. A few come right out and ask me what the hell happened to my face. Those are the ones that I talk to.
I don’t use the term albino. Don’t like it. It makes me think of a lab rat or a genetically modified pit bull some gangster would pay a lot of money to lock in a case. I’ve been called dozens of names in my life—whitey, Casper, ghost, spook, marshmallow, paper-plate, rice-man, milky, vanilla, light bulb, Charmin, Wonder bread, ice cream, tampon, new socks, Elmer’s, cotton, goose, coconut, yogurt, sheets, cocaine, sugar, and salt—but the one I like the best, the one I let people call me, is Snowman. It just fits.
When I was a kid I used to love that scene in Frosty the Snowman when he got locked in the greenhouse and melted away. Everyone else thought it was sad but I remember thinking it was cool that he could disappear anytime he wanted to, just by going into a warm room. I wanted to have a power like that. So when they started calling me Snowman I let it stick. I didn’t beat anyone up and I didn’t complain to the teacher. I started answering to it and writing it on my homework till even the principal was calling me Snowman and Dayton Lewis ceased to exist.
Truth be told, I’m an orphan. Been one a long time, way before my momma died. My parents met at a high school dance and married three months later, the day after my momma graduated at the top of her class from Hope High School. After a tour in Vietnam my daddy got a job at the post office. By then my momma was pregnant, so she quit her job at the phone company to wait for her first child to be born. They bought a small house off Elmwood Avenue and she filled the nursery with books she bought at yard sales for a nickel each. It took her the entire pregnancy to get through Moby Dick, reading every night to her doting husband and the restless baby, who, even in the womb, would not sleep.
I came early. It was a long and painful labor, one my momma thought she might not endure. When the doctor pulled me out by forceps, she was passed out from a shot of Demerol; my daddy was in the car listening to the Yankees beat the Red Sox in extra innings. I was almost an hour old before I saw either one of my parents. He was gonna name me Junior, Floyd Rutherford Lewis Junior, but when I came out white—or worse, actually, with no color—he told my momma she could call me Dayton after her favorite uncle, the first black undertaker in the state of Rhode Island. He’s the one we moved in with after my daddy left, the one who paid for ten years of Catholic school without my momma even asking. He was also the one who left me his entire estate when he died from a heart attack at sixty-five and had no heirs. Left me his house and the business and $37,000 in cash. I still own the house, but I sold the business and used the cash to buy my first rental property.
When my daddy moved out he left me something, too: the set of Lincoln Logs he got for my first birthday and didn’t stay around long enough to give me. Momma never let me play with them, but she did take them out to show me every year, cursing his weakness for leaving, and her own for staying behind. They never divorced and she never remarried, but she did have another baby, mostly to prove to herself that there wasn’t anything wrong with her, that none of it was her fault. I was twelve when Justin was born, a perfect brown-skinned boy with curly dark hair like my momma’s and almond-shaped eyes that made women in the street ask if he was part Eskimo. Momma would smile and deny it, but he could’ve been for all I knew. I never met his daddy and my momma never spoke his name. She said Justin belonged to both of us, and until the state came and took him away from me, I believed her.
When people ask me why I like to walk everywhere, I tell them I like to feel the ground. I like to step where someone else has already walked. Don’t matter what type—pavement, sidewalk, grass, cobblestone, brick, or dirt—I’ll walk on anything solid. Most of the city’s cobblestone streets got paved over by the time I was in high school, but there are still a few spots left downtown and on the east side where the rich people live. Sometimes I walk over the Point Street Bridge just to feel the stones under my feet. I imagine all the tires that have touched them, all the horse’s hooves, and it makes me feel like I’m a part of something bigger than I am.
I probably walk about five miles a day, depending on how many jobs I got. I like to work ’cause it keeps me moving. Can’t get anything done by sitting in one spot. If anybody asks, I call myself an entrepreneur. They don’t usually ask more questions after that. But really I’m just a businessman, and like any good businessman, I’ve had to diversify. Some of my ventures are legal, like renting vending machines at the high schools, and some are not so legal, like introducing people to the pharmaceuticals of their choice. Just for the record, I’m not a dealer. I’m just the middleman. I find customers for the big dogs and I take a cut. If I was dealing full-time I could bring in two or three grand a day, but I’m not a greedy man. What I am is a smart man, so every dollar I make I put right back into my business. I am also a free man, and I want to keep it that way. To do so, there are six simple rules I have to live by:
1. Don’t spend money on flashy
cars. (I walk everywhere.)
2. Never talk on a cell phone. (Don’t own one.)
3. Never let customers know where you live. (Nobody knows where I live.)
4. Never have a girlfriend. (Last one was in kindergarten.)
5. Always have a job. (Since I was sixteen.)
6. Never use what you’re selling. (Not even once.)
In the ten years I’ve been working I haven’t broken a single rule. That’s what makes me different from the average dope-slinging joker, and that’s why I still got a clean record. The cops might know who I am (I’m not stupid enough to think I blend in) but they don’t know what I do, and I plan on keeping it that way. Can’t find what you can’t see, can you?
Out of all my jobs there’s only one that feels like constant work: being a landlord. Every day I ask myself why I wanted to take care of something. I never really come up with a good answer, just keep coming back to the idea of permanence. The need to own something. To have something belong to me. I’ve got six houses now: two in Olneyville, two in Federal Hill, and two in the West End. What’s it add up to? Six headaches. I’m not sure if it’s the plight of all houses, or just these hundred-year-old Victorians we’ve got here in New England, but something’s always going wrong. Mostly it’s a problem with the house, like a busted hot water heater or a leaky roof, but sometimes it’s the tenants themselves, fighting over a parking space or somebody’s colicky kid or neglecting to pay the rent on time.
I don’t want to make it about race, but usually that’s what it comes down to. Like most things in America. My white tenants don’t bother me much. They usually keep to themselves; don’t mess with me and don’t mess with anyone else in the house. Quiet. Predictable. On time. The black folks? Late. Loud. Always complaining. The Spanish? Shit, they’re real consistent: something’s always broken; someone’s always yelling.
The folks on Sophia Street are ridiculous. Ever since the mom got locked up, the first floor’s been late with their rent every month. That’s three months and counting. Could’ve collected a lot of late fees if I was an asshole. But I’m not. I feel sorry for those kids. I know what it feels like to be left alone like that, to have to take care of your home when you don’t even know how to take care of yourself. It’s not their fault they can’t pay the rent. But of course, it’s not mine either. If I let them miss a month then all the others will think they can get away with it, too. And then it multiplies and next thing you know everyone’s living rent-free like this is the projects. Hell no. This is not some government-assisted-everybody-gets-their-own-patio-but-the-hallways-smell-like-piss-and-if-you-don’t-keep-your-kids-inside-they’ll-get-shot-on-the-front-porch program. Please don’t do me like that. This is a legitimate business operation. I rent out clean, comfortable apartments in fully inspected houses for affordable rates. I don’t care who you are and I don’t care who your momma is—if you can’t pay we don’t play. It’s nothing personal; it’s business.
This Side of Providence Page 9