by Unknown
Angel sits in the cold white circle of the halogen lamp, feeling abandoned, and afraid, too, of the vast dark wildness around the house. She should go to bed, but she knows that the baby will keep her awake, and if she’s lying prone and undefended, worry will descend in earnest, will grip her by the throat and drag her under.
She could take one of her grandmother’s sleeping pills or one of her dad’s Percocets. Angel wonders if the baby would drop off into a floating slumber, his lips parted, his little fists unfurling, or if the drug would only affect her, and he would continue to somersault and karate-chop her unresponsive body.
One thirty. She didn’t realize how long a night could be, how capacious and elastic.
Her father is wrong in thinking that Angel feels entitled to be here. She doesn’t feel entitled to be anywhere. What no one appreciates is that it takes courage—and considerable dramatic flair—to show up and insist you belong, to invoke genetic claims and demand food and love and housing. Angel falters, Angel worries, Angel lies awake, hating to be a burden, afraid they’ll send her away, but every morning she gets up and busies herself in the kitchen like it’s hers. She comports herself as though she isn’t some needy disgraced teenager, but a treasured, helpful daughter filling her rightful place. Fake it ’til you make it, Brianna told them.
Earlier, when her father left in his truck—stamped past them as they all stood outside shivering in the driveway—Valerie shook her cell phone and threatened to call the police, to alert them that he was on the road, “plastered out of his mind,” but Yolanda had begged her not to, saying he couldn’t afford a second DWI. Angel hadn’t even known about the first.
“So you want me out there on the road with him?” Valerie shouted, pulling her cardigan tight against the wind. “You want the girls out there? Even if you don’t care about us, how will you feel when he kills some stranger’s family?” But she lowered the phone.
Yolanda blinked helplessly before her daughter’s outrage. Angel stood with Sarah close along her thigh, stroking the little girl’s tangled hair, but Sarah brushed her hand away. “Come inside with me,” Angel said. “I’ll read you a story.”
“No,” Sarah said easily, big eyes on Valerie. Beside her, Lily also looked from her mother to her grandmother with interest, but no surprise. Clearly this fight had occurred in some form before.
Angel thinks that Valerie’s reaction was overblown. Her father didn’t seem that drunk, and kids at school drive buzzed and stoned all the time. It’s how you get between parties. Beer isn’t black tar, it isn’t meth, it isn’t even vodka. And these roads are so long and so empty. But she also feels pricked with injustice because someone should have told her about the DWI. She had a right to know.
“You can’t keep enabling him, Mother. At some point it has to stop. What does he do all day? Does he just sit around drinking all day? Do you ever ask anything of him?”
“He’s trying, hijita. He’s starting up a business fixing windshields. We’ve just been talking about it.”
“Windshields? Christ.”
Yolanda dragged her hands down her face. “Why can’t you help him instead of getting mad at him? You’re the counselor. You should help him.”
Valerie exploded with a long, garbled wail. “Help him? You think that’s what you’re doing? He’s thirty-five years old and unemployed. He still gets an allowance. That hasn’t helped him yet.”
“He’s thirty-three.”
“He should go to college,” Sarah volunteered.
“Stupid,” said Lily to her sister. “You can’t go to college when you’re thirty-three.”
“You were always so mad at Dad, but you let Amadeo and his addiction run roughshod over this family.”
“Your brother is sick, Valerie.” Yolanda’s voice is barely above a whisper.
“I know he’s sick. So was Dad, but you never had any sympathy for him. Did you ever help him?”
Angel stepped closer to her grandmother.
“I cannot believe it’s come to this. But until he gets help, or moves out, we’re not setting foot in this house. Get your things, girls, get in the car.” Sarah and Lily trotted inside. “The girls have seen enough violence, Mother; I’m not going to expose them to any more.”
Valerie was calming down now, bolstered by her plan.
“And you, Angel.” Valerie fixed an accusing expression on her. “I think you should seriously consider whether you want to bring a baby into this house.”
“Okay,” Angel said obediently, despair seeping through her like black ink. How many options does Valerie think she has?
“He’s a good boy,” Yolanda kept saying.
Somehow they’d split into teams: on one side, Valerie and her daughters, and on Team Amadeo, Angel and her grandmother. But Angel didn’t want to be on her father’s team. She was glad he was gone. She’d been scared, and even more than scared, embarrassed by his behavior. But, she supposes, the fact of her embarrassment only underscores her connection to him.
On Friday, when they’d cut him down, he’d swayed on his legs, then dropped to the dirt. “It hurts,” he kept whispering through chapped lips, looking up at her through tear-clotted lashes. “It hurts.” She’d felt the weight of his need settle across her back.
SHE MUST HAVE FALLEN asleep, right there on the living room carpet, because she wakes to a car crunching up the drive. Headlights brighten the living room window, an engine idles, a door slams, heavy, metallic. Fear grips her as the headlights swing around, grazing Angel’s body where she leans against the couch, and the rumble of the engine recedes. Her father’s steps on gravel, and then he’s inside. Behind him the screen door gives its pneumatic wheeze, then snaps shut.
He gropes the wall and then flicks on the overhead.
“You’re up,” he says, surprised, and for a moment they regard each other. “What time is it?” His face is puffy.
Angel doesn’t answer, but glances at the television’s digital display. Three thirty. The baby somersaults.
He steps closer until he stands above her. Her father’s gaze is clouded, and he lists just a bit. He toes the pile of baby clothes. “Jesus. What a load of crap.”
Angel wants to get away from him. His eyes are red-rimmed, and she’s afraid he’s going to cry. Again the thought hits her, how little she knows her father, really, how rarely she’s been alone with him, and with this thought, a taut thread of fear vibrates in her veins. She flashes on Mike, his hands around her throat, then bats that memory away. Sweat trickles down her sides.
Angel begins to gather the baby clothes into a bag. “I have to go to bed.”
Her father swoops down and Angel is briefly and irrationally afraid that he is going to claw her with the fingers that emerge from the bandage, claw his nails down her face and throat and belly, but instead he grabs the lavender pinafore and shakes it in Angel’s face. “Dresses? She thinks a boy is going to wear dresses?”
Angel snatches it from his hand, shoves it in the bag. “It was nice of her,” she mutters.
“She’s a fucking bitch.”
Suddenly Angel is so angry at him the surprise catches in her throat. She staggers to her feet. “Valerie’s right. You’re a drunk.”
“Angel,” he says, reaching for her upper arm. “Listen.”
She twists away. “Don’t touch me.” She jerks back and stumbles down the hall.
For a long time, Amadeo holds his head in his hands. He has sobered considerably, but still the room rocks and rotates into place when he opens his eyes. The living room is still scattered with the detritus of dinner. On the counter sits an untouched lemon meringue pie, the meringue collapsed and the filling shrinking from the crust.
The house is so unchanged he almost can’t believe that the last several hours happened. But they did. Just two days after enduring the nails, Amadeo has his second DWI and spent three terrible hours in jail.
Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as Christmas Eve. Then he had to spend a whole night in ja
il, because, his mother claimed, she didn’t get his voicemail message. Yolanda had been out driving, looking for him, worried, she told him later, that he’d hurt himself on the icy roads. Amadeo suspects that she left him there overnight to teach him a lesson. Why else have a fucking cell phone, if not for crises like that? He still doesn’t forgive her.
That night in jail was awful beyond words—smelly and dirty and the cops spoke to him like he was scum, and he’d had to puke in that seatless metal toilet and they wouldn’t even give him toothpaste to rinse his mouth, though one of the cops did give him a Quarter Pounder and even paid for it himself.
Tonight, when the cop asked him which number he wanted to dial, Amadeo hesitated. In the end, he called his uncle, who’d picked up on the second ring, despite the hour. He expressed neither anger nor surprise, just said, after a pause, “All right. I’m coming.”
The moment Amadeo caught sight of his uncle, he flung himself at Tíve, sobbing, clinging tighter the more Tíve tried to shake him off. “I wasn’t even that drunk.” The unsmiling lady police officer shook her head contemptuously and left them in the tiny windowless lobby, which smelled of disinfectant.
On the way home, Amadeo waited for his uncle to reprimand him. The old man squinted myopically at the dark road, driving fifteen miles under the speed limit. Amadeo’s hands lay in his lap, useless, the bandages filthy.
The silence stretched, itchy and intolerable. Finally Amadeo said, “I know what you’re thinking. I’m not like my dad. I’m not like Elwin.” The words were lumpy and malformed in his mouth.
His uncle lifted his foot from the gas and looked at him. Even in the light of the dashboard, Amadeo could see the hurt that flared across the old man’s face. “Don’t be,” Tíve said. “Your mother don’t deserve that.” He straightened, accelerated again, and was silent until they reached the house.
As Amadeo was about to open the door, his uncle said, “Tonight you make a change.” He gazed into the pool of the headlights.
Amadeo was surprised by his tears, which seemed to have sprung from some new source. “Yeah,” he said, and for a moment, the word swelled in him, a bubble of possibility, then deflated, because just a few hours ago he’d promised himself he’d be worthy of his daughter, and already he’d let her down.
From where he stands, Amadeo can see Elwin and his father on the living room wall, aged eighteen, in the only picture his mother will display of her husband. It was taken not long before Elwin died. They’re sitting close together on the steps of his uncle’s house: wide smiles, disturbing black mullets. Amadeo steps closer. His father’s face is round and dark, his hair gelled and wet-looking, curling at the nape. Amadeo used to stand before this younger iteration of his father, trying to reconcile the smiling boy with the man who scared him with his rages and his silences, and scared him more with his bouts of desperate affection. Amadeo remembers his father grabbing him and whirling him around, that terror and exhilaration.
With a cold flush, Amado is reminded that his father was thirty-three when he died, the same age that Amadeo is now.
Amadeo looks at the time above the stove. Four o’clock on a Monday morning in April. The house is silent. Outside, a coyote howls, and it sounds like a woman crying out in pain. It’s been hours since Mass concluded, since the church emptied itself into the bright day, and children and adults alike returned to their homes to glut themselves on Peeps and cheap grainy jelly beans. The austerity of Lent is past, the countless lapses and broken promises forgiven, Christ’s sacrifice forgotten.
His mother and his daughter are enclosed in their rooms at the back of the house, unreachable. Amadeo’s hands ache. He picks up the bottle of Percocet, rattles it, then, with difficulty, twists off the lid. Before he can stop himself, he pours them down the drain and switches on the garbage disposal.
Part II
ORDINARY TIME
The mission of Family Foundations is to improve outcomes for at-risk children in the greater Española Valley. Smart Starts! is the teen parenting and high school equivalency program, now in its third year, and, thanks to both a federal and a foundation grant, it is the jewel in the agency’s crown. The year-round program accommodates eight students, eligible from pregnancy through their nineteenth birthdays, with on-site child care. When BriannaGruver was interviewing for the teaching position last year, the application included a fill-in-the-blanks component.
“There are no wrong answers,” the administrator assured her, which made Brianna nervous, because in her experience “no wrong answers” really meant that the range of possible wrong answers was unimaginably broad. After all, the questions on her dating profile were also supposed to have no wrong answers, but hers couldn’t have been right because, apart from some dick pics, they have gotten her exactly nowhere.
Families should_____.
I get angry when_____.
I fear _____.
Brianna majored in biology precisely because in biology nothing is subjective. There were cell functions to memorize, complex neural pathways to map. When Brianna assisted in a lab studying chromosomal mutations in fruit flies, the procedures were clear and invariable. But these vague fill-in-the-blanks? What was she supposed to do with them? Be original? Be truthful?
There are a lot of things that make Brianna angry that she didn’t want noted in her HR file. Being talked over, being mistaken for a high school student, being subjected to couples making out in movie theaters when she’s trying to pay attention. In the end she settled on bland earnestness, which is more or less her default around people in authority. Families should focus on the needs of the children. I get angry when children are hurt. I fear not being able to make enough of a difference. So much of adult life, Brianna was discovering, was about pretending to be the person people wanted you to be.
Brianna was particularly proud of her last answer: I believe _____. I believe every young person is capable and precious and can change her life regardless of the circumstances she was born into. She’s pretty sure this answer is why she got the job. And it wasn’t just pious posturing, either. Brianna did believe this; if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been interviewing for jobs at nonprofits in Española. The whole country is suffused with hope: smiling, kind-eyed Obama is in the White House, progress unspools all around them, the bad old years of struggle and war and intolerance are, if not gone for good, at least on the wane.
Brianna is proud of her first year at Smart Starts! When she toured the classroom during her interview, the atmosphere was one of utter airless boredom. Eight teenage girls slumped at their desks, with their push-up bras and lip liner, paging hopelessly through their workbooks. She was surprised by how closely they resembled her own high school classmates, except that some had to squeeze pregnant bellies behind their desks and others had babies in the nursery down the hall. The walls were bare. Bookshelves in the back were filled with GED workbooks and nothing else, not even a dictionary. Above the whiteboard in the front was a single tiny American flag.
When Brianna got the job, she brought in art posters, books, a globe, an entire set of encyclopedias. She purchased bright rugs and a ficus plant. She sought donations from local businesses, and she spent plenty of her own money, too, including her grandparents’ birthday check. And it was worth it. The classroom is now colorful and inviting, the girls are engaged in daily journaling and simple science experiments. She even negotiated a deal with the president of the community college to allow those girls who receive their GEDs before they age out to take up to five credits’ worth of classes. Brianna has created a safe and positive learning environment.
The Smart Starts! schedule is flexible, to allow for the necessities of feeding and child care. The curriculum, derived from research-based best practices, leans heavily on self-reflection, the idea being that this particular population could use practice in stopping to reflect. In the morning, the focus is on academics and GED test prep, two pursuits that often seem in direct opposition to each other; the afternoons are
for parenting- and life-skills. It’s a student-driven curriculum, at least in name. Students give presentations on aspects of parenthood: early literacy, benefits of breast-feeding, introducing solid foods. Contraception. Today, Friday afternoon, class will end with their weekly Community Meeting.
The girls have surprised Brianna. She expected more behavioral problems, certainly problems more serious than gum-chewing and cell phone use. She expected these girls to be surly and oppositional. Española being Española, she expected heroin addicts (though many of those kids are referred to the city’s single overburdened addiction clinic). She expected, frankly, that since they were having sex so young, these girls had to be bad. But, with only a single, infuriating exception, they’re not. Brianna is amazed at how willing they are to engage in even the most inane group activities, activities that Brianna feels embarrassed even proposing, but that are part of the curriculum suggested by experts. Nutrition collages, for example: on the classroom wall are poster boards covered in examples of Always Foods and Sometimes Foods.
Their stories pain her, actually keep her up at night—the histories of abuse and family violence and addiction. Brianna doesn’t tell the girls about the studies that haunt her as she gazes over their carefully made-up faces in the classroom, showing that maternal stress can flood the bloodstream with hormones that poison the prenatal environment, making the babies over their lifetimes more prone to anxiety and depression, more likely to be born early and underweight and to die early and overweight.
So she teaches them meditation techniques. She drills them in power stances: legs planted apart, shoulders flung back, arms akimbo. She shows videos of the little monkeys desolate in their cages with their wire mothers and enjoins them to hold their babies, talk to their babies, sing to their babies, and the girls actually take her at her word. Just last week, from the bathroom stall, Brianna overheard Tabitha narrating her makeup routine to her belly.