You’re not fooling anyone.
Jenny has always looked older than me, and she’s wiser, too. She knew how to rim her lids with liner when I still used Milky Pens on my own eyes, and she was the first person to tell me what a Brazilian wax is. Most important, she’s got the nicest, roundest ass at our school. I know she won’t have any trouble convincing the men inside.
The shop is quiet when we open the doors. Two men stand behind the counter, under a wreath of mistletoe, looking at something on their computer.
We’re here for tongue rings, says Jenny. And we’ll pay cash.
Four girls stand behind us in their school uniforms, waiting.
You old enough? says the bigger man, with butter-colored sweat stains mooning under his armpits.
Yes, says Jenny.
How ’bout little China?
Yes, I say. We’ve got cash.
All right then, says the thinner man. The holes of his ears dangle like stalactites of skin. Give us five, we’ll get set up.
I need a cigarette first, I tell the men. I’m trying to sound confident, mature. So I’ll come back in five.
Jenny joins me outside. She doesn’t smoke, but she likes the smell of it.
Can you believe it? she says. That was so easy! We didn’t need to suck a dick to make that happen.
We both laugh at this. I take a long drag and try to steady my hands. I am terrified of needles. We’re quiet as we watch the cars pass over the train tracks in hard thumps. This other part of town. Garbage blowing all over—plastic bags, McDonald’s cups—the smell of seaweed. Apartments nearby that we visit for public school parties, the bad ones.
Shit, is that your mom? says Jenny.
It is. I hide the cigarette behind my skirt, instinctively, though I know she does not see me. My mother is driving Big Beau over the tracks. I watch her through the window. Sweet, pale moon-sliver of a woman, a sad face. Her black hair is cut jagged, framing her chin. My mother. From this view, she could be going to the grocery store to buy wonton wraps, going to Blockbuster to pick out just the right movie, meeting our family for dinner on the pier. But I know where she’s going in this part of town. Cousin Cindy has told me where Boca Brad lives, and I watch my mom’s car take exactly the turns I expect. Here we are on the same block, Mother, neither one of us near a movie theater, so far from where we ought to be.
Inside, I swish my mouth with so much Listerine it makes my eyes water. I lean back on the chair as the dangling-ear man adjusts his light, moving it along my whole body, taking his time. I open my mouth and the man pinches my tongue with a metal claw. Drool pools around the corners of my mouth. I look him right in the eyes as he brings a needle the size of a soda straw to the underside of my tongue, jabs it up, delivers me the sharpest pain I have ever felt and a high I’ve never matched since.
My mother is no longer fighting the sick. She’s in her Other Place again, writing in her secret language across the pages, the table. Today, she has conspiracy theories about how my father spends his time in New York. He has a secret wife up there, she says. A white woman. Tall, in a pink dress. Nothing like her.
Not true, I say. He’s working hard in the city. Probably freezing right about now.
Go to school, she says, and maybe he’ll come home when you’re out.
I don’t think so, I say, kissing her on the head. I wonder if she knows who I am. Glad you’re feeling better.
The rage—it’s never toward my mother or father. It’s their dealers: Boca Brad, Uncle Nacho, Nurse Harmony, Karate Kurt. I fantasize about slitting them with paper cuts between the webs of their fingers, their eyelids. Karate Kurt has kids push the drugs for him, kids in his karate class. He gets them hooked. In two years, he’ll wrap his lips around a handgun—later, Boca Brad will do the same—and I’ll smile both times I hear the news.
Addison picks me up and drives me to school, popping her gum and chomping on about The Senior and how I should stop putting out for free rides to the mall. You’ve got quite a name for yourself these days, she says. Kinky Chinky. Remember when you were Queera? When you only hung out with the fat girl?
You gave The Senior a hand job last week, I say.
I didn’t do it for a ride.
Fuck off, I say. I hate Addison, but we’re friends because people expect us to be.
The day goes on like any other day. I cheat on my history exam using an answer sheet rolled up under my pen cap; I get another talking to from my English professor, who says she knows I’m not an idiot but I sure act like one. “Gregor Samsa can blow me”? Really?
The Senior drives me to work after school. He reaches between my legs, but I tell him no; I’m on my period. Instead, we talk about some holiday rager coming up. You going? What’ll you wear? And, You think you’ll apply to college?
Nah, I say. I’m not smart like that.
I change out of my uniform and into my work clothes in his backseat. I spray the coconut.
My mother calls again, in the middle of my shift. She sounds worse than she did this morning. She’s crying by now—I can’t make out her words.
Chicken, is what I understand. Made chicken. Need sleep.
So go to sleep, I say. Eliza will drop me off soon.
But I don’t want Eliza to drop me off soon. I want Eliza to drive me all around town, and I tell Eliza this. I want her to buy me as many packs of cigarettes as I can afford, and a bottle of anything, and I want us to talk, the two of us, in her car, on the beach, anywhere. I want her emo music turned down low on the radio as I tell her what my life’s been like; I want to tell her about Nelle and Harley, about The Senior; I want to tell her that once, I could have been an Olympic athlete, or a jockey. Once, I even liked writing stories. I want to talk to her until my mother wakes up. I want my father. Most of all, I don’t want to go home.
Instead, we drive around until ten thirty P.M. talking about guys, before Eliza says, I do have to go home, you know. I’m tired. You good?
Sure, I say. Of course.
Tell your mom I say hi, she says. Your mom’s the bomb.
She’ll like that, I say.
I look at my house: the fountain trickling near the entrance, the ginger plants that ooze fragrant juices when you squeeze them, the royal palms, the white stones and smooth wooden fence. It looks beautiful like this, peaceful even. Like my mother brought a small piece of Hawaiʻi here with her. My home.
Inside, all the lights are off. I flip on the kitchen switch and watch cockroaches skitter across the counters, into the spaces between the crusty stove coils. Shoo shoo, I say, ignoring them, making my way to the fridge for a drink.
Usually my mother’s food combinations are contained in a bowl or a Tupperware, but this is different. There are chunks of chicken everywhere—smeared in peanut butter, most of the pieces raw. The chicken is on the shelves, in the drawers, slugging down a bottle of orange juice.
I go to my mother’s room. The lights are on, the TV blaring a special on country music. She’s lying sideways across the bed; her fingers are playing an invisible piano.
Mom? You okay?
Okay, she says. Need sleep.
You need some water?
My eyes sting. I am used to this by now, used to knowing that I will never be used to this—that this part of her will never not break me, that this may be the rest of our lives. The two of us here, in this house, waiting for my father. The chicken.
Goodnight, I say, and close the door.
I pick up my portable landline and call Beth.
What’s up? she says. It’s sure been a while. How’s that tongue ring?
Got caught, I say. But I’m sadly still alive. I am shimmying my pants off, kicking out of my heels. I count the cigarettes in my purse. I keep the pack inside a dirty sock, in case my mother ever looks. Six left. I’ve changed into pajama pants and a sweatshirt when I say, I miss you, Beth. We used to do so much stupid stuff together.
We sure did, she says.
Tell me a story, I say. Wh
at’s new with you?
Beth is telling me about her family and the Tradewinds Christmas light show, her father and his new house, a new dance move she learned from her cousin when I hear the crash. The crash sounds like wood splitting. Furniture, I think, but there is also a nauseating, thick-sounding thump. The sound feels like it takes forever. It breaks into its own syllables. By the time Beth says What the hell was that? I realize that I’m already opening my mother’s door. Next to her bed, my mother’s body is ragdoll twisted on the tile floor. The nightstand came down with her—she must have tried to hold on to it. A pool of syrupy black blood begins to inch out around her hair like a halo, until it finds thin, straight paths on the grit between the tiles. Red foam swells out from between her teeth.
I hang up the phone. I am on my knees, bending over, staring at the eggshells of her eyes, afraid to touch her. There are no pupils, no screams. Her body convulses like it’s being shocked, or like it’s the trout my mother once helped me catch when I was a child. I caught it in a pond in North Carolina with a single kernel of corn. The way it flopped in my hands as I pinched the hook from its mouth—the way I just wanted to throw it back into the water where it could breathe, survive. Please, please, Mom, make it stop shaking like this. All that hurt for a kernel of corn.
It doesn’t even feel this, my mother had said to me. Animals are resilient like that.
The paramedics will not let me ride in the back of the ambulance with my mother. You sit in front, they say. Ride shotgun like a big girl.
The way they’re treating me, like a child, is comforting. I want to stay curled up like this, in this dark seat, for the rest of my life.
So brave, the driver says. Not even crying.
Is she going to die? I ask. I don’t hear the sirens. The traffic lights whip by. Blowing the reds is not as exciting as I imagined it could be.
I don’t know, he says. I can’t tell you that.
I want to crawl into his lap. This man. I want him to take me home and feed me.
I have my own waiting room in the hospital. It’s a tiny room with a closed door, with bars of light so brilliant they ache behind my eyes.
Do you have another guardian? somebody says.
I have a grandmother, I say. My mother’s stepmom. She lives nearby. They call her.
After my grandmother arrives—She fell, grandmother. She was sleepwalking—a group of men ask to speak to me alone. My grandmother leaves the room.
Unnatural, is what I hear first. She fell unnaturally. The way she fell. Your mother. Twisted. Backward. Unnaturally, the way the nightstand was. The way her arm was. Her neck. Does your mother speak English? Your mother’s not responding. Does your mother speak Chinese? Who is your mother? Did you want to hurt your mother? Do you love your mother? Were you mad at your mother? Are you in trouble at school? Where is your father? Did you strike your mother? Your feet, they say, your feet are covered in blood. Why didn’t you call sooner? We’ll get you some shoes. How long had she been like that? Skull fracture, they say. Are you sure you love your mother? Who were you on the phone with? When did you hang up? Unnatural, they say. Is she taking anything? On any medication?
No, I say.
Are you sure? This could be life or death, sweetheart.
I imagine police tape around my house, twitching in the wind. A stranger’s gloved hands finding the bottles of pills, the potions, opening the lids, photographing my mother’s clothes. I imagine them handcuffing my mother in her hospital bed, the way she would wake up, confused, bandaged, screaming for me. I imagine them sending me to live with a family that is not my own. I have protected my parents for as long as I’ve been alive. If someone comes after them, I have teeth.
Is she going to die? I ask.
Depends.
My mother, I say. She just fell.
After my grandmother tells the doctors the truth—opiates, drug addict, overdose—words I had never before associated with my parents because none of us had ever said them aloud, because there was never a name for exactly what this was, after my family in Texas drives through the night to clean out my house, after my father arrives two days later (something I will never—even after he dies—forgive), after the doctors pump her stomach and stitch up her scalp, after intubation, my mother wakes up from an induced coma. My family lets me see her in the intensive care unit, but they ask that I do not speak to her. We need to discuss next steps first, they say.
My mother holds my hand in the hospital bed. This is not a private hospital room fragrant with roses. Rows of bodies are being resuscitated all around us—thin sheets hanging between each one. We look at each other, knowing. There is no coming back from this. This time is different.
Back home, my Auntie T offers to adopt me. She shows me a website for Wylie High, in Abilene, Texas. You’ll have me and your cousins there, she says. You’ll make friends. You just have a year and a half left of high school. Think about it, she says. We have a nice church, and great hamburgers.
I’m not leaving her, I say.
I tell my father about this offer, hoping he’ll take me to live with him in New York.
You could like Texas, he says. Jesus people can be nice. Maybe you could use some nice.
The doctors send my mother home with pamphlets for treatment centers. They all look like hospitals to me—hospitals with palm trees, and yellow doors, and smiling people on lawn chairs. Be the best that you can be! one pamphlet reads.
Back at home, my family preps me on the speech I am supposed to give. You’re the only one who can do it. They will stand behind me while I speak, they say, and I am supposed to lie. I open my mother’s door and approach the bed. The room is dark, but I still walk around The Spot, as I will call it for the next twelve years, until this house burns down.
MomMom, I say. I need to tell you something.
She nods. She doesn’t speak. She knows what’s coming—we’ve been through this before. I can barely see her in the dark like this, just the shine of her pupils. I can hear her jade ting against her Hawaiian name bracelet.
I’m moving to Texas. I’m enrolling in Wylie High. I’m going to go to church, I say.
She nods.
I need to leave you, I say. I can’t be alone anymore.
She nods. I wonder if she believes me.
It hurts, I say. I tap a finger at my heart.
I know, she nods. When you hurt I hurt.
No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.
My father and I drop her off at a treatment center later the same day. We walk through the yellow doors and say our good-byes as doctors take her vitals, ask her to open her mouth for a fat popsicle stick. This is the first time I check my mother into rehab, though it won’t be the last. The next time will be just after my father dies, and I’ll be wearing his monogramed shirt; I’ll sit in the seat he takes right now as he sandwiches my mother’s hand in both of his, saying, You’ve got this, baby.
When the doctors ask her to announce her drugs of choice, my mother lists them off, quietly. Embarrassed, I think. She rubs her arms like she’s freezing, rocking back and forth. It is a long list. I feel guilty being in this room. This part of her life is both mine and not mine.
My father doesn’t say much on the way home. I watch his steady hand on the wheel, the gold recovery bracelet he wears now—a new ruby on the triangle for each year he is clean. Three by now. I’m sorry I left you with this, he says. I didn’t know what to do.
It’s okay, I say.
I’m not solid yet, he says. Not well enough to see it. To be around it. He begins to cry, and shakes his head in a quick thrust, like a horse shooing off a fly. I can tell this hurts, and I know he’s been struggling. I know it by the way he picks up the phone when I call him sometimes. The drag of his voice when he says, I’m just tired, really, and his anger when I don’t believe him. I’m working so hard, but it’s so much fucking harder than you could ever know, he says, once he confesses to one drink, m
aybe two. And I hope you’ll never have to know it. He always hangs up on me.
In the car, I say, I think you’re solid, and I’m so proud of you.
Proud? Well—
It’s okay, I say.
I’ve got to head back to New York, he says, but I’ll be back for Christmas.
That night, after my father takes off, I call The Senior. I ask him to score the best drugs he can find. After I smoke and swallow everything he gives me, I leave his house and drive into a ditch off a road in Weston, Florida. I fall asleep like that, behind the wheel, in this U-shaped ditch, the rain patting my windshield. By morning, nobody has found me.
Where’s your mom? my half brothers want to know. They flew in to meet our father in Florida for the holidays.
With her family, in Texas, I say. She’s been gone two weeks.
We’re sitting on the gray couches in my Grandma Sitchie’s living room, smearing liver on crackers. Cousin Cindy is on the back patio, screaming into her phone, smoking. I would strangle her for a cigarette.
And she just dumped you on Christmas? the older one says.
Sucks, says the younger one.
I don’t like Texas, I say.
My father and brothers watch television all day long in Grandma’s living room. They exchange Hanukkah and Christmas gifts. A new phone with a twenty-four-hour sports radio, a wooden backscratcher—So you can stop using the spaghetti spoon, Pops. My father gives all three of us wads of cash.
I miss my mother. The hand-pressed paper over her presents, origami wrapped. The bows that shed glitter in a purple mist. She writes cards for every gift, writes cards for every person she’s ever met. Her writing, those loops and crosses—I love you to the moon and back—I miss her.
Here, says my older brother. My girlfriend gave me this to give to you. It’s a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Merry Christmas.
I drive to my mother’s treatment center. She’s made it through detox, and Christmas is my first allowed visiting day. A nurse leads me through a long hall to the backyard. The people inside stare at me. They must know I am my mother’s, I think. We look the same. There’s no mistaking it.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 14