Breaking Night

Chapter 8
The Motels

WE CHECKED INTO A MOTEL JUST OFF EXIT ELEVEN FROM THE MAJOR Deegan Expressway, where we took the best showers of our lives. I turned the water on hot, scalding, and let it scorch my skin bright pink. R. Kelly sang “I Believe I Can Fly” from Carlos’s brand-new portable CD player. My clothes were so gross and textured with dirt that it was difficult to put them back on. I tied a motel towel around my head, turban-style, and entered the room.
It was surprisingly cold. A draft chilled my wet head, sending goose bumps all over my arms and legs.
“Is the heat on?” I asked Sam, who had already bundled herself up in blankets, and was lying, propped up, on one of the queen-size beds.
“No,” she replied, “but if you get under the covers, it’s a little better.” She motioned to the other bed with her eyes.
The carpet was shag, the color of sand, and reassuringly soft under my bare feet. The wood-paneled walls were riddled with scratched-on graffiti left behind by previous renters: Jason hearts Maria 4-Ever! Rocky and Jessica, together, always 2-20-89. The residual smell of cigarette smoke gave the air an acrid texture, and anything portable had been bolted down to its neighboring surface. Across the counter, fifties and hundreds were spread about like a scattered deck of cards. The season’s first snow tapped lightly against the window.
Right outside the glass, Carlos stood, talking into a cell phone, which was as foreign to me as our new location. Noting the accumulation of snowflakes in his hair, I wondered, with an uneasy feeling, if he might have been talking the whole time I showered. His laughter, muffled from outside, seemed flirty, like it was in those encounters with random girls on the street. Something about it felt deceitful, making everything in the motel feel strange. I looked to Sam, who was chewing on a McDonald’s cheeseburger we’d picked up at the drive-through. Despite my anxiety, it felt good seeing her eat, safely tucked under the heavy blankets. We had been walking so much lately; we just needed somewhere to rest.
“Sam.”
“I know, girl, don’t even say it,” she told me. “He came back. It’s cool.”
“Sam,” I said, stepping in front of her. “We need to be careful.” I looked over to make sure Carlos was still preoccupied. “We need to start looking into apartments. We need to find a place. After that we can look into jobs and then maybe check out high schools for next year, only after we get settled.”
“I know,” she said. “I would love to get that place.”
“Yeah, well, we should get on top of it before anything. You never know. This whole thing feels shaky.”
Carlos stepped into the room and swiped the snow off his head, pushing air out through his lips while bulging out his eyes like a cartoon character.
“Brrrr, I was freezing my nipples off out there,” he said, shaking his arms clean of snow. We were too quiet to seem amused.
“Waz up, ladies?” he asked, looking around the room in exaggerated confusion. “You look like someone stole your best friend’s cat.” For a moment I worried that I might have been taking things too seriously, but I spoke up anyway.
“It’s nothing. . . . It’s just that, now that you have your inheritance, we need to work out the apartment stuff, right? You kind of disappeared for a while, and that was a surprise. We can’t really afford any more surprises.”
He paused to gather himself in a way that implied restraint. It made me feel I’d overstepped some boundary.
“Like I said, Shamrock, I needed to clear my head. It was wild to pick up Dad’s money, so I did it alone. Ain’t no way I wasn’t coming back. A’ight?”
“Yeah, Carlos, we knew,” I lied, too nervous to defy the edge of confrontation in his voice. Plus, I was feeling myself falling into the category of people that just didn’t understand him. I was afraid questions about where he’d been, or whether all that money was really an inheritance, would cause me to lose him.
“Well, if you believe me, then act like it and gimme some credit,” he snapped.
I didn’t move or speak. Sam looked at me as though she were waiting for instruction. Carlos looked from me to Sam and then back again, squinted his eyes, and smiled mischievously. He lifted a pillow off the bed in slow motion and let out a whistle to the theme of an old Western showdown, shifting the mood. Sam smiled and began playfully inching away from him, simultaneously abandoning me in my seriousness. Carlos arched his eyebrows and swung the pillow above his head like a lasso. I took a step backward and chuckled in spite of my frustration. How could I not? He looked ridiculous.
“Hey, we’ll get an apartment,” he said, whacking my shoulder with the pillow, then quickly dragging Sam clear across the bed by her ankle, swatting her, too. “Stupids,” he called out in a pouting child’s voice as he halfheartedly swiped the pillow back and forth between us. “Bums. You don’t believe me.” Sam clawed the mattress for a grip, screaming wildly. I gave in and grabbed a pillow, hitting him on the back using all my force, feeling both the futility of the impact against his strong body, like a mobile boulder, and my own anger come alive with each hit. We fumbled over one another until we became a mass of limbs, sweat, and laughter, collapsed on the smelly motel carpet. Carlos got up first. Gasping for air, Sam and I watched him straighten his shirt and walk to the dresser, where he rolled open the largest drawer.
“Here,” he said. “Take a look for yourself.”
Wiping sweat off his brow, he tossed a thick newspaper to me. It was The New York Post, opened to the classifieds.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Domino’s Pizza, ground beef and double pepperoni,” he said. “It’s the classifieds, Shamrock. What else? I was checking out places for us to get started.”
I held the paper up to my eyes and saw the title of the real estate section underlined in black pen. Next to it, there were a couple of phone numbers printed in Carlos’s handwriting; one of them was circled.
I was flooded with regret for not believing in him. I saw myself through his eyes and sensed how selfish I must seem. It was his dead father’s money, and I gave him grief about it because I was so needy that I couldn’t manage without him. I was immediately sorry and determined to make it up to him.
“Carlos,” I started, lifting myself up off the ground. But he held a hand up to stop me.
“Listen,” he said, smiling, looking from Sam to me, “tonight is . . . tonight is the night. We’re gonna paint the town magenta. Forget this. Tonight guys, get on your best T-shirts and jeans, I am taking you out.”
We cabbed it downtown, to a mysterious location Carlos said we’d have to see to believe. I had never witnessed anyone pay for a thirty-dollar cab ride before. Carlos sat up front, joking in Spanish with the driver, flipping the radio stations between rock and hip-hop. When he stopped the dial, Foxy Brown’s “Gotta Get You Home” blasted. Carlos scratched records on an invisible DJ turntable up front. Sam and I bounced up and down in our seats to the thumping bass of the music, windows down, wind whipping our hair. We laughed, wild with joy. Outside, the sky darkened to a deep blue-purple. I leaned out my window a little and inhaled the cold, late-autumn smell, that fresh moisture that charges the air just before a storm. Families shot by us in their Volvos, babies strapped into their child-safety seats, cars filled with normal teenagers. Their ordinary lives highlighted our own total lack of order.
We were a band of misfits, wild young people carving out our own alternative version of life, together. The adventure struck me as terrifying but thrilling, too, the difference hinging solely on where Carlos was going with all of this, and whether he would keep his promise.
The mysterious location was a small, run-down dim sum restaurant on Mott Street, in Chinatown. Carlos requested that the waitress, with whom he was on a first-name basis, clear a particular booth for us, in the very front. Under his instruction, she brought out no menus; Carlos ordered for the whole table, knowing the list of dishes by heart. He winked rather than explain himself. We laughed rather than ask.
Sitting there, I became enamored with him all over again. The whole night was wonderfully surreal—the way he could walk into a place and change it, make the crazy Chinatown lights brighter; how they shimmered on the wet asphalt outside. The ridiculousness of Carlos going into the kitchen and returning alongside the waitress, helping to serve our food. How he made a beautiful paper rose for me out of a napkin. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, his vibrance, his handsome face; every so often we’d exchange a glance so intimate I was forced to look away.
Sam was smiling wider than I’d ever seen her smile before—she looked completely happy. I was happy, too. The whole night had a dreamlike quality, and I told myself that life should always feel like this, filled with simple happiness. And just maybe, with Carlos around, it could.
Later, at the motel, Carlos stood in front of me, reasoning with the jammed soda machine for the return of his dollars. The glow of its light against his face turned his freckles auburn and illuminated his eyes. His voice seemed to match the machine’s hum. This was the moment I decided to sleep with him; I had finally worked up the courage. He had been persisting for nearly three months, the entire time we’d been together; now I knew that I could go through with it. I told myself that it would show him what he meant to me, and would seal a bond between us that lately had seemed shaky. The sodas clunked down after Carlos gently shook the machine. He made that happen, too.
The cans settled into a bucket of melting ice beside the bed. Sam had disappeared to visit Oscar; it was just the two of us all night, for hours, in this room. I was sure that he sensed my decision, because I started laughing too hard at things, waving my hands around when I talked, like two loose birds. I couldn’t initiate it—I didn’t have to; I didn’t have to move. There was no pain involved, only the weight of his heavy body, the strong smell of latex and of his hot breath. To my surprise, my first thought was that being with him was emptier that I’d expected, more function than joy.
I became distracted by how removed I felt, divided between the physical part of me that I shared with him, and my mind, which drifted. But he didn’t notice; he only moved and moved on top of me. For a moment, I resented him for it. In an effort to reverse the bad feeling, I decided to search his eyes, but they were closed. That’s when I realized that sex was not necessarily a shared thing. Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other. It didn’t necessarily bring you closer. In fact, it could highlight the parts of you that feel most separate. Sex could reveal to you your own isolation. Sam had told me that this act added up to love, but I did not feel loved by Carlos then, nor, in that moment, could I feel my love for him.
When he was done, he rolled off me and cracked open a can of Pepsi. I asked him to pass me the other one and I drank it, letting the icy burn trickle down my throat while my attention sought a focal point in the room—anywhere but him, or us. There was no “tingly weakness” the way Sam had promised.
That afternoon, she had already taped up rip-out magazine posters of dingy rock stars above the other bed. And she had hand-washed and folded shirts and socks and put them in the dresser drawer. This was more stable than we’d been in weeks, and we were appreciative. The rain fell softly outside, collecting on the windowsill, reflecting in its puddle the neon lights of the motel sign. I was miles away from home.
Over the next two weeks in the motel, Carlos rented out three neighboring rooms along with the one we were already living in. He began to act differently, more authoritative. The money was changing him, and with the money, he transformed everything around us. He became good friends with Bobby, Diane, Jamie, Fief, and several other more distant members of the group, all of whom wanted to come over and join in the fun of escaping their parents to sleep in a strange place. Carlos provided it for them, and in doing so, he became their ringleader. Nightly, he called three cabs to collect the bunch of us and take everyone to diners in the Village, for pool on Eighty-sixth Street, or to the movies in Times Square. He tipped his favorite waitress in the West Fourth Street diner fifty dollars, but only after he got her to curtsy, tilt her head, and smile. This, and all of Carlos’s jokes lately, made everyone—nearly twelve of his new friends occupying three huge tables—laugh hysterically.
Carlos had become very private about everything. He and Fief or he and Jamie, or whichever other one of my friends was available, routinely took mysterious cab rides to undisclosed places. I was told the purpose was private, and I was asked to stay behind. His cell phone calls, all placed from the balcony outside our room, were extremely private—it was taboo to inquire about them, even when he was talking to my friends. I never knew the details of the calls, or the secret excursions, but they made me think of the way Jamie threw her head back to laugh when Carlos talked; how she, like the other girls, all friends or friends of friends floating in and out of our scene, felt free to enter Carlos’s personal space, to touch his arm or pinch his cheeks. “You have the cutest freckles,” Diane once said, sitting in his lap. With some of my friends, Carlos shared inside jokes that I didn’t get. Sam slipped up and made several censored mentions of private conversations between her and Carlos. This was my first experience in resenting her, and around this time, she and I stopped having our own private conversations. The wedge, at the time, felt permanent.
I couldn’t yet speak it out loud, I didn’t dare actually say it, but there were two roaring suspicions sitting in my mind. One was that the reason for Carlos’s secret trips with my friends was that he was dealing drugs. This occurred to me when I realized how similar he began to look to the drug dealers in my old neighborhood: baggy jeans good for hiding things; a beeper and a cell phone for suppliers and customers to reach him; his Latin King beads, which he sometimes wore even in the shower, linking him back to his gang.
The other fear was that he was cheating on me with someone, maybe even with Sam. That suspicion was something I didn’t have any evidence of; it was just a feeling that sat in my stomach like a stone.
I was a worrywart, the one who was no fun. I watched Carlos’s behavior, kept track of his spending, and reminded him of the hundreds of dollars he wasted every day. I brought up the apartment, told him food was cheaper if we split things, and pointed out, to everyone’s great disappointment, that we didn’t need cabs—the train was $1.25. He guarded his bank receipts like gold from the mint, and told me he would start saving soon. In the meantime, I should relax, live large—after all, didn’t we deserve to live it up after all we’d been through? Why was I so serious all of a sudden? His kisses were rough little pecks that made my skin crawl.
Once in a while, at night while Carlos entertained everyone, I called Brick’s from the pay phone downstairs. Sometimes Ma was home, and sometimes Lisa told me she had checked into the hospital, her voice sounding mechanical, resentful. One time when Ma was home, she answered the phone and asked me when I was coming to bring more pillows, and then went on to tell me that the road was wide open; it was only a matter of driving and painting all four walls. Her voice, like some confused child, made my throat feel as if it were splintered with razors. I tried not to cry, but I knew from research I’d done in the Forty-second Street library that dementia was one of the final stages of AIDS. Lisa grabbed the phone.
“Lizzy,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you might want to think of spending more time with Ma. You may think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t.” Her voice was furious, but there was no way to communicate my fear of seeing Ma so close to death. I got off the phone as quickly as I could.
Later that night, Carlos was hosting a reggae party, blasting his radio for the crowd and jumping on the bed—which got us kicked out. We moved to another motel, an ancient set of two-story buildings lined with balconies on a desolate road, crowned by a pink fluorescent light that read VAN CORTLANDT MOTEL. Our bathroom window faced the massive expanse of Van Cortlandt Park. Carlos commented that we could make all the noise we wanted to here. He brought the party with us, and I pleaded with him for an extra room so that I could sleep. When we separated, Fief’s cousin, a white girl named Denise who wore huge hoop earrings and snapped her gum at me, was holding on to Carlos’s arm. I carried some of Sam’s, Carlos’s, and my things into the next room.
I spotted the paper Carlos had written those real estate phone numbers on protruding from a bag of clothing. I requested an outside line from the front desk so that I could call the one he had circled.
“Hello?” a female voice answered. Her name was Katrina; she was a waitress at some pool hall and had no idea about any apartment for rent. Tears filled my eyes. I hung up on her as she asked again where I got her number.
“Shut up,” I said to the ceiling. “Just shut up!”
My sleep was dreamless that night, as I breathed in the stale cigarette smell of my very own empty room while my boyfriend, my best friends, and a bunch of strangers partied, drank, and smoked weed rooms away.
The next morning, Carlos and Sam stood at the foot of my bed. Carlos’s voice was what woke me.
“Hey shimmy Shamrock, you want to go get some breakfast?”
“Where is everyone?” I asked. By the bright sun, I could tell it was early morning, and I figured they couldn’t have slept yet.
“Gone,” he said. “Eighty-sixed about an hour ago.”
Sam rubbed her stomach and let out an exaggerated wail.
“Ugh, sooo hungry,” she said, casting her thin arm over her forehead. “Fooood.”
At that moment I had to make a choice. I could confront Carlos about the phone numbers and take the opportunity to address the way he’d been acting, or I could drop it and go with the moment. I looked at Carlos, and for a second he became as much a stranger as the day I first met him—mysterious, slippery. But when he smiled, he somehow reversed it and became familiar all over again. My perception of him could change between blinks. How did he truly feel about me? If only he could be wonderful all the time and not send me so deep inside myself for answers that I didn’t have.
Sitting there, I decided to drop it. I ignored my anger and went with the flow. Anything else would have been pointless. What would the outcome of a confrontation be? If I got into a fight with Carlos, it’s not like I could go home to think about it. This was home; they were home. If I just acted like things were fine, maybe eventually they would be.
“Let’s go eat,” I said, shaking it all off.
Carlos pulled me up out of bed. I layered myself in three sweaters, pulled a knit cap over my head, borrowed a pair of Sam’s gloves that had the fingertips cut off, and followed them out. Downstairs, we discovered a tiny little café attached to the motel. It looked as if no one had mopped the floor or cleaned the windows in years, and certainly no one had painted the lime green walls in that long, but the grill shined like new and the air was flavored with the rich smell of bacon and eggs.
“Whatever you girls want,” Carlos said. “As usual.”
I ordered a toasted bagel with butter, and Sam did the same.
“Lots of butter,” she yelled at the grill guy, an ancient man with sparse whiskers. “I want a heart attack, serve it up,” she shouted in a deep voice, pounding on the counter. Several of the elderly people who populated the tables stopped their conversation to look her up and down. We took our food and exited. Carlos left a five on the counter and placed a cell phone call outside, standing with his light brown Timberland boots planted in the fresh foot of snow. Looking around, the area seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I thought I might have been in either the park or the café before. But when? How? As we walked back toward the stairs with our breakfast, I realized I was right.
“Duck,” Sam yelled. “Oh my God.” I looked around instead. Then I saw. Grandma, dressed in Ma’s old ankle-length bubble coat, clutching her tan purse in the crook of her arm, heading straight for the steps of the little café. Sam knew Grandma from her few visits to Brick’s apartment. She yanked me behind the corner of the motel building.
“Sam, oh my God,” I said, stumbling. “Her nursing home is right next door! She’ll call the cops and report me, I know it.” Carlos ran over to us. Without ducking, he threw his hood over his head, gathered the bottom of it with his fist and peeked out the top, exposing only his eyes.
“Who we hiding from?” he asked in a playfully girlish voice. “I’m so scared.”
“It’s my mother’s mother. She’ll report me as a runaway. She’ll call the cops. They’ll take me away to a home. Just be quiet.”
We peeked out from behind the wall, watching Grandma make her way through the snow. Her being there was like something from a dream, or an unconvincing scene in a bad movie. Without a thought in my mind, I let out a huge laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Sam placed her hand on my shoulder, squinting in Grandma’s direction.
“What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “She’s walking funny.”
Only then did I notice that Grandma wasn’t walking so much as inching her way down the street. More than once, she stopped to catch her breath and clutched her chest. As she drew close, I saw that her skin seemed pale, almost white. When she finally made it to the café, it took her several minutes to climb the few steps, while we looked on in silence. Once there, she flopped back onto one of the café’s hard plastic seats. None of the other patrons, who I assumed were also from the nursing home, acknowledged Grandma. She sat alone. Promptly, the grill guy brought a cup of tea to her and she passed him a folded bill, which she drew from her bag. It seemed a routine exchange.
Watching the whole thing, I became incredibly sad. It was a glimpse into her isolated world, the one she’d always complained of when I, Ma, or Lisa was stuck on the phone with her. Her words echoed back at me. “I’m lonely at the home. My granddaughters don’t come to see me. Even my rosary doesn’t cheer me up,” she’d always say. Now her loneliness played out in front of me like a somber, silent movie. It made real for me the impact of my neglect throughout the last few years.
“Weird,” Sam said. “It’s like we’re in the Twilight Zone.”
“I know,” I told her. “It’s so strange.” I looked behind me; Carlos was already upstairs. We turned to follow him, and made our way up the stairwell together. I wondered whether or not, in Grandma’s opinion, I would go to hell for all my sins: driving Ma crazy, abandoning her in her time of need, sleeping with Carlos. If you knew me better, Grandma, you wouldn’t want a visit from your granddaughter, at least not this one. I’m not the same little girl who spent Saturdays in the kitchen listening to your scripture. I’m reckless and I neglect everything, especially you.
Sam was speaking a jumble of words at me.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, isn’t that crazy, what that guy said to me when I left the store?”
“What?”
“Happy Thanksgiving. That’s crazy, I didn’t even realize. Kind of a downer, I guess, to think today is Thanksgiving,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied. “Wait, what? It’s Thanksgiving? Now? I mean, today?”
“Yeah, ain’t that somethin’? Who really cares anyway,” she said, pushing the motel room door open to reveal Carlos, who sat flipping channels on the old Zenith TV.
I did. I cared that it was Thanksgiving, and that I was so disconnected from the rest of the world I hadn’t even realized. I ate my bagel in a daze and watched the morning news curled up beside Carlos, half listening to him and Sam throw around jokes and conversation. I was busy thinking about how Lisa had begun Lehman College this term. It occurred to me that I never asked her how that was. It always amazed me that she could handle school, our family, and even boyfriends, without ever buckling under the pressure, without missing class. I was suddenly filled with panic at the realization that she was becoming yet another item on my list of growing regrets.
When Sam and Carlos eventually fell asleep, I lifted Carlos’s heavy arm up off my side, gathered change out of his army pants, not daring to touch his cell phone, pushed my feet into my boots, and slipped out the door to the pay phone. The cold stung my nose and ears, and the sound of Brick’s phone ringing quickened my heartbeat. I prayed for him not to pick up.
“Hello?” It was Lisa.
“Lisa, hi. Did I wake you?” My nervousness made me come off sounding chipper. I held my breath, waiting to see if she noticed.
“Lizzy?”
“Yeah. Hey. Did I wake you?”
“Um, not really. Where are you?” She spoke in a perplexed tone that implied my call was somehow inappropriate.
“Not that far away. I just wanted to see how you are.” I wished that I could tell her what had been happening, how unpredictable Carlos had turned out to be, where we were staying, how I had just seen Grandma in all her loneliness. But it wasn’t safe. I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t tell Brick, who would tell Mr. Doumbia, and then I’d be taken into custody. I wouldn’t risk that.
“Oh. How am I?”
“Yeah, how’s Lehman?”
“Lehman?”
It was so annoying, the way she kept repeating everything I said in the form of a question and pausing uncomfortably long between her responses. I could feel her suspicion, her mistrust of my good intentions and her anger toward me. It made me aware of every word coming out of my mouth.
“Yes, I, uh, just wanted to call and see how you’re doing. I was wondering about school and about you . . . and about Ma.”
“Lizzy, Ma’s in the hospital. She’s sick. She’s been there for the last week and a half. She’s in the hospital all the time now. She was asking for you before, but I think you blew that. She’s been pretty out of it lately.”
A lump invaded my throat. Maybe it was the cold or the lack of a good night’s sleep that obscured my thinking, but for some reason, I hadn’t counted on the confrontation from Lisa. I thought we might talk like sisters, maybe catch up with each other. I fished for something to say.
“Okay. I know . . . do you want to meet up or something?”
“Well . . . why, do you want to meet?”
Since as far back as I could remember, I’d felt that Lisa’s responses toward me usually bordered on the brink of hostility. Years later, a therapist would explain that growing up with few resources had turned us into competitors—over food, over our parents’ love, over everything. At the moment, we were competing for who had the better handle on Ma’s illness, and we both knew she was winning.
“I don’t know, Lisa. I was thinking maybe we should see Ma.” There was another drawn-out pause.
“Well, I can make it around six. Get a pen and paper, I’ll give you her room number.”
“Lisa?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, Liz, you too. See you at six.”
“Hi. I’m looking for my mother, Jean Murray. She was transferred here from North Central last week. My sister told me I could find her on this floor.”
The nurse looked at her list.
“Let’s see . . . Jean Marie Murray. Okay, you’ll have to take a mask.”
“A mask? Why?” This was a first.
“All visitors for patients in quarantine need to wear a mask. And how old are you? You can’t be here if you’re not at least fifteen.” The nurse looked me over, seeing my confusion. I thought of the reading I’d done on Ma’s condition—something struck me as odd.
“Why would I need a mask if AIDS is not airborne?” I asked.
“It protects against TB,” she said. “Your mother could cough and expose you. It’s for protection.”
“What?”
“Tuberculosis, honey. It’s a lung infection; people with AIDS are vulnerable to it. Didn’t they make you do this before? Don’t tell me that someone let you up here without a mask before.”
My face went hot. I remembered Leonard and Ma during their weeklong binges in the kitchen on University Avenue. The whole time, he coughed incessantly, his lungs crackling with phlegm until he worked up a sweat that dripped from his face and his skin glowed bright pink. Daddy used to comment, “Boy, you’d think he’s ready to keel over and drop dead in there, from the sound of it.”
“When was my mother diagnosed with TB?”
“Honey, I’m the charge nurse. I have no idea. You’ll have to talk to her doctor about that.”
She placed a soft orange mask in my hand. Hesitantly, I slipped it over my head and looked around.
There was a deadness about the ward, and it gave me an eerie sensation. The mute backdrop of the hospital magnified the few noises: the distant ringing of phones and the incessant beeps of numerous machines. The entire area seemed unusually desolate, even for a hospital. It was unlike the last few wards Ma had been in, where nurses bustled around and visiting hours brought all kinds of faces. This place was different. I pushed myself forward, in search of Ma’s room.
“Turn left, walk ’til you can’t go no more,” the nurse called from behind me.
I passed a sign that read INTENSIVE CARE UNIT and another that read ONCOLOGY. I had no idea what oncology was, but figured that it couldn’t be any good if it was somewhere between intensive care and quarantine. I passed door after door, within which patients lay unconscious, their heads cocked back to allow for the breathing tubes lodged in their throats.
You need it for protection. I thought of all the times Ma came home from the bar in need of my help. I thought of the vomit that had seeped into her clothing by the time she finally reached me. I recalled the putrid odor of the wet mess mixed with vodka rubbing off on me when I lowered her into the bath; Ma’s coughing fits as I washed her body clean and we both pretended not to notice her nakedness and her shame. I thought of her ninety-something-pound body, swathed in clean sheets, lulled to sleep by her own drunkenness, as I breathed in the fresh-out-of-the-box smell of the nurse’s mask one more time before deciding it was pointless. I pushed open Ma’s door and removed the orange cloth from my face.
“Hi, Ma.”
No response came from behind the brown-and-green fishnet curtain surrounding Ma’s bed. It took all my courage to pull that curtain aside, and it took that much more to conceal my shock over what I saw behind it.
Ma took up just a fraction of the bed. Her skin was yellowed and tight on her face, cheeks sloped dramatically inward, painstakingly molded by her illness. The hospital sheet was cast off to the side, revealing her emaciated body, curled up like a child’s skeleton, barely dimpling the plastic mattress beneath her. Up and down her limbs ran angry, little red scabs, each attached to a raised mound of flesh. Her eyes were wide open, but fixed on nothing, and her mouth was slowly moving, almost spelling out words, sputtering small sounds. That and the machines hooked up to her body were the only noises in the small, airless room.
I was trembling. I opened my mouth almost involuntarily, before I was sure of what would come out.
“Ma? It’s Liz . . . Ma?”
Her eyes drifted around the room in response. For a moment they landed on me and I thought I’d captured her attention, but then they kept roaming, her mouth maintaining that same choppy, wordless movement as they went. On the narrow table wheeled to her bedside was the hospital’s celebratory Thanksgiving dinner. In teal Tupperware, there sat an untouched serving of sliced meat saturated in congealed gravy that streamed its way through a scoop of mashed potatoes and onto the cranberry sauce. Lying on the tray beside her plate was a smiling cartoon cutout of a turkey decorated in red and gold feathers. The caption above its head read: A Time to Be Thankful.
“Ma . . . look.” I took a seat. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, Ma . . .”
I didn’t know how to speak; my throat felt squelched shut, too full to draw breath. I might have been suffocating, drowning on the tears I wasn’t allowing to come. I took two deep breaths and reached out for her hand; it was not much warmer than the metal rods upholding her hospital bed. Touching it sent shivers up my arm.
“It’s like she’s dead already,” I mumbled to myself. Then to her I said, “You’re not even here right now.”
The door clicked open, sucking air outward, floating Ma’s curtain into a small breeze. Lisa walked in wearing heels and a black peacoat, her long, dark hair wrapped in a neat bun. She could have been a social worker, a lawyer, or any type of professional grown-up. I felt dingy, dressed in layers of sweaters, thumb holes punctured near the fronts of the sleeves, my long brown hair, tattered and stringy, falling down from under my knitted skull cap. Lisa clicked a few steps forward, looking from Ma to me.
“Hey” was all we said to each other. She avoided eye contact and pulled up a chair to sit down near Ma. My heart raced. Seated there next to her, I judged myself through her perspective: I was a high school dropout who’d abandoned our sick mother to live in a mysterious location with my street boyfriend.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Just a little while.”
We spent a few moments sharing an awkward silence, and then Lisa leaned over the side of Ma’s hospital bed, tears spilling out of her eyes.
“Ma? Hi, Ma. Sit up. We’re here. Lizzy is here. Ma?”
“Lisa, don’t bother her. I don’t think—”
“She can sit up. Ma?”
Ma’s eyes raced all around. Her hand opened and closed, and she began muttering gibberish louder than before.
“Came here . . . came here to give me your soul. Spare me. Spare me . . . that am I all . . . spare it. Mine and yours . . . yours, yours!” She wasn’t looking at either of us; there was no sign that she knew who we were.
“Lisa, I just think we should leave her alone. Maybe she’ll get up, but she’s probably not feeling too good.”
“Lizzy, look. She was talking at home last week; I know, I was there. She would want to know that we’re here.”
Her tone was scornful. I quieted down as Lisa moved her chair up, right near Ma’s face. She spoke louder than I would have dared.
“Ma, get up. It’s Thanksgiving. We came to see you,” she said in a softer voice.
More gibberish. But then I was shocked to see Ma start to sit up. Very slowly, she lowered her feet onto the floor and peeled off the monitor as we quietly watched her make an attempt to go to the bathroom, dragging the IV pole behind her. I reached out to support her weight when she wobbled the six-foot distance, steadying herself on the door and the wall. As she turned away from us, Ma’s gown floated open in the back, revealing a full view of her upright, naked body. Pictures flashed in my mind of one of Daddy’s PBS specials on the Holocaust. If she stood still, I could count her vertebrae; they looked something like the metal links of a bicycle chain with flesh taut over them. Her pelvic bones protruded, and there was absolutely no fat on her bottom or her thighs. In the bathroom, I took a short towel from the chrome towel rack and wet it; I wiped Ma’s backside clean with one hand while supporting her frail body with the other. The fluorescent lights flickered on the white walls and on us. I bit down on my lip to keep from crying, and did all I could to stifle my need to cough on the smells of her sickness. “It’s okay, Ma, we’ll get you all fixed up,” I reassured her. “We’ll make you nice and comfortable, just relax.”
“Okay, Lizzy,” she said in the weakest voice.
When we were done, I took her hands in my own and lifted her from the toilet with almost no effort at all; she was so light, it scared me. All of it scared me. I was terrified, and wanted more than anything in this world to make her better. When I tucked her back into bed, I knew I had to get out of there.
“Are you leaving already?” Lisa asked as I hovered in the doorway. I was shaking; I needed to be alone. My heart pounded; I could not take one more moment of being there. And I was not going to lose it in front of Lisa.
“Well, um, it’s just that I was here before you, for a while . . . and I just think I should get going soon because I’m kind of tired. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes and turning away from me.
“Lisa, it’s just not that easy for me, okay?”
“Yeah, I know, Liz. I’m dealing with it, too. I know it’s not easy. I figured you wouldn’t stay long anyway, so just go ahead and go,” she said, sobbing.
“People deal differently, Lisa.”
“Yeah, they really do,” she snapped.
I hadn’t prepared for how scary this would be, for what I’d feel seeing Ma like this and being powerless to help her. I didn’t know what to do with the frustration I felt at not being able to change things for Ma; I wished Lisa and I could see each other through this, but she wanted me to sit in it the way she was, and I could not afford to. I felt stuck. If I stayed, I didn’t feel I could handle it. If I went, I was a bad daughter and sister.
“I have to go, Lisa. I just have to go. Please understand.”
I ignored Lisa rolling her eyes and leaned over to talk to Ma. At the time, I had no idea that it was the last thing I would ever say to her.
“Ma. I have to go, okay? I promise I’ll come back later. I promise. I’m okay. I’m staying with friends. I’m going to school, soon. I really am, I promise.” I reached down and touched her hand. “I love you,” I told her. “I love you, Ma.” I did get to tell her that. She said nothing in return, and I slipped out into the hallway, where I rested my back on the wall and inhaled deep breaths; holding in tears, I felt like I was descending, free-falling into nothingness. I wanted to scream. Lisa stepped out into the hall.
She addressed the floor. “You know, Lizzy. You just leave . . . that’s fine for you, but it’s just so cold.”
“This whole thing is hard for both of us in our own way, Lisa; I just can’t stay here, sorry. You act like I’m having a blast out there, but it’s not like that. Not having a stable place is no fun, okay?”
She turned in disgust and went back into the room; I escaped down the hall away from her, away from Ma, and I left.
That night, after hearing of my visit to the hospital, Carlos decided I needed cheering up. To get my mind off things, we’d do something absolutely crazy: go out for a good meal at a decent restaurant with good service—dressed in our underwear.
“Let them say something. If I’ve got the money, they’ll serve us,” he said, flashing a giant wad of fifties in the cab. “Right, Papa?” he asked the driver, who smiled and nodded blankly, glancing only at the cash. Carlos picked the Land and Sea diner just off of 231st and Broadway, a place where the walls were decorated with plastic fish, plastic lobsters, and plastic ship steering wheels—punctuated by bright pink fluorescent lights that wrapped around the diner walls. We flew down Broadway in the cab, Sam and I screaming as it raced through traffic. We pulled up to the restaurant like cops coming onto a scene, and Carlos peeled off a twenty to pay the driver for what should have been no more than a six-dollar ride. “Cheerio!” Carlos said, applying two hard slaps to the roof of the car to send him on his way.
Carlos led us to the largest table in the front of the restaurant. Customers turned their heads to watch the guy and two girls dressed in men’s boxers, boots, and hooded sweaters in the dead of winter. I kept my knitted cap on, hair half tucked in. Sam had found an old tie in one of the motel room drawers; she wore it dangling over her sweatshirt.
“We’re all British,” Carlos whispered. When the waiter came running up to our table to explain the dress code, Carlos addressed him with a purposefully terrible and unconvincing accent that made Sam and me burst out laughing.
“My good man, where we come from, this is appropriate dress. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Carlos took out a wad of money and placed it on the table without ever taking his eyes off the man. Problem solved.
We dined on lobster, T-bone steak, chicken fettuccini Alfredo, and half a dozen appetizers. I ordered using a totally inept British accent, enunciating all the wrong syllables, while Sam and Carlos burst into laughter. It didn’t matter; the waiter brought anything we asked for without question. I didn’t question it, either. I just watched Carlos pluck twenty after twenty out of his wad to pay for the whole outrageous meal. I didn’t care either way anymore; going with the flow was so much easier than pushing against it.
We drove around in cabs all night, stopping wherever, for whatever reason occurred to us, on a whim: Grand Central Station, so we could stretch out on the ground and stare up at the constellations on the massive ceiling; Chinatown’s arcade so Carlos could prove to us that there really was a chicken trapped in a machine who played you in a game of tic-tac-toe. There, we stopped in the black-and-white photo booth and snapped three strips of pictures: all three of us making crazy faces, contemplative faces, and one whole strip of me kissing Carlos, feeling his soft lips pressed to mine, while the heat from the bulb flashed through my closed eyelids onto our profiles.
“He is good,” I told myself. “He does love you, even if it’s hard for him to express it. Don’t forget the way this feels.” And it felt like heaven, the kiss, the whole night spent together—Carlos’s magic at work, again.
We took our last cab of the night to the White Castle drive-through on Fordham Road, just as the sky began to show streaks of morning light. We were only going to get milk shakes, but Carlos surprised us, asking for fifty hamburgers. We zipped up and down Webster Avenue, the Grand Concourse, Broadway, chucking the warm burgers out the windows, hitting parked cars, mailboxes, and lowered storefront gates. “Whooo!” Carlos yelled each time he sent another burger flying.
Back at the motel, we stretched out, a sack of greasy burgers on the floor beside us. I fell asleep in Carlos’s arms, something I hadn’t done since that night we’d first slept together. I wrapped my arms around his chest, where I buried my head in search of his heartbeat. He put soft kisses on my forehead and said, “I told you we’d cheer you up, Shamrock. I want to see a smile on that face again tomorrow, or we’ll have to go out there butt-naked next time.” Sam giggled hysterically from her bed. I was enchanted with Carlos all over again—with his kisses, his smell, and his ability to make me relax into him, drawing me far away from my growing emptiness.
For the next three weeks, I kept telling myself I was going to visit Ma. I really was, but it became hard not to be distracted by the little things, like how I coaxed Carlos into a real estate office, where we finally filled out forms and made appointments to see places. We wanted a two-bedroom in a quiet building in Bedford Park, just like we had planned, nothing too ghetto. In the meantime, I tried to make our living space as nice as possible. I made our beds, tucking in the corners just the way the maids had when we first moved in. Since we always trashed the rooms so bad, we’d hung “do not disturb” signs on the doors permanently. Sam helped me chase after garbage, several fast food containers per person per day. When we stopped at the corner store, I picked up one of those plug-in fresheners, potpourri scented, for $1.89.
Using gum, I tacked up our Chinatown pictures to the motel mirror, next to all the love notes I’d been writing Carlos. I wrote a fresh one and drew a cartoon frame of hearts around it that I colored in with a red pen. I hung it up beside our pictures.

Carlos, being with you has made me happier than I’ve ever felt before.
You are my purpose; you have been there for me when it mattered most, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, you made me laugh when it all seemed pointless. I love you dearly.
Liz
I wrote Carlos little love notes like these every day. But over the course of those few weeks in the motel, the theme of the letters turned from gratitude and affection to me expressing that our relationship was worth salvaging, and how glad I was that we were getting past our problems.
One day, while Carlos was out visiting an old friend, a big guy they called Mundo on the block, Sam and I used about ten dollars he had left behind to pick up a few things at the store.
We attempted discount makeovers. Sam selected two jars of glitter nail polish and an oversized can of hairspray. Following the advice of a teen magazine, which we propped open on the radiator in the bathroom, we got four packs of imitation Kool-Aid, and tried, unsuccessfully, to dye our hair Quirky Purple and Very Berry Pink.
“Is it working?” I asked Sam, lifting my head out of the bathroom sink.
“Um, I dunno. I guess I can see some purple, but I’m not sure if it’s just my imagination. How’s my head?”
I laughed out loud at the pinkish streams of water running down her face, between her eyes, dripping off the tip of her nose. Her whole scalp, clearly visible through the inch and a half of hair on her head, was pink.
“You look fab,” I said sarcastically.
The only thing we dyed was our skin and our T-shirts, which, splashed on their original white, appeared tie-dyed.
We kicked back, letting our hair and nails dry, and watched I Love Lucy reruns, waiting for Carlos to return so we could all go grab dinner. Six o’clock came and went. Eight. One. Four a.m. It occurred to me to call his cell phone, and then I realized he’d never bothered to give me, or Sam, the number. Carlos paid the front desk nightly for the following day, and I was sure he hadn’t paid in advance. I wondered what would happen if he didn’t come back by noon tomorrow, checkout time. I looked out the window all night, asking Sam over and over if she thought something might have happened to him.
“Yeah, his mother dropped him on the head when he was a baby, that’s what happened. Don’t worry, he’s not in danger. He’s just an a*shole.”
In the morning, I begged the hotelkeeper not to throw us out, using the phone to explain that Carlos would be back to pay any time.
“I’m sick of guys leaving their hookers here. This is not some flophouse.”
“We’re not prostitutes!” I snapped at him. “He’s my fiancé,” I lied.
“This is a business, lady, not a drug haven, not a whorehouse. Pay up or go.” And he hung up.
We bartered with him, using the only thing of value in sight: a gold watch Carlos had picked up on the day I visited Ma. The cold found its way into every crevice of my clothing as we walked to the front desk clutching our sweaters to our necks for warmth, Sam trailing behind me.
I spotted the person behind the nasty argument, a short, stubby, fifty-something Italian man. He held either side of Carlos’s watch, lifting it up to the light. “This will get you until tomorrow,” he said.
“But he paid a hundred and fifty for it, it’s brand-new,” I protested.
“Well,” he said, slipping the watch into a backpack on his side of the scratched Plexiglas, “it’s not worth the shirt on my back. I’m doing you girls a favor.”
By nightfall, we folded. Sam and I got out the trash pail and started digging through it in search of any salvageable leftovers from the last few days. We split rubbery hamburgers, stale strawberry shortcake, and a funky-smelling turkey sandwich. The water from the bathroom tap tasted poisonous. For hours, Sam and I took turns racing to the toilet and checking the window for Carlos. The bad food made bubbles rumble through my midsection; everywhere I walked, I felt sick.
At sunrise, we flopped down on Carlos’s and my bed, the one nearest to the door, and lay on our stomachs to look through the window together, out into the bright parking lot. We grew sleepy, watching how the morning sun gleamed gold off the windshields of parked cars and sparrows populated the frosted bare branches of a nearby tree. Neither of us said we were afraid, but under the layers of blankets, Sam grabbed my hand and held on tight. Every so often, when the wind howled on the other side of the thin windowpane and a cold draft kicked up through the crack between the door and the floor, she squeezed my hand harder.
I woke up to her nudging me, less than an hour later. When I opened my eyes, her finger was drawn to her lips, telling me to be quiet. My first instinct told me the hotelkeeper was nearby, ready to evict us. But then Sam motioned to the ground. There, between the foot of the bed and the ancient motel radiator, I saw them: a family of mice, a big one and four little babies, scavenging through the leftovers we’d declared far too rancid to risk eating.
We watched in total silence as the greasy takeout bags shifted and wiggled under the weight of the five mice darting in and out. Their cuteness immobilized us both. They were gray, not much lighter than the motel carpet, with pink noses and glistening black eyes. Remaining totally still, we discovered, as the biggest one carried food back and forth, that their nest was in the radiator, somewhere near the reverse side of the slits that ran along the top row of the vents.
“So that means they can see us from there all the time,” I whispered to Sam. She gave a small nod; her eyebrows were bent upward with affection.
“I like the babies,” she whispered back.
“Me too,” I said, softly, “they’re the cutest.”
We watched them until the sun was fully up and the motel’s overnight visitors vacated their rooms, opening and slamming car doors, starting up their engines. Dozens of times, the mice zipped in and out of our take-out bags, startling themselves with their own bristly movements, quickly retreating back into their hideout, only to peer through the vents and inevitably venture out again.
I was the first to hear his cab pull up. I felt it had to be Carlos because a hip-hop beat blasted, growing louder as the car approached. The door opened, then slammed. Sam looked at me.
“I don’t know whether to be calm or angry,” she said.
“Neither do I,” I told her. I realized then that I didn’t know because I was waiting to see what he felt first. I was used to that, sensing my own feelings only in relation to others. If he was content, then so was I. Carlos had been calling the shots all along, because I let him. I caught myself at this moment, ready to do the same, and it sickened me.
We stayed still and waited for his heavy footsteps to come close. Then his keys were jingling in the lock. My heart jackhammered in my chest. Carlos entered whistling.
“Hi,” he said casually as he came in. His face appeared worn, eyes drooping, bags underneath them. He looked different somehow. I wondered if he might have been up all night since we last saw him; I wanted to know what he was doing. He sat at the foot of Sam’s bed, smelling strongly of cigarettes. “Waz up, shorties,” he said, playfully. “I’m ready to pass out.” He avoided my eyes and sat, unlacing his boots.
“Where were you, Carlos?” I asked, as though it wasn’t in any way controversial to question him.
“I told you, Shamrock. Mundo’s house. I ain’t seen that fool in years.”
“Why didn’t you call?” I made sure he sensed the anger in my voice. I was not taking his crap today.
He moved around the room, needlessly arranging things, the TV antenna, his boots under the bed, our hairspray can on the bathroom shelf, ignoring my question.
“Carlos, do you hear me?”
He banged shut a drawer in response, opened another, removed a set of boxers from inside, slammed that one harder.
“The least you could have done was call.”
“Where is my watch?” he asked, cool as ice, looking straight into my eyes for the first time since he’d come in. A stab of fear went through my chest. Sam looked at me.
“Where is your watch,” I repeated stupidly.
“Yes. Where. Is. My. Watch?” His eyes were glassy, no tenderness behind them at all.
“We sold it to the hotelkeeper for a night’s stay when you left us here. That’s where it is!”
After a pause, Carlos cocked his leg back and kicked the trash pail, sending it sailing across the room, where it crashed against the wall and then onto the ground. Sam and I shot straight up and drew close to each other. I was shaking.
“Why would you sell my watch?” he asked through his teeth. I’d never seen him like this; he was possessed.
“You left us here.” I hadn’t meant to sound so whiny.
“Well, I am not responsible for you!” he screamed.
“Responsible for us? Is that how you feel?” I knew it was true, and I felt both angry and embarrassed when he highlighted it. “We had real estate appointments yesterday. You missed them.” Now I was crying.
“Don’t give me that shit!” he screamed, punching the wall beside the mirror, once, then twice, shaking loose my tacked-up love letters and sending them fluttering to the ground like leaves. Sam clutched one of the pillows, which was stained purple from dye. Together, we watched Carlos storm into the bathroom and slam the door.
He ran the sink and shower full force, and didn’t come out for over an hour. For a moment, Sam and I sat in bed together and were totally quiet. I needed something to happen. I got up and turned on the TV for distraction.
“What the hell was that?” I finally said, crying, pointing to the bathroom, my hand shaking. “He’s never acted like that.”
“I don’t know what that was,” she whispered. I’m not sure which of us was more afraid. But we didn’t leave, we just waited, hoping that when he came out he would be normal again, take us to a diner, crack some jokes, even if it meant ignoring what he had just done.
When Carlos finally came out, his hair wet, his face cleanly shaven, he tugged a blanket from Sam’s empty bed and went to sleep on the floor without saying a word to either of us. I was glad he didn’t come near me. On the opposite side of the room, it took me forever to relax.
“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Walk me to the bathroom? I don’t want to go alone.”
We stepped over Carlos’s huge sleeping body. In the bathroom, his things were scattered all over the filthy pink and cream tiles—his army pants heaped into a mound on the floor, that wad of money poking out from them, a disposable razor. Little hairs were peppered all over the sink. Using the mirror, I washed pink dye streaks from behind my ears while Sam peed.
“I got this stuff everywhere,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she said, swiping her hand over her fuzzy head. “Mine’s going to be easier to clean off. Can you pass me some tissue, Liz?”
“Yeah.”
I leaned down and lifted one of the two rolls from under the sink, when my eyes caught sight of something shiny. It was a small, silver cut of tinfoil, the exact size of the dime bag packages Ma and Daddy left scattered around our kitchen on University. Without taking my eyes off the foil, I passed Sam the tissue and crouched down.
In the center of the foil, ever so faint and small, I found tiny specks of white powder.
“Sam! Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t flush. Be quiet and look at this. . . . He’s on coke.”
The discovery of Carlos’s hidden habit transformed him for me from an eccentric, hilariously original person to a junkie with a personality disorder. For the two nights that followed, I stayed away from the parties he started up again in the spare hotel room. All throughout those nights, music blasted from the party and cabs arrived, unloading person after person: Fief and his cousins from Yonkers, people from Bedford Park, Jamie, Mundo, and countless others. Sam passed from one room to the next, doing her best to keep me company. My absence from those parties was a form of protest. I sat by myself, planning the letter I would write to Carlos telling him I knew his secret, and if he kept using drugs, I couldn’t be his girlfriend.
I could just see us if he didn’t stop using: we’d end up living in a Bronx apartment, a high school dropout and a cokehead. We would be one step away from Ma and Daddy’s life. What was the difference? Hookers, the hotelkeeper had called us. Maybe you could be a prostitute without knowing it, I thought. Maybe all it took was compromising yourself for the sake of gaining something in return. I was sick of my dependence on Carlos, tired of our sick lifestyle.
I fell asleep drafting different versions of my letter, with my notepad open on my lap.

Dear Carlos,
We’ve come to a crossroad . . .
The next morning, I woke up to the pounding before Sam and Carlos did, someone’s fist slamming against our door, rattling the chain, a man’s voice calling on the other side. The two of them were sleeping through it. Still foggy from sleep, I pulled open the door to a guy in his mid-twenties. His fist was lifted, ready to knock again. Sam came up behind me; we’d slept past checkout time.
“If you guys are using the room, I need today’s money,” he said. “If not, the maid is waiting.” He folded his arms across his chest. The cold chilled my bare feet.
“Sure,” I said. “Just a second.” Carlos sat up and lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the sunlight that poured into our dark room.
I knelt down beside the bed and starting sifting through Carlos’s jeans for the money. I counted off three twenties into the man’s open hand.
“Next time, you guys come to us. Or at least pick up your goddamn phone,” he called out, disappearing down the nearby staircase.
“I didn’t even hear it ring,” I told Sam.
“Me neither.” I sat on the bed and examined the phone, realizing that the receiver was not placed directly in its cradle. It could have been that way for days, since we never used it. Carlos and Sam watched me click it back in place.
“Is it about that time?” Carlos asked, pointing down at his stomach. “Yes, I think it is.” He was in a good mood.
“What time did you get in, Sam?” I was surprised that I slept through Sam’s return, especially since she had lain down next to me in her bed. Carlos got up and unfolded a large Chinese food menu.
“Let’s eat, fools,” he said, swatting my bare legs with the page.
“What’re we ordering?” Sam asked, forgetting my question.
I was too tired and hungry to think about the letter I had written to Carlos. I was too confused. It was easier to just focus on my immediate need: food.
We were sitting in a huddle on his bed, reading over all the selections, when the phone rang. Instantly, we all locked eyes. We never got calls on that phone. I gave Bobby the number to give Lisa only in case of an extreme emergency. Sam got up. Her face tensed when she answered, then she extended the phone toward me.
“Liz, it’s for you. It’s Lisa.”
“Hello?”
“Liz, it’s me. Why haven’t you been picking up?” But before I could answer, she continued. Her voice was watery, panicked, as she mumbled a blur of horrifying words.
“What?” My knees buckled. I don’t remember how I ended up on the bed.
Lisa sobbed, her child’s voice returning as she repeated the news again.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said, setting the phone down on its receiver.
“Liz, what’s going on?” Sam asked.
Tears ran down my cheeks. I wiped them away quickly, my eyes still lowered on the phone. “My mother died,” I said, sounding as flat and final as it felt.
Carlos’s strong arms were suddenly around me.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have to see Lisa. I have to call my father.”
Sam called us a cab. While I waited for it, I went to the pay phone outside and dialed Daddy’s shelter. My stomach lurched when I heard his voice and I knew what I had to tell him.
“Daddy . . . are you sitting down?”
We cried together, him standing in the shelter office being timed and supervised by staff, me standing outside the motel in the cold, at night. Though I had never actually seen my father cry, we sobbed together then, and I could feel both our hearts breaking.
The cab rushed me to Bedford Park in a haze of tears, my world spinning. Throughout the ride, Carlos kept staring at my face, rubbing my knee repetitively and urging me to speak. I could not have been farther away from him. All I cared about in those moments were Ma, Lisa, and Daddy. The gravity of our loss washed away the pettiness of everything else.
I met Lisa in Tony’s diner. She had on an old coat that looked like one of Ma’s. She was sitting by herself in front of a cup of coffee, but no food, at one of the tables in back; her eyes were bloodshot. As I approached and we looked at each other, my heart broke all over again.