“They’re all snakes out there, that’s why you gotta keep the grass cut low, Shamrock. To see the snakes coming a mile away.” He’d nicknamed me Shamrock when he found out I was Irish. “Especially when people know you’re loaded. They start thinking, What could that money get me? People are greedy, but I trust you. I want to share everything with you.”
“Listen, Carlos,” I said, ignoring the part he’d addressed to me. I was too excited at the idea that he was going to finally get off the streets. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, you could finally get your own apartment.” I squeezed his hand and smiled. But he didn’t smile back, just stared intently, directly into my eyes.
“Shamrock, maybe you didn’t hear me. I want you with me on this. This is the start we need.” I couldn’t hold back my smile; my body tensed with excitement.
“I am not like those people. I just want you to be happy, Carlos.”
“You make me happy, shorty. Don’t doubt it.”
When we went to hug each other good night, he suddenly hoisted me over his shoulder with an ease that made me realize his strength, charging forward with my body as a pretend battering ram for the lobby door. I screamed with laughter.
“Boooom!” he bellowed, thrusting the door open ahead of me with his hand. Moments later, with all the force in my body, I had to drag Carlos away from the buzzers to stop him from whistling to Brick over the intercom to make me laugh more. Because boarding the elevator meant saying good-bye for the night, it was a task that we stretched out for half an hour, time filled with eagerly made plans for when we might see each other next.
For every third truant day of mine throughout September, notices arrived in the mail from John F. Kennedy High School, informing the parent or guardian of ninth grader Elizabeth Ann Murray to please phone the principal’s office. I made a routine out of popping the mailbox to intercept them, so that I could rip the paper into tiny shreds and send them floating down the trash compactor chute like confetti—problem solved. But I hit a snag one day when I discovered an envelope bearing that all-too-familiar emblem from Child Welfare. The notice, presented in boldfaced type, called for a mandatory meeting with Brick to discuss my future in his care, as well as the option of placement back into the system. I couldn’t go back in the system; I wouldn’t. But I didn’t know how to go to school, either. I didn’t know what to do.
Outside of my friends, little grabbed my attention. After all, I kept thinking, I could always go to school later. It seemed like things were working out fine without it. With the exception of Bobby, no one in the group was going anyway. And Carlos kept talking about our plans with the money: We would get an apartment somewhere on Bedford Park, and Sam would live with us. Sam and I would go back to high school then, and all three of us would get jobs to keep up with the rent, but first we needed a stable place that was all our own.
So it’s not that I wasn’t going to go to school at all; it just didn’t fit in with my plans at the moment. I would go back soon, just like I would talk to Ma about all the important things I wanted to express to her, soon. Like letting her know that no matter what she might have done, I understood that she loved me; I saw how hard she tried. Most of all, she should know not to worry. I would go back to school. I would be okay, somehow. Just not today, I kept thinking, not right now. Life seemed to be rushing in on me, and all I felt I could do was duck and cover. Not now. Later, I kept telling myself.
Of course, this avoidance was growing increasingly difficult to accomplish. Child Welfare’s letter was not the only reminder that I was procrastinating with everything important in my life. Not when my mother’s habit of achieving drunkenness before noon each day was wearing on her and on me, while I was there, picking up the pieces.
She’d stumble back to Brick’s from Madden’s, barely able to stand, covered in vomit, sometimes in blood if she’d fallen down. Once in a while strangers—a chubby crossing guard, a nearby super, an Irish man from the bar—carried her back, bewildered to see my young face answering the door ready to collect her.
Without meaning to, they asked some of the toughest questions. “Where is your father?” some of them would want to know. “Will she be okay from here?” I didn’t know how to say, “My father’s in a shelter and no, she won’t be okay, she’s dying. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” All I could do was take her inside and thank them before shutting the door. The rest was for me to work through, alone. I’d take my mother and clean her up; help her, naked and vulnerable, into a warm bath; shampoo her hair as clumps of it came out in my hands. Sometimes she’d vomit in the tub and we had to start all over again.
I became more familiar with the bathroom than any other room in the house. The institutional green paint, the flickering light that bounced that green onto everything in the room, onto my hands as they worked daily to remove the blood, urine, and waste from the tiles. That light that shot green onto my mother’s pale skin as her heart still beat, consistently but more slowly now. As she sat, a folded collection of bones in the shallow water, I rubbed a washcloth over her narrow back, ashamed of my own healthy thickness, my fluid movements, and my youth. How unfair that I should flourish while she was steadily reduced, fading; the only successful function remaining within her, the virus that worked diligently in her bloodstream, silently stealing her from us. Yes, her heart still beat, but only to spread the poison, both keeping her alive and killing her more quickly.
It’s amazing that when there is just too much to deal with at once, the mind can compartmentalize. If I forgot for a moment that something was terribly wrong with my mother, these confrontations were a stiff reminder of what I had chosen to ignore. Still, after I had her hoisted out of the tub, dressed her in clean clothing, and tucked her in carefully, there was always a way to push it right back out again. I had only to close her door quietly behind me and slip into another world, one that was full of friends who cared about me, places I could go with them, endless adventures with Sam. No one would bother me there. We were all along for the ride together; responsibilities were what other people worried about. Besides, we were a little family. What danger was I in with so many people—Carlos especially—who cared?
The week before my mother began living in hospitals, I found out how much he cared. Before Carlos, I always tended to my mother alone, even with Lisa, Sam, and Bobby nearby. Not that I could blame them. When she came in drunk, my mother was hard to watch, let alone touch, hold, bathe, and dress. I understood. I held no resentment for Sam or Bobby when they looked on from the couch as I underwent the ordeal, repeatedly. But this is also why I was so impressed when Carlos didn’t do the same.
“She needs to be talked to more, who talks to her?” he asked me one day as we both lowered her onto the bed. In the living room, music blared over everyone’s laughter and conversation. I’d tried to shoo him away, to let Carlos know that I could handle it, but he knew better. When Ma had first come in, he ran to hold on to her arm and back—to support her, not reluctantly, but warmly, as though he saw right past the ugliness of the disease and through to her, the person beneath it all.
“Jean, you seem to need a little help. I’m going to help Liz help you.”
“Who are you?” she’d stammered through her crying.
“I’m someone who loves Liz very much, someone who’s been wanting to meet you,” he told her. If I had known a better way to react, I wouldn’t have looked away. He loves me? Is that what he said? The whole time I bathed her, he didn’t budge from just outside the bathroom door, no matter how much I insisted, “I have it from here Carlos, really.” Instead, he spoke clearly through the thin wood, directly to Ma.
“Jean, Liz told me about how you call her pumpkin. I think that’s adorable. I call her Shamrock ’cause she’s the luckiest thing that’s ever come my way. I know you talked to her a lot at night, too, always sitting at the foot of Liz’s bed to keep her company.” Ma’s eyes opened wearily. Tears rolled out of them as she and I listened to Carlos??
?s deep voice vibrate in the bathroom. “My moms had an issue with drugs, too, you know. I wish she could have cared as much as Liz tells me you do. I think it’s great that you look out like that. I know Liz loves you, too, and she’s proud that you haven’t used coke in so long. You’ve come a long way, Jean. You should be proud of yourself.” I reached my hand into the warm, filmy bathwater to hold hers. She closed her eyes again and smiled weakly.
“I love Liz, too. She’s my baby,” she said softly, speaking to Carlos, but I must have been the only one to hear it. The faintness of her voice made me swallow back tears. I hadn’t heard her say that in so long.
Carlos had listened to me; all the details I’d shared, he’d retained. He’d seen my mother as a person, spoken to her, touched her, helped me take care of her.
When I’d tucked my mother in and was ready to leave, Carlos sat on the side of her bed. From the doorway, I watched in amazement as he held my mother’s hand and spoke reassuringly to her until she drifted to sleep. Before leaving the room, he knelt down to tighten her quilt. Then, very tenderly, he gripped the blanket’s edge and placed a small kiss on her forehead, then stroked the hair from her face.
“Sleep well,” he said. “Everything is okay now, sleep well.”
Carlos took me by the hand, led me past Sam and Bobby sitting before the noisy TV and into the kitchen, where he sat me down and stood in front of me. Just the two of us. He had said that he loved me and now it was just the two of us.
“Look at me,” he said gently. But I couldn’t. I was afraid he’d see right through to my hope, my growing attachment to him, and my fear over what was happening to Ma.
“Look at me,” he urged, taking my cheeks in his strong hands and staring into my eyes.
“Don’t worry, Liz, I’m going to help you through this.”
I began to cry.
“I will help you through this, Liz, no doubt. I’m here.” He wiped my tears away with his thumbs, kissed my forehead, kissed my cheeks. Then he kissed me on the mouth, tenderly, slowly. I kissed him back and tasted salt, felt the bristly hairs from his goatee, felt his strength, his size, holding on to me.
“I love you, too,” I said, pulling back to meet his eyes.
“What did you say, shorty?”
“I love you, too, Carlos. I love you.”
His grip grew firmer. “I’m right here,” he repeated, pressing my head to his chest, pulling him tighter to feel his warmth and his heartbeat drumming against my ear, consistent and reassuring. I was afraid of how desperately I needed him never to back away.
During the weeks I spent with Carlos, Sam met a boy across the parkway, a guy named Oscar. He was twenty years old; Sam had just turned fourteen a few days after they had their first kiss.
“No big deal. He says I’m mature for my age. He really likes me,” she’d said from her spot under the bunk bed one night after Carlos dropped me off. We were splitting a large bag of Oreos and a box of Apple Jacks from Brick’s supplies. “Anyway, we’re just seeing each other. And besides, he’s hot.” She smiled. Considering how much Sam had gone through in her life, the things she’d shared with me, I had to agree that she did seem mature for her age.
“Yeah, I can see how you would seem older, I guess. He’d better be good to you, though,” I’d threatened playfully.
“Girl, you have no idea,” she replied, giving me a small wink.
As we lay in the dark that night, Sam schooled me on all the questions I’d always had about sex.
“Well, Brick and my mother did it, I know that. Sometimes I sleep on the fold-out chair in her room, you know, to be closer to her, and she comes in from the bar and starts asking him for money. ‘Brick, can I have five dollars? Just five dollars?’ At first he’s like, ‘No, Jean,’ but then I’d hear the springs on the bed squeaking. There would be all these sloshing noises and then I’d hear the crinkle of money. Next thing I know, she’s out. I don’t know, I guess it gave me the feeling like I didn’t want anything to do with sex. Like it’s gross.”
“Liz, it’s nothing like that, I mean that’s nasty, but sex can really be amazing. Oscar is amazing.” I listened closely as Sam described ways she and Oscar shared their bodies, how certain motions, when applied to particular parts of the body, made you rock and sweat and feel a “tingly weakness” that added up to love.
“He loves me, Liz,” she said. Lying above her on the bed, I let my body go perfectly limp, trying to mimic the “tingly weakness” she described. The love part was the most confusing.
As she spoke, I shut my eyes to see her experiences more clearly, but the scene was overrun by a picture of Carlos and me lying in the grass in Harris Field, stars pricking the night sky above us. The tender exchange Sam described didn’t seem to fit; it was too difficult to connect my body with any expression of love, even if I strained to. Still, I lingered in the image while she spoke, tried to make Oscar into Carlos, Sam into me, and have it all come together, but I kept losing focus.
Had I known when I left that there would be no going back, no returning to a roof over my head, I’m not sure I would have done it. After all, isn’t that what really draws the line between childhood and adulthood, knowing that you are solely responsible for yourself? If so, then my childhood ended at fifteen.
“What’s this? What the hell do you think you’re doing? This isn’t a shelter. Let’s go, get out!”
I will always wonder what tipped Brick off to Sam’s hiding spot. Our laughter before bed that night? Lisa? Sam and I were constantly waking her up with our late-night conversations, but we’d refused to do her laundry even one more time in exchange for her silence. Had she done this out of spite? If not, then how did he find out?
“This is my house,” Brick shouted over us. Lifting the sheet we used to block the bunk bed, a cigarette pinched between his fingers, he exposed Sam’s hiding place, his thick body looming like a threat. Spitting as he spoke, he frightened us both. I sat up to create a barrier between them; Sam shifted and curled herself into a ball in the corner. It was near three a.m., and the nighttime shot menacing shadow figures across the wall. Brick was one of them, a cigarette monster menacing us. We said nothing as he stood over the bed, staring down, panting. “Keep it up and you’re on your way out, too,” he said, looking directly into my eyes. “Let’s go, now!” he repeated to Sam, with an angry wave of his arm. Then he walked away and slammed the bedroom door, a trail of Marlboro smoke fading behind him. I could hear him flick on the bedroom lights and begin complaining to Ma, stomping all around the room.
Maybe if not for the letters that had been coming from Child Welfare, I would have given what I was about to do the consideration it deserved. Still, to think that I acted spontaneously is to lie to myself. Truthfully, I had been inching my way onto the streets all along, through my every run-in with premature independence, way before Brick ever caught up with us.
Later, Sam and I would say that at least it wasn’t one of the nights we let Carlos stay, the two of them under the L-shaped bunk bed together, their heads poking out to my left. Who knows what a confrontation between Carlos and Brick would have looked like.
Thinking back, it’s hard to believe that our setup lasted as long as it did: for well over a year I hid Sam at night, sharing half my meals, covering her with my blanket, and allowing her to come out ten minutes after Brick left for work. Maybe Sam should have slept directly under the bed; that way if he had heard something, he’d come to the living room and assume his ears were playing tricks on him. And I suppose we were pushing it when Carlos started spending nights, too. We hadn’t meant to test our luck, but he got thrown out of his friend’s place and he’d become too valuable to let out of our sight. Carlos introduced us to a whole new way of life.
“You gotta make moves. I am telling you, once I get my inheritance, we can paint the town green.” He’d talk to us of a life in which we could call the shots, and have a place of our very own where no one could yell at us or pull rank. After a few weeks, we
had already decided on the color of the carpeting and named our future wolf-dog Katie. The three of us planned to go down to Macy’s and take a cheesy family portrait to hang on the wall of the apartment we would get. We couldn’t let Carlos sleep outside; he was our future. And it’s not like the two of them were under the bed every night. No, we were far more creative than that.
We often made use of the top landing of the staircase in Brick’s building. All we had to do was bring quilts and notebooks and peanut butter sandwiches upstairs, and we were set for the night. Spread out across the thin cushioning, we’d use one another for pillows. We spent many nights there, sleeping on one another, like a litter of lazy cubs, breathing in sync and drawing from one another’s warmth. If Sam hadn’t pulled her pants down one night to pee on the next landing, dissolving a puddle shape into the super’s fresh coat of wax, then he might never have known to make us leave the hallway.
Still, we had places to go. Like Bobby’s house, where he snuck us in after Paula went to bed. The three of us split his futon, watching movies all night, snacking on Doritos and pound cake. Or Fief’s place, where we took one couch cushion each while his ferret, set loose for the night, rummaged in the many garbage bags around us.
For a few brief moments in the dark, after Brick had stormed out, neither Sam nor I spoke.
“Look out,” she said toughly, stepping past me. “I’m going to get my stuff.” She packed frantically, sniffling, slamming things around.
Lying there, listening to Sam pack and Brick shout from the next room, I thought hard. All my life, I’d looked out for myself. What would be so different if I left with her right now? Why not make my move? Was Brick’s place really doing so much for me, or was it a stop among the many that I’d been making lately, drifting? It had never felt like home to begin with. I thought of the boldfaced letter from Child Welfare. A mandatory meeting, the paper had read . . . to discuss the option of placement back into the system. Never again would I go back to the system. That was the thought that put me over the top. If I stayed behind, how much longer before they would just take me back into the system, anyway? That one thought, and the memory of St. Anne’s, was all I needed to decide. I’d rather scrape by on my own than go back into the home where people treat you like you’re less than a person. I was good at surviving; I could do that.