Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (38 page)

She caused a little stir; her blond curls bounced as she searched eagerly for her father. Coco slid onto a chair, which was bound to three others by chains. She pretended to be absorbed by Nautica, who wobbled on her thighs. Cesar stood in the interior cage, waiting for a guard to spring the gate. At last, Mercedes spotted him. He shuffled toward them, barely able to move. He was shackled with leg irons, and in handcuffs, both of which were attached to a chain around his waist. Mercedes looked terrified. “Come out! Over here,” she said desperately.

“I can’t,” Cesar mumbled.

“Teasing ain’t nice, come out!” Mercedes said.

“Can’t you see I’m chained up? I can’t move, Mercy,” he said, lifting his wrists slightly.

“Take them off. Take them off,” she demanded. “Take them off!”

“I can’t.”

“Play patty-cake!”

“Mercedes,” Coco chided.

“I can’t take them off, Mercedes,” Cesar said.

Mercedes determinedly outlined the invisible ink the guard had stamped on her hand. Soon her gesture became vague. “Daddy, you have money at your house?” she asked quietly.

“No, Mercedes,” he said sadly.

Then Mercedes brightened. It was as though she’d grasped that her father couldn’t tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. “We are going to get bunk beds and Nikki is going to be on the bottom, and I am going to be on the top!” she chattered. “You can come over and sleep with me on the top, and we can take a bubble bath.”

Cesar squinted, as though he had suddenly recognized her voice from far away.

“Wanna hear a song?” Mercedes asked. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until she said, “That’s Nikki’s daddy’s song,” puncturing the moment. He glanced over his shoulder stonily. “Look at Mommy’s face,” Mercedes urged. “Mommy been messing with her face.”

Cesar hadn’t teased Coco or complimented her dressy outfit. He’d said nothing about the tattoo, or the special Weeboks Nautica wore. When he had been in Harlem Valley and Mercedes had worn the cheaper, no-name-brand sneakers called skippies, he’d removed them and tossed them across the visiting room. Since then, Coco had made sure Mercedes wore name-brand sneakers for visits, but it didn’t seem to matter—all because of her face. “I’m sick of it; if that’s the way you want it, fine,” Cesar said to Coco. For the next three hours, they did not speak.

Coco busied herself with Nautica. Nautica grabbed on to the mesh cage, which was covered in lipstick. Mercedes explored the visiting room and collected compliments.

“Oh, that girl, she yours?” Cesar’s neighbor asked, watching Mercedes pass.

“That’s her,” said Cesar.

“She look like Shirley Temple.”

“These are my two girls. I got two other kids with other wives, four kids altogether. I’m nineteen. I got started young, right?”

Again, Mercedes asked Cesar, “Daddy, you wanna hear a song?” She performed “Kind Kind Mother” and got stuck on a verse. She kept repeating the start of the verse until she reached her aborted end, then began from the beginning again. “I had a kind kind mother . . .” Cesar teased her, “What about your father, too?”

Around noon, Cesar finally spoke to Coco: “Get me something to eat.” She bought three packages of chicken wings from the vending machine and waited beside the microwave. She tore open the packets of sauce and
silently passed them beneath the slot. Cesar hunched over the styrofoam tray. He pushed the wings into his mouth. The handcuffs dug into his wrists.

After he’d finished, Coco cleared the trays. Cesar carefully wiped his hands. He looked to the side and reached through the slot and held what he could of Coco. Touch did what only touch could do.

Coco’s words poured out. She told him about a new girl at Thorpe who knew all about the trailer visits. The girl had had a prison wedding. She had told Coco about all the right things to bring—satin sheets, and cream and strawberries. Coco had been learning new things, too, from watching pornography.

Cesar watched Coco soberly. He waited for her to finish, then said tenderly, “Sex ain’t everything.” The box had forced him to do some thinking. If they were going to marry, they needed to communicate. Coco bit her lip. His hope came across as a reprimand. “I want it to be you love me and I love you. Where happiness comes in is when I’m making you happy and you do things to make me happy,” Cesar said.

Meanwhile, Mercedes stared at the couple beside them, a young, skinny black man with a full set of gold teeth, and a large, middle-aged white woman in a modest silk dress. He was angry; she looked tired. He beckoned her closer, and she pressed her substantial bosom against the mesh. She bowed her head to listen. He cursed. Then, methodically, he smashed his handcuffed hands into her chest. He continued speaking in low tones as he punched her, and she held her body taut to receive him. Only her head jerked back. Coco furtively watched.

“They been having trailers for years,” Cesar said, without irony.

A guard climbed to the top of what looked like a lifeguard chair, a signal to Cesar that they had less than an hour of visiting left.

“I’m starting to think about going back to that cell, and it’s got me real depressed,” Cesar said. Besides letters, chess was the only activity that helped him pass the time in solitary. He’d made a chessboard out of paper, and his opponent shouted out his plays from down the hall. The pending good-bye wedged between them. “You better come next week or I’ll punch you in the face, you got my hopes up,” he said miserably.

By the end of the hour, the couple beside them had reconciled. The young man pressed one ear to the counter, penitent, as the woman braided his hair. The guard called time. Chairs scraped the linoleum. The men tried to stretch. Children’s hands clasped the grating like small claws. One mother yelled to her husband, who was talking to the other men, “Look at your boy! Look at your boy!” The man to
whom she called hopped, as if shaking off the visit. She shoved her son closer to the cage her man was in. “Say good-bye to your daddy. Look at your boy! Look at your boy!” She pressed the boy against what divided them. “Get your father! Get your father!” The boy’s thin fingers gripped the wire. His father swatted a good-bye and turned back to the protection of his friends.

“Mom, he said good-bye! Dad said bye!” the boy exclaimed.

Coco noticed Cesar eyeing a teenage girl who’d joined the line. Nautica slept, heavy in Coco’s arms.

Coco was relieved to breathe the fresh, cold air outside. She paused, watching Mercedes energetically climb the stairs into the bus. The idea of staying with Cesar and the reality of it were different; he was more demanding in person than he was in her fantasies. She couldn’t possibly afford to visit again any time soon—the girls’ birthdays were coming. Yet she couldn’t tell him no. Coco was glad to be heading home, even though home was Thorpe.

Shortly afterward, Cesar wrote and told her to limit the girls’ visits to Southport; he didn’t want them to see him caged in any more than necessary.

Coco’s trips to her mother’s and Lourdes’s were searching expeditions—she needed guidance, but Foxy and Lourdes were in no position to help; similar conflicts ruled their own lives. Still, Coco kept returning to the same places for answers again and again. Mercedes, who was almost four, was more direct; sometimes it was as though she voiced her mother’s unspoken worries and doubts.

One day early that winter, Coco took the girls by Lourdes’s. Lourdes was still denying that Domingo had anything to do with why her arm was in a cast. Lourdes was holding court in bed, her long hair loose, a blanket wrapped around her waist like the base of a Christmas tree. Two women sat on the bed beside her, while another scrubbed a blackened pot. Domingo sat at a half-open table, chopping cilantro. He placed fistfuls of the cut greens beside an impressive pile of garlic. A man stood beside him, sipping a beer. When Coco entered, all conversation stopped.

Lourdes beckoned her over. The ladies left. With her good arm, Lourdes whisked Nautica up. She held the whole of Nautica’s head in her palm, infant face to Grandma. “Look at this fucking baby!” she shouted gleefully. “Mercy, give me her bottle.” Mercedes removed the bottle from the side pocket of the brand-new baby bag and watched her grandmother nestle Nautica on her lap.

“Mami, braid my hair?” Lourdes asked Coco. Coco inched around the bed and began to separate Lourdes’s hair into small clumps with her fingernails.

Mercedes stroked her grandmother’s cast. “Who did that?”

“A boy,” Lourdes said mischievously.

“Domingo did that,” stated Mercedes.

“No, Mercy,” said Lourdes, glancing at Domingo significantly. Only his eyes and eyebrows were visible through the bookshelf that divided the studio into a bedroom and kitchen. “Domingo did not do this,” said Lourdes with emphasis. “He wouldn’t do this to
Abuela.
Two
morenos
did this to me.”

Domingo peeked around the shelving. “Do you like me?” he asked Mercedes playfully.

“He didn’t do this to me,” Lourdes repeated, trying to keep her audience. Mercedes appealed to her mother, but Coco concentrated on Lourdes’s braid. Domingo was making a commotion rummaging in his pocket like a magician looking for his rabbit. Then he pulled out a dollar. Mercedes scrambled to the end of the bed to grab it. He pulled it away and laughed.

“What do you say, Mercedes?” Coco prompted.

“Thank you,” Mercedes said. Domingo passed her the money. But Lourdes, to goad her boyfriend, returned to Mercedes’s silenced questions about her injury at every opportunity: when Coco told her about the wedding rings she’d bought to marry Cesar, Lourdes said, “
Abuela
wouldn’t lie to you, Mercy”; when Coco told her the latest news of Cesar, “Domingo wouldn’t do this to
Abuela,
” Lourdes replied. Finally, Coco brushed the tail of Lourdes’s long braid and then changed Nautica’s diaper for the road.

“Candy candy candy,” Domingo sang, helping Mercedes into her coat. He ushered her into the hall. “Candy candy candy,” he continued, and led her into the elevator, then took her downstairs to Edward’s grocery, a store across the street, where Cesar and Rocco used to play pool.

Coco waited outside with the baby. “Three enough for you, Coco?” asked a neighbor.

“For now. Me and my husband are going to try for another when he gets out, but that’s nine years.”

Coco wished that Lourdes would not expose Mercedes to so much of the confusion of her relationships. Whereas Nikki enjoyed playing with children, Mercedes preferred the company of adults, and Lourdes had a way of telling stories so the violent details beelined to the heart, barely
pausing at the ear. Mercedes was a lot like Little Star had been, and although Coco had been the same way, she wanted Mercedes to be a child while she was a child.

Edward’s Grocery had just reopened after being shut down following a drug raid. The new owner had revived it with a fresh coat of yellow paint. Mercedes and Domingo reappeared, a happy couple, Mercedes licking an icy and holding two lollipops in the hand that was free of his. Coco plucked one—the other was for Nikki—and stuck it in her ponytail.

That same winter, Coco finally received her preliminary acceptance for placement in housing. She should already have been settled in an apartment, but bureaucratic red tape and Coco’s own disorganization kept delaying her move. Sister Christine worried: she didn’t want Coco’s holding pattern to serve as an ending point. “It’s not that she was hard to reach,” Sister Christine later said. “She was hard to keep on track.”

Yet Coco was among the luckier tenants; plenty of the women had predicaments that were far worse—recent immigrants with violent husbands and no English; girls with violent tempers themselves; girls on drugs; girls with cancer and no family. Coco didn’t spend coked-up weekends in hotels with friends of her boyfriend’s, or ask someone to watch her kids so she could go to the store, then disappear for days. When the next-door neighbor covertly hosted an orgy, or the girls upstairs snuck out to smoke weed, Coco was the one who baby-sat. But these other women came and went, and Coco remained at Thorpe House, stuck between her future and her past.