White Lines II: Sunny: A Novel (17 page)

“I’m not running,” she said under her breath.

Born smiled gently at her. “Baby girl, you’re running so much I’ma call you Flo-Jo for the rest of the week.”

She smiled through her tears.

Their moment was interrupted by Sheldon clearing his throat as he entered the room. “Umm … can I talk to you?”

“Yeah!” Born said.

“Come sit down,” Jada invited, patting the seat beside her.

Sheldon sat down next to his mother. “I saw you crying before, and I couldn’t figure out why you were so upset, so I waited near the stairs and I heard y’all talking.”

Born shut his eyes, regretfully rewinding their conversation. He shook his head and looked at Jada helplessly.

“You smoked crack?” Sheldon asked. He looked at his mother, hoping he had heard wrong. The kids in school talked about people who smoked crack—crackheads, they called them. The thought of his mother being one of those people was enough to make him sick to his stomach.

Jada looked to Born for help and Born looked like he wanted to disappear. She felt like she had been hit by a Mack truck. The impact of Sheldon’t question left her speechless, and she stared at her son wordlessly.

Born watched Jada dying a slow death, so he threw her a lifeline. “What do you know about crack, Sheldon?” He hoped that Jada would pull herself together while Sheldon answered.

Sheldon shrugged. “I know it’s a drug that makes you act crazy. I heard of it before.” He thought about the movie he had watched with Born and DJ once. “Like that guy Pookie in the movie. Had got skinny and nasty looking, and couldn’t stop dancing.”

Born nodded, making a mental note to be more careful what he watched when the kids were around.

Sheldon was looking at his mother again, waiting for her answer.

Jada swallowed hard. She steeled herself inside and looked at her son. She recalled the day she gave birth to him and the regret that had washed over her as she realized she had given birth to a crack baby. Her fight for custody of him, the joy she’d felt at finally being able to take him home after his father was killed. Eleven years had passed since then and finally she was being forced to pull the mask off and reveal to her son who his mother truly was.

“Sheldon…” she began, her voice already cracking. She nodded, looked him in the eyes. “Yes.” She felt the fist in her chest clinch even tighter. “I used to smoke crack. But that was years ago, and I don’t do it anymore.”

Sheldon’s eyes were wide, fixed on Jada.

She looked to Born and he was staring at his hands.

She took a deep breath.

“I was seventeen when I started skipping school and smoking weed—marijuana—with my so-called friends. One day somebody I thought was my friend gave me some weed laced with cocaine—crack cocaine.”

Sheldon was staring at her with an expressionless face. She had his undivided attention.

“I smoked it, and I was hooked … I needed it after that. I had to have it and I did some really bad things to get it.”

“You smoked it when you were having me?” Sheldon had clearly been standing by the stairs for a long time.

Jada was stuck. She had indeed gotten high while she was pregnant with Sheldon. She had felt him moving around in her womb, kicking, and still she had smoked crack. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant with Jamari’s baby anymore, and so she had gotten high, hoping to miscarry. But the result had been that Sheldon was born prematurely, weighing a mere five pounds. He had stopped breathing four times and was hospitalized for months. He slept for only ten minutes at a time in the first few months of his life, and threw up like a faucet when he was fed. Sheldon had suffered through seizures, and had to sleep attached to a monitor. And it was all Jada’s fault.

Born watched Sheldon closely. He knew exactly how the kid felt. Born, too, was the child of a crackhead. He knew the shame Sheldon was feeling now, the disappointment. But he also knew that, unlike Born’s father, Jada had kicked her habit.

“It’s like a disease, Sheldon,” Born explained. “When people use drugs the drug takes over and makes them do some really messed-up things.”

Jada nodded. “I was very sick when I was pregnant with you and when you were born…” The tears threatened to plunge forth again and she valiantly fought them. “I took one look at you and I knew that I never wanted to get high again. I was in jail when I had you.”

She wiped her eyes and her nose, shrugged her shoulders. Fuck it, she thought, might as well tell the whole truth since she was already coming clean.

“I was in jail because your father…” The enormity of the story was too much for Jada to put in terms that her eleven-year-old son could understand, and she realized the magnitude of what she survived.

“My father made you go to jail?” Sheldon asked.

“No,” Jada answered, shaking her head. How could she explain that his father had sold drugs—that she had stolen his consignment and sold it dirt cheap in Arlington, gone on a crack binge and gotten arrested trying to buy more crack in Brooklyn?

“Where is my father now?” Sheldon had been told that he was dead, but he asked the question anyway, hoping that maybe he’d been lied to. He had always longed for a father. Everyone had one except him—well, him and Mercedes. It was one of the things that bonded them so closely. Their fathers had obviously both been polarizing characters in the lives of their mothers. The difference was that Mercedes’s mother spoke of her father with love, while Jada always looked forlorn at the mere mention of Sheldon’s father.

“He’s dead.” Jada sounded glad about it, without realizing it. “He was shot in Arlington trying to rob somebody.”

“Who was he trying to rob?” Sheldon’s eyes were narrowed, skeptical.

Jada looked at Born again. Jamari had been trying to rob
her
. Born’s eyes told her that he knew the truth, though neither of them ever spoke of it. Jamari had held a .40 caliber to her temple and demanded the thirty-five thousand dollars Miss Ingrid had held for her for two years while Jada had been incarcerated. Jamari had wound up with his brains blown out all across the parking lot of Miss Ingrid’s building.

“That’s not important,” she said.

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth about him?” Sheldon demanded, defiantly. “Every time I ask you about him, you change the subject. Now you start telling me stuff and everything you have to say is bad. I think you just hate him and you’re trying to keep me away from him.”

Jada was stunned. Suddenly she was beginning to understand Sheldon’s rebellion against her.

Born watched, helplessly. Jada’s reluctance to tell Sheldon the whole truth about his father was understandable. Jamari had been a thorn in both Jada’s and Born’s sides for a long time before he died.

“I knew your father,” Born said.

Sheldon looked at him. “How you knew him?”

“We grew up together. We were friends when we were kids. You look like him a little.” It was all true. But it wasn’t easy finding good things to say about a guy who had stolen money from Born when they were just getting their feet wet in the drug game, then years later had “stolen” his lady, resulting in Sheldon’s existence. When Born had confided in Dorian that Jamari had stolen from him, Dorian had warned him, “If you let him get away with it, he’s gonna cross you again.” Dorian’s words had proven to be prophetic. Years after he had first wronged him, Jamari did it again—causing Jada to fall victim to his fuckery.

Sheldon’s expression seemed to lighten somewhat. “He really died trying to rob somebody?”

Born nodded. He knew the story behind Jamari’s demise, and would never reveal the truth to anyone for as long as he lived. “Yeah. Your pops—not just your pops … me, too—we used to sell drugs a long time ago. And while I was in jail, your father—”

“What was his name?”

Born was stunned. “You never told him his father’s name?” He was looking at Jada in amazement.

Jada was staring at Sheldon and twisting her hands guiltily. “Jamari,” she said, through clenched teeth. “His name was Jamari Jones.” As she said his name she could picture his face so clearly, hear his voice urging her to take the crack he offered her.

“Go ahead and take it. I’m not gonna judge you. All of us have our bad habits. I got mine and Born got his, but he judges you. I don’t. Go ahead and take it. I got you.”

“Your father was not a good person.” Jada said it without thinking and regretted it immediately.

“A crackhead is not a good person.” Sheldon looked his mother square in the eyes as he said it. “Did my father smoke crack?”

Born wanted to slap the shit out of Sheldon for taking that tone with his mother, but to his surprise, Jada didn’t flinch.

“No. But he gave it to
me
to smoke. He encouraged me to smoke it and when I realized that he was controlling me, I ran away from him. But by then I was pregnant with you and … like I told you, I went to jail and then to rehab and I got clean.” She looked at Sheldon, knowing that he was hurting by all she had revealed to him today. “I love you, Sheldon. I have loved you from the second I laid eyes on you.”

It was true. When he was born and she’d looked at him, she saw Sheldon instantly as
her
child, not Jamari’s.

Yet here he was now, staring at her with clear contempt as, to him, his father sounded like the lesser of two evils. He shrugged his shoulders as was his custom, not knowing what to say as he processed all that was revealed to him today. Without another word he got up, went upstairs to his room and locked the door. He needed some time alone.

Jada and Born looked at each other speechlessly, both of them aware that it was too late to run away now.

10

UNGRATEFUL

Sunny was up at five in the morning, but she had no turkeys to baste, no collard greens to clean. She was splitting Thanksgiving between her mother’s and Jada’s homes and had no domestic duties on this day. She hadn’t just awakened. Instead, she had been up all night.

Sunny had been back from L.A. for two days. It had seemed far longer than that. After the charity ball, Sunny and Malcolm had made love until they ran out of energy, and in the morning they ordered breakfast to their room. They lay together all morning until Malcolm peeled himself away and went to spend the day with his daughter.

Sunny and Malcolm had shared a whirlwind of dinners, wine tastings, dancing, and incredible lovemaking. Malcolm was the most fun and romantic man she had ever met. They had flown back to New York, parting ways at the airport. Sunny had her brother, Reuben, pick her up at JFK with Mercedes in tow, thus sparing herself the misfortune of having to face her mother while high—and paranoid.

Sunny had hugged Reuben, her eyes shielded behind shades, and handed him her bag. The moment she turned to hug Mercedes, unexpected tears came. She had no idea what had triggered them at first, but later realized that the sight of Mercedes—twelve years old, sweet, innocent and genuinely glad to see her mother come home—had flooded Sunny with an intense sense of guilt. How could she have gotten high again after so many years being clean?

Mercedes had chuckled, happily, when she saw her mother tear up. “Oh, Mommy, you’re so emotional! I missed you, too.” Mercedes had thrown her arms around her mother, hugging her tightly around her waist.

Reuben had taken them home, careful not to mention the drama in the news in front of Mercedes. Marisol and Dale had insisted that their granddaughter not be exposed to the media’s version of what had happened during Sunny’s trip to L.A.

“Sunny will explain it when she gets home,” Marisol had said.

Sunny knew that her mother would be expecting an explanation, without question. Hearing that her daughter was on the other side of the country and had been on the scene of a drug overdose, while she was unsupervised no less, had Marisol concerned to say the least. She wanted to hear how Sunny had found herself in such a precarious situation—and what had led her to stay for an extra two days afterward.

Despite their mother’s insistence that he make no mention of “the incident” in front of Mercedes, Reuben had looked at Sunny sitting in the passenger seat of his Jaguar and his face showed genuine concern.

“You okay?” he asked.

Sunny nodded, grateful again for the sunglasses that shielded the truth in her eyes. She was far from okay.

“We’ll talk after I get some rest,” she had told him.

Reuben had dropped them off, and Sunny had gone to her room to lay down. While Mercedes unpacked and gave Jenny G her laundry to wash, Sunny had shed tears of regret over getting high, gratitude over having a piece of Dorian in their child, and of longing for some more of what she’d felt again in L.A.

Today was Thanksgiving, and two days had passed since she had returned from the madness of California. She had been tempted since her return to pick up her old habit again. After all, she reasoned, Mercedes was busy hanging out with her friends doing adolescent things over the holiday break. Jada was probably busy up Born’s ass. Olivia was busy with her clothing line. Sunny was bored and she knew that a few white lines were just a phone call away.

Sunny hadn’t copped cocaine in a very long time. In the days when her habit had been at its most intense, she had been pilfering her coke from Dorian. Having kicked her habit before he passed away, she hadn’t gotten high again until she hibernated in Puerto Rico for several months after Mercedes’s birth. Despite the fact that she had been clean in the years since then, she had always known where to get it, who sold it. But she hadn’t been playing with fire then. She was feeling like a pyromaniac these days, though.

Sunny got her Percs from Gillian Nobles, and knew it would be easy to get some coke from her as well. Gillian was discreet, having been brought up in the game among some of the most thorough hustlers—her own father, most of all. Gillian had learned to play the game expertly and there was a mutual admiration between she and Sunny. Sunny admired Gillian’s cojones, since a female boss of a family was a rare occurrence. Gillian admired Sunny’s success at inheriting the vast majority of Dorian’s fortune despite not being married to him. No one had really questioned the fact that Dorian had set things up so that she would hold the keys to his kingdom. She had proven herself worthy, too. Mercedes, DJ, and all of Dorian’s brothers thrived due to her continuous generosity.