This Side of Providence (4 page)

She walks into the room without saying a word, Trini asleep in her arms. Mami looks like she's wearing her pajamas, like she should be in bed. Her eye makeup is smeared like she's been crying.

“
Vamos, mijo
,” she says softly. “We're going to stay with Chino tonight.”

I stand up. “The cops were here,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says. She doesn't turn on the lights or put Trini down. “You talk to them?”

“No. I told them you weren't home.”

“Good boy.” She rubs my head as she walks by. She smells like cigarettes and burnt coffee. “Hurry, go get Luz. Lucho's gonna be here soon.”

She grabs some clothes from a laundry basket in the middle of the room. “You seen that army bag I keep in the back closet?”

I lift up the bag, already completely filled.

“I packed already. For me and the girls.” I can feel her looking at me in the dark. She smiles. “I was gonna pack for you but I wasn't sure what you needed.”

“
Nada
,” she says. She throws a few T-shirts over her shoulder. They rest on her collarbone, which sticks out so much it looks broken. She's skinny and shapeless like a child.

“Go now. Get your sister.
Rapido
.” She keeps telling me to move fast but she moves slow, like she's trying to walk through water.

I go next door and get Luz from the neighbor lady who sometimes watches Trini during the day. She has a set of encyclopedias just like at the library, so Luz always disappears over there whenever no one's looking, which is pretty much all the time. I'm only gone three minutes, but when we get back Mami is leaning against the kitchen wall with her arm over her face. Trini's laid out on the couch, still sleeping.

“Mami?” I touch her arm.

“What?” She opens her eyes. She looks at me like she's trying to figure out who I am.

“Is Lucho here yet?” I ask her.

She looks around the room. “No.”

I pick up the army bag. It's heavy, like there's a body inside. “You ready?” I ask her. She nods, but I can see that she still hasn't packed anything for herself.

Luz sits down at the kitchen table. She opens the book in her hand, even though there's not enough light to read. She won't look Mami in the eye. Trini wakes up and stumbles into
the kitchen like a drunk.

“
Tengo hambre
,” she says in a soft voice. Sometimes I think she sounds like how a hummingbird would sound if they could talk.

“No,” Mami says. “
Necesita esperar
.”

“We can eat when we get to Chino's,” I tell her. Trini starts to cry. Mami stares at her, looking pissed. She opens her mouth, but then closes it without saying a word. Trini cries harder. Mami pulls out her ponytail, snapping the rubber band around her wrist to wake herself up. She shakes her head like a dog. Her hair flies around in long, blonde strands like spaghetti.

“Sit,” Mami says, pushing Trini into a chair. “
Callate.
”

She gets Trini a plate of rice and beans left over from my birthday party. Luz smoothes the hair away from Trini's face to calm her down, something she's done since Trini was a baby. While the food is warming in the oven Mami gives her a cold pork chop, which she holds in her hand like a chicken wing, nibbling on the edges. I stand in the corner, letting the army bag hold me up.

Mami keeps looking out the window. She lays her head against the glass. Raindrops splatter across the windowpane and the reflection on her face makes her skin look blistered. She looks like a monster. I wonder how dark the room would have to be for her to look pretty again.

We hear footsteps on the front porch.

“Good, she's here,” Mami says. She closes her eyes.

But she's wrong.

The cops enter quickly, their flashlights streaking the dark. Something falls to the ground and shatters. Trini screams. All at once the lights turn on. This time Mami don't run. She stares at them with a look that says,
What took you so long?
They handcuff her right in front of me. She sucks in her breath as the metal digs into her skin. It looks too tight, like her wrists are going to snap off any second and the cuffs are gonna drop to the ground and then she's gonna be free.

I follow them into the hallway as they drag Mami away by her handcuffs. I'm yelling but not really making any sense and the cops are telling me to go back inside. Mami tells me to calm
down and shut my mouth so they don't take me with her.

“He's just a boy,” she yells to whoever will listen. “
El no sabe nada
.”

She's right, I don't know anything.

I try to jump on the smaller cop's back but I keep sliding off his uniform. The bigger cop picks me up off the floor and sets me down gently like a flowerpot. Like I could break or get him dirty.

“Your mom's in trouble, son. She's sick, and we're going to help her get better, okay?”

“Fuck you.” I try to kick him but my foot slips and I end up kicking the wall instead. The plaster cracks in the shape of a broken star.

When he lets go of me I run outside and watch the small one walk Mami to the police car. She trips over a rollerblade and loses a sandal. The next-door neighbors are on their front porch but nobody says anything. When I get to the street he's putting her in the backseat. She looks like she's crying but I don't see any tears. I run up and grab her around the waist. Her hands are tied so she can't hug me back. I feel her kiss the top of my head, hard, like she's planting a seed under my skin.

“
Los aviones
,” she whispers into my hair. “
Los regalos estan con los aviones
.”

The presents are with the birds. I have no idea what she's talking about.

The cop palms her head like a basketball and shoves her inside the car. He slams the door. I try to give her the sandal but the back door won't open. She smiles at me and turns away.

I take off my backpack and throw it at the cop. He knocks it to the ground and the Pepsi bottle breaks inside, spilling the soda onto the street. It mixes with the rainwater and washes some of the broken glass into the gutter. The rain falls steady and hard, soaking my shirt in seconds. Droplets fall from my face like tears, but I'm not crying. I am too angry to cry. I can see my sisters in the living room window, staring down at us. Trini is screaming while Luz tries to pull her back from the glass.

I see Lucho in the driveway, standing next to a lady with
a badge around her neck who keeps saying she works for the state. She calls my name but I look away. I hear the lady ask Lucho if she's my father. When I look back Lucho is shaking her head with a smile on her face. The lady has a file in her hand like at the doctor's office. Lucho pulls out her wallet and hands the lady her ID. The lady wipes it on her jacket a few times, trying to clear off the rain.

As the police car pulls away, I watch Mami through the back window, like I've watched lots of people leaving our neighborhood. She looks small, like a child, and I wonder if they put on her seat belt. I know it's her, but already she don't look like my mother. She leans her head against the window as if she's going to sleep. Her hair falls like a shadow across her face. By the time they turn onto Manton, I don't even recognize her.

I'm telling this story because nobody else will.

Arcelia

I
don't remember much about the precinct, except those asshole cops ask a lot of questions, and I don't feel like talking. Which is rare for me, 'cause usually you can't get me to shut up. Turns out they have everything they need to keep me locked up for a few years—two bricks as evidence and a few of my clients—but the lawyer they get me says if I plead guilty they'll reduce it down to possession and I'll only get nine months. With good behavior I could be out in six. He says it like I should be happy. Like six months is easy to do. The longest I been in one place since I left Puerto Rico is four months, and that was only 'cause I was pregnant. And I thought I was in love. They were both dead by the fifth month.

I guess they popped some john I used to score with, and he gave me up. That's the problem with this business: no loyalty. I suppose it had to happen—sooner or later everybody gets busted—and really I had a pretty good run, almost three years of using, selling, and working the streets without so much as a cop looking at me sideways. I think you could say I was better than average. About time I excelled at something.

I ain't gonna lie—I done some pretty bad shit. But who hasn't? If you got any imagination and you live long enough, you're bound to break a rule or two. Everybody lies to someone—their doctor, their kids, their priest—and some of us lie to all three. But I never been very good at lying. I'm really good at screwing up, but not very good at covering up. I guess we all have our weak spots.

My first night at the ACI isn't like I expected. It's quiet, and the building feels abandoned, like everybody just ran outside for a fire alarm. The guards don't say much, and neither do the other ladies, and I'm grateful for the silence. In prison movies you always see the inmates fucking with the new guy, but maybe that's only for the men 'cause nobody fucks with me the first night. Like they don't want to mess with you till they know how crazy you are. Pretty soon they'll see I'm crazy no matter what. Crazy clean. Crazy high. Crazy locked up. Crazy free.

They must know it, too, 'cause they send me to the sick ward first thing. A nurse twice my size walks me there when I'm still in my street clothes. She don't say anything and she don't look me in the eyes. When we go through a set of locked doors, she holds my shoulder like I'm an old lady and she's helping me cross the street. She rubs an old burn scar on my wrist and asks if it still hurts.

“I can't feel anything,” I tell her.

The room they give me is small and cold like they got the AC running. There's nothing on the walls, and the only furniture in the room is a bed on a metal frame. It's close to the ground, like a child's bed, and the mattress is covered in a thick plastic that squeaks when I sit down. The toilet is in the corner, behind a half wall. It's metal, and the toilet seat is missing, and all of a sudden it hits me—I'm locked up. Seeing that toilet finally makes it real.

“You're lucky,” the nurse says. “Most people don't get their own toilet.”

I look at her. I want to say something, but my head hurts too much to speak.

“They must think you're going to need it.”

I look out the window, which got no curtains. It's tiny, but it lets in enough light to keep me from sleeping. I can see the edge of a parking lot and a sign that says
STAFF
. The cars look like toys my son used to line up and forget about. The sun is rising in a gray sky and I watch the trees blow silently in the wind. I wish there weren't any windows, so I could block out everything from the outside.

The nurse finally leaves. I sit on the floor and hug my
knees to my chest. I can feel my last fix wearing off, so I hold my breath and wait for the buzzing to start. My hands twitch. I look at the walls to steady myself. They are the color of my skin, a pale and washed-out gold. My head pulses as I feel them start to close in on me. They must be soundproof, 'cause when I scream, nobody comes.

By lunchtime I think I'm dying. The pain is so big it's like my head can't stretch around it. I'm cold, but I'm also sweating, and when the sheets get all wet it's like lying naked on a frozen lake. But then it switches and all of a sudden I'm hot and thirsty and the covers are like a blanket of sand that suffocates me. My sweat starts to burn my skin like fire ants are crawling out of my hair. I try to scratch them all out but they won't die—it's like they're feeding off my sweat—and even when I pull them out one by one and flush them down the toilet, they keep coming.

There's a bucket for me to puke in, and when it's full someone dumps it out and brings it back to me empty. It's rinsed, but it still smells like death. I sit on the toilet for what seems like hours. I hear songs in my head from my childhood, things my mother used to sing to put me to sleep. I hear my children laughing. I try to picture their faces, but I can't see past the pain: a bright orange wave crashing into the sand. Everything in me screams,
I want to go home
.

Then something changes. I want to die but I can't—I won't—'cause something in my body won't let me quit. It's not going to stop, I think to myself. The rest of my life is going to be like this. No end to the crazy heat and ice, the dizziness, the vomiting up of everything I eat and even bits of food I only think about eating. Every time I pass out—every time I think it's over and I'm already in the next world trying to lie, cheat, or steal my way into heaven—I wake up and realize I'm only sleeping and the pain is still there and I haven't been let go and I'm not free. I keep thinking,
I'm not strong enough for this, I'm not strong enough to live through this,
but my body just won't quit.

On the third day I know it's time to stop. I give in to the pain and let it just run over me, till it fills every corner of my useless body and spills onto the floor around me. I guess I was hoping it would happen all at once—that one wave would
come and just drown me—but it keeps coming back and coming back and coming back until it's done. I thought it would beat me until I died, but when it's over I'm still alive and I don't think that means I'm brave or strong but I guess it proves I can endure almost anything—even life.

A week later they transfer me to my regular room and now I'm just like any other woman in here. I have to get up for bed check and do my daily jobs and meet with counselors and try to deal with the fact that I'm in prison, and that I don't have control over my body. I can't just walk outside, take a shower, have sex, shoot up, or see my kids whenever I want to. I won't be able to do any of those things for the next nine months. The length of a school year. The time it takes to grow a baby to be strong enough for the outside world.

After a few weeks they take me to the infirmary and a social worker tells me they're going to test me for HIV and Hepatitis C. I tell her they don't need to bother with the Hep C 'cause I already know I have it from when I lost my last baby. I didn't even know I was pregnant but I started to bleed real bad and the doctor at the clinic said I was miscarrying. Turns out he was only a medical student. I asked him if it was from the drugs and he said maybe, but my liver was also sick and my diet wasn't too good and we'd never really know what went wrong. He said he wasn't surprised about the Hep C 'cause almost all junkies get it eventually, since bleaching needles won't kill the virus. He told me I should use the needle exchange so I could at least get my own needles even if I couldn't stop using.

The social worker doesn't look at me. She puts down her coffee and takes a deep breath. Her pants are tight at the waist. She looks tired. The color of her fingernail polish matches her lipstick, a purple as dark as an eggplant. If she would smile, she could erase ten years and be pretty again. I want to tell her that, but I don't want to break the silence.

She puts a new legal pad and a pencil in the middle of her desk. Then she puts on her eyeglasses and starts reading from a
long list of questions.

“Did you ever try to get treatment for the Hep C?”

“They said I couldn't because I was still using.”

“Did you ever try to stop?”

“A few times. Never lasted more than forty-eight hours.”

She writes something down on the pad. “So this is the first time you've been clean in how long?”

I shrug. “I guess around three years.”

She nods. “And how does it feel?”

“Like shit.”

She looks down. “That's to be expected.” She circles something in my file. “We'll need to do a blood test to find out how your liver's doing. Maybe now that you're clean you can actually get some help.” She crosses her hands on the desk. “Now what about HIV?”

“What you mean?”

“AIDS. Have you ever been tested?”

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“Do you think you're at risk?”

I shrug. “Ain't everybody?”

“If you practice unsafe sex and share needles, yes.”

“So I guess I am.”

She hands me a form and tells me to sign at the bottom if I give my consent. When I take a long time reading it she asks me if I need the Spanish version. I shake my head. Either way I know all it says is that I don't have any rights.

She starts to fill in the testing form, but when she gets to my birthday she looks up from the file. “It says here that you were born in 1969?”

“Yeah.”

“But that means you're only…twenty-nine.”

I nod. “Thirty this winter.”

She looks at my hands, the fingertips yellow from cigarettes and bleach, and then looks away. People always think I look older than I am. When I was a kid I liked it 'cause it helped me get into bars when I shoulda been going to school.

“Still got my whole life ahead of me.” I laugh, trying to make her feel better, but the lady won't even smile.

A nurse comes in with a needle and a fat rubber band and tries to find a decent vein to draw blood. My left arm is shot from using and my right one is half-covered by a burn that never healed right, so she ends up using a vein in my thigh. I stop myself from telling her that I've had to use that one, too. Shot some bad shit from Philly that was laced with coke and kept me up two nights. It's a useless talent, but I can remember the specifics of almost every time I've used—where I bought it, where I shot it, how long the high lasted—like how my husband used to memorize baseball stats.

After she draws more blood than I knew I had, she labels the vials with numbers from my file and leaves without saying a word. The social worker speaks once we're alone again.

“We'll have the results in two weeks. They'll bring you back here to meet with me and then we'll go over what it means together. In the meantime, I can give you some literature on HIV prevention.”

“I thought it was an AIDS test.”

“We're testing you for HIV, which is the virus that causes AIDS. There is no actual test for AIDS.”

“So how do you know if I got it?”

“If you're HIV positive we'll get you meds so you can stay healthy. Hopefully you won't get AIDS.” She rubs her eyes, like this conversation is exhausting her. “I know it's a lot of information to take in at once. Do you have any other questions?”

I want to laugh or scream in her stupid face. Instead, I lean forward in my chair. Our eyes lock.

“Just tell me the truth—you think I got it?”

She looks at me. We seem to see each other for the first time.

“You'd be a lot sicker if you had AIDS,” she says.

She takes off her glasses; they hang from a chain around her neck. I reach for my own necklace, a gold cross my mother gave me before she died, forgetting that the guards took it off when they checked me in. I rub my fingers against the bare skin, as if I could somehow make it reappear.

She leans in closer. Her voice is softer when she finally speaks, like she's apologizing. “I'll tell you what I tell everyone,
Arcelia. Your body already knows if you have HIV. Now we're going to find out. All you can do is hope for the best while you prepare for the worst.”

I want to ask her what that means, but I don't. I'm done talking for now. Nobody in here knows me, and I want to keep it that way. When I die I don't want to leave anything behind. Except my children. Those three are the only thing that's gonna outlast me. The only proof I was ever here.

On my way out she hands me a stack of orange and blue pamphlets covered with cartoon drawings of rubbers and needles. The one on top says, “HIV: What Every Woman Needs to Know.” Underneath it another one says, “Ten Things You Can Do to Avoid HIV.” I tuck them into my pocket and wait for a guard to come get me, wondering if it's already too late.