The Best American Essays 2016 (11 page)

She opened the file and put on her reading glasses, flipped through the pages quickly. “Well,” she said, “I know you’ve been suspended quite a few times.” She observed me from behind her reading glasses.

“Okay,” I said, not surprised to find that everything she thought she knew she’d read from my school records.

She kept going, not taking her eyes off me. “I know you’ve been in a number of fights, in and out of school, that you ran away from home a year ago and the police picked you up two weeks later, that you were arrested last month for aggravated battery, and you have a hearing coming up.” She took her glasses off and waited.

I took a deep breath but said nothing.

“I know you’re
angry
,” she said, really emphasizing the word
angry
, “but what I don’t know is why.”

I shrugged and looked down at my sneakers, suddenly feeling like I’d made a mistake, like I’d rather be faking my way through Ms. Jones’s math test than sitting there being questioned.

“So why don’t you tell me,” she said, closing the file without even looking at it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She nodded. “Why don’t you tell me about your situation at home?”

I had no idea what she meant by “situation,” but I just shrugged again, rolled my eyes like I’d done so many times with Ms. Jones. “What do you wanna know?”

“Let’s start with what brought you here.”

I considered telling her that I’d just wanted to get out of class, but somehow I didn’t think she’d like that. I crossed my legs, uncrossed them. “Sometimes I live with my father,” I said, “and sometimes I live with my mother.”

“So they share custody.”

I shook my head no. “I just go whenever I want.”

“Where are you living now?”

“Mostly with my mother. But sometimes I don’t sleep there.”

“So where do you sleep?”

“Friends’ houses, boyfriend’s house, the beach.”

“The beach?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

It could’ve been her expression, the way her face contorted into something I read as disbelief, then anger, then pity, even though she was supposed to be the counselor for all the school’s fuckups, so she was supposed to be the woman who’d heard it all, seen it all. Or could’ve been something else—that I’d admitted this for the first time, confessed it to someone other than my delinquent friends, even though it wasn’t really anything, nothing compared to what still needed confessing. That once, last year, I stood in front of the mirror in my father’s bathroom with a box cutter, determined to slit my wrists, but then couldn’t do it, and instead I carved up my upper arm so deep it left a scar. That sometimes I saw myself climbing up on the concrete balcony in my father’s high-rise building, saw myself sitting on the edge, leaning forward, letting the pull of gravity take me. That even though I didn’t like to think about it, I found myself catching feelings for girls, that sometimes when I was around Boogie the swelling in my chest and throat was like a bomb that was ready to explode.

But I couldn’t say any of this. I didn’t know why. But right then, sitting in Ms. Gold’s office, the last place I’d expected to be even an hour before, I started to cry.

The second time was that winter. Holiday break. My mother was off her meds, and we’d been fighting for three days straight. We screamed at each other because there was no food in the house. Because my music was too loud. Because, my mother claimed, there had been a woman in the apartment going through her things and I’d been the one to let her in. Mami always had these stories—a woman who came into our living room and moved all the furniture while we slept, a man who kept looking in our windows at 2:00 a.m., people sending her messages through the television or the radio, a fat guy who came in and ate all our food while my mother stood in the kitchen, paralyzed with fear.

That morning my mother woke me before sunrise as she paced around the apartment talking to herself, refusing to take her pills or let me sleep. I covered my head with my pillow, and she pulled it off, started shaking me. I needed to get up, she said, help her check all the windows so nobody could get in the house. I turned over, my back to her.

She shook me again, yelled, “I said get up!”

“Fine!” I said. “I’m up.” I’d already learned that when my mother was like this, I had no choice but to do what she ordered. So I ran around the apartment checking all the windows—the living room, her bedroom, my bedroom. I made sure the deadbolt on the front door was locked, then got back into bed.

Ten minutes later my mother burst into my room, insisting that I’d left the windows open again. But this time I didn’t get up. I was awake but refused to indulge her. She yelled. I yelled back. She threatened. I threatened back. Then she left.

She came back with a steak knife, pointed it at me like it was a sword.

“Who are you?” she asked.

I jerked up and hit my head on the wooden beam of the top bunk. “What the fuck are you doing?” I jumped out of bed and on instinct grabbed my pillow, the closest thing I could use as a shield.

“Tell me who you are,” she said, “because you are not my daughter.”

I should’ve cried, begged her to stop, to put the knife down. I should’ve apologized and told her I loved her. But I didn’t.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “I never wanted to be your daughter! You’re not my mother. You’re a crazy fucking crackhead!”

She stood there for a while without saying a word.

I kept my eye on the knife, gripping the pillow with both hands.

“You are small,” she said finally, “like a fly. You are so small I could squash you. You are nobody. You are nothing.”

I didn’t believe what my mother said—not at first. I took it the same way I always took her rambling—everything she said was nonsense. But after she turned back for her room, left me standing there with the pillow in my hands, everything quiet except for the sound of my own breathing, something changed. It was like a switch that got flipped and everything that happened after was mechanical.

Dropping the pillow on the bed, the beeline for the kitchen for a glass of water from the tap, a car horn blaring across the street somewhere.

My mother rushing to the living room window, peeking through the blinds.

The bottles of my mother’s prescriptions on the counter, untouched for weeks.

My mother running back into her bedroom, slamming the door shut.

The first pill, a drink of water. The second pill, another drink. The third, fourth, fifth, another drink.

My mother coming back out of her bedroom, pacing back and forth. Bedroom, living room, bedroom.

Another pill, another drink. Bedroom, living room. Another pill and another and another.

The car horn again.

The way my mother walked past me so many times but never once turned to look at me, to see me killing myself again and again.

The wanting, more than anything else, to sleep.

My mother saying, “You are small.”

My mother saying, “You are nobody.”

My mother saying, “You are nothing.”

The second time, I swallowed all my mother’s pills, locked myself in my room, didn’t sit to wait until she found me. The second time, I slid a dresser in front of the bedroom door to keep my mother out. The second time, I woke sick to my stomach, stumbled out of bed but couldn’t get the dresser out of the way in time to make it to the bathroom, so I threw up all over the carpet in my bedroom. The second time, I woke to find that, again, I had not died.

In my bedroom, spewing a foul white foam that I assumed was my mother’s pills, and then the Kentucky Fried Chicken that Kilo had brought over late last night—blowing chunks of chicken and mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese—I was sure that if I didn’t die of a prescription drug overdose, then the retching would kill me. I bent over the mess on the carpet and the vomiting turned to dry heaving.

It took me a few minutes to straighten up, to push the dresser out of the way, to wash my face and brush my teeth, to get my sneakers on and my hair in a ponytail, to stuff some of my things in my backpack and go.

I walked past Normandy Park, feeling jittery and weak, headed toward the Circle-K, where I bought a small bottle of Gatorade and got some change for the pay phone. Outside, I sipped some of the Gatorade, then picked up the phone, my hands shaking. And then I threw up again, just liquid this time, left the receiver dangling, and bent over right there on the spot.

Again it took me a minute to get myself together. Then I finally made the call. I put two quarters in the phone and dialed my father. The line rang four or five times before Papi picked up.

“Hello,” he said, but not like a question, more like he was annoyed at whoever was calling. I was surprised by the sound of his voice, which I hadn’t heard in months—not since I ran away to my mother’s house. His voice stirred something inside me, and I couldn’t believe how much I missed him, how much I needed him. I wanted to ask him for help. I wanted to tell him everything that happened since I left, ask him to come and get me, take me home. But he’d let me down so many times, and I’d let him down so many times, I was sure it was the only thing we would ever do—let each other down.

“Hello?” he said again.

But I couldn’t do it. So I hung up.

I stood there for a long time, feeling tired and weak and so sick. I considered just going back to my mother’s, getting back in bed, letting myself drift off. But I wasn’t sure if the pills could still work, if my body had absorbed some of them before I threw up, if there was still a chance I could die.

I picked up the receiver again, but this time I called Kilo.

Twenty minutes later, Kilo’s dad picked me up in front of my mom’s building. He was driving his station wagon, Papo riding shotgun, and Kilo in the back. I got in, dropped my backpack on the floor, and thanked them for picking me up.

“Where to?” Kilo’s dad asked.

I gave him my father’s address in South Beach, and he made a right out of my mom’s complex.

In the backseat, Kilo held my hand. I hadn’t told him that my mother had pulled a knife on me, or that just hours before, I’d swallowed her pills and gone to bed, that I woke up vomiting, surprised to still be alive. All I’d said on the phone was that I was sick and needed a ride to my father’s.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, and he put his arm around me. In the front, Papo and Kilo’s dad were talking about the Miami Dolphins, Joe Robbie Stadium, what they planned to do this winter. When I called Kilo for a ride, I’d already known that I’d be leaving Normandy Isle for good, that there was no way in hell I’d ever go back with my mother, not if I could help it. I knew that my leaving would mean I wouldn’t see Kilo, Boogie, and Papo every day, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to stay out all night or hang in the streets whenever I wanted, that we could easily drift apart. But I was so tired.

Kilo leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, then whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t make out. I told myself that he said, “I love you,” even though I knew it wasn’t true, but for now I needed it to be.

I spent most of the ride to South Beach thinking of our time as if it were already in the past. How Kilo and I danced at the Nautilus Middle School Halloween dance, all sweaty and breathless and crazy. How once Papo introduced me to his neighbor as his sister-in-law, and afterward he always called me
Sis
. How we walked all over the place—the four of us shooting the shit from Seventy-First and Collins to Normandy Isle to Bay Harbor, even at three, four in the morning. How Boogie and I sat on a bench by the courts in Normandy Park, knocking back a quart, pretending we were grown and watching the pickup game. How Kilo and Papo acted like they were super-fly streetballers when really they were just okay. How in Kilo’s room the walls were all tagged up with spray paint and Sharpie, covered in bad graffiti, his homeboys’ names, their neighborhoods, and on the bedroom door, the largest piece:
RIP MIKEY.
How once I got so pissed that my name wasn’t written anywhere, I took his Sharpie and wrote
JAQUI N BOOGIE
on the wall next to his bed, then drew a heart around it. How he came when I called. How maybe he saved my life and didn’t even know it.

By January we would barely see each other. By Valentine’s Day, Kilo would already be with the girl who’d become the mother of his baby.

When I got out of the car in front of my father’s apartment complex, the air was too warm for winter. Even for December in Miami Beach. I strapped on my backpack, watched the station wagon as it drove off, headed north. They would drive past North Beach, past Seventy-First and Collins, then make a left toward Crespi Park. I would go into the lobby of the south tower, take the elevator up to my father’s apartment on the eighth floor, where my
abuela
would greet me with a hot meal and
café con leche
, always ready to forgive me for stealing her cigarettes, for running away, for getting arrested so many times.

A few days after going back home, I would have a dream. I’d be on the roof of the north tower, standing close to the edge, my arms extended like wings. I would be looking down at Biscayne Bay and across at the Venetian Islands, and then I would jump, and before I hit the ground, I would be flying, flying. The dream would come back every couple of months, and always I would fly before hitting concrete.

A couple of years after the French woman jumped, another woman—Papi’s friend—would fling herself off one of the balconies. The south tower this time. She would hit the side of the building, then the roof of the pool maintenance storage shed, then the ground. She would fall fifteen stories. And she would live.

IRINA DUMITRESCU

My Father and The Wine

FROM
The Yale Review

The making of wine binds me to my ancestors who were tough-sinewed peasants and whose feet were rooted in the earth.

—Angelo Pellegrini,
The Unprejudiced Palate