Nevaeh's Hope

by Thereasa Black

  Nevaeh told me who killed Junior, I didn’t see the man’s face. I just know where the shot came from because I was looking at Junior the whole time. Nobody looks around after their brother is shot, you can’t look away from him. Nevaeh never told me how she knew who killed him or why they were even over there that day. She doesn’t talk about it. After the cops told us that there was nothing that they could do since no one else was willing to make a statement, she never spoke about it again. Nevaeh won’t go down the street where Junior was killed. She won’t even look in that direction when we’re walking down the street. I don’t think she’s been to the cemetery since the funeral. It’s like she doesn’t want to remember that he existed. Like she’s choosing to feel nothing instead of the pain at the expense of forgetting her little brother. I wonder if she’d just forget me too.

  Marsha

  Sometimes, when I’m coming down, I make the decision that I’m going to quit this shit and go home. I remember that my life sucked before I found out about what Jamal did to Nevaeh and I was fine. Miserable, lonely, sad, but fine. Then after a few hours I change my mind. I start to think, really think, and I realize that I knew something was off with Jamal. I saw the way he looked at Nevaeh and Sasha too sometimes. I shrugged it off. “Men look at other women sometimes,” that’s what I would tell myself. But they weren’t “other women,” they were little girls and I saw it in his eyes. I’d seen that look before when I was younger, so I knew, but I ignored it. The idea of laying in my bed alone, the thought of having no one to reach for in the middle of the night, the belief that I wasn’t good enough to be loved by anyone else, made me look the other way. Just like my momma did.

  Nevaeh

  Sometimes I don’t recognize myself in the mirror anymore. My eyes, it’s like they’ve aged twenty years. I don’t see the pained, forgiving child that I once saw. A grieving, hateful woman, full of anger, has replaced that child. Who am I angry at? Everyone, everyone. It’s as if each person that I see, all the people I have meant, they’ve all played a role in making me end up in this hell. I’m mad at the strangers on the street for knowing that poverty and violent neighborhoods like mine exist and ignoring the ever-expanding problem that threatens to destroy this country. I blame my friends and teachers for not seeing the torment in my eyes. I blame Sasha for being so naïve that I have to sacrifice everything to keep her from the wolves of the world. I blame Junior for believing that he was a killer just because he grew up in this community. I blame my mom for being too weak to bear the burden that comes with surviving in our world. But most of all, I blame myself, for having hope. For thinking that despite it all, everything was going to work out. How can I possibly be mad at others for not seeing my pain when the mask that I wore was so deceiving that I couldn’t even recognize it as a disguise?

  I’ve been haunted by Junior since the day he died. It was my fault that he went to that house. If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be alive; that’s all that he reminds me of when he comes to me. I can hardly stand to be in this house knowing that Junior walked its hallways. I can’t go near Breeze’s house or to the cemetery. His voice is too loud when I’m there. He always asks the same question, “Why Nevaeh, why?”

  He never elaborates, but he doesn’t need to. I know what he’s asking me. Why was our mother’s life more important than his? Why didn’t I protect him? Why, deep down inside, did I believe that he deserved to die since it was his fault that my son was dead? I never said the words out loud, but I thought them into fruition. I asked God why it wasn’t Junior that died instead of my innocent baby, but they were both innocent babies. I realize that now, I realized it too late. My thoughts seem to be the Grim Reaper. But why, then, isn’t Breeze dead? More importantly, why is the man that started us on this deadly path still breathing while all of the innocent lives that he trampled on are being taken away? If my thoughts have any power, if God is just, Jamal will die, a slow and painful death.

  Sasha

  Things are getting bad lately, well worse. We hardly ever have food to eat and we started getting eviction notices. I don’t understand why they just started to come now. My mom must have been paying the rent even though she wasn’t around, but now she just can’t afford it. I don’t know where we will go if we can’t. I asked Nevaeh if child services would come get us and put us in a home. She said someone would have to care enough to call them first. I don’t really know what she meant, but I guess it means that they won’t come get us. Mama would probably let us stay with her if they kicked us out, but maybe not. I heard her tell Nevaeh not too long ago that she already raised her mistake and she wasn’t about to raise anyone else’s.

  Were we mistakes? After I heard her say that I used a dictionary at school to look up the word. I mean, I knew what the word meant, but how could a baby be a mistake? It said a mistake was “an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge.” Was I an error in judgment caused by poor reasoning and carelessness? My grandma seemed to think that I was. I don’t agree with her, babies can’t be mistakes. They are gifts.

  I think that Nevaeh thought that her baby was a mistake. Grandma said God saved him by taking him home early, but he never got a chance to come home. He never had a chance to be loved, to be held, to wrap his tiny hand around my finger, to look into his mom’s eyes and know that everything was going to be okay. He could have been the next President or the doctor that discovered the cure for AIDS, but instead he became just another sacrifice to the street gods. His death was the mistake, not him, not the baby. Babies can’t be mistakes, they can only be gifts.

  Marsha

  My daddy was a sweet man, always gentle, always loving. I was the only kid in my neighborhood whose daddy was still around. I always took pride in that. The other little girls on my block would get jealous when they saw him kiss and hug me goodbye every morning before school. I used to love that feeling, knowing that everyone thought that I was special, especially my daddy. He used to tell me all the time how special I was, when my mom wasn’t around. He taught me about all of my special places and showed me what boys were going to try to do to me. I didn’t know that there was anything wrong with it at the time. He told me not to tell my mom. He always had a good reason and since I knew my mom didn’t like to talk about boys, I thought that’s why she asked my daddy to explain it to me.

  I talked to my friend Stacy about it when I was around eleven, she told me that her mom’s boyfriend did the same things to her. We thought it was normal. It hurt, but that didn’t make it wrong. One day my friend’s mom came home and saw her boyfriend touching Stacy. Her mom grabbed the first thing that she saw and started hitting him over the head with it, crying the whole time. We did know if she did it because she was upset with what he was doing to Stacy or because she was mad that he was cheating. When the cops took her mom away, she was just crying and saying over and over, “He was hurting my baby.” That didn’t stop them for putting her in jail for second degree murder. Stacy went to a foster home after that, where a different man did the same things to her, only this time, we knew for sure that it was wrong.

  I didn’t want to end up in foster care; I didn’t want my parents to be ripped away from me only to end up in the same situation, except this time with a stranger. I tried to resist my dad, tell him to stop, threatened to turn him in, but he didn’t care. He said if I hadn’t told yet, I wasn’t going to. And he was right. I didn’t want my mom to kill my daddy, didn’t want to end up alone, so I kept my mouth shut. Years went by, they felt like decades, things never changed.

  It was almost a routine by the time Max and I got together. The first time Max and I made love, I knew that I couldn’t take my father’s abuse anymore. I thought about cutting off his dick. I thought about telling Max. I settled on telling a counselor at school. This way, my mom wouldn't have the chance to kill him before he was taken away.

  That night the cops came and picked him up. I never saw him again.
I spoke to a lot of doctors and female counselors in small rooms. We looked at a lot of pictures, I did a lot of pointing at pictures to show them what he did and where he did it, and then it was all over.

  I soon realized that my mom wouldn’t have killed him if I had told her. She wouldn’t have done a damn thing. She probably even knew what he was doing to me the whole time. After my dad was found guilty, my mom told me that he was in prison and she’d always be alone now, because of me.

  Because of me. Those words always stuck in my brain. She said it was my fault that he molested his daughter, that she left me alone with him so often, and that he had a mental sickness that made him sexually aroused by children. It was all because of me. She didn’t look at me the same after that. I guess she was the envy of the moms of the block because her man was the only one who stuck around or wasn’t in jail. I took that away from her, I made her just like everybody else, and she hated me for it. I became an orphan after all.

  I knew Nevaeh wasn’t lying. I recognized the look in her eyes. I spent years living under that same constant gaze. Though I promised never to look at my children the way that my mother looked at me, I couldn’t prevent her from casting that betrayed look upon me.

  That’s how I kind of knew about Jamal before Nevaeh said anything. He reminded me of my daddy, that’s probably why a little part of me always wanted to keep him around. Even after all that he did, I still loved my daddy. But everyone knows what happens to child molesters in prison, and though I forgave him, he will never forgive me.

  These are the thoughts that invade my mind when I come down. They are what always makes me take another hit. Maybe if I could just forget it all, maybe if I could just forgive myself, maybe then I could go home. Maybe.

  Nevaeh

  We’ve been living in the dark for months now, the eviction notice on the door says that we have two weeks before we’re kicked out, and the EBT card has stopped working. The only reason we were able to survive without my mom is because I stole the EBT card from her about a year ago, section eight paid for our housing, and the low-income discount made our electric free. Unfortunately, all of those programs require annual renewals. The welfare office requires people to come in and personally renew their benefits. I think they’d notice if I showed up in the place of my mom. Even if I could manage to get my worthless mom to the office, the state just enacted a new welfare law. No benefits without a clean drug test. What a brilliant decision by the state legislature. It’s like they’re saying, “Children, I know you’re going through enough heart ache with a drug addicted parent who can’t maintain a job, but to make matters just a little bit worse, we’re going to take away your sustenance until they decide to get their act together.”

  You never hear about drug addicts sucking dicks for food. No one tells stories of people choosing to live in crack houses and giving up their families so that they can get more food. What on Earth made lawmakers believe that taking away a drug addicts’ food would make them turn their life around?

  They couldn’t have believed that preventing a drug addict’s children from eating was going to resolve the drug epidemic. They just wanted to save money. It’s simple economics really. Pennsylvania will save at least a month of benefit money for each recreational drug user that comes in and doesn’t know about the new law because they have to wait at least one month to re-apply. Then they probably estimated that about one quarter of welfare beneficiaries were drug addicts and they wouldn’t be able to remain clean for long enough to pass a drug test. That would automatically decrease the welfare budget by one fourth. Of course, the result would be more starving children in America, but that bottom line is damn pretty. Besides, big cities are riddled with a bunch of hungry poor kids, what’s a couple thousand more?

  Everyone in the neighborhood knows the state that our mom is in. They see her standing on the corner in her filthy clothing, arguing with her ghosts. In the beginning, people invited us over for meals and tried to include us in their holidays and birthdays. We accepted with open arms. It’s a great feeling when you think that someone cares about you, but fixed incomes can’t be stretched. $750 a month is still $750 a month. Minimum wage minus taxes is a motherfucker, literally. These single mothers were working full time, minimum wage jobs and couldn’t support their own families, but they were still willing to hold out a helping hand to Sasha and I.

  After a while, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let other children have even less so that we could have a little. When we stopped coming by for meals, people brought plates over to the apartment, at first. Eventually, the food only came on holidays, then not at all. It was crazy how much support we received from strangers. Not strangers in the sense that we didn’t know them, but in the fact that they weren’t blood.

  Our grandmother knew about my mom’s problem before all of our neighbors did. For some reason, my mom usually ended up outside of my grandma’s house whenever she got high. From the beginning, my grandma said, “No one can afford to take care of another person’s mistakes.” She didn’t bring us food, she didn’t come to make sure that our lights were on, it’s like we failed to exist the moment that my mom failed to be around. I’ve come to accept that our grandma has her own problems, but that doesn’t help me understand. What have we done that is so bad that we are unlovable?

  Sasha

  The streets were crying last night, yet another child’s blood was spilled. I don’t know for sure that it was a kid, but it was somebody’s kid. They all are. I heard the gunshots from my bed. I still sleep in the bunk bed that Junior and I used to share. Nevaeh told me that I should just move to mom’s room since she’s not around anymore, but I can’t. I think that spirits go back to the places where they spent the most time while they were alive. Our room is where I feel closest to Junior.

  My room is also the reminder of all that I’ve lost. Junior was ripped from me. My mom has drifted away. My nephew was gone before I even got to see him smile. And Nevaeh seems present, but her eyes tell a story of vacancy. Lately, when I look into the mirror, I see Nevaeh’s eyes looking back at me. I try to think happy thoughts in order to take away the cold, sad glare.

  Every night I dream that things are the way that they were, but when I wake up, it’s as though I lost everything all over again. Sometimes I wish that I wouldn’t wake up, that I could just live in the fantasy. Then I realize, that’s probably what my mom is doing, and take back my wish.

  Our room and those gunshots last night took me back to Junior, took me back to the last time that I saw his face. As the bullets flew outside of my window, all I could see was his head exploding behind my eyelids. The fear paralyzed all but my bladder as that familiar warmth eased its way into my sheets. Too embarrassed to go to the bathroom and too afraid to move, I laid in the dampness until I was lured back to that familiar place where troubles melt like lemon drops.

  Chapter V

  Hope

  Marsha

  “Your children are orphans, always have been.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense Daddy. For them to be orphans I’d have to be dead.”

  “You are dead, to them. You’ve always hated them. Saddest part is that it took them this long to figure that out.”

  “No, you don't know what you’re talking about Daddy. They love me, they know that I love them. I gave up everything, everything for them. I wouldn’t do that if I hated them.”

  “You’ve always felt it, that disdain. They took away your bright future. You were the smartest kid in school.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Everyone knew you were the one that was gonna go to college.”

  “Stop!”

  “You were the only one whose father loved her.”

  “Daddy why are you saying these things?”

  “Then you got knocked up.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “That future that had shown so bright went black. College was out of sight.”

  “I was still gonna go to college. Just a
s soon as Nevaeh was old enough for daycare.”

  “Everyone changed their mind about how smart you were. After all, what kind of genius gets pregnant so young?”

  “They said I was dumb, that I threw everything away.”

  “You were dumb, they knew it. You knew it.”

  “I wasn’t dumb. I had a plan, everything was going to be alright.”

  “But then came the baby. Nevaeh destroyed your plan. You knew the second that Max started selling drugs that college wasn’t going to happen.”

  “No, I knew it the second I found out that I was pregnant with the twins. They killed my plan, killed my future, killed my dream.”

  “And you hated them for it.”

  “All three of them. But I hated you too Daddy. Daddy? Are you there?”

  Nevaeh

  Child services figured us out about two years ago. After the EBT card stopped working, I had no choice but to steal food. When I was caught, that was it for us. I was sent to a detention center close to Pittsburg. They never really told me where I was, it wasn’t like they needed to. No one was going to come and visit me. Sasha was placed in foster care. She called me whenever she could. She loved it at her new home, though, Sasha always had a way of finding the good in everything.

  Soon after I was shipped off, our dad was released from prison. At first, he told the state that he wanted to take us back. Because he and my mom weren’t married when we were born, he had to take a blood test to prove paternity. He and I weren’t a match, but they did have the DNA of my actual father on file. Turns out, my mother and I share the same dad.