Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  It hit me then: I couldn’t remember the last time Ma and I had had a conversation. All we’d been saying to each other was “Hi” and “Bye.” Our last real talk may have been five months ago, when she signed me up for Junior High School 80.

  The thought sent more tears streaming down my face; I couldn’t control it. Up until that moment, I told myself that I was handling her illness better than this; I prided myself on it. But avoidance allows you to believe that you’re making all kinds of strides when you’re not. I thought I had dealt with my feelings of pain over my mother’s AIDS, but the image of her lying helpless under Brick’s rage brought it all back. Like an exposed nerve, I felt the reality of her sickness jabbing at me. AIDS just wasn’t ever talked about in my family. Ma and Daddy didn’t talk about it, not even Dr. Morales brought it up, and certainly Brick didn’t talk about it. He watched Ma take her medication, could see her getting weaker, but he still made demands on her. Judging by the condom wrappers I found lying around, I am sure that for as long as Ma could manage it, they were even having sex.

  No one was talking about her AIDS, even as it was eating away at her in front of us. Yet it was as tangible and present as the shaky foundation we stood on with Brick. Ma’s rapid deterioration and her sickness, like the sickness of our collective denial, was real.

  Two weeks before, I’d been sitting in the kitchen alone when Ma burst in, crying, trembling. She went straight for the top of the fridge without noticing me, reaching for her fat brown paper bag of medication. The eruptive entrance and her raw, obvious pain had frozen me still. I watched her struggle with a childproof top. I didn’t dare speak for fear of embarrassing her. When the bottle finally popped open, the pills spilled out over the table, landing with dozens of little clicks against the wood. With great difficulty, Ma plucked up two, placed them on her tongue, and with one deep inhale, she paused her crying just long enough to swallow. In doing so, she caught sight of me.

  “Ma” was all I said, one perfectly useless syllable, and nothing more.

  “You’re too young for this,” she told me, raising her hand even as it shook. “I’m sorry. You’re too young.”

  I stared back blankly and just watched her go, the white pills still scattered across the dark tabletop.

  I’d never been too young for anything—not for the drugs, or for Ma’s graphic stories of teen prostitution—but I was too young for this, for AIDS. I absolutely hated myself for proving her right, for doing so little to soothe my mother when she needed me most. I was there for everything else, but when Ma was fighting AIDS, I had put a distance between us. Or, had she taken a distance from me? Something happened to us, because after she left University Avenue, after the group home, and now as she was getting sicker, we just weren’t close anymore. And now I had Sam, and my days were enlivened with cutting school, dreaming about the future with my friends, and a new vitality I’d never known before. What it boiled down to was, the more joy I experienced with my friends, the harder it was to come home to Ma and an apartment filled with her sickness. The harder it was to be near her dying. It was so much easier to not come home at all, to be with my group.

  “Selfish,” I said out loud to myself, harshly wiping tears from my face. On 202nd Street, I looked up at Bobby’s living room window, at the warm light glowing from it. I thought of his smile, the way it lit his large eyes, made them so inviting. I headed upstairs.

  Paula, his mother, served us pork chops and rice in front of his bedroom TV. It was tuned to wrestling, which made Bobby throw his arms up and cheer every few minutes, in a way that kept revealing his bare stomach and the trail of thin black hair running up to his belly button (I was careful about looking). Back in the hallway, I had wiped my cheeks clean and taken a few deep breaths before knocking, to make sure he didn’t have a clue.

  “I like your room, Bobby,” I said cheerfully. But then I remembered, even as the words escaped my mouth, that I’d told him that already when I’d first walked in.

  “Thanks,” he said, being gentle with the slipup, gracious as he had been when I’d surprised him at his door. “That’s Mankind,” he told me, pointing at the screen to a giant, leather-masked guy whose thick flesh glistened with sweat. The guy grunted into the camera, flew off the ropes, and landed squatting on his opponent’s back, sending a roar up from the crowd and into the room as Bobby flung his arms in the air again. I had no idea how to participate in the topic; Sam usually kept up the wrestling conversations.

  “Yeah? That’s cool. . . . Is he, has he been fighting for a long time?”

  “Mankind is nuts,” he answered, stopping for a moment to look into the next room. “Hold on. Close my door, Chrissy!” he yelled.

  A young girl with softer versions of Bobby’s facial features appeared and leaned in to grab his doorknob. Before closing it, she looked me over, spotting the T-shirt Bobby had given me to wear while mine dried off from the rain.

  “Shut it and get out,” he commanded. She rolled her eyes and slammed it, hard. “Brat,” he said. “Yeah, so this guy’s completely insane.”

  “Oh, like that’s his gimmick?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, just . . . Um, so he’s crazy?”

  “Yeah. And then there’s Bret Hart, who’s known for his precision. See, Liz, they all have something different about them . . .”

  Well into the night, I listened to Bobby talk, playing audience as he thumbed through his wrestling magazines. Leaning back on a pile of his soft pillows, with my legs curled under his blanket, we shared his bed and I drifted into sleep, hypnotized by the distant hum from his mother’s blow dryer and the sound of Bobby’s deep voice.

  “Hello, this is Mr. Doumbia from Child Welfare. I am calling regarding Elizabeth Murray, who has been placed in your custody. According to JHS 80, Ms. Murray is not in regular attendance at school and we are concerned about her future in your custody. Please call me at . . .”

  I was lucky to catch and erase the answering machine message from Mr. Doumbia before Brick had a chance to hear it. I hadn’t been to school in weeks, and I already knew what the message was going to say: I kept up my truancy, I was headed back to St. Anne’s. But I didn’t want to hear it, so I kept deleting the messages whenever I found them, hoping the problem would just go away.

  * * *

  WARNING!

  Apartment 2B is being cleaned and fumigated!

  Please take proper precautions for health & safety!

  —Management

  * * *

  The bold black-and-white flyers had been strewn about our lobby on University Avenue in surplus, tacked above the rusted mailboxes and slipped under each tenant’s door. Daddy hadn’t called to tell me that he was losing the apartment; I found out on my own. Sam and I had been discussing keepsakes and family pictures in the diner when I’d realized that almost everything I owned was still at the other apartment.

  “I’d at least like to have my pictures with me, and maybe a couple of my books too,” I told Sam as we followed the elevated train tracks to University Avenue. Following the 4 train’s route was the only way I knew how to get back to the neighborhood. Every so often a train would rattle by, sparking and screeching overhead. We kicked a can back and forth between us through the weeds growing up out of the sidewalk on Jerome Avenue.

  “I have books on sharks and dinosaurs,” I told her, raising my voice to be heard over the train. “Do you know who Jacques Cousteau is?” I asked eagerly. She shook her head. “My dad has these books . . . you have to check out his underwater photos. You’d never think some of these things existed.”

  As we drew closer, I got to what I really wanted to say. “You’ve never seen a house like this before, Sam, really. When I say it’s bad, I mean it, like a hundred times worse than Brick’s,” I said, hoping to make her realize just how bad the apartment was, so that when she saw for herself she would know that I also realized how bad it was. That way, she wouldn’t look at it and think differentl
y of me.

  “Liz, shut up,” she answered. “You know I love your white ass, don’t even sweat it.”

  Months of sharing with Sam had made me eager to bring her to the apartment on University Avenue, something I’d never done with a friend before, not even Rick and Danny. I’d been too afraid. But after sitting in the diner and talking so much and so often about Daddy and about University, I realized I wanted to show Sam where I came from. More than anyone I knew, I trusted she would understand.

  During the ten months since the court removed me, I’d visited Daddy only once, right in the beginning when they let me out. I thought it would feel good to come home again, but it turned out that being a visitor at Daddy’s was entirely different from living with him. As a visitor, we had to sit down and face each other, make conversation. We had to fill the time with words. This proved harder than I thought it would be. What were we going to talk about? The group home? Ma’s AIDS? His latest high? My new life that didn’t include him? Walter O’Brien? So we ended up watching TV together. Daddy fell asleep on the couch while I sat on one of the living room chairs, flipping channels, sitting beneath the fly tape that was still—after all these years—stuck to the ceiling. Garbage bags were open on the floor, and the stench that once seemed tolerable was so rank that I could hardly breathe. The house had become eerie in our absence. My room had been filled with storage boxes and garbage bags Daddy hadn’t taken out yet. It was obvious just by looking in my room that he had given up on my ever coming back. So I wrote him a note that said what a great time I’d had, and I slipped out while he was asleep.

  I might have gone back to visit Daddy again, except seeing him and our home in that state made me sad in a way that was hard to deal with. Plus, I started having nightmares after that. In them, our family was united and then divided over and over again. Always, we were on the brink of separation in my dreams, the difference hinging on a decision of mine. Always, at the last minute before waking up, I made the wrong call that divided us one more time. The pain was fresh each time it happened. So I stopped coming around altogether.

  Now, as Sam and I approached the building, I saw that planks had been nailed over my parents’ bedroom window and mine. My first impulse was curiosity, but that was quickly overrun by fear. “Sam, I think there was a fire,” I said as we approached the building, our necks craned upward at the boards with black X’s spray-painted across them. I played out the worst scenario in my mind as we climbed the stairs. Was my father alive? Had it all burned? I’d gotten in the habit of expecting the worst. We ran up the stairs and reached the apartment door; there was a stainless-steel padlock blocking our entry. An odd sense of relief filled me, accompanied by confusion. It took me moments to make sense of what I saw. Sam’s voice drew me back; she was reading something about a marshal and seventy-two hours’ notice.

  Outside on the fire escape, we pulled futilely at the large boards. For all our tugging, the only effect we could produce was a small wobble in the oversized plank, which wafted out the apartment’s musky odor. Soon we slumped onto our butts.

  “I just don’t understand. I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell us or where he would even go. I don’t know if our stuff’s still in there, either. Sam, I’m sorry I brought you all the way here, I didn’t—”

  “Liz,” she said, “come here.” I quieted down as we hugged, leaning back on the brick building. Up on the fire escape, placing my head on her shoulder, I breathed in the soft smell of peaches. In that moment I could feel that Sam cared about me as much as I did for her.

  “Oh well,” was all I said after that.

  Sam agreed. “Oh well, Liz. Screw it. What else can you do?”

  There was nothing to do, so neither of us said a thing. Not then, and not when I learned that Daddy had fallen behind on the rent and gone to live in a men’s shelter. And certainly not when I found out that the entire contents of our apartment had been taken away in dumpsters, way before I ever got there. There was just nothing to say or do, but accept it. So I did, like I had everything else so far.

  That spring, I squeaked by, graduating Junior High School 80 with exactly enough attendance to avoid being taken back into the system. After the June ceremony, Ma stood outside on the curb, smoking her Winstons, waiting for me to appear while unknowingly standing right beside a chatting cluster of perfumed, well-dressed parents that happened to include Myers’s and Bobby’s mothers. The guys stood separately, chucking their caps at one another like Frisbees. Bobby’s gown flapped open in the breeze. In his sharp, black suit, he looked like a grown man. His mother looked like the perfect mom; her hair, as brown and thick as her son’s, was pinned up in a shiny French twist.

  Ma had unearthed a short-sleeved floral, thrift-store dress for the occasion. Her arms bore scars that transformed her skin into something like pale hamburger meat. She’d cut her mullet for the occasion, and the white sandals she wore, with no stockings, emphasized the hair on her legs and provided a blatant view of her yellowed toenails, which curled ever so slightly over the edges of her shoes.

  I decided to wait it out in the bushes. As long as I could hide, crouching there, I would avoid the humiliation, preserving any normalcy I enjoyed in my friends’ mothers’ homes. I was done with being the odd one out; I had reinvented myself. I was normal, generally upbeat, even interesting, and I wasn’t giving that back—not now, when I could so easily wait this moment out and avoid the whole ordeal.

  Then something happened that I was unprepared for. Mr. Strezou, the man who must have been insane to pass me on to high school, stopped in front of Ma to make conversation. In his suit and tie, with a nonchalant look on his face, Mr. Strezou reached over and clasped Ma’s hand and shook it, smiling earnestly at her. His eyes were kind. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I saw that Ma had completely come alive with his attention. She was smiling, fidgeting from her medication. I realized I hadn’t seen her smile in a long time. And she was keeping him there, asking questions. About me? She shook his hand and held on to his arm with her other hand. I saw her say the words thank you. Then, when Mr. Strezou walked away, Ma looked all around for me again. Slowly, her face seemed to fall.

  I forced myself to step forward, over the wood chips and out of the bushes. I walked across the sidewalk, straight up to Ma, and hugged her tightly, openly. I loved her so much, and right in the center of my chest I could feel her love for me. I hugged her for the longest time.

  “Pumpkin,” she said, “I’m so proud of you.” I pulled back, still holding on to her arms; there were tears in her eyes. “When they called your name, I clapped so hard, honey. Did you hear me?” I’d received no special distinctions—I’d barely even graduated, but that didn’t seem to matter to Ma. I knew that she supported me, trusted my decisions. Maybe too much. I put my arm around her waist and escorted her forward. I was surprised to feel the sharp corner of her hipbone.

  “Come here, Ma, I want you to meet some people.”

  Walking a few feet over, I parted an opening in the circle of women big enough for Ma and me. I clapped my hands together, my heart racing. “Hey, everyone,” I said. “I want you all to meet my mother, Jean Murray.”

  Daddy called one night, a couple weeks after I started high school, as Brick’s ceaseless television noise, cigarette fog, and Ma’s illness filled the apartment. She’d spent the day vomiting into the toilet and onto the bathroom tiles; even though I’d gone through an entire roll of paper towels, the smell could still be detected, thick and sour. Sam and I passed the time between Ma’s bouts by phoning in to radio contests hoping for concert tickets, and by marking up a map of the United States with all the places we would go on our hitchhike cross-country. Although she would never get too close to Ma (I think because the sickness scared her), Sam helped me forget the rough job of cleaning her up by planning our lives on the road together. That evening Lisa had fallen asleep on her homework after a long day at school, a place I hadn’t been for days. I marveled at her diligence, wondering
how she focused enough to spend hours perfecting essays and lab reports up on the top bunk.

  When I lifted the receiver, I didn’t initially recognize my father’s voice—it was too small and far-away sounding, as though the call had been placed internationally.

  “Liz—Liz,” he said, “I’m doing okay. Not bad, really. They treat me well here. And I’m eating three squares a day. I’ve even been getting a stomach, believe it or not.” His laugh was tense. I woke Lisa and mouthed the word Daddy, but she waved me away, closing her eyes again. He continued, “They always play Jeopardy! for me, too; everyone stands there and bets on how many I’ll get right.”

  A scene returned to me of my father fixed on our couch, my child’s body curled on the far end, nightgown drawn over my knees as I watched him coach Alex Trebek on the answers. When he paused for a moment to recall a piece of vital information, he’d shut his eyes and rub small circles on his bald head as though to summon it. The living room flickered with the blue light from our old television, and correct answers to each trivia question came in waves of three; first from Daddy, then from the contestant, and lastly from Mr. Trebek. Moments later, Daddy went into the kitchen to shoot up.

  “Yeah, you were always good at that,” I said.

  “It’s pretty neat, Lizzy, you should see it.”

  The trouble was, I could see him now, occupying a thin cot in a loft of aging, broken men with wispy beards. Was he actually one of them? How had I gone all those years on University Avenue without noticing that there was something broken about my father? He’d once seemed so free, and we had felt so close. I must have been wrong about that. If he lived behind fenced windows, under adult curfew; if he hid an entire life from me; if he didn’t even bother to call when we were losing our home and our belongings, then maybe I’d never known Daddy at all.