Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  Blam. She reaches over and slams a belt across my waist. I start yelling at her, but she shuts off. She doesn’t even register that I’m calling her a stupid bitch and warning her that if they leave us in the same place my ma is gonna rip me apart, that she’s not herself right now. My ma is calling me a piece of shit, a pathetic excuse for a child, evil, a traitor, possessed.

  Poor Naima jumps into the ambulance at the last second before we drive off, confused and scared.

  At the hospital they separate us. Ma is so livid and dangerous looking they put her in a room by herself. I get handcuffed to a chair in the waiting area. I tell Naima she should go home. This is insanity and she doesn’t have to stay for it. There’s nothing she can do anyway. She asks me if I’m sure and I tell her to please make a break for it before they decide she’s “inebriated,” too. She says to please call her tomorrow and leaves.

  A young black guy in a security uniform comes in with the same attendant. I spit at her. I tell her she is awful at her job and she should lose it. That she just locked up the child of a drunk having a psychotic break, because she was scared.

  “My pupils were dilated in fucking fear, you get that? Good fucking job!”

  She ignores me and the guard unlocks my cuffs, steering me by the shoulder into a locked room. Panic is surging into my throat. I’m not concerned with being in this place, I’m concerned that if they keep us both here until my ma sobers up and let us out at the same time, she will go ballistic on me in the street. Having her locked up is a breach I don’t know how she will respond to. I don’t know what she’s capable of.

  I pace the room trying to figure a way out. I try the door, quietly, but it’s bolted. I see the guard through the window. He’s just a kid himself. He doesn’t give a shit about all this. He’s got no flag to fly for justice or whatever, he’s just stamping a time card. I smile at him. He half smiles back and turns away.

  I knock on the glass. He comes to the window and looks into my face. I smile, doing my best to show him I’m not a threat or losing my mind.

  “Hey. Listen. I know you’re just doing your job, but do you think I could go to the bathroom? I swear, I just need to pee. I’ll come right back. I’m not drunk or anything, I just got roped into this shit because of my mom. I’m not psycho. Please?”

  He looks into my eyes for a minute, then around the hallway. It’s deserted. No one cares if I pee. I can feel him conceding.

  “I really appreciate it, man. It’s just so nasty in here.”

  He turns the lock. I smile at him huge as I pass, my heart thumping with fear. He points me down the hall and tells me to come right back. I tell him I will and start walking, slowly, so I have time to figure out what to do. Glancing over my shoulder, I see that he has sat back down; he’s not even watching me.

  Just before the bathroom, a hall cuts down to my left and I see a red exit sign. Without thinking, I start sprinting toward it, my socks padding against the blue linoleum floor. Fear tearing down my spine and tightening my asshole, I slide to the beige door, bound down three flights of metal stairs, and explode onto the street.

  I’m bolting down Twelfth Street toward Sixth Avenue in the dawn light, leaping over a pile of discarded syringes on Tenth Street, making my way east toward St. Marks. I send Nikita a text message, something of an SOS, to call me urgently. I tell her what happened as I make my way down Second Avenue in my socks, the sun fully up, terror coursing through me about what will happen when they cut my ma loose

  The fear in Nikita’s voice takes mine away, and now it’s me who’s calming her. I tell her I’ll be okay, to just please stay on the phone with me. My socks are caked in filth by the time I sprint up the stairs to our apartment.

  Half convinced Ma will already be there, I push the door open silently and check for noise. The opera record is skipping and the lights are on in the kitchen, but no one is home. The air is tense, electric. Clearly something happened here that was interrupted. It’s creepy. I move nimbly to my bedroom and lock the door.

  I curl up with the blanket pulled over my head, cell phone pressed to my ear.

  “I think I’ve probably got a few hours before she gets out and makes her way home.”

  “Why can’t you leave?”

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go right now . . . I just want to sleep, so bad. If I can get an hour in, it’ll be early enough to go to school and wait it out there.”

  “Okay . . . I’m going to stay on the phone until you’re asleep, just in case.”

  SLEEP VEILS ITSELF like a thin film over my nervousness and I jolt awake when the apartment door flies open, slamming into the wall, the doorbell dinging from the impact. She screams my name, calls me an expletive. Nikita, still on the other end of the line, starts freaking out, demanding to know what’s happening. I whisper, “Shhh. I can’t talk or she’ll know I’m here.”

  The doorknob wiggles and she throws her body weight against the frame, screaming from her guts that I’m a disgusting piece of shit traitor and that I don’t deserve to be in her house and “Fuck you, you evil bitch” and so on. I pull the pillow tighter over my head, staring out the window at the brick wall across from us. I wish I were a bird on the tree just past the glass. I pray that the lock will hold.

  The sound of wood smashing on wood. She’s hitting my door with a baseball bat, screaming as loud as she can, crying. I imagine her body, enflamed and erupting with rage, hurt, confused, like an animal, thrashing in the forest. I can hear the door bending concave from the beating, but it doesn’t give in. Nikita is sobbing in Berlin. I tell her it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.

  Ma passes out before she can break through. I can’t sleep, so I lie there under the blanket for an hour until I’m sure she’s down for the count, then I grab my backpack and sneak out past her. She looks so harmless, asleep like that. She’s beautiful still, like Annie Lennox if she served in Sarajevo for a couple of years. Watching her, I wonder if our relationship will ever be the same.

  I’m sorry, I think, I’m sorry that whatever is haunting you is so savage. I’m sorry you’re more often this horrible creature than the other one that I love. I’m sorry I hate you more often than I love you now.

  I’m not taking you out to dinner anymore. I can’t bring myself to do it.

  Happy birthday, Ma.

  Chapter 42

  Good-bye, My Friend

  New York City, May 2003

  I’M BEING SMOTHERED BY EVERYTHING I’VE EVER FEARED. IT was an epic mistake to think that any one person could salve all the loneliness. I was stupid to have trusted her, the biggest fool on earth.

  How could Nikita want to be done with me when she’s the very air I breathe?

  Lovers share one pair of eyes. We guide each other when we cannot see. Now it’s as if I’m blind. I sit on a pile of dirty clothes and records that hides the armchair in the living room, which has become my mother’s bedroom. I feel like my bones are melting out through my skin.

  Ma is on the toilet behind me, in discomfort, listening to me weep, fidgeting and murmuring to herself, helpless. This is a woman who lost the love of her life in one shattering evening and roared back in the face of agony like a lioness. She took the blow, went through unimaginable pain, and conquered it with willpower. She knows only the searing extremes, not the equanimity needed to comfort her child’s broken heart.

  I am despondent. When everything was collapsing around me, the one thing I was sure of was Nikita, my one hope for escape. The walls used to be transparent, something that couldn’t hold me. Now I’m trapped, grounded in hell. I can’t see my way out.

  She says I’m too young. She’s too far away. She met a boy.

  I think about that boy. Some guy she met through someone I introduced her to when I was in Berlin. Some party king with awesome friends and a cool house who plugged her in to ecstasy and house music. Fuck them both.

  Berlin has a club scene beyond anything I’ve ever known, windowless halls so you never know when it’s tim
e to go home, entire compounds filled with throbbing masses, faces and bare chests upturned toward a guy in a booth sweating and sucking on cigarettes, fist pumping at himself. A pill to pull you up, a joint to level you out, a drink to calm the edge, a line to get you psyched again. Fuck that. Fuck all of them.

  Her tiny hands. Her bird bones entwined in mine. She made me feel strong, like I was worth something. Like I had a place in this world, because we were building a world together.

  The stack of tires that we fucked on down the path from school. The secret world we existed in. Her ankle, encircled by the bracelet I gave her. The hundreds of letters we wrote. Countless mornings spent wrapped around her throaty voice on the other end of my phone. Her guidance through my roughest moments. The ripping high that just didn’t end, of falling in love. Feeling like somebody beautiful, who I respected saw me, felt me, heard me—cared.

  My mother whimpers, sympathetic and impotent. Across the vast gulf of the kitchen she feels my pain like a twin. I don’t have to turn around to see her, pants around her ankles, eyebrows pulled together, fiddling with a piece of toilet paper. She doesn’t care about the pee drying on her, the appointment she’s missing, or the people she might be standing up. She feels like murder, but she doesn’t know where to put it.

  Chinese people are whining opera songs and I scream at the radio.

  Ma stops moaning, out of respect for the mourning.

  I dip into a hopelessness I had never imagined was possible. I stand still because the idea of walking feels too big. The world has so many rules, customs, social graces that I don’t understand. I am a wolf child, but Nikita was my guide. Without her it feels insurmountable.

  I take to my bed and don’t get up for three months. I don’t know how I am supposed to survive. Ma comes in with water and strange teas sometimes, but I don’t touch them. She sits at the end of the bed and caresses my foot under the blanket.

  I don’t have a home. That’s all I can think about. I built my home in Nikita, and that was a mistake. I cannot grasp how that could have been a mistake, but it was.

  No one will love me like that ever again. How could they? That love was essential. I have ghost pains where she used to be.

  Closing my eyes hurts. Getting through a few minutes exhausts me.

  I wither. Weight vaporizes from my bones as if it were being pulled into the air. Food repels me. Water is disgusting.

  Ma futzes around in the kitchen, making teas and soups, mumbling and humming along to jazz standards on the radio. The radio stays on, as always. No catastrophe can move that rock. Some nights I cry out in the darkness and Ma comes and sleeps next to me in the bed. One night I roll over and put my arm around her and she gently removes it because she’s not who my dreaming mind wishes she was.

  Why bathe? Ma doesn’t care, and I’m not trying to impress anyone. Who else would ever care what I smell like? And as a matter of fact I kind of like it. It reminds me that I’m alive.

  Some nights I wake up and Ma is gone. She comes back possessed. She puts on a pot of rice to boil and goes to take a bath. I fall asleep again to the sound of the water running and am awakened by the smoke alarm bleeping and a black cloud seeping under my door. The sound hammers at my eyelids until I slouch into the kitchen on autopilot, clutching my ears, climb on a chair and rip it out of the ceiling. Turning the stove off I see that the rice is burnt black, and tiny craters have bored into the bottom of the pan.

  I open all the windows, leaning over the plants that crowd the sills, and wave giant charcoal drawings of my mother’s face back and forth to clear the air, as I have done countless times before. Ma has curled her entire length into the tiny bathtub. She is naked in the drained basin, mascara cascading down her cheeks, hands draped across her belly, asleep. When I yell her name or kick the cabinet in anger she opens her crystal-blue eyes and purses her lips as she looks at me. Her look tells me she thinks I’m ridiculous.

  “Get up, Ma.”

  “Pssshhh.”

  “Ma! Get up! Get out of the fucking tub.”

  “Mmm . . . Leave me alone.”

  “You almost burnt the fucking house down! get the fuck up out of the fucking tub!”

  “Wwaaaaahhhhh! Go cry to your fucking frieeeendddss!”

  Like a demon has snapped a rubber band on her spine, she arches upward and spews this at me violently.

  Some nights I scream, too, other times I go back to waving the drawings around, trying to clear the noxious chemicals from the air before we both lie down to sleep in it.

  The lower half of the saucepan is caked in black from this ritual.

  In the morning she will shuffle in with tea, wearing her broken gold-glitter flip-flops. Mascara will be hardened in the ridges on the outside of her eyes, her wifebeater ripped into a V at the chest. I won’t roll over. She’ll sit on the edge of the bed and tell me a story about something that happened on the train or at dance class yesterday and I will want to jump out the window, but I won’t say anything. She doesn’t remember.

  Three months in, I get the craving for a FrozFruit. It is the first desire I’ve had for anything other than Nikita in so long that I pull myself to my feet. In sweatpants and a hoodie pulled low over my face, I drag myself to the corner deli to get it.

  As I am handing Abdullah my dollar, the headline of the newspaper catches my eye: WOMAN’S LEGS MANGLED IN HORRIFIC SUBWAY ACCIDENT. I stand there, feeling sorry for myself in my depression suit, and then something tingles in my brain. Some deep-seated notion that what I’ve got isn’t as bad as getting your legs ripped off by the R train.

  When I get upstairs, I look at myself in the seven-foot mirror I’ve been watching myself grow in since I was born. Pulling off my hoodie, holding the green FrozFruit between my lips, I see a skeleton. I take off my sweatpants and see that they were hiding two sticks. My long hair is matted and electrified, haloing my face.

  Something pounds its fist on my insides, reminding me that I’m still here. Seventeen years of bone and flesh and thought and dreams and love and screaming and joy stare back at me.

  Somebody else will think I’m cute.

  Chapter 43

  Finding the Answer

  New York City, August and September 2003

  IT’S SKATING THAT FINALLY PROPELS ME FROM THE SHEETS. It’s the furnace of summer, the apartment is too sweltering to sit around in, and I crave the feeling of throwing my board down and launching into the breeze. It’s like flying, speeding through the city, on display but invisible at the same time, moving too fast for anyone to really take you in or talk to you.

  I put music on at top volume, R&B and hip-hop, anything I can buy bootleg on Canal Street. I ride with no destination, coasting through parks and up the sides of the island, just to be outside. My body is drained from being in a slump, but I work my way back to my normal strength in a few weeks.

  I fill my days with this solitary ritual, falling in love with my city, trying to fall back in love with myself. I wander through areas I haven’t seen since I was a kid, skating from Battery Park to the tippy top of Harlem. It bodes well for my job as a drug runner, which I return to with a new vigor. Lance is thrilled that I can do twice as many deliveries in the same four-hour period. I blitz around downtown, my backpack laden with felonies, headphones shielding me from interacting with anyone except an occasional shitty driver.

  One day I’m sitting at a table at Mamoun’s falafel in the Village when a guy in a long leather coat comes in. He stops at my elbow and says, “You like desserts?”

  “Fuck off, dude.”

  “No, I’m serious. Do you like desserts?”

  “What are you talking about, creep?”

  “Do you like sweets??”

  “Yeah . . . so?”

  “Here, you can have this.”

  He sets a tinfoil-wrapped square on the table.

  “Like I’m fucking born yesterday, man. I’m not gonna eat that.”

  He smiles at me and continues to the counter. The b
oys who work there greet him with fist bumps and grins, and trade him two falafels for an identical tinfoil square. I consider his offering anew. Fuck it, if the boys are doing it, I might as well try it. I unwrap the small brownie and pop it in my mouth.

  An hour later I’m skating into oncoming traffic on Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. I have no idea how I got there, or why I’m going up when I should be going across town to the east. Everything is wobbling, and by the time I find Lance’s apartment, the TV is melting into itself. I’m supposed to be re-upping my supply for my coke runs, but I’m too fucked up, so I fall asleep on his couch.

  In the morning, I have an audition for Sex and the City. I’ve been praying for something like this for so long, but when I wake up, I realize I’m still off my face. Too bad. The show must go on.

  I arrive at the audition a disheveled mess. I walk into a room with a big table and seven people behind it, four producers and three directors. I almost barf with nerves.

  “Good morning, iO!” one says cheerily. The others just stare at the papers in front of them.

  “Good morning!”

  “How’re you today?”

  “I’m great! Fantastic. Just great . . .”

  They all look up.

  “Wow. Good! Good for you!”

  Oh god.

  “So, today we’re going to have you read for the role of a perfume salesperson at Macy’s, who is trying to sell Charlotte some perfume. Okay? Whenever you’re ready, you can just improvise.”

  Oh, I’m improvising? No problem! I got this. Easy. Everything is sparkling and in Technicolor, and I swear I can smell the perfume I’m spraying on this imaginary woman.

  They seem impressed.

  “Wow. That was really good. Let’s try another character. Now you’re working at a McDonald’s, and Sarah Jessica Parker comes in with her new lover. She’s in a ball gown and he’s in a tux. You’re really thrown off by them, in their fancy outfits in your McDonald’s, and you give them kind of . . . a look . . .”

  “Like this?”