This Side of Providence

by Rachel M. Harper

  “Who told you that?”

  “I can’t reveal my source,” I say, using a cliché I’ve heard a bunch of times on TV. Besides, what am I going to say, that I was eavesdropping outside the principal’s office?

  “Well I think I’d know if my best friend was dropping out of school.” Cristo stands up to put his sneakers back on. “Don’t go spreading any rumors, okay? And don’t believe everything you hear in the office.”

  He walks out before I can say anything else, just like he’s always done. Part of me wants to go after him and part of me wants to stay here by myself and enjoy the silence of an empty room. I roll into the space where he just was, smelling his head in the pillow, and close my eyes. Just like that, I’m home.

  Today my baby sister Trini turns four years old. I still call her that, but she’s not my baby anymore. Cristo picks me up at Miss Valentín’s and we bike together to Scottie’s sister’s house for the party. Miss Valentín bought my bike at a yard sale, a girl’s Huffy with knobby pink tires. Cristo rides a ten-speed that he’s holding for a guy from the shelter who went to Pittsburgh to bury his mother. It’s way too big for him, and it surprises me each time when he can actually reach the pedals. With an umbrella, it could be part of a circus act.

  The house is packed with people when we get there. It’s hot inside and there’s enough food on the dining room table to feed the whole block. Scottie waves at us from a chair in the corner and tells us to get drinks from the cooler in the hallway. He doesn’t introduce us to anyone. We find Trini in the kitchen, eating spaghetti out of the serving bowl with her fingers. She looks so grownup today, like her face knows it is an entire year older. Her round cheeks are mostly gone and Scottie has let her hair grow long, tying it in a braid down the middle of her back.

  Cristo tackles her in a bear hug, and when they get up off the floor I kiss her dimpled cheek and rub her head like my mother used to do. She asks where Mami is and we tell her she’s coming by later, after her doctor’s appointment. Trini wants to know what her present is but Cristo holds the bag above her head and won’t let her see inside.

  After we fill our plates, Trini entertains the party by dancing all alone in the middle of the living room. She’s wearing a long pink dress and she keeps picking up the bottom to twirl it around. She laughs and falls onto the carpeted floor. It makes me happy to see that she is still laughing. The music they’re playing is that old Motown stuff that only adults and little kids like to dance to. Scottie dances with her standing on his feet. She marches like a soldier, stamping his boots like she’s trying to break them. He lifts her onto his shoulder and spins around and around, almost knocking down the light fixture. He stops suddenly. His eyes are closed and he has a goofy smile on his face. He drops Trini onto the couch by her leg. Then he collapses into the coat rack, too dizzy to stand. Several coats drop to the ground, as heavy as falling bodies.

  Cristo sits next to me on a folding chair, balancing a plate of meatballs on his lap. He eats them in single bites like doughnut holes. We both stare at our sister and at her father.

  “Do you think she’s doing okay here?” I ask him. I don’t want to admit that this stranger’s house, this strange family, could be better than our own.

  He shrugs. “She seems fine.”

  I twirl the spaghetti onto my fork. “They look like they have a lot of fun.”

  “This is a party,” he says. “You know every day isn’t like this.”

  “But it’s better than the shelter, don’t you think?”

  Cristo gives a mean laugh. “The only thing the shelter’s better than is the street.”

  He sounds older when he talks like that, like the teenagers who hang out on street corners with their pants falling off. He pops another meatball into his mouth and shakes his head like the whole world is ridiculous. Scottie stumbles out of the room with a drunken smile on his face. My eyes follow him to the hallway, where he takes another beer from the cooler.

  “She’s lucky to have a father.” I don’t know why I say that out loud.

  Cristo looks at me. “We have one, too, you know.”

  “Ours doesn’t count. He doesn’t live with us.” I take a bite of the coleslaw on my plate. “And he doesn’t think about us.”

  Cristo wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Do you think about him?”

  “Sometimes.” I sit back in my chair, trying to remember the last time.

  “Well I bet he thinks about you, too.”

  After we eat, Cristo goes into the kitchen to throw away our plates. Later, I find him taking the empty beer cans out of the garbage and lining them up on the countertop in a straight line. He does that with a lot of things—cigarette cartons, juice boxes, sugar packets—like he’s trying to organize the world. When I pass through on my way to the bathroom, I count twenty-two cans. There are several other people drinking beer, like the girl with too much makeup who hangs on Scottie like a wet sweater and the men that he works with, but Scottie drinks the most, and it shows. He trips over a stool and spills a bowl of rice and beans, then yells at his sister for leaving it so close to the edge of the table. I spend the next ten minutes on my knees, helping his sister pick rice kernels out of the thick yellow carpet.

  When we sing “Happy Birthday,” Scottie shouts at the top of his lungs and keeps singing even when the song is over. Trini reads the letters on her birthday cake while the candles continue to burn. She touches each letter of her name, collecting bright red frosting on her fingertips. When she licks it off she says, “Umm,” purring like a cat. She closes her eyes to blow out the candles, squeezing them so tight she looks furious. I know it’s her birthday, but I make a wish, too. For her to come back to us. After three tries she blows out all the candles. The whole room claps together. The room vibrates with the sound of applause.

  Trini looks at me. “Your hands were like balloons,” she says. I’m not sure what she means but it makes me smile. She reaches for my hand, looking inside it.

  “What makes that sound?” she asks. “You holding something?”

  “Only the air,” I say.

  I watch Scottie stare at Trini from across the room. He can’t stop looking at her, his angel, his sweet little girl. There’s something sad about how he looks at her, like he can’t quite believe she’s his. It’s the same way he used to look at my mother. I don’t like to think about it, but I wonder what’s going to happen when she gets older and loses some of that sweetness. Will he yell at her like he did us? Will he hit her? I guess it’s different because she’s his real daughter and doesn’t need to get punished for not being his. I make another wish right then, while I’m watching him, and while I can still watch over her: that he loves her in a way he never loved us.

  My mother shows up when we’re cutting the cake. She takes a small piece and stands alone in a corner, trying to blend into the wallpaper. She doesn’t talk to anyone. Cristo brings her a soda and stands by her side like a bodyguard. She puts her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. Trini pushes a plastic lawn mower into the room. When she sees our mother she jumps up and down and claps. She spends the next twenty minutes mowing the carpet in front of her, over and over again. I should go over there, too, but I don’t. Nobody needs two bodyguards. Nobody needs two daughters.

  Scottie stands on the back porch with the other men and watches a football game on their portable TV. I watch him pour liquor into a cup of coffee that his sister brought him to help sober him up. Why are adults so stupid? The men roll their own cigarettes and smoke them quickly by taking long, deep drags. The smell is sweet like summer grass. They pass them around and joke about burning their fingertips. My mother watches them quietly. She smokes her own cigarettes, from a red and white carton she carries in her chest pocket. She looks like she’s thinking about a faraway place, not someplace she’s been, but someplace she’ll never get to see.

  I see my mother and Scottie in the same room only once during the party. They look at each other for a long time, over the heads o
f other people, but don’t say anything. When he walks up to her she’s holding an empty plate. He takes it from her and says something I can’t hear. She shakes her head. He smiles. She says something while Scottie lights two cigarettes. He offers one to her, but she hesitates before taking it, as if she doesn’t trust what it could be. She places it gently between her lips, like even the filter could burn her. He holds up a baggie filled with small green pills, just like the ones we found in Kim’s purse, and rubs it between his fingers. My mother shakes her head. He’s looking at her, but she’s looking at the bag.

  I lean over to tell Cristo but he’s already watching the whole thing go down. “Don’t worry,” he says to me. “Mami can take care of herself.” I want to believe him but I’m not convinced. We both watch her as she backs away from us and out of the room, her eyes locked on Scottie.

  When it’s time to say good-bye Trini doesn’t want us to leave. She wraps her legs tight around Mami’s waist and buries her head in her neck. She cries as Scottie pulls her off, taking her out the back door like an animal that’s misbehaving. The screen door slams and I can hear her wails from the driveway. Mami wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt and walks out the front door without saying a word. I thank Scottie’s sister before we leave, and wrap up a big piece of birthday cake to bring home for Miss Valentín.

  The sun is setting when we leave the party. Mami walks on the sidewalk while Cristo and I bike along a row of parked cars in the street. Cristo sings a song by Lauryn Hill, something about how you might win some but you just lost one. Mami and I don’t speak. I want to say something to comfort her but I don’t know what that would be. We stop at the CVS on Hartford Avenue and Mami goes inside to fill a prescription she just got from her doctor. Once she’s inside I ask Cristo why she still takes the medicine if she’s not sick anymore.

  “What do you mean?” he asks. “She’s still sick.”

  “But she looks better now. She seems all right.”

  “That’s just the outside. On the inside she’s still fighting. That’s why she’s got to keep taking the medicine, even when she feels okay.” He taps the handlebars on his bike. “The sickness she got is the kind you can’t see.”

  I put my feet on the ground to balance my bike. “You mean like spilling juice on a dark carpet? You can’t see it but the stain is still there.”

  “Yeah. Kinda like that.”

  The sun falls behind the hills and the street gets darker. “Why’d she get sick?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Cristo says.

  “Is it because of the drugs?”

  He looks at me. “Which drugs?”

  “The ones she used to take when we lived on Sophia Street. The kind you buy on the corner instead of in the pharmacy.”

  He’s quiet for a few seconds. “I think so. Maybe. But she stopped doing them a while ago. I don’t think it matters anymore.”

  “Maybe getting sick is her punishment.”

  He spits on the ground. “Going to jail was her punishment. Being sick is extra.”

  I roll forward on my bike, making checkerboard tracks in the mud. “Is that why she’s mad all the time?”

  “She’s mad because they keep taking her kids away. We’re all she’s got but she can’t even get us under one roof. How would it make you feel if we were your kids?”

  I don’t want to have kids. To be a mother. To love something so much but not be able to control it.

  “Do you think Trini’s ever coming back to live with us?” I ask him.

  “Of course she is. What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know…sometimes I think maybe she won’t.”

  Cristo grabs the handlebars on my bike, stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t ever say that again, okay? And don’t ever let Mami hear you say that. Trini belongs with us, Luz. Period. She’s our sister for God’s sake. Tu hermana. No one can take that away.”

  He lets go of the handlebars and pushes me backward. The bike wobbles and I have to stand to keep it from crashing to the ground. One foot lands in a puddle, splashing mud across the bottom of my pants. When Mami comes out she yells at me for getting dirty and I don’t bother to defend myself. My pants stay wet for the whole ride home, which seems like punishment for my lack of faith.

  We split up at the Elmhurst cemetery. Cristo and Mami head down Broad Street while I stay on Elmwood to go home to Miss Valentín’s. I feel guilty as I bike away, knowing that I’m going back to a nice apartment while they’re going to a loud and crowded shelter, but I don’t know what to do about it. I know staying together is supposed to be the most important thing, but I don’t think it’s worth any cost. But I’d never tell Cristo that. Maybe he’s a better person than I am, since he’s willing to sacrifice his own comfort to stay with Mami. Maybe he’s a better son to her than I am a daughter.

  When I bring Miss Valentín the piece of birthday cake her eyes get big and she tells me German chocolate cake is her favorite. She says she’s gonna put it in the freezer to save, but after dinner I see her in the pantry, eating it right off the plate with no fork. She eats the whole thing in a few bites, like she’s racing to be the first to finish. When she’s done, she wipes the crumbs off her face and buries the plate at the bottom of the garbage so nobody sees it.

  I hide behind the door when she comes out so she doesn’t think I’m spying on her. But I am. I like to watch her when she doesn’t know I’m looking. I noticed a long time ago she’s weird with food, but seeing her every day makes it obvious. Adults think they’re so sneaky, but everything they do is so predictable. She eats the way my mother smokes cigarettes and Kim drank that pink wine. Like they can’t see anything else, even if it’s right in front of their face.

  After I finish all my homework I lie in bed and write on the wall. The part next to the window so the curtain hides it. Every night since I’ve been here I’ve written my name at least once. When Miss Valentín comes in to say good night I stop writing. I hide the pencil under the covers like she hides her food.

  “Luz. I want to talk to you about something.” She comes into my room after I brush my teeth and sits on the bed. Her nightgown rises up, exposing the pale skin of her legs. They look like they’ve never seen the sun. “You know how you write your name on your papers at school, so the teachers know it’s yours?”

  I nod. Maybe I’m not so good at being sneaky either.

  “Or how you write your name in your coat, or on your lunch box? You do that so it doesn’t get lost or so someone else can’t claim it as theirs. But with bigger things, you don’t have to do that. When you have something that everyone knows is yours, when it really belongs to you, you don’t have to mark it like that.”

  I try not to look at the wall, but my eyes keep going straight there.

  “Slave owners used to mark their slaves,” I tell her, “because they were their property. They owned them. I read that in a book once.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “But they were wrong to do that. You can’t own another person, not like you’d own a car or a house or a book.”

  I feel the pencil under the blankets, hard like bone.

  “But when you love someone, don’t you belong to them?” It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’ve heard about it in love songs.

  “Sure,” she says. “But in a different way. When you really belong to someone they don’t have to mark you, not in a literal way. The branding is on the inside.”

  I don’t know what to say so I look away. I still feel her staring at me.

  “Everything you have here is yours. Everything in this room. No one’s going to take it away from you.”

  I let go of the pencil, afraid I’ll snap it in two. I look back at her. Her eyes are big like a cat’s and she’s holding her hands together as if she’s about to pray.

  “You say that now, but what if I don’t get to stay? What if they move me again?”

  My voice starts to crack so I stop talking. I hate the fact that I’m sometimes soft
like a little kid, that I want to cry. Miss Valentín turns to me, her elbows digging large red grooves into her thighs. “I’m not going to lie to you, Luz. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I can promise you this much: you will always have a place in my home. The door will always be open.”

  She says good night and leaves me alone in the room. My room. I grab the book of stories from my mother and climb back in bed, scooting my body deep under the blankets. When I usually start a new book, the first thing I do is write my name inside the front cover. This time, I leave it blank. I don’t even look for the pencil, lost somewhere in the warm darkness of my bed. I don’t need to own the book, just the story inside. Because once I read it, nobody can ever take it away from me.

  Cristo

  When we get to the shelter, the first thing they give us is a list of where to eat. The soup kitchens are the best, since the food is hot and free, and, luckily, they serve more than soup. The closest one is Oxford House, right off Broad just a few blocks from the shelter, and the food’s actually pretty good. Much better than the cafeteria at school, and way better than everything we used to make at Chino and Kim’s. The trick is to get there early and get a good seat. I like sitting at the end of the table, that way I don’t get squashed between two old dudes who never shower. I usually sit near the kitchen, so I can get up for more bread and refill Mami’s coffee cup with milk when she takes her pills. There’s a room in back with a few dozen beds, but only men can stay overnight. Most times I’m the only kid in here and Mami’s the only lady. Once I saw a lady eating with three little kids, but the men stared so much she left before dessert and never came back. Can’t blame her, after what I heard them say in the bathroom.

  The people here are supposed to be all nice and thankful since they’re poor and usually homeless, but a lot of what I see is people hanging out in small groups making fun of each other. It’s pretty much divided by color, with the black people on one side and all the whites on the other. The Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans are split up, too, neither getting too close to the whites or the blacks. And the women, if they show up, usually hang by themselves within those groups. Sometimes I’ll see an old couple together, cutting up their meat into baby-sized bites, and it makes me sad to think they don’t have anywhere else to go.