The Ugly Cry

by Danielle Henderson

  One night, Mom put us to bed. She read with each of us and kissed our foreheads goodnight, her necklace clinking against my cheek when she leaned in. I fell asleep pretty quickly and didn’t hear her leave the apartment with Luke. A loud noise woke me up, and I went out to the living room. No one was there.

  I opened the door to Cory’s room and woke him up. “Mom isn’t here,” I whispered.

  “So what?” Cory was never good at waking up, but this seemed like cause for alarm, and I needed his help.

  “What should I do?”

  “Go back to sleep!”

  Suddenly very aware that I was in the dark, basically alone, I started to panic. With no adult to protect us, anything could get me in here—the Blob, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Michael Myers. All of the horror movie villains from Grandma’s TV sprang to the front of my mind, along with every teenager they murdered along the way. I started crying. I walked to the kitchen, turned on the light, and dialed Grandma’s number.

  “Dani? Why are you calling me so late?”

  I had no idea what time it was; it was just dark o’clock. “Do you know when my mom is coming home?”

  “She’s not there with you?” Grandma’s voice was a mix of panic and anger. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I wailed, the tears coming out uncontrollably now.

  “Where’s Cory?”

  “He’s aslee-ee-eeeep.” I was crying so hard I started to hiccup in between sobs.

  “Dani, hang up the phone. I’m coming. Don’t answer the door for anyone but me.”

  I hung up and went to my room to calm down and wait for her.

  Grandma knocked on the door a little bit later. As soon as I opened it, she grabbed me in a hug. The sheer force of her made me start crying again. She pushed me away at arm’s length so that she could grab my shoulders and look me in the eye. “Go get some clothes and whatever you need for school,” she said sternly. “I’m going to wake up that other dummy.” She jerked her head in the direction of Cory’s room and smiled. I nodded and went to my room to get some clothes. I could hear Cory through our shared wall, very confused about why Grandma was here and why he had to pack.

  The front door opened again while I was starting to put some clothes in my book bag. Was Granddad here, too?

  “What are you doing here?” Mom’s voice. Luke hovering next to her.

  “I’m here to get these goddamn kids that you left alone thanks to this motherfucker.” Grandma was pointing at Luke. Mom pushed her way past Grandma into the apartment.

  “Ma, they’re fine—I was gone for a minute!” Mom protested.

  “Robin, you were gone long enough for me to get dressed, get a cab over here, and get these kids packed. Where the fuck were you?” I’d never heard Grandma so mad before. I couldn’t tell if her voice was shaking her body or if her body was shaking her voice.

  “It’s none of your business, Ma, they’re fine.” Mom walked over to me and grabbed me in a hug as if to prove that everything was okay. She muffled my crying by pushing my face into her stomach.

  “And you let that motherfucker drive my car? I didn’t get that car for him!” Grandma was shouting, spitting. Cory was crying behind his bedroom door; I was crying into Mom’s abdomen. Luke was standing in the middle of the living room, glaring at my grandmother.

  “Cut it out, Ma, god! We’re fine!” Maybe Mom thought that if she kept saying it, it would be true.

  Grandma marched up to Mom, her pointer finger leading the way. “Listen to me—I am done.” Grandma was so quiet now it seemed worse than the yelling. “These kids can have anything they want from me, but you? As long as that motherfucker is in this house? Lose my number, bitch.” Grandma kissed me and Cory on the forehead on her way out the door. The cab that was waiting for her took her back over the mountain and out of our lives.

  10.

  I didn’t know why we were moving. Mom had worked so hard to fix up our apartment; she sent us away, worked overtime. This apartment was designed around sacrifice, a step up into a new and better life. Now we were just . . . going somewhere else.

  Mom tried to make it sound exciting. “The new apartment is bigger!” she said. “And everyone will have their own bedroom.”

  The new house was still in town, but it was far enough that I now had to take the bus to school. It was a split-level ranch, yellow on top and brick on the bottom. I only knew to describe it that way because I kept reading about Elizabeth and Jessica’s house in the Sweet Valley Twins books and, having lived in apartments my whole life, had no idea what the fuck they were describing until I asked Mom. The bottom of the house was closed off to us by a locked door, and we lived in the top part.

  Luke stopped visiting me at night for a while. But that didn’t last long.

  * * *

  —

  My main memory of the lake house is hunger.

  We never seemed to have food anymore. Mom had always monitored what we ate; we had never been allowed to just pig out on snacks or help ourselves to cold cuts. Groceries were expensive, and she was careful about food stamps since they were doled out on a schedule. But we had snacks and could count on a regular routine of meals before Luke came to live with us.

  Part of the reason we didn’t have food is that we also didn’t have money. Mom had left her job at Pendine for a better paying job at the hospital; I could hear Mom and Luke fighting about it in their room, Mom asking him what he did with her paycheck, and me wondering why she gave it to him in the first place. We didn’t have food stamps anymore because Mom was working so much. Luke’s full-time job seemed to be doing whatever it was that made him wide-eyed and sweaty every time he came out of their bedroom after one of his frequent trips to the city.

  The school lunch was often my only meal of the day. I lived for sloppy joes and square-cut pizza and felt comforted by the way the food all fit into the molded portions of the plastic tray.

  Getting lunch was thrilling, but buying lunch was hard. Cory and I were on the reduced-lunch program at school, and much like the food stamps Mom once used, it was an obvious and slightly embarrassing spectacle every time I approached the cashier. Everyone who ate hot lunch at school had a wallet-size card; you brought it to the cashier, and they punched a hole or stamped one of the boxes for every meal. If your parents paid the full price, you got to put your card back in your pocket, where everyone hoped you wouldn’t lose it.

  Reduced-lunch cards were kept in an envelope with the cashier. They were a dull, washed-out green instead of the vibrant pink of the full-paying kids. Worst of all, you had to give the cashier your name and hold up the line while she dug through the envelope trying to find it. “Henderson,” I said softly, hoping no one behind me would notice. If you were lucky, the kids behind you in line would only whisper about how poor you were. Usually they were much more cruel.

  “Oh, she’s reduced lunch,” they hissed to each other. “That’s why it’s taking so long.”

  “Which one?” the cashier said, slightly too loudly.

  “Danielle.” I didn’t have to make the effort to stay quiet this time; I was so embarrassed that my voice disappeared.

  The cashier punched my card and put it back in the envelope.

  “FINALLY,” the kids behind me snickered. My skin felt cold. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye as I carried my tray to a table. At eight years old, I already felt the imbalance of a world that never wanted me to forget that I had nothing.

  Mom was always at work or in the city with Luke. My go-to dinner was Old El Paso taco shells. We always seemed to have a box around, even though I never saw Mom make tacos a day in her life. Taco shells are not very filling. They don’t taste very good cold. And they definitely didn’t taste like Doritos, even though they mimicked the texture. You can’t eat them as a sandwich; the minute you pressed the top half-moons together, it was bound to cr
ack at the bottom.

  Dry spaghetti sometimes worked in a pinch, too. Blue-box Ronzoni, two sticks at a time. It wasn’t smart to chew more than two—dry spaghetti had a tendency to break into tiny sharp pieces that sometimes would lodge in your throat.

  Luke always had food. He’d come home with slices of pizza, fast-food burgers, all for himself. I would find a way to be in the kitchen when he was eating, just in case he wanted to offer me a french fry or an entire McDonald’s cheeseburger. He never did. He rounded his back and put both of his arms on the table, protectively encircling his plate.

  Sometimes Mom would try to get him to give us something. “C’mon, Luke, you can’t give them some of your fries?” She’d be standing at the sink, pleading but still cautious, knowing full well that he never wanted to share. Usually he would laugh at her, at us, and keep eating.

  But one time he stood up, walked over to her slowly, and smacked her across her face.

  I sat at the table staring at Mom as Luke sat down, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and kept eating. Mom caressed her cheek with both hands and cried, silently, her shoulders hiccuping up and down. I got up to see if she was okay. “I’m fine, Dani,” she said, sniffing back her tears, pushing me away with her left hand without looking at me.

  A cold feeling crept through my body and settled on my skin in a cool sweat as I realized: the person I counted on most in the world was just as powerless as I was.

  * * *

  —

  Mom woke me up one night and told me to start packing. “School clothes and books only.” She snapped open a couple of black garbage bags and left them in the corner of the room.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, still groggy from sleep.

  “We’re moving tomorrow morning.”

  “Where?”

  “Warwick.”

  “Why?”

  “Does it matter, Dani?” Mom was annoyed, frantically putting my clothes into the garbage bags. “C’mon, get your shit.”

  We were being evicted for not paying rent, but I didn’t know that.

  “Where are we gonna live? Where am I gonna go to school?” I had a million more questions, but the look on Mom’s face indicated that I shouldn’t ask any of them.

  “We’ll be living with your grandma.” I hadn’t seen my grandma in months. Would she even want to see me?

  I stuffed down my tears and made sure my schoolbooks were in my backpack. “What about my toys?”

  “We’ll come back for them later,” she lied.

  If I had been given one crucial piece of information in that moment, I would have gone from crying to laughing: Mom and Luke were breaking up, and he had moved to California.

  We moved early the next morning, taking a cab over the mountain to Warwick, where we lived in the big room upstairs at Grandma’s. Cory and I took the bus to school. Granddad still went to work as a bartender in the city. I loved seeing Grandma so much; she always hugged me tight, and it didn’t feel like she loved us any less since the last time we saw her. We watched Mets games together, and I did my homework at the kitchen table after school, loading up on super-sugary 4C iced tea that I made from the giant can of powder in the pantry.

  I came home after school one day, and Mom was gone. According to Grandma, she moved to the city to be with Luke.

  Of course, a lot more was going on than I knew. Not many parents confide to their children about the ins and outs of their love lives, and even though I was nosy, I was only nine. It turns out Mom had started calling Luke from the pay phone in front of Grand Union; when Grandma discovered this, she kicked Mom out. She was twenty-nine years old and knew something none of us did—she was pregnant. With nowhere to go, she went to the Bronx to live with Luke’s mom, and Luke came back from California. They reconciled, and a couple of months later, they came back to Warwick and got an apartment on Cherry Street. Cory and I didn’t move in with them right away; Mom said she needed time to get the apartment together, and I was in no hurry to rejoin Luke. But the thought I wouldn’t ever be able to shake, the thing that haunted me immediately:

  We could have gotten away from him forever, and she brought him back.

  * * *

  —

  Mom barely let us unpack before she told us she was pregnant. She was beaming about it. All of the moms on TV and in the movies were always fully pregnant, even if they just found out—their bellies were swollen, filled with the very idea of pregnancy. Mom was still skinny, so I couldn’t really tell how she knew there was a baby in there, but then I remembered all of that period stuff. Disgusting. Luke puffed his chest out.

  “I’m going to have a son,” he said loudly. Mom shushed him, said there was no way he could tell it was going to be a boy. “I can tell,” he said, leaning down to yell right at her belly. “You’re a boy!” Mom jokingly pushed him away. He kissed her on the cheek as he came up. His wide smile looked demonic to me.

  “And that’s my son,” he said, standing up fully. “Not like y’all—y’all don’t have a father.” He laughed.

  “Aw, Luke, don’t say that!” Mom said.

  “It’s true, they don’t. And I’m not your father, either.” He pointed at Mom. “I’m his father, only.”

  Mom shook her head but said nothing more.

  We only lived on Cherry Street for a few months before we moved again. The house on Ackerman Road was similar to the lake house—a blue split-level ranch. It was on the outskirts of town, farther away from Grandma and surrounded by woods, with so many trees between each house you couldn’t see any neighbors. It had three proper bedrooms; Mom and Luke were in the back corner, Cory was in the other corner, and I had a small room off the hall, across from the bathroom.

  The landlords were a nice family that lived farther back on the property. They had an old blue pickup truck that they let Luke and Mom use for errands sometimes, like taking our clothes to the laundromat. They also had two kids, Julia and Reuben, and a huge trampoline and treehouse separated them from our view.

  Ackerman Road increased our isolation—I couldn’t walk to Grandma’s house, get a slice at Frank’s Pizza, or access anything that was comforting to me. Mom worked a lot, picking up extra shifts at the hospital before the baby made her too uncomfortable to move around easily. She was tired; most days she would come home from work, sit on the couch, and fall asleep with her mouth wide-open, her head drooping to the side. Luke didn’t really work—he stayed in the bedroom, where I could hear the snap of his lighter working for hours after we got home from school. He would eventually emerge—shirtless, his eyes black and consumed by his pupils, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. If I tried to say hello or ask how he was doing, he would turn toward me in zombie-like motions, trying to register the origin of the interruption. He was smoking crack or snorting cocaine almost all day, but to me, he was just acting stranger than usual.

  Anything we did now was met with Luke’s fist.

  I don’t even remember what set him off this particular night, only that I had walked into the living room. Did I say something to him? Walk with too heavy a footstep? Make too much noise? Ask to watch something on TV? Whatever it was, he was off the couch and slamming me down the hallway before I knew it. He picked me up by my neck, which he had never done before, and slid my body up the wall near the steps. His breath was hot; he was panting, and each time he exhaled, spit hit my face.

  He dropped me to the floor, where I collapsed in a pile of sobs, trying to make myself as small as possible. It didn’t matter: he was bigger and stronger than me. He grabbed my arm, twisted it back, and shoved me down the hall. I didn’t feel the underside of my middle toe slicing against the hinge of the closet near my bedroom, right at the base, where the toes meet the fleshy part of the foot. I only realized I was hurt when Luke yelled about the blood I was getting everywhere.

  What I do remember is that my mom was there and watched
the whole thing from the couch.

  She scooped me up and took me to the bathroom. She made me sit on the lid of the toilet, while she sat on the edge of the tub with my foot on her knee. Every time she touched my toe, I screamed.

  “I have to see how bad the cut is, Dani! Calm down!”

  She gently bent my toe back, and a shock of pain shot up my foot. I screamed again, tears pouring out of me like a faucet.

  “All right,” Mom said, annoyed. “We have to go to the hospital.”

  She left me in the bathroom with a towel while she went to borrow the landlord’s pickup truck. When she came back into the house to get me, propping me against her on my uninjured side so that I could hop down the steps, Luke asked where we were going.

  “I’m taking her to the hospital,” Mom hissed. I hadn’t heard her take this tone with him in a while. She was pissed.

  “For that little cut?” Luke said, looking right at me.

  “She needs stitches.”

  Mom helped me down the stairs into the pickup, which she had left running. As we drove down the dark road, I stepped on the towel to keep it pressed against my foot. “It was just an accident,” she said, her eyes fixed on the road. “That’s all. Because they’re going to ask what happened. So you tell them the truth—that it was an accident.” I was scared by the amount of blood soaking through the towel, but I was terrified by Mom asking me to lie.

  When the nurse finally called us, she helped me over to a cot. “Let’s get this cleaned up a little, okay?”

  Mom said, “Kids, right? So clumsy. Especially this one.” She laughed a little, in a mother’s-work-is-never-done sort of way, gesturing toward me and shaking her head.