by Donna Hylton
“What’s going on?” Woody says, now also gathering with all of us outside the bedroom.
“He’s not breathing,” Rita says, shaking her head in disbelief. “He’s not breathing.”
“No,” I whisper. “No. No.” I start screaming. “No! No! No!” I shove past Selma. “He’s breathing!” I yell. “Look—he’s breathing! He’s breathing! Look! He’s breathing! He’s breathing! Look! LOOK!”
Woody busts through and slaps me. I hold my face and turn, dazed, toward the living room, where I drop into a chair. I know he’s breathing. Nothing can convince me right now that he’s not breathing. My mind can’t accept any other possibility than that he’s still alive.
“We have to let Boss Man know,” Woody announces, but I’m still too much in a mental fog to pay attention to what’s going on—until I hear Woody’s plan. “I’m going to get a trunk from my apartment, and find some rocks.”
A trunk? Rocks?
This is not real.
“I just talked to Miranda,” Maria says, now standing over me in the living room. This time, I refuse to look at her. “Did you hear me? I talked to Miranda. He says we have to take the rental car back and go to Queens to pick up a van.”
I’m silent, overwhelmed, on the drive to Queens. We reach a rental garage, and Maria works with the clerk to rent a large white van. Woody returns just as we make it back to Selma’s apartment. I take a seat, still in too much shock to pay attention to what’s going on around me—but Maria says the car rental agency in Queens just called to inform her that there was a problem with her payment for the van. They tell her to go to their other garage, which is located in Manhattan.
Again, it’s my job to accompany her and Woody to the car rental garage on 96th Street between West End and Tenth Avenue. Maria gets out to take care of the payment while I sit in the van with Woody. “Go in with her,” Woody tells me.
I climb out of the van, but when my feet hit the concrete, I’m so catatonic with exhaustion—disoriented by what’s just happened—that it seems the rental office grows farther from me with every step that I take to reach it. When I finally step inside the lobby, I hang back by the door as my mind is only present enough to take in the facts of my surroundings: Maria standing at the desk to the left, the male clerk behind the counter who’s talking to her, two men in jeans filling out paperwork on clipboards in the waiting area. I watch as the two of them rise from their chairs to approach the clerk. “You’re under arrest!”
Maria turns slowly as each of the men stand with guns pointing at her. Then one of them takes my hands, puts them behind my back, and cuffs me. In this moment, my subconscious makes a distinct calculation whose outcome will only point to a conclusion that I don’t want to believe: if these are real police and they’re arresting me, then I have to accept that the man has in fact died. With my mind skewed by the events, the only consideration I allow myself to make in a fraction of a second is that this is some test set up by Miranda.
But within minutes, policemen from the NYPD swarm the scene. As they pull me outside and escort me to the backseat of an unmarked car, I begin to allow the weight of the possibility to set in: maybe this is real.
Then they drive me beneath the rental office to an underground garage, where minutes later, more officers arrive with Maria and another group with Woody. The three of us are held separately, though I’m not in a state of mind where I care to see either of them. My mind continues to wrestle with the death that now apparently has happened.
In the hours they hold me here, I learn more background about the crime than I’d known in the previous several weeks. Miranda and his business partner had been together on the selling side of a real estate transaction in which Miranda accused his partner—named Tom Vigliarolo, I learn—of swindling him out of figures that the police say ranged anywhere between $160,000 to nearly half a million dollars. Capturing his partner and holding him was Miranda’s attempt to get the money back, while plotting and overseeing the whole operation was Maria’s way of proving to her father, another close partner of Miranda, that she could be as tough and successful at their business schemes as the men in her family are.
The policemen in plainclothes were from the Nassau County Police Department on Long Island, where the victim’s wife waited several days to report him as missing because he routinely spent days at a time away from home to work in the city. But when Maria delivered the tape recording to his office on Long Island and I accompanied her, the guys in the office remembered that Thomas had planned a date with Maria behind his wife’s back, making Maria the last person to have seen him before he went missing. As they put the pieces together, they contacted his wife. That’s when she called her local police.
“What do you know about this real estate business?” police from the NYPD ask me.
“I don’t know anything, except what I heard them say in the car.”
“Is he alive?” they ask me. “Is he alive?” Yes, I want to tell them, because it’s what I want to believe. Yes, he’s alive. Can somebody tell me how he is? “I don’t know if he’s alive,” I tell them somberly. “I want him to be alive. But I don’t know.”
A few hours later when they circle me back to 143rd Street, there are helicopters hovering above the apartment building, bright lights high on poles to illuminate the scene, cameras, reporters buzzing around to collect information. The police leave me in the car while they go up in the apartment. I crane my neck to look out the window just as a lightning storm of camera flashes shine on the faces of two people I recognize: Rita and Selma. Theresa had a follow-up appointment with her OB/GYN in Boynton, which Miranda told her to keep so that no suspicion would be stirred by her absence at the doctor’s office.
Before I witness any indication of whether the man is still alive, the police pull out. For the next thirty-six hours they drive me around the city—throughout Manhattan, out to Queens, and to Long Island. They take forensic samples: my fingerprints, hair from my head, and hair from my private parts. My stomach roars with hunger, but I don’t dare ask to eat. The pain that’s making me sicker than my hunger is wondering what’s happening with my daughter now that I’ve been arrested. One of the police officers accuses me of having lied about not knowing whether the man was dead, but they don’t understand what was going on: I didn’t believe that he was dead. I had cared for that man. I couldn’t believe it.
I’m interrogated by NYPD officers at the 32nd Precinct. Here, I stay several nights in a cell by myself, restless, but so spent that I’m able to get small spells of sleep here and there. After a few days there, I face a small team of attorneys sitting across a conference table at the office of Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York County. “My daughter’s life was in danger,” I tell them. “Before we start, can someone please make sure she’s OK?”
“What do you mean your daughter’s life was in danger?”
“They threatened to kill her if I didn’t do what they said. Please—can someone check on her?”
“You use our time together this morning to tell us what you know,” one of the lawyers says. “And we’ll check on your daughter.”
I volunteer the little information that I have. After hours of asking me the same questions in dozens of different ways, they ask me to sign a statement, which I do. If they’ll check on Adrienne, I’ll do anything to cooperate.
At close to midnight, the police officers take me in an NYPD cruiser on a drive almost an hour away. They start north in Manhattan, over the East River and into Queens, finally leaving an island of trees and greenery to enter onto a bridge. To my right, out the passenger-side window, I can see the runway of LaGuardia Airport—the place I landed when I first arrived in this country thirteen years ago. I watch the flashing lights of a plane take off, soaring into the sky above us, like a butterfly in the air. Since I arrived in this city, I’ve dreamed of the day I could make my own choices for my life. Now it may be possible that I’ll never experience that freedom.
; After a couple of minutes, toward the end of the bridge, a road sign reads SLOW DOWN—but it feels as though the van actually picks up speed as a high chain-link fence with barbed wire emerges. The bridge meets land again, in a forest of fences and concrete. This is Rikers Island.
It’s late at night when they bring me into a receiving room. I still have not eaten, and I haven’t slept more than a few short hours at a time for what’s now three weeks.
One staff member stands under the curtain of an old tripod camera to take my photograph. “May I use the phone?” I ask the officer at the receiving room desk.
He looks up at the clock. “Who do you need to talk to at two a.m.?”
“I need to call home,” I tell him. “To check on my daughter.”
He refuses to look at me when he nods toward the phone. I dial Roy and Daphne’s number and hold my breath as the line rings once… then twice. At the third ring, I prepare to hang up, somewhat relieved there’s no answer—then suddenly, I hear Roy’s voice, gravelly with sleep. “Yeah?” he says. I rest my forehead against the wall in front of me. Nobody will ever love you the way I do. The memory of my adoptive father’s words ten years ago are a weight in my mind that have a way of pulling me down, down, always farther down, no matter how low I’m already feeling. If you ever loved me, as your daughter or anything else, I want to tell him, then can you please help me right now? “What is it?” he says impatiently.
“I just thought I should call.”
He grumbles, clearly irritated. “Where are you calling us from?” His use of the word us strikes me, as though suddenly he and Daphne are one entity, as though my absence, my failure, has somehow unified them.
I think twice for a moment… but I have no choice but to answer his question. “I’m at Rikers Island.”
From this point, he’s purely matter-of-fact. He doesn’t ask about the crime or how I am; he only tells me that the police have been to the apartment to question them. “They asked what we knew,” he says. “But we didn’t know anything. They showed up a second time—”
“To check on Adrienne?”
“No. The district attorney’s office wanted us to tell them you’re a bad mother.”
“Did you tell them I love my child?”
“I didn’t get involved,” he says. Immediately, I know why: he’d be subject to questioning about my upbringing, and he doesn’t want his own history to be exposed in the midst of all this.
“How is Adrienne?” I ask him. I feel the muscles in my face tense up uncontrollably as I try to keep my voice strong. “I’d do anything to see my little girl.”
“Adrienne is fine,” he says.
Will you bring her here to see me?!
“Here,” he says. “I’ll pass you to your mother.”
I can picture Daphne taking the phone, caught off guard and slightly rumpled from sleep but still properly coiffed. I hold the telephone with both hands, ready to pull it from my ear if she screams. Instead, she has one calm, singular point to tell me: “I didn’t put you in this situation.” A rustle comes through the phone as she hands it back to Roy. Then the line goes dead.
How I’m faring isn’t even a question in her mind.
The combination of loneliness, guilt, and shame—the desperation to be loved—threatens to put me over the edge. Since Mr. V died, I’ve been drowning in emotions; in disturbance and distress and unable to live with myself. Now these emotions begin to boil up inside me and give way to anger: Why don’t you care? I want to scream at my adoptive mother. Can’t you just ask how I’m doing, this once? If you’d ever listened to me when I asked you for help, I wouldn’t be here! I didn’t run away because I wanted to—I ran away because it was safer than staying in the home of a pedophile! Instead, the only help I found was Alvin—someone who beat out of me what was left of my self-worth.
As I dialed their number, I was foolish enough to hope that they might offer me some kind of legal help, or that they’d arrange to bring Adrienne to see me. When we hang up, I know: Roy and Daphne were my only prayer out of this. They brought me to this country and called me their daughter. They’re the only ones I can turn to, and they won’t even help me now, when I need a family more than ever.
“I just saw you in the news.” I turn around to find a fellow inmate working behind the registration desk. I cast down my eyes. “Have you eaten?” she says.
Now I look up at her. I’ve lost track of days. I’m unsure when my last meal was. I take a moment to feel for my appetite, which seems to have disappeared when the phone went dead… but I will gratefully accept any kindness that’s extended to me right now.
“We’ve got some food left from dinner, here—I’ll go heat some up for you.” When she returns carrying a tray of rice and a patty of chicken, I try to eat slowly, the way Daphne taught me when I was a child. I realize quickly, however, that my appetite is stronger than my manners. “They’re working to find you a housing unit,” this inmate tells me.
When I finish eating, she and an officer work together to register me and give me a pile of belongings: a green cup, a set of sheets, a small pillow, and a wool gray blanket that catches on my skin as soon as it makes contact. “Do I need to change or something?” I ask the inmate.
“No,” she says. “You’re a detainee. You only get a uniform if you get sentenced.” If you get sentenced. I have so much to learn about this process.
She and the officer show me to a cell by myself, a cell that’s dirty and dark, with one small window facing the shoreline of the Bronx across the East River. Because of the thirty-six hours I spent in police custody without food or anyone to talk to, I fall asleep easily. I’m not sure how long I’ve been sleeping when I wake up afraid, sweating, breathing heavy because of a nightmare.
They transfer me to a permanent cell by myself at the Rose M. Singer Center, the only facility of the jail that’s designated for female inmates. Instinctively, my old childhood habit returns when I check the cell door to see if there’s a lock: there’s only a lock on the outside of the door, which will give strangers here access to me, but will give me no means to protect myself. Inside the cell is an aluminum toilet, a sink, a metal bed that comes out of the wall with a thin mattress, and a tiny, blocked-up window so that I can’t see even the faintest sliver of light. They inform me I’ll be allowed out for a maximum of an hour per day.
Meals are delivered to me through a small slot—usually cold, except for the milk or juice, which usually comes warm. Alone in my cell, it begins to physically pain my eyes to see the plastic knives that they give me to cut my food. One of the officers takes me to see the psychiatrist, who suggests that I’m experiencing regressive memories from events that happened in my early childhood. I remember a time when my birth mother held up a knife in the moonlight to a man she was dating, and the way the moon shone off the silver of the knife so sharply that it hurt my eyes.
My nightmares continue, and each night, I wake up in my cell with tears sliding over my jawline, moistening my small square of pillow. In my sleep, I see Roy standing over me, licking his lips and making grunting noises the way he used to do when he insisted that I change my clothes with my bedroom door open. I see my birth mother in Jamaica, screaming and whipping me inside a cave. After a week of this, I call out to one of the correctional officers who walks by my cell. “Can you help me?”
She stops and slowly approaches. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t get any sleep. The nightmares—”
“It’s OK,” she says. “We’ll get somebody to help you.”
The next morning, she escorts me through the halls of Rikers Island. From inside their cells, I hear women ask each other: “Who is that?” and “Where the fuck does she think she’s going?” While we wait to see a doctor who can give me something to help me sleep, the officer asks me whether I have any children. I nod solemnly. “A daughter,” I tell her, suddenly forced to fight back tears.
“I’ll bet she’s beautiful.”
I
nod and stop a tear with the back of my fist. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s alright. What’s your little girl’s name?”
I take a deep breath to catch myself from sobbing. “Adrienne.”
“And how old?”
“She’s four.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s with her father. In the Bronx.”
“Are you upset because you’re worried about her?” I’m overcome with sadness; I can’t speak another word. “She’s going to be OK, Donna,” the officer tells me. “Right now, you have to take care of you.”
It is only the rare displays of humanity and care such as this that make it possible to survive in jail. No one comes to see me, though I do have an opportunity to phone Roy and Daphne for twenty minutes each week. I ask them both about Adrienne, and their answers are brief. They inform me that they’ve thrown out every award, trophy, and piece of identification that bears my name. I understand what this means: I’m dead to them. It’s not just because of the crime, either. It’s because of that day when I was twelve years old and dared to tell someone outside our home what had been happening inside. From that moment, I became the troublemaker.
When I hang up, the women behind me are surprised I’ve used so little of my twenty-minute call allowance.
In a cell by myself I’m going crazy, but around others, the danger seems more severe. “Look at her, she’s pretty,” the other female inmates say for me to hear when I take my free hour in a common area. There we can watch TV or prepare soup, coffee, or tea from the hot water faucet that pipes out from the wall. “She was in the New York Post, bet she thinks she’s really something special.” Others sneer, “Who does this light-skinned bitch think she is?”
I remember the kids in my class when I was a little girl starting school after I’d just come from Jamaica: Is she black, or is she white?
She’s an alien!
Just as I did back then, I keep to myself here at Rikers. I can tell there are a few who are already out to get me, and my instincts in this place are quickly sharpening. When I’ve only been here a few days and I’m still getting acquainted, I see motion in my peripheral vision. Something in my mind says, Stop her!
