CHAPTER 18
Old Enough to Know
During the cab ride home, I sat as far away from Mom as I could. I curled into myself facing the window, clenching my jaw tight as a vise. I would not cry. I would have rather died than cry in the taxi with Mom.
Back in our apartment, while I peeled off the sticky Halston dress, Mom ran a hot bath for me. She put fragrant aromatherapy oils in the water and lit candles. All were meant to soothe me, but they didn’t work. To stop myself from crying, I concentrated on hardening my heart to everything that had happened.
Yes, I saw Hailey Joanne kissing TJ. #IDONTCARE
Yes, I thought TJ liked me, but he likes her better. #IDONTCARE
Yes, I made a fool of myself in front of everyone. #IDONTCARE
If I could convince myself that I didn’t care about anything, then nothing could bother me, right?
For the first time since maybe second grade, Mom stayed in the bathroom and sat on a stool to bathe me. I didn’t care. She removed the sticky, clip-on hairpieces and tossed them into the trash can. I didn’t care. I closed dry eyes as she peeled my long, false eyelashes off. I didn’t care. She smeared my face with Vaseline to wipe off the layers of makeup. I didn’t care. Even soaking in the fragrant, steaming-hot bath water, I was a block of ice.
Mom lathered up a loofah sponge and began to wash my shoulders and back. She said, “You know, Mango, you can let go.”
“Of what?”
“Your feelings, honey. You are like one big knot. Relax and release. You’ll feel better if you cry.”
“I’m not going to cry.”
“Why not?”
For the first time since we left the hotel, I turned to look at Mom and narrowed my eyes. “You don’t cry. I’ve never seen you cry. Aunt Zendaya said you didn’t even cry when they told you that you would have to lose your leg.”
Mom sat back on the stool, let the loofah fall into the water, and wiped her hands on her jeans. “That’s not true.”
“What’s not true?”
“That I didn’t cry. Your aunt doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You shouldn’t listen to her.”
“You never talk about it.”
“I’ll talk to you about it when you’re ready. When you’re old enough.”
I noticed her hand trembling as she raised it to her forehead to wipe away beads of perspiration. She noticed it, too, because she grabbed it with her other hand, stood, and walked out of the bathroom.
I sat back in the tub, amazed that I had the nerve to bring up the subject Mom never talked about. I had rattled her. Maybe I’d hurt her. I felt a frog beginning to grow in my throat. I swallowed it.
#IDONTCARE
The water temperature had dropped to just below lukewarm when I finally got out of the tub, toweled off, put on my pajamas and robe, and walked out of the bathroom. Mom called to me from her bedroom. I didn’t want to talk to her or anyone. I just wanted to get in bed and try to sleep forever. But she said, “Mango, please,” and there was a tremor in her voice that I’d never heard before. I sighed and dragged myself to her room.
She was on the bed. A tray with two mugs of what smelled like peppermint tea sat on the night table, and her false leg was on the floor. She patted the bed next to her and said, “Come.”
I crawled onto Dada’s side of the bed, lifted my knees to my chest, and folded my arms tight around me. Mom lifted a mug of tea and held it out to me. I shook my head. She brought the mug to her mouth, blew on the tea, and sipped.
“You know my parents died when I was seventeen.”
I nodded, looking toward the hallway, where I could see that I had left the bathroom light on. Normally, Mom would make me go back and turn it off right away, but this night was anything but normal.
“I had a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. A coach out there wanted to train me, because the university thought if I worked hard enough, I might be able to qualify for the Olympics.” Mom kind of chuckled and shook her head. “I didn’t know about that, but I thought my future was set. Then life hit me head-on like a freight train. My parents—two homebodies who never went anywhere—got all dressed up one night and went to a hole-in-the-wall social club in the Bronx to celebrate a coworker’s birthday. They got trapped in a horrible fire. Newspapers said the owner of the club had blocked all the exits to stop people from sneaking in without paying. The one exit they could have escaped through was upstairs, and that’s where the fire started. I mean, really, what kind of world … ?”
My shoulders began to soften. I uncrossed my arms and let my legs drop away from my chest. There was a picture of her mom and dad, the grandparents I’d never met, on Mom’s night table. It was in a small, tarnished-silver frame and kind of clouded by the steam rising from the other mug of tea, but I could see they were smiling with their arms around each other. I realized I hadn’t really looked at that photograph in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even considered them.
Mom was staring down into her mug of tea as if there were a code or a secret she was struggling to decipher at the bottom. I cleared my throat to get her attention, but it didn’t work. Finally, I said, “Mom?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, needless to say, I didn’t go to UCLA.”
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t go all the way to Los Angeles and leave Dora all by herself.”
“You mean Aunt Zendaya?”
“She was Dora back then, before she became some kind of … I don’t know what. A free-thinking, radical/liberal pacifist—or whatever she’s calling herself nowadays.”
“She’s calling herself Zendaya,” I said, reaching for Mom’s mug of tea. She let me take it and picked up the one on the night table. She had sweetened the tea with just the right amount of honey. It felt good going down.
“Well, she was only fourteen back then. I was the older sister. I was responsible for her from the day she was born. Both my parents worked, and I was always left in charge of Dor—Zendaya. So I turned down the scholarship at UCLA and got a grant to do track at Brooklyn College and a part-time job. With the insurance money my parents left behind, we were okay, though I had to be careful with our budget.”
“So, that’s how you got to be the way you are.”
“What are you trying to say?”
I giggled. “Good with money. Uh … frugal.”
“Whatever.” She smiled. We both sipped our tea, and she looked over at me. “You sure you’re old enough to hear the rest?”
“I’m sure.”
Mom cleared her throat. “A couple of years later, Zendaya was sixteen, and she had a little boyfriend who lived down the block. He called himself some kind of rapper or beatboxer or whatnot. I couldn’t stand him, but I knew the harder I tried to keep her away from him, the more she’d want to be with him, so I gave them a long leash.”
Mom took a deep breath, blew it out through her lips, and leaned back on the headboard. “There was some kind of all-day hiphop festival over on Staten Island, and, against my better judgment, I let her go with her boyfriend and their friends. She was supposed to be home by ten o’clock at night. When she didn’t come back on time, I worried. When she didn’t come back after midnight, I began to panic. I blamed myself for being too lenient. As the hours dragged on, I could hardly catch my breath. When she finally stepped in the door after four o’clock in the morning, I went ballistic.”
I sat up straight and moved in closer to Mom. She balled her fists and squeezed them real tight and then released her fingers and shook them out.
“She claimed they had missed the last ferry and had to find a ride over the Verazzano Bridge back to Manhattan and then take a train to Brooklyn.”
“Didn’t you believe her?”
“Believe her? That didn’t matter to me. She should have got to a pay phone and called me! She put me through torture, Mango. She was like my child. We had just lost our parents two years before. I almost went out of my mind when she said she didn’t call because she ‘didn’t want to wake me.’ How could she imagine I would be asleep?”
Mom slammed her mug on the nightstand, and a bit of tea sloshed over the side. She covered her face with her hands, shook her head, and sighed deep. She reached behind her head and pulled off the band she used to put her dreads into a ponytail, shaking her hair loose. Her face had reddened and her eyes were like black marbles, growing harder and darker by the second. It was as though she was being pulled back twenty years, experiencing that night all over again. No wonder she never wanted to talk about it. But I had to know.
“What happened next, Mom?”
She rubbed her temples as she went on. “I don’t know what came over me, but I put my hands on my sister. I hit her. My parents had never laid a hand on either one of us, but I just snapped and couldn’t stop myself. Afterward I tried to apologize, but Zendaya pushed me away. She screamed that she hated me, that I wasn’t her mother, and that she wished I were dead instead of our parents. At that moment, so did I.”
Mom’s hand found one of her dreads, and she began to twist it around and around in her fingers. “I grabbed my keys and got into my half-broken-down car and took off. I wasn’t sure where I was going at first, but I found myself driving toward Brooklyn College. The streets were pretty empty at that time of morning. It was dark, and I was in fifth gear—pedal to the metal. I was rushing to get to the track; that was the only place where I could lose myself. Lose the pain I was feeling. The guilt. The regret. All of it. I just wanted it gone.
“As I approached the college, I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t … I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t seeing where I was going. I ran a red light. Two cars came at me from opposite directions, and …” She winced at the memory, breathed deep, and shuddered.
“When I woke up, there were sirens. Lights were flashing all around. Firemen were trying to get the car open with the Jaws of Life. Helicopters—I heard the sound of their blades whirring overhead. Then I guess I passed out again. Later I learned that I had made the morning news. That’s how Zendaya found out—when she saw what was left of the car on TV.”
I moved in close to Mom and touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
She put her arm around me and pulled me close. “Zendaya was the first person I saw when I came to in the hospital. She was a wreck, sobbing and saying how sorry she was. Then the doctor told me they would have to amputate my leg. And you were right: I didn’t cry. In that moment, I couldn’t cry.
“See, if I cried, my baby sister—the person I was responsible for—she would blame herself for what happened for the rest of her life. So I held my tears back with everything I had in me. This was my fault. And after what I had done, I deserved what I got. So I didn’t cry. At least, not when anyone could see.”
I sat up and looked at Mom. Tears were falling from her eyes. I held her face in my hands and did my best to kiss them away.
#IDIDCARE