Mr. Ortega says he’ll finish my shift, and tells me to call with an update. I stand outside under the awning of the bodega to avoid the sun’s heat and watch the steam rise from the grills in the food truck across the street. The cooks are getting ready for the long lines of people that’ll be waiting for their weekend fix. Some will be posted up against their cars, blasting music. People will form groups and dance, crack jokes, and smoke weed. This is all before the club. After is when the nightlife really starts, when girls start tripping over their heels until they take them off and leave them on curbs, when the chimi trucks run out of meat and people start cussing, and the police show up to tell everybody it’s time to go home.
I’m about to go back inside to call Leanna again, but her car rounds the corner and pulls in front of me. Ava rolls down the passenger window. I’m surprised she’s here. Normally, I don’t see her unless I go to their house, but I’m not complaining. She smells like brown-sugar perfume when we hug through the open window.
“What took so long?” I ask my sister. “Ma might change her mind and take off.”
Leanna rolls her eyes. “Stop fussing and get in. I’ll drop Ava home, then we’ll go.”
“We don’t have time for—”
“She’s right,” Ava cuts in, her blunt purple-colored bob swaying as she shakes her head. “I’m coming.”
“I’d rather you not,” my sister replies, voice low.
Ava grabs Leanna’s hand. “You’re my family, so she’s my family.”
Leanna usually hides these private moments. Sometimes when I visit them, if I’m quiet and sneaky enough, I’ll see Leanna come up from behind Ava while she cooks to wrap an arm around her stomach. But now, Leanna lifts Ava’s hand and turns it to kiss her palm. She doesn’t let go of it even though she knows I’m watching.
The Newport Bridge is a rusty green beauty. To calm myself, I take out my camera to record the workers hooked near the top of it. My stomach does a flip watching them. One time, I cried on a Ferris wheel and Ma had to wave at the worker to get us off earlier. She climbed this bridge many times as a teenager when she needed some fun. I told her someone couldn’t pay me a million dollars cash to climb a bridge. She said, “You’ll forever be no fun.”
Newport air is like a concentrated version of the way it smells in Warwick, where Leanna and Ava live, which is only three minutes’ drive from the beach, close enough to smell salt water and wet sand when the wind blows.
But here there are so many docks, seagulls flying. There are cottages with rock walls, canoes hooked to the top of trucks, and the ocean is everywhere. I love paying attention to the people walking with huge surfboards, but I lean forward, gripping Ava’s headrest.
“Can’t you drive a little above the limit?”
Leanna sighs, speeds up some, but it doesn’t feel fast enough.
When we arrive at the projects, we park in the corner lot of the complex, and I think of when we played jump rope in this spot. We’d run around here with all the other kids while Ma sniffed lines of coke somewhere out of sight. One day, Dev brought home a used needle he’d found by the blue dumpsters. Ma never brought us along with her after that, said we’d be safer at home, where we could lock the door and dial her up when we needed her.
Leanna turns to me. “Stay in the car.”
“You’re bugging.”
“I’ll be right back,” she says, getting out. “Wait with Ava.”
I want to protest, but Ava shifts in her seat to smile at me.
I look out the window, watch the children who run through the clotheslines, playing games with the hanging laundry, tripping over broken concrete as they chase one another. I build a scene for them in my head: massive trees to climb, enough grass for them to roll in, clean walkways and a park with monkey bars. They look happy just like this, but what if they had more?
Ava taps the dashboard and says to me, “Your sister’s taking too long. You coming?”
Betty’s door is cracked open, and Ava pushes it the rest of the way. Ma’s lying on a couch with Leanna leaned over her. My “godmother” Betty is throwing her arms open to hug us.
Leanna sucks her teeth. “We should call an ambulance,” she says.
Ma tells Leanna she’s fine, but she sits up to vomit in a big bowl. I freeze at the sight of her, and Ava is busy trying to get Betty to shut up. Leanna says to me, “Get over here and help Ma stand.”
Ma gets up on her own, swaying but on two feet. She looks at me and smiles. “Natty Fatty, my baby.”
My eyes water, and I move my feet to hug my momma. Her skin is sticky. She smells like body odor and alcohol. She keeps saying she wants to go home. But we’re together now.
Leanna looks through Betty’s trash, with Betty protesting behind her. “Fuck,” my sister says, then she shoves the garbage can and it falls on its side. “Let’s go.”
When we get in the car, she wastes no time. “You shooting up heroin now?”
Ma’s holding her head in the back seat beside me. I’m stroking her arm till I stop and turn it over. The marks don’t lie, and she’s not trying to, either. “My head hurts, Leanna. Please.”
Leanna grips the steering wheel and drives fast while she goes in on Ma: That’s what happens when you do heroin. Do you want to catch HIV? Have an overdose? Crack’s not bad enough?
My throat hurts. I look out the window, but the world outside the car gets hazy. Ma tells me she’s sorry, and her sweaty hand grips mine. It’s shaking as I try to push her away. But when we’re almost on the highway home, she starts breathing heavy, gasping for air.
Leanna’s still cussing in the front seat. “Shut up,” I yell, then pull Ma against me. I tilt her head, try to remember CPR from health class. “Ma, can you breathe?”
Her eyes close, and her heart’s beating fast. I can feel it going in and out against my fingertips, until I can’t feel it at all. “We need to get her to a hospital. Now.”
Ava’s already opening a map she took from the glove compartment to give my sister directions, and I’m stroking Ma’s wet hair. “It’s going to be okay, Momma.” I lean to whisper in her ear, trying to chant healing spells I can’t remember, wishing I paid more attention to Mili when she talked about the way her Papa would use spells to ease his own pain. If I’d believed sooner, if I was stronger, maybe I could fix this somehow. But all I can do is pray.
Somewhere between the docks and the hospital, Ma stops breathing.
The doctors rush her in on a gurney. It’s all beeps and clangs and so bright I’m dizzy. We follow them but get stuck outside the room, watching through glass as they use the paddles to shock Ma’s heart. After a few seconds, it starts beating on the monitor, and I rush to heave into a wastebasket. Ava makes me sit on a chair, rubs my back, and a nurse hands me a wet rag. Leanna won’t look at anyone; her back is still to us, her hand pressed against the emergency room window as she looks in on Ma. She’s stiff when nurses rush by her with clipboards, pushing patients in wheelchairs, wanting her to move out of the way. One of them leads us to the waiting room, where we call Devin and Mr. Ortega and wait. Five minutes, ten minutes, maybe forty.
Leanna sits up straight as the doctor comes out and sits across from her. “How is she?” she says. “How’s my mom?”
“Your mom is in a coma,” he says. Bits of explanation and medical jargon get lost between the parts my brain is able to pay attention to: “I think she’s suffered severe brain damage … I’m not sure she’ll wake up … I’m so sorry.”
His sorry makes the world splinter, but it’s Leanna’s cry that wrenches mine from me.