An Invisible Thread (24 page)

Looking back now, the story of what happened to Maurice brings to mind one of the great themes of mythology—what Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. It is a voyage many of us have had to make in one way or another. It happens on our path to discovering who we are and what we are made of. When we are young and full of energy but still naïve about the world, we are lured into a dark, mysterious forest—a forest that seduces us with the promise of great things. There we face challenges more intense than we could have fathomed, and how we fare in those challenges determines who we become. If we make it out of the forest alive, we are wiser and stronger, and the gifts we bring back with us will make the world a better place. The hero’s journey is a journey of self-discovery.

Maurice disappeared from my life so that he could enter that dark forest.

Maurice’s voyage began with a betrayal. He knew his father had done drugs, and of course he knew his mother was an addict. He
knew all his uncles and practically every other adult in his life were involved in drugs. But there was one person who hadn’t been sucked into the vortex, one person who, through it all, had stayed clean. And that was Maurice’s grandmother, Rose.

Maurice believed for most of his young life that Grandma Rose did not do drugs. She was the one who kept everything together while his mother was out scoring or in jail. She was the one who would comfort Maurice, tell him what a good boy he was, and tell him not to worry, that his mother would be home soon because she loved him more than anything. His grandmother was the rock in their crazy family. When he was young, Maurice noticed his grandmother never slept at night—she just stayed up in her chair—and he asked her why.

“Because I gotta watch out for my kids,” she’d say. “I’m always watching over you.”

Maurice believed that was true. His grandmother was his protector.

Then, around the time his son was born, Maurice learned his grandmother had cancer and was in a hospital for treatment. That by itself was a terrible blow, but then Maurice heard one of his aunts say Rose had asked for a bag of dope.

“What are you talking about?” Maurice asked her. “What would she be doing with a bag of dope?”

His aunt told him Rose did drugs all the time.

Maurice was crushed. Slowly, he put the pieces together: the reason she stayed up all night was to do her drugs without the children seeing. In the mornings she’d nod off and sleep during the day. Maurice felt angry and betrayed, and he rushed to the hospital
to confront his grandmother. He got there too early for visiting hours, but he’d been in the hospital before and knew his way around. He snuck in through the basement and went to the fifth floor. He walked into Rose’s room and found her in bed, hooked to a respirator, but her oxygen mask had come off and her gown was filthy. It looked to Maurice like no one was taking care of her, and he started yelling for a doctor or nurse, demanding they come and take care of his grandmother. Instead, two security guards grabbed Maurice, subdued him, and ushered him out of the hospital.

His grandmother died that night. He never got to talk to her.

He carried the betrayal with him for a while, but over time he realized his grandmother hadn’t betrayed him at all. Yes, she had succumbed to drugs, but she had kept her addiction a secret from Maurice so that he could see the best in her. And she
had
been his protector; she
had
steered him away from drugs, ever since the day she handed him that joint and then took it away. She had seen something special in Maurice, and she had done everything she could to keep him safe, right up to the day she died.

But now, she was gone. She could not be his protector anymore. That’s when Maurice realized he was no longer the one who needed protection.

He had a family now, and he had to become a protector for them.

In fact, his family was growing. Four months after Junior was born, Maurice and Meka split up; they simply fought too much to make it work. Maurice had seen his parents spend all their time fighting, and he didn’t want that for Junior. They agreed to raise Junior together, even though they were apart. Then Maurice met a
beautiful girl named Michelle and fell in love. Michelle liked that Maurice was quiet and reserved—that he didn’t need to be seen and heard like all the other noisy boys she knew. He saw the same quality in her—she was smart, centered, sure of herself. And Michelle had a tough exterior—quick to fight and slow to trust. For her, compromising meant ceding control, and that was something she’d never do. Maurice sat her down and told her, “I’m not always going to have everything you want, but if you stick with me you will always have everything you need. Ride out the tough times with me and trust me, and we will make it together.”

Michelle looked into his eyes and said, “I got you.”

“I got you,” Maurice said.

They moved into an apartment on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, and they had a son they named Jalique.

Maurice did not tell me about Jalique when he was born. He had seen how I reacted to Junior’s birth, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell me he’d had another child. When he had borrowed the money from me, it wasn’t to buy a coat for Meka.

It was to buy two winter coats, for Junior and Jalique.

What upset Maurice during that time was the feeling he was letting me down. He believed I felt he was irresponsible, and I guess I did. I wish I could go back and not be as hard on him. I didn’t know my feelings would bother him as much as they did. Perhaps I should have known, but I didn’t. One of the reasons he didn’t call me was because he couldn’t bear to be a disappointment to me.

The other reason was his realization that he needed to find a way to support his new family. He wasn’t the little kid who ate steak and cookies with me any longer; he was a father now. He
knew he couldn’t depend on me, or anyone else, to feed him or clothe him or otherwise support him. He had to find a way to do it on his own. That’s when he made a difficult decision: he was going to temporarily leave his family and go to North Carolina to try to set up a business.

Maurice’s plan was to bring jeans and other clothing with him from the city to sell in North Carolina, which was a couple of steps behind New York in terms of fashion. If he could set up a pipeline, all he’d have to do is send the clothing down and get money sent back to him in New York. Michelle was dead set against the trip; she didn’t like who he was going with. Maurice was traveling with two people he knew who were in the drug business, and Michelle was afraid they were going to North Carolina to sell drugs. She trusted Maurice and didn’t believe he would ever sell drugs himself, but both Maurice and Michelle knew that being around bad people could lead to as much trouble as being a bad person.
Nothing good could come of this trip
, Michelle thought, and she begged Maurice not to go.

But Maurice felt it was something he had to do, so he kissed his sons good-bye, told Michelle he loved her, and got on a Greyhound bus heading south.

He went to Raleigh and Fayetteville, Greensboro and Clinton. He missed Michelle and the children and called home whenever he could, promising he’d be home soon. He didn’t tell Michelle things weren’t going well in North Carolina. The men he was traveling with were getting in trouble with drug dealers and local girls and their boyfriends. There were constant fights and threats. Maurice found that, try as he might to steer clear of trouble, he often found himself right in the middle of it. He’d seen how his father acted in such
situations, had seen Uncle Limp and Uncle Dark being tough when they needed to be, and so his instinct was to stand and fight—to be the tough guy from New York who could handle the local gangsters. He’d been taught to prove to people that he wasn’t a chump. And as long as he was around a bad element, he would have to keep on proving it.

For a while he stayed in a run-down trailer with a man named Crickett. He noticed Crickett owned a lot of guns. When he saw them, Maurice knew he didn’t belong in that trailer. He was starting to realize this kind of life wasn’t for him. One morning he went to a service at the local Pentecostal church, and afterward the preacher came up to him and pulled him out of the crowd.

“Son, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but the Lord said, ‘It is time for you to go home.’ He has some work for you to do. Go home.”

Maurice shrugged him off. He still had business to take care of.

“If you don’t leave tonight,” the preacher continued, “there will be dire consequences. Your place is at home.”

That night, while sitting in the trailer with Crickett and his friends, Maurice heard the screech of cars pulling up. Earlier, one of the men Maurice had come down with had fought with a local woman, and now the woman’s brothers and cousins were there to set things straight. Maurice heard yelling and cursing and pounding on the trailer, and as soon as he stepped outside, he heard the first gunshot.

He dove behind a parked car and huddled against the front tire. He heard a bullet whiz past him; another shattered the windshield. The gunshots were impossibly loud, so loud he could barely think.
He saw Crickett and his friends shooting back, ducking and firing and ducking again. Maurice prayed for the shooting to stop, but it just kept going—a hundred gunshots ringing in the night.

Then Crickett tossed a gun toward Maurice.

Maurice’s father would have picked up the gun, and his uncles would have, too. Now, it seemed, it was his turn. Maurice stayed close to the tire and thought about what the preacher hold told him: “dire consequences.” He thought about Michelle waiting for him in Brooklyn. He thought about his son Junior and his son Jalique and how when he held them in his arms he felt like more of a man than when he did anything else.

And he thought about me.

There wasn’t time during the gunfight to think about all the ways that I had nagged him.
Don’t be late. Punctuality is important. Smoking is bad. Do your homework. Sit up straight. Clean your clothes. Be polite.
There wasn’t time to reflect on the trips to Annette’s house and the dinners at the Hard Rock and the warm cookies. There was no chance to remember the moment when he told me he loved me and realized that I loved him, too. With the shrill blast of bullets echoing in his ears, he could not think back to the first baseball game he and I went to, or forward to the first game he and his sons would see together.

In the chaos and the hail of bullets, with a loaded gun at his feet, Maurice could only form four words in his head:
This is not me.

He never picked up the gun. After twenty seconds that seemed more like twenty hours, the shooting stopped and the shooters drove away. Crickett looked down at Maurice in disgust.

“Why you crying?” he demanded.

“I have kids at home,” Maurice said. “I’m leaving.”

At dawn he was on a bus headed back to New York City.

Maurice walked into his apartment, saw Michelle and his boys, and said a small prayer of thanks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt anything sweeter than the feeling of his children tugging on his body as they tried to climb up and hug him.

He was also happy to see his mother again. He’d thought of her often when he was away and worried about her, because by then Maurice knew that his mother was sick. Not long after she had finished her long prison sentence, she sat Maurice down and gave him some bad news.

She told him she had HIV.

Maurice was devastated to hear this. All he knew about HIV was that it was a death sentence. Right then and there he started preparing himself for the day his mother would die. He played the day out in his head and tried to envision how he would feel, steeling himself so that he’d be ready when it finally came.

What made her disease even harder to accept was that, after a brief relapse, Maurice’s mother had kicked drugs once and for all. She’d checked in to an intense in-patient detox program, and Maurice didn’t hear a word from her for three months. After that she’d spent another nine months in the St. Christopher’s rehab clinic in the Bronx. Maurice visited her there and saw that she was lucid and clear-eyed and alive in a way she hadn’t ever been. All the needles and the crack rocks, all the dealers and the cops, all the nights with his mother slumped in a chair, eyes rolled back in her head—all of that, a lifetime of it, was now finally behind her.

“I don’t want that anymore,” Darcella had said.

For Maurice, her sobriety was something close to a miracle. She doted on his children, told stories to Junior, sang songs to Jalique, took them to the Big Apple Circus, thrilled them with her affection and attention. And Maurice was thrilled by it, too. One of his favorite memories is of his first birthday after his mother got clean. He had a party. His children were there, and his sisters and cousins and his mother, too, laughing and singing and having fun.
This is what birthday parties are supposed to be like,
he thought.
This is nice. This is good.

Maurice had always known his mother loved him. He knew that from the day she showed up with a hammer to get him back. He knew she’d done the best she could to shield him from her drug use. He never once felt she had let him down or failed him in any way. She had a sickness, that was true, a sickness that gripped her like the devil himself. But even in the face of that she had kept her family together, and now her son had a family of his own. Maurice did not feel cheated one bit, only blessed.

Not long after he got back from North Carolina, Maurice got a call from LaToya. She told him she hadn’t seen their mother in days. Maurice panicked. He was sure she hadn’t slipped back into drugs. He was
positive
she hadn’t. Later that day he got a call from an attendant at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in Brooklyn. His mother had suffered a stroke and collapsed in the street, and when paramedics got to her, she was in cardiac arrest. Now she was in a coma.

Maurice sat with her in her hospital room every day. She came in and out of consciousness and sometimes she opened her eyes and
moved her arms, but she was on a respirator and could not talk. So Maurice did the talking for her. He told her she should feel proud of her children. Her daughters were doing well and had families of their own. She knew he had a family, too, and she knew he was going to make something of himself.