Breaking Night (18 page)

That one gesture captured in that photograph was the single greatest act of affection I had ever witnessed between my parents. I felt like I was looking at strangers.

But my favorite picture, by far, was a black-and-white headshot of Ma that had been taken when she was high school age. With a brooding look on her beautiful face, she could have been a model, I thought. The photograph drew me in and I stared down at it for what felt like forever, at this single moment of Ma’s life before she went and accidentally made children, before mental illness, welfare, and even before HIV. I wondered if this was where she was always running back to: her old life, happier times that had nothing to do with children, a truant daughter interrupting her, driving her crazy, holding her back, making her sick. When I finally packed everything into the plastic bag again, I took that single headshot and slipped it into the back pocket of the jeans I wore under Ma’s robe.

Placing the bag back onto the shelf turned out to be trickier than pulling it down, so I grabbed a chair from the kitchen and stood on it to see high over the crates of records. As I did, my eyes caught sight of something I had missed before, an old, dust-covered wooden box situated on the very back of the high shelf in my parents’ closet. I returned the Farmers’ Market bag to its place and lifted the wooden box out from behind the crates of records; it was much heavier than I had expected, given its small size. I climbed down from the chair and sat on my parents’ bed, where I placed the box on my lap.

Inside, there was a scrapbook held together by rubber bands so old that they snapped when I pulled on them; a few pictures slipped to the floor. “
SAN FRANCISCO
” was scribbled across the tops of the remaining pages of the scrapbook, in my father’s bold handwriting. On each page, there was picture after picture of Daddy looking even younger than he did in the photographs with Ma, his head nearly full of hair. There were shots of him pointing to the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, relaxing on a beach, cooking hamburgers with friends at a barbecue, and laughing at parties.

In one photo, Daddy was standing in front of a place called City Lights Bookstore, in a row of four well-dressed men who were playfully serious for the camera, their chins bucked up, eyes squinting in the sun.

There were also two black-and-white pictures of Daddy, and on the back of them, unfamiliar handwriting stating three words, “
AT CITY LIGHTS
.” In one, Daddy is reading by himself, seemingly unaware that he is being photographed. In the other, he is part of a group of serious-looking people all seated audience-style before a bearded man, whose arms are raised in a gesture that implied storytelling.

Paper-clipped onto the back cover of the scrapbook was an old, faded letter, the return address of which I recognized as my grandmother’s, on Long Island. I unfolded a brief, handwritten note in which she informed Daddy of her surprise the day she had received his tuition check, returned by his school in the mail, uncashed. In the short note, she explained that Daddy’s former roommate had given her his forwarding address in California, and she asked when he intended to continue his studies and how long he would be “vacationing” out west. She signed it
With love, your mother
, just as she had signed every birthday card she had ever mailed to him at our apartment.

Clipped to Grandma’s letter were two more letters; these were unopened and not addressed to Daddy, but rather were from Daddy, to a Mr. Walter O’Brien, in San Francisco. They each were stamped
RETURN TO SENDER
. In my entire life I had not seen Daddy write a letter to anyone, and I wondered what they could possibly say, but I knew I was already snooping and that I couldn’t get away with opening them. So I thumbed through the postcards. One featured a photograph taken at the bottom of a very curvy hill, and it read
LOMBARD STREET
; it was sent to Daddy at a New York City address from a woman whose name I no longer remember, telling my father that she missed him and his “bad taste” in poetry. She also wanted him to know that their friend Walter missed him too, and that she hoped he would return to San Francisco.
Daddy liked poetry?
I couldn’t imagine it. With his true crime and trivia books, all he ever seemed interested in were facts, and usually dark ones, or those absent of deep meaning. Poetry didn’t fit.

I gathered up pictures that had fallen out of the scrapbook. There was one photo of a baby girl wearing a pink dress. At first, I thought it was a photograph of me, only I’d never seen it before and the picture was badly faded. Then I flipped it over to find that the writing on the back read,
Meredith
.

My chest tightened. I stared at the photo for a long while, comparing Meredith’s face to the foggy memory I had of her that day in the park when Daddy had directed Lisa and me to walk toward our big sister. I stared at Meredith’s face as a baby and compared it to Daddy’s. Taking in her complete vulnerability as an infant, I wondered where she was now, and how Daddy could have left her behind, and why we never talked about her. It filled me with a deeply unsettling feeling to wonder what else he was capable of doing.

In the last few photos, I found one that read “
Peter and Walter, July 4
.” I flipped it over and saw a picture of Daddy smiling. In it, his eyes were so bright, it was as if they were smiling too. The other man in the photo, Walter, was handsome, slim, and even younger-looking than Daddy. He was fair-skinned, with red hair and freckles. He was also smiling, and he had his arm around Daddy’s shoulder. In the background, I saw people carrying American flags in a park that did not appear to be in New York City, but rather someplace I had never seen before. It looked as though everyone was having a picnic.

Finally, I reached the last photo—a Polaroid at the very bottom of the stack, underneath the pictures. At first, the image confused me. I stared at it for some time because my mind simply could not make sense of what I saw. Slowly, though, the reality of it seeped in. First, I understood that I was looking at a picture of two men kissing. I then processed that the red-haired man in the picture was Walter. My father’s friend Walter. The Walter mentioned in the postcard. The Walter of the returned letters. Walter was kissing another man, and that man was Daddy.

Without thinking, I sprung to my feet in a sudden panic and stuffed the letters, postcards, and pictures back into the scrapbook and slammed it shut. I jammed the scrapbook into the wooden box,
fast
, as though if I moved quickly enough, I could pack my discovery back in there with it. I returned the whole thing to the very back of the closet, put Ma’s robe back in its place, and ran to my room.

On the bed, my head buried in my pillow, Ma’s warnings about Daddy came roaring back to me. I remembered all the times she accused him of being secretive and not loving her. I thought it was her illness making her paranoid. I had defended him and felt sorry for his having to put up with her irrational meanness.
Did I really just see that? Was that real? Did Ma know?

I cried hard into my pillow. I cried out all my hurt over missing Ma and Lisa. I cried out deeply unsettling feelings. I cried because, buried in the back of the closet in the bedroom Ma and Daddy had once shared, was evidence that I didn’t really know my father. Was he still seeing this Walter? Was he seeing some other man? Had he ever loved Ma? Could Daddy have given Ma AIDS?

Those next few months, I began spending a lot of time in my room with my door shut. Each night when Daddy returned from his drug runs or his time spent downtown, I’d step out briefly to receive the take-out food that had become our routine dinner, fried rice or a slice of pizza. We’d make brief conversation, and then when Daddy was ready to get high in the kitchen, I’d retreat into my room, where I could eat in privacy. When he brought home a second, smaller TV set from the trash one day, he let me keep it in my room. I explained that the couch wasn’t comfortable anymore. Sometimes at night, before Daddy went to bed, he’d tap lightly on my closed door to say, “Good night, Lizzy, I love you.” From the other side, I made him wait just a few moments before I’d finally answer “. . . I love you too, Daddy.”

A few months later, when I was thirteen years old, child welfare finally took me into custody. When they came for me, I didn’t put up a fight. In someplace deep inside of me that is hard to think about even now, I do believe that my heart broke when Daddy didn’t put up a fight either.

In response to numerous calls regarding my truancy from Junior High School 141, two unsmiling male caseworkers wearing starched suits appeared at our door to escort me by car to “placement.” One introduced himself as Mr. Doumbia, and the other was nameless. While Daddy signed the papers handing over legal custody of me to the state, I had ten minutes to pack whatever I could into a book bag. In a tearful panic, I’d taken some clothing, Ma’s bronze-colored NA coin and that one black-and-white picture of her, and that was it. Daddy’s hug was stiff and nervous at the door. “Sorry, Lizzy,” was all he said, his hands shaking with tremors. I hid my face from him because I didn’t want Daddy to see me cry. If I just had gone to school, this never would have happened.

In the backseat of the car, I sat with a bag in my lap. No one spoke a word to me. I tried to figure out what was going to happen next by listening to their conversation. But I couldn’t make out much through their guttural accents, which were drowned out by the roar of the car engine. My eyes were darting everywhere, up and down the Bronx streets that we drove through and which I did not recognize. They took me to a massive, anonymous-looking office building made of tarnished bricks, with no sign above the entrance, I noticed as we walked in.

I was brought to a small office that resembled a doctor’s examination room, but without the examination table. “Sit here,” a tall woman said, pointing to a chair, before walking away and leaving the door wide open. The walls were bare. The window was barred with a thick, rusted gate, and the sun illuminated a small, trash-filled back alley behind the building. From my chair I could see another girl seated alone in the hallway, hair in cornrows, wearing sweatpants. Her eyes were lazy; she looked the way people in Ma’s psychiatric ward looked when they were doped up on medication. More than a half hour went by, and no one returned. I got up and dared myself to walk over and speak to the girl.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you here for?”

“They think I stabbed my cousin. I’m sick of this shit,” she muttered, not looking up at me.

“Oh . . . sorry,” was all I said, and after a moment I went back to my seat. I don’t know how long it was before the tall woman came back, but when she did, she shut the office door and it was just the two of us alone. She opened a file under her desk lamp, read something, and then she turned, looking at me from over the top of her glasses. It was the first time anyone had looked at or spoken to me since I had gotten in the car.

“I need you to undress,” she said, followed by nothing but silence.

“Get naked?” I asked.

“Yes, I need to examine you. Please undress.”

The last thing I wanted to do was take off my clothes, but what else could I do? What wouldn’t I have done if she told me to? So I did. She flipped through a couple of pages from the folder while I stacked my clothing on the extra office chair. I stood slightly hunched over in the chilly office, rubbing my arms to smooth away the goose bumps, and I waited for my next instruction.

“Your underwear, too. Everything.”

“Why?” I asked, pulling my underwear down. “What’s this for?” If someone had just talked to me like a human being and walked me through what was happening, that would have helped so much, made it so much less frightening. But instead, she talked to me with a stiff office voice that told me I was not a person, but a job, to her.

She didn’t answer my question directly, but looked up from the page again and began to recite what felt to me like a practiced script.

“Elizabeth, we will be examining you today and I will need to ask you some questions. All you have to do is answer honestly. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” I said, standing there completely naked, repulsed by the feeling of her eyes on my skinny body.

Looking up from her notes, with the tip of her pen she pointed to a bruise on my shin and asked, “Where did you get that, Elizabeth?”

There were lots of bruises on my body. I was naturally pale and always bruised easily. Every time I came back from playing outside, I had a bruise somewhere, so how was I supposed to know where one particular one came from?

“Um . . . playing outside?”

She wrote something down. “And that one, and this one,” she asked, pointing to two more on the same leg, in approximately the same area.

What was the right answer? What would happen if I said I didn’t know? Would they think Daddy beat me? If so, could I never go home again? What was at stake? The whole thing was so unclear, and the less clear it was, the more she was in complete control of me, and the less I trusted her. Why wouldn’t someone just talk me through this?

“Um . . . my bike, from getting on my bike and hitting my leg.”

This went on for a while. I was asked to turn around, raise my arms up, and extend my legs. Finally, I could put my clothing back on and sit down. She walked out, and a Latino man entered to bring in some food. He didn’t say anything to me either. He just nodded and placed on the table a mound of something wrapped in cellophane; inside it was one thick slice of ham and one thick slice of cheese encased in a tough-to-chew roll. He gave me a juice box and left as noiselessly as he’d come. Eventually, Mr. Doumbia appeared in the doorway, and it was time to go. Back in the car, I curled my arms to my chest and stared out the window in a passive daze, at nothing in particular.

Saint Anne’s Residence was a plain but stern-looking brick building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It looked like a cross between a public school and a home for the aged. I would find out later from other girls in the home that St. Anne’s was a “diagnostic residential center”—a place where girls with histories of behavior problems like truancy, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, and other issues were sent to be “evaluated” before being sent to a more permanent placement. This evaluation process was supposed to involve sessions with all kinds of mental-health professionals, and there was a rumor that it took at least three months to complete.