Harlem Girl Lost (10 page)

He paused to see how she would react. A knot developed in Silver's stomach, but she remained silent.

“They sent me from one place to another, and each one would be worse than before. So I got to the point where I was tired of fighting and just gave up and let them have their way with me.” Chance put his head down in shame. “I learned it was easier to get it over with, and then maybe they would leave me alone for a few days or, if I was lucky, a few weeks.” Seeing Silver's pained expression, he reassured her. “But it's okay these days because the family I'm with now has only one horny old fart and he can't even get it up. He just likes to watch me bathe myself, so I guess that's why I smell so bad.” Chance tried to laugh. “Anyway, I just stopped trusting or responding to people, especially adults. So I just play dumb. That way, they don't want much from me, and that includes teachers. Since nobody seems to give a shit about me, I started not giving a shit either. I just stopped giving a fuck!” His voice grew strained. “Why should I care what they thought of me if my own mother didn't?”

It was the first time Silver had detected anger in his voice since meeting him.

“My mother made me, my mother fucked me … that's how I look at it.” He turned toward Silver, as if making a confession. “My mother was an alcoholic. I can still remember, as though it were yesterday, my mother staggering up the block with all the kids following behind her, imitating her drunken walk.” He shook his head. “That shit was so embarrassing. The kids on the block teased me every day. But nothing was worse than coming home from school and seeing a gang of guys from the neighborhood with their dicks out, running a train on my mother, some of them no older than I was.” He threw up his hands as his voice began to crack. “Everything happened so
fast. One minute my mom and dad lived together and we were a happy family. Then one day they started arguing all the time, which was strange because they never used to argue. I would hear my mother pleading with my father that she was sorry. I found out my mother had cheated on him with his best friend.” Chance began pacing back and forth. “As she got bigger, he tried to act normal and deal with it because he loved my mother that much, but I knew he was crushed.” He seemed to be in a daze. “My dad was like my hero. To hear your hero cry, that did something to me, yo.” He gritted his teeth. “And I hated my mother for doing that to him.”

Silver just wanted to take away his pain, but she knew he had to get everything out. “After my sister was born, he stopped coming home altogether. I guess he couldn't look at her without catching feelings.” As if it didn't matter anymore, he shrugged. “And to make a long story short, he started smoking crack and lost his city job and eventually …” He stared at the sky. “He owed a drug dealer some money and got himself murdered. After my father got killed, my mother musta felt guilty and started drinking a lot, and soon she began to have boyfriend after boyfriend, none of them staying with her very long.” He let out a big sigh.

“After a couple of years of moving around ‘cause she couldn't pay the rent, we started living in one shelter after another until welfare put us in public housing.” He shrugged again. “Then one day the bottom just fell out and she cared about nothing but her bottle. She would leave my sister and me home by ourselves while she was out drinking somewhere. My sister, Karen, was about four or five years old; I was about nine.

“My sister never talked because the doctor said she was a
little slow due to my mother drinking while she was pregnant with her. Anyway, when my mother didn't show up for days, we ate the ice from the refrigerator freezer because we were so hungry. When she finally stumbled in, she would be broke anyway. Even though we were on welfare and my moms got food stamps, she would exchange them at the bodega and get seven dollars cash for every ten-dollar food stamp. Between her cashing in the food stamps and those no-good men robbing her, my sister and I were left with no food or no nothing.” He shook his head and sighed. “But I wasn't about to let my baby sister starve, so I got to the point of not relying on my mother to come through for us. I decided to take to the streets to hustle for some change. I would go out and beg people for some money, and as soon as I had enough for a loaf of bread, we would go home and make some mayonnaise sandwiches.

“After a while, I started packing bags at supermarkets, and I had enough to buy us any kind of cereal that we wanted. Cap'n Crunch, Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, Fruity Pebbles— you name it, we had it!”

As if he'd won a victory, Chance smiled. “And we ain't never starved after that. We ate cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it was cool because I didn't know how to cook anyhow. I did everything for my sister, I fed her, bathed her, brushed her teeth, and did her hair, or at least I tried to do it.” He laughed as he reminisced. “And she couldn't go to sleep unless I read to her, so I would read her old newspapers, history books, science books, cereal boxes, hair care products, ingredients and all— anything.”

He looked at Silver. “Did you know that a bar of Irish
Spring has pentasodium pentetate and a tad of titanium dioxide? So I guess that's how I got to read so well. I loved my little sister more than I loved myself. I was all she had—I had to protect her. No matter what I did or where I went, I took her with me. I would place her in my shopping cart and simply pull her everywhere with me. Leaving her home with my mother was too dangerous, because the men she brought home were unpredictable when they were drunk.

“I remember this one time I woke up in the middle of the night and this man was just standing there zipping up his pants. I looked at my lil’ sister, who was still sleeping, and I noticed what I first thought was white glue all over her face and pajamas.” Chance gritted his teeth in anger. “That fuckin’ bastard had just jerked off on my little sister! After that, I got into the habit of setting up a makeshift bed in the closet for my sister to sleep in at night. I would place these old clothes over the top of her so they wouldn't see her. I wasn't about to let them dirty bastards touch my sister.”

Chance took a deep breath in an effort to control his emotions. “After a while, my mother stopped coming home altogether. By then it didn't matter none, ‘cause I hated seeing her. She wasn't giving us nothing but grief anyway. Shit, welfare paid the rent, and light and gas was free in the projects, so what we need her for?”

Silver knew he didn't mean that—it was written all over his face.

“The only problem we had though was BCW—you know, those child welfare people? They kept coming around trying to get all up in our business. Our nosy neighbors musta ratted us
out or somethin’, but I didn't answer the door for anybody anyway. It got to the point that they would begin to stake out the front of the building every day. But I would dick them and sneak out the back exit.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “After a while they got hip and started coming in pairs to stake out both exits. No problem—I just went up to the roof and crossed over to the next building.” His smile faded and he spoke with serious intensity. “See, I knew that if they caught us they would try to break us up, and I just couldn't live with that.” He closed his eyes as if in pain.

“Then one day out of the blue, me and Karen came home from packing bags at the grocery, and my mother was home. We hadn't seen her for five months, and I quickly noticed how different she looked. My moms had always been skinny, but she was skinnier, almost half of what she'd been. The whites of her eyes and her fair complexion were now yellowish. For the next two days she stayed in bed—she was very sick. For some reason, she kept asking me to get her some cold water because she said her insides were burning.

“The next day, I woke to my mother crying in intense pain. She told me to go call an ambulance, so I went downstairs to the pay phone and called 911. When the ambulance men came, they lifted my mother off the bed and into one of those chairs, and I saw the reason why they had acted so crazy. The sheets were saturated with thick blobs of blood. She was bleeding from her anus.” Chance put his head down as Silver rubbed his hands. “At the hospital, they kept my mother in intensive care because they said she lost her liver. The next day, my sister and I spent the entire day with our mother, right by her side.”
Gazing into space, Chance smiled. “That's when it dawned on me—this was the first time since I could remember that my mother wasn't drunk. She spoke to me clearly without slurring, and I didn't smell that horrible rotting odor from her mouth.

“Everything seemed like it was finally gonna be all right. She was in the right place getting cured, and besides, she had a white doctor. At that moment all the pressure and burden was lifted off my shoulders, and just like that, I felt normal again. My sister and I went home.

“When we got to the hospital the next day, I told the reception desk lady I was there to see my mother in room 416. The lady looked through the chart and made a phone call and whispered into the phone and hung up and told us to have a seat for a moment. After twenty minutes of waiting, I saw my mother's doctor get off the elevator and walk toward us. With him was a woman that I knew I had seen somewhere before. She was black, with a large purse over her shoulder, and behind her was a man in a uniform. They all had these fake smiles on their faces, except the man in the uniform, who didn't smile at all. Bending down, the doctor spoke first.

“ ‘Hi, I'm Dr. Epstein, Clara Haze's doctor. Are you her children?’

“All I could do was nod. That's when I remembered where I'd seen the lady from—she was one of those Child Welfare people that used to stake out my house.
They were there to get us!
They must have followed us, I thought. I immediately wanted to jet out of there with my sister, but I knew I wouldn't make it. The lady bent down and introduced herself.

“ ‘I'm Mrs. Cherice Mayo, with the Bureau of Child Welfare.
I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but your mother expired at around two o'clock this morning.’ “

As if Chance was right back at the moment, he shook his head in dismay. “For some reason it didn't register. I was unable to comprehend those words. All I could do was stare at them. I went numb and began to think,
How can this be? I just saw her yesterday. My mother was getting better—she wasn't drunk, she was getting help. There must be some mistake.
But the two faces in front of me told me a different story. It wasn't until I looked over at the receptionist wiping tears from her eyes that it hit me—my mother was really gone. All the while the social worker's mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear a single word. Time had suddenly stopped. It wasn't until I heard the cries of my little sister that I came back to reality. Not only were they there to tell us our mother was dead, they were there to break us up.”

Chance shook his head in anger. “So I went after my sister, who was crying and reaching out for me, but the guard held on to me. I broke loose anyway and ran to her. We sobbed and held on to each other for dear life, but they finally pried us apart. All I could do was call out for her over and over. The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed handcuffed to the railing. After that I went from one group home to another, and I haven't seen my baby sister since.”

Silver's eyes swam with tears. She'd had no idea how much suffering he had been through. All at once things began to make sense to her. “Oh, Chance … I'm so, so sorry. I didn't know. Why didn't you tell me?”

“I was afraid that you would look down on me like everyone else. But,” he quickly added, “it's not like that with you … you're so different from anyone I've ever met.” He stared into
her eyes for a moment. “That day in the cafeteria when we first met—you remember?”

Silver nodded.

“And you asked me to look at you when we're talking?”

She nodded again.

“Well, when I did … oh, my God.” He smiled at the memory. “I looked up and saw the most beautiful thing I've ever laid my eyes on. I said to myself,
Could there be anything more beautiful on this earth?
‘Well, the more time I spend with you, the more I realize how wrong I was, because there is something more beautiful than your face.” He paused. “And that is … your heart, Silver.”

Silver melted from the depth of his sincerity as she explored every feature in his amazing face.

“Never would I ever have imagined that something as lovely as you would come into my life and bring a glimmer of happiness into the world of a smelly, broken bum like me and make me feel so complete.”Tears welled up in his eyes. “I never believed that after all I've been through that I would ever trust or feel for anyone again. But you changed that, Silver. You did all that by simply being a friend to me, and for that, I just want to say … I will forever love you.”

She was overwhelmed, and for a moment the air seemed to have been removed from her entire body. Finally she gasped, “Oh, Chance … I love you, too!”

Caught in the grip of such intense emotions, they hugged each other tightly. As they pulled apart, they gazed into each other's eyes, and it seemed as if nothing else in the world existed or mattered anymore. Slowly, they moved back in to kiss for the first time.

A mysterious and overwhelming calm embraced Silver's young soul, for at that very moment she had found unequivocal love—the kind of love that many people searched for their whole lives but were never able to find. Silver knew that she would forever be a part of Chance's life, as he would forever be a part of hers, for their two worlds had aligned at precisely the right moment, and from then on they truly and forever would be one.

A
MINUTE TO PRAY,
A
SECOND TO DIE

B
irdie tried his very best to keep Silver's spirits up. He even walked with her to school on occasion. Today Birdie was dressed as a man to spare Silver any embarrassment in front of her friends. Birdie knew just how cruel other kids could be. They spotted the ever-familiar Mitts, the dope fiend, nodding as he begged people passing by for change. As Birdie and Silver approached, he straightened and grimly stared at them.