White Lines (58 page)

Doyle left in order to complete the necessary paperwork to facilitate Sheldon’s release. And Jada was left standing with her mother, shrouded in an awkward silence. Finally, Jada made eye contact with Edna, and saw a strength in her eyes that she had never seen before. “Thank you,” Jada said. “I appreciate you doing this for me.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Jada. I owe you for all the times I let you
down. I can probably never make up for what I did in the past. But I want to try. If you’ll just let me.”

Edna wanted to hug Jada, but decided against it. She wasn’t sure if Jada was ready for that. Instead, she reached out her hand, and let Jada make the decision of whether or not to take it. Jada stood still, and hesitated briefly. She looked at her mother long and hard, seeing how beautiful Edna still was. Edna had lost a lot of weight, and her hair that had once been long and flowing was now cut short in a choppy style. But she was still such a pretty woman. Throughout her childhood, Jada had thought her mother was as lovely as she was shy and reserved. She smiled inwardly, seeing that Edna’s beauty hadn’t diminished over time. Jada was so happy to get her son, and so grateful to Edna for coming to her rescue at last. She took her mother’s outstretched hand, and managed a weak smile. Together they went to bring Sheldon back home, where he belonged.

Jada moved out of her Brooklyn apartment and into Edna’s home in Staten Island. The first few weeks were tense and awkward in the home. The two women rarely spoke to one another, unless it regarded Sheldon’s well-being. Jada wasn’t ready to make nice with her mother, and Edna didn’t want to push too hard too soon. But one night Sheldon awoke after having a nightmare. And both women rushed to his bedside simultaneously. Jada scooped him out of bed, and cradled him lovingly in her arms. She rocked him back to sleep, as Edna stood in the doorway watching. As Sheldon fell into a deep sleep in the comfort of his mother’s arms, Edna smiled.

“You know it’s still amazing to see you now as a mother. I remember—it seems like just yesterday—that you were in my arms just that way.”

Jada smiled, wishing that she, too, could remember. “I bet you wish you could snap your fingers, and start over. I guess I should cherish him being this little, huh? Someday he may be as much of a headache for me as I was for you.” They both spoke softly, so as not to wake Sheldon.

Edna stepped into the room, and leaned against the dresser. She was so glad that Jada finally seemed ready to talk. “Your son is a lot like you
were. He looks just like you, that’s obvious. But Sheldon is also very strong-willed. He’s very bright for his age, just like you were. And he smiles, and it melts the coldest heart.”

Jada looked at her mother. She was happy to hear Edna say such nice things about her. But she was still getting used to their new relationship. She wanted to know what had prompted it. “Why did you come to court and do that for me?” she asked, getting right to the point. “How did you even know that I had a hearing that day?”

Edna pulled her bathrobe tighter around her small frame, and leveled with her daughter. “Your attorney called me. Your friend Sunny told him that he should see if I was willing to step up and help you win custody. They told me that they were threatening to put Sheldon in foster care because Jamari was dead. Sunny said that you were too stubborn to ask for it on your own, but she thought you needed my help. I told him that I would do anything to help you.”

Jada laid Sheldon gently back in his bed, and tucked him in. She continued to sit on the edge of his bed, and she looked at Edna. “So Sunny orchestrated the whole thing, huh?” Somehow Jada wasn’t surprised.

Edna nodded. “I’m glad she did. I was waiting for a chance to talk to you about everything that was happening. Everything that happened before.” She searched for her daughter’s eyes in the darkness of the bedroom. “Jada, I knew for a long time that you were using drugs. I knew when you were living with me, and you would come home high. You thought I didn’t know, but I did. The same way I couldn’t stand up to J.D., I couldn’t stand up to you.”

Jada hung on her every word. Edna folded her arms across her chest, and kept talking. “So I ignored it. I started going to church, and praying for you. I remember I used to beg you to go with me, and you refused. So I went by myself, and prayed and prayed for you. They kept saying that prayer changes things. And I wanted my prayers to change your problems. Every week I went to church, every night I pulled out my Bible and prayed for you. And then I caught you with Charlie.”

Jada looked at the floor in silence, feeling ashamed. She hated that she
had done that to her mother. She hated that she had fallen that far down to do something so terrible.

“Jada, I was so hurt when I found you doing that with him. But I wasn’t just hurt because I liked Charlie. I made you get out because I couldn’t handle it. I saw for the first time, just how strung out you really were, and I felt like you and Charlie had betrayed me. It was obvious that he knew you were using. Why else would a beautiful young girl like yourself want his old behind? I felt like an idiot. I was embarrassed. I was an emotional mess after that. I lost contact with everyone—you, your sister—everybody. Ava didn’t hear from me for years, and I know you and her didn’t speak either. I got a letter from you while you were in rehab for the first time. I read that letter so many times that the pages started to fall apart from all the folding and unfolding. But I couldn’t find the words to write you back. What could I say to you? I was so angry with you, so disappointed. I just went into seclusion and all I did was go to church. I prayed for you all the time. I prayed for Ava, too. Ava wrote me a letter after Ms. Lopez, her counselor, convinced her to do it. And I wrote her back. One letter at a time, we put the relationship back together, and it wasn’t easy.” Edna took a deep breath, as if she was admitting something out loud to herself for the first time. “I don’t want you to think that I love her more because I wrote back to her and not to you. It wasn’t that. It was that her problems were small compared to yours. Our problems were easier to fix.” Edna sighed. “I was never strong enough, Jada. I would always hide when the going got tough. And I hid when you got caught up. I ran to God, and threw my problems on the altar. People would come up to me and tell me that you and Shante were smoking crack. All I could do was keep praying. Looking back now, I think the Lord was telling me to go and find you and bring you home. But I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to do that. And then, I saw you for myself.”

Jada held her breath as she listened to her mother, and remembered the encounter vividly.

“You were in the corner store in West Brighton, and you looked a mess. I wanted to cry out to you, and hug you, and bring you home. And
I wanted to hit you all at the same time. But I didn’t know how you would react to me, or if you wanted to talk to me. As grown as I was, I was scared of what you might say to me. So I walked away from you. That was the most heartache I have ever felt in my life.”

Jada let the tears fall from her eyes, as she recalled the day her mother had walked past her in the store. Jada had been so desperate to get high, had no money, and was really at one of her lowest points. She remembered crying on her way home, devastated that her mother had walked past her. Now she understood that it had hurt Edna just as much.

Edna watched her daughter cry in the dark, and she knew that Jada remembered the day. “I wanted to reach out to you, but I was afraid. And the Bible says that God has not given us a spirit of fear. But he has given us a spirit of love, power, and a sound mind. So that voice in my head telling me not to reach out to you, telling me not to bring you home again—that was nothing but the devil. I didn’t see it that way then. I thought that you were too far gone for me to help you. But then Ava told me about you and Born. How you got yourself together, fell in love, and you were living happily ever after.”

Jada smiled at this, her face still slightly damp from crying. She knew that hers had been anything but a fairy tale. “Yeah, right.”

Edna smiled, too. “Well, she was happy for you. And that was when Ava began trying to get you to come and talk to me. But you weren’t ready, and I understood that. I was happy that you had cleaned yourself up. I thought that my praying had finally done the trick. Then Ava found you using one day at your house, and she left and came to stay with me. When she came to my house in tears, and I found out that you were back on drugs, I was devastated. I kept praying for you, Jada.” Edna let a tear fall from her own pretty eyes. Her heart was breaking for her daughter’s pain. “And the Lord really does work in mysterious ways. I picked up the paper one day, and saw that you had been arrested. I saw that as a blessing in disguise. At least you were going to get help. I wrote to you while you were away, and you never wrote me back.”

Jada shrugged. “I didn’t write you back because by then I felt like I didn’t need you anymore.” Jada knew that she was speaking bluntly, but
she had little concern for whether Edna was disturbed by what she was about to say. “I don’t think you really understand how terrible it was for me being out there all alone.”

Edna was ready to listen, and really wanted to hear what her daughter had been through. “Come in the kitchen, and let’s have some tea or something. We shouldn’t talk in here and wake Sheldon back up.”

Jada agreed, and followed her mother into the kitchen. She sat at the table while Edna got some water boiling for her tea. Edna turned around, and faced her daughter. She knew that this would be the night that it all came pouring out. Sitting before her was her child, who was no longer a little girl. Jada was a woman, with a child of her own. And both women had a lot to reveal. There was a lot to discuss.

“Jada, I want to tell you some things that you may not know. But first I want you to tell me everything that I don’t already know. We both have a lot of catching up to do. For the past few weeks, we’ve been living under the same roof, barely speaking. I want to rebuild our relationship. But before we can do that, we have to clear the air. Tell me everything that you went through. From start to finish. I want to know when you started using cocaine, and everything that happened to you after you left.” Edna sat down, across from her daughter, and waited for her to begin.

Jada took a deep breath, and began her story. She told her everything, from the time she and Shante started smoking crack to the day Jada got arrested while pregnant with Sheldon. She pulled no punches, and held no details back. She revealed to her mother how she’d resorted to selling her body for crack. She told her all about Mr. Charlie, and how he’d taken advantage of her vulnerable state of mind in the midst of her addiction. She told Edna about meeting and falling in love with Born, and how she’d lost him because she couldn’t end her new relationship with drugs. Jada told her mother about the day she’d come looking for her mother, and that she’d known that Edna had been home that day, yet had refused to answer the door. She told her about the bricks she’d stolen from Jamari, and how she’d stashed the money at Ingrid’s house. The only detail she left out was her and Sunny’s roles in Jamari’s murder. That would be one secret Jada would never reveal. She watched as her
mother cried tears of regret as she listened to her daughter’s heartbreaking story. Finally, when Jada was done, Edna wiped her eyes, and looked at her child.

“Jada, I know that saying sorry doesn’t fix anything. Sorry is only a word. I can’t change the fact that I left you all alone for so long. And I was home that day you came by to see me. I saw you through the peephole, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. I thought I was giving you tough love. I thought that we had years ahead of us, and that forgiveness could come later on. But I see now that I was wrong.” Edna sighed deeply, and shook her head. “I never should have turned my back on you. I gave up. I quit. And I should have had the strength to fight for you. But I didn’t.” She reached across the table, and took Jada’s hand in hers. “When you were in the hospital, and you called me to come and get Sheldon, I wish I had come to get him. I really do. But I think now that maybe you had to come that close to losing him before you realized how glad you were to have him.” Edna sounded like she was speaking from experience. “I have something to tell you, too,” she said. “I found out a couple of years ago that I have breast cancer.”

“
What?!
” Jada’s face registered pure shock. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Edna shrugged her shoulders. “Well, for one you weren’t talking to me, Jada.”

“But I would have listened if you told me you were sick! Why didn’t you make me listen …”

“I didn’t want your forgiveness just because I’m sick. I wanted us to fix our relationship because we both wanted to. I didn’t want your sympathy. To be honest, I don’t think I deserve it. After all the pain you’ve been through, all by yourself … I have no right to expect you to feel sorry for me.”

Jada began to cry. “So you still have it? Can’t they treat it?”

Edna nodded. “I’ve been through chemotherapy. I’ve had a couple of operations to try and remove it. But it’s spread, and now I have to get a double mastectomy.”

Jada gasped, and the tears flooded down her cheeks. She understood finally why her mother looked so much thinner, why her once long hair
was now cut so short. She imagined the pain Edna must have gone through while Jada was busy getting high. Jada imagined her mother’s anguish, knowing that she had to have her breasts removed in order to try and conquer the disease that was ravishing her body. “Mommy, I’m so sorry.” The words got caught in Jada’s throat. Edna got up and walked over to embrace her daughter. They sat and cried together in the kitchen for all the years wasted with anger and bitterness. And when the tears subsided, they looked at one another with so much regret.

Finally, Edna spoke up. “I want to tell you what I’ve learned. Listen to me carefully.” She held Jada’s hands once again. “God is the only reason I’m still standing. He is the only one you need to get you through. Trust Him. I know I’ve made mistakes, and so have you. But the Bible says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Even as messed up as we are, He still loves us. You have a second chance with your son. And I have a second chance with my daughter. But the only way that we can even begin to fix what’s been wrong for so long is if we lean on Him for strength. I’m not asking you to make a change overnight. But I will tell you this. You are not strong enough to beat this addiction by yourself. I know that you haven’t used drugs in a while. But every day there will be hardship and pain, and you will be tempted to go back to the one way you know to numb that pain. The only one who can give you the strength to fight it and stay clean is God. That’s your only hope. You have to pray, and trust that He will clean you up, and help you stand. I’m a witness, Jada. When I went to the Lord, I was a weak and broken woman who couldn’t find the courage or the strength to fight the demons in my life. But He changed that. He is my strength. And He will be yours, too. All you have to do is let Him.”