A Knock at Midnight(5)
Just when I’d about given up, the bathroom door opened. Jazz stood in the doorway, in no hurry at all, clearly unconcerned about my bladder. She held a pair of Mama’s cut-off jean shorts in one hand—the ones Mama always kept near her makeup bag on the bathroom counter these days—and a tubelike object in the other.
“Hey Brittany,” she said, as if surprised to see me there. “Brittany, what’s this?”
She held out the tampon-shaped object and, exasperated, I peered at it. It wasn’t a tampon. When I realized what it was, the air rushed out of me, and with it all my thoughts about peeing and the Fresh Prince rerun I was missing. All I could see was what my little sister held in the palm of her hand: a crack pipe, from the pocket of Mama’s summer shorts.
Jazz had no idea what she was holding, and all I knew was that I didn’t want her to know. “Dang, Jazz! I’ve been out here forever! Why you touching Mama’s stuff?” I grabbed the pipe and shorts, pushed past her, and slammed the door behind me. I stuffed the glass cylinder back in Mama’s pocket and laid the shorts where I thought I’d seen them last, trying to do it so no one could see they had been disturbed. Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub and just stared at the wall.
I was only ten, still tender. But this was the early nineties. Drugs were everywhere in popular culture, from movies like New Jack City to “Just Say No” campaigns and “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” commercials. I knew what that pipe was, and I knew what it meant.
Suddenly so many things made sense. Jazz had spent weeks selling Girl Scout cookies for her troop, but when it came time to turn in the money she’d kept so carefully in a box on our bedroom shelf, it was gone. A set of Billy’s brand-new tools went missing, and a prized bow and arrow he used for hunting. One day when I got home from school, the TV was gone from my room. Our Nintendo games disappeared the same way. Each time something went missing, Mama would pull one of her all-nighters. Her mood would swing wildly. Sometimes she’d sleep a lot.
Over the past few months, my mother had been going through a slow transformation, and with her our world. The changes had crept up on us. Mama still went to work, and we still had our fun days as a family. But many nights now, Mama paced manically through the house late into the night, banging around, in and out of the bathroom. Night after night, gentle Billy, who never yelled at anyone, raised his voice at her, pleading late into the night—“Dammit, Evelyn! You got to stop this!” Lying next to Jazz in the queen bed we shared, I’d listen as their voices grew softer and then crescendoed again. More than once I heard feet pounding in the hall and the bathroom door slamming, the toilet flushing as Billy tried to get rid of the drugs. Then Mama would lose it, screaming outside the door, rattling the handle, banging on the wood, cussing at Billy for all she was worth.
Mama was what used to be called a functioning addict, which in some ways made the growing problem even harder to confront. She made it to work, never missed a school event, presented herself to the outside world as if nothing had changed. But her addiction kept getting worse.
The summer I was to enter the fifth grade, Billy finally convinced our mom that things had gone far enough. She entered a residential rehab. Billy still worked long, hard hours at the coal mine and couldn’t be home to watch us all the time. So Jazz and I moved to Campbell, to live with our dad and his parents for the school year, until our mom came home, until she was better.
Our extended family was strong and had always been a part of our lives. The move seemed almost natural to us, a long weekend at Mama Lena’s that stretched into the next, and then the next. It wasn’t until the first day of that year’s Little Dribblers basketball season, when I walked onto the court, filled with nervous adrenaline as I always was at the beginning of the season, that I realized how much had really changed. It was like everything hit me at once. For the first time since I started playing basketball in the first grade, Billy would not be my coach. And this wasn’t my Little Dribblers team from Bogata, but a whole new group of girls. Everything was different now. No Billy to coach me after school and on weekends. No riding my bike with my friend Krisha to the Scholastic book fair. No seeing the same teachers I’d had all my life—a few of whom had been Billy’s teachers, too. And the worst part: Our mama was sick. Very sick. So sick we didn’t even live with her anymore.
I don’t know how I got through the rest of that practice. It was like every time the whistle blew it was a reminder of who wasn’t blowing it. I missed Billy. I missed home even though I knew that Mama Lena’s house in Campbell was home, too. It always had been. But that night, not for the last time, I couldn’t sleep for the nightmares.
Mama’s addiction had brought with it a confusion that my ten-year-old mind couldn’t fully comprehend. I was too young to process the urgent sense of responsibility and anxious worry that arises when a child is watching disaster unfold an arm’s reach away. I wanted to save her and protect her from drugs, to rescue her from this demon that had crept into our lives, that wouldn’t leave us alone. It didn’t occur to me that I was the child and she was the mother, that the weight of her addiction was not mine to bear. Or that I couldn’t save her. When Mama went to rehab it gave me hope and lifted some of that burden. I trusted that she was going to get better.
That year, Mama Lena dropped us off at school and picked us up again in the afternoons. She taught me to bake and spoiled me with every kind of cake decorating tool you can imagine: piping bags and tips, fondant knives, sugar flowers—you name it, we had it in our Campbell kitchen, in a special case with my name on it. Jazz and I each had our own room and got to choose how to decorate it ourselves, new paint colors and everything. When our dad got home from his job at the Dow Chemical plant, he helped us with our homework. While I read my books, he sat next to me and drew or wrote poetry in quiet companionship; Mama Lena sat in her plush blue recliner in her pretty blouse and matching slacks, pantyhosed feet tucked under her, glasses settled on the end of her nose, writing her sweet potato pie recipe in a small notebook. After school I’d walk down to the pond in front of the house with my grandpa, who we called Daddy Sudie, and watch him fish while he told me stories that shaped my view of myself and the world. In Campbell, we had sit-down dinners together every night. After dinner, my daddy took us outside to peer through his telescope, showing us the constellations in the vast night sky.