Desperation

Mariam Opincar Merrin

 

Desperation lived all around us. Maybe it started early one Saturday morning when I looked out the thin-paned window onto the ragged lawn, balding from the pine tree above. Just beyond, a woman held her head in her hands as she stumbled out of the stucco duplex across the street. Sobbing, she collapsed into her car and slammed the door shut, waking my twin, Anna, on the bottom bunk bed.

"The man who lives there, Brian's dad, is dead," I mumbled, "I just know it." Anna blinked her sleepy eyes at me.

"What?" She yawned.

"Something's wrong," I motioned toward the mustard colored duplex and the dead man inside whose fourteen-year-old son played with our brother. Later, Brian would say the word "suicide," and I would come to realize that life could come to a screeching halt at any moment.

"Girls, I need you to help unpack." Mom's voice bounced over the hardwood floors. My attention snapped back from death, the cold window, and the parent-less world where children became untethered.

Mom looked older. Moving made her sick. Her watery eyes seemed sadder as I rolled back the small mountain of her shoulder to see her face.

"Which boxes, Mom?" She coughed through the congestion. This whole week we had frozen burritos, which my older brother, Yeheshua, heated up for us on the camp stove since we didn't have a stove of our own yet. Mom must have been pretty tired if the food wasn't very healthy for us. She was tired of being denied a place to stay because she had four of her six children to provide for. Dad took the oldest two kids, barely scraping above poverty line as well. She was tired because the welfare and the Housing and Urban Development offices forced her to wait infinitely in their narrow white hallways to get subsidies. But more than tired, she was desperate to keep a roof over our heads so that we could stop drifting.

"Girls, I have to study for my final exams this afternoon, so I need you to watch your little sister." Mom wielded a heavy nursing textbook filled with bloody arms and spotty rashes. She encouraged us:

"With your help, I can finish the Certified Nursing Assistant program, hunt down a good job, and then buy us a house. Would you like that?" We jumped up and down excited.

Anna and I took to the boxes and tickled baby Nicolette's round belly. After assembling the dining room and kitchen, we organized the bathroom. How wonderful it was to hear Mom's soft cooing approval when our work was done. She wrapped her long arms around our ten-year-old shoulders and loved us. I nuzzled my head into her musky pajama shirt. That was Mom's smell. I wanted her this close. I wanted to help her and take care of her. Then she would never leave.

Almost a year later, she called us into the dining room and asked us to sit at the table. Her face never changed expression much, but this time her voice wavered.

"I need to tell you kids that I am going to court because I did a bad thing." On her lap, one-year-old baby Nicolette reached around and touched her chin, her eyes transfixed.

"Let's hold hands, just like we do when we pray." Her clear eyes became grey and murky: "I may not be with you for much longer if the judge decides to send me to jail." I didn't understand. Just like Brian's dead father? I wondered. Dead and gone? Adults were so fragile and their mistakes so enormous.

"Why?" we chirped. Her words danced around in my head, spastically somersaulting into nonsense. Then her tears started to gather in the blue caverns under her eyes. Yeheshua wiped his eyes. Anna and I whimpered.

"I saved money from my babysitting jobs when we lived in San Francisco. I can't believe it, but over two years, there's now four thousand dollars in my special account. My social worker doesn't know, and it has made me sick not telling her." Her voice pinched shut. She took a long breath, "But I offered the money to your dad because I was tired of keeping it a secret. I wanted us to have a house some day, but I had to tell someone. I was all alone with the lie." Nicolette reached for our hands. She wanted to hold on too.

"But then your dad did something I didn't expect," she hiccupped from the force of her tears. "He decided to press charges. He wants you to live with him." I was so confused. Whenever I was scared because Mom was out late, Dad never came to the phone, or when he did, his words moved so quickly they outran my fear; it was always time to hang up with Dad. Why did he want us now?

"Why does Dad want you to go to jail, Mom?" I'm sure she could tell we didn't understand the idea of welfare fraud. Fraud. It sounded like a piece of soggy fruit, overly ripe and its insides exposed.

"Who will sleep with us at night when you're in jail?" I croaked. Maybe I hadn't helped out enough. Maybe Anna and I should have watched the baby more. The pain in my chest began thudding, a rhythm of hooves. Just like Brian's dead father, she could leave us for good. Jail was death; she'd be gone forever and no one would be able to help us. I sunk my head down like that distraught woman across the street. I couldn't remember what happened to Brian after his father's suicide. Did he die too? Would I die without a mother?

"I might not have to go," she soothed and held us close. We gathered around her gentle sloping arms and then placed our small hands on her, looking for a free space.

"I have many friends who will write letters to the judge and my sister, Mary, will testify in court for me. Besides, your father only pays $37 dollars a month for all three of you. He's in no place to care for you in those ramshackle houses he's built." As for our baby half sister, Nicolette, rocking on Mom's knee, her father was long gone after he found out Mom was pregnant. No support there either.

But even though we lived in a shack when we stayed over at Dad's every other weekend, I was safely enveloped in the small crowd of children: Love, Gift of God, Yeheshua, Anna, and I. Actually, there was a shack just for us kids and a shack for the adults. At bedtime, it was just us together, free of adult worries and engaged in a task.

First, Love, the oldest sister, would ask Yeheshua to slide four cinder blocks to get the bed off the cement floor. Then Gift of God, our oldest brother, would sidle a slightly bowing sheet of plywood over the blocks. Then Love would ask Anna and me to go to Dad and Eileen's little place for the blankets and pillows. I would push the space heater back towards the child-sized table in the back corner since there wasn't much room for more than our bodies and the bed.

"Hand me the egg crate roll," Love instructed. Anna would smooth out the curled edges, quickly unzipping a mountain of sleeping bags for cushion.

"This one is the earth," I'd sing playfully, imagining as we spread out a brown synthetic sleeping bag, "and this one is the grass. That one is the sun!" We'd started in on the avalanche of electric blankets. In the seconds between the blankets' quick unfurling ascent and slow glided path down, I wanted to climb into that quiet nest, burrow away from baby Nicolette's incessant crying; unravel the rows of lines on Mom's forehead; yell and stomp to shatter Dad's crystalline silence. Then we'd all crawl into bed head-to-toe. The corrugated fiberglass roof kept out the wind and rain, but the plastic sheets for windows hissed our worries in and out. We would ask Love long questions about the solar system so that we could fall asleep to her voice. The heaviness of sleep held us close. We were safe together in this bed of boards and cinder blocks. Safe from death.

On the day of the hearing, Mom dressed Anna and I in our pink and purple corduroy jumpers she had made. We wore matching white blouses, tights, and sandals, the ones that knotted to a point over the toes. Mom decided to take us with her to wait in the audience. She cupped our faces after she parted our hair on the opposite sides,

"If I go to jail, you're to go with your father. You'll see him there in the courtroom." I cried softly. Mom's hands were sweating. Aunt Mary came to the door and ushered us out to her car to take us down to the courthouse.

As Mary pulled into the rows of white parking lines, she asked us to stay close to her, her hands enclosed ours. We trailed Mom into the courtroom and sat close to the front, just like in church. Dad faced forward. I wanted him to turn around and smile, to ease the heat in the room. I fidgeted in my seat. Anna and I removed our matching sweaters. We looked blankly at each other, holding our breath. The worry lines appeared again on Mom's forehead.

"Mary O'Connor to the stand," a voice boomed. A woman with a tall stack of hair busily struck small black keys. I watched as she recorded, not watching her own industrious hands.

"Yes, your honor," Mary started, "Dan is not a fit father to raise these children on a paper route. They live in a shack made of plywood. Their only toilet is a bucket of bleach."

Suddenly, I felt smaller than my pearly sweater buttons. I was swimming in the room's heat, Anna so far away from me. I thought about that little shack and saw shame there. I stared at Dad's rigid neck and Mom's bowed head and shame was there too. The whirlpool of shame swallowed our voices and spun us away from each other. I thought of the dead man across the street and knew we were all desperately alone. I couldn't save Mom from jail. My stomach growled from the emptiness of worry. I leaned in closer after Mary left the stand. I wanted to hear every word the judge said, hoping I could hear above the waves of heat that one important word, that j-word.

"….probation, community service, debt to society…" I didn't know what any of these words meant. I tried harder to understand.

"Is Mom going to jail?" I whispered to Anna.

"I don't know. What's a probation?" she searched for meaning too. Then, just as the hearing had begun, it ended. Mom's church friends cloaked her in concentric rings. Dad turned sharply away to his left, eyes on the opposite wall. I wanted to go run and cover him with hugs, make him want to love us again. The painful silence pulled us apart between the unyielding parallel lines of Mom and Dad, the adult world and childhood. Instead, he sailed away toward the door like an arrow.

Mom and Mary finally walked us out of the lonely, high-ceilinged courtroom. In the lobby on the bottom floor, Anna and I pushed all of the vending machine buttons that glowed neon dollar amounts. The burritos and sandwiches spun around on a carousel. Men in ties dug through briefcases on the too-small café tables. I didn't know what was going on. Neither Anna nor I could speak the adult language. Instead, we asked for an orange juice to fill the yawning hole in our bellies.

"Come on girls," Mary collected us. I didn't dare protest. I drained the little carton of juice. "I'm taking you to Howarth Park."

Anna and I couldn't believe it. Play? Now? We could leave the scene? On the grassy bank near the jungle gym, Mary lay down on a car blanket and opened a thin paperback book she brought for us. It said Shoeshine Girl. As she began to read in her lulling Irish brogue, she stopped, "Wow, I just can't believe it."

"What is it?" I asked, studying the lines of her mouth. She continued reading. Then she stopped again. She ran a hand through her curly grey hair, removed her glasses, and massaged the two red creases on either side of her nose.

"Your mother has been put on probation. She has to pay $15,000 to the state of California." Anna and I pitched upward on our elbows. How could she pay money to a piece of land? I thought about the vastness of the zeros on the dollar amount.

"What does that mean? What's a probation?" At least now we could get some answers. We pulled up tufts of warm grass. The breeze moved the tiny constellation of Brush Oak leaves over our heads. We looked expectantly at our translator.

"Your mother isn't going to jail. I just don't know where she's going to come up with the money." She shook her head and looked out across the parking lot into the distance. Her words repeated in my head, "Not jail. Not jail." Anna lay back down on the blanket. I closed my eyes. The swelling and condensing silence of the day finally broke into the happy sounds of horns and children shouting. It filtered down over my heavy thoughts. We would all live. Mary continued reading.