A Knock at Midnight(6)

Still, Jazz and I missed our Bogata house and friends. We missed Billy, and we missed our mama. Especially, we missed who our mama had been before the addiction took hold.



* * *



—

    WHEN MAMA CAME out of rehab, Jazz and I came back to Bogata. I was going into the sixth grade and Jazz the fifth. As ever, Billy held us together, adding to the lifelong lessons imparted to us in Campbell in his steady, no-frills way. After a two-hour basketball practice, he’d have me back out in the driveway to “practice what we practiced.” He drilled me to hit fifty baskets, but they had to be done the right way, with perfect form.

“Nope,” he’d say after I swished one through, nothing but net. “Didn’t count.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t count?” I’d gasp, my arms starting to throb. “That’s thirty-six shots!”

“Nope, you didn’t hit the backboard, Britt,” he’d say, in his even-tempered way. Rolling my eyes, I’d bounce the ball twice, laser-focused on the red square, and make a perfect shot off the backboard. “That’s thirty-six,” he’d say, reaching in his pocket for his tin of chewing tobacco. “Only fourteen more to go.”

To Billy, winning wasn’t about the moments of glory, the swish of a nothing-but-net shot, the roar from the stands. It was about the journey: staying focused, putting in the time, hitting your benchmark goals even if your arms were tired, even if you wanted to quit. Hard work was paramount. For him, victory was all about showing up to do the work. About staying even-keeled, even when times were rough. That was how he loved, too.

His teaching and strong example couldn’t have come at a better time. Rehab hadn’t made Mama better. If anything, she was worse. Our house seemed ruled by the highs and lows of Mama’s chemical cravings. In between highs, when she was drug free, we’d cling to the Mama we knew best, to signs of normalcy, to hope. Some mornings she’d get up and make French toast, just like the old days, the banter between her and Billy keeping us all laughing.

But when I’d get home from practice in the evening, that Mama would be gone, and I’d end the day seething in resentment. There was a catastrophe unfolding within our mother, one we tried not to acknowledge with words. The dope sickness took us all on the roller coaster of her mood swings. She still went to work, keeping up a functional facade. Physically, she was there. But she operated on the fringes of our family life. Sometimes, in the room we shared, Jazz and I would talk about it without talking about it. We knew when her paydays were, and we knew that the money made it worse. I wondered if Mama knew how much we worried about her, if she knew the higher she got, the lower Jazz and I sank.

    But we didn’t talk to her about it, ever. She’d always been feisty, and, like most people who struggle with addiction, she had fine-tuned patterns of self-defense, turning her guilt and anger on you in a second. We gave her a wide berth.

Still, I tried to fix it, to fix her. I would ask her to come to basketball games, school events, to walk down the road with Jazz and me for shakes and burgers. She wouldn’t. When he wasn’t working, Billy came instead. He took us out for Friday night dinners at the Sirloin Steak House in Paris. More often than not, Mama didn’t come. Billy’s way of coping was to ignore her absence, to carry on as usual, to make sure Jazz and I were good. We didn’t talk about any of it. We just carried on, as if the center of our lives hadn’t spun out of control.

Every other Friday of each month, Mama would bring me her paycheck. I’d be lying on my bed doing homework, listening to Aaliyah or Tupac playing in the background. Music was my escape now as much as reading, the rhythms washing over me and taking me away from scenes like this.

“Hold this, Britt,” Mama would say, handing me several hundred-dollar bills tucked neatly in a white envelope. “Keep it safe.” Safe from her, she meant. I’d look up at her and hold out my hand for the envelope, wordlessly put it in my top drawer under my stereo. Little by little, though, she’d come for it.

“Britt, let me get a hundred,” she’d say, almost like she was asking. “I’m just gonna get a hundred.”

I’d sit still on the bed, watching in silence as she opened the drawer, took the bill out of the envelope, and hurried out of the room. By the end of the weekend the money would be all gone, its only trace a fog of putrid-smelling smoke clouding the bathroom. I was twelve.

    I understood even then that my mother wasn’t well. People in their right minds don’t put that kind of responsibility on a child. She needed help, treatment. But it was 1996, and America’s War on Drugs was in full throttle. Resources for drug treatment were scant, while money was being poured into law enforcement and prisons. People with addiction like Mama didn’t stand a chance. And neither did their kids, caught up on the front lines.

I was still at the top of my class, still competed in statewide academic competitions, still starred on my basketball team, and still spent endless afternoons shooting hoops in our driveway under Billy’s watchful eye. But I was well aware of my mother’s addiction by now and of the ways my life differed from those of the Bogata friends of my childhood, for whom drugs were foreign. Slowly we drifted apart. I had more in common now with a different set of girls, like my new friend Jonandrea. She lived with her grandparents just as I had the year before, and just as I still did most weekends. Both of Jonandrea’s parents struggled with addiction. Later, her dad would die of an overdose, and her mom would go to prison. Jonandrea, a skinny, dark-haired white girl with a dimple in her chin and bottle-green eyes, didn’t require any explanation from me about the weird things going on in my house. She knew. We never talked about any of it, but we drifted together, united by shared experience.