Riot Baby, page 6
Ella manages to make it onto the Rikers bus heading back into Queens before crying. Her heart shakes in her chest. Kev has never been to the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
* * *
She moves the blinds by the kitchen window and watches the police patrol the block. Up and down St. Nicholas, they amble. Stationed on one corner, an officer sits in his mini-tank and says something that the cop walking by laughs at. The guns on the small tank’s turret are angled toward the ground. Metal orbs float along the sidewalks above the streetlamps, close enough for people to see, not bothering to disguise themselves, but everyone has already gotten used to them. They’ve quieted the neighborhood. The park across the way holds only the rustling of empty burger wrappers and soda cups. Her hands are shaking against the window blinds, and she feels it coming. Small pulses matching her heartbeat that radiate out of her to rattle the cutlery and unsettle the grill on the stove. They’ll see her.
The smell of sulfur swallows her.
Her eyes burn and when she opens them again, above her, a gray sheet for sky, and before her, a sign showing she has arrived at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York, outside of the outside of the City, where there are houses and strip malls, where cars have space to breathe on the boulevards. On the jumbotrons in the main building, white college students in loafers, seersucker suits, and their dates in broad hats, watch the Kentucky Derby alongside bomber-jacketed South Asians.
Ella wanders to the clubhouse. Nobody turns her way. She’s Shielded.
The tents and the front terrace are spotted with families and bearded, potbellied middle-aged white men tipping back cans of Bud Light. The kids, baby-faced and gleefully, obnoxiously tipsy, must be from St. John’s, prancing as they do now like the horses about to race, while the girls, in their gowns and gaudy, wide-brimmed hats, pull beer coolers behind them like servants. Bow ties clinch necks, sleeves rolled up, sunglasses worn indoors.
In clusters, at various points in the clubhouse, like scattered molecules, close to the exit onto the track and below the grandstand, wait people who look like they’re from around here. Familiars. The thick two-hundred-page paper programs of the day’s races rolled up in their nicotine-stained fingers. Weathered jackets and sweats and jeans loose on them, some of them with shirts tucked into their pants, they all crane their necks in anxious penitence, some of them marking their programs absently, others clutching their betting slips. Weathered white faces, all of them. No fear of gun turrets or constant observation. This place doesn’t need to be watched. A burst of anger flames in her heart, a small one, swallowed up a moment later by pity. Wasting away, and if they saw Ella, they’d still think they were inherently better.
Everywhere has a patina of dirt and dark, even though the sun has finally beaten back the cloud cover outside. A few patrons light up cigarettes as they brush past her, still unaware of her presence. Ella shuffles to a booth, reaches over a counter, feet dangling off the ground, then comes back up with a beer.
A heavy-set man nearby in glasses and a goatee speaks urgently into a flip phone: “I’m tellin’ you; she can’t keep doing this. Every month she’s in jail. Every two weeks.” He drifts out of earshot.
Someone behind her shouts an epithet.
Even here, the inevitable violence.
Ella, a few gulps into her beer, goes back and makes herself a Bloody Mary. The ingredients pour themselves out of their bottles. The stirrer shimmies its way out of its plastic box container and dances inside the glass. A brief promenade out to the track and she sees more of the bedraggled track-dwellers. A few of them congregate around a bench and chat, catch up, wonder out loud about the tactile realities of their world. The game, the kids, the front lawn. Many of them don’t pay attention to the races, the track often unoccupied for long stretches of time. There are some kids in leather jackets and fitted caps playing reckless games of tag, hopping over the metal benches and their dividers. Other white kids either pick at their fathers’ collars when they’re being carried or crush empty beer cans beneath their feet.
How much of that little girl’s lunch money for the year had been put on a horse that will run in a few hours?
If you had an addiction, Ella says to the Kev in her thoughts, you wouldn’t let your kids get in the way.
Back on the terrace, Ella steals a program and, perched over a small table in the front courtyard, scans for the next race.
The program lists, for her race, seventeen horses, and Ella smirks when she sees their names. Morning Glory, Valley of Lillies, O’Doul’s Revenge, Corp d’Esprit, and on it goes, random phrases purloined from a number of languages, meaning nothing except what significance the phrase held for the horse’s wrinkled white owner. Ella had seen some of the horses out front on the track while another made a lazy trot around, its jockey swaying in the saddle. Testing the hooves maybe or engaged in some other esoteric ritual Ella can’t begin to understand.
These outings fill her with a gleeful cruelty. She’d walked around these white people invisible, on the racetrack, in the trailer park villages, outside the pubs, and seen nothing but squalor and waste. In some places, hypodermic needles litter the floor and babies, when they cry, reveal teeth rotted by the Mountain Dew that’s cheaper than the milk their mothers want to buy. She wants to show this to Kev. See how little they are, brother. Knowing that jail tries to tell someone that all their betters are on the outside. They’re not better than you out here, Kev. None of them are.
In the larger building, Ella lowers her shield to bet on an Irish horse to place and a French horse to win. If Kev were here, she’d tell him, “Logic says, you can win big but you can only lose small.” And Kev would take maybe two and a half seconds before pointing out the holes in her proof, the missteps. But you don’t go to a racetrack to win money, these white people have taught her. You go to lose money. And what did it matter? she would ask him. She’d get their money to magically reappear, stolen from someone else’s pocket, or maybe pulled from thin air with her Thing.
The French horse has the longest odds. But Ella doesn’t care, not yet. Her gray horse—already “hers”—puts in a stronger-than-expected showing, but finishes middle of the pack, not even enough to show, though she had bet on it to win. Ella approaches the betting machines and gives them more money, punches keys and presses buttons according to the day’s philosophy, which has been, and remains, that if you bet long you can only lose what you put in, and if you bet long, you could win so much more than that.
Ella found the first race more amusing than thrilling, but it has gotten her going, and she watches the next Derby race and the next Belmont race, both close, on screen. She’d chosen her Derby horse quickly. In a race with seventeen horses, there was no hope. The next Belmont race promises more. Ella vacillates between Number 1 and Number 3. Number 1 has 10–1 odds, and Number 3 starts out 6–1.
Trackside, she fishes a coin out of her pocket. For an instant, the sun peeks through the cloud cover to glint on the thing. Her smile has wickedness in it. She flips the coin, and it stays in the air longer than coins normally do. It lands in her palm, and she slaps it onto the back of her free hand. Number 1 it is.
She flips it again, not playing with it this time. Horse Number 1 again.
She returns to the machine and bets on Horse Number 3.
The race begins. All around her, faces spasm in ecstasy and panic. Fists pump, betting slips crinkle, backs seize, shoulders tense. Feet tap. Stomp. Knees jitter. When the race finishes, an obnoxious bow-tied frat boy runs to a white girl in a hoodie and shouts, “We just won one million dollars!” on a 5–2 horse.
“Fuck that guy,” Ella mutters.
Then she hears a ghost of Kev whisper in her ear, “To win a million on a 5–2 horse, you have to already bet more than you should have. They didn’t make that much,” he says, smirking like he’s seen this many times before.
How often now had she come to watch white misery and provincial white joy? She has the ease of someone who has walked through sewer water before, knows to take off her shoes and socks and roll up her pant legs, knows the routine of watching for detritus, for broken glass. How much time has she spent watching these people? With them but not of them? She feels suddenly assured. This is what I did when I vanished, she hopes she can eventually tell Kev. Show him.
Around her, people split $10 and $5 bets on a few horses, one to win and maybe a few others to show or place. The seasoned ones mark up their programs and have pockets stuffed with tickets that will later litter the floor in pieces.
The next Belmont race starts off and Number 3, around the halfway mark, slips back. Number 1 breaks ahead, snaps the tape by a sizable length, and Ella watches it gallop away with the $260 she would’ve won if she’d listened to that damn coin.
The sky has started to darken.
Back at her kitchen table with its view of the surveillance tower at the top of the hill and the mini-tank at the corner of 145th and St. Nicholas and the mechanized orbs doing their controlled flight over Sugar Hill, night has fallen.
* * *
Ella has seen nothing but hospital rooms. At Mama’s bedside, her hand on Mama’s while Mama sleeps, swimming deeper and deeper into Mama’s mind, then letting the current pull her wherever it wishes, she sees nothing but hospital rooms.
A sound. A beep. When Ella looks up, Mama’s on a table in a small, dark room with a monitor hooked to her, her swollen belly wet with gel, her face turned to the monitor where she watches the heartbeat beep and beep. Ella follows her gaze, watches the green lines trace mountain peaks and valleys, then slowly turn to chicken scratching. In the ultrasound, the grainy image of a fetus moves, then stops. A nurse leaves the room, but there’s someone else there, dressed in a multicolored gown with beads around her neck and wrists. She holds a bag, and the odor of lavender wafts luxuriously from it. The two of them, Mama and the black lady, stare at each other, and Ella watches the black lady smile reassurance into a Mama who looks younger than Ella ever remembers her being.
“I’m anxious,” Mama says. “But I’m ready.”
“You’re ready,” the lady says back. She reaches into her sack and pulls out papers covered in crayon scribblings. Affirmations like “I can do this” and “I am loved” and “I am strong.”
The doctor returns and says to the room, “We don’t want to wait. We’re going to get her out now.” And Ella follows the nurse and her mother and this other woman up several flights of stairs to the labor and delivery unit, and the woman changes into purple scrubs, her sack now filled with snacks she got from the vending machine on the ground floor.
Ella stands by the wall as the doctor, brisk and white, enters with a clipboard in his hands. “Have you had any children before?” the doctor asks without looking up.
The woman frowns. “Have you even read her file?” And the two of them glare at each other for a moment.
“A stillborn,” Mama says, and the air vanishes from Ella’s lungs. This is new. She has never been here before. She’d walked through so many of Mama’s memories that she could describe them down to the chipping on the walls: Mama leaving abusive partners, Mama at church, Mama at the club with girlfriends, Mama praying by her bed at their home in South Central, Mama as a kid running through Mississippi backyards. How deep Ella must have gone to get here. But she doesn’t try to leave, doesn’t try to force herself out of the memory. The current brought her here. Mama brought her here.
“The demise was last year?”
Mama stiffens at the word.
The woman touches the doctor’s arm and says, “May I speak to you outside?”
After a moment, Ella follows them, passing through the door as though it were a curtain, and she watches the woman tell the doctor to please make a note in Mama’s chart about the stillbirth, how every time she has to recite her trauma, Mama’s mind goes back to that place of anxiety and fear and heartbreak.
“She’s having a high-risk delivery,” the woman says. “I would hope that her care team would thoroughly review her chart before walking into her room.”
For a moment, the doctor is silent. Then he says, “You doulas shouldn’t even be here. You’re lucky I don’t call security.”
Ella follows the doula back into Mama’s room, and it’s as though time stretches like a rubber band before snapping in place, because now there are tired lines on Mama’s face and she groans like she hasn’t had a drop of water in hours.
“Can I get an epidural?” Mama murmurs to the anesthesiologist nearby, who shoots the doula a look that gets the doula out of the room.
Ella stays, then watches the white woman administer a spinal dose of anesthesia. Ella’s fists tighten at her sides when she watches her mother clench her own fists and grit her teeth. When the doula returns, Mama’s head shoots up from her pillow, and there’s rage in her eyes.
“I can’t feel my legs,” she hisses. Then her head falls back. “And my head.” That last comes out as a moan.
“What did you give her?” the doula asks the anesthesiologist.
Mama’s blood pressure rises. Ella can feel it like heat rising in her own face. She looks at the numbers on the screen, another heart rate, the baby’s heart rate. It’s dropping.
The doula crouches at Mama’s side and grips her hand in both of hers. “What happened was wrong,” she says in a whisper, “but for the sake of the baby, it’s time to let it go.”
Mama grits her teeth. She’s not ready to let it go.
“Close your eyes,” the doula tells her in the softest voice Ella has ever heard. “What’s the color of your stress?”
“Red.”
“What color relaxes you?”
Mama takes several mountainous breaths. “Lavender.”
The beeping stabilizes. Mama’s blood pressure drops. Ella’s fists unclench.
A team of three young female residents hurry into the room with the delivery nurse behind them, a flurry of white, then a man who looks like the attending physician, and he introduces himself briefly before plunging his hands between Mama’s legs, and the question shines bright in Mama’s eyes, through reflexive tears, and the doula sees it and says, “What happened to Dr. Rosenbaum? He was supposed to be here.” But the doctor doesn’t explain the switch, instead pulling his hands out and snapping off his gloves and saying, “She’s ready. Time to push.”
And they all get to work, a small hurricane of white while the doula, the only other black woman in the room, leans by Mama’s side and says, “You’re a rock star. You can do it. This is it. You can do it. You’re doing amazing. Push! You can do it!”
And Mama pushes and pushes, not taking her eyes off the doula. And Ella watches her own head appear, a slick cluster of black curls. And Mama pushes again, and the young resident takes baby Ella’s head and eases the slippery body out, and the residents all take turns between Mama’s legs, but when Ella looks up, the attending physician is gone, almost like he wasn’t here, and it’s only the young white women and the doula and Mama sobbing shaking laughing as she watches her baby girl, purple and wrinkled and stone-still, touch air for the first time.
A resident lays the baby on Mama’s chest. “Is she all right? She’s not moving. Is she okay?” Then, a second later, the baby’s tiny arms and legs tense, and she opens her mouth and lets out a cry.
“She’s perfect,” the doula tells Mama.
“I did it,” Mama breathes. “Oh, Ella,” she says, looking to the baby, as she touches a back slick with blood and amniotic fluid. “I did it.”
Ella blinks, and the room is empty. The residents have vanished. So has the doula. So has the baby.
Mama is older. She’s back to now.
Mama’s eyes flutter open. “Baby, why you crying?”
Ella dashes away the tears. She blubbers an apology.
“Oh, baby. It’s going to be all right.”
“I almost killed you.”
Mama puts her hand over Ella’s. “Baby, you ain’t never do no such thing.”
A few moments later, Ella calms her sobs enough to ask, “How come you never told me about … about the stillbirth?”
Pain glints in Mama’s eyes, but it’s gone the next instant. “That was a long time ago. And—” Headaches and light sensitivity bleed from Mama, through their intertwined hands, into Ella. She sees the argument with the boyfriend and him grabbing the knife and her screaming, “Back up! I have a baby,” and the police arriving. Feels the swollen hands and feet and face and the doctors telling her just to take some Tylenol, always more Tylenol, then the day before the baby shower when her aches had become too much and a doctor scribbling 143/86 in a chart during her appointment. And her doctor telling her to lie down then telling her that he was going on vacation and she could deliver the baby by C-section that day if she wanted, six weeks early, then the car ride a few days later on the way to her boyfriend’s and the wetness between her legs which is not water like she expects but blood. In the rush afterward, someone saying that elevated blood pressure had separated her placenta from her uterine wall, then haziness and Mama asking over and over again, “Is he all right? Is he all right?” Then the silence of the delivery room. The most deafening silence Ella has ever heard in her life.
It’s gone the next instant.
“It was so long ago,” Mama whispers. “I’d hoped to keep that from you.”
“But why, Mama?”
Mama looks to the ceiling. “You’re always so angry. I … I didn’t wanna add to your burden.”
“Just like you weren’t gonna tell me about your cancer?”
Mama flinches. Just enough for Ella to notice. “I don’t wanna fight it. I just—” Then she allows herself a moment of release, of bitterness. “These doctors ain’t gonna help me with that anyway.” Then she’s back. She pats Ella’s hand. “It’s just enough that you’re here.”
