Authors: Liz Murray
“If you guys are using the room, I need today’s money,” he said. “If not, the maid is waiting.” He folded his arms across his chest. The cold chilled my bare feet.
“Sure,” I said. “Just a second.” Carlos sat up and lifted a hand to shield his eyes against the sunlight that poured into our dark room.
I knelt down beside the bed and starting sifting through Carlos’s jeans for the money. I counted off three twenties into the man’s open hand.
“Next time, you guys come to
us
. Or at least pick up your goddamn phone,” he called out, disappearing down the nearby staircase.
“I didn’t even hear it ring,” I told Sam.
“Me neither.” I sat on the bed and examined the phone, realizing that the receiver was not placed directly in its cradle. It could have been that way for days, since we never used it. Carlos and Sam watched me click it back in place.
“Is it about that time?” Carlos asked, pointing down at his stomach. “Yes, I think it is.” He was in a good mood.
“What time did you get in, Sam?” I was surprised that I slept through Sam’s return, especially since she had lain down next to me in her bed. Carlos got up and unfolded a large Chinese food menu.
“Let’s eat, fools,” he said, swatting my bare legs with the page.
“What’re we ordering?” Sam asked, forgetting my question.
I was too tired and hungry to think about the letter I had written to Carlos. I was too confused. It was easier to just focus on my immediate need: food.
We were sitting in a huddle on his bed, reading over all the selections, when the phone rang. Instantly, we all locked eyes. We never got calls on that phone. I gave Bobby the number to give Lisa only in case of an extreme emergency. Sam got up. Her face tensed when she answered, then she extended the phone toward me.
“Liz, it’s for you. It’s Lisa.”
“Hello?”
“Liz, it’s me. Why haven’t you been picking up?” But before I could answer, she continued. Her voice was watery, panicked, as she mumbled a blur of horrifying words.
“What?” My knees buckled. I don’t remember how I ended up on the bed.
Lisa sobbed, her child’s voice returning as she repeated the news again.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said, setting the phone down on its receiver.
“Liz, what’s going on?” Sam asked.
Tears ran down my cheeks. I wiped them away quickly, my eyes still lowered on the phone. “My mother died,” I said, sounding as flat and final as it felt.
Carlos’s strong arms were suddenly around me.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have to see Lisa. I have to call my father.”
Sam called us a cab. While I waited for it, I went to the pay phone outside and dialed Daddy’s shelter. My stomach lurched when I heard his voice and I knew what I had to tell him.
“Daddy . . . are you sitting down?”
We cried together, him standing in the shelter office being timed and supervised by staff, me standing outside the motel in the cold, at night. Though I had never actually seen my father cry, we sobbed together then, and I could feel both our hearts breaking.
The cab rushed me to Bedford Park in a haze of tears, my world spinning. Throughout the ride, Carlos kept staring at my face, rubbing my knee repetitively and urging me to speak. I could not have been farther away from him. All I cared about in those moments were Ma, Lisa, and Daddy. The gravity of our loss washed away the pettiness of everything else.
I met Lisa in Tony’s diner. She had on an old coat that looked like one of Ma’s. She was sitting by herself in front of a cup of coffee, but no food, at one of the tables in back; her eyes were bloodshot. As I approached and we looked at each other, my heart broke all over again.
DECEMBER 27, 1996
Dear Ma,
Part of what makes losing you so hard is all the things we will never get to say to each other. That’s what death did, Ma—robbed us of the things we still have left to say.
Did you feel it the way I do? The weight of what’s unsaid?
Over the last sixteen years, I’ve learned to swallow my feelings. How to swallow the things I couldn’t say because I didn’t want to hurt you or push you away.
You and me, Ma, reminds me of how pearls are made. People see pearls as beautiful, perfect gems, but never realize that they actually come from pain—from something hard or dangerous getting trapped inside an oyster where it doesn’t belong. The oyster makes a pearl to protect itself.
Behind my own sealed lips, Ma, that’s what I have done—oystered our family’s pain until pearls were born, thousands of tiny losses to withhold. But you’re gone anyway, and I am not sure my silence did us any good.
You died on a Wednesday, around 8:30 in the morning. I was somewhere, sleeping, laughing, or forgetting you.
I will always regret that.
You were alone when you died. No one had visited you for days; I hadn’t been there for almost a month. Did you worry that your daughter was never coming back to see you again? Did that make it easier for you to go? I’d always been there, to give you money, to clean you off, to be your diary. Why couldn’t I be there when you were dying? When strangers changed your clothing, fed you, put their hands on your naked body, frail as a newly hatched bird?
I know they coldly discussed their private lives with one another over your sick bed, changing your bedpan with their braceleted wrists fragrant with department store perfume. The isolation must have terrified you.
Were you afraid, Ma?
While I made love and ate burgers in diners, and laughed in the sunshine, were you afraid?
I’m not a loner anymore, Ma. I have friends. Some of them came to your funeral. Remember Carlos? He came. He’s my boyfriend now. Sam wouldn’t get out of bed. “I can’t, Liz, those things are depressing,” she’d said just before I disappeared into the cab. We paid for the transportation from a pool they took up at Madden’s; a friend of yours gathered it for us. I never wrote a thank-you note to her, or to any of them. I’m not sure why.
Lisa, Carlos, Fief, and me pulled up to Gates of Heaven Cemetery just before they were about to bury you. The day was overcast. You had a charity funeral. From the slot they donated, you could hear cars on the highway shooting by. You were put in a pine box that was nailed shut, with your name misspelled on top. Strangers had handled your body.
Were you still wearing your hospital gown inside?
Gene Murry
, the box said, underscored by bold letters reading,
Head
, and
Feet
, to note the direction. Carlos knew how much that bothered me. With his black marker, he drew a flowing angel on the front of your box, and filled in all the correct information:
Jean Marie Murray. August 27, 1954–December 18, 1996. Beloved Mother of Lisa and Elizabeth Murray and Wife of Peter Finnerty.
Mother
. You’d nourished us with your body for nine months, given birth to us, and passed us on to the world. Now that body is cold, unmoving, and forever out of reach.
Wife of Peter Finnerty.
He didn’t make it to the funeral—something about hopping the train and getting ticketed. I was the one to give Daddy the news, over the phone. I asked if he was sitting down, and he knew. Just remembering the horrible moan he let loose, I am filled with love for him and for you. He needed holding then, but you were gone. You are gone.
You didn’t know it, but he kissed you on the mouth in the hospital one day and the nurse scolded him. Said you posed a health hazard. I was glad you didn’t hear it. People had done that to you all your life, hadn’t they? Treated you like something they needed to back away from. Me too.
Did you feel I’d done the same, Ma, backed away? Deserted you? I will always wonder about that.
Can you imagine Daddy’s train rides back to the shelter after visiting you alone? I think of them often, how he might have put his head in his hands the way he does when something is really difficult. Passengers surrounding him, reading the day’s news while his wife’s body failed and his daughters lived their lives elsewhere. How he must have wished for your body to be healthy again so he didn’t have to leave you there, in a building smelling of sickness, filled with machines and the dying. Maybe he couldn’t accept the fact that you were one of them, dying. I wouldn’t.
We buried you the day after Christmas; it had taken almost a week to locate a free funeral service. The night before, Christmas night, I ate a twelve-dollar turkey dinner in the Riverdale Diner, surrounded by friends. Fief, his cousins, Sam, Lisa, Carlos, me—we were all missing our parents. We helped each other forget about you guys, the mothers and fathers who used to tuck us in, sing at our bedsides. The stars of our dreams and the basis of our reasoning. We banished you with the help of one another.
But I saw the diner’s Christmas tree blinking red, orange, and yellow onto Lisa’s sad face while she picked at her food, everyone laughing and talking around her. She looked so much like you there, with her petite frame and large, amber eyes. Ma, she’s beautiful. She’s grown into a beautiful woman, just like you. I wish we were closer so that I could have held her then, the way I want so badly to hold her right now and to hold you, and Daddy.
Someone paid for our meals at the counter. Before we slipped out into the winter air again, Carlos dropped two quarters into the table jukebox and played Sade’s “Pearls.”
Love Always,
Lizzy
THE WEEK AFTER WE BURIED MA, I STOPPED SLEEPING. ANY REST
that I got was interrupted by cold shivers and my heart, pounding me awake, beating on the walls of my chest frantically like the wings of a caged bird. When I did manage to sleep, guilt tormented me. I had a recurring nightmare that I turned my back on Ma when she needed me most, and because of it, she kept dying all over again—each time I went to sleep. The nightmares gave me insomnia.
New York City was hit with a record-breaking cold front. Motel management finally responded to complaints about the severe cold and turned up the heat. The air became heavy with steam. As I wrestled with sleep, tangled in the motel sheets, I was drenched in Carlos’s and my own sweat. My memory of that time is choppy: the fragrance of a dozen roses he carried to my bedside; their day-by-day, sweet-smelling rot, as Carlos’s radio fizzed and crackled; slow jams or old school rap, Slick Rick, Grand Master Flash, The Furious Five. Sam, standing in front of the mirror, smearing black makeup over her eyes, glittery gloss over her lips.
When I was awake, my state of mind was fragile. I could not handle my emotions; they just kept spilling out of me, or else I went numb and silent. By the third night, Carlos had had enough of my behavior. He taunted me with flirty cell phone calls to other girls placed right outside our window, within my view. Then he’d invite Sam for long walks alone, and return several unexplained hours later, toting leftovers from fancy restaurants with French or Italian names spelled in curvy script on grease-stained bags; all places he’d never brought me. I knew I was bad company, my sadness sucking all the air out of the room.
Our last night in the motel together was New Year’s Eve, into the infant hours of 1997. Spread out over the beds, the three of us split a bag of sunflower seeds and watched the ball drop on TV. At exactly midnight, a million shreds of multicolored paper rained on Times Square. My first one without you, Ma, I thought.
Carlos disappeared for three days. Without anything of real value left to barter, the hotel manager promised Sam and me that we would be out “on our asses” by eleven a.m. and not a minute later. We waited out the long night in silence, neither of us willing to speak what we both knew to be true: he wasn’t coming back this time. I don’t remember who started packing first, but I do know we helped each other. Sam jammed her belongings into a suitcase she’d found in the trash: comic books, jars of hair dye, her poetry, ripped-up jeans, and old-man sweaters. Everything I owned went into my backpack: my journal, my mother’s NA coin, some clothes, underwear, and the one picture of my mother I carried everywhere, the black-and-white one taken in Greenwich Village when she was homeless at seventeen years old. In defiance, we slammed our stuff into our bags, and what didn’t belong to us, we threw at the wall, or we kicked,
hard
, across the room.
Sam had been hiding ten dollars in case of emergency. Because the train was too far a walk and our bags were too heavy, when the sun was up, we took a cab—backpacks in our laps and one garbage bag of clothing each—to Bedford Park Boulevard. We had no idea what was next.
We hadn’t meant to split up; it just happened. Sam went to visit Oscar to store her bags. Since it was Sunday, I knew my friends would be home, so I went knocking on doors, Bobby’s, Jamie’s, Josh’s, Fief’s, anyplace I could think of knocking. Bobby let me leave my garbage bag of stuff in his closet. I showered at Jamie’s place while her mom was out. In the middle of drying my hair, Carlos knocked on Jamie’s front door. She looked back at me with her hand still on the doorknob, as though to say, “
What do you want to do about him?
” Carlos’s eyes were crazy, darting everywhere.
“I got us another room, Shamrock. Let’s go,” he said.
I needed a place to stay that I could be certain about. But not knowing when Jamie’s mom would be home, or if I could even stay at anyone’s place for sure, I ignored my gut and went with him. In the cab, my hair still dripping wet, I asked, “Can we stop and get Sam?”
“We’ll come back for her,” Carlos said, and I knew better than to push him. His army fatigue outfit had become tattered and was in obvious need of cleaning. He was unshaven, and his Timberland boots were mysteriously missing their laces. With one extended knuckle, he knocked on the Plexiglas cab partition. “New England Thruway, exit twelve plus one,” he said.
“What?” the driver asked.
“New England Thruway, exit TWELVE PLUS ONE!!” Carlos yelled, frantically rubbing his fingers through his hair in frustration, looking to me. “The devil’s all around me, he ain’t gonna make me speak his number. He’s screwing with me, Shamrock. I know it.” My heart jack-hammered.
“Thirteen?” I asked. “You mean Exit Thirteen?” Carlos flinched at the sound of the number and then nodded slowly, his closed fist over his mouth and his eyes winced shut.
“Yes,” he said in a way that was both flat and psychotic. Why did I get in the cab in the first place? I thought. I had no idea what Carlos was on, but I knew he was high on something.
Taking a deep breath, I told the driver, “He wants to take the New England Thruway to exit . . . Thirteen,” I said, cringing at Carlos’s outburst in Spanish. The cab accelerated.
Quietly, I reached into my bag, sifted through my clothing, and began rubbing my fingers along the rough edges of Ma’s Narcotics Anonymous coin. All these years I’d kept that coin; holding it made me feel close to her. In the cab with Carlos, I rubbed it over and over as we zigzagged through traffic.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .
Our new crash place was a side-of-the-road stop for truckers and people looking for a few hours of pleasure, called the Holiday Motel. It was not unlike the Van Cortlandt Motel, only now I had no clue where we were. I didn’t know how to get to any form of transportation that did not depend on Carlos, and I had a sinking feeling we would not be going back for Sam. At this motel there was nothing but highway, seedy-looking people, Carlos, and me.
I decided that being agreeable and quiet was my best bet. Whatever Carlos dictated I went with, even if it didn’t agree with me. I was too afraid not to, and he played my fear for everything it was worth. What unfolded was like a spiteful game of Simon Says. “Let’s go to the room,” he barked after he paid the manager. We went. He held the only room key; I waited. Standing in the cold, I watched him move ever so slowly, checking his beeper, then his phone, holding the key in his hand inches from the lock, keeping us in the icy outdoors, just because he could. Several times over the next few days, spontaneously, he called out “Time to eat!” It was—and not a moment earlier or later than he said so. I grabbed my coat and followed. When the cash register rang up, not once but twice, a total of $13.50 for our meal, he pounded the counter and walked out, abandoning our takeout food, impossibly out of reach behind the counter, leaving me hungry. And when he left the motel some evenings with no answer as to whether or not he would be back, I waited then, too.
Those nights come back to me often, the nights I spent alone in the Holiday Motel on exit “12 + 1” on the New England Thruway. Those nights were
my
bottom.
Watching the windows for Carlos, listening to the endless prostitution through the thin wooden walls, no money to use the phone, I had no place to escape to. Daddy told me that he once spent eight weeks in solitary confinement in prison, and all he had to entertain him was a single book. He said he began hallucinating the characters of that book; they began to talk to him, becoming his only companions. I paced the small motel room at night, frantic, heartbroken about Ma, slowly unraveling.
My thoughts fixated on the people in my own life, and how they defined my options.
Where would I go if I left?
To Bobby’s? That wouldn’t last. To Jamie’s? Her mother was a foster care caseworker. She would be just waiting to “help” me go back into a group home, so I couldn’t stay there long. After what I’d seen at St. Anne’s—the mean girls, the indifferent staff, and the prisonlike environment—I was never going to a place like that again. Back to Brick’s apartment? Mr. Doumbia was looking for me there, so that was like choosing the group home. No way.
I was stuck. I tried to numb myself with sleep and television, but thoughts of Ma kept intruding: the damn pine box they buried her in, the coarse nails holding it together.
Was she wearing her hospital gown inside the box
?
I told her I’d see her “later.” I’d really thought I had a later.
. . .
But if I had her NA coin, if Lisa and Brick still had her clothing hanging in the closet, could she really be dead?
As Carlos’s insanity escalated, much like getting caught downstream in a strong current, I felt like I was going right along with him.
Over the next two weeks, whenever Carlos returned from long mysterious hours “out,” he emptied his pockets onto the motel table: his black and gold Latin King beads, tubes of antibiotic ointment for his growing number of tattoos, a handgun, Ziploc bags full of pills, block-shaped bricks of weed, and, curiously, two cans of soda. From under the blankets, I would squint in the dim hanging light as he twisted the cap off a fake Coca-Cola can and pulled out a plastic bag of white powder that was undoubtedly cocaine. Standing before a wall lined with mirrors and tacky maroon carpet wallpaper, Carlos turned to me and held the bogus can and the baggie side by side. Counting his reflections, there were three of him. He made an amused gesture with his eyebrows, finding humor in his hiding cocaine in a Coke can.
The one saving grace was that Carlos ceased trying to be physical with me; instead, coming in at dawn those cold January mornings, he kicked off his snow-covered boots and pulled a blanket over himself on the floor. This was both a relief and unnerving for me, because if we didn’t speak and we weren’t sleeping with each other, what was holding us together at all? And yet my memory stubbornly recalled intense brown eyes gazing at me affectionately and his heartbeat as I slept on his chest. Carlos had once been a source of comfort and of love. He’d cared for Ma, just the way he said he’d cared for his own dad when AIDS took hold. It was hard to be angry at him after all we’d been through, but it wasn’t hard to be afraid.
After too many awkward nights of silence and too many disappearances, I risked a couple of questions. One night I used my most timid voice to ask, gingerly, “So where are you headed? Can I come with you? . . . Can we go get Sam?”
I didn’t have Oscar’s number, and everywhere I called, none of our friends had heard from Sam. I was worried. I was also sick of eating our half-rotten leftovers and watching the window, unsure of whether he’d return. Something had to change. Carlos responded to my questions with a sneer, his jaw slack, a hateful look in his eyes. But we hadn’t eaten all day, and unless I pressed him, I might not eat for yet another. I didn’t want him to leave without me.
Very gently, I asked again, “Carlos, did you hear me? Can I come with you?” My heart pounded.
Slowly he walked toward me, then he moved very quickly, his arm cocked back.
Wham!
His fist came flying past my head and split the wall’s wooden paneling on impact. I screamed. He pulled back his huge fist again, as though readying to punch me in the face. I flinched and raised my arms protectively. Looking me up and down with his fist held high, he laughed. “Stupid,” he muttered before walking to the bathroom. I was shaking; I curled up against the headboard and didn’t dare say another word. Never before had he threatened violence.
But maybe that wasn’t true. Carlos had a silent way of establishing control, ensuring that you just knew not to press him. He was muttering to himself in front of the sink, slamming objects down in the bathroom. I did not dare move or speak. For what felt like forever, I watched Carlos through the mirror as he gelled his hair back, perfected his goatee with a disposable razor, put on his gold rings, and finally stuffed the gun in his belt and his drugs back into the zipper pocket of his army fatigues. He slipped out into the cold, silently.
“
Cops Charge Beau in Stab
,” read the January 13 headline in the
New York Daily News
. The write-up was more factual than sentimental. It stated plainly that the woman “had been stabbed about the body and her throat was cut; she was left to die on the motel room floor.” It was a single incident of violence against a woman, perpetrated by her boyfriend, in a city where things like this happened all the time. In fact, boyfriend-perpetrated stabbings were not even new at what the paper called this “hot-sheet” motel, at which drug dealing, police raids, and violence against women was the norm.
But I didn’t have to wait for the news report to learn about the stabbing; I had only to lift my curtain. At the time, I had been watching the news on television while Carlos was out. At first, it didn’t completely sink in: a reporter talking in front of some motel, delivering a story about the gruesome murder of a woman at a dive on the New England Thruway. The motel maid discovered the body, which at that very moment was being wheeled silently into an ambulance behind the wide-eyed reporter. It could have been an episode of Daddy’s favorite show,
Law & Order
. Instead, it was a real murder—right outside my window. Rosa Morilla, age thirty-nine, mother of five, had bled out on the floor of her room in the Holiday Motel, just three doors down from my room. I jumped up to look out the window, lifted the curtain, and saw the reporter. It was like having two different TV sets to watch, with two different camera angles. I looked back and forth between the television and out my window to see the same view: Ms. Morilla in a body bag, the ambulance doors slammed, the reporter’s blinding portable light shining on her overly made-up face.
I shut everything off, light and TV, and crawled under the blankets. Through the dark, I listened to the police radios crackling, the dozens of footsteps crunching snow, the maids speaking frantically in Spanish. “No,” I spoke to the empty room.
“Goddamnit.”
Just a few hours later, you could have never guessed it happened. With the reporter long gone, the police packed up and departed, the whole motel was back to business as usual, as though Rosa Morilla never existed. As though she was not the mother of five children; as if she had not been someone’s daughter or sister; as if she didn’t even matter.