Chapter 15
Sadie
When I wake in the morning and pad through to the kitchen to make my breakfast, there’s no sign of James, and my heart thumps loudly as I stand and listen. No shower sounds. I peer down at my phone only to find a message winking at me:
My head is populated by marauding orcs.
Followed by:
Sorry about yesterday. Thanks for rescuing me. I appreciate it more than I can say. Had to head in to discuss some things with Cath.
I grin as my heart recedes from the red zone. But his next text pulls me up short:
I hope you don’t hate me.
What? Why would I hate him?
Never.
I’m smiling as I head back to my bedroom and gather up my clothes. When I arrive at the office, I catch glimpses of James from a distance as he flits in and out of meetings, but I have no idea how he’s surviving given what must be a monumental hangover.
By the time 5 p.m. rolls around, a couple of messages from my mom have appeared asking how work is going and whether I’m okay, and it feels like I need to go home and explain. I text James before I leave:
Heading to Queens to see my mom.
You want me to come with you?
I’m good.
I shrink down in my seat as I study the pale girl in the train window.
When I arrive at the station, I head down past the industrial buildings and York College, the playing fields and the cemetery, and turn toward Jamaica Houses.
It’s getting dark now, and my neck prickles as I take in the empty streets.
Gah, this walk never bothered me before.
When did I start seeing shadows everywhere?
When you moved to a smarter part of town, Sadie.
Or maybe it was being ambushed by your crazy stepdad.
I ease through the door to the building, past the scuffed walls and the broken tiles, but in my head I’m on Des’s big couch looking at the sun streaming down onto redbrick buildings.
I’ve taken my first big step out of here, or maybe my second.
Whichever one it is, it feels miraculous.
My mom’s clattering around in the kitchen when I let myself in through the front door and peer into the living room.
No Jake. Fingers crossed she didn’t tell him I was coming here tonight.
When she’s home, he’s often out. He takes her money, our money actually, and goes out and drinks.
I never thought much about whether there was anything wrong with my pay going into a joint account.
There were a lot of bills to pay and I liked contributing.
I thought Jake was contributing, too; he made money on and off, but now he’s talking about debts .
.. I’m not sure what’s going on. He always drank a lot, but it never seemed like he burned through what my mom and I earned.
Does Mom know about whatever this debt is?
“Hey, Mom!” I call as I head down the corridor.
“Hey,” she says, turning around from the sink as I step into the kitchen, and I take in her lined face and faded nylon apron, the matted brown slippers that have come apart at the sides.
I pull her small, round body into warm hug.
“My girl,” she adds, patting my back. “How are things going? Working hard, yeah? You all right?”
She pulls back to examine me, eyes skimming over my face. Christ, I hope she doesn’t spot the bruising, though I don’t know why I’m hiding it. One thing at a time, Sadie. Jake touching my ass and moving out, then the bruise and the debt.
“I’m good. How’s Cleaneasy?”
“Oh, same old, same old.” She turns back to a pile of dishes in the sink. I’ll bet they’re Jake’s. I pick up a dish towel. “The general manager is still an asshole. They’re still paying me for shit.”
I take in her curly brown hair shining in the overhead lights and launch straight into it. “I wanted to talk to you about some stuff, Mom. I’ve been thinking for a while that I should move out.”
Her hands still in the water. “I thought you might be considering that,” she says as she turns around, pursing her lips like she disapproves.
“I’ll have to move out eventually, Mom. With my pay coming in, it’s probably only a matter of time before they pressure us to leave.”
She makes a face. “Jake said you two had had an argument.”
What? Funny sort of argument. Well, two can play that game.
“You mean the kind of argument when he puts his hand on my ass and suggests we could have some fun while my mom’s at work?” I say.
Her jaw drops. “He what?”
“He put his hand on my ass, Mom.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t joking? He’s always been a bit …”
I shake my head. “You don’t mistake stuff like that, Mom.”
Her hand flutters as she presses it to her chest. Then she sinks into a chair at the kitchen table. “He done anything like that before?” she says.
I shake my head again, and she presses her lips together.
“He did do this, I swear. I wouldn’t make it up.”
She holds up her hand. “I know you wouldn’t.
” She reaches out and grips my fingers. “You’re a good girl, Sadie.
I’m just …” Her hand rests on her chest again.
“Horrified. All this time … I mean he never helped much with you, but he was around when I was working.” She shakes her head.
“I’m not excusing him, I’m ... God, I’m so sorry, Sadie.
I don’t know what to say. He touched you? Why would he do that?”
She pulls me forward, and I bend down and slide my arms around her back. She’s been with Jake ever since I was six, before we moved in here.
“I wondered if he’d taken something. His eyes were unfocused and …”
She leans back and makes a face. “You know he’s always smoked. I think he’s been doing more of that lately.”
“Why are you with him, Mom? He’s just always been this awful, inappropriate, weaselly guy. And I …”
She purses her lips, then gets up and walks over to the fridge, pulling out a couple of frozen dinners. “Let’s put some food in the oven and then we can talk.”
I pull out mats and cutlery as Mom puts the meals in to heat, and we sit down at the battered kitchen table.
She smooths her nylon uniform over her legs as she says, “Right from when I got pregnant, I had no one. No family. No money. No one to turn to. No qualifications that would get me a job with a baby to look after. Your dad took off before you were born, cleared all his stuff out of the apartment we shared one afternoon when I was at work, and I never heard from him again. I had no idea how I was going to take care of you and cover the rent. I carried on living there and did what jobs I could find, but the money was never enough. We were evicted eventually.”
She’s told me some of this story before.
“I got a place in a women’s shelter and begged on the street so’s we could eat.
I worried about the situation we were in with our older neighbor, Mr. Friedman.
I don’t know if you remember him, but he found me a cleaning job with a friend of his, Mrs. Katz, who had a house in a nicer part of town.
It came with a room in her basement, and for the first time, I had something that might work.
But Mrs. Katz paid me next to nothing and told me that the room was my pay.
I couldn’t do much about it because we needed a roof over our heads, and I could look after you as I cleaned, so I accepted it and kept searching for other opportunities.
I got another cleaning job, and for a while we had a place to live and money to buy food. No more, but we were survivin’.
“Then Mrs. Katz said I stole something from her, and we had to move on. I didn’t steal nothing, but she was a mean old coot, and I think she wanted rid of us.
We went from shelter to shelter, one terrible room after another.
We were thrown out when I didn’t have enough cash to keep a roof over our heads.
Cleaning, begging, I was doing anything.
I stole stuff too. Not proud of that, but we had to eat. ”
I have vague memories of this time—a series of damp, dingy places. My mom was constantly stressed, sometimes out at night.
“Then, one night, I met Jake. He came out of a bar drunk as a skunk, and I was on the street outside asking for money. He stopped to talk to me, and I realized that, if I could snare him, you and me’d be okay.
He could hardly stand, so I offered to help him get home.
That night, you and I slept on his couch, and when he woke up in the morning, he couldn’t remember who I was.
I said he’d promised me a place to stay for a few weeks.
I’m not proud of it, but I did what I had to do.
” She studies me with sad eyes. “It was what I had to do,” she repeats, in a whisper this time.
As her eyes fill with tears, I get up, shuffle around the table, and pull her into another hug, inhaling her familiar smell of cleaning products and cheap shampoo.
“God, Mom. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry you had to do all that because of me.”
She pulls back, shaking her head like a dog with a flea in its ear. “It wasn’t only because of you, and I haven’t regretted it once. I couldn’t be prouder of you.” She wipes her hand across her face as I straighten up.
Maybe she wouldn’t be so proud of me if she knew I’d lied to Williams Security.
“Jake’s never been a bad guy. Is he an asshole? Yeah, he is. He drinks too much and makes lewd comments all the time, but he’s always just been a pain in the ass, like a lot of men. But he never hit me or forced me, you know what I’m saying? It was survival. It was enough.”
“I don’t want to make you feel bad about Jake. I …”
“God no, girl. I’m livid. He touched you? That’s abuse. He’s been like a dad to you, not a very good one, but still … I counted on him. Trusted him to keep you safe.” She scrunches up her face and looks toward the kitchen window.
Oh, boy. Nothing I can say or do will make this better.
“God knows I don’t want you to move out, Sadie, but you can’t live here after that. I’ve put up with him and his nonsense for far too long.” Her eyes swing back to mine. “I’m happy you’ve got yourself out of the projects, Sadie. But I miss you.”
I lean forward and pull her into another hug. “I miss you, too, Mom.”
She leans back to look at me. “You going to report him?”
Report him? When you grow up in a place like this, you often don’t see the police at their best. My mom’s talked about being harassed by them, and I’ve seen it myself—how they deal with people in the projects day in, day out.
Some cops are fine, but others treat you like dirt.
And you know the other side of the story: people scraping by, living in grinding poverty, someone getting arrested because they’re the guy with the funny eye that no one would hire and they needed to eat.
It doesn’t excuse it, but you start to see how lives like that grind people down.
Not everyone starts out rotten; some are trapped in a terrible situation or dealt a bad hand before they were even born.
Some can’t read or write. Others have no clue how the system works, and no real chance of figuring it out.
Then there are people like Jake—an asshole, sure, but not a criminal.
At least you don’t think he is, a little voice reminds me.
In the scheme of what they deal with, would the cops even be interested? I can hear the questions now: “Are you sure he wasn’t just brushing past you?” And how would it work anyway? I’d say he touched me, and he’d deny it and say I must have misunderstood.
“What do you think?” I say.
She scowls. “I think he deserves what’s coming to him, that’s what I think. But I’d bet my ass they wouldn’t believe you or care.” She waves an arm around the tiny apartment where I’ve spent so much of my life. “You know what Jamaica Houses is like. They don’t believe no one in this place.”
What if I reported him and he took it out on my mom?
She’s caught right in the middle of this.
I’ve somehow got to get her safe before I can do anything about Jake, and now I don’t want to tell her about these debts he’s been chasing me about because she’ll worry that all our efforts to pull ourselves out of our financial situation count for nothing.
She runs a distracted hand over her hair. “I don’t want to land us in trouble if he’s involved in something more serious around here. Drugs … Maybe I should do some askin’ around.”
“God, Mom, is that safe?”
She shrugs. “Don’t want to be blindsided, Sadie. If he’s involved in something, then it’s a problem whether I ask around or not.”
She’s not wrong. And maybe she’ll find out more about these debts, but I still don’t like it. The other side of living here is that some people are out-and-out criminals, and if Jake’s got himself mixed up in something dangerous, then all bets are off.