Breaking Night by Liz Murray Read Free Book Online Page B

around,” and she always sat extra close to the TV, squinting when his face filled our screen, his white hair perfectly neat, his suit freshly pressed. Together, we would bet on the “showcase showdown,” taking turns pretending to be contestants, winning boats, new living room sets, and glamorous trips around the world. I’d stand and clap extra loud for the contestants who won big. Ma sometimes vacuumed, humming smoothly while I was parked in front of the TV for hours, our apartment bright with the morning sun. It was a brief time when I felt that Ma belonged only to me.
    And then some days Daddy brought me to the library, where he helped me pick out books that were mostly pictures. For himself, he’d choose thick ones with photographs of contemplative men in suit jackets on the back, which he stacked around the house and never returned. He was always applying for a library card in a new name. Some nights, I liked to take one of his books and bring it to my room, where I would try to read it the same way Daddy did—held directly under the light of my bedside lamp, searching for any words that might be familiar to me from nights when Ma read to me at my bedside. But the words were too big and they made me tired. So I’d just fall asleep beside the book, smelling the yellowed pages, relaxed by the feeling that I shared something special with my father.
    It worried me to think that I would be away in the mornings now, missing out on this. I got the feeling that something was slipping through my fingers, and that I was the only one who saw the loss of our special time as a bad thing.
    I wondered what starting school would be like, and how it was supposed to help me become grown up. I wondered what grown up could mean, when there were different types of adults all around me. Though I wanted to, I didn’t dare ask Ma to help me figure things out, because I knew it would only make her feel bad about herself and the scrounging we had to do to get by. Some things I was just going to have to figure out on my own.
    Later that week, the evening newscaster—a white man in a suit who wore a triangle hat with colorful streamers dangling from the top—called the day, July Fourth, a time to celebrate our independence . Then he and the poofy-haired woman beside him waved good-bye under the rolling credits and blew simultaneously into kazoos. The noise honked in our living room, becoming the second-loudest thing next to our window fan whirring behind me. I sat alone on the couch, motionless. Ma had promised me earlier, when it was still light outside, that she would take us downtown by the water so we could watch fireworks along with everyone else. I had run to get dressed and chosen my blue shorts and tie-dyed shirt to match the festivities. But I had stayed in my room too long. By the time I came out, Ma had left for the Aqueduct Bar without telling anyone—a new place she’d recently discovered and been running off to more and more lately.
    Her trips there started on St. Patrick’s Day, that past March. Ma and Daddy had taken us down to the parade spontaneously, after we’d seen it announced on TV.
    Under a light sheet of rain, we watched from Eighty-sixth Street, just off the park, as men in kilts played eerie notes on bagpipes and beat drums so powerful I could feel them in my chest and legs. Lisa and I had our cheeks painted with four-leaf clovers, for luck, and Daddy let me fall asleep on his lap for the whole train ride home.
    Ma didn’t make it back to the apartment with us. Just as we were about to come off Fordham Road, she ran into an old friend who was headed into a bar, and she decided to catch up with us later. After all, what was St. Patty’s Day without a drink, he’d insisted. Without bothering to wash the paint off my face, I’d set my blanket down on my windowsill to watch for Ma’s return. I waited for hours, dozing off against the window, until she finally came home around three in the morning, smelling