Ma started with the drinking after their missed reunion. She had waited ten years for it. Finally, after keeping my brother and I fed and off the streets, after keeping her legs closed for all those years, after saving all that money, waiting in those lines, filling out those forms, he was finally arriving. She’d bought a potted orchid for her bedroom and some ferns to hang in the kitchen. She was scrubbing down the apartment every second she could spare away from work. I remember because she gave Marcel the whooping of his life for stomping through her freshly mopped floors with his muddied baseball cleats. She even went to Walgreen’s to buy new make-up when before she used to say, “I don’t have time for that foolishness.”

Ma signed us up for summer camp that year. She wanted a week alone with Ba without us kids around to play spy. She dropped us off on her way to the airport. Ma was all nerves like a teenager again. She had her hair done up with just a few loose tendrils framing her face and the black liquid eyeliner that made her look like a cat. She was beautiful. I was scared to go away but didn’t want to ruin it by crying. I stuffed my face in my rolled up sleeping bag. I bit my cheek hard as I could, praying the hurt would chase away the fear. Ma gave me a kiss and called me my favorite nickname. She said, “Dumpling, you’ll love it. You’re going to have so much fun you won’t want to come back. But when you do come back, we’ll be one big happy family.” I let the red smack of her new L’oreal lipstick linger on my cheek as a seal to the promise. I left it there for an entire day and a night until the camp counselors got mad and told me to wash up proper.

Camp wasn’t too bad though it was a different world from the city. In our neighborhood, I fell asleep to the steady chop of helicopter blades on ghetto birds. Drunken whoops in the night meant there was a party or a fight but certainly a sign of life outside our apartment walls. Ambulance sirens were a reminder that someone was rushing to help someone else out. At camp, there was just a lot of open air. I had never been around so many trees all in one place before. At night, it was pitch black and so quiet it was eerie.