First published in The Record, June 26, 2020

On Hope Avenue, a family of nine dreams big. COVID-19 threatens to destroy it all.

One night at ten o’clock, Kathleen Torres helped her father, Miguel, climb into the black Chevy Tahoe. She feared he might die, and her mother too. Kathleen is 17, so she did as her parents instructed. She drove her father to the hospital. For five hours, Miguel sat in a waiting room at Saint Joseph Medical Center, fighting for breath. He never saw a doctor, and none of the nurses stopped to talk. At 3 a.m., they gave up. The streets were silent as Kathleen drove back to the apartment. 

Back to Hope Avenue. Inside, the family was trapped, nine people living in three bedrooms on the first floor of a peeling duplex on a crowded street in Passaic, an old city weakened by years of poverty and weeks of death.

It seemed like everyone had COVID-19. Kathleen’s parents, Miguel Torres and Laura Perez, could barely breathe. All seven of their children fell ill, from 20-year-old Erik down to Elvis, the baby.

“I told Kathleen that if I die, she needs to take care of the kids,” said Perez. “I feel like that’s too much responsibility on Kathleen. She’s still a child.” 

Kathleen’s emotions roiled. She feared losing her parents. She feared becoming a mother to her seven siblings.

Below the terror, she felt joy — and a rising anger. Her father left the family when Kathleen was 3. By 2017 he was living in a borrowed car, along with two sons from another relationship. That’s when Miguel and Laura reunited, and fell back in love. Miguel rejoined Laura’s family, moving with his sons into the apartment on Hope Avenue.

Kathleen loves her father. She’s happy that he’s back. But as the weeks of coronavirus quarantine stretched into months, certain dynamics became impossible to ignore. Miguel is openly emotional with his kids. When they walk into the room, he smiles. When he talks about the years they spent apart, he cries.

Miguel likes to sit on the blue couch in the living room, three feet from Kathleen’s bedroom door, and snuggle Elvis, who was born soon after the family came back together.

To her surprise, Kathleen finds this painful to watch.

“My mom is taking care of my dad’s kids. That’s a lot to put on my mom, especially after he left for so long,” Kathleen said. “I see everybody as a family. But it gets me mad to see my dad raising his kids in my house. Because he didn’t raise me.”

You can keep your 'difficult times'

This is why we invent clichés, to avoid saying the hard things we really mean. Ads on Netflix call these times uncertain, unprecedented, trying and troubled. What they mean to say is this: A microscopic killer floats unseen through the air. So we hide at home with our families, who love and wound us both.

On Hope Avenue, people are too tired to invent clichés. Like a third of the people in Passaic, Kathleen’s family lives below the federal poverty line. Around them, coronavirus hit the city hard, producing 3,131 confirmed cases of COVID-19 by June 10, the last date for which city numbers are available. Of those, 186 people died. Kathleen’s family is not counted among the positive cases. They all had the symptoms of the disease, but never got tested.

“We had ambulances on this block all the time,” Laura Perez said. “My best friend died.”

Miguel works construction jobs when he can, but Laura’s full-time job as a hairdresser in downtown Passaic makes her the family’s breadwinner. When the coronavirus forced her salon to close, the family had no income. Perez and Torres spent their savings. They have nine people to feed, plus a guinea pig named Guinea and a scared white dog named Coco. Rent on Hope Avenue costs $1,600 a month. The family is one month behind. If the Chevy Tahoe gets repossessed by the bank, if the coronavirus returns and everyone gets sick again. . .

. . . Kathleen and her parents replay this cascade of potential catastrophes in their minds like a holy litany.

“I was doing so good before he came into my life. All he brought into my family is a lot of stress, a lot of problems,” Perez, 37, said of Torres. “I cry so much. I worry I’m gonna lose my car. We’re gonna be homeless. We’re going to end up like him, living in a car.”

Love. Trouble. Repeat.

These tensions — the fear of poverty, the fear of abandonment — didn’t start with COVID-19. They were there from the beginning, in 1997, when this love story began. Perez was 13, the daughter of a successful restaurant owner. Torres was 17 and poor, working as a landscaper. From Passaic they eloped one day to Brooklyn, but Perez’s mother found them. She threatened that if Torres didn’t return her daughter, she would kill him.

“When we got back, her mom chased me with a big knife,” Torres said. “Her parents didn’t like me because I didn’t have any money.”

Three years later, the young couple married. Perez’s parents didn’t approve. Torres was too old for her, and too poor. Also, the young couple fought a lot. When Perez got pregnant, she didn’t want anyone to know. She gave birth to two children, Erik in 2000 and Kathleen in 2003. Each time, she managed to hide the pregnancy for the first eight months. 

“I was embarrassed,” Perez said.

The relationship lasted 12 years, but the fights got worse. Eventually, Torres wanted out.

“I left my daughter when she was 3,” said Torres, 40. “It was really hard for her. It was hard for everybody.” 

Torres and Perez met different people. Each had two children, she two daughters and he two sons. Perez built a stable life, working in the salon and renting the apartment on Hope Avenue. Torres descended into drinking, drugs and weapons. He spent four years in prison in New Mexico. When Torres and Perez reunited in 2017, he didn’t even own the car he was living in. The car was borrowed from a friend.

The former teenage sweethearts fell back in love. Torres and his sons moved into the apartment on Hope Avenue, and the old dynamic repeated itself.

Perez got pregnant with a boy they named Elvis. Again, she felt embarrassed. Again she hid her pregnancy, this time from her teenage children.

“She didn’t tell us about Elvis,” Kathleen said. “We figured it out.”

Again, there was tumult. When Perez was alone she worked full time, and she always paid the rent on time. Now, with so many children in the house, she often left the salon to attend some emergency. Torres’ prison record makes it hard to find regular work. He gets depressed, and Perez gets angry. With four new mouths to feed, Perez often couldn’t pay the landlord until the third of the month.

“I’m tired of being home with the kids and the noise and the fights,” Perez said.

One recent afternoon, five of the children got hungry simultaneously. Perez cooked their tacos in shifts because she can’t find a pan big enough to hold all the eggs. 

“I feel like I’m working in a restaurant anytime I cook for everybody,” said Perez. “It’s so many people.”

On the other hand, Perez and Torres had rediscovered their improbable love. Elvis was brash and loving and cute, and he seemed to knit the family’s disparate parts together.

“Kathleen came in and said, ‘Mom, you guys love each other. Be happy. Look at your story. This doesn’t happen to everybody,’” Perez said.

To tune out the chaos around her, Perez likes to sit at the dining room table, prop her phone against a glass and read the news. In January, she saw stories of a mysterious disease killing thousands of people in Wuhan, China.

“We didn’t believe it was real,” Torres said. “She was reading these stories. We thought it was just the flu.”

'I thought she was going to die'

When Kathleen drove her father home from the hospital, he felt like someone was poking his legs with hundreds of tiny needles. He couldn’t breathe. The family had no insurance, no masks, and no room for anyone to keep their distance.

Perez slept on the wooden floor of the living room. His stepdaughters slept on either side of him, each on a blue couch. A few times a day Perez stepped over them all, leaving her bedroom to prepare tea and home remedies.  

“She couldn’t breathe for two weeks,” Torres said. “I thought she was going to die.”

Subtler rifts cracked open. A salon client came to Hope Avenue, knocked on the family’s door, and demanded a haircut. Perez felt so sick she could barely walk. She refused to open the door. Her client walked away, angry and offended. Meanwhile, Perez’s mother kept demanding visits.

“My mom said I didn’t care for her because I didn’t go visit her enough,” Perez said.

Perez knew a visit would endanger her elderly mother’s life. Occasionally she would relent, and go anyway. This made her oldest son angry.

“Erik and his grandmother are very close,” said Torres. “Whenever she’d go over there for a visit, he got upset. He was really worried she was going to kill his grandmother.

Minor annoyances festered. Four of the children use the same school-issued laptop, so they squabble constantly. Each of Torres’ sons — Alan, 10 and Michael, 12 — got annoyed at the other’s verbal tics.

“Can you say, ‘Yeah, um, but’ again?” Michael said.

Kathleen led math lessons and tried to keep order.

“Michael, are you done with your homework?” Kathleen said. “OK, you have to clean up after yourself. You know the rules."    

As Torres felt better, he won sporadic construction jobs as a day laborer. Still, the family fell behind on bills. They survived on free lunches from the Passaic school district and from Passaic County CASA, a nonprofit group that also delivered diapers, baby wipes and clothes.

One afternoon, Perez and her sweetheart sat together on a blue couch. They smiled often, regarding each other with tenderness. They did not touch. Perez felt her anger rising.

To keep her home and car, she needs money. But after the shutdown, her salon may be slow to recover, which means smaller paychecks than before. Summer camps are canceled, leaving nothing for the children to do. What happens if Perez and Torres return to work, catch COVID-19, and bring it home to the children?

“So I’m going to go back to work, for what?” Perez said. “Am I going to make less money? Are we all going to get sick again? But I have to go to work because we need money. Who’s going to support us?” 

Home on Hope

Years before he met Perez, Torres moved from Mexico to the United States in 1993. He planned to attend high school, work in the evenings, and send money home to his mother. When he arrived in Passaic, his older brother told him no. You came here for work, Miguel, not school.

So Torres became a landscaper. The die of his life – hard work, hard living – was cast. He was 13.

Twenty-seven years later, his family is desperate. Too much time in a too-small apartment has everyone on edge. It would be easy for Torres to press his oldest children into the same decisions he made: forget school, get a job, help the family.

Just in case these thoughts ever occurred, Kathleen used the walls of her bedroom to mount a defense. Above her bed she painted a crying clown with a hand pressed to his cheek.

“I went through a phase in my life when I was sad all the time. I was lonely. I felt like I needed someone,” Kathleen said. “I painted that so I could be sad with somebody. And I painted the hand to say: we’re in this together, me and him.”

On the opposite wall, Kathleen made a flowchart of sticky notes and color markers. The top sticky reads “Main Priorities.” Below that are notes for New Jersey Institute of Technology, William Paterson University; 3.0 GPA and 2.7 GPA. Then two more stickies: “Doctor??” and “Nurse??”

She dreams of working with mothers in a hospital delivery room. But in her own life, Kathleen is tired of children. Let the Netflix ads keep their clichés about family and difficult times. Kathleen has words of her own.

“I don’t see myself in the future having any kids because of the experiences my mom has gone through,” Kathleen said, sitting with Elvis on her bed. “How does she do it? Wake up in the morning and think, ‘Well, I have seven kids in the house.’ I wouldn’t want to wake up. It’s too many kids.”