Chapter Twenty-Four

Jennifer Mendoza applied the flamenco-red lipstick to her lips and carefully used a paper tissue to kiss away the excess. That done, she gave her reflection a tentative smile.

The smile didn't linger, quickly morphing into a desolated look.

Jennifer came this close to reaching for the makeup remover bottle and wiping her face clean for the ninth time that evening.

‘I look like a cheap, back-alley hooker,' she whispered to the mirror.

No, you don't, Jenny,the mirror whispered back. ‘You're just not used to it anymore, that's all.'

The mirror was right. Jennifer's makeup was subtle by any standards – just a little foundation, some eyeliner, light lipstick and a touch of blush – but it had been a very long time since Jennifer Mendoza had applied makeup to her face with the intention of going out on a date… a real date. To her out-of-practice eyes, a mere contour of lipstick made her look like a circus clown. But a little makeup was better than no makeup at all, because her skin didn't feel or look like what it used to anymore.

Jennifer studied her reflection for a moment longer before breathing out and using the tips of her fingers to gently brush her fringe to one side. Her dark hair had been cut into a stylish and quite attractive bob, but she would be lying if she didn't admit that she missed her long hair.

In high school, due to her olive skin tone and how shiny her hair always was, her nickname had been Pocahontas, but Jennifer's hair, together with everything about her, especially her appearance, had fallen victim to her addiction, which began some twenty-two years ago, when Jennifer was only twenty years old.

Jennifer was born in Bellflower, a neighborhood of South Los Angeles. Her mother, Andrea Mendoza, was a drug addict who, to support her addiction, had turned to prostitution. There was no record of who Jennifer's father really was.

Not surprisingly, since her mother sometimes used their small apartment for business, Jennifer hated being at home, so she did most of her growing up in the streets of South LA, and she did it as an angry kid. She did go to school – first to Ritter Elementary and then to Jordan High, both public schools in Bellflower – but she never showed any real interest in completing her school education. Her grades were poor and her behavior was disruptive to say the least. Her teachers did try, but Jennifer simply didn't care and her mother cared even less. She didn't care if Jennifer went to school or not, got an education or not, graduated or not, as long as she was out of the apartment. At the age of seventeen, halfway through her sophomore year, Jennifer dropped out of school. That was just months before she became pregnant with her daughter, Tabatha.

Jennifer had promised herself that she would never end up like her mother, but she quickly learned that, unfortunately, life rarely turned out like most people expected, or hoped it would. The night after she turned eighteen, high on whatever drug people were passing around at the party, and having consumed enough alcohol to poison most fully developed livers, Jennifer ended up having sex inside a bathroom stall, in some B-rated nightclub in North Hollywood. The boy with whom she had sex, she had met that night. His name was Toby. She never got his last name. She never saw him again either.

Things got really tough after that night.

Jennifer's mother, Andrea, had recognized her daughter's reckless behavior months before her eighteenth birthday and had warned her that if she got pregnant, she'd be on her own. She couldn't afford to have a pregnant woman sitting in her apartment, scaring her clients away.

Andrea never backed down from her promise, sending a recently pregnant Jennifer to go live on the streets.

Jennifer did think about having an abortion, but her fear of what God would do to her in the ‘afterlife' way outweighed her fear of becoming a mother. Nine months, almost to the day, after Jennifer had met Toby, she gave birth to Tabatha Mendoza, a stunning olive-skinned baby girl with midnight-black hair and sapphire-blue eyes.

While pregnant, Jennifer applied for several grants from the US Government that were specially allocated to single mothers. Because she was homeless, she was immediately approved for three separate programs. With that, she managed to secure shelter, food and clothing for Tabatha and herself, until she was able to work.

Jennifer tried hard to keep the promise that she had made to herself to not be like her mother… to love and care for her daughter with every atom of her soul. And that was exactly how it was, at least for the first two years of Tabatha's life.

Just a couple of months shy of her daughter's second birthday, Jennifer managed to land a job at a food distributor warehouse in Culver City, where they lived at the time. With her new employment, she also succeeded in securing a new grant from the government – Daycare/Nursery Assistance. The grant guaranteed that Tabatha would be professionally looked after during the hours that Jennifer had to be at work.

One morning, as her three-month trial period was coming to an end, Jennifer was transferring and rearranging a few medium-sized boxes across a wide corridor, from one shelf unit to another. The boxes weren't as heavy as she thought they would be, so, to gain time and impress her boss, Jennifer began taking two boxes across at a time, instead of one. During one of her trips, she partially turned her body to check how many boxes were still left on the shelf behind her – a simple movement, one that should've offered no danger whatsoever – but that morning, maybe due to the awkward way in which she twisted at the hips together with her trying to use her chin to keep the top box from sliding off, something snapped in her lower back. The pain that shot up her spine was so excruciating, it felt as if her body had been severed in two. That was the end of her trial period.

Unfortunately for Jennifer, that was also the kind of injury whose fault fell totally with the employee, not the employer. Her instructions had been to carry one box at a time. It had been Jennifer's decision to try to gain time, coupled with her awkward body twist, that had caused her back to seize, not a lack of health-and-safety measures at the warehouse. What that meant was that Jennifer's injury had to be categorized as ‘own short-term illness'.

In the USA, the federal government does not require employees to have access to paid sick-leave to address their own ‘short-term' illnesses. It was up to the employer to decide if he would pay sick-leave or not, and Jennifer's employer wasn't about to pay a single penny to someone who wasn't putting in the hours. And if Jennifer didn't put in the hours, she wouldn't have a job.

That knowledge sent Jennifer into ‘desperate' mode. She couldn't afford to lose that job. She needed to provide for her daughter and that was exactly what she told the ‘pain management specialist', who she saw that same afternoon.

The year was 2002 and the ‘specialist' was quick to prescribe the number one drug in the country at the time, used in the treatment of moderate to severe pain – OxyContin – a highly addictive, semi-synthetic opioid created and distributed by Purdue Pharma. To be on the safe side, the ‘specialist' decided to start her off on 20mg tablets instead of just 5mg, a practice known in the pharmaceutical industry as ‘individual dosing'.

And boy, did it work.

For Jennifer, when it came to numbing her pain and allowing her to go back to work, those little round pink pills were like a miracle in tablet form and, under the guidance of her ‘pain specialist', she took them freely and without restrictions. Soon, 20mg became 30mg, which quickly shot up to 40mg. Within only two months of her injury, Jennifer had become totally addicted to opioids. A week later, she lost her job.

Even with a legal prescription, OxyContin wasn't exactly a cheap drug. With no immediate income, there was absolutely no way that Jennifer could afford it anymore, but there were plenty of cheaper opioid alternatives out on the streets, and the cheapest of them all was also the worst of them all – heroin. The first time Jennifer stuck a needle in her arm, she wasn't even twenty-one years old.

From then on, her world simply collapsed on top of her. Her drug use intensified, she became a violent person, and her disregard for everything around her, including her daughter, grew exponentially.

By the age of twenty-two, Jennifer had essentially become the person that she despised the most in this world – her mother – exchanging sexual favors for money, or bottles of OxyContin, or little bags of heroin, sometimes even food… while her daughter was left alone to cry herself to sleep in the corner.

Jennifer knew that she needed help. She didn't want to be like her mother. She didn't want to be a user. She didn't want her daughter to hate her, but getting help at the height of what became known as the opioid crisis in America proved to be a lot harder than anyone would've imagined.

Just days after Tabatha's fourth birthday, Jennifer was arrested for soliciting, theft, and possession of narcotics. When she told the police that she had a young daughter sitting alone in her apartment in Culver City, social services were there in less than forty minutes, and what they found disgusted them – a neglected, bruised and crying Tabatha, who was immediately taken away and put into foster care.

In court, Jennifer pleaded guilty to all charges, including child neglect and cruelty, which, because she was a first-time offender, got her only four years inside – out in two, with good behavior.

But there was no good behavior.

In prison, Jennifer had to learn how to defend herself… how not to back down when being intimidated… and how to physically hurt others on purpose. And she learned quickly.

One night, after serving almost a full year of her initial sentence, three inmates tried to ambush Jennifer in her own cell over some silly argument that had happened in the courtyard a couple of days before. They bribed a guard to leave Jennifer's and their cells unlocked after ‘lights out', but Jennifer had gotten word of the ambush and she was ready. As the three inmates entered her cell and lashed out at a dummy made out of rags and pillows on Jennifer's bed, Jennifer came out of the shadows behind them, carrying a shiv made out of a toothbrush. The fight didn't last long. Jennifer stabbed one of her attackers in her knee and another in her left eye – not deep enough to penetrate past the ocular globe and hit the brain, but deep enough to permanently blind the inmate in that eye. The third attacker tried to run, but Jennifer tripped her up and drove the heel of her right foot into her face, fracturing her nose. The incident earned Jennifer the kind of respect that prevented similar attacks against her from ever happening again, but it also got her an extra twelve years without the possibility of parole.

Jennifer Mendoza served all sixteen years of her sentence without a break. She was released just over two years ago and since then she'd been nothing but a model citizen.

From prison, Jennifer wrote Tabatha a letter, sometimes two, every week, and she truly believed that her letters were being delivered and hopefully read. She knew that it would be years before Tabatha could read them by herself, so at first, she wrote several letters to Tabatha's foster parents – accepting her guilt for being such a terrible mother, thanking them for looking after her daughter and begging them to read her letters to Tabatha.

It never happened.

Not once.

Social services were delivering the letters as normal – at least most of them – and at first, Tabatha's foster parents were putting the letters aside for a later date, until Tabatha was old enough to understand what had happened… but that was before they got word of Jennifer's second conviction – for the ‘attack' and maiming of three inmates. With the new knowledge that Jennifer would spend at least the next fifteen years in prison, Tabatha's foster parents applied for ‘permanent care', and they were quickly approved.

Not surprisingly, during her sixteen-year incarceration period, Jennifer never received a single letter back from Tabatha, let alone a visit, but she never gave up hope.

The first thing Jennifer did once she stepped out of prison was to try to locate Tabatha, but she had been unlucky, yet again. Jennifer was released from prison two years after Tabatha had turned eighteen – adulthood – according to California state law. What that meant was that Jennifer had no say in her daughter's life anymore. She didn't even have the right to know Tabatha's address, or if she was still alive. Nothing at all about Tabatha's life… unless Tabatha wanted her to and, according to social services, she didn't, and there was a reason for that.

During her time in prison, Tabatha's foster parents hadn't been kind about Jennifer, spinning horrible stories about her to Tabatha and doing away with every letter Jennifer had ever sent her daughter, making her believe that her birthmother never truly cared for her.

For the past two years, Jennifer had done everything in her power to try and locate Tabatha, to no avail.

But tonight wasn't about Tabatha. For the first time since Jennifer had left prison, tonight was all about Jennifer.

She checked herself in the mirror one last time.

Jenny,the mirror said, knowing what Jennifer was just about to do. We're done here. You look great, girl. Go.

Jennifer hesitated.

GO, already!

‘OK… OK.' She turned off the bathroom lights, grabbed her handbag, and finally stepped out of her studio apartment in Van Nuys, San Fernando Valley.