![]() Inside their room, Vanessa placed her insulin in the minifridge as her children chose beds, where they would sleep two to a mattress. The last time the family checked in, the kids carried their homework up to the room as Vanessa followed with small grocery bags from the food pantry, passing two men sipping Modelos and apologizing for their loud music. It looked like a highway motel: two stories with doors that opened to the outside. She liked the Red Roof Inn, which she saw as “more civilized” than many of the other motels she had stayed in. If Vanessa had the money, or if a local nonprofit did, she would book a motel room. When things got too loud or one of her grandchildren gave her lip, she would ask Vanessa to take her children somewhere else. Her health failing, Zaida could take only so much of Vanessa’s children, Taliya, 17, Shamal, 14, and Tatiyana, 12. Her husband’s death left her with little income, and Vanessa was often broke herself. ![]() Vanessa’s mother, Zaida, is 62 and from Puerto Rico, as was her husband. The family erected a shrine to him in the living room, a faded, large photo of a younger man surrounded by silk flowers and slowly sinking balloons. Vanessa’s father died a year after Vanessa moved in. “My dad was a junkie, but he never left us.” Vanessa, 33, has black hair that is usually pulled into a bun and wire-framed glasses that slide down her nose a shy smile peeks out when she feels proud of herself. “It was something you got used to seeing,” Vanessa said about her father’s drug habit. He had been a functional crack addict for most of her life, working as a landscaper in the warmer months and collecting unemployment when business slowed down. Vanessa took only what she could cram into her station wagon, a 2004 Chrysler Pacifica, letting the bed bugs have the rest.Īt her childhood home, Vanessa began caring for her ailing father. It wasn’t a safer neighborhood, but it was a known one. ![]() They found a floor to sleep on in Vanessa’s parents’ home on North Clinton Avenue in East Trenton. Vanessa Solivan and her three children fled their last place in June 2015, after a young man was shot and killed around the corner. ![]()
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