Specter of 3 Orphans Drives AIDS-Infected Mother on Mission : Family: Life with HIV is uncertain, but so much better now. Maria is drug-free and seeing to her children’s future.

For 17 years, Satan pulled the strings and Maria Ferrer danced a junkie’s waltz.

She lived for heroin, then cocaine and, finally, for crack. She traded food and furniture for a fix. She bought crack from her teen-age son, she dragged her crying daughters out of bed in the middle of the night to beg for money in the streets of the South Bronx.

In 1988, 33-year-old Maria lay, stick-thin and fever-racked, in a hospital bed. She was sure she would die soon and leave her children with the memory of a mother who loved drugs more than she loved them.

“My God, what have I done?” she asked herself as she drifted in and out of consciousness, too weak to move. “Look at the time that I’ve wasted, so vainly! I never did anything for my daughters. I’m going to die and I never had a chance to show them real love.”

Like a slap in the face, fear brought her to life. When Satan tugged at her now, Maria pulled back with new strength.

The hour was so late, and the devil already had his due.

Maria Ferrer was infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and so was her husband. Now she worried not for herself but for her three girls. Who would keep them together and care for them after she and her husband were dead? Who would raise them with the kind of spiritual values she only recently had rediscovered? Who would help them grieve and go on?

Maria couldn’t think of a soul.

When Maria was a child, she knew a kind West Indian lady in the neighborhood, a lady who loved her. “Why don’t you give me that little girl?” the lady used to ask Maria’s mother. Years later, Maria sometimes wondered what life with her might have been like, and whether that sweet lady could have beaten the devil away from her door.

Life became chaotic after Maria’s parents divorced. Her mother shuttled her and her two younger sisters between New York and Puerto Rico. The girls frequently clashed with their stepfather, who resolved every conflict by throwing them out of the house. Maria never forgot that or forgave it--how her mother stood by while he pushed the three of them out of the door.

By the time she was 15, Maria had quit school, married and had a son. Her husband was just a year older. They fought often, and he hit her. She left the baby with her mother and lived on the streets. By the time Maria was 19, she was hooked on heroin.

She met her second husband in 1973, when they showed up at the same place looking for a fix. The attraction was intense and immediate: He was drawn to her dark beauty, her high cheekbones and expressive eyes. She was intrigued by his quiet intelligence. They stayed together from then on.

Drugs drove their lives and they careened out of control, end over end, over the edge. Her husband went to prison for five years for burglary and armed robbery, and Maria became a prostitute to support her habit. She was raped twice and beaten often. She thought she would be dead soon. It seemed to her that dead women littered Puerto Rico’s beaches like crumpled paper cups.

She entered a drug program and kicked the habit for four years. Her husband was clean in prison. By 1980, they were back in New York and addicted again.

Daughters were born, one in 1981, another in 1982, the last in 1984. Maria was on methadone during the first pregnancy, and mainlined cocaine every day of the second. She was drug-free for the third, and she struggled to stay that way, wrestling with her demons every day. She drank beer, lots of it, to dull her craving for heroin.

When Maria learned she had HIV, she gave up again. She went out in search of money for drugs, or drugs to buy, or a place to shoot up, and left her children to fend for themselves. Her oldest girl was about 6 then.

Once, Maria and her husband had an argument. She wanted to leave, and he didn’t want to stay with the children. So she set the bedroom on fire and ran out, her daughters’ screams in her ears.

Later, when Maria was straight again, she wondered what possessed her. Drugs were scrambling her brain. People treated her like garbage; she felt like dirt, like nothing. She didn’t know how to be anything else.

“I was born to be a drug addict, I’m going to die a drug addict,” she thought. “This is destiny, this is destiny. This is what I was born to be.”

It would be impossible to say when Maria became infected. She and her husband shared needles with friends and strangers and drifted in and out of shooting galleries where hundreds of junkies used the same syringes over and over.

Pay a dollar, shoot up, rinse it off. Nobody talked about AIDS.

When the AIDS epidemic was five years old, Maria’s younger sister fell deathly ill in Puerto Rico. She had pneumonia, the doctors said, and no one would go into her hospital room. In late 1986, she came to New York to stay with Maria, who was then dancing around the needle, trying to keep it at arm’s length.

Maria bought a bag of dope for the two of them and asked her sister to leave her half of it for sniffing. Her sister cooked the whole batch.

“If you don’t want to shoot up, you can skin-pop,” she said. That’s what Maria did, slipping the needle just under the skin.

They shared needles and they shared the AIDS virus. Maria’s sister found out she was infected when she became pregnant.

“How dare you! You knew all the time in Puerto Rico!” Maria yelled, furious. She wanted to hit her sister, to hurt her the way she was hurting now. And her sister cried, saying, “I never knew, I never knew! They didn’t tell me! They didn’t tell me!” over and over.

Years before, her sister, the baby of the family, would watch Maria shoot up and plead with her, “Let me try that.” And Maria would say, “I don’t want you to get hooked on this.” But her sister did anyway. She was 18 then.

Ten years later, she was telling Maria about the damage done.

“I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” she kept saying, over and over.

After that, Maria stopped fighting her demons. She stayed in a methadone program because she was afraid child welfare would take her kids, but she still shot up cocaine and smoked crack.

“Drugs are like a bondage, you feel there’s no escape, no escape,” she said. “You make your children go through so many things, and they grow up in this way of living, and it’s terrible. I didn’t want to be like that, but I didn’t know how to get out of it.”

She scraped bottom just about the time she met social worker Eula Johnson. Johnson, the one-woman staff of Project HEAL (Help, Education, Alleviation, Life), works to reinforce lives weakened by the AIDS virus. In Maria’s case, the seams disintegrated in her hands.

The day came when Johnson walked in and found the house a shambles, the refrigerator empty, the electricity turned off and one of Maria’s daughters sick. Later, Johnson learned that Maria regularly stocked the house with food pantry donations the day before her visits, then sold it all for drug money the moment she was gone. Johnson struggled with the decision to report Maria. “Who are you here for?” she finally asked herself. “Making the mother feel better, or doing what’s right for those kids?”

Child welfare agents took Maria’s children away and gave them to her mother. They told Maria: “If you want to keep on using drugs, go right ahead. If that’s the life you want to live, live it, but don’t let your children suffer.”

A few weeks later, Maria checked into the hospital with an uncontrollable fever. She refused treatment and almost died, and when she came out, she decided to enter “detox.” She wanted to be drug-free. She wanted her kids back.

She begged the pastor of her church to help her, and he sent her to a Christian drug program in Philadelphia. She studied the Bible and realized that she had been fighting a spiritual battle and needed God on her side.

She stayed for two months, and when she came out, she felt her demons were gone for good. She thanked God she had become sick, because it had opened her eyes.

“Whatever time I have left,” she said to herself, “I got to give some kind of happiness to my kids, I got to show them there’s a different kind of life.

“I got to give them what I didn’t give them all these years. I’ve got to give it to them.”

Maria wishes she could move her girls to a better school, she wishes she could move them to a green place where no one drinks on the streets at night. She knows she will never get there, so she does the best she can in the Bronx.

She carefully budgets her disability check and food stamps and sifts through church donation boxes for dresses. She bought a $400 car, a big American model, and she can fill the gas tank for a week for the cost of one subway trip with her kids.

She is at peace with herself and the world, and she shares her happiness with her children.

“Isn’t it different now?” she asks her girls. “It’s beautiful!”

“Yes, Mom,” they say.

The girls are so close, yet so different. There is an edge to the oldest, now 10, a result of early suffering, her mother believes. She is serious and thoughtful, a gifted math student who loves computers. The youngest vibrates with energy: She’s the most like her mother in looks and temperament, a talker and a charmer. The middle child, mildly learning-disabled from prenatal cocaine exposure or newborn meningitis, holds more inside, Maria says. She is the most sensitive.

Once, when Maria was driving with her daughters, a sharp pain shot through her chest and she had to pull over. The oldest and youngest sat in the back seat, silent and anxious. The terrified 8-year-old began to cry.

“Mommy, I don’t want you to die, I don’t want you to die!” she said, and Maria hugged her and said: “It’s OK for you to be scared.”

The girls, who are not infected with the AIDS virus, have yet to be told that their parents are. Still, they worry about death. Maria tries to calm their fears, just as she has calmed her own.

“Yes, I’m going to die someday, and so are you. And you and you,” she tells them.

“If you ever die, who’s going to take care of us?” the youngest asks. “Don’t worry,” Maria says. “There’s going to be a lot of people that’s going to love you. There’s going to be someone to watch over you.”

She wants a family that can take all three girls. She doesn’t care about race or income, just values, spiritual and moral. And when she finds that family, she’ll tell her girls, “These people are here to start taking care of you if anything ever happens to me. They’re going to love you and care for you like I do.”

There is a picture on Maria’s wall of a little girl in pigtails, a child not unlike one of her own, with tears on her chubby cheeks. Written underneath, in Spanish, are the words “Only the warmth of the unity of a family could make possible a real life.”

This is what Maria believes.

There is a sense of finality about Maria’s meeting with the Legal Aid attorney, even though it’s only the beginning of child-care arrangements that might take the rest of her life.

There is a sense of urgency about it, too, even though Maria and her husband appear well. The AIDS virus might lie dormant for months or years, then disable and kill within weeks or days. There is no way to know, so they act while they can.

Maria will never agree to separate her daughters. She will never agree to leave them with her own mother, even though it would keep them together. “She raised me in such a screwed-up way,” Maria says.

Her husband wants to look within his own family, and Maria agrees to that.

“Then, if there’s nobody, we would like to meet the people,” Maria tells the attorneys. “We would want to know who would stay with our children, we want to be able to let the children to stay with the person on the weekends. We want the children to start knowing that person.

“I don’t want to just die and not know who’s going to take my kids.”

It’s easier to find relatives than strangers, the attorneys tell her.

“His mother always used to say, ‘If something happens to you, I’ll give (the oldest) to this one, (the youngest) to this one.’ And I got to sit down and talk to her. It’s not going to be that way.”

There have been cases, the attorneys say, where nothing was written down. And while the families fought it out, the children suffered.

“That’s my main concern, my children,” Maria says. She will go to court, she will give up her parental rights if necessary.

She wants her children to have a family always, and she prays for that. “God, I know I’m going to die one day. Well, whenever you want me, I’ll go. I just ask you to help me get somebody to take care of my kids.

“Once that’s settled, I don’t mind dying at all.”

Someone pushes past Maria as she goes into her apartment building, a woman with a flushed face and reddened eyes that are swollen and sullen. “I used to look like that,” Maria whispers.

It is the first day of summer, the third summer of Maria’s new life, and the South Bronx heat bakes and blisters. Maria tries to clean up. She mops the hallway and the kids are everywhere, still in their pajamas. “Put some clothes on!” she tells them, and, finally, they do.

Then she brushes their hair, and it falls like silk through her fingers.