There were no fire trucks in earshot. Lina’s intestines knotted as she thought about what Annetta had said. Thought about Nellie. Had Nellie been there, she’d have wrapped Lina in her arms—held her captive. But Nellie was home, asleep.
Lina didn’t have a choice. She would not be able to live with herself any other way.
Pulling her shirt collar over her mouth and nose, Lina sucked in her breath and ran into 80 Livonia.
Ducking as disintegrating tiles rained on her head, she raced up a staircase she could see only two steps at a time. One landing, then the next, hacking, eyes burning, pulled forward by that terrible pitch, she pushed through the smoke. A face charged at her—she shrieked, but it was a wall mirror and the face her own: thick eyebrows arched, Afro misshapen. She reached a room that radiated the neon red of an exit sign and crawled through it, her stomach brushing the floor, all the way to the whimpering body buried in a corner beneath a table.
“Grandma, can you hear me? Grandma, hold on to me. We got to get out of here!”
At that moment, the two boys reached Tilden Houses.Sneaker Houses, the older one had nicknamed it. Each of the eight brick monoliths in the complex had a yellow stripe painted up its length, the yellow interrupted by patches of brown brick, like a shoelace stitched in and out of the holes on a sneaker. That, and the buildings’ whopping sixteen stories, distinguished Tilden from the other NYCHA projects directly to its north and east. On their way home through the neighborhood’s west side, they’d passed heroin-starved bodies quaking into death and so many burned-down houses that their work seemed in keeping with the way of the world. The man had said: no one lived there—or, at least, no one was supposed to live there. Yet the older one was still worrying as they ran into Tilden, thinking about the little shoes he’d seen in the hallway of those Livonia buildings, the orange banner draped from a third-floor window.
“My brother! My brother!” the old woman cried between her coughs, her fingers pinched around Lina’s wrist, and she pointed to the next room. Lina squinted through the smoke and the flames but could see nothing. Grandma had a brother?
“My brother! My brother!” the woman howled. Lina crawled three feet into the adjacent room, and at once, his screams pierced her. She smelled a putrid sweetness. Beside a bed, he was dancing, the wailing flesh ablaze. And that was when the ceiling collapsed.
“Grandma!” Lina cried, shielding her face from a waterfall of plaster. She backed out of the room, hurled herself toward the old woman, and lifted her by the armpits. “We got to go!”
“My brother! My brother!”
Two brothers slipped quietly into bed, side by side with their two little sisters, feigning sleep for their mother, feigning courage to each other, so agitated they would not sleep until dawn. The windows were open to the chatter on the road, the crunch of broken glass. But why be scared? They’d only obeyed orders. Only followed the steps, like a Duncan Hines recipe.
Lina tripped down three flights of stairs with the old woman in her arms, thinking she might collapse under the weight of Grandma’s bones, that they might both, like the old man, be too late. She closed her eyes, swallowing her thirty-four years, and in her desperate fingers, the woman’s hair became Nellie’s hair. The woman’s cries became her mother’s keening.
Lina’s feet moved before her, moved her down toward the door.
The older boy lay in bed thinking, at least it’s over, at least the younger one is safe and out of trouble. The younger brother thinking, at last he’s proven himself, at last he’s shown the older he can be counted on. Each taking comfort in the thought of a hundred dollars.
The stairs dissolving under her…
A hundred dollars could buy a skateboard orThe Incredible Hulk225!
The crowd on the street, shrieking…
A hundred dollars could pay the next month’s rent.
A beam of light, a spray of water. Tripping toward the light, toward the water…
A whole family trip to the RKO Albee Theatre!
The frame of the door, the fresh air, the crowd that took them in, gasping…
A bicycle! A ride at Coney Island! An escape!
Sirens, blocks away, too late…
A life far, far away from Brownsville.
They were Sharon’s kids, as Lina had guessed: Billy and Francis. Lina would find that out later. She would hear it on the street and then she would see their picture in theDaily News—not their faces but their bare black backs, poking shoulder blades, and buzzed heads, hands against the wall. Spindly boys like feathers, and now to be blown far away.
The city would never find out who paid the boys, but Lina had known from the minute she’d first reached the sidewalk. She told all her neighbors, and she told the precinct captain, and then for almost forty years, no one asked her about it again.
SADIE
When NewGotham.com expanded its list of covered neighborhoods to include Brownsville, Brooklyn, the editors knew they ought to hire a Black reporter. Yet, as they sifted through the fifty applications they received after emailing their university contacts, they discovered not many Black people had applied. Of these, the editors selected only two for an interview, and by the last round, they had five prospects: four white people, and Sadie Chin.
It was a relief to theNew Gothameditors to find her. Twenty-three-year-old Sadie had graduated in 2013 from Yale University. She didn’t have a journalism master’s, but she’d participated in the Yale Journalism Initiative and interned atThe New York Times. She’d also performed well on the copyediting test, and her references sang high praise. But the thing that made the editors choose her—even over some of the candidates with the j-school degree—was that Sadie was from Brooklyn; said her family used to live in Brownsville, and even though her surname suggested an East Asian heritage, she looked kind of Latina.
That was how Sadie Chin landed her first salaried job in the summer of 2014, reporting in a neighborhood to which she’d never been. She’d only sat in the back seat of a cab driving through Brownsville on the way to JFK Airport, always with the windows rolled up becauseher father feared the squeegee men on Eastern Parkway. Jason Chin had spent his early years in Brownsville; his family had run a Chinese restaurant there. The Chins had been among but a handful of Chinese in a mostly Jewish, then mostly Black neighborhood. But that had been a long time ago, and Sadie had grown up miles away, in Park Slope.
