“When you told me who you were, in Mr. Henry’s store, I was angry.” He looked directly at her. “But then with you searching for me, I knew you needed the truth.”
LINA
Lina woke up on her mother’s couch.
She was thirty-four years old, her dreams destroyed, and—she suddenly remembered—a murderer.
Nellie had found her. Had taken her to her mother’s place at five a.m. Mami had pressed a cold towel soaked in alcoholado to Lina’s head, smeared the burns with Vicks VapoRub, and tried to make her talk, but Lina only turned away into the cushion.
She had always been the strong one, but the night of the fire, Lina had fallen to her knees on the hot sidewalk and wept. That was when the trucks arrived, and the roof collapsed and the EMTs loaded three bodies into an ambulance. All around, the neighbors moaned and wheezed, and the old woman who’d lost her brother screamed into the smoke-filled sky, asking for the Lord to take her too.
Lina was still on the sidewalk, forehead to the cement, when she felt Nellie’s arms around her.
“I’m a murderer,” she cried.
“No, baby.”
“It’s my fault.”
In the morning, then, Lina lay on her mother’s couch and yet was not really present—she was stuck in the black hole behind hereyes. There, a little girl with burned legs howled in pain, and an old man danced, and Annetta in her bonnet wailed,You done pushed that Mr. Wong!
Lina sat up on the couch, wincing when fabric brushed the burns on her elbows and legs, and she peeked out the window blinds. She was back at her mother’s place in Van Dyke, on the twelfth floor. Danny, Cindy, and Sofia and her kids had moved out.
Lina thought to herself that maybe she wasn’t a revolutionary. She was just delusional, and the neighborhood would have been better off without her. She knew what it was like to lose a brother. That someone else had lost a brother on her account, she felt, was beyond forgiveness.
Weeks passed like this. Lina adjusted to living with her mother again. Morning cheek kisses and prayers to the Virgin. Plastic-covered furniture, vases of fake roses. No elbows on the table, no locked bedroom doors, no privacy. As winter came around, the hum of muddy aguinaldos on the record player. Irresistible bowls of arroz con dulce.
Van Dyke Houses was different. No longer was the lawn perfect as the crinkle cuts in an Easter basket. Now, she noticed holes in the hallway windows and trash scattered across the courtyard. The shopkeepers had installed gates over the stores, and at night the kids tagged them with gang signs.
In her bedroom, Nellie would braid Lina’s hair. She’d talk about Wesley, who wanted to be an artist—“and we know where he got that from,” she’d say, bending over to kiss Lina when Mami Isabella was not in earshot. Lina would pretend to listen, but her mind kept returning behind her eyes. It was like living inside a snow globe, except instead of snow, she was aswirl in ash.
Nellie thought they needed to get out of Brownsville. “Oh!” Nellie exclaimed one evening. “Let’s go to Coney Island!”
“Why?”
“I’ve still never been.”
Before Lina could object, she was dragged to the car and drivendown the Belt Parkway, down to Astroland. They rode the Ferris wheel, and at the pinnacle, Nellie kissed her. The next week, Nellie drove them to a park in the Bronx and goaded Lina to throw bread to the ducks.
For many months, it was Nellie’s love alone that kept Lina alive—a love stolen in shadowy spaces, muted so as not to draw the attention of relatives: her head, resting on Nellie’s lap in Lincoln Terrace Park on a fall afternoon, the air full of sweetness and decay; the mornings, waking up together in the back seat of the car, cold coffee in the cup holder.
It was all she lived for, and that something so precious could require such furtiveness didn’t seem right. Lina had not much left to lose, and she was willing to risk everything for what held her to life.
So, Lina sat with her mother at the kitchen table, two hands in two hands. She looked into the eyes of beautiful, withering Isabella with her silver Indian braids, her rosary beads, who every day patted her stomach and wondered aloud, “¿Estoy demasiado gorda, niña? ¿O es esto lo que le pasa a la cintura cuando tienes cinco bebés?”
Lina squeezed those hands. Hands that, each day at church, joined in a prayer for Lina’s recovery. She didn’t believe her mother would throw her out—Mami was too soft for that—but she was afraid of breaking her mother’s heart.
“Mami. ¿Te gusta Nellie?”
“Sí.”
Her mother slipped away from Lina’s hands, poured them each a cup of café.
Lina exhaled. “La amo.”
“Sí,” her mother nodded, breathing in the steam of the café. She still did not understand, Lina thought, and to make her understand would be a kind of violence. A shattering.
“La amo,” Lina repeated, her voice shaking. And then: “La amo como un hombre ama a su esposa.”
