Her mother stirred the sugar.
“No puedo evitarlo,” Lina added, then swallowed.
For a while, neither woman said anything. The spoon rang against the side of the mug.
“I know, mija,” she finally said, and her bony shoulders rose in a shrug. A tiny smile flickered across her lips, light and fleeting as a breeze in a lace curtain.
“Lo sé desde hace mucho tiempo.”
She lifted Lina’s chin. “If you are happy, I am happy.”
It was then that Lina’s tears finally came. Delayed as a fire truck. Gushing like an unscrewed fire hydrant.
She took a job at the Head Start program. Brought home the bacon. This was all her family had ever asked of her, after all: to be a little more normal. To not turn everything into “algo político.” She could still help the community, but in quieter, tamer ways. Change was slow. It was time she accepted this as truth, time to be grateful that she was alive, she had a salary, her family ate three meals a day. Not everyone was so fortunate.
At least that’s what she thought the world was trying to tell her. The women who smiled nervously at her, then lowered their eyes and hurried away. The young men who quickly shoved their hands in their pockets. She was so deep in her head those years, it took her a while to realize something else was going on in the community.
She was visiting Annie, her old friend and high school crush, when she figured it out. Annie was a sweet soul, a daydreamer. She still kept her hair straight and bobbed, with a little bow ribbon, and when that hound dog from Bed-Stuy got her pregnant, she’d been excited to be a mother. She’d miscarried, and ever since then, she’d been different—drinking, it was rumored. Still, Lina went to Brownsville Houses to wish Annie a happy fortieth birthday, and that’s when she first heard it, theitthat had invaded the neighborhood. It was crackling on the cooker.
“Lina, you ain’t yourself anymore. I ain’t either,” Annie said wistfully. “But what I got here is gonna make you feelgood, I promise you that.”
Lina caught a glimpse of the stove. She saw chunks of it, glowing white like hardened Domino Sugar.
“Girl, no way in hell.”
She refused to do it, refused to watch Annie do it, and left soon after, her only regret that she hadn’t knocked that pan right off the stove.
The unraveling began quietly. Smokers hiding in the staircases, ziplock bags traded in hallways, brown baggies dropped from windows, young women with blisters on their lips. The projects were rank with the smell of burning plastic. Most young users avoided her, afraid she’d give them a dressing-down, but one evening, Lina was walking on Mother Gaston—the sidewalk littered with vials—when she spotted Hank, that smart, quiet boy whom she’d taught at J.H.S. 271 fifteen years earlier. He was a grown man now, and as they neared each other, she could tell something was wrong: his clothes soiled, his chin sharp as a wedge, his eyes bulging.
“Give me what you got.”
He grabbed her shoulder, pressed her to the wall, put a gun to her temple.
“Hank! Don’t you know me?”
“Give me your money, lady, or I’ll shoot your brains out.”
She had four dollars and her mother’s prescription pills. He took these and left her there, with bruise marks on her neck. Once again, she felt herself to blame. If the Freedom School had lived, it would have saved him.
Had it lived, she thought, there would be a Freedom School on every block by now. Instead, every block had a crack house. One night, Hank attacked the addicts in the Blake Avenue crack house with a screwdriver, then started breaking into other peoples’ homes. The melee ended when a tenant across the street shot Hank in the face. Lina attended the family’s burial wearing sunglasses.
The next public victim was Denise Scott. Lina was the one who found her motionless and blue-faced on the sidewalk, her two-year-old boy Tyrell in tears, shaking her shoulders with his tiny hands.
Annie thought she could handle her new medicine, but within a year she had sold all her furniture, all her clothes. Her refrigerator was empty, and she slept on her apartment’s brown floor—all for that one ziplock bag. When Lina visited, she found Annie out of supply, curled in a corner by her living room window, a sliver of her former self. Lina kneeled beside her friend and held her bony hand.
“Annie,” Lina said, fighting the itch in her eyes. “You got to get help.”
“I got to stop,” Annie whispered. She lacked the energy to sit up. “But I can’t, girlie. I can’t go back there.”
“Back where?”
“To the world.”
She watched her people forget their faith, forget each other, forget themselves. On summer days when tempers boiled over, gunshots echoed through the courtyards. Addicts dropped their kids off at her Head Start program, and so did their dealers.
“It’s a job,” one of these young parents told her. “The Chinese wash underwear. The Italians work the docks. If I don’t sell, someone else will.”
As deeply as she disagreed, she felt helpless to persuade them otherwise. All she could do was bolt the door after each child’s arrival.
