He did not slam the door in her face like the lady had, and she found herself stumbling into the front room.
She had never done this before—physically trespassed inside a house. At least Tyrell had held the door open.
The fineness of his McMansion chilled her. High ceilings, lacquered wood floors, mahogany stairs, carved balusters, Persian rugs, and cold enough to warrant a sweater.
He marched into another room. The lady—his wife or mother, Sadie wasn’t sure—watched in horror from the stairs.
“If your grandfather was Ethan Griffiths,” Sadie called after him, “he might know about these two properties that my grandfather sold in Brownsville to an entity called 78 Livonia LLC. All I want to do is work with you to figure out what—”
He had come back with his jacket off, his small eyes boring into her, and a gun.
“What the fuck?”
He was pointing it at her from about ten feet away. “Get out of my house.”
“Oh my god,” she cried, scooting toward the door. She was staring at the gun in his hands, and then she was deep within her head, watching a film: of herself staring at the gun in his hands. “What the literal fuck!”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said coolly. “You’re trespassing, and under the Castle Law, it’s legal to protect my property.”
She stumbled down the stoop, grappled with the lock on the metal gate, and ran down the block. He had the semiautomatic pointed at her until she’d rounded the corner.
“What the literal, literal fuck!” she gasped once he was out of sight. She leaned her back against someone else’s wall and tried to take a deep breath. Tears came to her eyes. She slid down to the concrete.
“What the fuck! Oh my god!”
She was only twenty-four. She wanted to be home in the arms of her mother. Her mother who loved her, despite all her tempestuousness.
She struggled to her feet and tried to remember the way home.
“Fuck!” she cried to the sky, laughing, as she walked toward the nearest subway station. “Oh my god!”
All the way home, she relived the experience. She saw the moment Aaron Griffiths had pointed the gun. The amber glow of the wood floors. The woman on the staircase. Swirled in these thoughts, she almost missed her stop on the F.
And yet, after she’d spent the evening cuddling with her mother, after she’d eaten her father’s rice cakes and lap chiang, she saw her trip to South Brooklyn had been, from journalistic standards at least, a failure.
Sadie stayed up till four a.m. that night, writing down what she did know. She composed an article, though one poorly written and full of holes and question marks.
Then she thought about the draft email that had been sitting in her account for weeks, one she hadn’t had the bravery to finish. She added a few more lines to the email, attached the unfinished article, and, holding her breath, hit the send button.
LINA
The school’s auditorium was so stuffy it was like breathing through a sponge. They had gathered there on a sweltering Saturday in July to find out who had won the Request for Proposal for the development of the Livonia Avenue lot. In the front row sat the deputy mayor of housing and economic development with two of her commissioners. The community board members were assembled behind them, along with Jean Bernard and his associates. Lina sat in the back among about twenty Brownsville residents.
All the middle rows of the auditorium remained empty, and this, to Lina, signified that once again the mayor’s team had failed to conduct sufficient outreach. She’d seen her people on the walk over. Everyone was out on the basketball courts and in the playgrounds eating Klondike bars with no idea what was about to go down at Teachers Preparatory High.
An image appeared on the screen above the deputy mayor, but it was not from their community land trust’s RFP submission. With smiling brown people strolling on the sidewalk, it was a picturesque sketch of an off-white building bordered by birch trees. In the left-hand corner: the Bernard & Company logo.
“This will be upzoned to R7, allowing for fifty-three units of below-market housing—that’s one hundred percentaffordablehousing—along with much-needed community facility space on the ground floor,” explained the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
The Bernard & Company group applauded. Lina’s Wesley Price Community Land Trust activists cursed under their breaths and crossed their arms. Tyrell sighed, and Lina heard the creak of his wooden auditorium chair as he shifted restlessly.
But of course, the city would never hand them their land on a silver platter. The world had never worked that way.
“Now just to be clear, this project isn’t fully approved yet,” the commissioner said. “It will first have to go through theextensivedemocratic vetting process known as ULURP—the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.”
Someone shouted from the back row. “What the hell is that?”
“ULURP. ULURP will give your community board, the borough president, the City Planning Commission, and finally, the city council an opportunity to weigh in and vote on the project. But we are really confident about the proposal, given our city’s true need for affordable housing…”
