A few months after Nellie took her life, Lina had questioned the value of her own existence. This was once the shock had begun to dissipate, and she’d found herself back in her body, in her mother’s bed, with two bowls of arroz con dulce growing cold on the bedside table.
But as always, there was no privacy in her mother’s house, and a lot of prayer. And knowing her well, her mother enlisted not only Sofia, Danny, and Cindy, but also Father Powis and Reverend Oliver and Nick Parson, and even the Sunday school teacher from San Juan whom her mother pitied because he’d been crushing on Lina for two decades—anyone who could give Lina a reason to heal,to live.
An idea suddenly came to the arthritic Lina in the chair. A crazy idea, crazy as some of young Lina’s crazy ideas. After the fire, she had promised herself to do all things by the book, to never get the courts involved or put anyone at risk again. But here she was, seventy-one years old, neck stiff and shoulders aching, and hatching a plan that could get her put away.
At six a.m., she shook off the crazy idea, rose and ate her oatmeal, emptied the leak bucket under the sink, and sat down at the Dell monitor as usual.
But she couldn’t take it any longer.
“None of this shit!” she shouted at the screen. She couldn’t just sit there, waiting around for this email or that email, feeling like she was already dead herself.
She would have to be crazy.
She put on gardening gloves, a raincoat, and rain boots to protect herself. Then she went down to the yard keeper’s supply closetto borrow the handheld electric grass trimmer, a pair of large wire clippers, and several heavy-duty garbage bags. The grass of Brownsville Houses could go one day without a trimming, and NYCHA had plenty of garbage bags to spare.
Appropriating the grass trimmer as a cane, Lina marched the half mile down Livonia to the lot. Once she’d arrived, she trimmed around the sidewalk—there were ferns growing in the cement cracks—and then used the wire clippers to cut a hole in the fence large enough to climb through.
Real old school, she thought. They could definitely throw her in a cell at the Seventy-Third.
Half an hour later, however, Lina had trimmed a patch of the lot, and no one had come to bother her but the block cat. When a deli down the street opened, she left the lot and bought the cat a pack of turkey cold cuts, then sat down on a stoop across the street.
“Hermanita,” she whispered as the cat nibbled on the turkey. “Are you Miss Freedom? Or are you Miss Freedom’s grandbaby?”
She thought about what was next. After trimming, she’d need to bag all the trash—old beer cans, chunks of Styrofoam packaging, pizza plates. There were so many hypodermic needles, you’d think they grew on the trees. Yet she was already fatigued. The work was difficult for her legs, and being in that space jerked her back to those times. When the train passed by, she thought about those nights when she’d fallen asleep to its midnight rumble. The smell of soy sauce in the walls. And of course, Grandma, in the building next door, sitting all day at her window. After her brother died in the fire, she’d lived only a few more months.
In the nineties, Lina had tried a couple of healing regimens to help with the nightmares. She’d seen an acupuncturist, but without much result. She’d visited a psychologist who specialized in trauma and accepted patients on a sliding scale—a white man. He had told her it was “time to move on from your past,” and she didn’t appreciate hearing those words out of his mouth.
It always seemed to Lina that there were two types of people inAmerica: the people who forgot and the people who remembered. The forgetting ones didn’t dare recall the things they’d done to others’ bodies. They amputated the memory, and their bodies appeared healthy and fit, at least to others. They couldn’t tell their children, so their children, too, inherited the amnesia. These children were the ones who faced forward, who climbed the fastest, who thought they could escape history. Born from denial, they graduated into the heights of power.
The children of the remembering remained weighted. They bore the memory of centuries.
So no, she hadn’t healed. Her body refused. And it seemed to her that if she let herself heal, the truth would cease to exist. After all, why had Sadie Chin come after her? Because the story of the fire lived only in the mouths of its victims.
Lina stood up again and resumed trimming the yard. Her knees begged her to give up the enterprise altogether, to go home and never get up from her chair—but to hell with her knees, because she had work to do. This was just the start, and the following week, she’d find a mower. She’d get rid of that mini fridge and the two car tires in the back right corner. After that, she’d buy planters for vegetables. And how about some solar panels! Why not bring Brownsville into the future, make it the greenest neighborhood in all of New York City?
Even as she was getting excited, she reminded herself that she was crazy, and that she had to do this alone. That way, she alone would suffer any negative consequences. This would be her one-woman show, her resistance art, and even if they locked her up and bulldozed the garden for the Bernard & Company development, at least they would have to crush what she’d made with her own hands.
“Lock up who?”
At the sound of the voice, Lina nearly had a heart attack. She turned around and found Tyrell standing outside the metal fence.
“Ty!” she yelped, gripping her chest. “How you knew I was here?”
“Well.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a long story. When I got up this morning, I decided to check on you. And you didn’t answer yourdoor. So I thought about what you’d want me to do, and I thought you’d want me to eat breakfast. So I went out and got a bacon, egg, and cheese. But that bacon, egg, and cheese didn’t come with enough ketchup, and like usual, Tima finished the ketchup last week and didn’t bother to tell no one. So I went to the deli, and on my way home, I ran into Floyd. And Floyd told me he saw you this morning. He said you stole the grass clipper and went down Livonia.”
“The man is a snitch,” Lina replied, but she was chuckling as she shook her head. She sat on the mini fridge, depleted by the worsening heat.
“So who’s getting locked up?” He raised his eyebrow, gripping the hexagons of the wire fence.
“Me! Was I talking to myself? I guess I’m losing my marbles.”
“Whatcha doing here at eight o’clock in the morning?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
Tyrell shook his head in disbelief, but instead of abandoning her to her obsession, the skinny kid ducked through the hole she’d cut in the fence.
“Don’t come in here!”
