Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
The next day Iris walked up Ninth Avenue to meet Roman and help James’s sister move out of her damaged apartment at Hendricks Houses.
She had Hugo in tow, which she had resisted but Roman had insisted he’d be “like a therapy dog” for James’s niece and nephew while the adults packed up what was salvageable from the apartment.
It would be the kids’ first time back since the explosion.
Iris had offered to help because she knew something about what Veronica and her kids were going through, but now that the day was here, she found herself anxious.
She’d put on Rapacine’s perfume that morning for a boost.
Before the destroyed building was fully in sight, her nose caught the acrid, nauseating smell of smoke and charred building materials.
It had been nearly twenty-five years since she’d smelled it, but the odor piqued her memory like it was yesterday.
It got stronger and stronger as she approached, and by the time she and Hugo were standing before the Hendricks Houses explosion scene, every muscle in her body had tensed, because she remembered.
The visceral, emotional experience of returning to the most familiar of settings—your home—and finding a new, strange nightmare in its place.
The four walls that had once meant safety turned into a kill shed.
The internal parts of a building strewn across the ground like entrails, body horror of the home.
She might have been eleven years old again.
But Iris knew today wasn’t about her, and this wasn’t her heartbreak.
In the clarity of the present, the scene she took in was completely different from that of her childhood house fire.
For one thing, the scale was enormous. An apartment building five stories tall with a giant bite taken out of it at the bottom, a third of it collapsed into a pile of bricks.
Also, the level of police presence as well as FDNY personnel.
The entire area was crisscrossed with caution tape fluttering in the wind and officials tasked with keeping residents, neighbors, and looky-loos at a safe distance. She texted Roman that she was here.
Iris spoke briefly to an officer at the perimeter and he let her through.
A minute later, she felt Hugo tug at the leash, his tail wagging.
She looked ahead to see Roman waving at them from across one of the courtyards.
He was easy to spot, even though he was wearing an N95 mask, as he was a six-foot-three white guy with California surfer blond hair (never mind that he grew up in New Jersey).
He stuck out everywhere, especially here.
Roman pulled his mask down when he reached her. “Ah sorry, I was coming to let you in. Did the security give you a hard time? They’ve been dicks all day.”
“Not at all, the cop let me right in.”
“He did? Huh.” Roman frowned.
“Must’ve been Hugo. The cute dog card never declines.”
“Anyway, thank you for coming, you’re the best.” He gave her a hug and sighed into her hair. “Finally, someone that doesn’t smell char-grilled.” He drew back, still holding Iris by the shoulders. “Wait, you smell better than nontoxic. You smell amazing . What is that?”
“Oh, thanks, it’s this new perfume my neighbor gave me. She says it’s gonna change my life.” Iris smiled and rolled her eyes.
He made a stank face normally reserved for new Beyoncé. “It might change mine. I’m still gay, but barely. That’s why the cop let you in.”
“You think?”
Roman motioned her to follow him. “We’re around the other side. Although, I feel bad, I probably should’ve called you off today, there’s less work than expected.”
They rounded the corner of the block to the least impacted side of the building where security was directing parking for a temporary loading area and residents were lined up along the fence sorting through their boxes of belongings or pitching what they weren’t keeping into a big construction dumpster.
Many people wore masks and blue surgical gloves.
The staff that was escorting people in and out of the building were in full white paper hazmat suits and gas masks.
“Asbestos,” Roman explained. “They’re giving them out, we’ll get some for you if you want. But we already got in and out of the apartment.”
“You did? Am I late? I thought you said—”
“No, there’s just…not much left.”
They had arrived at where James and his family were stationed, and a round of introductions were made between Iris and his sister, Veronica, and her two kids, Kiara, a teenager, and Isaiah, who looked about eight, and Iris expressed her sympathy for all that had happened.
She could see the family resemblance immediately, something that always delighted Iris.
Veronica was rounder and fuller-figured than her younger brother James, but as James was a sinewy and lithe professional dancer, that didn’t take much.
They all had slender long legs without being tall, and their faces had apple cheekbones and wide-set, smiling eyes.
Isaiah looked like his uncle’s mini, sharing James’s camel-like eyelashes that seemed to curl up to his brows, and Kiara looked just like her mom, with matching dimples in their perfect heart-shaped faces, although neither was smiling much.
Hugo tugged toward Isaiah and the boy jumped back with a tiny yelp. Iris quickly reeled her dog in.
Veronica put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Sorry, he’s a little scared of dogs. He’s just not used to ’em.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry. I should’ve been holding him. But he’s very friendly.” Iris shot Roman a look of reproach. Therapy dog.
“I’m not afraid,” Kiara said, stepping forward. “What’s his name?”
Iris told her as Kiara scratched his ears, making Hugo’s back leg beat on the sidewalk in happiness. Not to be outdone by his sister, Isaiah tentatively approached.
“Put out your hand, baby, let him smell you first,” Veronica said.
Isaiah stuck out his stiff little palm, from about four feet away. Iris carefully let Hugo get closer, but still left enough space that Isaiah could be the one to close the gap.
But Hugo beat him to it, giving the boy’s outstretched hand a quick lick. Isaiah jumped back once again, but this time with a giggle. After that, both kids were Hugo’s new best friends.
“So how can I help?” Iris asked.
“Well, it’s mostly this.” Veronica gestured to a picnic blanket they’d laid out on the grass with their things on it.
Iris couldn’t believe how little they had left. Two trash bags full of clothes, three cardboard boxes of loose items, and a few piles of random things they were sorting through on the blanket. And more than half of it looked utterly soaked, wrinkled, or hopelessly soiled.
Veronica explained, “I was thinking fire. I didn’t think of the water damage from the sprinklers and hoses. The water really got everything. We just have to see what’s worth keeping.”
Isaiah had a little pile of toys that looked like they’d been through a war. Kiara was filling a trash bag and tried to take a truck whose dump attachment had snapped off, but Isaiah snatched it back like a much younger child. “Mine!”
“Excuse you?” his sister said.
He covered his pile with his body. “I’m keeping all my stuff.”
“Let him keep it. We’ll see what we can wash at Uncle Jimmy’s,” Veronica said.
Kiara shook her head. “You baby him.”
“I’d baby you, too, if you let me.” Veronica tried to touch her hair, but Kiara ducked away. She dropped the trash bag on the grass and said she was getting a water and walked away.
James smiled after his niece. “She’s just like you when we were kids.”
Veronica tsk ed. “I didn’t want that. I wanted my kids to grow up slow .”
With the kids out of earshot sorting through their own belongings, Veronica filled them in on the latest from the building management, which was holding firm to their decision to exclude them from emergency housing.
Iris was wrapping dishware in newspaper, outraged for them. “If they couldn’t legally kick you out before, they certainly shouldn’t have the right to do it now. Do you have a lawyer?”
Veronica scoffed, “If I had the money for a lawyer, I’d be renting somewhere else.”
Iris felt sheepish to have suggested it. But she made a mental note to ask Hannah’s husband, Mike, a real estate lawyer, about taking the case pro bono. She would shoot him a text about it on the way home.
—
While Iris was hauling some trash to the dumpster, she noticed a commotion on the other side of the police tape by the wreckage.
A crowd had formed, including a meager press spray of photographers and reporters; the focus of their attention seemed to be a political type taking questions.
Iris walked over just as all the cameras began to go off at once.
She weaved through the people to get a better view.
A robotic creature marched haltingly toward the destroyed building.
It was the size of a Great Dane, with four black metal legs curved and jointed like an animal’s and gripper prongs in lieu of paws, a wasplike tapered yellow body, and, disturbingly, no head.
As a police officer with a remote control walked slowly behind it, the mechanical creature moved with eerily precise strides, anatomically canine but lacking the natural fluidity of a real live dog.
“What is that?” Iris asked a man in glasses next to her.
“?‘Digi-dogs,’ search-and-rescue robots. The NYPD got two of them for seven hundred fifty thou. See the one over there painted like a Dalmatian? That’s the FDNY’s. Our tax dollars at work.”
“Jeez. A trained golden retriever would be so much cheaper, and cuter.”
The man chuckled and looked at her for an extra beat.
Iris noticed. He continued, “It’s news that they’re here.
Digi-dogs were banned in public housing under de Blasio, because the tenants’ organization thought the cops would only use them to spy on residents.
Or worse. But the current admin is more police-friendly. ”