Chapter 16 Sadie
SADIE
When Sadie reached home, her parents were sitting in the living room, reading aloud articles from The New Yorker.
She avoided their eyes. “I just need to change,” she muttered.
The wind at Grand Army Plaza had sucked the last life out of her umbrella, and in her room, she peeled off her sweater, jeans, shirt, and bra.
It was like peeling off a layer of skin.
Buried in her comforter, eyes closed, she saw the moment when Ms. Lina had told her to leave.
She’d messed up.
No, she would not tell her parents what happened, not yet.
And she couldn’t talk to her friends from The New York Times internship—didn’t want to admit to them she’d gotten herself thrown out of an interview.
Her transplant friends from Yale would be the most sympathetic, but she didn’t want their kindness. They wouldn’t really get it.
Of course, she couldn’t speak to Wendy or another reporter at New Gotham because the truth was, she should never have been reporting on a story of personal significance in the first place.
Thinking about Wendy, Sadie realized she had an article due the following day, a piece about a healthy-eating initiative in Brownsville. She sat up immediately in bed and grabbed her laptop. No more dwelling on what had happened. There was no time.
She stayed up till one a.m. drafting an outline for the healthy food article, and the next morning, she tried to contact a few sources.
It was more difficult than usual. Ms. Charlene, one of Brownsville’s nutrition gurus, almost always picked up her phone, but that morning, she didn’t answer.
Sadie had arranged an interview with a local children’s advocate for ten a.m., but that source emailed her at the last minute.
Sorry, something came up. Sadie tried several other numbers, but people either failed to pick up or dismissed her curtly.
She wrote to Wendy for a twenty-four-hour extension.
At two p.m., Carl Baker, a parent on the PTA at P.S. 401, sent an email that confirmed her worst fears.
Please stop emails to me and any others in Brownsville who you may be in contact with. Peace be with you.
Once again awash in the anxiety that had choked her the prior night, Sadie stared at the email, now completely at a loss. She was almost afraid to bike to Brownsville and see what people on the streets would say to her.
The following day, she biked there anyway, and when she arrived, there were no activists waiting to throw her across Utica Avenue.
A Dominican man, smiling warmly, sold her a beef patty.
Like always, the children gaped at her press pass.
It was not until she found Ms. Davis, the director of a NYCHA senior center, that she was able to speak to someone in earnest.
“Miss Sadie, I’m going to be honest with you, I liked the article you wrote about the senior center last month,” Ms. Davis said as she opened boxes of applesauce in the center’s kitchen.
“I don’t know what you did to make other people mad, but you sure did make them mad.
A lot of people here don’t trust you anymore.
How come you’re reporting in Brownsville, anyway?
You report in other neighborhoods? Maybe you should try reporting in a different neighborhood. ”
Sadie blew her breath out and leaned her hands on the metal countertop. As she’d always been a good student, this would be the first missed deadline of her life.
When Sadie left the senior center, it was snowing, the first flurry of the year, the flakes light and wispy like puffs of laundry lint.
Ms. Lina and Tyrell’s building was a few blocks away.
Out of desperation, she reached for her phone, wiping it with her reddening hands each time a flake curtsied on the screen.
Hey Tyrell, I’m in the area. Can we talk?
Waiting for a reply, she walked up and down Rockaway Avenue, watched the snow kiss the car hoods. A NYCHA janitor spread salt on the sidewalk, the chunks as big as fish tank pebbles.
No response.
Sadie snuck into their building quietly. On the sixth floor, she hesitated, unsure which door was his and afraid Ms. Lina would discover her standing there. Sadie picked the door with a bumper sticker shaped like a skull and bones. CRACK IS WACK, it read.
She knocked.
Footsteps. An eye in the peephole, widening. An awkward pause.
“Tyrell, is that you?” she whispered. “Can I please talk to you?”
She heard him cursing beneath his breath.
The scraping of the chain lock. He opened the door just a few inches and glanced beyond into the hallway, looking for Ms. Lina.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he whispered.
“Can I come in?”
“No,” he snapped, and then he swallowed, his forehead creased.
“Please, I really need to talk to you. Just for a second.”
Warily, he unchained the door, let her through the entry, and closed it behind her.
“What did you want to say?”
“Could we… sit down for a second?”
He bit his lip, and without speaking, led them to two separate chairs by the TV. In one corner sat a white machine that looked like something you might find in a doctor’s office, and near it, a table stacked with Clorox wipes and blue pads.
All of the warmth of their earlier interactions was gone, and more than ever, she felt like an outsider.
“Look, I didn’t mean to hide something—I didn’t expect any of this would happen.”
She waited for a sign of understanding, but she could not read his expression.
“I didn’t know anything about the fire when I started this job. I knew my grandfather ran a restaurant. And I was shocked when I learned the connection.”
“How can we trust anything you say?”
He pinched his temples as if he had a headache.
“Tyrell, can you please convey my apology to her?”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and cracked his knuckles. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt her, but tell you the truth, I haven’t seen her like this before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know she’s been through a lot, like stuff she hasn’t even told me about.
And you know, she’s a strong lady. Always keeps looking forward.
But I feel like, talking about the fire, that landlord, your grandpa, it got to her.
She usually knocks on my door every day, and she hasn’t left her apartment since that night. ”
Sadie put her hands over her face.
“She’ll be all right. But I can’t help you.”
“I feel so guilty,” she exhaled.
“We don’t need your guilt, Sadie.”
She felt a lump in her throat, like she’d gulped a salt pebble.
“Go home,” Tyrell said calmly. “Ask yourself if you’re here for the right reasons.”
She looked at her lap. Put on her hat and walked to the door.
“I fucked up,” Sadie whispered. “I’m sorry.”
When she reached the stairs, Ms. Lina was still locked away in her apartment.
The following week, Sadie met with Wendy and Simon in New Gotham’s conference room and told them the full story. Beyond its glass walls, a half dozen reporters worked cheerily away at their assignments—reporters, she imagined, who would never have made a mistake as grave as hers.
“We’ve talked about it,” said Wendy, “and we think it’s a good idea to transfer you to Sunset Park.”
Sadie nodded. A part of her had hoped her bosses would assure her it was no big deal, but they hadn’t done so. At least they hadn’t fired her.
“We need a reporter on Sunset Park,” Wendy continued. “And we recently met an amNewYork reporter—Brian Parker. We’d like to offer him the position in Brownsville.”
“What about the story of the fire?”
Sadie didn’t mean to be so forward. She only wanted to know whether they were giving that to Brian too.
“There might be a story there,” Simon said, “and we can have Brian take a look at it, but you understand it really shouldn’t have been you pursuing this story by yourself, given the conflict of interest, and definitely not without informing us.”
For the rest of the day at the office, Sadie tried to keep it together. Stuffing her face with the coworking kitchen’s free almond croissants, she googled Brian at amNY and found that, as she had guessed, he was a Black man, and he had ten years working in the field.
Waiting at Broadway-Lafayette for the Brooklyn-bound F train, she thought to herself how much she’d wanted Brownsville to claim her as its own.
But Brownsville had never needed her help.
Maybe that had been some white savior shit.
And yes, you are also white, in case you forgot, she told herself.
And you’re not the first white person to try to fool themselves into a state of innocence.
The F train blew into the station. She grabbed a window seat and watched the tunnel lights loom and loom, disappearing right as they blinded her.
For a moment, a train sped parallel to hers, and she could see herself in the reflection of its windows.
It was a train kaleidoscope, blurry versions of herself rippling out like ghosts, and she wondered if you could talk to the dead this way, trapped in a transit layer cake.
At dinner, she told her parents everything: about the argument at Ms. Lina’s house, her struggles reaching her contacts, and that she’d been transferred to Sunset Park. She tried to eat enough of her dad’s chicken to make it look like she was okay.
“Honestly, they shouldn’t have hired me to begin with,” Sadie declared when she’d finished explaining.
“I don’t think that choice was yours to make, honey,” her mother said. “Your responsibility was to do the best job you could.”
“My best job wasn’t good enough.”
Sadie pronged the bok choy.
“Well, Sunset Park. That’s a lot closer,” her father said.
Of course, he would be happy that she was in Sunset Park: no more panicked calls from Ngen Ngen each time NY1 covered a shooting in East Brooklyn.
“Do you believe it now?” Sadie asked, looking quickly at her father and then back down at her plate.
“Believe…?”
“Believe Grandpa burned down those buildings.”