Chapter 20 Lina
LINA
Lina woke up on her mother’s couch.
She was thirty-four years old, her dreams destroyed, and—she suddenly remembered—a murderer.
Nellie had found her. Had taken her to her mother’s place at five a.m. Mami had pressed a cold towel soaked in alcoholado to Lina’s head, smeared the burns with Vicks VapoRub, and tried to make her talk, but Lina only turned away into the cushion.
She had always been the strong one, but the night of the fire, Lina had fallen to her knees on the hot sidewalk and wept.
That was when the trucks arrived, and the roof collapsed and the EMTs loaded three bodies into an ambulance.
All around, the neighbors moaned and wheezed, and the old woman who’d lost her brother screamed into the smoke-filled sky, asking for the Lord to take her too.
Lina was still on the sidewalk, forehead to the cement, when she felt Nellie’s arms around her.
“I’m a murderer,” she cried.
“No, baby.”
“It’s my fault.”
In the morning, then, Lina lay on her mother’s couch and yet was not really present—she was stuck in the black hole behind her eyes. There, a little girl with burned legs howled in pain, and an old man danced, and Annetta in her bonnet wailed, You done pushed that Mr. Wong!
Lina sat up on the couch, wincing when fabric brushed the burns on her elbows and legs, and she peeked out the window blinds. She was back at her mother’s place in Van Dyke, on the twelfth floor. Danny, Cindy, and Sofia and her kids had moved out.
Lina thought to herself that maybe she wasn’t a revolutionary. She was just delusional, and the neighborhood would have been better off without her. She knew what it was like to lose a brother. That someone else had lost a brother on her account, she felt, was beyond forgiveness.
Weeks passed like this. Lina adjusted to living with her mother again.
Morning cheek kisses and prayers to the Virgin.
Plastic-covered furniture, vases of fake roses.
No elbows on the table, no locked bedroom doors, no privacy.
As winter came around, the hum of muddy aguinaldos on the record player. Irresistible bowls of arroz con dulce.
Van Dyke Houses was different. No longer was the lawn perfect as the crinkle cuts in an Easter basket. Now, she noticed holes in the hallway windows and trash scattered across the courtyard. The shopkeepers had installed gates over the stores, and at night the kids tagged them with gang signs.
In her bedroom, Nellie would braid Lina’s hair.
She’d talk about Wesley, who wanted to be an artist—“and we know where he got that from,” she’d say, bending over to kiss Lina when Mami Isabella was not in earshot.
Lina would pretend to listen, but her mind kept returning behind her eyes.
It was like living inside a snow globe, except instead of snow, she was aswirl in ash.
Nellie thought they needed to get out of Brownsville. “Oh!” Nellie exclaimed one evening. “Let’s go to Coney Island!”
“Why?”
“I’ve still never been.”
Before Lina could object, she was dragged to the car and driven down the Belt Parkway, down to Astroland. They rode the Ferris wheel, and at the pinnacle, Nellie kissed her. The next week, Nellie drove them to a park in the Bronx and goaded Lina to throw bread to the ducks.
For many months, it was Nellie’s love alone that kept Lina alive—a love stolen in shadowy spaces, muted so as not to draw the attention of relatives: her head, resting on Nellie’s lap in Lincoln Terrace Park on a fall afternoon, the air full of sweetness and decay; the mornings, waking up together in the back seat of the car, cold coffee in the cup holder.
It was all she lived for, and that something so precious could require such furtiveness didn’t seem right. Lina had not much left to lose, and she was willing to risk everything for what held her to life.
So, Lina sat with her mother at the kitchen table, two hands in two hands.
She looked into the eyes of beautiful, withering Isabella with her silver Indian braids, her rosary beads, who every day patted her stomach and wondered aloud, “?Estoy demasiado gorda, nina? ?O es esto lo que le pasa a la cintura cuando tienes cinco bebés?”
Lina squeezed those hands. Hands that, each day at church, joined in a prayer for Lina’s recovery. She didn’t believe her mother would throw her out—Mami was too soft for that—but she was afraid of breaking her mother’s heart.
“Mami. ?Te gusta Nellie?”
“Sí.”
Her mother slipped away from Lina’s hands, poured them each a cup of café.
Lina exhaled. “La amo.”
“Sí,” her mother nodded, breathing in the steam of the café. She still did not understand, Lina thought, and to make her understand would be a kind of violence. A shattering.
“La amo,” Lina repeated, her voice shaking. And then: “La amo como un hombre ama a su esposa.”
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, the it that 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 feel good, 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.”