The Dempsy County jail stood half demolished, and the only surviving section of exterior wall, the southwest corner, was a grotesquely defiant crumble of plaster and brick, a raised fist thrust into the flawless blue of a hot summer morning. The prison bars, running the entire length of the building but hidden from view for ninety years by a sooty gray facade, had now, in these final days, revealed the building for what it truly had been: a seven-story cage. Those bars were naked to the sun, intersecting in a grid pattern, with seven layers of sheared prison cells hanging open and raw. A century’s worth of graffiti, startlingly legible to anyone walking by, marked the plaster back walls, a titanic bulletin board shot up from hell.
When Lorenzo pulled up to the main jailhouse steps, which now led to nothing but their own height, he saw Army Howard out front sitting on the open tailgate of an old pickup truck, still wearing his Perry Ellis America warm-up suit from the night before. As Lorenzo approached, treading his way through small chunks of jail, Army flicked his cigarette into the debris. “Hey, boss,” Lorenzo said, clasping Army’s hand upright, as if they were going to arm wrestle.
“’S up.” Army yawned into his fist and leaned back against the edge of a coffee-table-sized object in the truck bed. It was covered with a filthy children’s blanket printed with dinosaurs.
“What you got there?” Lorenzo tilted his chin toward the mystery. Army looked right, left, right again, then lifted the blanket, revealing a jagged chunk of the 1909 cornerstone, the letters NTY JAIL carved deep into the granite face.
“Get outta here.” Lorenzo’s voice went high, trailing off with surprise.
Army replaced the blanket, lit another cigarette. “My brother-in-law’s on the demolition crew. I got this here sold to two cops and a prison guard.”
“Together?”
“Separate. Paid me three hundred each up front.”
Lorenzo laughed, a guttering sound. “Sounds like a Army special…”
Army nodded. “Yeah, I’m gonna tell ’em somebody else got it first but I can buy it from them, but you know three hundred ain’t enough, so how high can you go? Give it to the winner.” Army smiled distantly and patted the stone under the blanket. “Yeah, it does sound like a Army special, don’t it? Sounds like a Army classic.”
“Yeah.” Lorenzo stared down at his shoes, pacing himself. A water bug crawled over the rubble, a last tenant.
“Shit, man,” Army drawled, “been in this joint so many damn times? I feel like selling this thing to my own self, you know, like a, a keepsake or something. Like the last laugh, you know what I’m saying?”
Lorenzo idly kicked what looked like a tooth. “How you doin’ otherwise?”
“How’m I doin’?” Army shook his head. “Not too good, not too good. I got me bills longer’n train smoke. You know Sheryl? The one I got on Boulware Street? She thinks I’m fuckin’ around on her, so she goes into Western District, tells Valentine I robbed her at gunpoint, and now this time I can’t fuck around. I had to go get me Rosenfeld. I ain’t takin’ no chances with Legal Aid, ’cause you know Valentine. He’s been lookin’ to put me away from back in the day, you know what I’m sayin’? And Rosenfeld, he gets his money up front. So there’s that, awright?”
Lorenzo nodded sympathetically.
“Yeah, and then my wife, Pauline? She wants to have another goddamn baby, can you believe that? The woman is forty-two years old, doctor says she can’t have no baby. I tell her we got one grandchild livin’ with us already, what you want with another kid now for?” Army hissed in disgust. “So, you know, next thing I know I’m out somewheres in Bayonne, go to this clinic where they get you pregnant? You know, they take some eggs, take your sperm. Hey” Army waved it off. “I don’t even want to talk about it. Woman’s forty-two years old, she’s a goddamn grandmother, but you know, that’s what she wants, so… We did it three times, right? You know, three implantations? That’s three times fourteen thousand dollars. Fourteen thousand dollars times three. And it ain’t even worked, but they’re, like, ‘Pay up,’ and I’m, like, ‘Yeah, I’ll give you your money. Come to the baby’s first birthday party, I’ll have a check for you,’ you know what I’msayin’? I mean, you go into a restaurant, do you pay before or after the food comes, right? And, like, I don’t even hear no pots bangin’ in the kitchen yet, so…”
“I hear you.” Lorenzo smiled at his own shoes.
“Yeah, an’ so now I got this motherfuckin’ collection agency on my back, and, damn, you ever deal with those people? So, like, I got that—Sheryl, Valentine, Rosenfeld, my wife, my granddaughter’s sick ‘n’ shit. Too much, too much. An’ alls I got right now is a nickel and a nail, and the nail don’t spend, so you know I had to close up the motherfuckin’ store. Can’t pay the delivery bills, can’t pay the rent, had to shut it down before the landlord kicked me to the curb, you know what I’m sayin’? An’ so now, like, where am I gonna run this shit here?” Army took a pair of red translucent dice from his pocket, rattled them loosely in his fist. “This the cash machine, right? And, like, I ain’t even got a setup for this now, no backroom, nothin.’”
“You know what my moms used to say?” Lorenzo knuckled down a yawn. “‘The world don’t owe you nothing but hard times and bubble gum—’”
“‘And it’s fresh out of bubble gum,’” Army said, finishing it up for him.
“Yeah, you got your problems.” Lorenzo read some graffiti off the exposed back wall of a third-floor prison cell: EL HA RECUSITATO.
Lorenzo grunted one last time and then got into it. “So, you hear anything?”
“About what, last night?” Lorenzo settled in with a heavy-lidded nod. “Yeah, you know what I heard? I heard I did it.”
“I heard that too.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were calling me just to listen to my problems. No, I didn’t do it. Sorry.”
“How come people say you did?”
“You know what I think? I think my goddamn nephew’s been talking that shit about me again.”
“Curtis?”
“Naw, the other, Rudy, my sister’s kid. That boy gets two beers in him, he’s got me robbing Fort Knox. Tells people all kinds of shit ’cause he, like, idolizes me all the time, you know? I tell him, ‘Don’t idolize me, idolize your teachers, ’cause if you want to make it in this world you got to know how to speak it, spell it, and read it.’”
Lorenzo dug a toe into some sky-blue plaster, watching a chunk of brick molt off the southwest corner, skip its way down the jagged edge of the facade, picking up speed with every hit, and finally dive twenty feet out from its last bump, landing in a mound of wet Masonite.
“I tell him, ‘You want to see the light at the end of the tunnel? You got to keep your nose to the grindstone.’” Army lit a third cigarette. “It’s got to be Rudy.”
Lorenzo unfolded a copy of the flyer and passed it over. Army glanced at it. “Yeah, I saw this. Huh. You know who this looks like? Looks like my cousin George. Don’t that look like George Howard?”
Lorenzo took back the flyer, carefully folding it in quarters. He had seen Curious George dead asleep on his grandmother’s linoleum last night. “So you didn’t hear—”
“Nothin’.”
“How about Rudy? Where was he at last night?”
“Rudy? He’s in a wheelchair, Lorenzo.” Army laughed.
Lorenzo snapped his fingers, chagrined. “I’m mixing him up. Awright, so nothin’?”
“You know who I’d tell.” Army slid off the tailgate and slammed it shut.
“I had an uncle was in demolition,” Lorenzo said, eyeing the blanket-draped cornerstone. “You know what he called it? Making sky.”
Army walked around to the cab. “Put a positive spin on it, huh?” He slipped into the driver’s seat, stuck his head out the window. “Yo, Big Daddy.” Lorenzo turned to him from his car. You want to buy this? I’ll give it to you right here and now, five hundred dollars.”
Lorenzo considered it for a second, then passed. “Naw, man, it would be too much like taking my work home with me, you know what I’m saying?”
Army laughed, a lazy bark, then pulled out.
Bobby McDonald’s office was hung with a bizarre combination of sunset paintings, crime scene photos, and action shots of his son banging under the boards for Our Lady of Solace high school. Dressed in a cheap wheat-colored sport jacket and chinos, Bobby sat on the windowsill. The prosecutor, Peter Capra, sporting a steel-gray three-piece suit, sat, knees crossed, on a nubby brown-and-yellow couch.
Coming into the room less than an hour after meeting with Army, Lorenzo felt awkwardly underdressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that read PRESS ON. He had no idea where to position himself and finally settled for leaning against the wall nearest to the door, his arms folded across his chest.
“How she holding up?” Capra asked, stubbing out a cigarette.
“Bad.” Lorenzo tightened his mouth for emphasis.
“Bad, like tragedy bad?” It was Capra again; Lorenzo was pretty sure that Bobby would say next to nothing.
“Bad, like banged up—you know, emotional.” Lorenzo inadvertently hit the wall switch behind his back, blinding everybody with fluorescence.
“Sorry,” he said, flicking it off, telling himself to relax.
“She talking to you?” Capra again.
“Oh yeah.”
“Anything worth hearing?”
“Not, you know…” Lorenzo moved to the edge of Bobby’s desk, perched there for a while.
“Is she a piece of shit?”
“How do you mean?” he said. Then, reflecting for a second, “Not, no. I don’t think so.”
“So, like, you don’t see her hanging tough on this story.”
Capra’s cell phone rang inside his jacket. He slipped a hand in and killed the call, waiting on Lorenzo.
“Well, not, you know—once again—if it is a story. But no, I can’t see her holding out for too long, no.”
Bobby squinted out his window. Lorenzo knew how much he hated surrendering his office like this.
“Can you see her giving it up to you?”
“Hey.” Lorenzo laughed nervously. “We just met.”
“You like her?”
“What do you mean?”
Capra lit another cigarette. “You feel for her.”
“Yeah.” Lorenzo fanned away the first waft of smoke. “I do.”
“Good.” Capra nodded. “So, OK. Why don’t we set up a kind of two-pronged offensive here. You let us worry about the jacker, the car, the witnesses, and you stick with her. You know, keep her talking.”
Lorenzo hesitated for a moment, not sure if this signaled a promotion or a demotion. Capra looked to Bobby on the windowsill. “Yeah?” Bobby nodded. It had clearly been a done deal between them before Lorenzo ever walked in the door.
“What if she’s telling the truth?” Lorenzo asked, folding his arms across his chest again.
“That’s why we’re doing a two-pronged offensive. Cover our bets.”
“Would you rather be working the jacker end?” Bobby said, speaking up. “You want to pass her off?”
Lorenzo thought about it, decided that he wanted to be where the action was on this one. “No, I’m good. I can, I’m good.”
“Do you want any help with her?” Capra offered.
“No,” Lorenzo said, thinking, Too many cooks. “No. I mean, maybe, but not yet.”
“Because as you can well imagine…” Capra stubbed out his second cigarette. “We have people waiting in the wings. I mean, they’re camping out on line for this one.”
“What, FBI?” Lorenzo said, the final drift of cigarette smoke making his lungs flare.
Capra nodded. “So what do you think?”
Lorenzo experienced a surge of possessiveness—she knew more than she’d been saying, and he would definitely have it out of her.
“The FBI, can you keep them away?” He looked to Bobby for backup or approval, but his boss’s gaze was directed out the window again.
“You think we should?” Capra asked mildly.
Bobby finally turned back to the room and tersely nodded to Lorenzo. It was a craved-for gesture of support that somehow boomeranged. Lorenzo panicked momentarily, much as he had the night before in the hospital when he first realized the enormity of the potential fallout from this situation.
“How about can you give me just today?” he said.
Bobby and Capra looked at each other. “OK.” Capra shrugged. “We can play it by ear.”
“And can you do something else for me?” Lorenzo said, feeling stronger now. “Can you get all them cops out of Armstrong?”
Capra took a deep breath. “Lorenzo, you remember five years ago in the Powell Houses they shot the principal of Twenty-eight School?”
“I was right there,” Lorenzo said. He had hoped Capra wouldn’t compare that situation to this one.
“Guy was just walking.” Capra proceeded to lay out the tale, ignoring Lorenzo’s claim to having been on the scene. “Bang, out of the blue. Nine million windows—could have come from anywhere, right?”
“I was there.”
“We closed off the houses, and what happened. Three hours, that’s all it took. The jugglers brought us that knucklehead on a silver platter. Three hours.”
“Yeah, well, number one…” Lorenzo eased off the edge of the desk, checked his watch. “It’s been fourteen hours, OK? And number two, there very well might not be any knucklehead to bring this time.”
“Well, what if there is?” Capra countered lightly.
“No.” Lorenzo smiled through his anger. “I don’t see nothing good coming out of this blockade you got goin’ on over there.”
“No, I hear what you’re saying,” Capra said mildly, Lorenzo reading it as Tough shit.
Bobby stared at his shoes, outgunned.
“Well, can you at least get Gannon out?” Lorenzo said.
“I tell you what.” Capra sucked his teeth. “Get her to talk to you.”
A few minutes later, still smiling, still angry, Lorenzo left Bobby McDonald’s office, feeling like the prosecutor was doing to him what the cops were doing to the Armstrong Houses.
Lorenzo rolled up to Brenda’s apartment house a little before noon and had to wade through the shooters, head down, hands up, nothing to say. Ben came out of the vestibule and helped clear a path to the door. Inside the building, Lorenzo gave him the once-over: gray marble forehead, mouth slightly ajar, a flutter in the hands. He saw the angry cuff marks on the wrists. Ben put his hands behind his back, embarrassed.
“What happened?” Lorenzo said.
“Nothing.”
“The brother?”
“I’m good.”
Lorenzo decided not to pursue it; they were in Danny’s town now. “You here all morning?”
“No big deal,” Ben answered with fatigued chirpiness.
“I’m gonna get her out of here for a while, so you go call it a day, all right?”
“You taking her?” Ben said quickly. “How about Jesse?”
Lorenzo shrugged, thinking, No way. “We’ll play it by ear,” he said, not wanting to give Ben a negative answer. He started to climb the stairs, then couldn’t resist. “It was the brother, right? Danny?” He ducked down so Ben could see him halfway up the stairs.
Ben blushed, turned away. “I’m good.”
When Lorenzo entered the apartment, Brenda was sitting on the edge of the convertible, tense and expectant, hands in her lap, waiting for him. She had on fresh clothes, even a touch of makeup, but looked baggy and rumpled. Jesse did too—clean clothes, a little mascara, but somehow disheveled. Lorenzo needed only one look at her to know that, much like himself, she didn’t have shit; otherwise she wouldn’t be standing there like a human corkscrew, hugging herself, glaring at the floor, most likely racking her brains for a pitch that would allow her to hold Brenda’s hand through the coming day.
“What’s going on?” Jesse asked, looking off, not sufficiently armed to make eye contact with him yet.
“We’re out there humpin’,” he said, feeling sorry for her, then turning to Brenda. “Did you get any rest?” He was just asking to be polite.
“Cody,” Brenda whispered.
He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and saw that he didn’t look so hot either, the three of them turning this room into a 4 A.M. Greyhound terminal. “Brenda? What I’d like to do is take you back to the houses, take a look at the scene in the daytime. Maybe we can talk a little more, go over some details.”
Brenda nodded, then slowly, carefully hung headphones around her neck, the padded earpieces coming to rest on her collarbone. She took up a Discman and a zippered CD case, rose to her feet, but lost her balance, flopping back to a sitting position. On the second attempt she finally made it up. Lorenzo watched her, thinking she should be going berserk right now, assaulting him with questions, on her knees praying, anything other than this moving around as if she were made of fractured glass, Lorenzo thinking, It’s here, right here.
“Can I speak to you?” Jesse asked, walking into the kitchen area and waiting there as he gestured for Brenda to hang tight.
“So what’s shaking out there…” Jesse asked tonelessly playing with a spatula.
“Brick wall,” Lorenzo said. “What happened to your brother?”
“Tried to play doorman with Danny Martin.”
“Whoa.” Lorenzo yawned. “Excuse me.”
“Yeah, Danny came up here, got into a shout-out with his sister, went back down, and I guess he just changed his mind, cut Ben loose, and took off.”
“Other fish to fry,” Lorenzo said. “Anything I should know about that shout-out?”
Jesse shrugged. “Guy’s all buffaloed.”
“Buffaloed,” Lorenzo repeated.
“Yeah, it’s been pretty wild around here,” she said tensely, flipping the spatula into the sink.
“Yeah, huh?”
“I’m not blowing my own horn or anything, but I have to say, if I wasn’t on my toes, like, nonstop? You’d probably be needing a body bag this morning.” She finally raised her face to him. “I can keep her functional.”
“I can’t do it, Jesse. You know that.” He smiled to soften the cutoff, seeing in the pouches and crevices of her exhaustion a glimpse of the old woman to come.
“Are you bringing her back here?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can’t say, because…”
“I can’t say.” His smile shrunk a little.
“Yeah, well, she said some interesting stuff last night.” Jesse picked up a box of Lucky Charms.
“Like?” Lorenzo was too tired for this.
“I can’t say.” Jesse looked him in the eye again.
“No. You cannot play me like that.” He leaned into her, making her arch backwards, her spine pressed into the sink. In her retreat from his anger, he saw again that she really didn’t have shit.
Outside, the shooters came at them in a rush, Lorenzo trying to shield Brenda, Jesse hanging on to his coattails, the barking of the mob divided between calling out for Brenda to watch the birdie, to say something, and yelling at Jesse to get the fuck out of the picture. Brenda reacted to this gauntlet by cowering, shell-shocked, then abruptly turning to the cameras with an open-faced eagerness, a wide-eyed, guileless hunger for reassurance. Lorenzo got the impression that it was not the cameras she was facing—those she ignored. Rather, she was facing the shooters, the individuals. She turned to them because they were there, personally engaged with her plight and therefore capable of granting her some kind of boon.
As they headed for Lorenzo’s sedan, they passed two reporters rooting through the garbage cans, bringing up Red Dog, Pizza Hut, a prescription bottle, one guy squinting as he read the label. Brenda turned to them, said, “That’s not my garbage,” with the same undisguised hunger for connection she had shown the shooters.
“Let me ride with you.” Jesse was almost begging.
“Jess,” he said, once and for all time. Ben pulled up behind Lorenzo’s car, leaned over, and pushed open the passenger door for his sister.
Pulling out, Lorenzo saw Jesse in his rearview The expression of anguish on her face was, to his thinking, way out of proportion to her loss.
Once they had rolled clear of the video mob, some of whom had jogged after the car for the first few blocks like rice throwers at a wedding, Lorenzo calmed down enough to eye Brenda’s discs: Al Green, Ann Peebles, Curtis Mayfield. She was listening to something now, staring straight ahead and moving her lips to the lyrics; Lorenzo could hear “Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” coming through her phones, minute and metallic. He didn’t hold the music against her, figuring that the phones were there to keep her brains from leaking out her ears. The only alternative was to conclude that she was both cold-hearted and stupid. Nonetheless, he recommitted himself to breaking her down, to maintaining a one-prong mind-set on this.
Brenda sang along with her disc in the hoarse, loopy, half-whispered croon of someone who doesn’t realize that she can be heard. Lorenzo touched her arm. She slipped off the headphones.
“Anything come to you last night?”
“Nightmares.”
He took out the folded police sketch, passed it to her.
“How does he look today?”
“Did you arrest anyone?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, pressed her bandages to her eyes. Again Lorenzo thought, She should be all over me, chewing my ass. He could swear that what he sensed coming off her at this news of no news was relief. “How you feeling?” he asked, looking at her bandages, seeing that the gauze on the back of her left hand was blotted the dark brown of dried blood.
“They want me to go on TV,” she said.
“Yeah?” Lorenzo didn’t tell her that she had been on already, that this morning’s gauntlet would put her back on tonight.
“I won’t do it.”
“They… I won’t. I just want to be left alone.”
Lorenzo nodded.
“I feel like I’m being crushed.” She stared straight ahead, knees running.
“I hear you,” Lorenzo said, laying back.
“I just want to be alone. I know I can’t, I know I can’t be allowed to now,” she said, her voice climbing to a penitential singsong, Lorenzo thinking, Allowed.
“But I just won’t do it. No television.”
“What if it helps find your son?”
“No,” she responded bluntly. She slipped on her headphones again and Lorenzo let it be, losing himself in running down the game plan for the next few hours, hoping that Bump had set the scene as requested.
Brenda bobbed gently in her seat, as if in prayer, her sing-along reduced to a high, toneless keen from the back of her throat. She remained in that state until they came abreast of the Mumford Houses, a mock-Federal-style low-rise project that covered two square blocks of the city. She looked up at the blue-and-orange billboard announcing the name, turned to stare at the buildings as the car passed them, then took off her headphones.
“Did you work the Kenya Taylor murder?” she asked.
“No, that wasn’t mine,” Lorenzo said, wondering where she was going with this. Brenda was referring to the stabbing death of a thirteen-year-old girl in those houses, the actor the jilted boyfriend of Kenya’s mother. The actor had waited for his ex-girlfriend to drive her new lover to work that morning, then come into the apartment and taken his revenge out on the woman’s daughter, afterwards writing with lipstick on the living room wall, YOU ROCK MY WORLD I ROCK YOURS. James White—Lorenzo saw his face now—James White.
“The guy, he’s still out there, right?” Brenda asked.
“Yup. Got married last month too.” Lorenzo left out that he had shown up at the killer’s wedding just to fuck with the guy’s big day. White didn’t have the guts to kick him out. Fucked up Lorenzo’s day too. “Did you know her, Brenda?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking at her hands. “I was a teacher’s aide at Forty-six School when that happened. That day, I swear to God, the kids, when they heard what happened to Kenya? The whole school fell apart. All these thirteen-year-old hard cases, hard boys, everybody, they were all crying like babies.”
“Yeah, I heard about that.”
“Nobody could teach. They had to send in this trauma team from Trenton. It was like a disaster area, that school. They had to set up, like, for a hurricane or a flood. They had this one born-again teacher, Mr. Conklin? He turned his classroom into a praying room, and they put a bunch of the trauma team people in the library, made that the time-out room for anybody wanting to come in, have a cry, talk about it. And the rest of the trauma people, they just roamed the halls to spot kids looking like they needed some help. And thank God they were there, because the teachers, they, we weren’t in much better shape than the kids.”
“Huh.” Lorenzo knew all this.
“I remember they put some movie on in the auditorium, just played it all day, anybody wanted to watch it, and they opened up the gym, threw all the balls out on the floor, anybody could play, let off steam. And on the fourth floor, they had this double-sized classroom. They made that the game room, and I was in charge of that, if anybody wanted to come up, play Monopoly or whatever, and, I remember everybody in my room, we had this enormous, like, life-sized jigsaw puzzle of America, all the pieces different states. I mean, I swear, this thing was maybe thirty feet across, and I just remember watching maybe a dozen freaked-out kids, each with a different state in his hands trying to put the country together. And this one boy Reginald Hackett, very tough kid from Mumford, real hard-core, I remember him standing in the middle of the country holding, like, Kansas or Nebraska or wherever, and he couldn’t figure out where it belonged, and he just bust out started to cry…” Brenda faltered, crying herself now.
“These kids…” She tamped her tears by pressing her face into her shoulder. “These kids, they couldn’t handle it, you know, because Kenya, she was from Mumford, and, like, Mumford’s the big feeder for Forty-six School, everybody goes to Forty-six, and the projects, you know what they’re like. It’s just one big cousins club, so it was like losing a relative or something, but…” She wiped her face and started in again, her voice fluttering through her tears. “But I often wonder why everybody fell apart like that over her. I mean, they had other kids, over the years, you know, die, but, I don’t know, maybe it was because she didn’t do anything to, I know this sounds horrible, but she didn’t do anything to deserve it. I mean, she wasn’t hanging out on the street corner, she wasn’t riding around in some dopemobile, she wasn’t playing hookie. She was home. It was early in the morning, she was getting dressed for school, she didn’t do anything.” Brenda stared at Lorenzo as if pleading Kenya’s case, her face flushed and distraught, demanding.
Lorenzo grunted, shook his head in sympathy, waiting.
“I mean, things happen like that, it’s a lot easier to accept it if you can find some kind of, of lesson in it, but, you know, nothing. It was like the world had lost its mind. I mean, nothing.” Brenda licked her chipped and peeling lips. “And, like, Kenya… See, I think the school freaking out like that, I think it had a lot to do with Kenya herself, like, how she came across. Because on one hand, I’ll tell you, she was no angel. No way. But she had, like, this, this charisma. She was a big girl, big, big-boned, tall. And she was a fighter, all the time, all the time. And she wasn’t afraid of anybody. Like, even the boys kept their distance, because she was too independent for them and they probably knew she wouldn’t put up with any of their shit, you know, everybody calling their girlfriends ’my shorty’ and all that. But she had this great smile. And something else. She loved little kids and, you know, that school goes from kindergarten on up, and I remember seeing her around the little kids? She was the most sweet-tempered, gentle teenager I’d ever seen. I mean, if you were on eye level with her you had hell on your hands, but with the first graders? The second graders? She never raised her voice. And, you know, the thing with a lot of projects people, it’s like they’re always yelling, yelling at their kids. I mean they might not even be angry, but it’s bark, yell, shout.” Brenda winced and pressed her hands to her temples.
Lorenzo saw the towers of Armstrong in the distance and felt fatigue like a fine drift of grit under the skin around his eyes, in his joints.
“I don’t know, maybe people think that unless they can see a reaction from a kid, you know, tears or something, maybe they don’t think they’re getting anything across. Like, people don’t know that there’s this world inside a child, and maybe the more you yell, bellow, smack, the quieter the kid’s gonna get, the more that kid’s gonna hide from you. I mean this city… Most people don’t think like that, but Kenya, she was, she had a gift for being with kids. She had a gift…” Brenda trailed off, wiped her eyes, sniffing wet and raw. “Jesus.”
Lorenzo nodded, not telling her that Kenya was one of his many godchildren, that the killer, James White, had about six more months of legitimate police investigation coming at him—the exercise of perhaps a half dozen more angles of pressure on various buddies, ex-girlfriends, relatives, anybody who could place him in the apartment at the time—and that, if all of those avenues turned into dead ends, one night there might be this terrible accident…
“But anyways, Kenya. The day that happened I come home and Cody, he can see I’m upset and he asks me what’s wrong. I tell him a bad thing happened to this—I don’t know how I described her—this big girl in school, I think, and I leave out the details, but I tell him why I liked her, how she was a handful with kids her own age, how everybody was a little scared of her, but I also tell him how sweet she was to the little kids, how they all loved her, and Cody, I see in his eyes how he’s absorbing her, and he looks at me… He looks…” She paused, got a grip. “He looks at me and he says, ‘Mommy? Would she have liked me?’ And…” Brenda took a breath. “And I said, ‘She would have loved you.’ And he nods, my son, this little nod, and he says ‘Good.’ I’ll never forget that. ‘Good.’”
“Brenda.” Lorenzo parked the car two blocks from the Hurley Street blockade, alongside a surveillance van with heavily tinted windows. “Why are you telling me all this about Kenya?”
“About…” She hesitated, then said, “No, no, no,” touching his arm. “I’m telling you about my son.”
Slipping on her headphones again, she slunk down in her seat and pushed Play.
Bump hopped out of the surveillance van, and he and Lorenzo quickly swapped vehicles. Someone had left a copy of the New York Post faceup on the dashboard, the tinted windshield creating a mirror image of Brenda in her crouching anguish of the night before. Lorenzo snatched the paper away before she could see it and passed it out the driver’s window to Bump, who was on the street.
“How’s she doing?” Bump asked, rolling the paper into a baton. In the passenger seat, Brenda, phones to her ears, started to sway. Bump stared at her, then shot Lorenzo a look.
Lorenzo shrugged: Let it be.
Squinting through the heat toward the houses, Bump whapped the paper baton into an open palm. “We had us a big fuckin’ roll-around already this morning.”
“Who.”
“Jamal Bankhead.”
“And…”
“Me. Fuckin’ bonehead’s out there on the edge of the sprinklers hangin’ with his crew, throwing back forties.”
“He ain’t allowed to drink there.”
“No shit. I say, ‘Yo, Jamal, you got the DMZ we gave you guys under the overpass for that. Do your drinkin’ there.’ He says, ‘They’s bees over there.’ I say, ‘You can’t drink here. There’s all these kids barefoot in the sprinklers. You drop one of them forties, it’s a disaster. You don’t like the DMZ? Then go the fuck upstairs, do your drinkin’ there.’ He says to me, ‘If I was drinking glass-bottle Pepsis, you wouldn’t be saying shit, so later for that.’”
“What the fuck is wrong with him…” Lorenzo said, finding himself craving a beer for the first time in years, an unnerving sensation.
“I say, ‘Just get the fuck up there.’ I turn my back—ba-doom— I get it right between the shoulder blades. Some little kid sat on a sprinkler head, and the water, as they say, got misdirected. I turn around, there’s Jamal, like, ‘Haw, haw’ I couldn’t help myself: drunk and disorderly.” Bump started counting off. “Resisting arrest, assault on an officer. Clipped me a good one too.” He waggled his jaw.
“His grandmother just died last night,” Lorenzo said with disgust, but still thinking about that beer.
“Yeah, well, he might just have to miss that funeral as it stands now.”
“How about the other. They behaving themselves down there?”
“Who, Gannon?” Bump shrugged. “I think they’re getting homesick.” He scowled into the sun. “To tell you the truth, we’re all startin’ to come apart around here. Supposed to be like ninety-eight today? Heads up.”
“I hear you.”
“No bullshit, Lorenzo. We got to wrap this up. This place is ticking like a time bomb.”
“Awright. You got me set up down there?”
“They’re all in Three Building, the stinkhole stairs.” Bump passed him a tagged apartment key. “I even got fuckin’ Tyler out on loan from County for this. That’s one kid gonna owe me big-time.”
As Lorenzo began to roll off, Bump shouted, waving for him to stop as he jogged up to the van. He passed a videocassette through the driver’s window.
“I almost forgot.”
It took Lorenzo a moment to realize that what he had in his hands was a tape of last night’s Law and Order.
“Wait till you see that thing.” Bump grinned.
“Yeah, I forgot something too.” Lorenzo gave him a half-mast stare. “How do you like my girlfriend?”
“Who.” Bump squinted.
“Jesse Haus.”
“Who?” He was playing it all bewildered.
Lorenzo lowered his lids so his eyes were slits. “Yeah, OK.” He began to roll again. “And my name is Patsy Fool,” he said, dropping it, not having the head for this right now except to note that the next withdrawal from the favor bank was his.
Driving through the blockade without incident, Lorenzo backed the van up to the breezeway of Three Building, then hustled Brenda inside without anyone’s making a commotion. Avoiding the elevator banks, he turned her directly into one of the stairways, the superheated stench like a solid wall, the humidity giving the cinder blocks a waxy sheen and turning the graffiti into a fire-blackened smudge.
A few steps up from the ground floor, Brenda hesitated as she made out the four teenagers lounging along the stairs, another two on the second-floor landing. They had been placed there by Bump to eyeball her, see if she was any kind of customer—sort of a reverse lineup. Lorenzo didn’t care for the stiff, unnatural poses, the jugglers all stone-faced, nobody even talking, each of them taking the task seriously, desperate to get the police out of there so they could start making some kind of money again.
Lorenzo led her past this crew, not one of them acknowledging her passage, and saw that three more jugglers were planted on the third-floor stairs like homeboy wall sconces. There was an uninvited presence, too, a stubble-headed reporter leaning against the glistening cinder block between knuckleheads one and two, smiling almost apologetically. When Lorenzo and Brenda came abreast of him, he slipped Lorenzo his card, said, “How’s it going?” and made as if to join them in their ascent. Lorenzo had to turn and gently shove him off. “You ain’t even supposed to be in here.”
“No, I just—”
Lorenzo continued to climb, quickly taking Brenda out on the third-floor landing. “What’s up there?” the reporter called after them.
Despite the disruption, Lorenzo was left with the sense that Brenda had just cleared local customs: none of the jugglers on the stairs had given any indication of having ever seen her before. As he unlocked the door to 3P, Brenda slipped off her headphones and ran her forearm across her brow. “So did I pass inspection?”
The apartment was vacant, freshly painted, and explosively hot. Lorenzo was instantly nauseated by the fumes; his shirt matted to the small of his back before he could cross the living room to crack a window. The view was directly over the pocket park, one floor up from Miss Dotson’s, and he gestured for Brenda to come over and take in this aerial of the crime scene, holding her back slightly, not wanting her to stick her head out and cause some kind of stampede from the train tracks.
Bump had suggested 3P, arguing that it was the ideal setting, allowing Lorenzo to take her out of her element and go one on one without making her defensive, the view of Martyrs Park justifying both the journey and the isolation. It was good thinking on Bump’s part, although Lorenzo wouldn’t have objected if his partner had bothered to crack open a window or two beforehand.
“What do you think?”
Brenda stared down at the scene drunkenly the ferocious glare combined with sleep deprivation turning her eyes into sun-snuffed blisters.
“It looks so easy.”
“What does?”
“Driving through the park.”
She was silent for a while, studying the canopy of trees. Lorenzo watched her, thinking any second she’d conk out, but then he saw the tears again. Her hair was shot with gray, something he hadn’t noticed the night before, perhaps, he thought, because the gray of her eyes was so overpowering that it absorbed all similar shades about her. Her clothes, an indifferent pair of jeans and an old Pearl Jam T-shirt, fit her as if she had lost a great deal of weight since she bought them. He intuited that she had no idea how to dress herself in any but the most shapeless and shambly manner, that clothing in general both baffled and bored her.
“Brenda,” he began quietly, looking out over the humble turrets and spires of Gannon. “What are you thinking?”
“I was remembering something,” she said distantly, her eyes roaming the room.
“Yeah?”
“Reliving something.”
“What’s that…” He leaned against the wall, felt the tackiness of the fresh paint.
“I can’t get rid of it.”
“What.”
“I can’t get it out of my mind.” She started walking the perimeter, her movements clunky and stiff.
“What.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Is it about last night?” He found himself ducking and weaving as he tried to catch her eye. She wouldn’t answer. “Because that’s what we’re here for.” She shuffled around the blank room, her right shoulder sliding along the walls.
“Is it about your son?”
“You have two parts to your life,” she announced abruptly, continuing her tilted march. “Before children and after.”
“I hear you,” he said, allowing her another circuit around the room. “Just say what’s on your mind.”
“It’s not going to help anything.”
“You never know.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I got time,” Lorenzo said mildly, reminding himself that right now there was no more critical place to be than this vacant apartment, right here. “Hang on.” He left the room and searched the apartment for something for her to sit on, finding in one of the closets a metal folding chair spotted with what appeared to be dried red nail polish. Bringing it into the living room, he wrestled it open for her.
“Take a rest.”
She sat, got up, moved the chair into a shaded corner, then sat again. Lorenzo perched himself on the edge of a windowsill. The sun was hitting his shoulder as if through a magnifying glass, but there was nowhere else for him to sit without ruining his clothes.
“About, like, ten years ago?” Brenda began slowly, addressing the floor between her feet. “When I was about twenty-one? I moved over to New York to, like, get out from under the bell jar.”
“The what?” Lorenzo said, moving to the paint-tacky wall, the sun just too much.
“To get away from home. And, I got a job at the Hayden Planetarium and I started seeing this guy there, and he was in this group where everybody in it was in the same kind of therapy. They were all organized, with all these shrinks seeing all these patients. Maybe, like, a hundred and fifty people all knew each other. They lived in group apartments, five, six people sharing a loft or a giant apartment or whatever, everybody seeing the same dozen or so shrinks, the shrinks seeing each other, everybody kind of hanging out with each other. It was like this secret society right in the middle of the city.”
“Get out of here,” he said faintly, neutrally, marginally musing on the fact that most of the people he knew who were in psychotherapy were there under court order.
“Anyways,” she continued in a tired murmur, “this guy, he brought me to this party—they had these huge parties—and there’s no boyfriend-girlfriend match ups, everybody’s having a good time, drinking dancing getting high, making out, and, I was kind of lost at that point in my life, you know, so I’m, like, Where do I sign up? And before I know it, I’m in therapy with this shrink, he’s charging me next to nothing, and I’m living with a half dozen other women in this huge loft in Tribeca, I have all these new girlfriends, I’m seeing all these men, everybody’s on the same wavelength, and at first it was a lot of fun, you know? But there was this basic, I don’t know, worldview they had that was, like, there’s two types of people around: us, the group, and everybody else, the rest of the world, which was basically a bunch of psychopaths… And that, that family you came from? That was nothing more than a psychopathic unit. Like, your parents’ basic mission in this life was to destroy you. And if you came to the group married? Well, your marriage was nothing but a psychopathic partnership, so break it off, and, and you.” She raised her eyes, pointed an accusing finger at him. “If you reject this world-view of theirs? You’re probably a two-bit psychopath yourself.” Her gaze dropped again, her head almost between her spread knees. “It was, like, as a person you’re either growing or deteriorating, and the message was, If you reject us, our values, our wisdom, you’re obviously deteriorating, or worse, you’re choosing to deteriorate.”
Lorenzo, thinking, Jonestown, Moonies, sank into a squat before her. “Did these people… You don’t need to be afraid of nobody. Did these people have something to do with your son last night?”
Brenda waved him off. “I mean, as I’m saying this, it sounds obvious and, you know, creepy, but they get to you, they get to you. You get so wrapped up in this, this giant community, this friendship thing, this living-together thing that, and, you know, anybody who’s deciding to see a shrink, I mean, obviously you’re kind of miserable in your life to begin with, so they already got a leg up on you the minute you walk through the door, you know, offering you such a sweeping change that…So anyways, I wound up cutting off my family, living with a bunch of women, and fucking a lot of men. Everybody did. I mean, you know, I come from a police family, so it was kind of easy to take them apart with a shrink. But anyways, I was in this group, and it was OK for a while, but then we would have these weekly house meetings that were, like, half house business, half amateur therapy. Like, a roommate would say, ‘I’m mad at Brenda?’ You know, every sentence would go up at the end. So anyways, it would be, like, ‘I’m mad at Brenda? She didn’t lock the front door last night? And I think that was very angry?’ or, ‘I’m mad at Brenda? She didn’t feed the cockatiel? And I think that was very angry?’ And then everybody would be, like, ‘Yeah, me too. What’s going on with you, Brenda?’ And I’d say something like, ‘I guess I’m angry? Because I’ve been doing my family history? With Ted? And I guess I’m starting to get in touch with, like, how much my mother was an angry person? And it really makes me angry? But I think it like also really scares me? To think about growing up around that much rage?’ And then I’d start crying and everybody would give me a hug and they would start crying, and then I would feel really great and loved, and for the next few days I’d make sure the front door was triple-locked and I’d overfeed the cockatiel. It was like being a battered wife or something. You know, slap, caress, slap, caress.”
Lorenzo stood up and backed himself to the nearest wall. He was losing a lot of what she was talking about now, her comment about fucking a lot of men still ringing in his head—not the act, but the language. Lorenzo had an oddly prim sensitivity, given his line of work: he did not like profanity in the mouths of women.
“But anyways.” Brenda exhaled with a huff. “After a few months, I’m hanging in, I like some of my roommates, I’m definitely not lonely, and then this one Saturday, I come downstairs and there’s my brother, there’s Danny in a parked car, like, staking me out. And I’m scared shit because I just cut my family off, like, wrote them a note or something. So I go back upstairs, I tell my roommates he’s down there, they’re, like, ‘Oh my God, the cop?’ They asked me how could he find me? I said, ‘Well, I think I might have talked to my mother last week just so she would know I wasn’t dead and I might’ve mentioned where…You know, that I was living in the neighborhood that I was living in, but I definitely didn’t give her the address.’ So they go nuts, everybody’s ringing up their shrinks. We have this emergency house meeting where it was, like, decreed that I was a psychopathic bitch, viciously and willfully exposing my roommates to an armed and possibly homicidally enraged cop, that I had put the entire therapeutic community in danger. And they gave me two hours to leave, kicked me to the curb.”
“Get out a here,” Lorenzo said again, in that high, trailing tone of disbelief, desperate for the punch line.
“Well, I didn’t need two hours. I was out the door in five minutes. Left everything there. I mean, those spineless… I mean, it was hard work for me living like I was living. But I was really trying. I was doing the therapy, doing the house meetings. It was hard, but I thought they kind of liked me and I kind of liked them, but in five minutes it was over. I was a nonperson because my asshole brother shows up, I mean…” She rubbed her face, taking a breather.
Lorenzo grunted in sympathy, eyed the time: twelve-fifty
“So I go downstairs, I go right up to Danny in the car. He says, ‘You’re breaking Mommy’s heart.’ I say, ‘She doesn’t have a heart,’ and off we go back through the tunnel. And you know, when I left that apartment I’m sure they were back on the phones to the shrinks, you know, ‘She’s gone, Tom, Tod, Sheila, Lorraine.’ And then they all probably asked for emergency sessions where they were all told that Brenda’s therapy was probably freaking her out, making her get too close to the truth of her family’s anger, that her therapy was way too terrifying for her, so in her hateful rage at her shrink and at her peers, who were perpetually challenging her to grow, she tried to sabotage the whole show for everybody, all the people who were trying to help her.” She was swaying to the rhythm of her rant, gesturing like a conductor, her voice a mocking singsong. “They were probably told that my psychopathy was too formidable and—” She came to a full stop, began to cry, a bitter, quivering wail that she attempted to master by compressing her lips, squeezing her eyes shut, and pressing a bandaged fist to her forehead.
Lorenzo was still a little lost, but he felt for her.
“And, like, for years after that, that’s how I felt about myself, like a real piece of shit and, and everytime I fucked up after that, when I did drugs, when I—when I lost a job, lost an apartment, when I had to move back home because I didn’t have the money—every little fuckup in my life, they were like this audience in my head, you know, watching me screw up just like they predicted… But do you know when all that stopped? When I had my son, when I had Cody. As soon, as soon as I had him in my arms, I became more. I became … fuck, you. Fuck, all y’all. You cannot touch this. You cannot be this, this baby’s mother. Me. I am that… And then, I would still see them in my head, like, watching me? But it was like, it was like, they were blown away. That’s how I imagined it. It was like, I would see them, I don’t know, gasping or, I don’t know, humbled, ashamed, but—” She stopped again, leaned back in the metal chair, her chin aimed at the ceiling. Lorenzo watched grayish rivulets of sweat meander around her throat.
“They’re still in my head, you know? They’re still—” She swallowed audibly, her voice fluttering with defeat. “And so what are they thinking now, huh? It’s all in the papers, on TV… This must be like a fucking home run for them. Talk about ‘I told you so.’” She rose from the chair, moved to another corner of the room, and sat on the floor.
“OK,” Lorenzo said, to acknowledge what he hoped was the end of the tale. “OK,” he repeated, taking a beat to gear up, many forces at work in him now. Having finally absorbed the brunt of her tale, he was torn between feeling angry at her and angry for her. Fighting down panic in the face of the relentless pressure of time, he felt pity, frustration, but underneath it all, independent of this crime, this woman, he experienced a powerful afterburn of indignation. He had to restrain himself from saying how flippant and self-indulgent he had found the group’s attitude toward family. Sometimes it seemed to him that he spent most of his waking hours trying to hold families together. Lorenzo regarded a mother and a father together under one roof as a blessing, regarded a mother or a father’s swat to the backside or even to the side of a teenager’s head as commitment, as concern. Parents, no matter how angry, how strict or repressive, as long as they provided three squares, a cot, and consistent rules to live by, were to be respected, were to be honored, were to be treasured because, without a family in place, without at least some facsimile of a family in place, no kid stood a chance, at least not in Lorenzo’s neck of the woods.
“OK,” he said yet again, still marking time, then deciding to work this thing through the biggest hammer of all.
“Brenda,” he finally addressed her. “Do you believe in God?”
“God?” She slowly raised her face to him. “I don’t know how to answer that in an unclever way.” Her words left a slight tang in the air.
“Try yes or no,” he said patiently. There was some kind of shouting match going on down in Martyrs Park. Brenda didn’t answer. “See, I don’t know if I believe all that much in psychiatry and roommates and giving people negative labels and whatnot. But I do believe in God, and I believe that whatever happens to us on Earth, good things, bad things, they happen because God wills it,” he semi-lied, actually believing more in the act of believing than in God himself.
He took possession of the folding chair, dragging it over to her corner, so that when he sat he was basically hovering above her.
“See, like now, with your son, looking for your son.” Lorenzo hunched forward, his hands clasped in front of her face. “I know,” he said, his voice dropping to a gentle, hoarse whisper. “I know that in the back of your mind is the great fear of it coming out, you know, unhappily.”
Brenda turned her head until it was a profile against the wall.
“Me too. Me too… But you got to draw strength from God. You have got to believe that if something, you know, happened… that, if that’s the case, then that’s because God wanted that boy like he’s gonna want all of us one day or another, and at least on one level it was nobody’s fault—that, that there was nothing anybody could do about it.” He paused, smiling down at her through half-mast eyes, his hands in that cross-gripped clasp.
“See, you can think of people as good, bad, guilty, innocent, but whatever we do, whatever mistakes we make in life, He don’t make mistakes, and me, you, everybody out there, we’re nothing more than His agents. You see what I’m saying?” Lorenzo beamed at her, trying to get inside. Brenda was still looking away. “And if He calls for someone? They got to go. They just, got, to go.”
Brenda stared at her hands, her face all reddened triangles. “Understand me,” Lorenzo said, hunching over even more, as close to her as breath. “I will not rest until I find your son and’the person he was, last with. But what I’m trying to say to you is that sometimes the more you try to know, the more mysterious life will get.”
The ruckus downstairs was growing louder, and Lorenzo could identify voices now—a Dempsy cop named Beausoleil and a projects kid, Corey Miller.
“Like, why Kenya Taylor. Why’d she have to die. Why, why, why. We don’t know why. But He does. He does…It’s just sometimes his reasons are too deep for us, and the more we try to, to, comprehend, the more lost we’re gonna get, and so sometimes, the best thing for us to do, the only thing for us to do, is to surrender—surrender to Him, surrender to our own weakness, our own ignorance, our own humanness. Because if you do that… If you, do, that… You will have more peace in your life than you can get with a whole army of therapists, psychiatrists, witch doctors, gurus, and what have you…”
Lorenzo waited, elbows on knees, slowly rubbing his hands, bobbing and weaving again to find her eyes. She turned her face completely to the wall and Lorenzo could see a knot in her chopped hair the size of a marble, could see the knobs of her spine, like braided rope.
“Of course you try to do the right things in life, but when things go wrong you got to know that we aren’t the ones calling the shots, and sometimes there’s nothing else to do but let go, let go, just let go and surrender…”
Lorenzo nodded, smiling softly, trying to remember how many times he’d given this speech in the last fifteen years. He always expected the perps to laugh in his face, to call him out on his transparent shit, but it never happened. They were often so desperate to latch on to anything, any kind of reasoning that would help them find a way to continue living with themselves. That did not mean, however, that they would hear his “Let go, surrender” rap and then surrender. At first, most of them simply wanted to find a way to get just one more good night’s sleep.
Brenda was quiet, breathing evenly—digesting his words, Lorenzo hoped. He had said all that could be said on the subject without beginning to preach in circles. He rose from the chair and leaned out the window, taking in the sizzling sky, then glancing down at the beef on the street. Beausoleil and Corey Miller were starting to chest bump each other in front of Martyrs Park, both of them silent now, giving each other big “Fuck with me” stares—the fight itself coming up in about two minutes.
He turned back to Brenda, who was still down on the floor.
“Yeah, and if you ever see that therapy group again? You can tell them there haven’t been any psychopaths around since 1930. It’s called antisocial personality disorder these days.” Brenda made a chuffing sound approximating laughter. “Come on up here.” Lorenzo beckoned to her. “Get some air.”
Slowly she got to her feet and joined him at the window, just as Beausoleil and Miller started shoving. “Look at that there.” He clucked his tongue as three of Corey’s friends and a bunch of cops converged on the confrontation, which, as Lorenzo and Brenda watched, became a wild exchange of headlocks and haymakers. The cops flipped Corey, belly to the mat; Beausoleil, sporting a bloody mouth, pressed the kid’s face into the steaming asphalt, while another cop cuffed his hands behind his back. Corey’s boys circled the action, cursing out the police so ardently that Lorenzo could see their neck cords standing out like pipes.
“You hear what Bump said before we came up here today?” Brenda didn’t answer, just leaned into his shoulder, exhausted, the unexpected physical contact producing in him a confusing wave of tenderness. “He said these houses are ticking like a time bomb. Well, you know what this place is like. You ain’t no tourist.”
“I’m so tired.” It was a whisper.
“Brenda, I pray to God I can find your boy. That’s number one, you know what I’m saying? But I also pray to him that I do it before somebody around here gets really hurt.” Lorenzo grunted at the action below. “Look at this shit.”
Two of Corey’s crew had joined him on the asphalt, a knee in each of their backs. Others were rushing over now—kids, the elderly, more cops, and more cops after them—everybody looking hot, half crazy.
“I don’t know, Brenda, we’re banging our heads against the wall here on this. We’re doing everything we can… If there’s anything else you can tell us about what happened, any way you can help bring all this to an end. Now’s the time… Now’s the time.”
Brenda stepped back from the window and sat unsteadily in the chair. She dropped her head between her knees and held it there, motionless. Frantically Lorenzo debated with himself whether he should quickly reach out and chin-lift her face to him before she could collect herself or whether the best thing would be to let her come around on her own.
He took a gamble on restraining himself—no physical contact, no talk to break her train of thought—and when she finally sat up it was as if she were emerging from a lung-bursting dive, mouth open, shoulders lifting to her ears before settling back into her frame.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” she pleaded, face twisted in misery. “It’s so hard, you don’t know.”