By the time she turned sixteen, Daneen was exquisite. Her cocoa-colored face was set around thick, bow-shaped lips and large, mysterious eyes. Her jet-black hair fell to her shoulders in loose, bouncing curls. Her breasts were full and firm, and her wide hips curved into thighs that were at once muscular and soft, just like the rest of her.
Tyrone Jackson fell for her one summer afternoon when he saw her at the basketball courts at Sixteenth and Susquehanna, where he was playing in one of the outdoor leagues.
A good student and a handsome boy, Tyrone was well liked, but naive. He believed that his basketball talent, and the accompanying college scholarship, would carry him wherever he wanted to go.
He thought he could do anything, and that nothing could hurt him. So when he told his friend Kevin about Daneen, and Kevin warned him to stay away from her, Tyrone accused him of wanting her for himself. Kevin denied it. But the advice tore their friendship apart and pushed Tyrone even closer to Daneen.
In his senior year, when a severe knee injury cost him his college scholarship and virtually ended his basketball career, Tyrone wanted to turn to Lynch for help. But his pride wouldn’t let him. Instead, he turned to the only other person he believed would understand—Daneen.
She convinced him that the only way to get the things he would have had as an athlete was to sell cocaine. He did, and shortly after he began selling, she became pregnant and told him the child was his. Nine months later, when Kenya was born, everyone in the Bridge knew that Tyrone wasn’t the father. The child looked nothing like him.
In spite of the whispers, he accepted the child as his own. But the persistent rumors and the resultant humiliation became too much for him to bear. He wasn’t used to adversity. As a top-flight athlete, he’d lived in a world in which everything had always been handed to him.
By the time Kenya turned one, the pressure had taken its toll. Tyrone was using the cocaine he was supposed to be selling. And as his casual drug use escalated to addiction, he fell hopelessly in debt to his suppliers.
In a desperate attempt to salvage something of his life, he set up a meeting with them, ostensibly to pay off his debt. In reality, he was planning to rob them, to take the money and fly Daneen and the baby somewhere, anywhere that would allow them to start anew.
It didn’t work.
Five minutes into the robbery attempt, a hail of gunfire rained down on the corner of Ninth and Indiana, and Tyrone lay dead in the street. When the news made its way back to the Bridge, something inside Kevin Lynch died, too.
His friendship with Tyrone had been his link to a normal existence away from the regimented home life his grandmother demanded. When that link disappeared, Lynch was left to flail through the murky waters of his teenage years, trying desperately not to drown in them.
In the ensuing years, as he moved out of the projects and embarked on his police career, Lynch always told himself that he blamed Daneen for Tyrone’s death.
But after watching his career go up in flames over his attempt to help Daneen find her daughter, Lynch had to admit the very truth that he’d been hiding for the past ten years.
He didn’t blame Daneen for Tyrone’s death. He blamed himself.
If he had admitted that Tyrone was right when he accused Lynch of wanting Daneen, his friend would never have gotten involved with her. He might have even lived.
But the past didn’t matter anymore, Lynch thought as he got into his car. He was married now, with a child of his own, and a lifestyle far removed from his upbringing in the projects.
And though his love for Daneen had grown from mud pies and childhood games, it had all but died along with his friend, and then it had shriveled into hatred.
But none of that was important now. What mattered was the child.
As he started his car and rolled out of the parking lot in search of the man whom he believed to be Kenya’s abductor, Lynch told himself that his feelings, whatever they were, didn’t matter.
But not everyone was willing to live such lies.
Darnell knew what he felt for Lily. It had surged when the boy had touched her on the corner of Twelfth and Parrish, and he’d moved to protect her, forgetting the lost years and the abiding hurt that lingered from the time when she’d loved him last.
It was a time he remembered still. And a time he needed to forget.
So when he left her and came back to his aunt Judy’s empty apartment, he searched for the crack Judy had managed to hide before she was arrested. When he found it, he tried to lose himself in a swirling cloud of smoke.
As always, the first hit brought a dizzying high that swept over him like a swarm of bees, at once stinging and pouring honey on him. But after that, there was nothing.
No matter how much crack he smoked, Darnell was left only with the realization that Kenya was gone, leaving Lily—the one woman he’d ever loved—with a grief that he could never understand.
The thought of Lily ate at him, even after his girlfriend, Renee, came to him with a bundle of crack she’d scammed from an old man for the unfulfilled promise of sex.
The thought of Lily consumed him, even as he and Renee engaged their every sexual whim in an effort to maintain the rush that came with each hit.
But in a matter of hours, when the drugs were gone, Darnell was left with the same thing that always waited for him at the end of the rainbow. He was left with reality.
And so it was that he and Renee ended up on Judy’s living-room floor on Sunday afternoon, scraping the last of the brown residue from the car antennas they used for crack pipes. Scraping and hoping for one last hit.
Renee, as always, watched Darnell, taking her every cue from him. She was, after all, nothing without him. At least that’s what she believed.
With chalk-white skin, and thick, yellow-white hair that came out in clumps beneath her ever-present scarf, Renee was an albino. And though she had always been an outcast in the Bridge, she’d spent her teenage years doing what all the other girls did—watching Darnell.
She’d fantasized about him, knowing that her dream would go unfulfilled, like every other dream she’d ever had for herself. She’d watched him and wished for something better.
When crack came along, the choice for her had been easy. She’d never believed that she would be anything other than a failure. When Darnell succumbed to it, however, she didn’t see the wasted life that everyone else saw. Instead, she saw an opportunity.
Renee became a slave to Darnell, sharing with him every bit of crack she could attain, giving herself to him in ways that were humiliating and painful. In exchange, he gave her one dream—tarnished though it was by addiction. He gave her himself. And she gladly took him. But the more she gave herself back to him, the more he despised her.
Renee couldn’t see that. All she could see was Darnell. And as she sat on Judy’s floor that afternoon, staring at the handsome teenage face she still saw beneath the ravages of crack, she was caught in the illusion of it all.
“What you lookin’ at?” he asked when he noticed her eyes on him.
“I was just thinkin’ they got some good treys down Crispus Attucks,” she lied, referring to three-dollar caps that were sold in the nearby housing project. “You wanna get a couple?”
“My niece missin’, and you talkin’ ’bout some damn treys,” he said, staring at her in disbelief.
“Your niece gon’ show up,” Renee muttered as she filled her makeshift pipe with residue and crumbs left over from her last cap.
“I don’t know why you so worried about her now anyway,” she added, raising the pipe to her lips with a self-satisfied smirk. “You wasn’t thinkin’ ’bout her last night.”
Darnell watched with mounting anger as the crack in Renee’s pipe sizzled beneath the first lick of flame. Then he suddenly swung his arm, knocking it from her hand.
The pipe skittered across the floor, and the crack spilled from the end of the tube. Renee scrambled after it, but Darnell grabbed her feet and dragged her back.
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“That’s all you worried about is smokin’ some damn crumbs?” he yelled as he pulled her toward the door. “Get yo’ li’l white ass outta here.”
“No, Darnell, stop!” she screamed, reaching out in panic for the last of her crack.
He pulled her to the door, opened it, and pushed her into the hallway. Then he slammed the door in her face.
As she banged on the door and yelled his name repeatedly, Darnell surveyed the floor for every crumb she’d dropped, took the screens out of her pipe, and deposited them in his own.
When he lit the crack, the smoke rushed to his brain in a swirling play of light and sound. Judy’s apartment became Lily’s. Renee’s screams became Lily’s. She was there, in his mind, calling him. And Darnell had every intention of answering.
He knew that the only thing that could possibly bring her back to him was showing a commitment to finding Kenya. As he left the apartment and pushed past Renee, in the darkest recesses of his crack-addled mind, he believed that would be enough.
Judy spent the night in the motel room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the reality of her relationship with Sonny.
She heard it in the sounds of creaking mattresses and sizzling crack that filtered in from the rooms around her. The noises reminded her of his latest betrayal, and propelled her out of the room for one final search.
As she weaved between the prostitutes and customers who filled the dimly lit hall outside her room, something else pushed her. It was her love for Sonny. And try as she might, she couldn’t deny that truth.
“I’m checkin’ out,” she said, dropping her room key in front of a dead-eyed desk clerk in the darkened, rust-colored lobby.
“You don’t want another hour?” he asked, watching as her firm, round behind switched past him. “I’ll pay for it.”
But Judy was already outside, walking south on Germantown Avenue with her head down, hoping to avoid the man who had robbed her of her last few dollars.
She didn’t look like one of the pencil-thin crack prostitutes whose gyrating movements separated them from the heroin-slowed whores with fuller forms and swollen hands. But men in cars still stopped, craning their necks and waving their arms in an effort to learn her price.
Judy ignored them, walking with purpose as she trekked down the twisting avenue, deeper into the heart of North Philadelphia.
She skirted the edge of the cemetery where abolitionists had been buried a hundred years before. Inside, she saw heroin addicts nodding against headstones, stuffing a new kind of slavery into their veins.
When she turned left from Germantown Avenue to Cambria Street, however, the vibes changed. The contented nod of those who’d gotten their morning wake-up disappeared. In its place, there was the violent desperation of those who hadn’t.
Men and women ran up to cars, nearly plastering themselves to the windows to hawk their peculiar wares.
“Works, works!” shouted a man in a thick jacket, holding up packages of vacuum-packed needles.
“Glass, glass!” shouted a woman with hollow crack pipes hanging from her spindly, burnt fingertips.
These were the people on the fringe of the game—the bottom-feeders who sold paraphernalia to those who bought their drugs in the Badlands.
On the corners beyond them were the lookouts—the boys who shouted Agua when police approached, warning the dealers to stash their bundles in hollowed brick walls and car shells.
And then there were the addicts whose lives played out like puffs of smoke in the dangerous space in between. They were everywhere, skittering about like roaches, slowly dying from the poison that was dropped between the crumbs.
The effect of it all was like that of a large bazaar, with deals, seen and unseen, taking place under its open-air tents. It was exciting in its way. But only to the untrained eye.
For those who knew what lay beneath it, Cambria Street was the gateway to its own special hell.
Judy had traveled down that street only once, when she’d accompanied Sonny to buy weight two years before. Since then, she had allowed him to handle that part of it. And watching the dangerous dance that passed for life there, she remembered why.
On the night when she’d come there with him, there was a drought—cocaine was in short supply because of a large seizure or some other unseen calamity.
During such times, hustlers sell fake coke, addicts cross invisible boundaries, and dealers die at each other’s hands in greater numbers than usual.
Judy knew that. But when she watched Sonny get out of the car on the corner of Darien and Cambria, and the buzz of activity grew still, she was nearly oblivious.
She told herself that Sonny was at home in this place—that the danger she felt was nothing.
Ten minutes later, when Sonny came back from the house on the corner with half a kilo stuffed into each sleeve of his jacket, she watched him open the car door. And then she looked up as the barrel of a rifle eased out the shattered window of a vacant house just two doors away.
A man behind Sonny jumped toward him and reached for his pockets. The rifle in the window belched fire. Blood and bone exploded from the robber’s head. He grabbed at the wound as the life rushed out of him. Then he fell against Sonny’s back, wrapped his arms around him, and slid to the ground in a puddle of blood.
For the next few seconds, nothing moved. Then Sonny smiled toward the window where the rifle had been, kicked his feet out of the dead man’s grasp, got in the car, and drove away.
It was the first time that Judy saw someone die. When she finally mustered the courage to speak of it to Sonny, he just smiled and said a single word: “Pablo.”
She never spoke of it again. But she always remembered that name.
And so it was that when she rounded the corner from Cambria to Darien Street, stopping at the house where she’d seen Sonny go on that fateful night, she knocked and waited for the metal cover to slide back from the rectangular cutout in the door.
When eyes appeared in the opening, she said the only thing she could: “Pablo.”
The eyes watched her silently.
“I’m Judy,” she said, trying not to look as nervous as she felt. “I’m here for Sonny.”
The eyes watched her for a second longer. The metal cover slid back into place. And then the Dominican’s door swung open.
When she went inside, Judy walked into something she had never expected.
Lily sat on her living-room couch while her daughter, Janay, sat on the floor between her legs. They were all alone now, in the bright-afternoon light that poured in through the window of their apartment.
Lily brushed her daughter’s thick hair with one hand and smoothed it with the other. The repetitive motion was relaxing. It should have pulled Janay down into sleep. But after a day in which her best friend had disappeared, sleep came in bits and pieces. And when it did, it was filled with nightmares.
Kenya struggling to catch her breath as Janay tried in vain to help her. Kenya falling down one of the building’s elevator shafts as Janay stood by, unable to move. Kenya smiling and waving good-bye as she floated skyward, with Janay grabbing desperately at her feet.
Janay was afraid to fall asleep again, so she sat with her mother in their apartment and tried not to think of Kenya. But everything—from the drip of the leaky faucet to the sound of children playing outside—reminded them of her.
Janay hadn’t spoken of her all day. In fact, she hadn’t spoken of anything. When she finally did open her mouth, her eyes opened, too, releasing the tears she’d been holding back for so long.
“Mom, why they had to do that to Kenya?” she asked, sniffing as she struggled to say the words.
“We don’t know what happened to Kenya, yet,” Lily said, brushing her daughter’s hair gently.
“She woulda came home if ain’t nothin’ happen to her. She woulda least came back here. Right, Mom? She woulda least came back.”
Lily stroked her daughter’s hair, knowing she was right. She contem
plated her answer for a few strokes more, then spoke what she hoped was the truth.
“Sometimes people do things, and they don’t even know why they doin’ it,” she said. “Sometimes they hurt people just to be hurtin’ ’em. And sometimes they hurt people ’cause they really wanna hurt theyself, and they just ain’t got the guts to do it.
“I don’t know why nobody would wanna do somethin’ to Kenya, baby. But everything ain’t meant for us to know.”
“She ain’t never do nothin’ to nobody, Mom,” Janay said.
She paused as the tears streamed down and dangled from her chin before falling to her lap.
“All she ever wanted to do was be friends. Even when people was mean to her, she tried to be they friend.”
“I know, baby,” she said, brushing gently. “I know.”
“Why they couldn’t hurt somebody else, then? Why they had to pick her?”
Lily couldn’t lie to her. She couldn’t pretend to know the reason why. “I guess only God know that.”
“God supposed to know everything, right, Mom?”
“Yes, baby. God know everything.”
“Well, how come God ain’t do nothin’ to stop somethin’ from happenin’ to Kenya?”
Lily brushed her daughter’s hair for a little while longer. They sat in silence until, eventually, Janay fell asleep.
Lily never answered her last question. She didn’t know the answer. The only one who could know that answer was God.
And He wasn’t ready to reveal it yet.
Lynch sat in his car outside the projects, trying to convince himself that what he was doing was right.
He’d driven there after the impromptu hearing in his captain’s office, and had spent the better part of the afternoon in his car, watching the projects breathe.
From what he could see, much had changed since he’d left there a decade before. But much had remained the same.
Drug dealers still shuttled back and forth from the corner to the entrance of the projects, while teenage boys walked shirtless to basketball courts and girls pretended not to notice. Young mothers still carried heavy bags and pushed strollers to the 23 bus stop. Children still looked happy, oblivious to the true burden of their poverty.
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