by Meg Medina
I run to the corner and pull the fire alarm, the way Mr. Mac taught Kathleen and me years ago. The smoke and flames grow worse as the minutes tick by. Every one of the stores on this block could burn down, one after the other, and it’s all my brother’s doing.
In the end, all Pablo and I can do is join the crowd that gathers from neighboring blocks who’ve come out to shake their heads and see the spectacle.
It takes more than thirty minutes for the fire trucks to finally reach us.
By then, Mr. Farina’s shop is gone.
For a second, I don’t know where I am. Two pigeons are cooing at me from their perch.
Then I remember that Mima and I slept on the fire escape. What else could we do? The temperature barely dropped under ninety all night. Without fans on the top floor, we couldn’t breathe inside. Instead, we curled up against sweaty pillows and waited for Hector, who never came home. It’s probably best that he isn’t here. All night, I’ve plotted how to slap him silly, how to scream at him for all he’s done.
I sit up and stretch painfully. It’s still early, judging from the orange glow between the buildings. I don’t wake Mima, though. She mumbled prayers late into the night, crossing herself every time we heard another siren.
“There was a fire at the pharmacy, Mima,” I told her last night. I showed her my sooty hands. “He was there; I saw him set it. Hector was stealing and —” But Mima just put her hand on my lips and cried.
I don’t know when or how we finally fell asleep.
I’m cautious when I climb back inside my bedroom, but scanning quickly, I see that Hector isn’t inside, either. The rooms are stifling, and I’m starving, too, but I’m out of luck. Without power, the freezer has puddled all over the kitchen floor; a foul odor hits me when I crack open the refrigerator door, too. So I toss down a dishrag to soak up the mess, and head downstairs instead.
Stiller is on the stoop, making a strange matched set with Manny, who’s asleep in his lawn chair. He’s still got a baseball bat across his thighs. Last night, after Pablo finally dropped me off, all of us tenants gathered around Stiller’s battery-operated radio. As news of the looting in Queens was broadcast, Manny dug his bat out of the basement. “In case of trouble,” he told us, and for once I thought he was brave.
“Have you guys been here all night?” I whisper.
She rubs her eyes and looks over at Manny. “He’s the last man I ever thought I’d spend the night with, but yes.”
“Any word on the power?”
“Yeah. Con Ed’s got it, and we don’t.”
She clicks on the radio, and we listen to the morning DJ read off the latest announcements and reports. Ace Pontiac over in the Bronx had its windows smashed to gemstones, and people drove off with fifty brand-new cars. On Jamaica Avenue, a mob shouted Do it, do it, do it and ripped the security grates right off a record store and emptied it. Hospitals don’t want to see you unless you’re having a baby or dying. They’re on generators, and they’re clogged with people who’ve shown up shot, cut, and mugged overnight.
“Ladies and gentlemen, as of right now, one thousand fires are still burning, and more than three thousand individuals have been placed under arrest.”
I close my eyes and sigh, wondering if Hector is one of those individuals.
Stiller clicks the radio off again. “No use running the battery down to hear what we already know: the city has finally gone crazy.” She glances at me carefully. “No sign of the kid, huh?”
My throat squeezes tight. “No.”
Pablo calls the house in the afternoon. Any hope that maybe I dreamed last night’s fire at the pharmacy is gone.
“We have to tell them what happened, Nora,” he says.
A while later, we stand together at the door. The pharmacy burned down to the studs. In fact, we can see through the crumbling wall to the candy store next door.
Mr. Farina picks through the debris with Sal. He looks lost standing there, as if he can’t decide what to do first. His hands are shaking, and when he sees us, his eyes fill up and his shoulders seem to stoop even further.
“Stay out, kids,” he says. “It’s not safe in here.”
The fact that Mr. Farina is worried about us makes me itch with guilt. How will I ever explain not telling him about Matt and Hector, or how my brother is the reason his business is in cinders?
“Gutted,” Pablo whispers to me as we step inside anyway. I can’t look at him, wondering what he’s thinking of me now. He knows my brother was involved; I know he saw Hector set the blaze. Any minute, he’s going to say what he knows.
“We were at the bottom of the sixth when the lights went out at Shea,” Sal says, wiping the sweat from his chin. “By the time we rushed back, it was too late. The fire was in free burn. I tell you, if I get my hands on the derelicts that did this . . .” he mutters.
“It was Nora’s idea to check on the block,” Pablo says, probably trying to soften the blow of what’s coming. “She’s the one who pulled the alarm.”
My stomach clenches when Sal smiles at me. “Thanks, Nora. It could have been a lot worse without you, I guess.”
Shame presses in on me. He won’t be so pleased for not coming to him sooner with all that Hector has been up to.
I walk to the charred dispensing area. The old picture of Mr. Farina in front of his store is shattered on the ground. The locked drug cabinet has been forced open and emptied. I can’t stand to think that Hector, wherever he is, took part in this, that he set fire to everything that Mr. Farina holds dear. If ever I have truly hated my brother, it’s now.
Mr. Farina picks through the few remaining glass bottles. Even from here, I can see that he’s pale and sweating through his shirt. Already the heat is ticking up near ninety again.
“We’ll help you get it fixed up, Mr. Farina,” I whisper, trying not to cry. “I can even build you some shelves if you want. Remember? I’m pretty good.”
But Mr. Farina only turns away quickly to blow his nose. “I never thought I’d see the day when my own neighborhood would ruin me, Nora,” he says. “I’m an old man. I just don’t have it in me to start all over again.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Farina’s Drugstore is forever.” I pick up the picture of him and shake off the glass. “You’ve been on this corner for more than thirty years. We’ll rebuild it. And besides, it wasn’t your neighbors who turned against you . . .”
I trail off and give Sal a pleading look.
“Come on, geezer,” Sal says gently. “The heat is making you talk crazy. Let’s all get to the deli and get something to eat at least. We can finish this later.”
Silence.
“Mr. Farina?” I say.
A bottle falls from his hands as he tries to steady himself. Pablo rushes to grab him before he hits the ground.
“I’ll get the car!” Sal shouts.
Mr. Farina is still in the hospital. The doctors said that heatstroke is dangerous in old people with heart problems like him. I know better, though. Mr. Farina got his heart broken, plain and simple. I can’t forget the look of anguish in his eyes when he saw his shop in ashes yesterday. And I’m ashamed that I let him down, even though he doesn’t know it. What if I had told him about Matt and Hector? Maybe he would have figured out how to stop them. Maybe none of this would have happened at all.
I didn’t realize until now that Mr. Farina was everyone’s grandfather in a way. He’s seen everybody in the neighborhood through colds, splinters, and stomach flus, year in and year out. He’s been a constant for all of us over the years, and we barely noticed it until he was gone.
We all miss him already. The block doesn’t feel the same with the drugstore boarded up or without Mr. Farina strolling up the street to have a coffee or argue about “the bums who traded Tom Seaver.”
Sal is a mess over it. He’s got his Mets cap on the deli counter, right next to the framed photo of Mr. Farina that we salvaged. He and Annemarie stop by the hospital in the morning,
and they leave early to stop in again on their way home.
Pablo and I are left to close up.
It’s weird to see Pablo behind the slicer, especially since the case is nearly bare. We stand here looking out the window, an awkward silence now that it’s just us. There haven’t been many customers, just people rubbernecking at the damage on the rest of the block. The power came back, but the deli still smells like rotten food. We had to toss all the perishables; the delivery trucks won’t be here until Monday.
Pablo studies Mr. Farina’s photograph for a second. “If they had any sense, they’d be Yankee fans,” he says.
There’s a long pause.
“There’s going to be a fire-marshal inspection eventually,” he says, looking over at me. “You know that, right?”
I nod.
“They’re going to ask a lot of questions, Nora.”
I know what he’s getting at. I had my chance to come clean and tell Sal and Mr. Farina what I knew, but I didn’t do it.
I swallow hard. “Yep.”
“What are you going to do?”
I stare out at the street in misery. Heat rises from the asphalt and warps the air. “Figure something out, I guess. Same as always.”
“What do your parents say?”
I give him a look. “Not everybody’s family has a working set of parents like yours, Pablo.”
He blushes and falls quiet for a minute. “What a mess,” he says.
I pick at my cuticle. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I know,” he says. “But look: I’m still here.”
It was 102 degrees again yesterday. The whole city is boiling mad as we all pick through glass and board up windows. Governor Carey declared us a disaster, which Sal says is like declaring the sky blue. Neighborhoods in all the boroughs, especially the poor ones, look like war zones. Here in Queens, we had 134 fires set and eighty stores looted, but that’s nothing. Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, the Bronx, Amsterdam Avenue, Harlem. Seems like there’s not a store left in any of them, and none of the business owners will say if they’ll ever reopen. They don’t have insurance, they say, or else, like Mr. Farina, they lack the will.
But mostly it has become a game of nasty finger-pointing as to why people looted.
Customers troll Sal’s aisles, picking over the slash-priced items and offering opinions all day long about why ordinary people turned into criminals when the lights went out. One thing is for sure: it’s a bad time to be brown or have a last name like López or Ruiz, no matter where you live. The only thing worse might be working for Con Edison.
A lady piles her groceries on my counter and glances at the newspaper there. She shakes her head at the picture of two guys hauling a stolen sofa from a furniture shop in Jamaica.
“Animals! I hate to say it, but we should send all the blacks and Puerto Ricans back if they behave like that here.”
Pablo and I exchange uncomfortable looks. She’s squeezed the problem down to brown people, all of us. A blush rises to my cheeks, thinking of Hector. It would be easy to say he stole because he’s a López, but that isn’t it at all. Besides, all kinds of people looted when they had the chance. I saw it myself on Main Street.
I’m biting my lip, not wanting to make trouble for Sal. “Send them back to where? We’re all from right here, ma’am,” I say pointedly.
Sal looks up from arranging the new cheeses and frowns. His face is bright red from the heat — or maybe because of what I said. For a second, I think I’m in trouble.
“Pablo,” he says, not Paulie, “get the door for this lady, would you?”
I ring her out and she leaves in a huff.
But it’s not just cranky customers. Tempers boil over at the MacInerneys’, too. Even Stiller and Mr. Mac get into a spat.
Kathleen’s dad came home sporting stitches near his eye after the blackout. The threads still poke out awkwardly so that it looks as if a caterpillar is crawling across his face. He got pelted with a rock as he was working a fire in the mayhem.
All week, he’s seemed kind of quiet, especially as the accusations build against the police, who sometimes stood by and watched, and fire departments for failing to show up for alarms.
He piles some corn on his plate as Stiller and Mrs. MacInerney gab about the Abzug campaign and how the blackout is going to fit in. Then the conversation turns to Stiller’s aunt, who lives over on Jerome Avenue.
“They let that whole neighborhood go up in flames,” she says.
“Nobody let anything burn, Stiller. There were twenty-three thousand alarms, and most were false. How could we possibly respond to all of them?”
“But they did respond to some, Pat, just not to very many in the poor sides of town.”
It’s like watching a tennis match across the dinner table.
He sighs. “The city is in a budget crisis. We’re understaffed.”
“But it’s interesting that they closed fire stations in the poorest neighborhoods. I’ll bet the fire station near the chief’s house is running just fine,” she says.
Mrs. MacInerney reaches for Stiller’s hand. “It’s horrible what happened to your aunt’s neighborhood, but lots of people do care.”
Stiller shakes her head and stiffens her spine. “I don’t know, Mary. That sounds like lip service to me. Nobody seems to care if the poor burn up. You can see that for yourself.”
We sit in awkward silence. The only sound is the faint clicks and static of the scanner. Mr. Mac grips the side of the table, his lips drawn to a thin, angry line. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him lose his patience before.
“Those residents set the fires themselves, Stiller,” he says a little too loudly. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph — they threw rocks and bottles at us. We’re working long hours — sometimes for free. What the hell does anyone want from us?”
“I want you to stop pretending this city didn’t neglect those neighborhoods on purpose,” Stiller says. “You can’t do that and still be shocked when it collapses.”
He gets up from his chair and tosses down his napkin.
“Pat,” Mrs. MacInerney calls as he strides away.
But he doesn’t turn. Instead, he throws open the door. “I’ll be at the station,” he calls over his shoulder. “Let me know when our guest leaves.”
That night, I’m home watching Mayor Beame on TV. He tells us we’ll rebuild, but I’m not so sure. How do you rebuild people? How do you help them trust one another again? It seems so much harder than fixing buildings.
I turn off the TV and go to the window fan for some relief. Hector is slung across the couch nearby, pawing through new albums and listening through a new headset. He’s got a nice shirt, pristine shoes, all stolen. Mima knows this, even as she tiptoes around him in the hot apartment.
“Farina’s in the hospital,” I tell him. Does he even care? Does he know what he really did?
He looks at my lips moving but doesn’t take off his headphones.
Rage feels like rocks in my mouth. Pablo’s question loops over and over in my brain as I close my eyes and face the hot breeze coming in through the fan.
What are you going to do?
The heat presses on me, and there’s no end in sight.
It may not be the real end of the world, but it feels pretty damn close to me.
You can’t miss the next day’s headlines:
MONSTER STRIKES AGAIN!
POLICE HELPLESS AS VICTIMS CLING TO LIFE.
PICTURES IN CENTERFOLD. STORIES PAGES 4, 5, 26, 27.
Two more.
A first date for two twenty-year-olds. Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante shot under a bridge in Sheepshead Bay over the weekend.
And now this: Stacy is a blonde.
What is it about that detail that suddenly makes me feel as though everything has broken apart? Maybe it’s how helpless the police seem despite what they call the biggest manhunt in the city’s history.
But it’s something else, too.
Son of Sam has broken his own rule.
Every rule I know is gone, and we’re in chaos. There are no rules for how a family should work. No rules for how far loyalty should reach. No boundaries on stealing or looting. No limits on how people ruin one another’s lives or how we blame one another for our pain.
Now no rules for how we kill each other, either.
He won’t just stalk girls with long, dark hair. Everyone is in his sights now. No one is safe in his random game.
Foul! No fair, my brain shouts.
And it’s in that strange moment that I finally decide to take a stand. The question is: how?
It happens slowly at first. Small moments of revenge taken from a safe distance.
Maybe this is the way a murderer begins, too, with small crimes that no one can see until later.
I’ve scratched the B sides of all Hector’s new records, spat on his new shoes, pulled the hem apart on the bottom of his shirt in the closet. I’ve kicked his favorite lighter under the oven where the roaches live, too.
But none of it is noticed. And it doesn’t fill the hole or solve the problem of what I’ll say when the fire marshal finds me. The investigators already scoured what’s left of the pharmacy this week. Pablo saw them shovel samples of ash into gallon cans marked for the crime lab. I kept my eye on them from a distance. I recognized the same marshal who came to our door a few months ago.
As Hector sleeps tonight, the sheets balled at his feet, I stare at the ceiling in misery. The mattress and pillow are hot beneath me. Sweat dribbles along my neck, behind my knees.
Pablo’s question chases me again in the heat. I can’t outrun it, and it leaves me feeling more trapped than I ever have in my whole life.
I tiptoe out to the kitchen to pour myself a cold glass of water. The picture of Stacy Moskowitz strapped to a gurney stares back at me again from Mima’s paper.
Stacy died today. Her date, they say, lost an eye, and is now virtually blind in the other.
Every headline has broadcast the details until I can almost feel Son of Sam at my back in a cloud of heat. I stare out at the moon, wondering for a second if the lovers noticed its fullness in the sky this weekend as they strolled under the bridge, if maybe their killer did, too.