Say the Word(40)

“Lux, this isn’t your fault,” Fae told me.

“I know that,” I muttered. “But these girls… They don’t have anybody.”

Fae sighed. “We don’t know that for sure. And we can’t call the police. Vera and Roza might not be legal citizens…the last thing we’d want is to try to help and in the process accidentally get them deported.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Roza,” I called, approaching the little girl slowly. “Can you do me a favor, sweetie?”

She nodded, licking the green ice cream residue from her lips and fingers as she finished off the cone.

“Can you tell me where you and Vera live?”

She stared at me blankly.

“Do you know your address?” I tried again. “Your neighborhood? The name of your street?”

“Don’t know,” she said, shaking her head remorsefully.

“Could you bring me there?” I asked. “You…take me….home?” I did my best to mime the question with my hands, and watched as comprehension flared in Roza’s dark eyes. She nodded once, then reached out and grabbed hold of my left hand. Hopping down from her milk-crate throne, she turned and began walking, tugging me along after her.

“Where are you going, Lux?” Fae hissed, keeping pace with us. “You don’t know where she’s taking you. It might be a bad neighborhood. You could get in trouble.”

“I know,” I said, catching her eyes with mine. “That’s why you should stay here. If I don’t call you in an hour, you’ll know something’s up. Okay?”

Fae was silent for a minute. “You’re serious about this?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding firmly. “I have to know that Vera is okay. If something happened to her…”

“This is insane,” Fae grumbled.

“That’s why you’re not coming,” I said.

“That’s exactly why I am definitely coming.” She scoffed. “At least one of us with common sense should be going on this crazy escapade.”

“I have common sense,” I muttered indignantly.

“No, what you have is a soft heart and a heck of a lot of leftover southern charm. That whole ‘love thy neighbor’ bullshit really doesn’t apply to New York,” Fae explained. “Here, it’s more like ‘tolerate thy neighbor until they play their music too loud, then call the cops on their asses.’”

I rolled my eyes, turned my feet forward, and followed after Roza in silence.





***


Roza walked for five blocks, cutting across the Garment District and eventually leading us down onto a subway platform on 34th Street without speaking so much as another word. Fae and I looked at each other warily for a moment, indecision warring with concern for Vera’s wellbeing. I wasn’t about to force Fae to come with me, but it was too late for me to turn back at this point — I’d promised Roza that I’d help her.

“I can’t let her go alone,” I whispered, tilting my head down at Roza. “She’s only like seven. It’s not safe.”

Fae shrugged her shoulders in agreement and followed me onto the platform with a resigned sigh.

Within minutes, the F line arrived and we were being whisked away southbound toward the lower east side. When the train screeched to a stop at East Broadway — the last stop in Manhattan before the tracks crossed over the East River into Brooklyn — Roza hopped off her seat and entwined her sticky fingers with mine once more.

“Come,” she said, looking from me to Fae before tugging us toward the car exit.

“If I die on this asinine adventure of yours before ever seeing John Mayer in concert, I swear to god I will haunt you until your dying day,” Fae told me, a simpering smile crossing her face.

“No one’s dying,” I assured her.

Roza led us out onto the street and walked with small yet determined strides down another three blocks, deeper into a neighborhood that was visibly poorer than the sections of Midtown I was accustomed to. Most of the restaurants and businesses we passed by were marked with colorful signs bearing intricate Asian characters, and while many different languages were spoken by the people on the streets, Fae and I were the only ones I heard speaking English. Before I’d made the move to New York, I’d spent months studying maps of the different neighborhoods and enclaves that made up the massive metropolis, but even without my cartographical obsessions I’d have known where we were — the sprawling bridges overhead were a dead giveaway.

Roza and Vera lived in Two Bridges, a neighborhood comprised mostly of low-income public housing tenements and best known for its location, sandwiched between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge overpasses on the southern tip of Manhattan. It was a well-known immigrant borough and the poverty here was apparent, from the cracked sidewalks and the lack of greenery to the graffiti-sprayed buildings and the heavily-lined faces of the residents. Taking it all in, I felt guilty for ever complaining about my own tiny apartment here in the city, or my money woes as a child.

Though my family had been poor, there was a difference between growing up below the poverty line in a city like New York versus somewhere like Jackson. In Georgia, I’d always had neighbors to lend a helping hand, appearing unexpectedly at our door with “extra” casseroles they couldn’t possibly finish, or pies they’d “accidentally” baked by following a double recipe. There’d been no lack of nature or room to breathe as a child, and Jamie and I had both relished the freedom of the outdoors. Here, though, I couldn’t imagine Roza ever finding a space to call her own, or a minute to breathe. She probably shared a room at the very least with Vera — but I’d heard stories of entire families sharing a single space in buildings like this.