place, Lauren was often sent outside to do the grocery shopping or pick up medical supplies. There was plenty of time to read. And everybody made her feel like she was wanted, like she was contributing to something important. No one was really around to miss her at home, anyway. Since her sister Carla had been court-ordered to the Eagle Feather Center for Hope and Healing, her parents made the drive upstate every weekend for visiting hours. Sunday nights, they’d come back looking gray, their words of parental encouragement scooped out of them. The TV was on a lot.
Lauren was glad to have somewhere to be with people who might possibly become friends—or more. And there was Johannes. Whenever he swept through, the air in the room felt different to Lauren, charged with possibility. She watched him—leaning one arm against the door frame, lean and long in a worn-thin Vampire Weekend T-shirt that showed the outline of muscle across his broad back, his deep-set eyes taking everything in, that lazy smile showing up along with a pair of dimples and a low growl of a laugh that did things to her stomach. She’d seen the way he was with the teens who came through the doors, how he calmed them, took in their stories, nodding. It was hard to believe he was only twenty-two. Sometimes he’d drop by her desk or pop into the long, musty filing room where she sat sorting through manila folders with badly-typed patient names on the tabs, putting them in alphabetical order.
“How’s it going in here?”
“Fine,” Lauren would answer, wishing she could think of something clever to say to keep him there.
“Got those supplies for me?”
She would hand over whatever she’d been asked to procure that day—boxes of gauze, economy-sized bottles of hydrogen peroxide, pine floor cleaner, rubber tubing, new sheets and towels. Once, she’d had to make a run to the home improvement center for long, flat pieces of lumber, nails, and ten-pound bags of mulch. “Might want to do some retaining walls and some plantings in the parks. Good project for the newbies,” Johannes had explained when she and the delivery guy had dropped it all in the freight elevator for Johannes and Rakim to take down to the basement.
Sometimes, Johannes would pop his head into the filing room and ask, “Need anything?”
“Keep up the good work,” he’d say, and Lauren would creep to the door to watch him walk away, his beautiful ass perfectly showcased by his Levi’s, as he took the stairs down to detox.
Four
FRIDAYS WERE RECYCLING day at home, and since no one else bothered to do it anymore, Lauren hauled the newspapers down to the recycling area behind their new rental with its view of traffic on Fourth Avenue. Their old apartment had windows that looked out onto Prospect Park, but that was before Carla’s medical bills poured in, and they were forced to move down Park Slope into a fourth-floor walk-up in a building with a super who liked to chatter whenever he saw Lauren. She dropped the tightly-bundled papers, the blue bags of spent plastic and metal in the bins and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. The super nodded to the day’s paper with its two- inch headline: BLOOD GANGS OF NEW YORK.
“Another body,” he said in his heavily French-inflected English. “That make ten so far. They find this one with her throat ripped out.”
Lauren didn’t want to get drawn in or she’d be late for work. “The police think it’s some gang thing.”
“In Haiti, the Tonton Macoute would come in the night like ghosts. If you spoke out, they would come. If you didn’t, sometimes they still come. Everyone lived in fear then. They would come and come until our spirits were silenced and we all felt dead.”
A loud blast came from Fourth Avenue, and two cabbies cursed each other until a full-scale fight broke out.
“Crazy people,” the super said, dropping the lid on the recycling bin.
When she slipped back into the apartment, the TV was on with the sound muted. Lauren saw garish images of kneeling prisoners in orange jumpsuits, black hoods covering their faces. Lauren’s mom sat in her chair by the window unit wearing her reading glasses as she sorted through a stack of mail that Lauren knew were bills. Her dad was at work. He would stay in the safe bubble of his office, with its office jokes, water cooler, kitchen coffee pot, and shared stories about the “putz” boss, until he was forced to come home.
“I’m off to work, Mom,” Lauren said.
A minute later, as she was closing the door, her mother answered. “Okay. Be careful.”
The day passed slowly. By six o’clock, Lauren had accomplished her to-do list and finished the last forty pages of her book, so she loitered in the hallway outside the sharing room where people did their 12-step work. The voices inside were hushed murmurs. A big guy named Brian stepped out. He had a shaved head that had been tattooed with intricate designs and smack in the middle was the Angelus House insignia. He headed to the men’s room without noticing Lauren. A snippet of confession drifted through the cracked door.
“… it was just the most incredible feeling, and I like feeling powerful now, not like before …”
“… I’m gettin’ my mark at the end of the week …”
“… that’s awesome, bro. Stick with the program. You won’t be sorry …”
“… let’s say the Angelus prayer. ‘We are the fallen angels. We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega …’”
Lauren pressed closer, trying to hear more. A hand pushed the door closed.
“Sorry. You’re not supposed to listen in. Privacy and all that.” Brian was back. He towered over her, smiling.
“Oh, I-I’m sorry. I was just … sorry.”
“No problem.” He gave her a dazzling smile before slipping inside and shutting the door tightly behind him.
Lauren wandered the halls staring at the photos of those smiling teens, wondering what made them succeed. “Everybody likes a winner,” she whispered to the wall.
A long, chest-rattling moan of pain drifted up from the detox floor, and Lauren found herself taking the stairs down into the shadows, drawn to the sound. It was cooler as she descended and so dark she had to hold fast to the banister to be sure of her steps. She’d reached some sort of wide door, but it was locked. She put her ear to it, hearing nothing but the AC hum. And then came a piercing scream that prickled the hair on her neck and sent her stumbling back up the stairs toward the light. She sat at her desk with her headphones on, blasting her music until it was time to go.
Five
IT WAS THURSDAY night, just before the end of her shift, when the guy got inside.
Somebody had accidentally left the back door open, and now he was standing in the common area screaming obscenities, with a wild-eyed look and a knife in one hand.
“What did you do to me!” he shouted. His teeth were a mottled brown; angry sores dotted his face.
“Okay, take it easy, bro.” Six-foot-two Brian tried to take him, but the guy smacked him hard, sending him reeling. The drugs made him fearless, and no one could get close.
“What did you do to me?” he screamed until the tendons of his neck bulged. “I can’t sleep. I see things the way they really are. I know. I know!”
“Calm down. It’s all right,” another staffer said, extending her hand.
He jumped back and jabbed at the air with his knife. “You’re out to get me!”
“They’re out to get me, too,” Lauren said suddenly. He noticed her for the first time.
“You know? You know what I’m talking about?”
She nodded and lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “We’ve got to get away. I’ve got a safe room. I’ll take
