Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  Chapter 25

  Antoinette kissed Jupiter on the cheek. She said goodbye to him. She fingered the hijab back around her ears.

  She touched his hands, still warm. She touched his face. She closed his eyes. She prayed to Jesus. To Allah. That Jupiter was safe with him. With God. With Allah. They were the same.

  She prayed that she herself could continue without him.

  And then she looked again at Jupiter. It wasn’t fair that he be taken from her before they had real happiness together.

  Jupiter had looked at her—over the past few weeks, especially. And still, since she’d worn the hijab.

  He had seen her.

  The hijab had been, in its way, a test for him. A test he’d been passing. To make sure his affection for her had been real. And now who saw her? Babies, children. No one else. No one.

  She dragged Jupiter’s body farther inside the house in front of the mirror at the entrance to the front parlor. It was heavy, but more than that, she had never touched his body before. She had dreamed of it. She’d wanted to touch his hands with hers.

  That the Devil took him from her like that. Fury rose within her. It was unfair.

  Antoinette had lived long enough to deserve some kind of happiness. Is this because I’m leaving Jesus? She turned to the Devil. Well you can’t have anyone else. You can’t have me. You can’t have Teddy, and you can’t have Simon. The Devil is going to have to come through me, and I’m not going to let it.

  Antoinette had to bring God into this house. To protect the vulnerable in God. Especially baby Simon. Otherwise, the Devil would claim him as his own. Antoinette was strong. She believed in her own strength.

  Chapter 26

  But just then Antoinette and Amelia heard another two gunshots, this time from Daniel and Thela’s apartment below.

  “Crouch down!” Antoinette yelled in a kind of whisper. “Crouch down with the baby!”

  Amelia’s hands got numb and cold, and she started to cry, and the baby started to cry again. The vomit was already hardening, though Simon had vomited less than a minute earlier and it had never hardened so quickly. It was as though they were living in fast-forwarded time.

  Simon didn’t understand about being quiet. He yipped and yelped and gasped for breath. Amelia wiped vomit from his face with her vomit-covered shirt.

  Antoinette crawled over to Amelia and took Simon. With corpse particles on her hands.

  Amelia wiped herself off with a linen blanket from Simon’s Pack ’n Play. Tossed the soiled blanket to Antoinette and Simon. Simon’s eyes were wide open staring at Antoinette. He was trying to see something deep into her. Amelia saw that. Amelia believed that was true.

  Sprinting up the concrete stairs outside was a young, thin body in all black and a black baseball cap, running through the open front door, past the shattered decorative interior door, past Jupiter’s body, up the interior wooden stairs and up to the bedroom or office floor. She was running from the gunshots, from the gunshots in the street.

  “That was the girl,” Amelia said. “That was the girl with them.”

  There was some banging upstairs, some wild banging and crashing, but then the house settled.

  The girl, Amelia was nearly certain, had gone all the way up, past the bedroom floor to the top floor, the office and exercise room floor. There was a lock on that door. The girl had locked herself in Amelia’s office. The black girl who’d been with the kids who’d shot Jupiter. Amelia tried to call 911 but couldn’t get a signal.

  Chapter 27

  “I shot him!” Daniel shouted, sprinting up the interior stairs from the downstairs garden unit, banging on the door that connected his apartment to Amelia and Aaron’s parlor floor.

  Antoinette let him in. They looked at each other uncomprehendingly. They had never formally met before, Daniel and Antoinette. Antoinette had only seen Daniel look at her every morning on her way up the stoop.

  Daniel had not expected Antoinette, and Antoinette did not want to let this man with a gun into the house. But after a moment, she stepped aside.

  Daniel was shaking. “I think I shot the man who shot Mr. Jupiter. I saw it. I saw the whole thing. Well . . . well I couldn’t see anything inside the house. I was watching up through my window.”

  Chapter 28

  The streets were full of teenagers. Hundreds of teenagers were already gathering around the house. Daniel was inside with a pistol, waving it around his head. He had a shotgun in his other hand. His arms were shaking around his bright red hairy face.

  Antoinette asked Jesus for forgiveness and Allah for strength. She locked the doors and windows, closed the wooden shutters.

  A large group of kids gathered outside. A number of them wore ill-fitting sports jerseys probably stolen from nearby closets. Antoinette didn’t know if the other kids guilty of shooting Jupiter were with them, but she didn’t see any cops there, so she didn’t see why not. If Antoinette had been guilty of shooting someone she would have run home, but she wasn’t as young as these kids were, and she wasn’t as wild. One of the kids who’d shot Jupiter was shot, outside. Another was upstairs in the office. She didn’t know if the girl upstairs was good or evil, so Antoinette tried to keep herself calm, with faith and vigilance.

  Amelia sat silent, clutching Simon and a bottle. Her shirt was dry but sour. Simon didn’t want to drink. He was shaking. “You have to drink, baby. Nothing can touch us. We have each other,” Amelia was saying. She wanted to get Simon’s body intact through the next few hours. Her body’s job was, as it had been when he was inside her, to protect him. It was scary holding him in the same way it had been scary to be pregnant. She shared his vulnerability. And she bore responsibility.

  “The girl’s in the house,” Amelia said to Daniel and Antoinette. She didn’t know whom to say it to. She didn’t know what to do. Her eyes darted back and forth between them.

  “The girl who was with the boy you shot,” Antoinette told Daniel. “She must have been running from the shooting?”

  “Get her out of here,” Amelia said. “Get her out of my house!”

  “I should shoot her, too?” Daniel said.

  But then Amelia returned to Simon. “There’s nothing we have to worry about, baby boy.”

  Simon seemed worried. He seemed tense. He felt her tension. She tried to relax. She counted backward in her mind from twenty. She counted backward in her mind from one hundred by sevens. She counted backward in her mind in French. Simon still seemed tense.

  “Who-oo’s my ba-by,” Amelia sang. “You’re my ba-by—you’re my baby, baby.”

  She pressed him against her chest, and he didn’t seem to like it. He screwed up his face. He wouldn’t drink. But he didn’t squirm away. She held him against the sour smell of his vomit, and he just remained there, rigid. She counted backward in her mind again. She checked her phone but there were no bars. FaceTime wasn’t working. Aaron wasn’t responding to texts. She Snapchatted him, but he only checked that occasionally. She Snapchatted Aaron a photo of Jupiter’s body on the floor.

  Chapter 29

  Daniel was in Amelia’s kitchen to wash his hands. He always washed his hands after shooting.

  Amelia tried to call 911 again but couldn’t get a signal. She asked Antoinette and Daniel, but Antoinette didn’t have any bars, either, and Daniel wasn’t listening. Amelia thought briefly about Skype, but that seemed impossibly complicated on her phone, and the girl was in her office.

  What damage could the girl do? Access her email, but that didn’t matter, probably. She could steal, but who cared? She was in her home. She was a stranger in her home. A dangerous stranger who was in her home and possibly armed. Whose friend had just been shot. Whose friend had just shot and killed Jupiter.

  “Should we just let her stay upstairs?” Amelia said. “Simon won’t drink.”

  “For the moment, yes,” Daniel said, with a certainty that thrilled him. “She can’t do any harm there. And we’re three of us here. And armed.”


  Daniel put his Beretta M9 into the sink, because the sink was empty and the counter was covered in bottles and containers of baby formula. The gun was black, and the sink was white, which had the effect of making the gun look fake. Daniel was shaking. He’d just killed a man—a boy—in some combination of self-defense, revenge, and because he thought he’d never have an opportunity like this again.

  He’d been in bed when he heard the original scuffle upstairs. He’d been spending more time in bed. He couldn’t read as well lately, and he had trouble going out. He lay in bed listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast, Common Sense. Carlin talked about American and international politics from a leftist perspective that pretended to be independent. There’d been a poll out recently that Daniel thought about while listening to the Dan Carlin podcast: 37 percent of Americans consider themselves politically independent, but as John Dickerson had said on Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, the statistic was meaningless. Or, if not meaningless, at least more indicative of voters’ odd psychologies than whom they were going to vote for. People who had never voted Democrat in their lives called themselves politically independent. It made them feel more autonomous, more . . . independent. Anyway, Dan Carlin shared most of Daniel’s beliefs about how war was a great evil and the government should be more transparent. Common Sense was a bit wishy-washy for Daniel’s brother, who was more of a Rand Paul libertarian without the isolationist bent.

  This episode of Common Sense had been boring—Carlin was going on as usual about William Binney and Thomas Drake telling the world about the US government spying on its citizens—so when Daniel heard the commotion upstairs he removed the earbuds and ate a few Altoids and put on his jeans and button-down oxford and opened his window and craned his long, thin torso to see what was going on. He only had to wait a minute or two until Mr. Jupiter came tumbling out with a teenage kid. Daniel liked Mr. Jupiter because once the two of them had been up together past midnight. Jupiter had been waiting up for his son, and Daniel had been waiting up for Thela. Jupiter had brought out a couple of beers and they sat on Aaron’s stoop for twenty minutes and talked about politics, but then just sat silently for another hour before Thela got home. They’d agreed that though Obama wasn’t keeping his promises, the Republicans were mostly to blame because of their obstructionism. Jupiter was the one who’d used that word, obstructionism.

  So when he’d seen Jupiter, hurt from the tumble with the kid, gather himself and retreat back into Aaron’s house, Daniel was on high alert. Daniel prided himself on not seeing all these kids as just a sea of black faces on the stoop. He knew which ones were going to school in the morning and which ones hung around on the corner up to no good. He couldn’t see inside the house, but he could see all four faces on the stoop. He recognized the three boys as kids from Boys and Girls High, he thought, but the tomboy he didn’t know.

  When, from his window below the stoop steps, Daniel had seen that kid’s pistol bulge in his sweats, he’d gotten his own pistol from his nightstand. And when he’d heard the pistol fire four times, he steadied himself and opened his window. When nothing happened for thirty seconds or so, he retrieved his shotgun from under the bed. And when the kid with the pistol saw Daniel with his shotgun, the kid aimed his pistol again, this time at Daniel. So Daniel shot the kid.

  Chapter 30

  “I can’t get ahold of Aaron,” Amelia said. “I can’t get ahold of Daddy. Texts aren’t going through and he’s not answering his email.”

  That girl was alone upstairs as a mob grew outside. Simon was ignoring the bottle at his lips. His skin was transparent, and he was taking what felt like three breaths per second.

  Suddenly, a cry rose through the mob, the cry of a wounded animal. Maybe the boy Daniel shot had died. Maybe the others, in a furious imitation, responded with cries of their own. Soon Amelia felt everyone outside threatening and moaning. Cries of anger hurled up at Amelia’s building. Kids were climbing up on cars and on trees to reach at Amelia’s windows, so far without luck.

  “Where is he?” Amelia said, meaning Aaron.

  “I wouldn’t want him coming here,” Antoinette said.

  “Oh my God,” Amelia said.

  “Everything is locked up?” Daniel said. Daniel’s eyes were laying claim to everything in her house. “Secure?”

  A man’s voice that wasn’t Aaron’s or even Jupiter’s sounded wrong in the house. Jupiter’s body lay on its back in the entranceway toward the stairs. Simon kept looking toward it, or maybe Amelia was imagining it. But it was all Simon seemed interested in. His neck kept turning toward it when Amelia blocked him from it with her body. Daniel’s voice was deeper, louder, than it should have been with his stiff, lanky body, and he held a shotgun in his right hand.

  “All the doors and windows on this floor,” Antoinette said.

  “Everything on my floor,” Daniel said. He paced back and forth on the parlor floor looking through the cracks in the wooden shutters deciding whether or not to aim his shotgun. Whether anyone was climbing too close.

  Chapter 31

  The girl was still upstairs. And Amelia was scared of so many things. She was scared of more in that moment than she’d ever been scared of in her life. She was scared that Aaron was missing, and that he’d never come back . . . that he’d come back and accuse her of mishandling the situation . . . that he’d come back and Simon would be hurt and that it’d be her fault . . . that he was worried about her and had no way to reach her . . . that he’d come back and be hurt by the crowd outside. She was scared that the crowd outside would break into her home and hurt her or Simon. That they’d hurt her home, rape her, kill her, and that it would be her fault . . . that it wouldn’t be but it would hurt anyway. That they’d kill her baby . . . kidnap her baby and that it would be her fault. She was scared that the girl upstairs would hurt her or her baby, or that Daniel would hurt the girl and she would be able to prevent it but she would be too selfish to.

  “The police won’t blame you,” Antoinette said. “You had to shoot if he was aiming at you.” Antoinette was on a chair she’d pulled up, it seemed to Amelia, to keep Daniel company while he kept watch. Daniel had red hair that sprouted in curls on his face and unkempt coils on his head. Antoinette had taken the baby and was holding him on her knee and bouncing him and cleaning him off with wet wipes while she talked to Daniel. Daniel was deciding whether or not to aim his gun at various windows. Antoinette said, “I’ve always told my son that there were two types of worry: you could like people who worried about other people, and be careful about people who worried about themselves.”

  “Mm-hm,” Daniel said, as though what Antoinette said applied to the situation. Amelia felt completely alone.

  “Teddy!” Antoinette said. From her phone, she emailed her boy to tell him to go directly to church after school and that she might be home late. “It’s safe in other neighborhoods, right?”

  “You’ve got bars?” Amelia said. “Oh, never mind. iMessage.”

  “Of course it is,” Daniel said, aiming his shotgun, then lowering it.

  “Where is Thela?” Antoinette said.

  “Boston,” Daniel said.

  Antoinette and Daniel had never met before that Amelia knew of, but she could tell that Antoinette liked Daniel. From what Amelia could tell, everyone liked Antoinette, and Antoinette seemed to like everyone. Men, at least. This would have shocked Amelia just a few hours before. Amelia had always considered Antoinette good with the baby but cold. Jupiter’s body lay there where they all could see it, but only she and her baby ever looked at it. His shoes were workers’ shoes, heavy and worn.

  “I’ll go lock the bedroom windows in case they try to climb closer,” Amelia said. “You have Simon?”

  “I’ve got Simon,” Antoinette said. “You’re not worried about the young lady up there coming down? You’re not worried about going to the bedroom floor alone?”

  “Take my pistol,” Daniel said, jogging to the kitchen to retrieve it. “The girl upstairs isn’t a
rmed as far as I can tell.”

  Amelia laughed. She laughed now at the impossibility of her taking the pistol in the same way she’d laughed when she’d watched as the second World Trade Center building had fallen.

  Chapter 32

  Aaron didn’t check his phone until just before the fifth race, when he had already placed a bet on the favorite. Five grand to win six. But he was confident, and he’d win back the losses from the previous race and have a grand to spare. And start feeling great again. The feeling alone would be worth it. He felt as if he might be a step closer to understanding himself, which meant understanding the world and his new life. The rest of his life. Maybe his latest psychologist was correct, that these races were Aaron’s last connection to his old life. “The wagering brings you back each time,” he’d said. “It’s your final connection to your life as a rabbi.” When the psychologist had suggested this correlation—that without the gambling, he’d no longer have any rabbi in him—Aaron had laughed it off, but the shrink had made Aaron focus on the possibility. The basics of Freud as Aaron understood them were that in order to move beyond one’s hang-ups one had to confront them—understand that the reason one was working as a professional gambler on stocks and bonds and then sneaking away from work to bet on horses was not for the winnings but for the connection to a life one used to live. Once one understood that, one could contemplate that previous life, for example, and reminisce, maybe, instead of sneaking away from work. And the gambling might become less desirable. And he could become a consultant. Or an academic.