Judy watched as his almond-shaped, coal-black eyes danced with childlike mischief. She took in the straight hair that extended from his scalp in fine, black wisps. It was at moments like these that the resemblance between Judy's nephew and her great-niece was uncanny. Looking at Darnell was like looking at Kenya in a fun house mirror. He was her reflection, twisted into a gnarled, gray shell of itself.
“You look like you seen a ghost,” Darnell said, reading Judy's expression.
“And you look like you chasin' one,” she snapped back. “Ain't shit else in that pipe, Darnell. All the scrapin' in the world ain't gon' change that. Now if you spendin', you can stay. But if you ain't, you can get out. Matter fact, all o' y'all get the hell out right now.”
The pipers got up without a word and slowly shuffled to the door. Judy opened it and pushed them into the hallway. Darnell, who was last in the procession, turned to her as he left.
“I know my sister,” he said with a mirthless grin. “Same way she called the cops, Daneen gon' do whatever she gotta do to find Kenya.”
“It's a li'l late for her to be tryin' to do whatever she gotta do for Kenya, ain't it, Darnell?”
At that, Darnell's eyes grew intense. He looked at Judy as if he was probing her for the truth.
“That's what I'm wonderin', Judy,” he said, staring at her as he walked out the door. “I'm wonderin' if it's too late.”
Â
Â
Â
It was five-thirty, and dawn had begun to sift burnt orange sunlight across the cracked sidewalks outside the projects. A cab screamed to a halt, and Daneen burst from the backseat with a crazed look she hadn't worn in the two months since she'd begun her latest try at recovery.
She charged into the building, ran past the foyer's shrinking shadows, then bolted up the steps. But as she knifed through concrete passages that the light of dawn had yet to reach, she was reminded of all the ugliness that lived and breathed within the Bridge.
Huddled in dark corners of the stairwell were the faces she despised: men she'd tricked for half a cap, women she'd fought for less than that, boys who'd snatched her self-respect and locked it in crack-filled vials.
She saw them and hated them still. Hated the glint of recognition in their eyes, the way their smirks withered to pity as she approached, the way their glances turned downward to avoid the awful truth that had brought her back.
Kenya. The sound of her name was just beneath the silence. Daneen could feel it. And as she reached the seventh floor and ran down the hallway to Judy's apartment, she silently prayed that she would soon be able to wrap her baby in her arms again, the way she'd done in the days before things fell apart.
Daneen tried to hold on to the sound of Kenya's name as she stood outside Judy's apartment, trying to gather herself. But she couldn't feel it anymore. It was as if her name was merely an echo, a reflection of what she used to be.
Daneen tightened her gut in an effort to push out the premonition that lingered there, then forced herself to raise her hand to knock. But before she could do so, the door swung open.
Judy was wearing a robe and a blank expression as she stared at
Daneen. When she saw that Daneen was frozen between her desire to leave and her need to stay, Judy opened the door a little wider and stood to one side.
Daneen walked in hesitantly. When she looked around the room and saw that Judy was alone, her tension eased, but only slightly. She stood in the middle of the floor, not quite sure of what to do next.
“Ain't nobody call and say where she was?” she asked, her words dropping like hammers against the silence.
“No,” Judy said. “And I ain't call nobody, either. Not even the cops.”
“Why not?”
“âCause somebody already called the cops for me,” Judy said, turning up the corners of her lips in mild disgust as she stared at her niece.
Daneen folded her arms and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She was clearly uncomfortable. “Look, Judy, what was I supposed to do? Sit there and wait for you to do it?”
“Don't matter,” Judy said. “I told âem wasn't nobody missin', and they left.”
“Well, call 'em back,” Daneen said, her voice nearly a squeal.
Judy ambled to her chair and sat down, pulling her near-full bundle of crack from one of her robe pockets and making a great show of counting each of the plastic caps.
Daneen turned away and tried to ignore the sudden churning in her stomach. But there was no denying the rumble that soon grew to a growl. It echoed across the room as Judy placed one cap after another on the table beside her chair.
“I think we should try to find her first,” Judy said, still counting the crack-filled vials.
Daneen couldn't hear Judy. Her nostrils were beginning to fill with the lingering scent of crack smoke. Her pores expelled tiny beads of sweat as her heart climbed out of her chest and beat wildly against her throat. The rumble in her stomach began to work downward until she felt that her bowels were going to burst.
And still, Judy counted. Daneen thought she could see a tiny smile playing on her aunt's lips.
“You know what I think, Daneen?” Judy asked as she counted. “I think Kenya gon' show up 'round nine o'clock talkin' 'bout âWhat's for breakfast?' Same way you used to do when you was her age. Disappearin' and showin' up when you felt like it. Remember how you used to do that?”
Daneen's mouth was beginning to water. She could hear Judy now, but couldn't concentrate on what she was saying. The taste of crack was once again dancing on her palate. The smell of it was overwhelming her.
“What's wrong, Daneen?” Judy said, with a self-satisfied smirk.
“You always did like to fuck with me, didn't you, Judy?” Daneen said, turning to face her aunt. “Probably doin' Kenya like that, too, ain't you? Figurin' out how to push her buttons. That's probably why she got the hell up outta here.”
“Kenya ain't weak as you,” Judy said, taking out one of the caps and opening it. “She don't give me the satisfaction.”
“I ain't gon' give it to you neither,” Daneen said, moving toward the door.
“You sure about that?” Judy picked up the open cap and held it in the air. “'Cause I sure could use some satisfaction right about now. You got some money, don't you, Daneen? First one's free.”
Daneen swallowed hard, ignoring the taste in her mouth, the rumble in her stomach, the stench in her nostrils. She backed toward the door, staring at the crack, even as she reached behind her and pawed at the air until her fingers closed around the doorknob.
“I gotta find my baby,” she said as she opened the door and stepped backward. “I justâI gotta find her.”
And with that, Daneen was goneâwithout a word about the final call she'd made before coming to Judy's apartment.
Not twenty miles from the chaos that was about to erupt in the projects, on the edge of a tree-lined section of Philadelphia called Chestnut Hill, Kevin Lynch could feel the quiet bearing down on him.
The solitude of middle-class living was the one thing Lynch hadn't mastered, even ten years removed from his last years in the projects. He still found himself wishing for profane tirades and breaking glass, childhood games and pulsing music. Sounds he had almost forgotten since leaving the richness of ghetto poverty.
Whenever the silence he hated was broken, he jumped to embrace the noise, secretly hoping to snatch a piece of the confusion that was so much a part of him.
That's what had happened when he had received the phone call shortly before five. He had snapped awake to the sound of the ringing phone and listened with growing panic to Daneen's sordid tale of crack dens and missing children.
It had taken him just minutes to get up and bathe and dress. When he came back to his bedroom and his sleeping wife, he moved quietly, strapping on his shoulder holster and his handheld radio before easing himself down onto the corner of their bed. He bent
and twisted his broad shoulders to tie his sneakers, then stood to his full six feet as the moonlight streamed in from the bedroom window and reflected against his bald head. When he was about to leave, his wife, who'd been listening to him move about the room, decided to speak.
“Where're you going?” Jocelyn asked in a sleepy voice as she lay unmoving beneath a single sheet.
Lynch considered lying. He didn't want his wife to know where he was going. More important, he didn't want her to know that a woman he'd known since childhood had asked for his help. With the troubles they'd had in their marriage lately, he knew that Jocelyn would read more into it than was there.
Things had changed in the six months since she'd lost the baby.
Jocelyn had experienced complications five months into the pregnancy and was forced to go in for an emergency delivery that was supposed to be routine. The baby was a boy. They'd planned to name him Kevin. He didn't survive. Jocelyn nearly died, too.
Though she had come through the experience physically, she'd suffered a terrible emotional toll. And rather than cling to her husband, she withdrew from him. No sex, no communication, open bitterness.
It played on Lynch, made him tense, magnified everything he felt. His wife knew that, and it worried her. Because somewhere deep down, she believed that he would eventually look elsewhereâaway from the staid environs of Chestnut Hillâto find what she refused to give at home.
She knew that a part of him longed for the raw energy of the projects. The Bridge, after all, was just like him. Concrete slabs, damaged and defiant, wrapped tightly around a steadfast will to survive. He still had old memories, old friends, and old connections in the projects. He claimed to want to forget them, but in reality, he cherished them. They gave him identity.
His wife, though she would never say it, believed those connections to the projects impeded his ability to smooth out his rough edges the way she wanted him to.
Even in the dark, Lynch could feel his wife's concern. He turned away from her as he answered her question.
“Something came up at work,” he said vaguely. “I should be back sometime this morning. It shouldn't take long.”
“Be careful,” Jocelyn whispered in an anxiety-laden voice.
He mumbled a response, then strode down the hall and into his daughter's room. He stood silently beside her bed, watching her sleep, then brushed his massive hand against her face.
“I love you, Melanie,” he said, sweeping her hair away from her forehead to get a better look at her.
He stood for a moment, marveling at the young lady his daughter had become. She didn't play the same childhood games as other girls her age. Rather, she immersed herself in black thought and high fashionâtaking weekly shopping trips with her mother so the two of them could satisfy their cravings for revolution and Armani.
But beneath all that maturity, she was the same as Kenyaâa little black girl who could very well be missing, too. A girl who, in the scheme of things, didn't matter much to anyone but her family.
That thought crowded Lynch's mind as he backed softly out of her room. He knew that it was only by the grace of God that he could still kiss his daughter good night. Not everyone was that fortunate.
It was six o'clock by the time he started down Germantown Avenue, breathing in the morning through the open window of his unmarked Chrysler Grand Fury.
The police car bounced along the cobblestones of the centuries-old street, the tires sliding on and off the trolley tracks that followed the winding road from affluence to poverty. Watching absently as the pristine sidewalks north of Mount Airy Avenue gave way to discarded beer bottles south of Chelten, he tried to think of where his best friend's daughter could be.
It had been years since the last time Lynch had seen Kenya. She was only two years old then, sitting quietly on her mother's lap as Lynch sat across from them in Daneen's apartment. Kenya had stared at him. And he stared back, his eyes filled with loathing for the project whore and her bastard child.
Lynch hated Daneen for what she'd done to his friend Tyrone. He despised the way she'd lied to him about the child. The way she'd conned him into the crack trade. The way she'd placed the sliding board in front of him and pushed, then stood back and watched as his addiction had spiraled down to a violent death.
He hated Daneen Brown for all that and more. He tried to hate the child, too. But he couldn't. Though nothing of Kenya physically resembled Tyrone, there was something in the way she'd looked at him. It was like Ty's spirit was alive in her, peering out from the sparkling, coal-black eyes. It was like he'd known her for years.
That day, when he'd finally seen for himself the woman and the child Tyrone had loved as his own, he knew that what he'd always suspected was true. Kenya Brown was not Tyrone's daughterânot physically.
But in spirit, she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. She was all that was left of him. Lynch swore to himself after looking into her eyes that he would help Kenya Brown to make it out.
It was a promise he'd done little to keep. But that was about to change.
Â
Â
Â
After leaving Judy's apartment, Daneen stood outside the building, waiting anxiously for Lynch to round the corner. Ten minutes turned into fifteen as she tried to ignore the stench of death emanating from the man-size weeds in the vacant lot on the corner.
By six-fifteen, she knew that she couldn't stand there any longer. She had to do something.
Daneen rushed back into the building. Up the steps, down a hall.
And then she was there, standing in front of Lily's door and pounding her fist against it. She pounded again, then waited, praying that Lily had allowed Kenya to stay the night with her. When Lily answered, Daneen didn't wait for a greeting.
“My daughter here?” she said, barging into the apartment and looking around the living room for signs of Kenya.
Lily felt sorry for her.
“No, Daneen, she ain't here,” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “You want some coffee or somethin'?”
“Lily, I ain't got time for no small talk,” Daneen said, standing near the front door and looking around nervously. “You seen Kenya or not?”
Lily came back to the couch with a cup of black coffee. “Sit down, Daneen.”
“I don't wanna sit down,” Daneen said, raising her voice. “I want my damn daughter. Now where she at?”
Lily sipped at the coffee and contemplated telling her about the dream she'd had concerning Kenya.
“I don't know where she at,” she said, after deciding against it. “She played with Janay almost all day yesterday, then they came in here, and I gave 'em dinner. Kenya stayed 'til somethin' after nine, then I sent her home.”
“She ain't come back here last night?”
“She ain't spent the night here in 'bout a week, 'cause Judy don't want her stayin' here no more. Least that's what Judy told me. If it was up to me, she could stay here all the time, 'cause it ain't like Kenya got a real home to go to.”
At that, a simmering anger filled Daneen's eyes. Lily could see it. So could Janay. She had come out of the bedroom and was watching them from the hallway.
“I ain't mean that like it sounded, Daneen. It's just thatâ”
“Yeah, I know what it's
just,”
Daneen said. “It's
just
that you one o' them bitches think they better than everybody else.”
Lily stood up. “Look, you ain't gon' be standin' up here disrespectin' me in my house.”
“I'ma do more than that you don't tell me where my daughter at.”
“Oh, so now all of a sudden Kenya your daughter,” Lily said cynically. “Where was all that mother love when she needed you, Daneen? I probably done spent more time with Kenya in the last year than you ever did. Now you got the nerve to bring yo' ass down here like you gon' save the day? You shoulda been down here before somethin' happened to her.”
Daneen's head reared back as if she had been slapped. “What you mean somethin' happened to her? How you know somethin' happened to her?”
Lily answered in a near whisper. “I just know.”
Daneen knew, too. That's why she didn't answer.
Janay watched it all from the hallway. But she couldn't let it go at that. So she walked into the living room, and through a haze of tears, asked the question that was burning on her lips.
“Why you let her stay there with Miss Judy and Mr. Sonny anyway?” she cried, her accusing eyes fixed on Daneen.
“Janay, go to bed,” Lily said. But Janay would not be silenced.
“You know what they do in there, Miss Daneen.” Janay's voice shook with emotion as it rose to a near shout.
“And you let Kenya stay there anyway. You ain't come get her. You ain't do nothin'. They was hurtin' her up there, Miss Daneen. They was hurtin' her and ain't nobody care.”
Janay broke down, the sobs wracking her body as she collapsed against her mother. Daneen stood speechless, staring at the nine-year-old and wondering what she meant by
hurt.
Lily glanced at Daneen, then took Janay's chin in her hand and raised her face until she was looking into her daughter's eyes. She wiped Janay's tears and ran her fingers through her hair. And then she asked.
“Who was hurtin' Kenya, baby?”
Janay looked from her mother to Daneen and back again. Then
she fixed her eyes on the floor and uttered the name no one wanted to hear.
“It was Mr. Sonny,” she said. “He was doin' it to her. She told me it hurted.”
Â
Â
Â
It was six-thirty when Lynch parked the unmarked car on the sidewalk and ran into the building, bounding past the elevator and into the stairwell.
He moved with purpose, pulling himself up by the railing that ran alongside the stairs. He was passing the fifth floor when Daneen stumbled out of the hallway and into the stairwell, nearly bowling him over in the process.
Lynch reached out to grab her, and as his hand touched hers, they both paused, almost imperceptibly, before she tore away from him and bolted up the steps.
“What is it, Daneen?” he called after her, ignoring the electricity he'd felt in her touch. “Did they find Kenya?”
She rounded the landing to the seventh floor. With Lynch lagging behind, Daneen flew down the hall and burst into Judy's apartment.
Judy had barely looked up before Daneen was upon her.
She jumped headfirst into the chair where Judy sat, knocking it backward. Money and caps flew into the air as Judy's head bounced against the floor. Daneen was merciless, straddling Judy's chest and using her knees to pin her arms to the floor.
“Bitch! You knew what that nigga was doin' to my baby!”
She punctuated each word with punches and slaps. With her eyes stretched wide and a rope of saliva swinging from her open mouth, she looked like a madwoman. She drove Judy's head into the floor, punching her again and again as Judy struggled in vain to break free.
Lynch tried to stop her, but Daneen would not be denied. She continued to flail away as she repeated the words like a mantra.
“You knew!” she cried, pounding her fists into Judy's face. “You knew what that nigga was doing!”
She continued until Lynch was able to force his hands under her armpits and clasp them behind her neck, pulling Daneen's arms into the air and dragging her away from Judy.