Someone’s found an iPad on the bus for the girls and they watch Dora. Someone’s found a bag of Cheetos for them and they sit entranced, orange powder covering their faces and hands.
I think so, I say. Where is she?
I run my hands up and down the girls’ arms and legs. It’s cold out and they don’t have sufficient clothes on. The big, rough blanket sits awkwardly around the three of us.
Is she okay? I say.
The cop looks at me, then smiles at the girls without responding.
Would you be able to identify a photograph? he says.
The female Spanish-speaking cop is talking to our neighbor and he grabs my arm as they lead us to a cop car. I grab hold of his hand.
They show us a blurry black-and-white photo of Josslyn. It looks paused, a screenshot. I nod, crying, though I can’t say why I’m crying.
Our neighbor keeps a hand around my arm. He goes three times a week to get dialysis. His skin is sallow.
The female cop is speaking to him about the photograph.
Where is she? I ask the male cop.
Did she have children? he says. A boyfriend?
She has three kids, I say. She talks about them to me. I know they’re grown up but she talks about them as if they’re as small as mine.
He shows me another picture. Another screenshot. The man is on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. He wears a tank on his back.
I get queasy. He was there today, I say. I walked by him.
He was standing on the landing and I’d smiled at him. The girls had stopped fighting to smile at him. He’d kept his eyes angled toward the floor.
They nod toward me. Another screenshot, my back, hunched over, both girls holding my hands, their books and toys clutched in their free hands.
That’s you? the woman says. I don’t realize at first that it’s a question. Obviously it’s me. I look at them. They’ve frozen the screen. The girls are looking at the man, his head still down.
I nod.
Had you seen him before?
I look back at our neighbor, who is staring, shocked, at the screen before us, his face even more sallow.
I don’t think so, I say. I’m not sure.
* * *
On the security camera, which I watch, hours later, in the interrogation room with the overly apologetic cops, I see the man in the exterminator’s uniform. The girls are in another room with a female cop, more junk food, the same iPad. On the screen, I smile at the man, my lips move. I must have mumbled something. Hi, hello, good afternoon, trying to be polite, but my mumbling often isn’t loud enough and goes unheard.
He smiled back at me, can slung over his shoulder, the wand for spraying in his hand. So that’s— I say. He pushed her into the elevator and she stood there, mouth agape, talking, maybe. She screamed or talked or begged. The wand popped up, although he was out of the camera’s line of vision. The wand waved past the screen three times and it feels certain in this moment that she’s screaming. He threw something small and round in the elevator, the wand disappeared, door slid shut, the screen went black.
They caught him within hours of the explosion. They have him on tape. There were burn marks on his fingers and his face.
I confirm the time they already have on the bottom of the camera screen. I confirm I saw the man, that he was standing in the stairwell.
Had you seen him before? they ask over and over.
I shake my head. I don’t think so, I say.
Josslyn lived alone?
I think, I say.
The Dominican man, whose name I now know is Luis, has told me, through a combination of hand motions, English, and Spanish, that they think the man who killed her might have been her son.
* * *
I leave the girls with their iPad and with Luis and I call my husband to tell him what’s gone on.
Jesus, he says.
I think I’ll start to cry but I stare straight ahead, wishing he were here, waiting for him to tell me what to do.
Did someone call her family? he says.
I think.
How are the girls?
Watching Dora, I say. I’m so grateful for the straightforward ways that comfort can be given to small children. Eating junk food and being doted on.
How are you? he says.
I stay quiet because we can’t afford for him to hear me crying. If I start to cry he might come home and then we’ll have no way to pay our rent.
* * *
The explosion makes the news and three of my friends call.
You have to move, says my friend who is quadrilingual.
We can’t move, I don’t say.
* * *
At the apartment, the burned smell is everywhere—the scorch of the explosion and the remnants of the water that they’d sprayed to make it stop, antiseptic smelling, bleachlike. It’s proof, each time we walk up the stairs, that the memory of violence that runs through my head a thousand times a day is real. The girls’ legs are small and squat and they’re exhausted by the walk up six flights to the apartment. Carry me, they both say. On the third floor, I scoop one into each arm and keep going.
* * *
Three days straight, I call in sick to work: I pick them up early from school. I take them to the park and pack loads of snacks and we run around and have a picnic. The fountains at the playgrounds have been turned on and they get soaking wet, still in their clothes, and then fall asleep in the stroller as we walk home.
The four-year-old is too big maybe for the stroller, but with the stroller, I can run them, and we go all over town. I push them uphill, leaning forward, arms stretched straight and legs digging in.
We loiter at the bookstore and sit on the floor and I read to them. They ask to buy books but I explain this is the books’ home and that they have to stay for now. They pile on top of me, one and then the other, each with a stack of books beside them. Our legs all stick together until someone’s leg is taking up too much space and then there’s fighting, and then both of them get up and my legs are wet from sweat. I ignore the emails from work. I think maybe I’ll never go back and we’ll tell the landlord that we’re not paying rent until the apartment doesn’t smell like smoke any longer, and then I think about Josslyn and I cry and then stop crying so our girls don’t get scared.
I keep trying to fit it into my brain. We sat outside together drinking coffee, all the hi hello kiss the girls how are yous. She was a human who was loved and living. She died in this awful, thoughtless way. Like with nearly every other tragic thing I scroll through, in all the scrolling, I feel wholly ill equipped to digest it properly. I force myself, each time we climb the steps, to think about her, to attempt to mourn her, grieve her in some way. I try to hold, each time we walk past her door, the fact of her, and then I try to hold inside my head the fact of her being gone. I don’t know, though, what to do with this fact. The specific shape this sadness takes is knobbed and awkward. We did not know her, really. The violence she experienced is almost unfathomable to me.
* * *
My husband comes home two days later. He got in a fight with his clients. He was desperate to come home and they refused to pay him because the job wasn’t done but he still left. Fuck them, he says, when he talks about it, but he looks down. Our funds are dwindling. Later, after we’ve put the girls to bed, after they have hugged him, kissed him, climbed overtop him and he has cooked us dinner, we click through the spreadsheets we’ve been keeping to keep track of our income and our spending. His student loans weren’t covered by the bankruptcy; we have piles of letters from creditors, one of whom is contesting the bankruptcy, and we have to pay the lawyer more. My husband says: How is it we do everything so wrong?