That little family in the Tenement Museum kept coming back to me, popping into my thoughts. Would they make it? Why would they live there? Maybe they didn’t feel they had the right to one of those condos. I started getting mad, thinking about it. I looked down and my hands were clenched into fists.

It probably took us longer to get there than if we’d walked in a straight line, but we made it. We got to this neighborhood where everybody knew what was going on, knew the building. Someone pointed us to where it was.

It was huge. There were these giant windows that went all the way up to ceilings, and the floors were taller than in any building I’d ever been in. There were silhouettes moving against the dark windows, and down near the door.

We got closer to the door. There was a huge man there. Another came outside with him. There were more inside. I didn’t know if he had a gun or a knife. I knew I didn’t want to mess with him, no matter what I had.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I threw back my shoulders and got up in his face, even though it wasn’t completely necessary.

“We heard about what you’re doing here. We think we can help you. We think you can help us.”

The man standing there uncrossed his muscled arms from in front of his chest.

“You willing to slag? There can’t be anybody here that doesn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Work. Are you willing to work with us?”

“Yeah,” Sebastian said, stepping forwards. “We’ve been working to get by alone. We can work here, too.”

“You’re willing to cooperate with other people?” he seemed to be looking hard at me this time. People are always pegging me for the troublemaker.

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“And you’ve got nowhere else to go?” he asked. His voice softened at this last question.

“If we did, we wouldn’t be here,” I said.

He stepped aside, just like that. And we walked in the door.

There was someone painting.

On the hospital in the Bronx, there had already been murals. Those murals had been of saintly people in white, doing good things with their hands, making the world safe and helping people live. Those murals had been lies once the storm came.