Old people said that Van Cortlandt Park had been a happy place once. There had been picnics and children playing and families everywhere. I couldn’t imagine it. Now it was just a dreary place, a place where we went to dispose of the dead.

Our little convoy stopped and two men—I thought they were probably from St. Athanasius, María’s church—took the casket from the truck and placed it on the concrete platform in front of the old band shell. Even before the priest got to the front of it, the two men had begun to pour water into the openings at the foot and the head of the casket. Biocremation took only twenty minutes if everything went right. Oxygen-infused potassium hydroxide lined the casket, the water was poured in, and in seconds, the body would begin to decompose. We wanted to honor María Esteban, but no one wanted to be away from our neighborhood for too long. It wasn’t safe.

I had read historical accounts of bodies cremated by burning. It would have been better, I thought. We could have seen the flames rising to the heavens. We could have pretended the body was going to someplace called Heaven.

A priest was praying in Spanish for María’s soul while another man—short, square, baggy pants—held a shotgun as he nervously looked around for any favelos, roaming gangs who might be in the area.

Then the priest’s prayer was over, and the dead woman’s neighbors were getting into their cars. The city would send their crews to clean up the final remains of my cousin. I watched as tiny birds made black silhouettes against the steel-gray sky.

“Dahlia, it’s time to go.” Alfredo, the owner of the bodega on my corner, spoke softly.

“I’m not going back,” I said impulsively.

“You don’t have any other place to go,” Alfredo answered. He smelled of garlic and tobacco. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned away. “Try not to stay out too late. In any case, we’ll wait up for you.”

As the cars rolled away, I saw their faces against the glass windows. I knew they would understand how I felt. They would think about me and María as they drove the six miles back to our own little section of el barrio. And I knew they would save my place.

María had been a cousin and a friend. She knew how to touch me, and when to put her arm around my waist and smile at me even when her own life was not going well. More than that. More than that, she knew how not to dig too deep for the truth when the truth wasn’t worth a damn, which was most of the time.

Years ago I had read Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. Good shit, mostly. We, me, María, everybody in the Bronx, we were the wretched of the earth, wandering through our lives like sheep in a storm, struggling to make sense of what was not sensible. I was feeling sorry for myself.