You don’t know the first thing about it. How hard I worked to just get clean. I’ve been off dope since April, you know that? Completely, utterly clean. Do you think I just gave that up one day on a whim? Do you?

I tried to make a sound but nothing came out of my mouth. My peripheral vision had gone dark, so that I was staring at Claudia through a tunnel. I was at one end and those mad eyes were at the other.

I’ve been abandoned and I’ve lost every fucking thing I care about. But you don’t care, do you, Lily? You’re just horrified and ashamed. You didn’t even ask me what happened. You don’t even care why I’m like this.

Claudia let go then, and I fell backwards into the hallway. I hope you drop dead, she said, then she kicked my feet out of the doorway and slammed the door. I lay there, staring at the ceiling for a minute before I’d gotten up and stumbled down the stairs. I’d run from the building, swearing to myself I’d never go back. Now, lying in Jesse’s bathtub, I was sure that my sister had deliberately lured me back into her web. I was trapped as surely as if her hands were still closing around my throat.

CHAPTER 11

Coming up into the chilly sunlight from the Castle Hill subway station, I tried not to retch at the reek of urine. No matter how many stories I heard about the revitalization of the South Bronx, I thought of it as New York’s own heart of darkness. Farther north and west were the glories of Belmont and Riverdale; south was Castle Hill itself, a neighborhood that was proudly working-class, much like Norwood, the formerly Irish enclave above the Botanical Garden. But the subway stop was in the no-man’s-land between Soundview and East Tremont. Both were textbook cases of grinding poverty, but Soundview had the distinction of a murder rate that soared while the rest of the city’s plummeted.

I’d been born in the Bronx, but the only reason I’d ever come back was for my family. Claudia and I had been raised in sight of the Woodlawn Cemetery, on the borough’s northern border. It had been a tough neighborhood, but a close one, and not a place where junkies went to score dope. My father was buried in Woodlawn, and I brought flowers to his grave from time to time, and always on his birthday. Soundview was another story: it was early Tuesday morning, and cold enough to keep foot traffic to a minimum, but the juxtaposition of sagging buildings with sleek SUVs parked out front hinted at the score. I kept my head down, lifting it to glance at the mural of the angry eagle as I turned at Newbold Street, and I moved fast.