Lourdes woke up from an afternoon nap complaining about the dirty dishes her son had left in the sink that morning. He was twenty four and still giving her ample reasons to fuss and fight. She mentioned it to her prima Mayra on the phone, but when she tried to say his name the first letter choked up in her throat like a fish bone. How odd, Lourdes thought, but she did not let it ferment into worry. She did not know that her son was already laid out in the lobby of their building, that the mousy girl from the second floor was running upstairs at that very minute to tell her mother what she’d seen.
Lourdes called the bodega where her son worked to remind him to bring home the eggs, milk, and bread. Lately he’d been buying white instead of wheat, or forgetting to bring the bread altogether, another point of contention between them.
“His shift ended an hour ago, Doña,” Miguelito the bodeguero said. “He’s probably sweet-talking some girl on the block, you know how he is.”
Lourdes tried to say his name to vocalize her disapproval, but she stuttered again, more violently this time. She settled for referring to him as “ese muchacho,” and hung up the phone in frustration. Then she put her fingers to her lips to check that everything was where it should be. Her crooked bottom teeth, her full lips, her heavy tongue pulsing in her mouth. She chuckled and tried to fight her worry from blooming into presentiment. “Must be that dementia,” she whispered to herself. “That’s how it started with mami.” She waved away the worry like she was swatting a fly.
Meanwhile word about her son was spreading. Lourdes didn’t know that the vecinos downstairs were already passing the story of her son’s murder from apartment to apartment. His body had not lain dead in the lobby for an hour and already half the building knew, his name flowing from lip to lip as the rumor ballooned with sorrow and conspiracy.
Outside a car passed by blasting merengue. A couple of kids made circles around an open fire hydrant. They shrieked and yelled after each other loud enough that Lourdes could hear them on the fourth floor. She shut the window, tired of the summer symphony that broke her peace. When the doorbell rang, Lourdes was finally settling into her couch. It was her day off, the only day of the week she didn’t waste her hours cleaning toilet bowls and making hotel beds. Her lower back pulsed as she got up. She’d ask her son for a massage later as payment for leaving the dishes.
Lourdes sucked her teeth when she saw her through the peephole. It was the woman next door who smoked a pack a day in the hallway no matter how much everyone complained. They’d gotten into an ugly argument last week. Lourdes forgot herself and wished the worst cancer on the woman. She apologized to God later, but in the moment it felt good to deliver her neighbor a slice of the truth.
“I don’t want any problems today,” Lourdes started.
“Your son,” was all the woman said. Those two words were not lost in the static of her raspy voice.
###
Shot and killed by Officer O’Brien, that undercover cop from the 34th precinct. Not an uncommon story. But it was the violence prior to the discharge of the gun that made the block whisper in horror and contempt.
Lourdes’ son was beaten purple before the cop’s heart softened enough to pull the trigger. The only witness, the mousy girl from the second floor, was on her way downstairs when she stumbled upon the scene. From where she hid, she caught a glimpse of a sleek black baton slam against a rib, a brow, the curved bone of a jaw. She froze at the sight. She knew the police were violent, she’d seen the news about Rodney King last year. But in her mind and on the news it was always the moreno americanos in combat with the cops. The occasional Boricua, caught in some senseless fire with the authorities. But most of the Dominicans in Washington Heights were a quiet group. They kept to themselves in their own little slice of upper Manhattan and parts of The Bronx. Even the tigueres among them were discreet about how they ran their nefarious businesses. And so the mousy girl, in her indolent youth, could not imagine why the cop should be beating Lourdes’ son. He was a charitable bodeguero who happened to sell drugs on the side. Everyone on the block knew about the side hustle and looked the other way because he offered a joke when he handed out groceries across the counter, gave his mother money to split the bills, let the mothers on the block slide when their WIC checks didn’t last them the full month. But his ethnicity, his generosity, none of it deterred the cop from striking the young man down in the lobby. The mousy girl did not yell his name as the cop beat him, and she did not scream when the machine in the cop’s hand exploded. Her voice was stuck. She tried to scream. She tried.
###
Lourdes didn’t get a chance to feel what she needed to feel before her small apartment filled with reporters. They wanted her to tell them about her son’s legacy. Out of spite, she told them all she could without forfeiting a single tear. Tears were the necessary display of public mourning they needed to tell a good story for the six o’clock news.
Then the mourners came. Her cousin Mayra and her nieces first. The girls invited her son’s close friends. And the friends invited two of the women her son was dating. Just an hour after she received the news, after going down to see the body spread out in the lobby, Lourdes sat in her apartment and watched other people grieve. She consoled Mayra, who was putting on a show. She offered coffee and the occasional hug to console neighbors whose names she didn’t remember. She even brought her son’s two girlfriends together, quelled the jealousy simmering between them by sitting them next to each other and forcing them to talk.
She wanted moments alone with the memory of her son, but others wanted him too. His body, carried out too soon by the stingy coroner. His childhood memory, which Mayra clung to as she told stories of his youth. And his name, which balanced at the tip of every sorry mouth in the room, in the whole building now.
She ushered the last visitors out with haste three hours later.
“I just can’t believe it,” Mayra said at the door.
“Well, believe it, Mayra,” Lourdes said coldly. “Believe it.”
At the end of the night Lourdes lay on her bed alone. She pulled her head to her knees to make a perfect circle, waited for tears to catch up with her, but they would not come. She struggled more now than before. She tried to whisper it to her knees. But she stumbled, her neck cramped, the air gave out. His name was a smooth stone skirting across a cold blue lake. She tried to say it, but it skipped and skipped and would not sink into her sorrow.
###
The name was still fresh in her mind when she woke up the next day, but like the vaguest of dreams, it became grainy and distant as the morning went on. Lourdes tried to distract herself with breakfast, but she had no bread to make an egg sandwich. He forgot to bring the bread again, she thought to herself. Except this time she couldn’t nag him about it. All she had was his absence. She pulled herself together best as she could, threw on a black blouse and took her time walking down the stairs. She passed the lobby quickly and did not look down at the circle where the body had lain.
At the bodega, Miguelito bagged her groceries at the counter quietly.
“You don’t have to pay today,” Miguelito said. He looked as if he might cry. Her son and Miguelito were friends for years, long as they’d worked together at the bodega. “Ay doña, mi hermano,” he said, and then he really did cry, deep and full. She reached her hand across the counter and pressed his arm to hold him together. He repeated “my brother, my brother,” as if her son were only that, his brother.
###
Across the street from the bodega, a crowd gathered at the corner. They stood around an altar littered with flowers and white candles. Above was a photo of her son cut out from the morning paper. It was the yearbook photo from the high school he never graduated from. His flirtatious smile which facilitated his way with women, his small ‘Fro, bright eyes. He’s so handsome, Lourdes thought with a pang.
A young man, one of the mechanics from the neighborhood, stood next to the photo and spoke to the crowd. “Eso policias son asesinos.” he said.
The crowd resounded in agreement. Most of them did not know her son personally but had seen him at the bodega or out on the block. He was a familiar face in the community, now destroyed and reduced to another photo plastered above a detritus of flowers. Most of the people that gathered around the altar looked sad, confused. But as the young mechanic spoke of justice, their backs straightened, their eyes filled with resolution.
Lourdes hid in the shadow of a truck and listened. She heard whispers of her son’s name soon enough, but she couldn't quite pull it from the chaos of the crowd. Finally, the young mechanic said it, giving permission for others to say it loudly and with newfound rage. The crowd marched down the street, Lourdes walked in the opposite direction. She still could not say her son’s name, but she held it in her mind as close as she could, this little piece of her son the crowd had left her.
###
“They’ve been marching down the street all morning,” her cousin Mayra said on the phone. “Woke up the whole block.”
Lourdes didn’t have the patience to gossip. She was protecting something more precious in the core of her mind and meant to keep it there as long as possible. She hung up on Mayra and finally got around to making her sandwich, all the while repeating his name in her mind. It danced inside of her, slow and tepid. But it wasn’t long before she started to forget. By the time she was done eating breakfast, the name was fickle and distant again. She tried to resuscitate it as a prayer, but it barely moved out of its languid stupor. And anyway, it was not enough just to think it, to remember it. She wanted to say it out loud, to carry the weight of it in her mouth.
Outside, the neighborhood stirred. She poked her head out the window, met the summer sun with trepidation. It was hotter now, the light burned. Downstairs the group had grown. If this morning there were twenty, maybe thirty people, now there were at least a hundred. They moved as one collective body down St. Nicholas Ave. The young mechanic led the pack. He seemed more force than person now, more guiding star than the opaque tiguere he’d been just yesterday, lounging in front of the building doing nothing after work. He held a megaphone to his mouth. “If they can’t get away with that shit in Los Angeles, they can’t get away with it here,” he yelled. Then he started an old patriotic song from their country. This energized them. They raised their heads higher, marched with more vigor, said her son’s name in the name of the country and the country’s name in the name of her son. Lourdes thought she ought to feel encouraged by this grand act of solidarity. They were peaceful. They were together. And they meant to honor her son. And yet. The more her neighbors yelled her son’s name around the block, the quicker it withered in her mind. Why couldn’t they yell the cop’s name? O’Brien. Why couldn’t they yell that name up and down the street, make him disappear instead? Her son was hers. She gave him life, raised him fatherless, carried him onto a plane in ‘73 and brought him to this country. She had given him all of herself only to lose him to New York. Slowly at first, as he learned English, as he became more and more American with his obsession with hip hop, his refusal to speak Spanish outside the house. And now, he’d been ripped from her violently and all at once. So why could she not have him, this last time?
She slammed the window shut. Lourdes found a blank notebook from her box of old and forgotten things. She sat by the small circle of her dining table, held the pen to paper. If she couldn’t say his name out loud, maybe this would work. She tested the pen on the page with a list of other words. Azul. Verano. Dolor. She braved his name, wrote it slowly and with focus, even included his last name to be specific. The name was clear and still on the page. Then, it exploded into the air like confetti. She jumped out of her seat and tried to grab them, but the letters were wild in the air, dancing around her fingers like dust. She collected them one by one and settled them back onto the page. The name was almost complete again, but the first letter was missing. She looked under the seat, down at her blouse, around the table, but it was nowhere to be found. Then she felt a smidge of shadow just above her left eye, as light as an eyelash. Sneaky bastard, she said quietly, chuckled as she pulled the last letter from her lashes down to where it belonged on the page.
Lourdes read his name out loud, just as it was written. She said it again, to prove to herself that it was real. How easy it rolled off the tongue now. A marble of saltwater rolled down her cheek and tapped on the page. “Oh,” she said, exhaling a whisper of air in surprise.
###
Half an hour later, Mayra called with another chorus of gossip.
“Did you hear?”
“No Mayra, what happened?” Lourdes asked with little enthusiasm.
“A couple of those boys, a fire, and boom!”
“Esperate esperate, slow down.”
“A vecina called me, said she saw it from her window. A couple of those boys strayed from the pack, lit a car on fire. The cops are gathering. Those fucking tigueres. The boys, I mean. Though the cops are no angels. All of them, soiling your son’s name like that.”
The crowd had marched too far down St. Nicholas for Lourdes to hear anything. She welcomed the silence. But now she worried that she could not see anything for herself. How much of this story had her cousin extrapolated, she wondered. She couldn’t help the stream of worry that swelled within her. Was she a bad person for focusing all of her anger on the protesters, rather than the murderer? Mayra’s call sparked the first pulse of a headache.
Lourdes cleaned the dishes from last night, a dozen ceramic mugs stained with black coffee. It was helpful to do something with her hands, to feel the rush of warm water loosen her joints. She practiced the name, but her mouth was a sputtering faucet, a mess of broken syllables. It was disappearing quickly. But she would write it again, as many times as needed to keep her son close.
The doorbell rang. She cursed, dried her hands, took her time getting to the door.
It was the mousy girl from the second floor. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, her doe eyes were cast low. Lourdes had been in her apartment a few times but had only seen the girl once. Every time she went to apartment 2B to pick up an order of rum cake, the girl was hiding in her room. After the first few visits, Lourdes started calling her el ratoncito. Where’s the ratoncito today, she would say to the girl’s mother. They laughed, but in truth Lourdes thought it was quite rude. The girl was sixteen, too old to hide and not welcome guests. It reminded her how much she disdained these American-raised children, how this country stripped most folks of common sense and courtesy.
“Hola, señora,” the mousy girl said now, averting her eyes. Lourdes noticed a protruding tooth in the girl’s mouth which further ignited her frustration. The older woman said nothing in return, opened her palms in front of her, a simple gesture she hoped would usher this interaction along to its end.
“I um. Just want to say. I’m really, really sorry.” The mousy girl finally met Lourdes’ eyes. There was a hint of guilt in them that Lourdes did not understand.
Against her better judgment, Lourdes invited her in for some coffee, but the girl said she had to run. Before she turned to go, she informed Lourdes that the protesters were wondering where she was and why she hadn’t joined them. What better evidence of a slaughtered man than his grieving mother?
“I won’t tell them I talked to you though. I mean, fuck them, right? I’m sure going out to protest is the last thing on your mind.” The girl apologized once more and ran down the stairs before Lourdes could say another word.
###
By the time she was done cleaning, all traces of her son’s name were gone from the plain white page. Que maldita vaina, Lourdes said, cursing her luck. She laid the notebook down on her lap and wrote it again, bolded in black ink. This time she put her palm to the name to hold it there. It pushed against her hand, meaning to explode into the air as it did before. When the pressure on her palm waned, Lourdes was happy to see that the letters had not moved. She read the name out loud, sank once more into its bittersweet song. It was like touching the mouth of a lake with her toes, with vague restraint at first, then jumping into its vastness all at once. She rested her head on the couch, held the notebook where it met the pulsing muscle in her chest.
The phone sliced through the room. When it tired of ringing, silence returned empty and spacious. She leaned into it, closed her eyes, only to be interrupted a few seconds later by another call.
“What is it?” Lourdes said.
“Ahy prima,” Mayra said into the phone. “Again, it happened again.” She explained that the group marched toward the 34th precinct earlier that afternoon. They sang their patriotic songs, chanted in unison and held signs that cried for justice. A line of police officers barricaded the protesters from moving forward just two blocks from the precinct. For a few minutes it seemed that all would remain peaceful. But soon a fiery young man stepped forward, shouting and cursing at the anonymous line of masked cops. Then, propelled by a red, feathered rage, he charged forward into the barricade. Two of his boys came to his aid, tried to pull him away, but by then the batons were on them. Civilians scattered at the first explosion of gunfire. The second explosion, accompanied by a wounded cry, sent them running back down St. Nicholas.
“When did this happen?”
“What? I don’t know, probably half an hour ago. I heard it from a vecina who saw it from her own window.” How Mayra had a watchful vecina on every block in Washington Heights, Lourdes could not figure out. She looked down at her notebook, the letters still clear and dark on the page. It sounded like the confrontation had begun around the same time that she wrote her son’s name.
“I don’t know, prima. Maybe you should go out there, calm everybody down. Since you’re his mom and all.”
“No Mayra. Maldita sea, I’m not going out there, okay? He was my son, dammit.” Lourdes slammed the phone and hoped the force of it would deter her cousin from calling again. Why should she suddenly be responsible for her neighbors? And what could she do to quiet the anger and chaos sprouting out of the movement? She was just one woman, too old to lead a crowd and too burdened by her own pain to be useful to anyone else.
A wave of loneliness overcame her. Not the same balming quietude that cradled her before. Now, she was heavy with worry. She looked toward her son’s room, the door ajar. She wanted to be amongst his things, to sit with the last echoes of his presence. But she was not ready to sink into that well of grief yet.
She slipped into her own room. She meant to slide in bed, but her reflection in the bureau mirror stopped her. Last time the moons under her eyes were this cratered was in ‘85 when her mother died. She couldn’t go back to Santo Domingo to bury her, on account of her expired visa. So she settled into a year’s depression, hoped her grief would reach her mother’s tomb across the Atlantic. It was her son that eventually dug her out of bed. Or his need for her, rather. He was failing high school, according to the letters his teachers sent home. She couldn’t believe the boy his teachers described in their fancy English. Boisterous. Rambunctious. Unfocused with a proclivity towards violence. When she went to his school to confront them, the teachers promised they only had her son’s best interest in mind, but Lourdes didn’t want to hear it. They were villainizing her son, making him out to be someone she did not recognize. So she shielded him from their criticism, sent the pack of worried white faces to hell where they belonged. When he dropped out of high school, she swallowed her shame and looked the other way, focused instead on the money he was bringing home, told everyone about what a fine young man he was becoming, caring for his mother the way he did.
Now, Lourdes traced under her left eye with her finger. She wanted to bury herself under her blankets, but Mayra’s call reverberated in her mind. All those young people outside, getting themselves into trouble for her son, she thought. She sucked her teeth, looked down at the notebook in her hand. She couldn’t even start planning the funeral properly yet, not until the coroner was done with the extensive invasion of her son’s body.
She’d have her dance with sorrow soon. But not yet. She needed to see what was happening outside for herself. Lourdes threw on an old headscarf and her only pair of shades. She shrouded her hair and most of her heart shaped face, then walked out the door with trepidation.
###
The protesters were dispersed on the corners of St. Nicholas Ave. Lourdes picked up disparate pieces of the day’s events as she walked by. Bits and pieces from each conversation on St. Nick. She was careful not to linger too long. She did not want to be noticed.
They began as a gathering of mourners the morning after the shooting. Out of quiet prayer a rally was born, fueled by the young who thought something needed to be done, and the old who were now afraid for their own children. A few of the homeless people in the neighborhood joined, too, especially those who had gotten free food from Lourdes’ son at the bodega. It felt good to air their grievances together. But after a few hours, sharing words was not enough. They marched through St. Nicholas guided by old songs about the pueblo’s tenacious spirit. The young were the loudest but among them were people of all ages, mostly Dominicans, but a few Puerto Ricans and Black Americans, too, in solidarity. Even those among them who had critiqued the LA riots just two months before showed up. Those who turned their noses up and away from the grief of Black Americans in the City of Angels, who used the L.A. riots as another reason to perpetuate stereotypes about Black people everywhere, those same voices of dissent were now the loudest in their group. Mayor Dinkins held a press conference, spoke of peace and justice, but nothing he said made any difference. It didn’t matter that he looked like them, his proximity to power meant he was just like the cops, untrustworthy and corrupt. Later that afternoon, the opposing cops became their common enemy, and the herd of ravenous reporters gave them an audience and a public mission.
And now, scattered by violence, what were they?
In the middle of the street, a man and his daughter picked up stray branches and threw them toward the sidewalk. This small gesture to reassert order softened Lourdes. Further up an old car burned in the middle of the street. Burning cars dotted the street as far as Lourdes could see. Shattered glass from ravaged store fronts littered every corner. Heaps of garbage hot and putrid filled the streets.
Along the sidewalk Lourdes happened upon a reporter in front of a camera.
“Bottles are being thrown, M-80s are being lit, looting is rampant. It is total chaos in the streets of Washington Heights. Unfortunately, this is the result of urban rebellion.”
The whole thing made Lourdes’ stomach turn. She walked back toward her building as fast as she could. She spotted Miguelito the bodeguero and was relieved to see a familiar face. He was talking ardently to a young man Lourdes did not recognize. Her lower back ached, but she sped in their direction, hoping to be held by Miguelito’s grief, something familiar to cling to.
“Bro, chill. He just died yesterday,” she overheard the young man say. The street was loud, but they were yelling over the noise.
“Nah. I told that nigga he was being reckless,” Miguelito said. “Selling in front of his building. That puts my whole shit in jeopardy. Caught by a pig. What kind of corny shit.” He accentuated his predicament with a groan of disgust.
“Mi muchacho no era ningún tiguere,” Lourdes said. She removed her scarf and shades, stood before them as an apparition.
Miguelito’s face spun in a whirlpool of confusion, anger, contempt, though he landed on a mask of surprise. The same face that was struck with grief just a few hours ago when she talked to him in the bodega. “I didn’t mean,” his pale lips now said.
Lourdes threw the scarf in Miguelito’s face. It was her deepest source of shame. “You heard me, right? He didn’t sell no drugs, so don’t you start spreading that shit about my son.”
She turned from the truth she knew and had known so well for years and walked back toward her apartment building. She was met there by a new crowd in the middle of the street. Some were lighting dozens of white candles in the shape of a cross, others were placing the lit candle across the front of her building. Lourdes slowly sat on the stoop amongst the crowd so that her lower back would not ache. No one noticed her, distracted as they were. She opened the small notebook on her lap and found that the name was gone, just as before. She wrote it again carefully, held her hand down on the page and waited.
It wasn’t long until an argument broke out. People joined the fray from up and down St. Nicholas, wondering what the ruckus was about, if it was time for another demonstration. Perhaps it was one of the protesters taking justice into their own hands. Or an opportunist, independent of their cause, looking to feed the rage of anarchy. Whoever it was snuck through the agitated bodies and into the abandoned building right in front of where Lourdes lived. They were too focused on the argument, did not see the fire until gusts of flame escaped the second-floor windows. A few of the protesters ran inside to check for the homeless people who occupied the building. The rest of the crowd stood motionless and quiet.
Through undulating waves of heat and thickening smoke, the mousy girl ran out of the burning building. Lourdes barely recognized her. The girl’s face, usually under a shadow of uncertainty, was lit by the flickering yellow of flames. She looked bolder, driven by purpose. What was her name, again? Lourdes tried to remember.
The young mechanic was also there, just a few hours ago leading hundreds of people from the block, now taking orders from the girl. Lourdes could not hear what they said, but it was clear that they were preparing to enter the building again. The girl covered her nose and mouth with a bandana, and instructed the others to do the same. Lourdes wanted so badly to run back upstairs, to recede into the still water of her sorrow.
She said her son’s name and held it one last time before setting the book down on the stoop. Letting go of one name clarified the other. Isabel. That was the mousy girl’s name. She watched Isabel run back into the flames. Then Lourdes picked herself up from the steps and joined the crowd.
Contributor Notes
Alejandro Heredia is the author of the chapbook You’re the Only Friend I Need (Gold Line Press, 2021), a collection of short stories that explores themes of queer transnationalism, friendship, and (un)belonging in the African Diaspora. Alejandro’s work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Lambda Literary Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He currently writes a monthly column at Tasteful Rude Magazine.
