The Sacrifice Read Free Page B

sharply. “I told you, Anis don’t allow disrespectful behavior in our house. S’b’lla got to know that.”
    Clutching her photographs Ednetta moved on. Ada watched the woman pityingly as she approached people on the street, imploring them, practically begging them, showing the pictures of Sybilla. Most people acted polite, and some were genuinely sympathetic. There was something not right about what Ednetta was doing, Ada thought. But she had no idea what it was.
    Ada was ashamed now, she’d spoken so inanely to Ednetta Frye. But what did you say ? Girls like Sybilla were always “running away”—Ada knew from being a schoolteacher—meaning they were staying with some man likely to be a dozen years older than they were, and giving them drugs. What she could remember of Sybilla Frye from the middle school, the girl was sassy and impudent, restless, couldn’t sit still to concentrate, had a dirty mouth to her, and hung out with the wrong kind of girls. Her grades were poor, she’d be caught with her friends smoking out the back door of the school—in seventh grade. None of that could Ada tell poor Ednetta!
    Ada knocked at the second-floor door of a woman named Klariss—just a thought, she’d ask Klariss to come with her. But Klariss was asvehement as Ada’s mother. “You keep outa that, Ada. You know it’s some drug dealer somebody put a bullet in, or some druggie OD’ing. You get mixed up in it, the cops is gonna mix you up with them and take you all in.”
    Weakly Ada tried to cajole Klariss into at least coming outside with her, in back of the building—“You don’t have to come any farther, K’riss. Just, like—see if anything happens . . .”
    But Klariss was shutting her door.
    In the front vestibule were several tall teenaged boys on their way outside—ebony-black skin, mirthful glances exchanged that signaled their awareness of / disdain for stiff-backed Ada Furst they knew to be some kind of schoolteacher—(these were boys born in Red Rock of parents from the Dominican Republic who lived upstairs from Ada)—and for a weak moment Ada considered asking them to accompany her . . . But no, these rude boys would only laugh at her. Or something worse.
    Outside, Ada walked to the rear of the building. No one ever went here, or rarely: behind the tenement was a no-man’s-land of rubble-littered weeds and stunted trees, sloping to a ten-foot wire fence at the riverbank, against which years of litter had been blown and flattened so that it resembled now some sort of plaster art installation. In this lot tenants had dumped trash that included refrigerators, mattresses, chairs and sofas and even badly broken and discolored toilets. (Ada recognized a broken lamp that had once belonged to Kahola, her sister must’ve tossed out here. For shame!)
    Ma and Karliss were right: Ada shouldn’t be here. Hadn’t there been a murder in this block, only a week ago, one in a series of young black boys shot multiple times in the back of the head, dragged into an abandoned house to bleed out and die . . .
    But this person, if it was a person, was alive. Needing help.
    Noise from jetliners in their maddening ascent from Newark Airporta few miles away, that began in the early morning and continued for hours even on weekends. Ada couldn’t hear the crying sound, with those damn jets!
    Ada checked to see: was anyone following her? (The tall black-skinned Dominican boys, who hadn’t said a word to her though she’d smiled at them?) She made her way through the debris-strewn lot to the fence, that overlooked the river. Here she felt overwhelmed by the white, vertically falling autumn sunshine, that blinded her eyes. And the wide Passaic River with its lead-colored swift-running current that looked to her like strange sinewy transparent flesh, a living creature with a hide that rippled and shivered in the sunshine. Oil slicks, shimmering rainbows. The Passaic had once been a beautiful river—Ada knew, from