One Cold Night

persons who looked like long-lost fathers. Sticky, knotty problems.
    Her pink sneakers crunched along the pebbled path. She smelled the pungent air of the river and watched bubbles jump out of the froth left by motorboats as they trolled past. This was how she did it: by letting her mind go calm and open to whatever she needed to know. She was a single mother, a detective, always busy; but she had learned that if she slowed down, she could hear things beneath the surface, and this was where she — the being who was not woman or motheror cop — came alive. She couldn’t explain it, exactly, but it was a component of how she solved all her cases. Too much noise, and she couldn’t read the signals.
    She found an empty bench and sat down, turning to look behind her at the huge warehouse building, empty as a ghost, that faced the Strausses’ building on Washington Street. She wondered what went on in there at night, or in the day, for that matter. The cops had been all through it this morning: no Lisa, no one, nothing. She closed her eyes and imagined life on the waterfront a hundred-plus years ago, before bridges blocked the sky and the quiet, when the place hummed with immigrant factory workers. She wondered what it would be like here a hundred years from now. “Flying cars,” Orlando would say.
    Lupe got up and circled out of the park at Main Street. She could feel the cobblestones through the thin rubber soles of her sneakers. When the rail tracks surfaced, they felt cold underfoot. She walked them. She thought of Lisa, and how teenagers let time peel away like a waterfall, figuring there’d be an endless supply of it later. She thought of Lisa last night, tried to feel what it might have been like to be her. She felt lost and she felt found. She was a happy girl with a new piece of information about her past. A surprise answer to a question she had long considered asking.
    Lupe remembered being a teenager herself. At fourteen, she herself was always out alone. At fifteen, like Susan Bailey, she was pregnant.
    Orlando’s father, Hector, had eyes the color of sand mixed with ocean, unusual in a person of color. He was excited to be a father and went into the drug trade to make some money, got killed before he even sawhis baby. Broke Lupe’s heart. Orlando carried a shadow of Hector on his face, and once in a while she visited her teenage lover in those eyes, but not for long.
    Besides getting pregnant at fifteen, Lupe’s and Susan’s histories were opposite. In the world of Lupe and her friends in East New York, Brooklyn, girls got pregnant and had their babies all the time. Grandmas raised them. It was their way. Now some of Lupe’s teenage girlfriends were grandmas themselves, sitting on the bench, living on assistance, wondering if they had missed a moment when they might have fought the undertow. Lupe’s moment was simple. Riding on the subway one day, sixteen years old, cradling sleeping baby Orlando in her arms, she read an ad for police recruits. It said you needed to be a high school graduate. So she became one. The more she tasted, the more she wanted, the more she got. She didn’t resent being a single mother. She felt steely inside, but did not swallow anger or spew it at the world in general; she gave it to her work, as a gift for the bad guys of New York City.
    Turning onto Water Street, she came into the crime scene. A couple more TV vans had joined the wait. At this point the forensics techs were gone and cops were guarding the scene from gawkers; you never knew when you’d have to go back behind the yellow lines and look for more clues. Yellow lines, yellow paint. Before sunrise the scene had looked like a bumblebee, the black of night striped and splotched with yellow. Now, in full day, it looked like tired chaos.
    Just hours ago, Lisa had been here. The yellow paintbrush had flown from her hand. Lupe’s eyes followed the arc of drips landing in a now-dried paintblotfilling the seams between cobblestones. She stood above the partial footprint, yellow, and let it into her mind. The shoe’s sole had a particular pattern, already matched by Forensics to a common work boot. Size nine. A small foot for a man. Last night, in the dark, they were here together. Agitation showed in the half-finished yellow line, the splatter of paint, the hasty single footprint. Lupe felt a cool autumn humidity hanging in the air like the remnants of fear.
    She ignored the reporters who tried to talk to her,