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in another country.” He smiled enigmatically while handing over two hamburgers and french fries “on the house,
chica
.
Suerte
, good luck.”
    By the time she got to the hundred-year-old bridge it was past five a.m. and the streets were starting to fill up. At first she was anxious, but she could hear the trains squealing overhead. The early-morning risers were going to work. Bundled up against the cold, they barely gave Tanisha a glance, walking quickly to the steep stairs to the M train platform or ducking into the coffee and donut shops that lined Broadway in a shadowy sunless netherworld. She knew she was near the bridge when several men walked along the early-morning streets of Williamsburg in long black coats and round brown fur hats with white socks. She had heard about this group of Hasidic Jews, the Satmars. They ignored her and spoke among themselves in a guttural foreign language. An orange school bus idled at the corner, plumes of white exhaust exiting the rear like a surreal post-apocalyptic beast. The door opened and long black coats and fur hats got inside.
    It took Tanisha awhile to find the pedestrian walkway across thebridge. She waited until a group of middle-aged workers, black metal lunch pails in hand, started across and trailed them by fifty feet. They would be her safety net to the other side. The morning was sparkling clear and very cold. The wind whipped through her layers. She tucked the hood tightly around her head and put her hands underneath her armpits. Traffic was picking up. Red taillights zipped by. Tugboat lights headed north up the East River toward Roosevelt Island. Sparkling yellow lights from Manhattan stretched as far to the north as you could see. Once she was across the bridge, she was in known territory. She had been “placed” on the Lower East Side two years earlier. There wasn’t a block, bodega, or pizza shop she didn’t know in the area, from Delancey Street to 14th Street. Avenue C in Alphabet City had been her home base. It would be good to be out of a Brooklyn she was unfamiliar with—each neighborhood a crazy quilt of angled streets, different languages, street gangs, drug dealers, hustlers, hipsters, and old folks sitting on their stoops. You had to have your wits about you and stay in your safe zone or it was a game park.
    As Tanisha wound her way past the midpoint of the bridge and began the downward slope into Manhattan, her thoughts changed into Spanish. She was back in the house of her
abuelita
. Mama Lola as her family called her and
abuelita
(little grandmother) as the six young girls called her, wards of the state in foster care in a group home run by Mama Lola and her adoring husband, Hugo. He drove a livery car or gypsy cab fifteen hours a day, as the price of gasoline had inched its way up and cut into his weekly take-home pay.
Abuela
always said her husband “was an exception to Dominican men. He has one wife and one family, and he is a loving man. I found the one in my town.”
    As her legs carried her down the slope, she ran through in her mind the families and group homes she had lived with over the years since she had a memory. Of her mother she had no recollection, and there virtually no information was shared with her or perhaps known. All Tanisha knew about her mother was that she was a Latina drug addict; crack was her drug of choice. She had several other children all in foster care removed by ACS. She had left Tanisha when she was a child with some “crack sisters,” and a neighbor called 911. Afterthe police arrived and found a six-month-old girl in a filthy rug, they brought the baby to St. Barnabas hospital in the Bronx. ACS was notified and traced the mother to the Rose M. Singer women’s prison at Rikers Island. They worked through the legal system to have Tanisha removed permanently from the mother’s custody given her long record of drugs, abandonment, and prostitution. Tanisha’s mother had been a victim herself of a mother who