Free An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski

Maurice refused to go; he cried and rolled on the ground and said, “I’m not leaving.” Uncle Dark slung Maurice over his shoulder and carried him away, the boy’s cries cutting through the night, bringing patients to their windows as Darcella disappeared inside.
    She made it home a few weeks later, clean for the first time in years. Maurice didn’t understand what rehab was, but he could see his mother was different, better, happier. She would spend more time with Maurice and his sisters; she’d ignore all the uncles as they came and went with their drugs. For the first time in his life, Maurice had a mother who wasn’t strung out all the time. For the first time he experienced something close to normalcy. The Brooklyn Arms, it turned out, wasn’t such a bad place after all.
    Until one day when Uncle Dark came home and said, “Yo, Dee Dee, come here. I want you to try somethin’. This is something different.”
    “No, man, I’m done,” she told him.
    “Yo, Dee, this ain’t nothin’ like the old stuff. This is freebase.”
    “I don’t care, I don’t care. I’m done.”
    Uncle Dark laid a rock of crack on the table.
    “Yo, Dee, you gotta try this high, you don’t know what you missing. And Dee,
this shit don’t get you hooked
.”
    Darcella stared at the rock for a long time. Finally she took it into the bathroom. She came out a minute later, and her eyes were watery. They were open as wide as fifty-cent pieces. Maurice was still too young to realize what exactly had happened, but he was old enough to think,
This is not good.
    And just like that Darcella fell off the razor’s edge separating one world from another and tumbled permanently to the dark side.
    Room 305 became the crack headquarters of the Brooklyn Arms. Once Darcella got a taste for the drug, she became the biggest crack dealer in the hotel—bigger than any of the uncles. She was the first one to learn how to cook cocaine and turn it into crack; she taught her brothers how to do it, too. The uncles would buy coke from the Dominicans on upper Broadway and bring it home for Darcella to cook. Sometimes she went out and bought the drugs herself. Money poured in like never before, wads and wads of bills.
    Years later, Maurice guessed that in less than a year, with his mother and his uncles all dealing at once, at least a million dollars in cash passed through his apartment at the Brooklyn Arms.
    And all that money brought its own sense of stability: for the first time, Darcella had enough to buy her children shoes and coats and underwear. People treated his mother and uncles with respect, and that trickled down to Maurice, who felt important, too. Life had a rhythm to it, a predictable chaos. Maurice believed that, finally, he had a place he could call home.
    And then, the Brooklyn Arms erupted in flames.
    In 1986 two children started a fire in their room. Their mother wasn’t home; she was out copping drugs. The children, too scared to run and too young to know better, hid in a closet. Smoke was everywhere. People were running and screaming. Maurice stood on the sidewalk and watched children—children he knew—stagger out stiff-armed and burned and crying. In all, four children died in the fire.
    Afterward, Mayor Ed Koch denounced conditions at the hotel and pledged to clean it up. Not much later, police raided the Brooklyn Arms. They banged on doors and slapped handcuffs on tenants. Maurice’s mother happened to be walking down the stairs at the very instant police were charging up. She convinced cops she was just a drug addict, only there to score, and not a dealer who sold drugs out of her room. The police let her walk, but two of Maurice’s uncles were arrested in the raid. Once again, Maurice stood on the sidewalk, watching police and camera crews swarm the place he called home. He watched the news crews leave that night, and he watched the dealers go back to dealing the minute they were gone.
    Just a few days after the raid, his