I didn’t know it at the time, when we were six and seven and would walk to the banks of the Passaic River where overturned shopping carts stood in knee-deep water, acting like seines, capturing the plastic once-white bags that eventually developed a gleam from the muck and pollution, a shimmering like the underbelly of landed bluefish, and we’d watch them undulating in the slow current as if they were alive—I didn’t know that my best friend Paula, my constant companion, the girl next door, would, at the age of seventeen, be blown up by a car bomb planted by the North Jersey mob and meant for her boyfriend.