The brother, Jose, ran through the airport shrieking for Alberto Fermin, who was flying to Paris. Jose gave everybody his name and shouted in all the rooms he went into.

The mother was home on her bed in the dark front room of the ground floor apartment at 208 Barbey Street in East New York. All through the long mean night she wept for her son.

When a news photographer asked to borrow a picture of her son, she shook her head and threw her hands to make him go away.

"Please leave her alone," somebody said. "Her son might be dead."

Alberto Fermin was 28 and he had worked in a clothing store on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan and saved his money so he could fly to Paris for the first time in his life.

The manager of the store was up all night at a computer trying to find the name in the crash news.

He came from Barbey Street in East New York, which is in the 75th Precinct and for the last many years has been the center of violence in the city. Thursday, they talked about how Alberto got through all the years in East New York only to be blown up on his way to the splendors of Paris. "He is the second one from here who went this way," a woman said. "There was a Marine boy from down the street who stopped to help somebody and he was hit by a hit-run. He died. They never find the one did it."

Barbey Street runs through East New York to its end, where the streets plunge into weeds and marshes that end at Jamaica Bay and across from it, the ocean where off to the left, many miles off but not that many really, the bodies from the TWA plane floated through the night and into the first light of the morning and then the hot day on the calm surface, with shoes and seat cushions around them.

The mother thought that Alberto was in this ocean.

"Crying all night," a woman on the front steps said.

"Crying all night," another said.

And the mother sat on the bed with her hands to her face and stared at the dimness and waited for the moment when her son Alberto would pick himself up from the water, as if it were a wood floor, and come walking to her, smiling and young and proud. Walking right off the ocean and into her arms in this room. Only she knew this.

Into the frame house the others came, these members of the big wide Dominican family. They went past the mother's bed in the front room and pushed through a dark narrow hallway to a back room which became so crowded that there was no room for seats. There was another son, Jose, and a chubby guy, Star Cartadena.

"She cannot talk," they said of the mother.

When somebody tried to look in on her, a heavy young woman in a pink T-shirt held a hand out and pushed.

Thursday morning, the woman from upstairs and Annette Evanson, who lives across the street, stood in the heat and talked about a prayer service in her mother's house.

"She has a leg that she can't move about," the woman from upstairs said.

"They are coming to pray in her house," Evanson said. "Reverend Taylor will come and have a prayer service."

Barbey Street was so far from Paris. At the corner, el tracks the color of mustard had sun coming through down to the street in patterns. Under the el, bodegas were at each corner.

"How have things been?" a young guy on the street named David was asked. He was 24 and had his hair in short braids.

"There's been no shooting?" he was asked.

"Nothing on this block. This block's quiet. Oh, I got shot on the next block. I got shot in the back and the leg. I know it was mistaken identity. They didn't want me."

In the house the mother held the phone.

"He is alive!" she shrieked in Spanish.

"Alive!" one of the women around the bed said.

The mother sat up in bed in the dimness and saw her son rising from the ocean. She called out to her son Alberto.

Outside in the street somebody shrugged. "I don't know what happened inside, but I don't believe he is alive," he said.

International tragedy did not stop the life of the street. Now a woman double parked her car and went inside the house. An unmarked police car with license D939WK came along and one cop said they were going to ticket the double-parked car. David said something about the plane crash and the cop said something about locking him up and now Evanson yelled and the cop said, "EFF you," as the unmarked car drove off and the chubby guy, Cartedena, came running out of the house, shouting to the streets.

"He is alive. She received a call."

"No."

"Yes, I am sure."

"Who says so?"

"She does."

"Then he is alive," Evanson said. She ran across to the Fermin house and then came out in tears.

"We got to barbecue later!"

The woman she spoke to was in tears.

"We goin' thank God," Evanson said.

"I don't know what happened," somebody said. "I don't know how he could be alive."

Later, the manager of Alberto's store on Columbus Avenue said he had spoken to Alberto's roommate and that he was alive. Then Alberto himself called his mother on Barbey Street.

Nobody knew what plane Alberto took or why he wasn't on the TWA flight, but what he had done was to get another flight on another airline without bothering to tell anybody. They all thought he was dead in the water. The reason nobody heard from him right away was that he went shopping Thursday in Paris. But these are only facts. His mother knows there was something more powerful than such a simple explanation. All day, the only two people to know he was alive were Alberto and his mother, who knew he would get up from the water and come home.