No Place Safe (23 page)

That was the line that got Ma’s anger up. It didn’t take much these days.

“And why am I here today? I should be out finding a serial killer right now, so I’m assuming this meeting is extremely important.”

Father said nothing, surprised as he was by this response, so my teacher tried to fill the dead air.

“Kim was disruptive to my class, and the standard punishment for that is ten demerits. We ask parents to join us for a discussion of the problem, to ensure parents are aware of what’s going on with their children in our school. And we’ll also need you to sign off that you’ve been made aware of the infraction.” His thin mustache and brown hair pressed against his head made me think of Hitler.

“What was the infraction, exactly?”

“I thought Kim would have told you.” Father stared at me, attempting to give another sermon telepathically.

“She did, but I thought she must have left something out. I was certain that what she told me—asking about black writers in an American literature class—wasn’t all there was to it.”

“That is precisely what happened.”

“Are you sure? For something that trivial, I know you wouldn’t ask me to drive twenty-five miles up here from the Southside where I should be working a crime scene. I know you wouldn’t have brought me or my child in here on some piss-ant charge like that. So what’s the real problem?”

I could tell from the look on Father’s face that he’d not run into a parent like Ma before, cop or no. The teacher didn’t know what to make of her either, so he just slid the piece of paper across the desk toward Ma, and offered her a pen.

“We won’t take any more of your time then. If you’d just sign here, please.”

“I’m not signing this. Kim had a legitimate question. All you needed to do was answer yes or no. How did she disrupt the class? Did she scream her question? Did she start an argument with you?”

“No, but we follow a prescribed curriculum—”

Ma cut him off, dismissed him by turning to me and asking, “Are you done with classes for the day?”

“Yes.” My first word since she’d arrived.

“Then let’s go. I’ve got work to do.”

She didn’t say goodbye, didn’t acknowledge the paper. I wanted to look back to see the reactions of the principal and my teacher, but I didn’t dare. I had to return there Monday. This performance wasn’t a surprise to me. Ma was like this any time she got rubbed the wrong way, any time she felt even an inkling of an attack on her kids or herself. Most times, I’d cower in embarrassment while she set straight the fancy department store clerk who followed us around expecting us to steal, or the front desk clerk at check-in who discovered suddenly that there were no more rooms even though we’d made the reservations weeks ago. Even though she was right in most cases, and I longed to have her nerve, I’d still be embarrassed. Couldn’t she fight back with a little more grace? But this time I was glad Ma was the way she was, even though I was certain I’d feel the repercussions next week.

Now she was moving through I-285 traffic in her usual way, as though launching a tactical assault on the beginning rush hour, so I wasn’t sure if she was angry or just driving normally.

“I don’t have time for this mess,” she finally said.

“What mess? All I asked was if he could talk about black writers.”

“Not that. You heard me defend you to that pompous ass. I’m talking about the whole thing. You hate the school, you complain about it all the time, and it’s costing us a ridiculous amount of money. I don’t get it. And it isn’t like I got time to come way out here to West Hell to deal with these crazy priests over stupid shit.”

Maybe Ma hadn’t studied the map with the circles and squares in a while, hadn’t done the math, but I had. The number of miles between my school and the home of the nearest victim was twenty. The child who lived closest to our house had played ball, hung out with friends, slept, did his homework, and watched TV less than two miles from where I did the same things. One boy may have died only footsteps, not miles, from where I did those things. But I knew Ma wouldn’t understand this was the reason I wanted to stay in a school that made me feel like I’d walked into the wrong door every single day, so I said nothing, and wondered what it would be like sitting in American literature class come Monday.

*

I was glad I had a house party to go to that night. I didn’t want to think about school, how much I hated it, or what Monday would be like. It was a birthday party for the girl whose house provided the table and chairs for our Spades games. Cassandra and I walked down together after I spent half an hour convincing her to go.

“You know I don’t like to dance.”

“So don’t dance, just talk to people.”

“I don’t know what to wear.”

“That looks nice what you have on. And look how it matches your new manicure.”

Even a few houses away, I could smell the smoke from the pine burning in our fireplace, thought I could feel its warmth. I could see Bridgette in front of the fire, putting too many marshmallows on a stretched-out wire hanger, and not letting them toast for as long as Ma taught her. Then she’d complain that they wouldn’t smash right when she put them between the graham crackers. I knew that Ma had watched through her bedroom window as Cassandra and I left her house. Without looking back, I knew she had slipped out of the house in her robe and house shoes and was watching us now, and wouldn’t go back in until we’d arrived at the party, because you just never know. Bridgette was going to have one of those nights in front of the TV on Ma’s bed that she missed, and I had a brief moment of regret that I wasn’t home.

At the top of the driveway, we could hear Kurtis Blow’s “These Are the Breaks” coming from the house, and I wondered when the birthday girl’s parents were going to come from their bedrooms and tell her, “Turn down that music before somebody calls the police.” Even though the night was cold, kids were hanging out on the front porch, trying to cool off from dancing inside a house packed with people. Inside, the party was already going strong. Having to coax Cassandra out of the house timed our arrival just right; that awkward moment when no one knows what to do or say had already passed. Now kids were doing the dance inspired by Chic’s
Le Freak
despite the record being a couple years old, because it was a dance even the most uncoordinated could pull off. I wanted to join them, but we couldn’t just walk into a party and start dancing. So Cassandra and I made the rounds, checking out who was there, both of us carrying cups of soda because holding something always helped quell our nervousness at parties.

“Look,” I said to Cassandra, barely nodding in the direction of a boy across the room. “Who’s that?”

“Like I know.”

After some investigation that I hoped appeared nonchalant, I learned that the new boy was a visiting cousin of one of the neighborhood kids. I spent most of the evening trying to work up enough nerve to introduce myself to him, and never would have if his cousin hadn’t called me over to them.

“Kim will tell you, she knows,” said the cousin, a girl from the next street over who I didn’t hang out with much.

“What do I know?” I couldn’t help but stare at the new boy, who was introduced to me as Mark, because he had blue eyes, something I’d never seen before on a brown-skinned person.

“I was telling Mark about the dead boys, how he’d better watch out while he’s in town. The killer is looking for boys just like him. Am I right? Kim knows ’cause her mother’s a cop.”

“It’s true. One of the victims was from out of town, just visiting family like you, when he was abducted.” I wished I sounded like a girl interested in a cute boy instead of a cop or TV reporter. I wished I’d said something that would make him want to stay in Atlanta forever, instead of making him want to catch the next bus home. But I kept talking like a cop or TV reporter. “His body was found the next day.”

Despite my morbid conversation, he asked me to dance. His eyes weren’t blue like the boys’ eyes at school, an icy blue that made me think of watching the sky through a frosted windshield in winter. Mark’s eyes had heat, the warmth and color of the deep end of my pool at dusk, when a full day of summer sun had knocked off the water’s chill. He would have been beautiful without the blue eyes, but the shock of them made it even more so. We started out dancing to Gary Numan’s “Cars,” but someone put on something slow and I was glad he didn’t run like most boys would. I didn’t dance with him the way I danced with Kevin, but it was nice.

On Monday morning, I played sick. Even though I began building my case Friday night, complaining that something I ate at the party didn’t sit well with me, on Saturday blaming it on cramps, and by Sunday turning it into a stomach virus, Ma didn’t buy any of it. But I was smart enough to wait until the last minute to tell her, when she was already running late and needed to get Bridgette to school and herself downtown, so she let it go.

At the dining room table, I finished the homework I’d put off over the weekend, giving me an excuse to look at Ma’s files. There was no one in the house to catch me, only my guilt. Ma would likely kill me if she knew I was snooping around her papers, but by now, I felt like I was as much a part of the investigation as she. It was my helping around the house, watching Bridgette, taking over the budget and bill paying (which I had to do after Ma got so caught up in work that she forgot to pay the light bill the month before) that made it possible for her to spend nearly every waking hour on the investigation. She was working more closely with the FBI now on the Wilson case, using their hypnotist and victim profiles to help with the traditional police work she and the Task Force were used to doing. I read her notes from an interview with the hypnotized neighbor boy who said he’d heard screaming coming from the girl’s apartment in the early morning hours that she had been allegedly abducted.

The boy had brought his date home to watch some TV a little before midnight. Before going into his home, he saw two males and a female leaving the girl’s apartment. He thought the female might have been a young girl. They disappeared from his sight. He saw what might have been an ice cream truck in the driveway. The boy then went into his apartment with his date. He heard what he thought was the sound of someone getting a whipping. The boy thought he heard the victim’s sister yell out “Stop,” after which he heard no more sounds.

At about one in the morning, the boy left his apartment to walk his date home, and saw the victim’s mother sitting on her porch. He greeted her but she ignored him, which was strange because she was usually friendly. The boy thought the mother seemed upset. He noticed the victim’s younger brother playing in the front yard.

The end of the report was missing, and I had to use my imagination to fill in the rest.

*

Going back to school on Tuesday wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. I realized I’d given myself too much credit as far as the impact I had on my classmates. Three days had passed and they’d forgotten about my call for a more complete literature lesson, and they’d probably forgotten it the minute they hit the door Friday afternoon. My teacher was smug as usual, more so since he’d won this particular battle and I now had only twenty demerits remaining of the thirty allotted per school year before being expelled.

After school, Grandma was waiting for me in the pick-up circle out front. Ma had convinced her to take some time off for a couple of weeks in January to come back to Atlanta to help around the house and look out for Bridgette and me. Two weeks into her visit, she decided to make her temporary stay permanent, and quit her job while my grandfather stayed in Cleveland another two years to finish out his time with Ohio Bell so he could collect his entire pension.
Grandma moved into my aunt’s house, left empty when she joined the Air Force, and immediately found a job cleaning the house of a rich white man who had no kids or wife. She’d had the job for a week before we discovered how close her employer lived to my school. We planned that on Tuesdays and Thursdays she’d give me a ride home and save me an hour off my commute. I was especially grateful that Grandma had started her job in cold and dark January.

We still get a laugh from the fact that I increased our trip by twenty minutes because I only knew the way into downtown Atlanta by following the bus route, unnecessarily making Grandma go down side streets, do switchbacks (
Why are you sending me in a circle, girl?
), and travel through residential neighborhoods when the on-ramp for I-285 was just a couple of miles from the school. But the bus route was all I knew, and I didn’t discover how far out of the way the route took us until long after Grandma had quit that job.

I’d been to the man’s house a couple of times in the first few weeks she worked there. When she didn’t get everything done before it was time to pick me up from school, we’d go back to the house so she could finish up. Being in the man’s house gave me a glimpse into how my classmates must have lived. I usually referred to them as classmates more often than friends—our connection lasted only as long as the school day. I’d never been invited into any of their homes, I was told little about their lives outside of school, though their questions about how I lived (really, how
all
black folks lived through my single interpretation) seemed never-ending.

So I had to piece together what their worlds must be like when they weren’t at school. Since the man’s house was only a couple of miles from the school, I imagined many of the kids lived in neighborhoods and houses much like his—huge plantation-style houses full of columns and hanging ferns out front, azalea bushes manicured by professionals, grass that seemed to stay green straight through winter. And always the older black women walking the mile from the bus stop into the neighborhoods where their day’s work lie. They made me grateful Grandma had a car, and once she got to know some of them, she’d offer a ride instead of just passing by.