No Place Safe (3 page)

“We used to watch the
Carol Burnett Show
in her room and crack pecans with that raggedy pair of pliers because you lost the nut cracker, and the next day she’d fuss about the shells in her bed.”

The pliers and pecans were familiar. “I remember us watching that show. Is it still on?”

“No, and I don’t know the last time we went to the farmers’ market for pecans. Nothing is like when I was little.”

That was funny to me because she was still little in my book, but I didn’t laugh because she looked so serious about it. In that moment I wanted to call her Little Bit, which was my nickname for her until she was five and told me she hated that name. I’d always assumed it was better than Monkey, which everyone else called her because she could climb anything and went a long stretch where the only food she’d eat willingly was bananas. She told me she hated that name, too.

“Next week I’ll buy some pecans from the market downtown.”

Bridgette looked just about done with me. “Pecans aren’t in season until fall.”

After I warmed the SpaghettiOs, I told her to go wash her hands before she came to the table.

“You’re not Ma, stop trying to act like it,” she said, but she did it anyway.

When Ma would get home from work, she’d make us tell her what we did all day, but only after she went around the house inspecting furniture and opening closets, making sure we did our chores, which included vacuuming, dusting, and laundry. She liked a neat house, but getting chores done was also Ma’s way of making sure we weren’t getting into any trouble while she was gone. If everything was done on the list—and it was always a long list—she figured we didn’t have time to do much else. She was usually right, but sometimes suspected us anyway.

“You played basketball down the street?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Did you have any company over here?”

Ma always asked this, trying to find out if my boyfriend had come over. Kevin had been my boyfriend since the summer before, when he kissed me on a warm night while a bunch of us kids played a game of hide-and-go-seek, the night lit only by lightning bugs and the glow from some family’s porch light. He’d caught me hiding between a house and a thick forsythia bush growing against it. He was fourteen and experienced, given his reputation around the neighborhood. I was twelve and it was my first real kiss. It had come earlier than I’d expected which meant I hadn’t prepared for it, and my teeth were more involved than they should’ve been, but it was still exciting.   

Kevin was handsome, even as a boy, with the strength of a man’s face barely masked behind the softness of a boy’s. His eyes were brown like just about every black person I knew, but hinted at the possibility of something gold warming the brown. Or perhaps that was just my imagination. He opened up a world of conversation for me at school, allowing me to add descriptions of my first kiss to the popular girls in eighth grade, who allowed me close enough to listen, but never expected me to contribute. And when they doubted my veracity, the wallet-sized school picture Kevin had given me was produced as proof. An unattractive boy would have gotten an immediate laugh, then dismissal. When they gathered around to silently scrutinize his picture, I knew they were impressed. When they questioned where I’d gotten the picture, suggesting maybe it was a cousin instead of a boyfriend, I knew they were jealous. I wouldn’t respond, only returned the picture to my wallet, and let my silent smugness tell them exactly what I thought about their skepticism.

Ma was always saying, “I’m not raising any babies that I didn’t bring into this world. Don’t have any babies while you’re in my house.”
When I was six years old, she made sure I understood how that might happen, and later, lectured me on the availability of birth control many times, warning me that it was best to keep my legs shut until I no longer lived in her house
.
I understood that these warnings were well intended, and had much to do with the fact that she gotten pregnant with me when she was eighteen.

Ma couldn’t stand the idea that I was only thirteen and had the same boyfriend for a year. Kevin lived one block over, and his father was a cop, too. Ma knew him from the Department. I think that’s why she never made me break up with him—she figured between her and his father, they’d catch us if we were doing anything. She preferred having that kind of surveillance over me, something she wouldn’t have if I was going with a boy whose father wasn’t a cop. She didn’t realize that Kevin and I were scared shitless of both of them, and wouldn’t get into any trouble—at least not with each other. (It wasn’t until later that I learned my first love’s reputation had been honestly earned.)

“Kim didn’t have any friends over, did she?” Ma treated Bridgette and me like her suspects, waiting for one to turn over on the other, but we rarely did, even if there was something to hide. She’d catch us at the front door, immediately send one into another room, and question us separately on where we’d been, what we’d done, and who with. She caught us lying only a couple of times before we learned to get our stories straight before we reached the front door.

I prayed Bridgette wouldn’t bust me, because on that very day my boyfriend
had
come by, though I didn’t let him in the house, which was Ma’s specific question. Instead, I led him around to the windowless side of the house, safe from Bridgette’s watch. There, we kissed until the prospect of being caught by the neighbors and the thrill of the kiss itself made it difficult for me to keep his hands from wandering.

Bridgette said, “No boys came in,” and I knew I’d owe her something later.

When Ma was satisfied that no boys had been in her house, she relaxed and stopped being a cop. I helped her make dinner, chopping vegetables for the salad and mixing up the corn bread, which were my regular dinner tasks anytime Ma was home early enough to cook. When she wasn’t, I cooked the whole dinner.

“They’ve identified one of the Niskey Lake boys, the older one,” Ma said after sending Bridgette off to watch TV. When she sent Bridgette away so we could talk about her work, it always made me feel like I was a grown-up. And it was a chance to have Ma to myself. When she was home, it seemed to me most of her time went to Bridgette, because that’s how it works when you’re the youngest. Or maybe I was just jealous.

“How do you know he was older if you don’t know who the other boy is yet?”

“The medical examiner can approximate their ages.” Ma sounded too business-like about something so dark, until I considered figuring out the ages of unidentified dead was part of her business. “His name was Edward Hope Smith, and he was just a month shy of his fifteenth birthday. Last time anyone saw him was at that skating rink you go to.
Used
to go to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I knew what it meant, but asked anyway.

“Until they catch whoever did it, I want you to stay away from there.”

Greenbriar skating rink on Campbellton Road had been a favorite hangout since I was eight or nine, when we still lived in Southwest. My girlfriends and I would loop yarn around two cardboard doughnuts, snip the yarn along the edges, and tie string between the doughnuts to create pompoms, which we tied onto our skates. I had pompoms to match every outfit. Ma or a friend’s mother would drop us off and leave for wherever they went to get a few hours’ relief from being mothers. I’d skate until I grew sweaty and tired, timing my strides to the beat of Chic’s “Good Times,”
made dizzy by the squares of light reflected from the disco ball as they moved round and round across the floor, walls, and skaters. I wouldn’t leave the floor for an hour straight, except during Slow Skate when the DJ would play something meant for couples, and fake smoke would blow from the ceiling, which made me cough.

And here Ma was trying to keep me from one of the few places a thirteen-year-old could go to have some fun. Since I didn’t have any skating plans in the near future, I let it go and decided to cross that bridge when I got to it. By then, they’d have caught the killer.

“What’s taking so long to identify the other boy?”

“They’re working on it.”

“But it’s been two weeks. No one’s called in about him?”

“There’s a missing report on a boy named Alfred Evans who hasn’t been seen since he got on a bus heading downtown to watch a movie at the Coronet, but the police want to be as sure as they can before asking the family to identify the boy’s body. As it is, there wasn’t much left of him to identify when he was found.”

That was a sad thing to me because it meant there was no one to cry over him, and somewhere in Atlanta there was a family wondering where their child was, hoping he wasn’t the boy lying in the morgue.

“They still aren’t tying the two boys together yet,” Ma said, absentmindedly poking a spatula at ground beef that was long since cooked through. “But they’re wrong on that.”

Sometimes, I was sure she missed the Department. She wouldn’t get involved in the investigation until the case was brought to the district attorney. By the time she got her hands on it, much of the early discovery was already done. Ma never wanted to see anyone hurt, especially not kids, but she did like to solve cases. I could tell she wished she could work on this one.

“Do they have any suspects yet?” I asked. I always asked Ma about this stuff, although most folks would probably say this wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss with a thirteen-year-old. But who else was going to ask her? She had to let go of her work at the end of the day just like a professor did with her husband, or a businessman with his wife. Besides, I’d never been thirteen a day in my life.

“Nothing so far. I guess they won’t be bringing it to us any time soon. You know these things take a while.” She handed me the plates to put on the table.

“What about the boy from the skating rink. What else do you know about him?”

Ma didn’t answer, and I knew she was in her own head, thinking about patterns.

“Maybe you can help out with the investigation,” I said, trying to bring her back to me.

“That’s the city’s business for now. I think those boys are tied together, and so do some of the detectives working the case. The city doesn’t want to raise that question, though. People will freak out if they think somebody’s out there killing kids.”

I thought about the boys, wondered what the one from the skating rink did that night, the one named Hope. Maybe he skated with his girlfriend during the Slow Skate, maybe he had a quarter get stuck in the pinball machine that was always taking kids’ money. He probably left there wondering what lie he was going to tell his mother for getting home late, and it turned out it didn’t matter.

“I hope he at least had fun,” I said, and Ma looked at me as if to say,
Who?

My friend Cleo from middle school worked in the Municipal Market where her parents owned a stall. The market was in the middle of Sweet Auburn, the cradle of civil rights in Atlanta—home to Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and the
Atlanta Daily World
, the city’s first black-owned newspaper. Before desegregation, black people couldn’t shop inside where the best selection could be found, and had to make purchases from curbside vendors. By 1979, it seemed only black folks ever shopped there, and only on the inside.

It was like a farmers’ market but better, because it had all the flavor of Atlanta wrapped inside of it in the form of food prepared from the soul, or soon to be, at home in someone’s kitchen. While the vendors sold you tender collards, fat garlicky pickles, or let you sample just a little taste of pulled pork, they’d talk to you as if they’d known you forever, even if you’d never been inside the place. And the regulars they
had
known forever, they’d remember to ask how a child was doing in school, or whether an elderly father was recovering all right from his stroke. People who didn’t go there that often complained about the smell, but that’s because they couldn’t sniff past the fish on ice to get to the good stuff—fresh melons and berries, home-style fried chicken, or fresh baked sweet potato pie.

Since it was only two blocks from the hospital, I’d walk down there after my shift and try to pull Cleo away from her job
running the cash register so we could hang out somewhere downtown. Sometimes we’d window-shop the latest styles, visit Walter’s Clothing on Decatur Street for a new pair of Converse high-tops, or maybe check out the record store for new 45s. Almost always her father would let her go, but not before handing us whatever fruit was at peak season—a handful of strawberries when summer was just getting started, or blueberries about the time it seemed the days couldn’t get any hotter. (Bridgette was right—it was much too early for pecans.) Since it was on the waning side of August, he handed us a peach, sweeter than any you’d ever find in a grocery store. We walked toward Central City Park, talking about the things important only to thirteen-year-old girlfriends, trying to keep peach juice from running down our arms and staining our shirts.

“I can’t stay away too long,” Cleo said. “It’s our busy day and Daddy’ll need me back soon. You hanging out until your mother gets off work?”

“Nah, I catch the bus back home. Never sure what time she’ll get off work. I just figured we won’t see each other much after summer vacation ends.”

“Why do you want to go to that school way out in the middle of nowhere, anyway? Not like it’s the only Catholic high school in town. It isn’t even in town, for that matter.”

“It’s a good school,” I said, wishing immediately that I hadn’t.

“The school I’m going to is a good school, too.”

“I know. That’s not what I meant.” I pointed out a bench in the park, saying that the large shade tree it sat beneath would give us some relief from the sun, in hopes of changing the subject. She sat beside me but didn’t change the subject.

“You’re going to that white school like you think they want you there. They just want to make their quota.”

“There isn’t any quota.” I knew she wasn’t saying it to be hurtful, that she was still angry that I’d reneged on our deal to attend the same high school. Neither of us had been part of the popular crowd at school, though they tolerated us, like the football team put up with the mascot and the band, part of the team but not really. So Cleo and I mostly stuck together. After three years of being each other’s confidantes, having each other’s back in an afterschool fight, sharing the angst of our secret and unrequited crushes, it was hard to imagine not seeing each other every day. But I told myself there would be weekends and summers.