No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  NO PLACE SAFE

  A Family Memoir

  Kim Reid

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  Also by Kim Reid

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  The summer before I started high school, two boys went missing and a few days later, turned up dead. They were found by a mother and son looking for aluminum cans alongside a quiet wooded road. It was already ninety degrees at noon, even with an overcast sky, because it was the end of July in Atlanta, Georgia, which I imagine is similar to the heat in hell, except with humidity. The mother thought she saw an animal at the bottom of a steep embankment that started its descent just a couple of feet from the road. The combination of heat and damp created a smell that frightened her. Something about the odor must have told her it wasn’t an animal at all, must have made her call her young child to her lest he discover the source. They left off the search for discarded cans and walked to a gas station where the mother called her husband, and he called the police.

  The boys were friends; one was about to celebrate his fifteenth birthday, the other had just turned thirteen, the same age as I at the time. One went missing four days after the first, but they were both found on the same day, not two hundred feet apart in a ravine just off Niskey Lake Road. The two detectives first on the scene, responding to a signal 48 (person dead), noted in their report that either side of the road was bordered by trees, like most streets were in Atlanta at the time. Loblolly pine, white oaks, and the occasional stray dogwood that played unwitting hosts for the creeping kudzu vines that threatened to take them over completely. The officers also noted that the woods and ravines lining both sides of the road were “used as a dumping ground for trash.” This was where they found the first body. A vine growing from a nearby tree had already wrapped itself around the boy’s neck, unaware that his last breath had been stolen from him days ago.

  While making notes of how the child’s body lay among other thrown-away items littering the road’s shoulder, the detectives caught an odor on a small, hot breeze coming from the north. They knew the smell immediately, and it led them to the second boy’s body. At the time, no one knew the boys were friends because the police didn’t know who they were. By the time school started, only one boy had been positively identified. More than a year would pass before a name could be given to his friend.

  *

  It wasn’t much more than a blip in the news—two black boys being killed in Atlanta in 1979 didn’t get much coverage. The only reason I knew what I did was because my mother, an investigator with the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office at the time, told me to be a little more careful. She said it was probably just a coincidence, but just as likely not, that the boys were close in age, black and found in the same wooded area.

  Warning me to be a little more careful because those boys were killed was a waste of words. By my thirteenth summer, I’d learned to be nothing but careful, whether I wanted to or not. I couldn’t help but think like a cop. Even though they were my favorite, I rarely drank frozen Cokes because I avoided going into the convenience stores where they were sold (an off-duty cop still in uniform is a sitting duck if she walks in during a robbery). At restaurants, I never sat with my back to the door (you need to be aware of everyone who comes in and out, and know your entry and exit points). I always tried to carry myself like I wasn’t scared of shit (even if you are, don’t let them know or they have you). My friends called me Narc.

  Ma told me about the boys while we got ready for work, sharing her bathroom mirror. I combed my hair while I studied her use of blush—the sucking in of cheeks to find the bones, the blowing of the brush to prevent over-application. This girly part of her never seemed to go with the other part, the other woman—the one who, as a uniformed officer, carried a .38-caliber service revolver in her thick leather holster, along with other things difficult to associate with a woman, especially a mother: handcuffs, nightstick, and the now illegal blackjack, solid metal covered in leather for handling an uncooperative perpetrator, or bad guy as I called them. Perpetrator filled my mouth in an uncomfortable way.

  My use of cosmetics was limited to tinted lip gloss and a brush to tame my thick and unruly eyebrows. But I watched her anyway, filing away the technique for the time she’d let me use real makeup to turn my face into something that resembled hers.

  “I’ll call a friend at the department to see what other information I can get on those two boys,” Ma said while she softened the tip of her eyeliner pencil over a match’s flame.

  “Why?” I asked. “People are all the time turning up dead in Atlanta.”

  “Something’s not right about it—them dying a few days apart, both being teenage boys and black, turning up in the same location. I’ll look into it, and in the meantime, you be watchful, and look out for your sister.”

  Ma didn’t need to add the last part. When wasn’t I watchful? And I didn’t know any other way than to look out for my sister. Bridgette was only nine. I was the oldest, which meant looking out for her was my job.

  I just told Ma, Okay, I’ll be careful. She was thinking there might be a pattern. She was always looking for a pattern in everything. The fact that the two boys were found so close together but in different stages of decomposition, a clue that they hadn’t been left there on the same day, made Ma think their killer was the same person and was using the wooded spot just off the road as a dumping area. I imagined a car slowing just long enough to open a door and toss out some mother’s child, like an emptied beer bottle or a tread-bare tire.

  Beyond that bit of theory, Ma couldn’t come up with more. Even if she was right about a connection between the victims, I didn’t see what I had in common with the dead boys other than being black and our ages being close. For one thing, they were boys, and everybody knew boys liked risk. Boys looked for trouble, and if none could be found, they’d make some up.

  Ma said herself that most homicide victims were left not too far from where they lived or where they were killed. Niskey Lake Road was in southwest Atlanta, a good fourteen or fifteen miles from our house. Though they didn’t know it for sure, the cops were already speculating the boys were poor and messing around with drugs. There was nothing new in this theory—according to the police and the media, all black boys in inner-city Atlanta were poor and dealing. I didn’t know much about drugs other than the joint I’d sampled when I was twelve, during a summer vacation in Cleveland with my grandparents that freed me from Ma’s surveillance.

  We did okay financially, considering we lived on a cop’s salary and there were no child support payments waiting in the mailbox, no sugar daddy to take up the slack. Neither of those income sources was my mother’s style. Maybe those boys were from the projects or nearby, and I lived in a house with a pool in the backyard. True, I lived within a couple of miles of two housing proje
cts, but that was on the other side of Jonesboro Road—the side that led down Browns Mill Road to Cleveland Avenue and its pawn shops, check-cashing stores, and fast-food joints that filled our passing car with the smell of old grease. To me, it seemed a world away.

  *

  In between filling the dog’s water bowl and making sure Bridgette didn’t add more sugar to her Frosted Flakes, I began the morning countdown, telling Ma the time every three minutes to keep her on track because she was never on time for anything. You’d have thought she was an actress instead of a cop, as much time as she took in the morning. It probably would have made her cop life easier, but she didn’t pretend to be a man. She wore her hair long, although as a street cop, she’d had to wear it up. Long hair could get you into trouble when you’re trying to take down a bad guy. This is probably what made her popular with some of the more open-minded male cops, those who didn’t see anything wrong with a female cop as long as she was something to look at.

  We rode together in the mornings because we both worked downtown, and I pestered her about the clock until the moment we were in the car. I hated being late for anything, much less a place where I was responsible for things. The source of my obsession with being on time is a mystery because Ma didn’t give me much of an example. Or maybe it’s because she didn’t. There were too many times when I was the last kid picked up from daycare, or school, or basketball games that she couldn’t get to early enough to watch me play. Put-out babysitters, teachers, and coaches would give me the evil eye in between checking the window for any sign of her, though when she finally arrived, they’d say, “Not a problem at all, I understand.”

  Normally, I’d catch MARTA, the city bus system, to avoid having to depend on her. She let me start taking public transportation when I was eleven. After that, my tardiness could be blamed only on the bus driver, and even that rarely happened because I always tried to take a bus earlier than I needed to just to make sure I wasn’t late. But it was summertime and I was already getting up earlier than should be legal during summer break. Riding with Ma gave me an extra thirty minutes of sleep. When I’d finally get her out the door, I always thought we’d make it on time as long as we didn’t get stuck at the train tracks. More often than not, we did.

  I left Ma in the parking lot in front of her building, the Fulton County Courthouse on Pryor Street, and walked the last half mile to work. Past the old entrance to Underground Atlanta, once a tiny city beneath the city (and now is again). Down Martin Luther King to Courtland and into the Georgia State University campus. And finally, over to Butler Street, where all kinds of things could be seen and heard: fights between spouses, patrol cars coming and going, people grieving, the homeless, people going about their every day, and ambulances screaming to be heard over all the rest.

  My job wasn’t a paying one, but it should have been. I was a candy striper at Grady Hospital, which was like being a candy striper in a war zone. It seemed like a good idea when Ma said I needed something to keep me busy during the summer. I figured I’d get to wear a cute nurse’s outfit, and Ma always said I’d wanted to be a doctor since I was six, when she bought me a microscope for Christmas, complete with specimens pressed between small rectangles of glass. The job would give me a chance to find out whether this life of medicine was Ma’s dream or mine. True, I lied to the volunteer agency about my age, saying I was fourteen, but the job shouldn’t have been given to anyone under twenty-one, and even then, I’d have warned them to think twice.

  The uniform was the first disappointment because there was nothing cute about it. Instead of being white and form-fitting as I’d imagined, it was a smock of blue-and-white-striped seersucker worn over a white blouse. The top half of the smock was apronlike, square-necked, sleeveless, and a size too small, pressing down my breasts like binding. The bottom half flared out, giving the impression my hips were far wider than they were. The candy striper uniform did nothing to help me broadcast my recently acquired curves. And the job wasn’t like what I remembered from the movies—handing out magazines, filling cups with ice chips.

  Back then, Grady was the largest hospital in the Southeast. It was where people were sent when no other hospital wanted them—because they were on Medicaid, because they were shot while trying to kill the person who shot them, because they had no place else to go. It was where the ambulance took Ma after a car chase that ended badly. She said when you’re on the wrong side of the white light, Grady was the place to go if you weren’t ready to check out just yet. Once they saved you, though, it was another story. You had better get moved to another hospital quick.

  Grady served its purpose, but that didn’t keep it from being a scary place. Everything about it was functional and institutional—brightly lit rooms, echoing hallways, and no thought given to softening the waiting areas with silk plants and paintings to distract visitors from whatever bad thing had brought them there. When I started the job, they gave us a tour and told us how many miles of corridors there were. I don’t remember the number, but after spending my first few days there, I do recall thinking that it meant a lot of corridors filled with sick people, forgotten people, hopeless and hopeful people, overburdened nurses, and pushed-to-the-edge doctors.

  It didn’t help ease my initial fear of the place when they put me on the gynecology ward during the middle of a nurse shortage, requiring me to do a lot more than fluffing up pillows. Within the first week, I’d learned a couple of things: the whole idea of being a doctor was shot to hell regardless of whose idea it had been, and I planned to avoid those stirrups for as long as possible. According to the nurses I worked with, a girl didn’t have to have the exam until she was eighteen or having sex, whichever came first. I thought that if the girls at school could see what I did, heard the screams I heard outside the examination rooms, they’d become nuns.

  Part of my job was to put together admissions packets for the patients. I put the appropriate blank forms into the folders, and stamped each one with the patient’s insurance cards using one of those machines they used for credit cards at the department stores. It was always the same card—Medicaid, cornflower blue with patient information embossed in white. When I stamped one card in particular, I was certain the date of birth information was wrong, because it would have made the patient ten years old. When I showed it to the nurse at the desk, she said, “No, it’s correct.” She had checked the girl in herself.

  The girl was back in the ward, in the room where we’d put the people who were either too poor—or not sick enough—to have a semi-private room. We had no private rooms in our department that I can recall, which was too bad for the patients, because nearly everyone was there for something they probably didn’t want too many people to know about.

  I knew that, in the suburbs, the candy stripers weren’t allowed in certain places, weren’t allowed to see certain things. At Grady during a nurse shortage, I saw things and went places I’m sure I should’ve been nowhere near. I was a responsible thirteen-supposed-to-be-fourteen-year-old. People forgot I was a kid after spending a little time with me. And they were so short-staffed, I had to help wherever I could, as long as it didn’t require actual medical work. I wheeled patients on gurneys and in wheelchairs to x-ray, and shuttled blood and plasma stat between floors (I liked saying stat). On my trips to pathology, always colder than the rest of the hospital, I tried hard not to think of the cadavers and body parts in jars that I imagined were stored inside the huge metal refrigerators, especially if I had to run this errand right before my lunch break. This kind of work was why I thought I should have been paid. Instead, my reward was supposed to have been satisfaction in helping others. At thirteen, it was difficult to see the reward in that.

  When I went back to the ward, the girl I saw in the bed didn’t look ten years old. I was certain she was at least fifteen when I looked at her face, but when I made out the shape of her body under the sheet, I could tell she was still a little girl.

  “They sent me in here to take off your makeup,
” I said, trying to talk as I would to a small child even though she looked older than I did.

  “Who the hell are you? Whoever you are, I don’t want you touching me.” She looked fifteen, but her mouth sounded thirty. “How old are you? You don’t look like a real nurse.”

  “I’m not a nurse. All I want to do is take off your makeup. The nurse will be in soon to get you ready for your exam.”

  “All right, but don’t touch the lashes. They fake, and it’s hard as hell to get them on just right.”

  “They have to come off, too.”

  “You try and I’ll slap you.”

  I saw at this point that I was no match for the woman-child, and decided I’d remove everything but the lashes. The nurse could handle that. I tried to make conversation, and besides, I was dying to know what a ten-year-old was doing in the gynecology ward.

  “What procedure are you in here for?”

  “None of your damn business.” She folded her arms over her chest and stared at me while I wiped cotton over her clown-red cheeks.

  “You know I can just look at your chart.”

  “Then why you asking me?”

  I realized that was the end of our conversation and removed the rest of the makeup in silence, a little embarrassed that the woman-child scared me. I didn’t scare easily—I’d been in more fights than a girl ever should, had a knife pulled on me once by some high school girls, and hid in a closet while a man who had been stalking Ma broke into our house. But this ten-year-old made me nervous.

  When I finished removing her makeup, the girl touched her lashes to make sure I hadn’t tricked her. She watched as I walked to the end of the bed and picked up the chart hanging there. I avoided her stare but felt it just the same. The doctors in Emergency had her admitted because she had gonorrhea. I wondered if she’d have to get the D&C procedure that made grown women cry out. I’d seen the makeup on their faces, knew of the diagnoses with women who had the disease so advanced that it had spread throughout their bodies, but would have never connected those women and their self-described profession to this girl. I bet none of the candy stripers in the shiny, new suburban hospitals ever removed the makeup of a ten-year-old prostitute.