No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  Usually her weekends were spent making extra money doing security and traffic detail for Braves baseball games in spring and summer, or concerts and ice skating shows at the Omni during the winter. For a while, she worked security at a high-end clothing store, mostly for the discount because it was hard to be fashionable on a cop’s salary, and my mother liked to look good. The owners were grateful because Ma figured out it was the store manager that was stealing from them, pretending she was taking out garbage in those big plastic bags. Sometimes I’d benefit from the discount if she thought an outfit didn’t look too grown for me. She worked a lot so we could have nice things, so I tried to understand her lack of spontaneity and good-timing. I never felt short-changed. Her presence was so big to me that even a small bit of it filled me up.

  We arrived at the theater early enough to get the best seats since there were hardly any people in line.

  She handed me two ticket stubs. “Take your sister in and get a seat on the aisle so I can find you. And not too close, or I’ll get a headache. I’ll get the popcorn.”

  “And Goobers?”

  “And Goobers.”

  I tried to take Bridgette’s hand but she shook me off, saying, “Always thinking you’re somebody’s mother.” Inside the nearly empty theater, we found four seats on the aisle. Bridgette sat in the inside seat and I sat next to her, leaving the two outside seats empty, one for Ma and one for buffer. We watched the coming attractions for a few minutes when a man sat down in the end seat.

  “That seat’s saved,” I said, immediately wary. A man sitting down one seat over when most of the theater was free set off alarms. The man didn’t say anything, just smiled at me funny. I pretended to stare at the screen, all the while trying to keep one eye on him. The man hadn’t done anything yet, and maybe I’d just look crazy making a scene over nothing. I hoped Ma would come soon.

  Next thing I knew, the man had unzipped his fly and had his hand in his pants, still smiling at Bridgette and I, his hand working away. In the time it took me to figure out whether to take Bridgette and climb over the seat to the next row, or just scream, or try to cuss the man out like Ma would have done, there she was, her arm around the man’s neck as she leaned over him from the row behind us.

  “I oughta kill you right here, but it’s my child’s birthday.”

  She pulled the man from the seat and yanked both his arms back, and with no more words, she led him out of the theater. I was surprised he didn’t fight back, but I wouldn’t have fought her either. By the time she came back to us, the Fish That Saved Pittsburgh was nearly over. To this day, I couldn’t tell you much of what the movie was about, and I never asked what happened to the man. Some things I knew not to question, though I always figured she called a uniform and filed a report.

  *

  There was another occasion, just a couple of weeks after the movie, that’s as vivid for me now as it was then.

  Ma, Bridgette, and I were at the Greenbriar Mall exchanging birthday/Christmas gifts. We were walking through the parking lot back to our car when we heard a woman cry out. At first, we didn’t see anyone else in the parking lot, but after another scream, we saw a man hitting a woman inside a car parked in the row across from us, two or three spaces down.

  “Take Bridgette and get in the car,” Ma said, handing me the keys and the packages she was holding.

  I did what she said, but rolled down my windows and watched her walk toward the car the screams were coming from. By now, the man and woman were out of the car, and the woman was using her jacket sleeve to wipe tears from her face.

  “What’s going on here? You all right?” Ma asked the woman.

  “Ain’t none of your damn business how she doing,” the man said, taking a step toward Ma.

  Ma put her hand into her purse. I was scared then, and realized I should be distracting Bridgette from what was going on, but I couldn’t help watching.

  “I’m making it my business. Lady, do you know him?”

  “It’s okay, he’s my man. We all right.” I could tell from her shaky voice and her swollen face that nothing about her was all right.

  “Look, I want you to come with me,” Ma said to the woman. “He can go and do whatever he needs to, but you don’t need to get into that car with him.”

  “She ain’t going nowhere,” the man said, “and I’m about to give you some of what she got if you don’t get the hell out of here.”

  Before he could take two steps, Ma raised her purse in front of her, her hand still inside of it.

  “You move another inch and I’ll blow it off.”

  I wasn’t sure if Ma was really carrying, she didn’t always when she was off-duty, but her voice must have sounded like she was. When he finally moved, it was back toward his car. When he tried to get in, it must have scared Ma because she told him to stop. Again, her voice convinced him he’d better do what she said.

  “Come with me,” Ma said to the woman, but she refused.

  Now Ma was in a risky situation—me and Bridgette in the car, the woman she was trying to rescue not cooperating, and a man in front of her who was still excited by the adrenaline that had flooded him while he was beating his girlfriend. I wondered if she would try to arrest him, but that would’ve been dangerous without backup. All she could do was back down or be ready to shoot him if he did something crazy. If she was really carrying. And even then, she couldn’t turn her back on him to get into our car, and she couldn’t let him get into his car. He could have had a gun in there. I was so afraid I was ready to wet myself.

  “Who the hell you think you is telling me what…”

  Ma made a movement with the hand that was still inside her purse, which I hoped was cradling her .38.

  “Ah shit, you a damn cop,” the man said, finally realizing that no average woman would be going through all of this unless she was either crazy or a cop—in Ma’s case, both. The man stared at her for a second, then said, “I know you. You the bitch cop that put me in jail for five years.”

  “If you know I’m a cop, then you know what I got in this bag.”

  “Hey, I ain’t trying to start no shit with you.”

  “Unless you want me to call this in, ya’ll need to go your separate ways. Give her the keys, and you walk back toward the mall.”

  The man handed the keys over to the woman, and started walking toward the mall like Ma said, but not without calling her a bitch again.

  Once the man was far enough from our car and the woman had backed out of her parking space, Ma got into our car. I watched the woman as we left the parking lot. She pulled alongside the man and he got into the car, then they drove away.

  “Stupid woman, he’ll probably kill her tonight,” Ma said. “You girls forget about that, okay?”

  Bridgette and I nodded, but she was crazy if she really thought I’d forget. I couldn’t have if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. When we got home from the mall, I peeked into Ma’s purse and saw her gun, and wondered how things might have gone if the man hadn’t believed her.

  Chapter Eight

  The killer had been silent over the winter months, and most of us let our guard down. Except for those in the neighborhoods where the four boys went missing, where the empty space left by the children still lay gaping, people didn’t talk as much about the boys anymore. The city was still trying to figure out who killed them, but they were no longer at the front of people’s minds. Too many other bad things had been in the news to take their place—American hostages were taken in Beirut, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. These places many of us had never heard of before, or at most, could point them out on a map, we now knew of in detail—at least the details provided us by grainy film on the evening news. Atlanta got on with other things, like how expensive it was to fill a gas tank or how hard it was to find a job.

  Just as we were ready to believe that whoever was committing the murders had moved on, something we could be thankful for even if he hadn’t been caught, another child turned
up missing in early March. This time it was a girl, twelve years old, with a name too pretty and hopeful to fit properly in a news article about missing kids: Angel. Now the bonds between the victims had fallen to two—young and black, but the killer was no longer partial to boys.

  Maybe because she was a girl, maybe because it had finally sunk in how real this whole thing was, maybe it was her name, but she was the first one I really prayed for. Despite all the Catholic schooling and churchgoing, I wasn’t much of a Catholic. The year before the killings began I’d told my priest that he’d heard my last confession. I just didn’t see the point of bringing a middleman between myself and the Maker. Ma was called to the school to help the priests talk some sense into her heretical daughter, but it was useless. She’d done the same thing early in her own Catholic career. I haven’t been in a confessional since.

  But the missing girl made me go down on my knees, light a candle, and beg God to let her be okay. I tried to forget all the facts and statistics that living with Ma had taught me. Surely, there were times when kids were found past the first twenty-four hours—hiding out in a basement to torment parents who didn’t understand; the center of some communications mixup between family members who got the dropoff place and time wrong; found in a bus station with money stolen from piggy banks and fathers’ wallets. When my friends spoke of her in past tense, I corrected them. She wasn’t gone. She was only missing.

  God didn’t hear me, or chose to ignore me. I didn’t have to wait for the TV news. I asked Ma daily what she knew about Angel. Almost a week after she went missing, Ma told me Angel had been found tied to a tree with the same electrical cord that was used to steal her last breath, panties that didn’t belong to her wadded into her mouth. It was the first time I remember questioning God’s omnipotence. I didn’t think he controlled everything if he could let Angel die like that. The priests and nuns had been feeding me fairytales.

  *

  At school the next day, I joined some friends in the cafeteria, which wasn’t like most school cafeterias back then, but a kind of deli where we paid cash for sandwiches, soups, and salads. Most days I brought a bag lunch of bologna and yellow mustard on white bread from the day-old bakery, or leftover chicken with a piece of fruit. But sometimes I’d leave my sack on the kitchen counter and didn’t have enough money to buy something from the deli. Luckily my friend Dana was generous and would loan me money. She also brought me gifts of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers so I wouldn’t have to use vitamin E capsules for lip gloss. (I’d lied and told her my doctor recommended it for chapped lips, but I guess she saw through my story.) She gave me a tin of peppermint when she noticed I was still trying to make a giant Christmas cane stretch into spring by breaking off bits at a time.

  Dana never wanted the lunch money reimbursed, probably because she figured I needed it more than she did. She was right, but I always paid her back. I was nobody’s charitable deed. The partial scholarship that allowed me to go to the school I earned through good grades. The rest of the tuition Ma earned working security jobs. I didn’t want people thinking we couldn’t come up with lunch money.

  I’d say, “Dana, can you loan me fifty cent until tomorrow?”

  She’d always give me the money, saying, “Fifty cents. It’s plural. Why do you always make it singular?”

  Because that’s the way everyone I know says it, but if I told her that, she’d ask more questions about a world where people went around failing to pluralize properly and I didn’t want the bother. By the end of the school year, she’d badgered me enough that I said it correctly. To this day, I think of Dana when I here someone say fifty cent.

  On one end of the lunch table we’d chosen, someone was talking about a party. My lunch mates were not part of the conversation because I’d settled in with a group that had been marked as one that didn’t get invited to parties. We were the kids with excellent grades but not much else going for us as far as school social standing went, so we had to take solace in the future, when we’d be the ones running corporations or emergency rooms or universities and throwing the fabulous, invitation-only parties. For fun at these parties of the future, I imagined we smart kids would speculate on which of the party kids from school were now pumping gas or living off trusts funds, still being reminded by their parents of the thousands spent on their fine educations.

  We’ve been called different names since the first school opened when time began, but I believe in 1980 at my school the term was dweeb. I’d never heard the word in my other life. I was grateful I had another life, where I got invitations to house parties that played music I wanted to hear, so I wasn’t too broken up when I wasn’t included on my school’s social agenda. Even if I were invited, I’d have no way to get there. None of the kids with cars was going to drive to Southeast to give me a ride. I listened to the conversation, anyway.

  “His parents won’t be in town all weekend. Can you believe it?”

  “I hear he’s getting a keg.”

  “I heard two kegs.”

  It sounded like all the other parties I’d heard about around school. A few things still surprised me after nearly a full school year. Daily, I learned more words in a whole new vocabulary, words like kegger and dweeb. I also learned that kids of privilege seemed to have no fear of their parents. No one in my neighborhood would have even thought about throwing a party while their parents were away.

  *

  We didn’t have much time to mourn Angel Lenair because a ten-year-old boy named Jefferey Mathis was reported missing the day after Angel’s body was found. He was last seen a mile from my old school in the West End, the same school Bridgette still attended, on his way to buy cigarettes for his mother. I thought of this boy’s mother, wondered how she felt when she learned her last communication with her child would be about buying her some cigarettes. Anytime she lit a cigarette, or smelled the sulfur from someone’s struck match, or sped by a cigarette ad on a highway billboard, I wondered if her heart would break each time.

  I knew the service station where he was last seen, had bought candy and soda there more than once. I suppose that’s something I was thankful for about my new school. Kids didn’t show up missing from gas stations down the street, and I didn’t have to worry about girls from Brown High teasing me and my friends about our plaid uniforms, using them as an excuse for an afterschool fight.

  But Bridgette was still there, and sometimes I felt guilty for the green soccer fields of my new school while my sister’s fourth grade class spent recess on a blacktop. She was too young for the Brown High kids to pick fights with, but she was the same age as the last boy to go missing. I told myself she was safe, probably safer than when I was still there and we rode MARTA home together. When I began attending my new school, Ma hired a woman to meet Bridgette after school and take care of her until she could pick her up. Mrs. Ingram lived in the West End, just a few blocks from the school, so Bridgette’s day no longer included trips on MARTA. I figured she was probably safer now with me out in the suburbs.

  Remembering Angel, I noticed for the first time that no one at school really talked about the kids who were dying, so I asked a couple of classmates what they thought about it.

  “What kids dying?” was one kid’s reaction.

  “Oh yeah, I think I heard something about it,” said another. “Why? Did you know any of them?”

  Yes, I know every black kid in Atlanta. I wanted to say it but never did because I liked them and realized they didn’t know any better.

  “No, I didn’t know them. It’s freaking me out a little, I just wondered what you thought about it.”

  “Well, it’s not freaking me out. I mean, it’s sad and everything, but weren’t those kids poor or something?”

  “Yeah, they live like a million miles from me.”

  I wanted to tell them that Angel had lived only eight miles away from me, but caught myself because I was still uncomfortable letting them know that I wasn’t as well off as they were. They knew I lived far away, but
having never been anywhere near Southeast, I thought they imagined I lived in a version of their world, only on the Southside, if they even thought about it at all. Not telling them that Angel and I shared far more similarities than I did with my classmates made me feel guilty later, made me feel small and weak and a traitor to Angel.

  To my classmates, the dead kids and their world was more than just miles away. They were a whole life away. The private-school kids weren’t black and just getting by; many didn’t even have an Atlanta address. It was a story they’d heard on the news and it touched them the same way the news about the Beirut hostages did—more bad news on TV that didn’t really change how they got to and from school, didn’t make them pick up the pace when a car drove too slowly past them on a city block.

  *

  On a spring day toward the end of the school year, I was walking the half mile from the bus stop to my house, noticing how the forsythia had all but gone from yellow flowers to green leaves. The pink and white of dogwood flowers in most of the yards hid the first signs of a middle-class neighborhood quietly sliding into lower class—a sagging shutter on one house that had been that way a couple of seasons now, a junk car sitting idle for months in more than one driveway, burglar bars on the windows of a few houses. Azalea blossoms had already peaked and were turning a faded version of their once magenta and coral selves, which meant summer vacation was less than two months away.