The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  Cathauling is a form of punishment in which an angry tomcat is thrown onto the naked back of a slave and allowed to claw and maim the poor man until he faints dead away. When Silas told me this had been done to his youngest brother, Levi, who was tied down by leather thongs wrapped at his wrists and ankles, I was horrified. But when he told me the cathauling had been ordered and carried out by a Negro overseer named Luther, I began to understand what true horror really is. Silas says Levi’s screams still echo inside his head.

  It broke my heart when Silas explained that after he took Levi’s blood-soaked body back to his cabin, after he bathed his brother’s wounds and tended to his fever, he did not go to the master to demand Luther be punished, even though the master had outlawed cathauling on his plantation. Instead, Silas went to the Negro conjurer and asked him to mix up a potion to be slipped into Luther’s nightly brew that would bring the overseer the bad luck he deserved. The next morning Luther was dead.

  Silas pulled the red-flannel Mojo from the inside of his shirt. He explained that his charm bag was made by the same conjurer who helped him with Luther, and that he wears it around his neck always to keep him safe. “There’s no justice for the Negro in the white man’s world,” he said. “That’s why we find ways to make our own.”

  “But how can you say that when you’re more of a white man than a Negro?” I asked. “When three of your grandparents are white?”

  Silas gazed at me with the weary, sad expression I have come to know so well. He touched my hand, but then pulled back and his expression hardened. “In this world, the smallest drop of Negro blood makes a man a Negro,” he said. “The white man’s world is only for the white man.”

  I could not hold his gaze and looked down at my hand, feeling the warmth and sweetness of his fingers upon mine as I felt how very dull and stupid I was: I have experienced nothing, seen nothing, understand nothing. I stand humble before this man.

  December 5, 1858 (evening)

  I write in the warm glow of the lamplight as I am unable to sleep. It must be well past midnight, and Silas sleeps before the fire. I am curled on the chesterfield, wrapped in Mama’s afghan. I watch the gentle rise and fall of Silas’ broad chest, the way his well-muscled arms glisten in the firelight, and wonder what it would be like to have that chest pressed to mine, to feel those arms around me. Despite the warmth of the room, a shiver of imagined pleasure ripples through me.

  I have grown more in two days in the company of Silas than I have in the past two years in the company of Papa and Caleb and Wendell Parker. Silas stirs in his sleep, turns toward me and opens his eyes. I drop the afghan from my shoulders and kneel next to him. I reach out and touch his cheek. When he pulls me to him and cradles me within the warmth of his body, I learn what it feels like to have those arms around me. I learn what it feels like to be a woman.

  It is all far more wonderful than I could ever have imagined.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I went into work Monday morning hoping that getting back into my routine would make the world feel right again. To my disappointment, but not to my surprise, it didn’t work. On the drive over, I kept wondering how everyone could be doing their usual Monday thing when it wasn’t a usual Monday at all, and when I got to SafeHaven, everything felt off, as if someone had come along and put things at a slight slant while I was away. The shoemaker’s elves with diabolical intent.

  Kiah’s condolences and concerned expression seemed to be coming at me from the wrong end of a telescope, and I could have sworn I’d never met the two new residents washing the dining room floor—although Kiah assured me I had. My desk, crammed under the eaves of my tiny attic office, was larger than I remembered, and the ceiling dipped lower than it had last week. I sat down and scanned the room. The last time I had been here, I was finishing up the Health and Human Services report, pleased that the project was complete, but dreading my return to Gram’s cellar. How prophetic that concern had been.

  I knew Gram had lived a good life, and that her sudden and quick death was just what she would have chosen for herself. Still, I missed her with an ache that belied my logic, and although her last moments were indelibly etched into my consciousness, I couldn’t quite believe it had happened. When my mother told me that an autopsy had been ordered, that it was standard practice when a sudden death occurred outside a hospital, I refused to discuss it, fearing the image it evoked of a cold room filled with sharp tools, a long metal table holding a naked blue-white body.

  Gram wasn’t dead. It was some kind of bad joke. She just couldn’t be. I began to sort through the messages and mail that littered my desk, but even as I read the letters and made a list of calls to be returned, I found my mind wandering from the tasks before me to the place it had been gravitating since last Tuesday afternoon: to Gram’s bizarre death scene in the cellar.

  I still hadn’t told anyone what I had seen, and although I knew Kiah would claim it wasn’t good for my mental health, I wasn’t planning on it. What would I say? That Gram had been fighting with an invisible being over a shovel? That the sight of it, or the power of it, or the fear of it, had killed her? I thought of the conversation I had had with Trina about an afterlife being no more improbable than life itself. I didn’t think I believed in an afterlife. I never had before. But maybe a ghost would explain Dotty Aunt Hortense’s behavior. Or maybe, just like she, I was losing my mind.

  A sharp rap on the doorjamb startled me from my reverie. Kiah strode into the office and planted herself in front of my desk. Her eyes were worried, and there was a slight twitch at the left side of her mouth. I wondered if I had screwed up something in the report.

  “Got a second?” she asked.

  I pushed back in my chair and motioned her to sit on the corner of the desk. The room was too small to hold any furniture other than my desk and a narrow bookshelf. “What’s up?”

  She remained standing. “It’s your friend Trina.”

  The way Kiah said, “your friend Trina,” was not promising; it reminded me of the way my mother used to say, “your daughter Lee,” to my father when I’d done something wrong.

  “What’d she do?”

  “It’s not what she did, but how she’s doing it.” Kiah crossed her arms over her chest. “There’re two uniforms downstairs.”

  Cops, I thought. Shit.

  Kiah stared at me impassively. “It’s that sweet-talking, pretty-boy Lionnel Matthias.”

  “So Trina’s not in trouble herself?”

  Kiah shrugged. “Your guess.”

  I massaged the back of my neck. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or are you just going to keep giving me non-answers to my questions?”

  Kiah had the grace to smile. She sighed and draped her lanky body over the end of the desk. “Lionnel’s been busted for fencing hot goods, and the cops think Trina knows something about it.”

  An image of Gram’s diamond-and-emerald bracelet flashed through my mind. “Did they recover anything?”

  “Why?” Kiah jumped on my question immediately. “Why do you ask that?”

  Although Kiah was only ten years my senior, she seemed much wiser and more worldly than I. She had grown up in the projects and done the old pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps thing after a long bout with drugs and prostitution. She once told me that the aunt who had raised her—if you could call what the aunt had done “raising”—had instructed her to “be nice to men” when they were nice to her, and that it had been real clear to Kiah exactly what the aunt meant. Kiah was twelve. “I was too young to know any better,” she had explained without the least bit of self-pity. “I just wanted money so I could be stoned out of my mind for as many waking hours as possible.” But Kiah had also wanted more. After putting herself through two years at Roxbury Community College, she got a scholarship from Harvard to finish up her BA. She founded SafeHaven when she was a senior. The woman could smell something fishy a thousand miles inland.

  “Do you know something I don’t?” she pressed me.<
br />
  I moved a pile of papers from the right side of my desk to the left side. “No.”

  Kiah’s narrowed eyes told me she guessed I wasn’t telling the truth, but that she had bigger fish to fry. “Trina’s copping a major attitude,” she said. “You know, the too cool, kicked-back sulky bit. She won’t give up anything except that some base head is probably setting Lionnel up.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  She shrugged again. “Sure.”

  I was touched Kiah trusted me enough to be honest. In my single year at SafeHaven, I had seen druggies setting up druggies, pimps setting up pimps, and cops setting up any poor hapless bastard they could find—especially if his or her skin was a few shades darker than white. There was a reason the people who lived here weren’t long on trust.

  “Trina told ’em Lionnel makes bank on blow, not fence. She said if they want anyone to believe their bullshit, they’ll have to get their story straight.” Kiah’s voice contained a touch of respect.

  “Compelling argument.”

  “Not to the man.”

  “They aren’t talking arrest, are they?”

  “Just trying to scare her, I think. But Trina doesn’t scare easy, and she’s holding her own.”

  “Do you think Trina has done something wrong?” I asked because Kiah appeared more concerned than she usually would under these circumstances. Cops were always showing up at the door, wanting to question this one or arrest that one. SafeHaven was, after all, a drug treatment facility for poor, minority women, and these women lived in a world where suspicious police were as common as substandard schools.

  “I don’t think anything. It’s like I was saying last week: I just don’t like the signs.”

  I watched Kiah warily. The stubborn jut of her chin told me we were reaching that peculiar edge of our friendship where black was black and white was white, and no matter what else we shared, Kiah wasn’t going to believe that anyone but her own could really understand.

  “How do you mean?” I asked carefully.

  A look of distressed patience passed over her features. “This kind of attitude and protection of the shit boyfriend is a freshman thing,” she said, as if explaining the obvious to a child who should have known better. “Sophomore, tops. If Trina were anywhere near ready to go back out there and beat the street, she wouldn’t be acting like this.”

  “Are you thinking of demoting her?”

  “That’s not the point,” Kiah said.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to ask what the point was. I waited for her to tell me.

  Instead, she asked, “Why did you want to know if anything was recovered? Did Trina tell you anything the other day that I should know about?”

  “No,” I said quickly. This was a sticky issue at SafeHaven. While the staff was urged to offer friendship to the women, to gain their trust and develop mutual respect, if secrets were shared, we were supposed to turn around and tell all. I’d never been able to buy into this: if a friend told me something in confidence, it meant I didn’t tell anyone else. As far as I was concerned, that was what confidence was. But, as I said, trust was in pretty short supply around there. And it looked as if Kiah’s trust in me had just dried up.

  “Lee,” she said coolly, “this isn’t about some promise you made to your little girlfriend when you were all playing in your suburban backyard. This is the real world—there’s more at stake here than who peed in the sandbox.”

  It really annoyed me when the women at SafeHaven started talking down to me like that—and I’d heard it from both staff and residents. Why did they always have to believe we couldn’t understand, that we were so different from them? A few months ago, a dispassionate discussion I was having with Trina about the possibility of a black person receiving justice in a white world—I said it was possible, although acknowledged it was difficult, and Trina insisted it was always impossible—blew up when I told her I didn’t think I was a racist. Trina claimed every white person was racist, and that it was racist of me not to recognize my racism. If I was a racist, I had asked her, what was I doing there? Why would I bother? She had just shaken her head with the same look of distressed patience on her face that had been on Kiah’s.

  “I don’t know any more than you do,” I told Kiah. “I couldn’t get Trina to tell me anything.”

  Kiah’s smile was tight, a sad granting of the reply she had expected. “Just thought I’d check before I laid into them,” she said. “Lionnel may be an asshole, and he’s surely done lots of things way worse than fencing a few hot computers, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got the right to hassle him like that—or Trina either.” Then she turned and walked out the door.

  I stared into the empty hallway for a long time after Kiah disappeared. Why did I have the impression she thought I disagreed with her? I was relieved when the phone rang. It was Michael.

  “I’m at the house,” he said, his voice terse. “I stopped by for a minute and found the police waiting in the driveway.”

  “Are they looking for Trina?”

  “No,” he said. “They’re looking for you.”

  Trina watched the two uniforms leave, avoiding eye contact with Kiah. It was obvious Kiah was pissed off, but Trina wasn’t exactly sure who Kiah was pissed at: Lionnel or the cops or her. Probably all of them. Trina glanced over real quick, and just as quick Kiah gave her the red eye. It was pretty clear Kiah thought she was fencing for Lionnel, or else that she was doing something else she shouldn’t be doing. If Kiah believed Trina was turning, how could Trina expect the uniforms not to? Trina didn’t look again. She just went back to the kitchen sink, which was where she had been when the cops had showed up.

  One of the cops was a brother and the other a know-it-all white boy who didn’t stop yapping the whole time he was sitting there. Yapping about how Trina knew what Lionnel was up to and how she was helping him dump all his shit all over town. Right. Here she was in drug rehab, for Christ’s sake, locked in and watched every minute, on the edge of going to prison every day. How would she be getting rid of Lionnel’s hot watches and boom boxes? When she told them so, they didn’t believe her. They just thought she was giving lip.

  The cops figured that because of Hendrika and the smack, Trina was lying. And Lionnel sure wasn’t helping, sniffing around even though he wasn’t supposed to, knowing it could land her in jail. “As long as you know me, don’t you come near me,” she had told him when he showed up at the kitchen window last week. But he kept coming. He didn’t believe any more than anyone else that she really wanted to get her shit together.

  Even Kiah, whose whole life was supposed to be dedicated to believing, didn’t believe Trina could change from what she’d been. From where she’d been. Trina wanted to tell them all that a dead baby can change a lot of shit for a person. But, then again, maybe even a dead baby wasn’t enough.

  She pressed her finger to a spot above her upper lip to keep from crying and washed the rest of the dishes with one hand. What did the police know? What did Kiah and Lionnel know? They didn’t know shit. Kiah had never even asked her if she was okay about Clara.

  Trina felt real bad about Clara. It was like there was this huge hole where Clara had once been. One minute, she and Clara were shooting the breeze, and then the next thing Trina knew, Clara had passed. Trina hadn’t wanted it to be like that, that wasn’t how things were supposed to go, and even though she knew nothing hardly ever worked out the way you wanted it to, it still hurt to think about how it had come down.

  Trina pushed harder on the spot, but a tear rolled down her cheek anyway. Maybe the cops and Kiah and Lionnel were right. Maybe they were just seeing what she didn’t want to.

  “Poison?”

  “Only a possibility, ma’am.” The cop swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. He appeared to be all of sixteen and quite uncomfortable. He had introduced himself as Detective Raymond Langley. His partner was Detective Lynn Blais.

  “Are you telling me it’s possible
my grandmother was poisoned?” I looked at the policewoman who sat to the young cop’s left. She obviously had seniority, but she didn’t offer an answer to my question. I turned back to Langley. “Are you saying that someone gave Gram poison on purpose?” Although I knew this was impossible, a part of me recognized that if Gram had died from some kind of poison, she couldn’t have been scared to death by a ghost.

  Michael placed his hand over mine. We were in the east parlor. The two cops sat across from us in Gram’s yellow bergere chairs. Michael and I were squeezed together on the old chesterfield. “I told you that no one would want to hurt Clara Barrett,” he said. “It’s not possible.”

  “And it’s probably not,” Blais said. “This is all very preliminary. We’re making no assumptions at this point. Just checking into possibilities.”

  “Following through,” Langley added. “Procedure. We’d like to know everything Mrs. Barrett ate or drank last Tuesday. What medications she took. Where she went, who she saw.” He pulled a small notebook from his pocket. “Everything necessary to reconstruct her day.”

  “You think it could have been some kind of drug interaction?” I asked, latching onto the only thing he had said that made any sense. “I know she took blood pressure medication. And estrogen. Her doctor’s name is Larry Starr. He’s right here in town, and he’s sure to have a record of everything she was taking.” I jumped up and turned toward the front stairs. “Would you like me to get her pills for you?”

  Blais waved me back into my seat. “You were the one who found Mrs. Barrett?”

  I clutched the arm of the chesterfield. “Yes, yes I did. In the cellar. I’ve always had the feeling that something bad was going to happen down there.”

  “You knew something bad was going to happen on that afternoon?”

  “No, not then, anytime. I mean, it wasn’t that I thought something bad was going to happen on that particular day, it’s just that I always thought something bad was going to happen down there period—ever since I was a little girl and my older cousins used to tease me. You know how you are when you’re a kid and there’s this dark, creepy place?”