No Place Safe (25 page)

I’d seen Ma on TV before, but only on the evening news for just a few seconds while the cameras watched her make an arrest, or as she walked behind a reporter who was giving an update from a crime scene. This time she was going to be interviewed and the tape shown all around the country, although I remember wishing it wasn’t being shown on PBS, a station I believed had only two demographics—preschoolers and old people. I figured not many of my friends would catch the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
.

Bridgette, Ma, and I sat on Ma’s bed, our evening TV viewing spot despite having the garage turned into a rec room. We made a bowl of popcorn like we were in front of a movie, and watched the opening credits, excited about our brief moment of celebrity.

“When will they show you, Ma?”

“Hush, we’ll miss something.”

Then Ma appeared on screen with Sid, looking like herself and not whatever I’d imagined. I blamed my slight feeling of disappointment on too many fantasies of Ma as Christy Love, Coffy, and Foxy Brown. She looked regular, like any businesswoman, except she was trying to explain what the Task Force was doing and why they hadn’t figured out who was killing Atlanta’s children. Ma, Sid, and their bosses hoped to get two things from the national public, one spoken, the other not: help in solving the cases and sympathy for the maligned Task Force.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault appeared neutral, almost sympathetic I thought, to Ma and Sid during the interview. She didn’t attack them the way I expected most journalists would if given the chance. But she was still an Atlantan and like every other person who called Atlanta home, she wanted to know what was being done to stop the killer. So she asked questions that Ma and Sid couldn’t always fully answer although they gave it their best shot, partly because doing so would compromise the investigation, but also because they just didn’t have the answer. Especially to the questions about whether the murders were racially motivated.

But she asked questions I knew no one in town could fully answer. If they could, I’d have been watching
Perry Mason
reruns instead of PBS. I’d go to bed that night without fear that there’d be another child found dead in the morning. Bridgette would be sleeping in her own bed instead of mine, which she’d taken to doing on the nights Ma spent working some crime scene. And I wouldn’t have been wondering whether the despair I saw in Ma’s eyes on the TV screen was something I’d imagined, a trick played by television cameras, or something real.

*

Bridgette and Ma weren’t home even though it was
after seven and I’d already cooked dinner, cleaned the dishes and checked the phone twice to see if maybe it was off the hook. Just as I was about to call the Task Force to see if anyone knew where my mother was, I heard a car door slam shut. It was an unmarked police car and I felt a little better until I saw Bridgette get out of the passenger seat and right away noticed she’d been crying. I wondered if this was the Moment, but no, the detective was smiling. Even Bridgette was smiling, holding on to a fast-food restaurant bag.
This isn’t the moment
, I told my stomach, and it tried to settle down.

“I’m Detective Hurst,” he said to me. Right away, I noticed and appreciated that he spoke to me like an adult, though I’m not sure why he did or why I appreciated it. “No worries, your mom’s okay.” He was also a mind reader, or had family at home who also prayed the Moment never came, but were always prepared, or thought they were, if it did.

“Where is she?”

“She got caught up on a scene, so she asked if I could see to your sister getting home.”

 “Thanks for bringing her home, Detective Hurst. For the dinner, too.”

“No problem. You girls gonna be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Your mom says she might not be home for a while yet.”

“We’ll be okay.” I was immediately angry at Ma for not calling to say she’d be late, or to say a cop I’d never met would be bringing Bridgette home, or to tell me how long  “a while yet” would be this time.

When the detective pulled out of the driveway, I noticed how cold the evening had grown. February was like that in Atlanta, the warm days could fool you into thinking spring had arrived, and the nights reminded you that no such thing had happened.

“Why were you crying?” I asked Bridgette as I hustled her inside.

“When?”

“Before. I can still see the streaks on your face from where you were crying. And your eyes are still red.”

“I wasn’t crying. I was mad. Ma was so late. It was closing time and the afterschool people were trying to find her. I thought she’d forgotten about me. Then the cop came, and he scared me.”

“Why did he scare you?”

“Anybody she ever had pick me up has been someone I already knew, some good friend of hers. I didn’t know what to do ’cause I didn’t know him and ’cause he’s white, and Ma doesn’t have any close white cop friends that I know about. And you know how they’re saying it’s a white man killing the kids.”

“But he showed you his badge, right? And the afterschool teacher saw his badge, right? And you know what an unmarked car looks like.” Even though it was over and Bridgette was safe at home, it made me afraid thinking about what might have happened. I wanted to make sure she knew the right things to do next time, because I was certain there’d be a next time.

“That doesn’t matter anymore. You know what the mayor said.”

“About what?”

“That until they catch the killer, everybody’s a suspect. And one of the parents of the dead kids was on TV talking about how it could be a cop, for all she knew. For all I know, too.”

“So what made you go with him?”

“He knew the code.”

I’d long forgotten the code, mostly because I didn’t have much need for it anymore. For a few years now I’d been responsible for getting myself home; it had been a long time since a patrol car came to pick me up from school because Ma couldn’t get away from some crime scene. But back in those days when she couldn’t always rely on a friend or family to pick me up, Ma had given me a codeword. We had decided on
Mannix
, the name of my first dog and the cop show she loved to watch, never suspecting she would be running down bad guys herself a few years later. I could only get into the car of someone who new the codeword, no matter whether he was a cop or not, in uniform or not. Back then I thought it was cool, a secret that made me, in a small way, part of the Blue circle. Now, it only made me angry.

*

When Ma got home, the first orange in the sky was just beginning to show. I’d already missed the bus that would get me to school on time, but I couldn’t leave Bridgette home alone.

“God I’m tired,” she said as she hung her coat in the hall closet. “My feet are killing me.”

I didn’t say anything at all, just watched her from the kitchen table while she pulled off her boots, which I noticed were caked in mud again.

“What are you pouting for now?”

“You didn’t call.”

“I was in the woods on an investigation. I couldn’t even get decent radio reception, much less get to a phone. I had to send a uniform into radio zone so he could call the captain and make sure someone could get Bridgette. I told them, ‘I have to get my child. Either get someone to pick up my child or I have to leave this crime scene right now.’ Didn’t Hurst tell you I’d be late?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t say
tomorrow
.”

“I got a mother.” Ma’s tone told me that I needed to back down, but I was ready to fight until I noticed the expression in her face change from tough cop to someone I’d never seen before. Her eyes were wet and it scared me. I filed through every memory I had and realized that I’d never seen my mother cry. I thought I’d heard her cry late at night through the double layers of bedroom doors. But I’d never
seen
it. Never, not once. I was afraid of what might come next and tried to leave the table before it did.

“You think this is what I want? You know what I was doing at the very moment I should have been picking Bridgette up from school?”

No, I don’t, and please don’t tell me. You’re scaring me
. At least the tears didn’t fall. She’d pulled them back somehow and her record remained unblemished. I still hadn’t seen her cry. But she looked as though she could at any minute.

“I was standing over another victim. I was looking at bones that I knew were once a child because of the size, but there was not much else to go on because of what time, the elements, and animals had done to him. I was wondering how his mother would react when we asked her to identify what little was left of him, once we figured out who he was. Would she just die right there on the spot?

“I was thinking, ‘How can I be here in these woods standing over this boy’s body when I don’t know whether my own baby has gotten a ride home? When I’m not sure my other child is okay walking that half mile between the bus and home? How can I be here doing this now when I’ve got my own babies out there?’ No, this is not at all what I want. And I don’t need your attitude, either.”

Her eyes were dry then, and she’d gone back to being tough again, but for the first time I fully realized how much of that was an act. So much of it
was
an act, and I wondered what I’d done to make her think she had to act around me, too.

“It was okay, Ma. Detective Hurst even brought some dinner when he dropped Bridgette off. She liked the burgers a whole lot better than the chicken and rice that I made.” Even to me the cheer in my voice sounded false, especially when I’d hoped it sounded like an apology. It didn’t matter, she didn’t hear me anyway.

“I always think I’m going to be prepared. After so many years being a cop, and after working nearly ten of these murdered children crime scenes, I keep thinking I’ll know what to expect. It’s always the hair and teeth that get me, the only parts ever left intact that might distinguish them from all the others. I expect it, but I’m never ready for it.” She looked directly at me now instead of out the window behind me where, until now, she had been focused on something or nothing. “Once, we found a boy wearing only his underwear, and they were the kind with cartoon characters on them. Underoos, I think they call them. They didn’t have those when you were little. They’re only babies, some of them. Just babies.”

She left me then and went toward the back of the house, saying she needed to wake Bridgette for school.

I was walking down the driveway after checking the mailbox when Ma pulled in but didn’t turn off the car. Bridgette had barely gotten out when Ma put the car into reverse, yelling to me that she had to get back down to the Task Force, and that she’d be home late. No news flash there.

I didn’t wait for her to come home anymore in the evenings because I knew it could be anytime. Without noticing, I’d fallen into a new routine. On weeknights, I took the bus home and sometimes waited for some unmarked car to drop Bridgette off, but most often she’d stay with her friend on the Northside, so I was alone. I made dinner. If she was home, helped Bridgette with her homework. Did my own homework while Bridgette watched TV. Watched the evening news hoping I could figure out what Ma was doing that night, where she might be working a scene. Listening to middle-class parents say they were sending their kids out of town to stay with relatives until the killer was caught, even though the killer hadn’t snatched any middle-class kids.

When they talked about another child missing, they’d pan across some housing project from the air, showing kids playing in what looked like a military barracks instead of a place children should grow up—no trees, no grass, just red dirt. Kids using a garbage can for a basketball hoop, or playing games I thought only existed in the old days, like stickball or keeping an old bike rim upright and rolling down the street with a stick. I wondered what happened to the rest of the bike, and felt guilty when I thanked God I wasn’t poor.

If it was a Friday, I packed my brown polyester uniform in my school duffel bag in the morning, and went straight from school to work, and hoped Ma hadn’t forgotten to pick Bridgette up from school, or had arranged for someone to do it. Then I’d call Ma at home when the restaurant closed at eleven, waking her so she could come downtown to pick me up. While I scrubbed down the grill or cleaned the shake station or whatever task I was assigned for clean-up that night, I would hope Ma didn’t fall back to sleep and that when we’d finish the cleaning and the supervisor was ready to lock the doors, I’d see her car outside. Sometimes I’d see no car and would have to call her at home again because she hadn’t gotten more than a few hours of sleep a night in months and she had a hard time staying awake. Sometimes, a coworker or the supervisor would wait with me for the fifteen minutes it took for Ma to get there, but sometimes they wouldn’t. Those times I’d stand in front of the locked restaurant’s doors wearing my don’t-fuck-with-me
face, certain no one was buying it.

*

I thought Ma had forgotten about having to go to my school to discuss my demerits situation because she’d forgotten about so many other things lately, but I learned otherwise one morning as I fried up some link sausages for Bridgette and me. My favorite breakfast was fried sausages on white bread with some Miracle Whip.

“I want us to check out a public school,” Ma said.

“Where is this coming from?”

“It’ll either be the one in our district or something through the magnet program. You choose, but we’re looking at one. I don’t think where you are now is doing you any good. Don’t think I don’t know why you’re always coming up sick on Monday mornings lately.”

“But what about getting in to a good college?”

“That line has grown tired. I’m more concerned about you not winding up on Grady’s eighth floor. That’s where you’re headed if you stay where you are.”