No Place Safe (2 page)

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.

*

I’d thought about the doll-sized prostitute throughout the rest of my day, wondering if she was afraid of being in the streets since those two boys had died. Did it make it any more dangerous for her, or was her world scary enough that two dead boys she’d never met were the least of her problems?

Ma was reading the paper that night after dinner while Bridgette and I watched TV. Normally, talking to Ma while she had the paper in hand was not a wise thing. She’d shush anyone who disturbed her while she watched the news or read the newspaper—my grandparents, houseguests, it didn’t matter. But thoughts of the girl in the hospital wouldn’t let go of me.

“Ma, guess what happened today.” Right away, I knew I should have just told her, and the look she gave me over the newspaper confirmed it. It said,
I know you don’t want me to play guessing games while I’m reading the paper.
I pretended not to notice. “I had to take makeup off a prostitute’s face.”

“Mmm.”

“She was wearing fake eyelashes and said she’d slap me if I touched them. She just about jumped out of the bed when I tried to take them off.” I thought I should liven up the story a bit to get a better response.

“You should’ve let the nurses take care of it,” she said from behind the paper.

“The craziest part of it is that she had gonorrhea
and
is only ten years old.”

Ma said nothing, just kept reading the paper like meeting a ten-year-old prostitute with the clap happened every day. I was getting mad, and wished I had the nerve to tear the paper from her hands. My story was every bit as interesting as whatever she was reading.

“Don’t you think that’s something?” It was more a demand than a question.

Ma just said, “You wouldn’t believe the things I see.” She didn’t look up from the paper when she said it.

Sometimes, no matter where you live, how nice the neighborhood is, or how friendly the people are, you’re bound to hear your neighbors fight. Parents yelling at kids, lovers threatening to kill each other for the hundredth time, so you figure if they really were going to do it, it would have been done by now. Some people get up enough nerve to call the police and hope their neighbors never find out who called. Most folks just try to ignore it rather than get involved. That’s how it probably goes in most homes: just pretend the bad thing isn’t happening and hope it’ll end soon.

Not at my house. On an August night when it wasn’t hot enough to justify turning on the air conditioning and running up the electric bill (which in Ma’s mind meant no one had fallen over from heat stroke yet), we had the windows open and could hear an argument building next door. Our neighbor was single, mostly kept to himself and rarely had visitors. Being these were often the traits of single men who ended up on the evening news for committing some shocking crime that surprised their neighbors, I’d already decided he was slightly suspect.

But recently he’d gotten himself a girlfriend, and their relationship must have been based on the kind of passion created by antagonism, because they often made us an unintentional audience for their bickering. The houses on our street sat on half an acre each, some more than that, so it wasn’t as if we were right on top of each other, but still we could hear them clearly. It started out like a loud discussion, quickly turned into an argument, and soon enough, it sounded like our neighbor might be beating the hell out of his girlfriend.

There was something about a man beating a woman that agitated Ma more than other crimes. It was the thing that made her talk angrily to the TV set when she heard mention of a husband killing his wife during the nightly run-down of all the bad things that happened in Atlanta that day. The other murders, the robberies and corruption, she’d let go by with only a disgusted sigh, but wife-beaters made my mother cuss without apology. Even though she’d told me a million times how a domestic dispute was the worst call for a cop to go on because tempers are high, passions are fired up, and people do things that don’t make a damn bit of sense, Ma headed over there anyway. When I asked her if I should call the police, she said, “I
am
the police.” She put her gun into her hip holster and clipped it on before she left the house, for which I didn’t know whether to be grateful or afraid.

These were the times when it was hard for me not to blur the line between my mother and the other woman. When I tried to make the distinction, I could see only my mother going into a situation that might get her killed. It was difficult to see a cop with six years’ experience, one who could kick some ass when she wanted to, according to her police friends. Still, I didn’t see why she couldn’t just call some uniforms to come over and deal with it.

Bridgette and I ran to her room to watch what would happen from the window. Both our bedrooms were on the side of the house that faced our neighbor’s, but our house sat farther back from the road so his front door was out of sight. We had to listen to it instead, which wasn’t difficult because the neighbor was loud and Ma was loud right back at him. The conversation went something like this:

Ma:
Stop beating on your girlfriend.

Man:
This is none of your business. (I remember him being very proper talking, and I think he said something like “This is none of your affair,” but probably not.)

Ma:
Everyone on the street can hear you, so you’re making it everybody’s business.

Man:
So call the police.

Ma:
I am the motherfucking
po-lice
. (Ma liked saying this, and she could curse like nobody’s business when provoked, probably something she had to learn to sound tough on the streets.)

I don’t remember much else of the conversation, but the police never came and the couple stopped fighting, at least for that day. I don’t recall ever hearing them fight again, but I’m certain they didn’t stop. They probably just made sure to do it more quietly from then on. After Ma went
Kojak
on them, I went out of my way to avoid the man and his girlfriend, not certain why I was the one embarrassed when it should have been them.

*

One Friday, Ma was working while I took care of Bridgette. I didn’t have to work at the hospital on Fridays, which meant Bridgette didn’t have to go to the babysitter. When I was her age, I didn’t much have a babysitter, but Ma said me being the oldest made me more responsible. Bridgette wasn’t at all responsible; she didn’t have to be because doctors had diagnosed her when she was six as being hyperactive, a condition that made her a scary combination of aggressive and reckless, and required her to take little pills that Ma or I had to cut in half or else they turned her into a zombie. She was also the baby, so Ma had fewer expectations of her.

We were watching reruns of
Gilligan’s Island
.

“You’re sitting too close to the TV,” I told Bridgette. I liked to act as if I were her boss, mostly because Ma said I was completely in charge when she was at work. Sometimes I pushed it too far, like the time I tried to spank Bridgette with a wooden spoon like Ma used to do me before parents started getting into trouble for that. Bridgette nearly kicked my ass, and would have if I didn’t outweigh her, so I never tried that again.

“Move back from the TV.” I had to repeat myself because she was ignoring me. “You don’t move back and I won’t put any cheese on your SpaghettiOs.”

She moved back, but only by an inch or two. I didn’t ask for anymore. I wasn’t even worried about her eyes; I just wanted to make sure she knew who was running things. I kept all kinds of threats and bribes ready for those times she wanted to give me trouble, like when I had to comb her hair after lunch. To make sure she held still, I’d tell her she couldn’t go down the street with me to play basketball later. Of course, I’d never leave her alone in the house – Ma would’ve killed me – but Bridgette hadn’t figured that out yet.

 “Remember when Ma would be home most of the time, and not always be at work?”

She turned down the volume, maybe so I could focus on the question, but I didn’t remember such a time because Ma was always at some job. I figured Bridgette was old enough to have only four years of fully reliable memory, and Ma had been a cop for longer than that, so whatever days she was recalling, she’d made them up. But she must have taken my silence as agreement.