After the Fire: The ‘Shorts’

by Forrester, Nia

  So articulate, went the murmurs, hands on chests. Heartbreaking!

  That was usually about when I started yearning for alcohol. The only thing that made those moments feel less exploitative was that I was usually able to twist David’s arm to make sure the youngsters were paid a decent honorarium for being there.

  The cops were at this particular event to educate us on the city’s homelessness abatement initiatives, and the ways youth homelessness presented differently from adult and familial homelessness. There were five uniformed officers, a racially and gender-diverse bunch, no doubt picked for exactly that reason. And two were in plainclothes—well-tailored suits—who did all the talking.

  Gideon was one of the tailored ones. Erect as a soldier, with a burnished gold complexion and low-cut wavy hair, he introduced himself and spoke with a very slight accent about how kids often left foster care and juvenile justice facilities only to find they were no longer welcome at home. He talked about how many of them wound up couch-surfing at friends’ places by night and hanging out in libraries or Starbucks by day just so they could connect to the internet, remain connected to the world, and to each other.

  Then he spoke about how they picked up occasional jobs where they could, and how some even attended school, never letting on to teachers and the administration that they would leave school grounds that afternoon with no idea about where their next meal would come from, and where they might sleep. He concluded by talking about how invisible young people experiencing homelessness were if you didn’t know what to look for.

  “They look like your kids or mine,” Gideon said, looking around the room and making eye contact with his listeners. “A casual observer would never know that they’re homeless or housing insecure. They carry backpacks and look like your average college or high school student, but in reality, those bags may hold all they own.

  “They’re smart, resourceful and masters at blending in. But they’re also very much at risk for trafficking and other forms of sexual exploitation; for gang recruitment, for having violence done to them, or on occasion, committing survival crimes.”

  Despite knowing all the factoids he was conveying, I found myself watching and listening to Gideon closely, critiquing what he said, almost hoping he would misstate the facts in some way and ruin the excellent impression he was making. I wasn’t a fan of the police department, and he was wrecking that for me with his nuanced, compassionate description of a problem that I often liked to say the PD didn’t understand.

  Occasionally, his eyes drifted my way and lingered, but I assumed it was just because he was spreading his eye-contact evenly around the room, the way all good speakers know to do.

  When he was done, there was polite applause and he offered his contact information to anyone who wanted it, letting them know that he had business cards available if they wanted to reach him later. There were plenty of takers. A crowd of people—mostly female—descended on him with follow-up questions.

  I found David and we stood at the coffee station together while I asked after my niece and nephew.

  “You need to stop by,” my brother-in-law said. “It’s been a minute.”

  “Yeah. Maybe this weekend,” I lied.

  Maya and I were in the middle of one of our frosty silences, about something or other that would blow over in a few weeks when one of us had news too juicy to keep to ourselves, or a problem that could only be solved with a sister’s input.

  “We’re thinking about getting pregnant again,” David added.

  “Yikes,” I teased him. “You really are trying to turn that house into your own little African village, aren’t you?”

  David laughed. “If I have anything to do with it, hell yeah.”

  Maya ‘thinking’ about getting pregnant probably meant she would be calling me in a week or two. There was no way my sister was going to make that decision without talking to me first. She wouldn’t ask my opinion exactly, but I knew she would use me as her sounding board, expecting only that I listen before reaching her own conclusions.

  “Anyway,” he drawled. “You didn’t come here to talk to me. We can do that any time. You should circulate, meet some of these deep pockets.”

  “Who’s got deep pockets?”

  David and I both turned, and there was Sergeant Gideon Santana.

  He was taller than he appeared from a distance. Maybe six-four or so. And broader, bigger, more solid. He was one of those guys I rolled my eyes at in the gym, whose physique communicates that maybe they’re taking the whole hard-body thing a little too seriously. Not bulky and borderline ridiculous like The Rock or anything but just enough that you wonder whether they might not have a little OCD about their workout regimen.

  His dress shirt, tucked into crisp pant, skimmed a completely flat and trim waist, not a hint of softness or pudge to be seen.

  Fucking cops, I thought. And what kind of name was Gideon?

  If they spent all their spare time trying to remake themselves to look like The Terminator, was it any wonder people were scared of them? And that was without the gun.

  But I was just nitpicking. I was attracted to him, and I hated myself for it. The body alone was too obvious to excite me. Okay, it excited me a little. But even more than that, I liked his dark, dense, smooth eyebrows, his full, even lips, slightly dark as if he had once been a smoker, or still was. And his high-bridged almost aquiline nose that made him look like nobility.

  “Gideon!” David said, greeting him with an extended hand.

  They clasped and dapped and hugged, then shook.

  Then Gideon turned to look at me right away. “And you are?”

  “My sister-in-law, Kendra,” David said. “Kendra, Gideon and I partner up to do community meetings sometimes.”

  “And what do you do, Kendra?” Smiling, Gideon oriented his torso as though he had forgotten David was even there, or wanted to excise him from the conversation entirely.

  “I’m Executive Director at Open Doors, Open Arms,” I said, unsmiling.

  “Good program.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “If you do say so yourself.”

  Still, I didn’t smile back. In fact, he smiled too much. I tallied it all up, adding one more thing to dislike about him.

  “You gave a nice little speech up there,” I said, my tone slightly snide. “Hit all the right notes. Pity I get four or five kids a week coming in to tell me how they got roughed up by your officers, just for being in the wrong parks in the wrong parts of the city. The parks where people would rather not have a bunch of homeless kids sitting and enjoying the weather when they take little Connor or Kennedy to play.”

  “Which parks would those be?” Gideon asked.

  Out of my periphery, I could see David’s shoulders tensing a little. He was never sure if I was going to make a scene even though I would never make a scene. Not at my brother-in-law’s place of business, for heaven’s sake. Sometimes I thought Maya seriously overplayed my loose cannon tendencies with her husband.

  “You know which parks,” I said. “If you understand half of what you said up there, then you know precisely which ones.”

  Gideon pursed his lips. He nodded slowly, squinting thoughtfully.

  “Can we start over?” he said finally. “Just … go back to the beginning? The part where we introduce ourselves? And, I don’t know, maybe save the fighting for when we’ve been going out for at least three or four months?”

  And how the hell was I supposed to respond to that?

  I burst out in surprised laughter.

  * * *

  The Center is in a neighborhood that is decidedly not transitioning, but still squarely in the middle of decay and disrepair. It’s housed in an old church that Open Doors was able to buy for a song from the city after it got seized from the landlord for unpaid taxes and the congregation moved to a smaller storefront space a few streets down.

  Over twelve Saturdays in the spring of the previous year, all the kids, some co
mmunity volunteers and a few paid contractors rehabbed the place to transform it into a drop-in center for young people with nowhere else to go. We had a few emergency beds, but mostly it was designed as a meeting place, a community center, a place to do laundry, get homework help, take showers, speak to a licensed social worker who came in once a week, and to connect with a job counselor.

  It was also the place where Viv and I allowed the local racial justice groups to meet. Viv advised one of them, and I was her co-chair which basically meant I was the only other adult in the room since the activists were on average nineteen-years-old. Viv’s and my roles were relatively minimal, but lately consisted mainly of holding the kids back, reminding them to be more measured, more strategic, and to think longer-term in their approach.

  Over wine and tapas, Viv and I had many a happy hour conversation about how much more fearless this new generation of activists was. They had revived the language of the sixties, speaking often about ‘solidarity’, ‘community’, and ‘empowerment’. It was language that Viv and I, as late-eighties babies had not used when we were coming up and dabbling in social justice movements.

  Our movements had been about participating in systems or reforming them to work for us. Young activists today were talking about dismantling them. Was it any wonder they didn’t mind burning stuff down? They had no compunction about leaving only rubble in their wake since their purpose was rebuilding from the ground up.

  Disarming the security system as I entered the Center, I turned on the bright overhead lighting in the main room and locked the door behind me. I planned to work in the larger cavernous space with the vaulted ceilings, because being in an old church alone at night was kind of a creepy experience. Seldom was there not at least one other person in the building even late at night, but that was more common lately.

  Before the pandemic and civil unrest, the Center stayed open sometimes twenty-four hours a day if we had volunteers to staff it. Kids came in at all hours, some of them sex workers who wanted to shower, or rest their heads someplace safe for an hour or two; some having just that evening been kicked out by a stepparent. It was almost always a stepparent or a parent’s partner who tossed kids onto the streets often with the complicity or consent of their blood relative.

  It frustrated both me and Viv that now, when the need was so much greater, our capacity to meet it was much less than it had ever been.

  Re-arming the alarm system, I went to stash my pocketbook in the back office and fished out my phone, dialing Viv’s number to let her know I had arrived.

  “Just dropped Malik off at his father,” she said without greeting. “So, that was fun.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “He give you a hard time?”

  “Yup. Had some chick over there so I guess I disturbed their groove.”

  “The same one who …”

  “Yup. One and the same.”

  Vivienne’s son’s father, Raymond, was a good enough guy. He and Viv had been together since high school and I had witnessed them break up and get back together more times than I could count, even though I had only known Viv since college. They were a couple of star-crossed lovers if I had ever seen such a thing. When in each other’s presence they lit up like fireworks, either in anger, or passion, or animated attentiveness. Like they ignited a spark in each other that no one else stood a chance at duplicating.

  But their history was long and complicated. Ray had gone to live in another city at one time, Viv had gone away to graduate school, he had cheated, she had cheated, various members their families disliked each other … It was always something. I tried not to get too invested in their reconciliations because somehow, they always found a way to mess it up again.

  “Whoever this chick is, she won’t last,” I said, reassuringly.

  “I know she won’t,” Viv said. “Doesn’t mean I don’t hate it while it’s happening.”

  “I know,” I said soothingly.

  “Anyway,” she intoned. “Now that Malik is safe, I guess I’m ready to go into the eye of the storm. Jesus, Ken, what the hell are we doin’? Aren’t we getting too old for this shit?”

  Chapter Three

  A lot of people don’t realize this, but policing is shift-work. Sometimes Gideon worked nine-to-five, sometimes three-to-eleven and sometimes crazier hours than that, if the case demanded it. He didn’t always have weekends off, and sometimes even when he did, he was too zonked to do much of anything. But it worked for us.

  Once we started seeing each other earnestly, exclusively, I got used to him popping over at my place unexpectedly, sometimes just to sleep, sometimes to mess around, sometimes to cook, eat and watch tv with his head in my lap, drifting in and out of sleep.

  If he was coming immediately off a shift, he wasn’t always entirely himself. He would vacillate between extremes. He was either tactile and affectionate, or broody and short-tempered. Sometimes he just seemed sad.

  One night in the late winter he came by, knocking on my front door after three a.m. and I let him in. His lips, when he kissed me on the forehead were cold from the outdoors, and he mumbled something about needing to take a hot shower. I was exasperated because it was a weekday and he had to know that even if he was off until mid-afternoon the next day, I would have to get up in less than four hours and go to work. But I didn’t say anything. I just let him go take his shower while I climbed back into bed.

  It was almost dawn when I became aware of him lying next to me, and only because he spoke.

  “Hey,” he said, in a normal voice, as though we were continuing an earlier conversation. “I want to ask you something. Your professional opinion on something.”

  I rolled over onto my back and looked at him, then at the ceiling.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

  I could see that he was wide awake, and probably had been all this time. He was partly covered by the sheet, bare-chested and probably naked, because that was how he preferred to sleep.

  “The kids you see … the ones who come to Open Doors, before they wind up, you know, on my side of things, what’s the one thing that could have turned them around? The one thing that for lack of that thing made them go off the rails?”

  I could see from his expression that he was serious, and that he had been thinking about it, maybe for the past couple hours while I slept next to him.

  “Hard to say.” Clearing my throat, I sat up partway. “It’s … it’s never just one thing, Gideon. It’s more complicated than that.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know that. I just mean … if you had to oversimplify, what’s the X-factor? The one element that if a kid has that, the chances of him or her offending goes down significantly.”

  Offending. That was the way he talked. And I sometimes teased him about it.

  ‘There you go again with your cop-talk,’ I would say whenever he referred to a young person as a “juvenile” or a woman as a “female.” In truth, it grated on me because the language was so dehumanizing, but at least knowing Gideon assured me that he didn’t think that way, even if that’s how he sounded.

  “If I had to oversimplify?” I said, musing. “I don’t know. I guess I would say the one thing that can keep a kid from going off the rails is the presence in their life of a caring and consistent adult.” I shrugged.

  At that, Gideon’s eyebrows went up. “Huh.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice still gravelly with sleep. “There’s been studies about it. I mean, like I said, it’s complicated but that’s pretty much it. As near as we can tell, that’s the X-factor.”

  “That’s sad. A caring adult. That’s all, huh?”

  “And consistent,” I said. “That’s very important.”

  “A caring, and consistent adult,” Gideon said, shaking his head.

  “Yup,” I said. “And you’re right. It’s sad. Because that’s not expensive and shouldn’t even be that hard, right? To give every kid at least that much.”

  “Nah.”
Gideon nodded, staring off into the distance. “It shouldn’t be hard.”

  I looked at him for a few moments more, watching his gears turn, wondering what he was thinking about.

  Finally, he looked at me. His eyes focusing fully once again and growing warm. He smiled and leaned in to kiss me at the corner of my lips.

  “Anyway. You still got like …” He glanced at the bedroom clock. “An hour and a half of shut-eye. Go back to sleep, sleepyhead. I’ma lay here a little but I might be gone before you get up. Got some paperwork to wrap up from last night.”

  “Okay,” I said, relieved that he didn’t want to talk anymore.

  As promised, he was gone when I woke up. I made my usual breakfast of a buttered bagel and coffee while I prepared to leave the house, with the local news on in the background. And that’s when I heard it.

  There had been a multiple-murder overnight in the West Kensington area of the city, and three arrests had been made. A specialized police unit was being praised for having closed the case within hours.

  Three young men had broken into a rowhouse around nine-thirty in the evening. It was rumored to be a stash house. The intruders made off with whatever was there, but not before killing everyone inside: two men, a woman and two teenage girls, ages thirteen and fourteen. The girls’ bodies were found where they had been hiding and cowering, in a bedroom closet. Everyone had been shot to death.

  The person believed to be the primary shooter, the police spokesperson said, was only sixteen years old, a minor, so his name was being withheld.

  Because of where the rowhouse was located, and because the crime was one about guns, about drugs, I knew it was likely Gideon’s case.

  I also knew he would never tell me about it. And I would never ask.

  * * *

  After about twenty minutes of sitting in the main meeting room and trying to get in touch with some of my kids, I grew spooked by my own reflection staring back at me in the large windows out front. The idea that someone could see me and yet I wouldn’t be able to see them unless they were right up against the glass made my stomach twist with nervous apprehension. I kept irrationally expecting someone to come running up and press their face, twisted into a ghoulish mask, against the window like in a horror film. So, I moved my operation into the rec room in the back of the building, turning on the television to the local ABC affiliate, which was still showing real-time what was happening in the 24th.