ONE WEEK LATER, I stood in the back room of a restaurant in Hyde Park. The room was filled with birthday balloons. A cake half the size of a wedding cake stood on a pedestal in the middle of a long serving table. Already-cut pieces of a marble sheet cake sat on paper plates. Round tables covered in paper cloths filled the room, and in the center of each, a small centerpiece made out of Matchbox cars surrounded pitchers filled with Kool-Aid.
Laura had rented the place and planned this whole thing the moment she realized that I had no idea how to do it, and Althea was too overwhelmed with Lacey to give a party any thought. Laura, of course, had given it too much thought, but the kids didn’t seem to know that.
Jimmy and his friends sat on the floor on the far side of the room, playing some kind of game that I didn’t understand. Laura and Althea were running it. It involved a lot of shouting and laughing and prizes. Althea had already warned me that when this party was over, I would receive a sugared-up kid who was so jittery he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, and my job would be to take him home and calm him down.
I stood near the door, with Franklin, watching. Lacey had walked around the room twice, inspecting the doors and windows. She had peered at the cake several times as well, and actually looked interested in it. She didn’t look at the presents, piled obscenely in the corner.
She knew that the hotel had burned down. I had a hunch she suspected who had done it. She claimed it made her feel better, but I doubted it. She claimed a lot of things, and did nothing. She had spent the week at home, recuperating. On Monday, she would start at the Laboratory School attached to the University of Chicago.
Laura had pulled some strings to get Lacey in during the already-started winter term but, she insisted, Lacey’s grades had done the rest. Now Laura was talking about setting up a scholarship program for deserving South Side students. She had also agreed to fund the other Grimshaw children into the private school of their parents’ choice, but the problem was that no school was taking students at this time of year.
Jonathan had taken the Catholic School exam without telling anyone he planned to do it. He had, in fact, left for it about the time Sinkovich and I were driving to my apartment. Jonathan’s score was high, but the Catholics only wanted him to go to the school in the Black Belt, and that school had a waiting list as long as my arm.
We would work on a campaign for all of the children in our little family for the fall term. I felt better about sending them to the school at the moment.
The neighborhood still reeked of smoke. The Starlite Hotel remained as a burned-out shell. Part of the hotel’s roof had
fallen on the restaurant and burned it down as well.
The police called the burning of the hotel arson, but they blamed the Stones. The body of the desk clerk had been found in the rubble still intact, with all of the bullet wounds to his body. The other bodies were as yet unidentified, but a police spokesperson claimed that at least one of them had to be Turner.
No one found or interviewed the woman Marvella had taken out of the hotel. Marvella had taken her to a different hospital from the girls we had rescued. The story Marvella had given hospital staff was that she found the woman wandering a few blocks from the school in her nightclothes, clearly high on something.
She never got arrested and no one seemed to know she existed. Marvella promised me that she would get help, just like the girls would.
Eight girls got rescued from that hellhole. Three had intact families. The other five would get help from Marvella’s group or Helping Hands. And, Marvella told me, my folder was in the custody of the women. I had accidentally left it at the Y the day we planned the operation. Some of the women took it, and would try to find the girls who had disappeared.
I offered to help. She turned me down.
“I wasn’t kidding when I told you they don’t like men,” she said. “Better to let them do it.”
For once, I agreed. I had to get back to paying work. But more than that, I finally felt comfortable with giving away some of my workload. Those women taught me something.
They taught me that help sometimes came from the most unexpected places, and I needed to be open to that.
I looked across the room at Jimmy, who had started all of this. He seemed no worse for the wear. If he knew how much danger I had been in, he didn’t show it.
In fact, he’d had more trouble with official birthday celebrations for Martin. Every school in Bronzeville had had some kind of remembrance. Several let any kid who wanted to go to the special church services held that Thursday morning.
Jimmy had asked me if he could stay home. I let him. Thursday was also his birthday, an irony I’d noted the year before, but one I had ignored. This time, I decided he deserved something special. I let him sleep in, and then we went to the Field Museum, which was probably a better learning experience than anything he would have gotten that day in school.
Gradually, the on-edge feeling I’d had eased. I did ask Sinkovich to follow up on the girls, just to make sure no one reported any of them as prostitutes or as victims of a possible fire. No one did. The police seemed clueless about what happened at the Starlite, and I hoped it would stay that way.
More laughter erupted from the far side of the room. Lacey looked over, longing on her face. I walked toward her, making sure she could see me so she wouldn’t think I snuck up on her.
“Why don’t you join them?” I asked. She shook her head. “That’s for kids.” “Laughing’s for everyone,” I said. “Then you join them,” she snapped.
“I will if you will,” I said.
She gave me a sideways look. “You’re just taking care of me.”
“Of course I am,” I said. “But I’m also taking care of me. Everyone’s going to stop laughing if I go over there by myself and join that circle. I need you as cover.”
She looked at them, and then up at me, as if she were assessing me. Then she took my hand, and led me over to the group.
We sat down together. The kids, mostly little boys, looked at us like we didn’t belong. But after a moment, we’d been clued as to the rules of the game, and Lacey was letting out the occasional reluctant chuckle.
Laura smiled at me. She maneuvered the game so that I would not win, which was just fine with me. I decided I would go home with my son, just as sugar-high and just as relaxed.
I’d never been to a real birthday party, either.
I wasn’t all that good at normal life. I used to think I wouldn’t like it. But as the damaged teenage girl next to me smiled and touched my arm, I realized that I liked a lot of it.
I especially liked how much other people enjoyed it.
And I would do everything in my power to make sure that they could continue to enjoy it, every single day.