My safe place.

The little grey man with half glasses asked me what I had to say for myself. I didn’t know how to answer him. I didn't know what he was asking me.I should have known. Someone should have taught me. But no one had ever come back from here to teach us.

I learned that most people don’t have a safe place. They don’t need one. I asked Angie once what hers looked like. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Angie lived in a nice neighborhood, where bad things didn’t happen. Bet she’d never heard a police siren or ambulance rushing down her street in the middle of the night.

Those sirens were our lullabies. We learned to tell the difference between a car backfiring and a gunshot before we knew our colors. We could recognize a Colt from a Sig Sauer before we could spell our name. We could disassemble, clean, and reassemble each before we memorized our multiplication tables.

I thought everyone had a safe place and I don’t mean where the dust bunnies live under the bed or that dark spider-invested corner in the basement behind the old rusty lawn mower.

No, I thought everybody had a place in their mind where they could go to escape reality.

My safe place was something I had seen on the computer screen in the guidance counselor’s office at school. It was a tiny yellow island in the middle of a calm turquoise sea. On the island there were five or six palm trees. Just enough to give shade and the occasional coconut for food and water. That’s where I went when things got to be too much.

There I’d imagine the smell of the sea. A warm moist wind to keep the sun from being too hot. A small freshwater pond in the middle for a dip and a drink of water, a monkey to play with. It was my place; I could make it as beautiful as I wished. If I wanted birds to sing, there would be birds singing.

Fridays were always bad. Those who worked got paid, those who were on welfare had collected and those who came to collect would come knocking. Woe you, if you spent your money on bread and bologna or cheap gin. Woe you if you had already lost it to Jake, the bookie. Then the ambulances might run. Though they never ran as fast as you’d wanted them to. Not here.

Mamma would be paid today. She told us this morning, promised us that she’d stop and buy fried chicken on the way home. It was Bennie’s birthday or had been earlier this week. But nothing was celebrated during the week. I had set the table and put Bennie in clean pj’s. While we waited for Momma, we listed all the side orders she could get. We were giggling about what our favorites were when the door burst open.

Panting, legs spread, hands on his thighs, catching his breath Logan shouted at me.

“Go, Iza, get the hell out here! They’re coming, Go!” He gasped while he grabbed Bennie. “I’ll take care of him. You just run. As far as you can.”

I was already out the door. I didn’t take anything with me. I just went. I wanted to ask Logan what happened? Where was Mamma? What would happen to Bennie? Why did I need to run? I didn’t do nothing wrong. Where should I go? Who was coming?

I ran down the back alley, the packed dirt absorbed the slap of my plastic shoes. Then I’m on the street. Who was I running from? Why?

One block, two, a corner three more blocks. A bus. I got five stops before the conductor pushed me off. I ran again, four blocks, another corner two more blocks. I pounded on the door of Angie’s parents’ home and collapsed into the hallway when Mrs. Pearson opened the door. “Child!” she gasped and helped me inside. I didn’t think anyone had followed me. I thought I had been fast enough but made myself as small as I could anyway. Angie drew the curtains.

I was fifteen then. That was my last night of freedom and childhood.

The next morning Angie’s father handed me a few credits and dropped me off at the train station. He apologized, but I understood. Hiding me would put his whole family in danger.

Later I thought if maybe he had dropped me a few blocks from the station. Maybe, if I had been able to sneak in through a side door. Maybe, …. But reality was that the chip they had told them all along where I was. A Debt-mat grabbed me when I stood in line to buy a ticket and dragged me to a van parked at the curb. It tossed me inside.

“Last one.” It Intoned.

The human waiting inside the van grabbed me before I could get to my feet. He pushed me face-down to the floor of the van and tied my hands behind my back. I never got to see who else was in the van, the man's crotch was in my face the whole ride.

Before we were ushered into a large holding cell, hands still tied, a cheap cardboard tag was hung around our necks. Each had a number written on it. I was number nineteen. They didn’t feed us but there was an old-fashioned water fountain. You had to ask someone to hold the button down for you while you drank and then you'd return the favor. Most of us were young; pre-teen and teenaged, there were a few women and one old man.

The next morning, I watched two Debt-mats bring a table and several plain chairs. Then one by one we were pulled in front of the desk. As soon as we stepped foot outside the cage a rope was slung around our necks. When it was my turn, Gordon Sheely took the other end of my rope.

Gordon Sheely was the loan shark in my neighborhood. Nobody wanted to borrow from him, but if you wanted your kids to eat, you often had to. Momma said she’d never borrowed from Gordon. So why was I here? Why did he claim me?

“Her father reneged on a two thousand credit loan. He put her up as collateral.”

“But I don’t …” I didn’t get any further before Gordon slapped me across my mouth, cutting my bottom lip on my teeth.

“You Iza Concord?” The slight, dun-colored man in the center looked over his half glasses at me.

I nodded. “But I don’t ha…” The nondescript man held up his hand stopping my protest.

“Yah, sure.” He nodded. “I’ve never heard of an accused acknowledging its crime.” he smirked at his neighbor who smiled back. “One simply pays." he shrugged. All in a day's work. "Two thousand to be paid after ten years of labor. Next.”

I then understood the expression ‘paying for the sins of our father.’ Though Mamma had said over and over that she didn’t know who my father was and wouldn’t explain why she didn’t know, someone had very conveniently claimed me as a daughter. I wouldn’t put it past Gordon to have done so himself.

That day I disappeared.

We, everybody in the neighborhood, had known someone, someone we had played with in the street, someone who had been in our class, someone we had seen in the laundromat or church, someone who had disappeared. If we asked we were told that he or she had gone to live in the country for their health. But nobody ever saw them again.

The ride to wherever they took us was long, hot, and thirsty. We were locked in the back of a windowless van. We soiled ourselves; several kids passed out from the heat and thirst. One died.

For seven years, give or take a year. I was chained to a small workstation. My job was to sew the left sleeve to a denim work shirt. After 56 left sleeves you let your mind wander. After 103, you don’t live here anymore. After 217 sleeves your brain is asleep, autopilot has taken over. While sewing, I lived and slept on my island. The small yellow dollop in the turquoise bay. I played with my monkey and drank coconut water.

Food was put on the floor at daybreak and sometimes at the end of the day. As soon as our group of twelve had met our quota we could sleep. We’d crawl under our sewing station and pretend to sleep. If we had more than four hours between meeting our quota and sunrise, the demand would be upped. So, we never produced more than 23 shirts in our nineteen- or twenty-hour shift, which was one more than the lowest producing team. The twelve of us were a well-oiled machine.

And each night we’d grind away at one of the inch and a half thick links holding us to our workstation. We used what we had, dull scissors. Sure, the padlock might have been easier to cut through, but the guard unlocking us for our more or less weekly hose-down would have noticed the damage. A scratched-up link four or five spaces back from the ankle was less noticeable.

It was agony waiting for your team mates to cut through their link, but eventually we all did it. Four teams of twelve. Teens and twenty-somethings. Germaine, our leader, had a plan of how we were going to overpower the guards. Heated arguments were whispered back and forth between Germaine, Lauren, and me. Urging Germaine to think cunning rather than strength.

It was a moot point in the end.

We managed to free ourselves on May 5^th. Not suspecting our rebellion, the guards had celebrated and passed out soon after sundown. It was child’s play to take their weapons, kill them and flee. We found the master key to our shackles and once free, we tossed the keys to the other teams.

And ran.

We ran into the jungle. Barefoot, dressed in whatever we had been wearing when we had been picked up by the Debt-mats. My jeans and hoodie, though too big for me since I had lost more than twenty pounds, served me well against irritating nettles, mosquitos, biting ants and lord knows what other creepy, crawly things were out there. We pulled leeches off each other when crossing rivers and swamps. And sucked snake poison out of bite wounds.

We snuck across the border.

The first seven miles of desert might have been harder on us than the jungle had been. Not all of our forty-eight made it. None of us were proud of it, but we had long since hardened our feelings, knowing that only the fittest, the ruthless would survive. We learned to close our eyes, say a prayer and breathe.

About fifteen or twenty miles past the border, we split off into groups of three and four, then split again and again. Finally, it was just me. Though I was anxious to see Mamma and Bennie, I was scared, felt vulnerable. I didn’t know anything. Had word spread of our breakout? Were they chasing us, looking to capture us, kill us on sight? Would I put Mamma and Bennie in danger if I just barged in? And what if they were no longer there? How would I find them if they had moved? These thoughts kept running through my head.

But I had no choice. I had to see them.

It was just past dusk when I slid into the backyard, just a small patch of dirt behind the back door. Between the duct tape covering the cracks in the backdoor window I saw Mamma standing at the stove. Even with her back to me, I knew it was her. The huggable, slightly crooked back, the way she proudly held herself while protecting those wonky joints. Though she was greyer, less plump, a tad less straight or proud, she was still Mamma.

At the table sat a boy. He was mere months away from losing his baby fat. His cheeks still showed a hint of plumpness. His dark brown hair was kinky and nappy, showing his father’s heritage.

Keeping a wary eye on the neighbor’s houses, making sure nobody was looking out their back windows, listening for drones, staying in the shadows as much as I could, I crept forward till I stood next to the back door.

My heart was full and clogged my throat. There was no room for breath. My hands were both ice cold and sweating. My gut clenched and churned.

Now!

I eased the door handle of the screen door, pulled back silently, and pressed down on the inner door handle.

I was inside.

Bennie looked up from his algebra text, his eyes wide with fear. It broke my heart that he didn’t recognize me, but it had been almost eight years.

“Mamma?” I whispered. The wooden spoon clattered to the floor. She didn’t turn around.

“Baby?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

And then she was there. Yanking down the cheap paper blinds while hugging me. I held out a hand to Bennie, but it took longer to win him over. Can’t say I blamed him, the way things were.

We sat at the kitchen table and planned. Reminiscing, telling each other sanitized or made-up versions of our lives would have been a waste of time. We needed to gather what little of value there was, everything edible and at least one change of clothes for each.

Mamma and Bennie went to work and classes as usual while I packed and waited. The hard part came right after they came home. I had to cut their chips out. Mine had been cut out before I was brought to the shirt factory. I had been off the grid for eight years. But Mamma and Bennie were monitored at all times.

It hurt. I knew it would, I remembered the hurt, but it had to be done. They had to leave their chips behind. With a little luck nobody would bother checking for a day or two, giving us the extra lead time.

We left after sundown, as soon as their arms were bandaged. Each of us carrying a pack.

We went south.

We walked through woods, hid in gullies and sewers in the day, and ran at night. On the third night, near sunrise, we met up with Lauren and her brother, Harmon. I was rude, I know, but I had to be sure that his chip was gone. He grimaced at the painful grip I had on his recent wound. I didn’t apologize, he didn’t ask for one.

Two weeks later we borrowed a rowboat and oared across a bay to a small island. One of the locals promised to come and bring back the rickety boat.

We crossed the island and hunkered down for two days. The ship was not fancy. The captain showed us the scar where he had taken out his chip and asked us to show him ours.

“It will not be a pleasure cruise.” He warned us. “I have no electricity on board, nothing for them to track us or see us. It’s easy to get lost on the seas. I sail by the stars and the current. Call me Columbus.” He chuffed.

It took Columbus three weeks to reach the Free Islands. A cluster of thousands of tiny barely inhabited dollops of land surrounded by turquoise water.

I stood at the railing and cried when I saw it. A yellow bump with palm trees and a few birds. I smiled through my tears and wondered where I could find a monkey.

Harmon came to stand beside me. He looked at the little island and back at me.

“That the one?” I had told them all how I had escaped the reality of my prison for those eight years.

I nodded and smiled.