Earlier in the evening, she’d heard the doorbell ring again and again, the excited choruses of young children shouting, “Trick or treat!” and seen Sasha, her beautiful, slender, five-foot-seven teen, rushing enthusiastically to the door with the large plastic bowl of candies, then bending at the waist and complimenting each child on his or her costume as she put treats in their bags.
The sequence of sounds had repeated until about nine o’clock, when the kids—even the older ones, a few in their middle teens who knew they really were too old to be trick-or-treating—had stopped ringing the doorbell.
Sasha had then told her grandmother that she was going down the street to hang out with Keesha Jones, her friend since they were ten. Joelle was never completely comfortable with Sasha being out at night, especially late, but she reminded herself that the child was now eighteen, too old to be kept home, and Keesha lived just at the end of the block.
About the only thing that Joelle could do was tell her to be safe. And, as an added precaution—so that when Sasha came home it would be easier, and quicker, to come inside the house—leave the heavy wrought-iron outer door unlocked.
And now, from the sound of it, Sasha was coming home very quickly.
Too quickly.
Joelle heard the wooden front door fling open, making a stunning thud as its heavy brass doorknob smacked an interior wall.
Then she heard a clearly terrified Sasha cry out, “Grammy!”
Joelle got the chills. And when she heard a familiar male voice call out, “Trick or treat!”—the tone deeply threatening—her knees buckled.
Xavier Smith! she thought, clinging to the lip of the sink to keep from falling to the linoleum floor.
Ridgewood Street was in the Kingsessing area of southwest Philadelphia. Joelle Bazelon had lived there going on forty years, graduating from South Philly High, then LaSalle University with her teacher’s certificate, and ultimately being assigned to Anna H. Shaw Middle School, from which she’d now retired as principal.
The school, at 5400 Warrington Avenue, was only a three-block walk from her row house on Ridgewood. She’d moved to the row house with her husband, Ray, whom she’d met at LaSalle, and later they’d reared their only daughter, Rachel, there.
About the same time that Joelle retired from teaching, Rachel, then age eighteen, had become pregnant with Sasha. The father, a year older, had stuck around for about half the length of time it had taken him to cause the actual moment of conception.
The Bazelon house—a modest thirteen hundred square feet total—became quite full.
That had lasted for only just shy of a year, however.
Ray and Rachel had been driving up from Delaware on Interstate 95 when their car’s front left tire blew out, causing the vehicle to roll over and strike a bridge support. They were killed on impact.
Among many things, Joelle was tough. She had to be. And, as she had already reared one daughter and over the years taught countless other children, she had no problem with the idea of bringing up Sasha on her own.
Yet over the years, despite Sasha proving to be both as sweet and as smart as her mother had been, rearing a granddaughter hadn’t been easy. As any single parent knew, the constant one-on-one time with a child exhausted energy and emotion. There had also been a money problem—Ray’s income went away shortly after his burial, and Joelle’s pension did not go as far as she’d have liked. Then came her health issues, including the diabetes and, because of her excessive weight, a heart condition, which not only further sapped her strength but also drained the savings account to pay for doctor’s bills and medications.
And what put a painfully fine point on their problems was that southwest Philadelphia simply was no longer the same place that Joelle and Ray had first moved to twenty years before to raise a family.
At first glance, Kingsessing appeared to be the same somewhat comfortable middle-class neighborhood. Most of the residents tried to keep the row homes tidy, the small yards trimmed and free of trash.
But if one looked closely, the signs of quiet despair were present.
Practically all the residences had something not one of them had been built with: burglar bars. The heavy racks of black wrought iron had been added house by house over the last ten or twelve years.
Some of the chain-link fences were even topped with razor wire.
There was a creeping blight on almost every block: When houses burned down—not always by accide
nt—the owners took whatever money the insurance company paid out and got the hell out of town. The city was stuck with the task of finishing off the destruction of the property, which more times than not left a dirt lot littered with rubble. A lot that oddly still had the five-tier set of concrete steps coming up from the sidewalk but leading to nowhere.
When that happened to the house next door to Joelle Bazelon’s, she saw the writing on the wall. She planted a FOR SALE sign in the small ten-foot-square patch of grass that was her front yard.
Joelle Bazelon found that she was not the only one who saw that the neighborhood was going to hell in a handbasket. Three other row houses were on the market within just two blocks of her address. They all offered essentially the same property, give or take a bath or bedroom.
She’d listed the property through a realtor, setting the asking price at ninety-nine thousand dollars. And she never got a single offer. When she asked the realtor why not, Joelle was told that the price on one of the other row houses for sale nearby was being reduced by five thousand dollars every two weeks. Worse, it still wasn’t getting any reasonable offers.
Joelle Bazelon had suddenly felt terribly trapped.
She now knew that she’d seen the start of all this decline years before, back when she’d been principal of the middle school. She’d seen kids who were on the path to no good—and parents who didn’t care. And in the time since then, she’d seen plenty of punks from Shaw, from the neighborhood, who had gone on to cause trouble in high school or, worse, in one of the disciplinary schools that served as their last stop in the School District of Philadelphia.