The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  “Powers?”

  “You know,” Corey said sheepishly. “If they could…make things happen?”

  Angela didn’t have the heart to ridicule him. The guests’ speculations about Gramma Marie must have fired up his imagination, and how would he know any better? Corey had only been five when Gramma Marie died, and he barely remembered her. This was the first time he’d asked about his great-grandmother with real interest, as if he wanted something from her memory.

  “What kind of things, Corey?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  Corey’s gaze shifted away, then back again. His sigh seemed to harbor real sadness. “Nothin’. Forget it.”

  “Well, hold on. Gramma Marie held on to a lot of old folks’ superstitions, so she might have mentioned something about the ring,” Angela said quickly. One of Corey’s major complaints about her was that she didn’t take his concerns as seriously as Tariq did. “I’ll have to sleep on it, okay? Ask me tomorrow. When it’s not so crazy.”

  “Yeah, a’ight,” Corey said, although his face didn’t brighten. “Things are good with you and Dad this summer, right? I hear ya’ll sneakin’ around at night, those floors creaking. Ya’ll ain’t fooling nobody. Thought you should know.”

  Angela laughed, rubbing his short, wiry hair. “Don’t get your hopes up, but we’re trying.”

  “Cool. Guess we all make mistakes, huh? Some small and some big.” Corey’s eyes were unusually solemn and wistful now. He pressed his hand to his abdomen, like a pregnant woman feeling her baby kick. “And you just gotta’ try to fix them, right?”

  “Corey, you look awful. Are you sure you’re all right? You don’t have to help with the fireworks if you want to go lie down. I’ll explain it to your dad.”

  Angela saw uncertainty on her son’s face—or, more precisely, what she saw looked more like he could not choose one facial expression. First he looked nearly stricken, then sharply annoyed, then resigned. Corey rarely allowed his emotions to surface so baldly in front of her, and watching his face reminded her of studying her mother’s warring emotions as a child, trying to guess which version of Dominique Toussaint would emerge next.

  “I’mfine, dag,” Corey said impatiently.

  “Then do me a favor and go to the cellar and bring some sodas up, okay? They’re stacked in the corner. Bring up a couple of cases. And you might as well bring the fireworks up, too.”

  His eyes flickered to the cellar door and back. She thought she heard thethckk as Corey sucked his teeth. Gramma Marie would have knocked her across the room for making a sound like that, but she and Corey had just had a rare nice talk, an actual conversation, so she ignored it.

  “I have to go to Sean’s,” Corey said.

  “Take that up with Tariq, but we both know what he’ll say. I tried to talk you guys out of a big light show, but your dad’s looking forward to it,” Angela said. “Now go get the sodas, please.”

  Corey didn’t answer. What was wrong with him today? Angela watched him prop open the cellar door and stare down a moment before he descended the stairs in silence.

  She heard Gramma Marie’s voice in her head:Now, Li’l Angel, you be careful.

  Angela was about to tell him to tug on the string and turn on the light when he suddenly leaned back to gaze at her from beyond the narrow doorway. All at once, his tentative expression shed itself of everything except the unrestrained love he’d shown her when he was four and five. So loving he almost looked feverish. Little Corey. God, she missed that sweet, happy young kid. And he was here again, smiling at her like a photograph from easier days.

  “I’m gonna take care of you good, Mom,” he said with an exaggerated wink. “You wait.”

  Angela never forgot that smile from Corey.

  If she had glanced at her watch, she would have noticed that it was 7:15P.M. Exactly five minutes before the party would be over.

  At 7:16, the doorbell rang.

  Tariq was standing over the backyard barbecue grill cooking ribs, talking draft picks with Logan Prescott, Gunnar Michaelsen, and Tom Brock, who were all long timers with the Sacajawea Logging Company. A few yards from them, the seven young children at the party, including Glenn Brunell, were playing kickball in the clearing. Only the bigger kids were allowed to go after the ball if it got kicked too far into the woods, because there was a very steep dropoff that could be dangerous.

  So far, so good.

  In the living room, the player piano was limping through an atonal version of “Getting to Know You,” and it irked Angela that Laney Keane or someone had put on a piano roll without her permission. The piano wasn’t a toy, as Gramma Marie always used to say. Sheriff Rob Graybold had wrested the conversation away from Laney Keane’s historical reflections, and the group was listening intently to his theories on why people became child molesters. Because he hadn’t expected to be on duty today, Rob was halfway through his second Bud Light.

  All talk of Elijah Goode or Marie Toussaint and her cure-all teas had been forgotten.

  Angela answered the door, and it was then that she received the second of her three big surprises of the day: A dark-skinned black man stood on her front porch with a half-dozen huge sunflowers. The man on the porch had shaved his head clean, sported a thin moustache, and had no sign of the round-frame glasses he’d worn in high school, but she knew hismouth . His teeth. His eyes. Myles Fisher was waiting on the porch just as he had when he’d come to fetch her on prom night. “Well, I will bedamned,” Angela said.

  Liza Brunell squeezed Angela’s shoulder from behind. “Aren’t you surprised?”

  In Myles’s hand, the sunflowers truly did look like sunshine on stems. Angela squealed, laughing. “Myles, look at you!”

  Myles stepped toward her and hugged her with unself-conscious firmness. She tried not to notice the pleasant, refined scent of his cologne or how broad his shoulders had grown since high school. She gave his lips only a polite peck before she pulled away, but she felt giddy in a way that scared her. Myles’s eyes shone like burnished copper pennies, and his shaved head suited him well, making him look self-assured, controlled. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from his face.

  “Angela Marie Toussaint,” he said, pronouncing each syllable of her name slowly, with affection. “For once, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I thought you were in D.C.!”

  “He’s interviewing to be the new boss at theLower Columbia News over in Longview,” Liza broke in, excited. “He came to the market Tuesday and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I said he should come to the party and surprise you.”

  “That’s the only reason I didn’t call sooner,” Myles said, his gaze deepening. “I wanted to see this look on your face. Liza nabbed me my first day back in town.”

  Myles had been working as an editor atThe Washington Post for years, she’d heard. Why would he leave thePost for such a tiny paper? Myles patted her hand, seeing her bewilderment. “Ma’s sick,” he said quietly, and Angela suddenly understood. His adoptive parents had been older, and Ma Fisher’s husband had died when Myles was only a junior in college. She must be close to ninety by now, and she was probably the only family he had left.

  “I’m so sorry about Ma Fisher, but I’m thrilled to see you, Myles. When some people leave town, theyleave town . I haven’t seen your sorry ass in more than twenty years.”

  “You’ve obviously mistaken me for a much older man.” Myles’s eyes drank in the details of the house with the same appreciation he’d shown for her, and she understood that, too. He’d had many good times here. “Look at this place! Angie, you’ve done good. Gramma Marie is beaming down from Heaven, darlin’. She says,‘Fantastique, cher.’ ”

  She squeezed his hand. “I hope so.”

  Angela was glad Tariq was out back grilling and couldn’t see her face, because she didn’t want to learn whether or not her husband’s jealous streak was still intact. After a couple of beers, Tariq could act foolish over nothing. And frankly, this might be the one time it
wasn’t exactly nothing, because Myles looked good. His face had rounded out in an attractive way, and his build had grown stocky, shedding his adolescent lean-muscled wiriness. The defining lines of his chest were visible through his tight, bone-colored Lycra shirt. He worked out, apparently. Not in the rigorous way Tariq lifted weights to feel like he was still an athlete, but enough.

  Liza caught Angela’s gaze and wagged a finger at her, and Angela smiled. For an instant, she felt as if she were back in the hallway of Sacajawea County High, an odd, gratifying feeling. She wondered why she hadn’t had a party like this long ago.

  “I need to meet the man who stole my girl,” Myles said. “Where’s this Mustafa guy you married? The big, bad football player? Is it true he can read, too?”

  “Fool, you better hush. His name isTariq,” Angela said, slapping at his shoulder. “Nobody told you to go to Columbia. Maybe if you’d gone to U.C.L.A. like we both planned…”

  “Is that Myles Fisher I hear?” Art Brunell’s voice thundered from the living room. “Mark my words, folks: The first thing I’m gonna do when I’m elected mayor is set up restrictions so we don’t have any more of these deadbeat yokels moving back into town!”

  Everyone laughed then, a sound that resounded throughout the house. Angela couldn’t remember the last time she laughed that hard, like someone dizzy on champagne.

  Then, it was 7:20.

  For the rest of her life, this was all Angela would remember: loud, braying laughter. Off-key piano strains. Children outside shrieking,Get the ball! Then, smothering everything else beneath it, the powerful sound of something exploding in aPOP .

  Whatever it was, it was right near them, in the house. In the foyer.

  Angela looked at Myles at first, as if his arrival had brought the sound somehow, but he only looked deeply startled, shoulders hunching. Then, she realized the sound had come frombeneath them. The cellar.

  “What the hell—” Rob Graybold said. “Who’s setting off firecrackers?”

  The explosion brought a hush to the room. Even the children outside were quiet. So was the piano, the birds, and any other sounds that had been present, near or distant, before then. Or, at least theyseemed to be silent. In the silence, the memory of the sound loomed larger. The sunflowers were on the floor, at her feet.

  Corey,Angela thought, her mind splintering. Then, she shouted his name.

  Sheriff Rob Graybold went down the cellar stairs first, and she leaned on him, pushing. He’d told her to stay back, to let him take a look, but she didn’t hear him, and she wouldn’t have listened if she had. The cellar light was on, a naked bulb shining overhead. Her eyes followed the neat brick patterns on the cellar wall, blurring lines. She couldn’t see past Rob. She couldn’t see Corey.

  “What happened?An-geee?” she heard Tariq call in alarm, from miles away.

  She smelled gunpowder. Goddamn fireworks. They were illegal in California, with good reason. Children lost limbs and eyes. Why the hell had she let Tariq go out with Corey and buy rockets that were meant to light the sky?

  It won’t be too bad. There’s a doctor here. Whatever it is, it won’t be too bad.

  Rob Graybold went frozen where he stood on the steps, and Angela couldn’t move past him. She heard the air seep out of his lungs in awhooshing sound because she was so close to him, pressed tight. She felt his heart pounding, and she could smell pungent perspiration from his underarms, beneath the stink of burnt powder.

  “Dear Mary and Joseph,” Rob Graybold said. He turned around and tried to take Angela’s arm, tugging so hard it hurt. “We need to get that doctor in here, Angie,” he said, pale as milk. “Don’t go down there.”

  But by now, Angela was screaming. She writhed against Rob Graybold until she squeezed herself past him, and her struggle brought both of them stumbling down the cellar stairs, off-balance.

  Corey was lying on his stomach in the exact center of the cellar floor. His head was turned away from her, one arm raised nearly to his face, the other limp at his side, palm upward. He looked like he was taking a nap. And he must have dropped some of the drinks, some of the red ones, maybe some bottles of cherry syrup, because his head lay in the midst of a red puddle that reached almost as far as the wine shelves against the far wall. And the puddle was growing.

  Another smell threaded its way through the scent of smoke and perspiration, a thick odor she couldn’t allow herself to recognize yet, though she knew perfectly well what it was.

  She didn’t see any bags of fireworks or cartons of soda near Corey. The only thing shedid see was a very realistic black toy gun in the middle of thered puddle, inches from Corey’s hand. The gun bore a remarkable resemblance to the gun Tariq had, a black Glock with a taped butt, the one he’d kept in his nightstand drawer until she finally won the fight and he took it to a gun shop and got rid of it. Yes, he got rid of it. He said he did. He marched into the house and said,I hope you’re happy now, bitch, and showed her the receipt. It was the first and last time he had ever called her that word, and he’d later said he was sorry. But he’d gotten rid of it because she’d screamed at him, telling him how she’d walked into her mother’s bedroom to find Mama standing there with a gun in her mouth when she was twelve, and it just wasn’t safe to have a gun, not with a child in the house. Angela always tried to be careful, just like Gramma Marie said.

  “He got rid of it,” Angela rasped, even though she was seeing that gun again, with that same tape wrapped around the butt, a mirage from a life she had left behind.“He got rid of it.”

  Angela repeated those five words and nothing else for the next half hour. All the while, Gramma Marie’s gold ring gleamed on her finger as absolute proof that some things can come back after they’re gone.

  As far as most of the guests at Angela Toussaint’s Fourth of July party knew, it was the first bad thing that had ever happened at the Good House.

  Homecoming

  Your home stands behind you, patient.

  It knows,cher, you will return.

  —MARIE TOUSSAINT

  Two

  LOSANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Two years later

  BY THE BEGINNINGof her third mile, Angela Toussaint was flying. Her lean, corded legs reached a rhythm of their own accord, piston machinery propelling her white running shoes as they hit the ground. Angela no longer perceived gravity’s work on her feet, or the tiny shocks of impact on her legs and hips. She no longer felt the searing sensation that had been dogging her lungs as she struggled to take in enough oxygen. She only felt the dawn air in her face and the blood rushing hot through her taut body’s arteries. Flying. Finally, flying.

  This was Angela’s favorite time and place to be. She was nowhere and nothing. She had no beginning, no end, no present, no future. When she was flying, she disappeared from herself. Let it last forever this time, she prayed. Let it last.

  But it never did. Angela could run ten miles or more without much trouble if she slowed her pace, but she had never learned how to run slowly. When Angela ran, she liked torun, to push her body to the end of what it had to offer. She’d vowed to start slowly today and train the way the experts instructed, but the next thing she knew, she’d been flying again. But she couldn’t fly long. Angela could sustain her faster pace for only a mile—maybe a mile and a half, on very good days—but then her body began to complain. A monstrous stitch in her side. Burning lungs. Rock-hard shoulders. Tightening muscles in her legs threatening to knot themselves.

  With a squeal of frustration, Angela began to slow down, her strides landing harder and more clumsily, and the world that had been passing in a blur while she was high on endorphins took its mundane shape again. She trotted to a stop on the path at four-thousand-acre Griffith Park, nearing the Los Angeles Zoo. This was her favorite morning jogging route despite the number of other runners here even by 6A.M. , when the park off of the Golden State Freeway officially opened. It was a hazy morning, so the daylight was muted and weak, and a pale shroud hid the top of the S
anta Monica mountain range at the park’s horizon.

  Gasping for air, Angela made her way to a bench, where she propped up one leg and doused her head with water from the bottle she carried in a leather pouch slung across her back. When she’d emptied nearly half the bottle on herself, she took it to her lips and began to gulp. The lukewarm water was gone fast. She tossed the empty bottle into the L.A. County Parks recycling bin and doubled over to try to slow her breathing, locking her arms against her knees.

  Nearly three miles at full speed and no puking today. That was a good sign. She hadn’t done too much damage to herself this time.

  “You must wake up every morning feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck,” a stranger’s voice said, and Angela looked up to see a man stretching in the grass ten yards behind her, his legs splayed wide open as he faced her. He was shirtless with a concave abdomen, a typical specimen of Los Angeles perfection—if she’d been into the Richard Gere type. Or if she’d been into anyone. This would be the part in a movie where she and the stranger would strike up a chat, share breakfast together, and then live happily ever after. Except that this was real life. In real life, there was always anever after, she knew, but happy had nothing to do with it.