The Summer We Got Free
Page 5
***
Regina emerged from her bedroom a little while later and when she walked by the bathroom she saw Ava on the floor, on her knees, scrubbing the bathtub. She leaned against the doorframe and watched her daughter, who was sweating in the warmth of the small space. When Ava paused to wipe sweat from her brow, she saw her mother there and she knew immediately that Regina had changed. “You back, Mama?” she asked.
Regina nodded. "I'm back."
To anybody who didn't know Regina, she would have been unrecognizable from only a few minutes ago. Her hair was combed now, and held in a neat bun at the back of her head. She had changed out of her tattered housecoat, into a plain cotton dress, all the buttons of which were fastened correctly. The most stark difference, though, was the look in her eyes. It was steady now. Clear. Almost Normal.
“Didn’t Sarah clean that tub yesterday?” Regina asked.
“Did she?”
Regina nodded.
Ava sighed, then looked thoughtful. “Mama, what did you mean before, when you said you thought I was the one I used to be? Do you remember saying that, at the door?”
“I think so,” Regina said. “But I was probably just talking nonsense, Ava. You know better than to listen to anything I say when I’m like that.”
“I know. But the way you looked at me, it was like you really saw something.”
“I don’t know what I thought I saw, but maybe I was thinking about how you was when you was young.”
“What do you mean? How was I?”
“You remember how wild you was. How happy.”
“Was I?” Ava asked. “I don’t remember that.”
Regina shrugged. “Well. People change. Girls grow up.”
Still, Ava thought, she should be able to remember being wild and happy. She was only aware of ever being exactly as she was now. That bothered her, although she wasn’t exactly sure that there was something to be bothered about. In the doorway with Helena, though, just for a moment, she had felt wild. And happy.
It was still early, not yet noon, but the sun had burned off the morning chill and the air outside had become warm and soft. Paul and Helena walked down towards Fifty-Eighth Street, towards the park at the end of the block.
"You lied to your family about where you went when we split up,” Helena said.
Paul stopped walking, looked at her. “Y’all talked about that?”
“I didn’t tell them where you really went, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He was relieved. "I don't want them knowing nothing about it. Juvie was the worst time of my life and I don't want to think about it, let alone tell nobody."
"Even your wife?"
He didn’t answer.
“Will you tell me about it?”
He took his hands from his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. “If I was gone tell anybody, it’d be you. But I’m not.”
They walked on, farther down the block, and Paul noticed people on their porches looking out at them. Audrey Jackson and Lillian Morgan, older ladies who had lived on the block for decades and who Paul knew had been friends of his in-laws long years ago, now only stared and whispered whenever Paul or anyone in his family walked by, and today was no exception. Vic Jones, the burly, middle-aged bus driver who lived across the street and always had a menacing look to offer any one of the Delaneys, leaned over his porch railing, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes narrowed. Paul remembered the brick through the window, which had been pushed from his mind by his sister’s arrival.
"Well, then tell me about Ava,” Helena said. “What's she like?"
“She’s steady. Easy. She aint all moody and emotional like most women are.”
“Really? Hmm. I thought I sensed some…complexity in her.”
“Ava?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t ever call her complex. With Ava, what you see is what you get. There aint too many surprises.”
“Oh,” Helena said. “I wonder what gave me that idea.”
“Well, what about you? You aint never got married or had kids or nothing?”
“I don’t know about ‘or nothing,’” she said. “But no, I never got married or had kids.”
“You still got time. You aint but thirty.”
The park was almost empty of people, but the few who were there, sitting on the scattered benches, stared openly at them as they walked by. The looks Paul usually got from his neighbors, looks of disapproval and disdain, were now accompanied by double-takes at his sister, and outright gawking. Paul glanced at Helena, who seemed to notice but not to be bothered about it, and he realized how used she must have gotten to being stared at. It had always bothered her as a child, but over so many years she must have learned to ignore it.
As they circled through the park, Helena suddenly asked, "Are you happy, Paul?"
He shrugged. “I love my wife, and I got steady work, so, yeah, I guess I'm happy as I can be. What about you? You happy?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not. But I’m trying to be.”
“Seems like you doing alright, though,” he said. “Better than a lot of people I know.”
She frowned. “Do you know how much I have come to hate that word? Seems. People use ‘seems’ to keep from having to really know anything. They just decide how something seems and they don’t have to look any deeper, or go any further, or ask any uncomfortable questions.”
“Hold on, now,” he said, stopping at the end of a path, “I aint seen you in almost twenty years and you aint been here two hours yet, so if I aint asking the right questions fast enough, you can feel free to just come on out and tell me why you here, why you showed up after all this time. You aint got to wait for me to ask.”
She looked surprised and a little hurt. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, but he didn’t know how to communicate with this woman who was his sister, but who he did not know. She sighed, and shook her head slightly as if answering a question that had not been asked. “I don’t feel like walking anymore,” she said.
“Me, either.”
They abandoned their walk and went back to the house and when they reached the bottom of the stairs Helena caught sight of the broken window. “What happened there?”
He walked past her up the steps. “Some kids messing around out here, I guess,” he said, because that was the last thing he felt like explaining right then.
Helena’s train was leaving at two. Ava came downstairs to say goodbye. She’d spent the last hour in her bedroom, thinking about what her mother had said. She thought that maybe if she looked at Helena again, really looked at her, she would see what she had seen, and feel what she had felt, that first moment at the door, and would understand it. She stood before her now, in the foyer, and although she still felt a little bit lightheaded, a little bit off-kilter, she did not feel the thing that had surged up in her and made her kiss a strange woman on the mouth. She frowned, a little disappointed.
“Well,” she said to Helena, “have a safe trip.”
“Thank you, Ava.”
“Promise you’ll come and see us again,” Sarah said, looking unhappy, and Helena promised she would.
Paul had offered to accompany his sister to the train station down at Thirtieth Street and now he grabbed her suitcase and portfolio and walked behind her out the door.
They made it as far as the front porch before Ava rushed out after them. “Stay a few days,” she said.
Both Helena and Paul turned and looked at her. She could not read the look on Helena’s face, but Paul looked confused.
“Y’all can really catch up,” Ava said. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Paul?”
Paul hesitated. Then nodded. “I guess so.”
“It’s not too much trouble?” Helena asked, looking at Paul, not Ava. “Y’all have room?”
“We can make it work,” Ava said.
Sarah looked ready to shit with excitement. “This is wonderful!” she shrieked. “You can take my room, Helena, and I’ll sleep with Mama.”
***
“What’s Baltimore like?” Sarah asked Helena. They were sitting on the back porch steps now, drinking iced tea and smoking, because the kitchen had become too hot for habitation.
“It’s not that different from Philadelphia,” Helena told her. “Smaller. They have good seafood. Especially crab legs.”
“Ooh,” Sarah said.
Paul rolled his eyes. Sarah was spreading it on thick. What was so special, all of a sudden, about crab legs?
“What do you do, Miss Sarah?” Helena asked.
“You mean for work?”
“Sure. But also tell me what you do for play. What makes you happy when you do it.”
Sarah was not used to anyone showing any real interest in her. She had spent her life from aged two to fifteen being stuck in the shadow of Ava’s specialness, and the years since stuck in the shadow of Geo’s death, and she could not recall, in all of her adult life, ever being asked what she did that made her happy. She told Helena that she worked at a bank as a teller and had for several years. As for what she did that made her happy, she said there was nothing.
“But there must be. Think harder.”
She thought harder. “I don’t know. I like to knit. I make sweaters in the winter.”
“Does that make you happy?”
Sarah shrugged. She felt disappointed that she couldn’t come up with anything, not because it meant that there was nothing in her life that made her happy, which there wasn’t, but because she feared she couldn’t hold the interest of the only person who had shown any interest in her in a very long time. Worried that Helena would think she was unworthy of her attention, she blurted out, “I used to love a man who was happy about fire.”
Helena clapped her hands together, delighted. “Tell me.”
“It’s silly,” Sarah said.
“That’s all the better,” Helena assured her.
Paul, who had never imagined that Sarah had loved any man, leaned forward a little on the step.
Sarah hesitated. She had never told anyone about the man before. “This was years ago,” she said. “Back in sixty-nine. When I used to work way down in Old City, at the bank on Chestnut. At lunch time, in the summer, I used to walk down to Penn’s Landing. There was a man I always walked by. A street performer. A fire-eater. People was always gathered around him, watching him do his tricks. At first, I never stopped. I thought it was stupid, I thought he should go get a real job. But every time I walked by, I’d see the fire out the corner of my eye and wonder how he did it.”
Helena was holding her iced tea, but she wasn’t drinking it, and she looked mesmerized by Sarah’s story.
“One day, after I had walked by him, I was sitting on a bench eating my lunch and it started to rain, so I ran and stood under this awning. It wasn’t raining hard, but I didn’t have no umbrella, and I didn’t want my hair to get wet and have to go back to work looking like a drowned rat. From where I was standing, I could see him doing his fire thing. He wasn’t but twenty feet away. The crowd had left soon as it started raining, so it was just him there by hisself and he kept performing. I watched him. The way he held the fire, the way he was so gentle with it, you’d have thought it was alive, and fragile. He sort of caressed it. He looked at it with a kind of love in his eyes. I watched him juggle his batons, and not one of them went out in the rain. Then he opened his mouth wide and ate the fire from every one of them. It was so wonderful that I started clapping. He turned around and saw me there and he smiled. And, Lord, was he handsome. Scruffy-looking, like an alley cat, but he had a sweet face. He bowed a few times and I knew he wanted me to give him some money, so I threw a few coins in his hat. After that I would stop all the time and watch him do his fire tricks, and I’d stand at the back of the crowd.”
“Did you ever talk to him?” Paul asked.
“No. That one time, I’m sure he was just glad to have somebody to perform for and be able to make a little bit of money in the rain. But he never paid me no mind when there was a whole crowd of people throwing money in his hat.”
“Seem like you would have tried to talk to him, if you liked him so much,” Paul said. He had always thought Sarah was a pretty woman, if a little skinny, and he knew for sure that men were interested in her, because sometimes when his buddies from work saw her they’d ask Paul if she was going with anybody. Whenever they’d smile at her and try to start a conversation, though, she would act cold and unfriendly. She never believed Paul when he told her they were interested in her, no matter how much he assured her that they were.
Sarah shrugged. “It wasn’t nothing but a silly little crush. I left that job a year later and I aint really thought about him since,” she said, which wasn’t true.
“We had a cousin who juggled,” Helena said. “Remember, Paul?”
He nodded. “Just oranges, though, and they wasn’t on fire.”
When, a few minutes later, Paul went inside to use the bathroom, he found Ava in their bedroom, sweeping under their bed, and he accused her of avoiding his sister. “I’m not avoiding anybody,” she told him.
“You the one asked her to stay,” Paul said.
“I know.”
“Then what’s wrong? Why you acting all—” he started to say nervous, but it wasn’t a word he had ever used to describe Ava before, ever, and it felt strange even to think it. Nervousness required a level of worry, of concern about things, that Ava just didn’t have. “Strange,” he said, finally.
“I’m not acting strange,” she insisted, and continued to sweep under the bed.
Paul sighed. Maybe it was him. Maybe the surprise of Helena’s appearance and the fact that he had barely slept in twenty-four hours was making him see things that weren’t there. He felt suddenly overwhelmed with tired and he sat down on the bed. For a few moments, he watched Ava sweeping, watched the ends of the straw broom as it scratched against the worn wood floor. “Ava, I lied to you about something,” he said, without knowing he was going to say it.
“About what?”
He continued to watch the broom ends, noticing the way they caught in the cracks that had split into the wood after so many years of nobody taking care of the floors.
“When me and my sister got separated, I didn’t go live with my cousin like I told you. I went to jail.”
She didn’t even look up from her sweeping. “Jail?”
He nodded. “Well, juvie.”
“Why? What for?”
He sighed a long sigh and shook his head. “Baby, I aint ready to tell you all that yet.” He knew she would not press him, though some little part of him wanted her to. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, like a child.
“You need to rest,” she said.
He nodded, lay back on the bed, and was asleep.
When Ava got to the back screen door, she saw Helena alone out on the back porch, sitting on the top step, smoking, her head leaned back against the wooden porch railing, staring out at the overgrown yard. Paul was wrong. She hadn’t been avoiding his sister. She had been trying to think of a way to talk to her, to broach the subject of what had happened at the door that morning. Now she stepped out onto the porch. “Where’s Sarah?” she asked Helena.
“Your mother needed something, so she went inside to help her,” Helena said. “Where’s Paul?”
“’Sleep.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good. I thought he was going to pass out on the steps here a little while ago. Does he work nights a lot?”
“A lot lately. He wants us to get our own house,” Ava said.
“He wants?” she asked. “You don’t want that?”
Ava shook her head.
Helena took a drag off her cigarette. Smoke filled the air between them and then blew away on a warm breeze.
“I’m sorry about what happened this
morning,” Ava said. “At the door. I haven’t really been feeling like myself today.”
Helena grinned. “Who have you been feeling like? Someone who kisses strangers who show up at their door?” She shrugged. “Well, stranger things have happened.”
“Stranger things have happened to you than showing up on the doorstep of the brother you haven’t seen in twenty years and being kissed on the mouth by a woman you’ve never seen before who turns out to be his wife? Baltimore must be a lot more interesting than it sounds.”
Helena laughed, but Ava didn’t really see the humor in any of it. Helena seemed to realize that and said, “I’m sorry, Ava. I’m not making fun of you. You’ve just looked very serious and concerned since it happened and I’m trying to lighten the mood a little. It was odd. But I’m sure there’s a simple reason for it.”
Ava had not considered there was a simple reason. Thinking about it now, she could not come up with one, either. “Like what?”
“Maybe you saw Paul in me and were drawn to that. And you…reached out…in a way that seemed strange afterwards, but was just a natural impulse at the time. An embracing of the qualities of my brother that are in me.”
Ava did not think that answer was at all simple. Or at all true, for that matter. She was sure she had not seen Paul. Paul had never inspired that kind of behavior in her. She thought about saying that, but changed her mind. She wanted to know, wanted to really understand, what had happened, and why, but she did not want to push. Especially since Helena seemed so unconcerned about it. They may as well have been talking about the weather, with the way she sat there, smoking her cigarette and casually flicking the cinders into the ashtray at her feet.
“Anyway, it was just one moment, and it passed, so you don’t need to feel embarrassed about it, or nervous.”
But then Ava saw something. Still with that amused look on her face, Helena leaned down to tap her cigarette ash into the ashtray. And her hand shook. No, not shook. Trembled. She looked up at Ava and for a moment her façade of unconcern failed and Ava saw a flash of worry in her eyes.