Just as they were finishing dinner, the sky opened up, and rain like a torrent drummed hard against the open windows of the kitchen. Paul and George rushed to close them, while Ava and Sarah cleared the table. Ava saw, through the window, a heavy flash of lightning across the sky, and then thunder shook the house.
“Somebody better close the upstairs windows,” Regina said. “’Fore it’s water all over the floors.”
“We’ll get ‘em,” George said, and he and Paul hurried out of the kitchen.
Ava watched Helena carry a stack of plates to the sink.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I’m glad to.” Helena took the glasses Ava was holding and placed them in the sink with the plates. “It’s really coming down,” she said, watching the rain through the window, as lightning cut hard again across the sky.
The lights in the house flickered and went out.
“Shit,” Sarah said.
There was some lingering daylight, but not enough to see by inside.
“You got your matches, Mama?” Ava asked the outline of Regina that she could make out in the half-dark.
Regina took from her pocket the book of matches she was always carrying for cigarettes and struck one. In the light of the small flame, Ava watched her move to the counter and open a drawer, taking out two candles. She handed them both to Sarah, who held them while Regina lit them. Regina then took one of the lit candles for herself. “It’s a few more of these in the dining room,” she said, and she and Sarah went to get them, leaving Ava and Helena in the kitchen, in the dark.
At first, neither woman spoke. Ava could hear Helena’s breathing, which was as nervous and loud as her own. Then Helena said, “We seem to be having the strangest effect on each other, don’t we?”
The lights flickered on, just for a moment. In the sudden brightness, their eyes met. The next second it was dark again. Then lightning flashed through the window and Helena screamed.
Sarah and Regina came rushing in, followed by Paul and George, all of them carrying lit candles.
“What’s wrong?” Paul asked.
Helena pointed at the window over the sink. “There’s someone there.”
Standing out in the backyard, looking at them through the window, was a middle-aged man in a dark bathrobe, standing under a large umbrella. He squinted at them through thick glasses, not the least concerned, it seemed, that he’d been caught peering into their house.
Paul pulled the window open and yelled, “Mind your own goddamn business!” and Ava could hear the raw anger in his voice.
The man looked right at Helena and said, “You know who you keeping company with? The devil’s in this house!”
Paul yelled, “You better get the hell away from this window right now, fool, ‘cause if I come out there you gone see the devil for sure.”
“We aint scared of you!” the old man yelled back. “We got the good Lord on our side.”
Paul made a move away from the window and towards the back door, and the man quickly moved away from the window, climbing over the fence that separated their backyard from the one beside it, and disappeared into the next house.
“Who was that?” Helena asked, sounding shocked.
“Dexter Liddy,” Ava said. “He lives next door.”
“Is he crazy?”
“Out his damn mind,” said Paul. “Just like everybody else on this street.”
“They aint all crazy,” Regina said. “They misled, mostly. And a little stupid, too.”
Helena shook her head. “I don’t understand. Misled by whom? About what? About the devil being in this house? That’s sure something to be misled about.”
“And a long time to be misled about it, too,” Regina said.
George frowned. “She don’t need to know about this.”
“How you plan on keeping her from knowing it?” Regina asked her husband. “You think that preacher gone just let us have a nice visit? Now I think about it, she’s what that brick musta been about.”
“Can’t be,” said Sarah. “She hadn’t even got here yet.”
Regina thought about it, then looked at Helena. “Was this morning the first time you came by here, honey?”
Helena shook her head. “No. I came by yesterday, early in the evening, but nobody was at home, so I went on over to our cousin Tyrone’s place and stayed the night there.”
Regina nodded. “What I tell you? Goode musta seen her. Or somebody else saw her and went and told him. With them suitcases, they musta figured she was coming back. That brick was a warning.”
“What did it say again?” Paul asked, trying to remember.
Sarah frowned. “Something about not making friends with us.”
Regina nodded again. “Mmm hmm.”
Helena looked back and forth between them all. “A preacher threw a brick at somebody?”
“At all of us,” Paul said. “He threw it through the front window. Or told somebody else to. That’s how it really got broke.”
“Why?”
“Because everybody on this street got something against us,” Regina said. “Been that way ever since my son died. You saw that church across the street?”
Helena nodded.
“Well, the preacher I’m talking about is the pastor over there. Has been for the last twenty-five years. He had a son, too. Same age as mine. They died together. Then his wife died not even a year later, from the grief. And he blamed us for all of it. He been trying to get us off this block ever since. And he managed to turn all the rest of these people against us, too, including that fool who was just looking in here.”
“When you say ‘died together’—what does that mean?”
Ava felt a rush of heat move up her neck and along her scalp. A picture flashed in her mind, of her brother and Kenny Goode, lying dead on a hot sidewalk, on a smoldering Saturday morning. The image cut through her like lightning through the hazy sky. She felt dizzy and she held on to the counter to keep her balance.
“Now, look,” George said, “this is family business. Any stranger that come by here don’t need to know about it.”
“Hold on, Pop,” Paul said. “It aint no cause to be rude.”
“And she aint a stranger,” Sarah said. “I mean, she’s Paul’s sister. She’s family.”
“We don’t know this woman from Eve! And since when y’all so eager to talk about all this? Aint nobody in this house had a word to say about it in years.”
“Who we supposed to tell?” Regina asked. “Each other?”
“I didn’t mean to pry,” Helena said.
George stood up and moved towards the door. “I’m going out for a while.”
“In this weather?” Sarah asked him.
“I got an umbrella,” he said.
When he had gone, Regina looked at Helena. “You gone have to excuse my husband. He don’t hate nothing much as he hate the truth.”
Helena didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Ava was sure she was still wondering how the two boys had died together, but she didn’t ask again. “These people have been harassing you for…how long?”
“Seventeen years,” Regina said.
“Why do you stay?”
“This our house. Houses don’t come easy, you know. Aint nobody gave this one to us, we had to work every day of our lives to get it and to keep it after it was got. Besides, we aint done nothing that we ought to leave for. Pastor Goode might think he God, but last time I looked he was just a man.”
“But bricks through your window?” Helena asked. “Is it really worth it?”
“It don’t happen all the time,” Sarah said. “Nothing’s happened in the last couple of years.”
“The thought of us having company, being connected to the world, like normal folks, musta got them all riled up again,” Regina said.
“If my being here is causing trouble for you, I can just go on up to New York like I planned.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” Sarah said. “I mea
n, it aint no reason for you to go.”
“Sarah’s right,” said Ava, whose head had begun to clear again.
Regina nodded in agreement. “We been dealing with that preacher and all the rest of these fools for all these years. A few days aint gone bother me none. But I can understand if you don’t want to have to deal with it.”
Helena looked like she was thinking about it. After a few moments, she said, “I can deal with a little scandal, I guess. It won’t be the first time.”
“These lights ever gone come back on?” Regina asked.
“They out on the whole block,” Paul said.
“Well, that’s good. ’Cause if it was just our house, I’d start to think the devil was in here.”
They laughed, small, uneasy laughs, all except Ava, who laughed a real laugh, a laugh that went on after everyone else’s had finished. Her laugh grew louder, and it had the unbound sound of a child’s, giggly around the edges and saturated with a kind of silliness that did not really fit the moment. It grew eager and full and caused her shoulders to shake and her body to bend slightly at the waist, under the weight of it. She felt wetness around her eyes and the muscles of her stomach ached. She could not remember ever laughing so hard. She was aware that they were all looking at her strangely and she did not understand why they weren’t laughing, too. It was hilarious, what her mother had said, although she wasn’t sure what about it had struck her as being so especially funny. Probably the way Regina had said it, with that half-crazy look of hers. That thought made her laugh even harder. Suddenly she felt out of control of it, and with that out of control feeling there came a weakness, both in her knees and in her bladder, and she knew that if she didn’t stop laughing she would wet herself, but still she could not stop. She felt only slightly more control over her legs than her bladder, but she thought she could make it to the bathroom if she ran fast. Still laughing, she pushed herself hard off the counter and raced out of the kitchen. She ran through the foyer, feeling her way in the darkness, and up the stairs, and barely made it to the toilet. She was still giggling, her jaws sore from it, the urine coming out of her in a staggered stream as her abdominal muscles continued to contract with her laughter. She remembered, suddenly, laughing at her brother as he made faces at her across the dinner table, laughing uncontrollably, a feeling of bliss filling her up. The memory jolted her and she began to feel in control of herself again and the strange laughter quieted, leaving her exhausted and out of breath.
***
Helena barely slept that night. Sarah knew this because she was awake for hours herself, listening to their guest moving around on the creaky floors of the bedroom Sarah had offered her for the duration of her visit. Even after midnight, she could hear Helena walking the length of the room, her feet making different sounds on the area rug by the bed than on the places where the floor was bare. Sarah wondered what she was doing in there. Probably thinking about what she had been told at dinner, about Geo and the pastor’s boy, and the years-long feud. She had been relieved when Helena said she would still stay, in spite of all of it, but now she worried she might change her mind. Maybe tonight, while they were all asleep, she would slip out, quietly, just the way she had come. How could Sarah blame her if she did? Without a very good reason not to, anyone would stay away.
Around one in the morning, Sarah heard something being loudly unzipped, and she knew it must be the large portfolio Helena had brought, which had been leaning against the dresser when Sarah had gone in to say goodnight hours earlier. Sarah pictured it lying open now, its contents—drawing paper and pencils, she guessed—strewn about the bed, and Helena taking her time deciding what picture she might make. Sarah wanted, more than anything, to slip out of the bed where her mother lay snoring beside her and peek into the next room, or, better yet, to knock and be invited in. She imagined herself sitting cross-legged at the top of the bed while Helena sat at the foot with her drawing pad in her lap, talking more about Baltimore, sharing morsels from her life, and Sarah tasting, devouring. She did not want to disturb Helena, though, to interrupt, so instead she closed her eyes and wished for morning.
It came, warm and smelling like mid-summer in the city, like scorched air and hot sidewalks. Sarah’s first thought upon waking was of Helena, and she listened, trying to hear her stirring in the early light, but there was no sound coming through the wall now. She went downstairs and started the coffee and, through the back window, saw Helena sitting alone on the back porch, smoking and staring off into the tangled weeds that had been rosebushes and a vegetable garden long years ago. When the coffee was ready, she took a cup out to Helena, smiling and saying, “Good morning,” as she offered it to her.
“Good morning, Sarah,” Helena said, taking the coffee. “Thank you.” She looked tired and pensive, and a little bit troubled. “I was just sitting here listening to the music.”
The music she was referring to was the usual Sunday-morning sounds coming from Blessed Chapel, the pre-service rehearsal of the choir, which, Sarah knew, could be heard a block a way in all directions. It rose up in the air and hung over Radnor Street like smoke.
“They always did have good music,” Sarah said, sitting down beside Helena on the steps. “We used to sing in the children’s choir when we was kids.”
“Do you miss the church?”
Sarah nodded. “I always liked church. Ava and Geo only went because our parents made them. But I liked it. The music, the bible stories, even the sermons. And the feeling I got being so close to God. I felt like he could see me, like he knew who I was, when I was there.”
“But you never joined another church, after your family left this one?”
She thought it was nice of Helena to use the word left, instead of the words, was thrown out of, which were truer. “There’s a church over by where I work,” she said. “Sometimes I go to their evening prayer service. But it aint the same as the church you grow up in.” Sarah remembered Sunday mornings at Blessed Chapel, the sounds of praise songs, the smell of bibles, and all of them sitting there on their usual pew, all together like real family. “You go to church?” she asked Helena.
She shook her head, no. “We weren’t raised religious. Our mother never went, so we didn’t either. I studied the bible quite a bit, when I got older. I wasn’t ever all that impressed with it, to tell you the truth.”
“Well, it aint for everybody, I guess,” Sarah said.
“Can I ask you something?”
Sarah nodded, eager to be asked something.
“Why do you stay in this house? I mean, I can understand your mother feeling so attached to the home she worked so hard to have, but why do you stay?”
“Where else I’m gone go?”
“Well, anywhere,” Helena said.
“But where, exactly?”
Helena looked unsure.
“The little bit I seen of the world don’t impress me any more than the bible does you. Maybe ‘anywhere’ aint for everybody, either.”
“You remind me of Paul,” Helena said. “When we were kids, he always hated the idea of growing up and going out on his own. He just wanted to stay close to what he already knew, which wasn’t even good. I always thought he was afraid that the rest of the world wasn’t any better, and that at least our pain was pain he was used to, and he didn’t want to trade what he knew for something he didn’t know that was just as bad, or even worse. I guess I’m not surprised he ended up marrying into a family like yours.”
Sarah wished the conversation would turn back to her, and away from Paul, and she was willing to wait patiently for that to happen. Helena was quiet now, probably lost in some memory of her brother.
“Do you want to see their wedding pictures?” Sarah asked, feeling torn between spending their time talking about Paul and risking being shut out of Helena’s thoughts altogether. “I can show them to you.”
They went inside and found Regina in the kitchen, pouring herself some coffee. When Sarah told her they were going to look at ph
otos, she said she’d join them and followed them into the dining room. Sarah went to the china closet, the top shelves of which were filled with fancy dishes that hadn’t been used in seventeen years. In the lower compartments, she found the dust-covered photo albums and hauled them out onto the dining room table.
Helena sat down at the table and Sarah sat beside her, moving her chair closer so that they could look at the pictures together, while Regina stood over Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah sorted through the albums and pulled out a small white one, with a large pink heart on its front. She opened to the front page, to a photograph of Ava and Paul holding hands, Ava in a simple white dress and Paul in a dark blue suit.
“They got married down at City Hall,” Sarah explained.
“That’s the dress I wore at my wedding,” said Regina.
Helena smiled. “It’s lovely.”
“Don’t Paul look handsome?”
Helena nodded.
When they got to a photograph of the whole family sitting together in the living room after the ceremony, Helena pointed at an old woman and asked who she was.
“That’s my mother-in-law,” Regina said. “Mother Haley. She passed away years ago.”
Helena looked at Sarah. “You look a lot like her.”
“You should see her when she was Sarah’s age,” said Regina. “You’d think it was Sarah herself.”
Regina sifted through the stack of albums and pulled out a fat blue one that was full of very old, black and white pictures. She flipped through until she found one of Mother Haley as a young woman and they all agreed that Sarah bore a striking resemblance to her late grandmother.
Ava came in then, with a pad of paper and a pencil. “Anything y’all want to add to this grocery list?” she asked them. “I’m gone stop by the store on my way home from work.”
“Ava, we looking at old pictures,” Regina said. “Look at this one of your grandmother.”
Sarah felt a twinge of disappointment as Ava came and sat down at the table.
“Who are these people?” Helena asked, pointing to a photograph of a group of folks standing outside a very small house.
The Summer We Got Free Page 7
