The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  Weeks passed and Ava grew miserable without color. He had taken her paints and her chalks and her crayons, and all she had left to make art with were the pencils she used for school. She drew pictures on the pages of her composition books, but they were colorless, and soon her craving for yellow and blue and, especially, red, became unbearable. She spent as much time as possible staring at the red walls, and watching the blue sky and the orange sunset, but seeing color wasn’t enough, she needed to use it. One day, while playing with Ellen and Juanita, she fell and skinned her knee, and the blood that beaded on her skin was beautiful, and it filled her with pleasure. Later, she took a needle from her mothers sewing box and pricked her finger, and used the blood to color a small drawing she had made. A week later, her fingertips were raw and red from being pricked and when Regina noticed and asked what had happened to her hands, and Ava told her, Regina told George to give back the art supplies.

  “No,” he said, over his newspaper. “She aint apologized.”

  “And she aint going to,” Regina insisted. “I can tell you right now, your anger aint gone outlast hers. You ought to know that child good enough to know that.”

  But he did not want to give in to Ava. He believed she knew that what she had done was wrong, and that her refusal to apologize was just stubbornness, pure defiance for the sake of itself. He agreed with Goode that Ava needed to be kept in line and he blamed Regina for always giving in to her. Children needed discipline and, even more, they needed to understand how the world worked, and know that their survival depended on following the rules.

  “This aint a game I’m playing with Ava,” George said. “I’m trying to teach her right from wrong. God forbid you’d take my side and support me on something.”

  Regina started to say something, then shook her head and left the room, looking frustrated. George went back to his paper. A few minutes later, Geo and Kenny came through the front door, in their swim trunks, their hair still wet with harsh, chlorine-smelling water.

  “How was the pool?” George asked.

  “I learned to swim, Daddy,” Geo said, grinning, proud.

  “What you mean, swim?” George asked, chuckling. “You mean walk around in the shallow end?”

  Geo laughed, too. “No, I mean swim. David was there, and he taught some of us how. He learned at the Y last summer, I guess. You know David, Uncle Chuck’s son?”

  George nodded. His kids still called Chuck “uncle” even though he hadn’t been a close friend of the family in years. It had just stuck. He frowned, tried to push Chuck out of his mind. “You learn how to swim, too, Kenny?”

  “Naw, he learned how to sink, though,” Geo said.

  Kenny jumped on Geo, put him a headlock. Geo put his arms around Kenny’s waist and lifted him off the floor. They were both laughing, their skinny, naked arms and chests pressing damply together. George felt a sudden rush of nausea and heat and he sprang up from his chair and grabbed Geo, prying him off of Kenny. “Stop acting like a little faggot!” he snarled, his teeth clenched, shaking the boy. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Geo stared wide-eyed at his father, blinking, confused. Kenny looked down at his feet, embarrassment bleeding into his face and neck.

  Regina rushed in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, looking anxious. She looked from Geo to George. “What’s going on in here?”

  Geo shook his head. “We didn’t do nothing, Mama. We was just wrassling. We didn’t mean nothing.”

  Kenny shook his head, too, still staring at the floor.

  Regina peered at George. “Let him go.”

  George glared at her. “Don’t tell me what to do about my own goddamn son! You the reason he so soft in the first place! He need to start acting like a man!”

  “He aint a man!” Regina screamed. She put her arms around Geo and pulled him away from George. “He twelve years old! You the one need to start acting like a man.”

  The heat that had filled George boiled in him now. He turned Geo loose and raised his fist.

  Geo screamed, “Daddy, no!”

  George slammed his fist into Regina’s face, making a sound like bat against a ball, and she stumbled back, then dropped to the floor. Geo crouched down next to her, shielded her with his body, protecting her.

  Kenny just stood there, trembling, looking too scared to move.

  George looked down at Regina. Her lip was busted, bleeding. He felt the heat inside him boiling over. He couldn’t breathe. He needed to get out of there. He turned and moved by them, walked toward the front door, and behind him he heard a shuffling of feet. He turned around, just as Regina swung a table lamp and smashed it against his head. The pain seared through him, and spots appeared before his eyes. He felt himself falling, but didn’t feel it when he hit the ground.

  A full month after he had taken her paints away, George walked past Ava’s room and, through the open door, saw her sitting on the floor beside her bed with blood dripping down her arm onto the wood floor. He rushed to her side. She was peaked and shaken.

  “What did you do?” he asked her.

  “I was just trying to get some red,” she said.

  She had been trying to get some red with a steak knife across her forearm, and had nicked a vein. George cleaned the small wound and dressed it, thinking all the time how everything always seemed to be spinning out of control lately. It had been a week since his fight with Regina and in that time their physical wounds had nearly healed, but the emotional wounds that had caused them had only opened wider. Now here again was more of their own blood dripping on the floor.

  “It looks like paint drops,” Ava said, eyeing the beads of dark red.

  George sighed. “Why can’t you just be like normal people?” he asked her, and he could hear pain in his own voice, and fear.

  She shrugged. “This is how I am.”

  George shook his head. She didn’t understand. She never did, no matter how hard he tried to make her see. “One day you gone piss off the wrong person, Ava,” he said, wrapping a bandage around her arm, as tenderly as he could. “It’s crazy people in this world.”

  1976

  Thunder rumbled the next evening and lightning cracked open the sky. Rain fell in fat drops, like gumballs from a broken candy machine, round and dense, making plunking sounds against concrete and window panes. With the storm came a much-prayed-for break in the heat, and Regina decided she would take the opportunity to cook a real meal for the first time in days. When she went to the kitchen, she found Helena there, cooking pork chops and potatoes. “Look like we had the same idea,” Regina said.

  Helena nodded. “Great minds.” Then, “Oh! I almost forgot!” She hurried out of the kitchen, into the dining room, and she returned a few moments later, carrying her drawing pad, flipping it open. “I’ve been meaning to show you this,” she said. “I finished it a few days ago.” She held out the completed sketch of Regina.

  Regina gasped when she saw it.

  “What’s wrong?” Helena asked, looking disappointed. “You don’t like it?”

  “That aint it,” Regina said, staring at the drawing. “I just didn’t know I looked like that. Is that how I look to you?”

  Helena hesitated. Then nodded. “Well…yes.”

  Regina stared down at the drawing. It was well-done, and looked very much like her, but there was a hardness in the eyes, and an anger in the set of the mouth that made her look sick and mean.

  “I’m sorry,” Helena said. “Maybe I didn’t get it right.”

  Regina put a hand on her arm. “No, you did a good job. You did just fine. I’m just preoccupied about dinner, that’s all.”

  Regina prepared the broccoli Helena had bought. Ava, Paul and Sarah all got home in the next little while, and when dinner was ready they all sat down to eat. Soon, George arrived, and joined them. Across the table, Regina saw him eyeing Helena. Whenever Helena spoke, he found something to disagree with her about.

  “This weather is a mess,” Paul said.
“If it aint a thousand degrees, it’s pouring rain.”

  “Thunderstorms are what I love most about summer,” Helena said.

  George frowned. “I hate them. They make the humidity even worse.”

  “These greens are wonderful, Mrs. Delaney,” Helena said.

  George shook his head. “They too salty.”

  Regina rolled here eyes. “You eating them fast enough.”

  Sarah ate her food in silence. She had not told Ava or Helena about the fire-eating man, about turning her lie into the truth, when she’d gotten home from work the previous day, because coming up the street, coming up to Fifty-Ninth, she had seen them up ahead, had seen Goode

  pointing at Ava and hollering. She had stood back and watched, and when she saw Helena stop and confront the pastor on Ava’s behalf, she knew that the fire-eating man, and the lie that had become the truth, didn’t matter anymore. Helena was Ava’s now. Just like Kenny.

  “Sarah, why you so quiet?” Regina asked.

  She shrugged. “I aint got nothing to say. I probably won’t have nothing to say ever again.”

  George raised his eyebrows. “What’s wrong now? Wait, let me guess. It got something to do with that one,” he said, pointing a steady finger at Helena.

  “Pop—”

  “Don’t ‘Pop’ me,” George said. “I want to know how much longer your sister gone be here.”

  “Daddy!” Ava said. “Don’t be so rude!”

  “Maybe I should go,” Helena said, standing.

  “Sit down!” Ava and Regina said in unison.

  Helena sat.

  Regina leaned forward in her chair. “Why you want her gone so bad, George? Hmm? What she doing that got your drawers in a bunch all the time? I don’t see her doing nothing but helping with the cooking, the cleaning—”

  “And meddling!”

  “It’s not my intention to—”

  “Pop, she aint doing nothing but—”

  “She causing trouble, and you know it! All y’all know it! Y’all just rather let it happen than agree with me about anything.”

  “Causing trouble how?” Ava asked.

  “Asking all these questions. Bringing up all these bad feelings!”

  “Look, George,” Regina said, standing up. “I made an agreement with myself a long time ago not to ask you certain questions. But I can’t, and I won’t, try to stop anybody else from asking.”

  A hush fell over the table. A shadow passed over George’s face. “What that supposed to mean, Regina?”

  Regina shook her head. She was tired of this. Real tired. “You want me to say what it mean?”

  George’s throat felt suddenly very dry, but he didn’t want to swallow and show any sign of weakness or guilt. He opened his mouth to say something, but his voice cracked. He felt shame cut him open and slip inside him like a greasy hand, taking hold of his liver.

  “That’s what you want, George?” Regina asked, glaring at him across the table, “‘Cause I can do that.”

  “What are you talking about, Mama?” Sarah asked.

  “She talking the same crazy shit she always talking!” George said. “You decided one Saturday a week aint enough time to fit in all your ranting and raving, Regina?”

  “I heard Chuck came by,” Regina said, her voice calm, steady, anything but crazy-sounding.

  George felt his shame giving way to rage and he clenched his teeth and growled at her, “I hate you. With all my might I wish you would die, right here at this table.”

  Ava said, “That’s enough, Daddy.”

  “I wish you would keel over into those pork chops and suffocate in that gravy,” he said, and the image flashed in his mind, causing a grin to spread across his face.

  Ava felt something swelling up inside her, heaving, and she was suddenly overcome with rage, white-hot and overpowering. “I said that’s enough!” she screamed.

  “Ava,” Paul said, reaching out and putting his hand on her arm.

  She jerked away from him, angry, and stood up, still holding her knife and fork, glaring at her father.

  He pointed his finger at her now. “Don’t talk to me like that! I’m the head of this family!”

  “You’re not the head of this family. You never were,” Ava said, and she was vaguely aware of an urge inside herself to reach over and grab her father, as he sat there looking defiant, and to press the knife that she was only half aware of holding into the soft flesh of his throat. “You kept yourself shut off from us all our lives. We don’t even know you!” There was a raging inside her. Colors flashed before her eyes. She did not understand the fury, did not really know the source of it, but for a moment it had complete control of her, and her fist clenched around the knife, which felt heavy and purposeful, as the fork in her other hand dropped onto the table with a loud clang. Everything hushed. She was aware of people’s mouths moving, but she could not hear what they were saying. Her father was sitting right beside her. She had only to lift the knife and in one movement, the narrow-minded, hypocritical fool would be dead. She closed her eyes. She did not want to kill her father. And yet she did want to kill him.

  She felt a hand on her arm, close to her wrist, and a gentle touch. She opened her eyes and saw Helena standing beside her, her green eyes searching Ava’s. The flashing colors stopped and the hush that had fallen over everything lifted.

  Her father was staring up at her with fear and confusion in his face. “What the hell is wrong with you, Ava?”

  It was only then that she realized she had raised the knife and was holding it inches from his face. She lowered her arm and placed the knife on the table. Then she moved away from the table, so quickly that her chair fell over and banged hard against the linoleum. She saw Sarah jump, and put her hand over her mouth. Ava turned and ran from the room.

  George fled, too. Angry and humiliated, he left the house in a blur of cussing, hurrying up Radnor Street and away from his house and his family as fast as he could, like a grenade trying not to go off where people were gathered. The rain had stopped, but the air was heavy like cream, sticky on his skin, oppressive, and he longed for that summer to end, for Helena to leave and things to go back to normal, or whatever had passed for normal before she had come. What had happened at the table was her fault. It was her questions that had brought all these bad things to the surface again.

  He walked faster, eastward first, then cut over to Walnut, then Spruce. The rain had washed the streets cleaner, but not clean, never clean, the trash and grime of the city clinging evermore to the pavements and gutters. He hated this filthy city. He always had. He had come here because he could no longer stand the south and he believed he could never have any kind of real life there. Here, in Philadelphia, he had done alright for himself, better, he knew, than he would have been able to do down there. But he had never loved this place, had found little beauty in it, and nothing compared to the forests and open skies of Georgia, where he had learned what beauty was, what nature could do if left alone to flourish. Yet, he had never gone back to visit. Not once. He had left his home and never looked back.

  He found himself on Baltimore Avenue, way south, and heading east again, not really thinking about where he was going until he looked up and saw the street sign for Fifty-First. He was at the corner of Chuck’s block. He looked down the street, with its tall, narrow houses, and frowned to himself. This was the last place he needed to be. Still, he kept walking, and when he approached the house where Chuck and Lena lived, he slowed down, and peered at it from across the street. The front door was open, and through the screen door he could see lights on inside. He wondered what Chuck was doing and, for a moment, he thought about knocking on the door. He knew he couldn’t. A moment later, the screen door swung open, and Chuck, Lena, and another man came out onto the porch. The other man was tall, and much younger than Chuck, and George recognized their son, David. He watched as David hugged his father, holding the embrace for a long moment as they laughed over each other’s shoulders, sharing
some joke George could not hear. As he watched, the scene changed before his eyes, and instead of David on the porch, he saw George Jr. as a grown-up man, tall and strong, and laughing, with his arms around his own father, around George himself, who held his son tightly to him.

  Tears welled in George’s eyes. He wished he could go back. He wished he could change it, all of it. He wished he could see his boy again and love him better.

  When the embrace between Chuck and David was broken, the two men became themselves again, the image of Geo disappearing on the sticky air. George watched them for another moment, and then walked on by.

  Helena found Ava sitting on the floor in her bedroom, at the foot of the bed, with her head back against the footboard, her knees pulled up to her chin. She came in and sat down beside her, her longer legs stretched out in front of her. She didn’t say anything, just sat there, with her head back, too, staring up at the ceiling.

  “I’m tired of this,” Ava said. “I’m tired of these flashes. Of these emotions I can’t control. I need to understand what’s happening to me.”

  “How can I help you do that?”

  Ava shook her head. “I don’t know.” She got up and paced the floor, from the bed to the door, to the window, and around again. Though the rage from a few minutes ago had gone, other things still churned inside her, like an ever-threatening storm. She knew she could not go on like this. She knew she would go insane, if she wasn’t already.

  “Your mother told me you used to paint every day when you were young,” Helena said. “What happened to all of them?”

  “Most of them got burned,” Ava told her.

  “Burned? How?”

  “It was years ago. I was taking them outside so they could get hauled off to the dump. They were out on the porch. Dexter Liddy climbed over the railing and threw a lit match on them.”