The next day, as soon as service ended, the congregation of Blessed Chapel Church of God spilled out of the back and side and front doors of the church and made their way to the back wall. It was a chilly day, a day not made for standing outside very long. The temperature had dropped overnight and there was a frostiness in the air that did not fit for May. The congregation stood close together, some of the older folks shivering. George and Regina stood at the front of the crowd, and Geo, Sarah, Kenny, and Ellen stood nearby. Pastor Goode held the rope to the tarp and Ava stood beside him.
When the tarp came down, the congregation broke into applause. Most of them had seen the mural at some stage of being almost-finished, and in the bright light of the afternoon they saw what they expected, what they already knew they liked, and they immediately offered up their approval. Even Pastor Goode clapped, at first, smiling down at Ava, eager to commend the child, for her talent, but even more for her obedience, for her compliance, finally, after all those years of rebelliousness. Her parents clapped, too, the vague hint of worry in both their eyes, which had been there all morning, suddenly gone. They looked relieved. Especially her father, who, it seemed to Ava, exhaled for the first time in a full minute. The only one who did not applaud was Geo. Not because he saw something the others did not see, but because he saw exactly what they saw. A beautiful painting, strange and eccentric in its planes and angles, lush and feverish in its curves and colors, extraordinary in its display of skill and breathtaking talent. But entirely devoid of any argument, of any challenge, of any fight whatsoever. For a brief moment, he looked on the edge of tears. Then he blinked, and Ava watched the smile break open on his face, as he saw what she had added to the mural, what she had finished painting only a few minutes before, so that the paint was still wet, and her own hands, held behind her back, were smeared with color.
Shackles.
Onto the wrists of each parishioner lining the rows of pews and on their knees before the altar, she had painted shackles.
It took one and a half seconds for Geo to see them, for the image of the mural that he already had in his mind, the image he had already made up his mind about, to be replaced by the image that was actually before him. And in the half-second that followed, everyone else saw it, too. The sound of applause vanished from the air all at once. In its place, there were gasps, then murmurs, as people turned and looked at each other, with questions in their eyes, as if they could not believe what they were seeing and needed confirmation, first that the shackles were there, that they weren’t just imagining them, and then that they meant something terrible, that they weren’t misinterpreting them, but that their impulse to feel offended and angry by what they were seeing was valid. When they were sure that it was, they all turned and looked at Pastor Goode, who was staring up at the mural with fear and anger in his eyes.
He grabbed Ava’s arm. “Why’d you do this?”
“Get off me,” Ava said, trying to wrench out of his grip.
Regina and George rushed over. “Take your hands off my child,” Regina said.
Goode let Ava go and Regina pulled her away from him. He glared at them. “I warned y’all about this child. I been warning y’all for years. The devil is in this girl.”
“The devil!” Vic Jones yelled from the crowd.
“Listen, Pastor,” George said. “She just a little girl. She don’t know what she doing.”
“She know exactly what she doing!” screamed Goode, pointing a shaking finger at Ava. “Every time I look at her, I can see her mind working. She wanted to defy me, she wanted to make a fool of me and every person in this church. And why? What for?”
“I aint trying to make a fool out of nobody,” Ava said, looking out at the parishioners. “I been thinking about y’all, thinking about what y’all need.”
“What they need?” The pastor asked. “What you think that is? To be told they slaves?”
“To be told they’re not slaves,” Ava said. “And you’re not their master.”
Goode looked ready to kill her. “I aint trying to be nobody’s master!” he screamed.
“You tell everybody what to do,” Ava said. “What to think. How to live.”
“We live according to the Lord,” Vic said.
“This aint right!” Malcolm yelled. “Y’all aint never known how to control that girl!”
“She gone too far this time,” said Goode. “The Lord’s gone punish her for this, y’all mark my words. He’s gone bring down a judgment on this girl.”
“I knew the first time I saw her it was something not right about her,” said Hattie Mitchell.
“Me, too,” said Lonette Brown. “I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.”
“She too much,” Malcolm said, shaking his head. “She too much.”
1976
The dark fell like a brick that night, the sunset coming fast across the sky, daylight giving way to moonlight in little more than an instant. Coming home, George got caught in it, as if in a sudden rainstorm. It was strange, eerie, and he walked faster up and across the streets, eager to be indoors again.
When he came up Radnor, he saw Ava sitting on the front steps of the house, alone in the spanking new dark. He felt anger and humiliation stir inside him, remembering the knife at the dinner table, but when he got closer and saw the look on her face, it dissolved, and he spoke tenderly to his child.
“Ava? What you doing out here?”
She looked at him blankly, as if she didn’t know who he was.
“Ava? What’s wrong with you?”
She blinked and shook her head, looking around her.
George crouched down and looked into her face. “Ava?”
He saw focus slip into her gaze. “Daddy?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said.
“How did I get out here?”
George put his arm around her shoulders and helped her up off the step and inside the house. He took her up to her bedroom and she lay down in the bed again. He stacked the pillows behind her head and rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment, before turning to go.
“Daddy?” Ava called to him, and when he turned she said, “I’m sorry.”
He looked at her, amazed at how much she seemed like herself as a young girl again these last few days. “You know, when you was a child, I was always lecturing you, always trying to get you to follow the rules. I know you hated it. But I was just trying to keep you safe. That’s what fathers is supposed to do. But sometimes that becomes the only thing there is between you and that child, and next thing you know you aint got no other role in they life than that. It aint nothing worse than watching your children doing things you think—you know—is gone get them hurt. You got to try and stop it, even if that means hurting them yourself some, ‘cause at least then you know where the hurt is coming from, and you can control it. You hurt them, so somebody else don’t kill them. Or, at least, you hope it works out that way.” That’s what he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Not out loud, because the words were too hard to get out, the truth of it almost too much to bear. Instead, he said, “It’s alright. Just don’t do nothing stupid like that again.”
A little while later, Helena came into the room and sat down beside Ava on the bed. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Alright,” Ava said. “Fine.”
“I just heard your father telling Paul he found you on the front steps and you didn’t know how you got there.”
Ava laughed. “Well. Besides that.”
Helena shook her head. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. This is my fault.”
Ava could see the worry in her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I wanted to push. I still do.”
“I think you should take it easy, Ava,” Helena said.
Ava shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because what if this is all I ever get? Just bits and pieces, outbursts and fainting spells?” A few days of it had already begun to take a toll. She c
ouldn’t imagine months and years of this.
“The rest of it will come,” Helena told her.
“You don’t know that. What if it stops when you leave? What if I forget myself all over again?” She got up from the bed and walked over to the window. Outside, the dark was heavy, thick clouds covering the moon. She could see Helena’s reflection in the window pane, watching her from the bed.
“I won’t leave, then,” Helena said.
Ava peered at Helena’s reflected self.
“I’ll stay in Philadelphia. I won’t go to New York.”
Ava turned and looked at her. “But your job—”
“There are jobs here,” she said. “I looked at a place out in Wynnfield. There are three schools nearby it. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of them will need an art teacher.”
There was a soft rustling in Ava’s chest, like fallen leaves in a breeze, and she felt suddenly warmer, as if she had just been wrapped up in a soft, invisible something. She remembered being very small, sitting in her father’s lap, with her head leaned back against his chest, and George’s arms folded around her. She remembered her grandmother reading her fairy tales and kissing her goodnight. She remembered her sister tending to a scrape on her knee with a tissue and some spit, carefully, gingerly, gently. She remembered what each of those things felt like—the rustling, and the warmth on her skin, the same as she felt now. The feeling of being loved. She felt a swelling in her throat, a tingling, and when the tears came they were warm on her face.
“I’m upsetting you,” Helena said.
“No. I’m not upset. I’m grateful,” Ava told her. “But you have to go to New York. I don’t want to disrupt your life.”
Sarah knocked on the open door. “Helena, Paul is looking for you.”
When Helena had gone, Sarah stood there staring at Ava. “You know, I almost believed you, when you said you wasn’t trying to take nothing away from me. But deep down I always knew you would.”
Ava sighed heavily. “Sarah, I’m tired. I don’t want to do this with you. If you want to say something, say it. I don’t have the energy to break your code.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “She came here for me.”
“Helena?”
“Yes, Helena!” Sarah said, stomping her foot hard on the floor. “Who the hell else?”
“How do you figure that?” Ava asked.
“I wished for her.”
“You wished for Helena?”
“For somebody to come and make it better,” Sarah said, nodding fervently. “And then she came. And I was happy. But you didn’t care. You did what you’ve always done. You took her.”
“Took her where?” Ava asked. “She’s still here, Sarah, she just walked out of the room not three minutes ago, you can go and talk to her right now if you want to. Instead of standing here accusing me of…I don’t even know what you’re accusing me of.”
“It’s too late!” Sarah yelled. “She can’t see me anymore! All she can see now is you, just like everybody else. She don’t know I exist. Maybe I don’t.” On those last words, her voice cracked, and she started to cry. Ava went over to her, put her hands on her sister’s shoulders, but Sarah took a step back away from her. “Just leave me alone, Ava.”
“You’re in my room.”
Sarah glared at her, anger flashing through her tears. “Everybody thinks you so great. Everybody loves you so damn much.”
“Who? Who are you talking about? When are you talking about?”
“But I can see what you really are,” Sarah said. “You are selfish. You have always been selfish. You don’t never think about anybody but yourself. What you want, what you need. That’s how you was with Geo, always dragging him somewhere he didn’t want to go, or into something he didn’t want to do. Up a tree, out on the roof, into a fight. You wasn’t never scared, so you didn’t care if he was.”
Ava sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“And when Helena came here, you saw I was happy, I know you did. But that didn’t stop you from placing yourself wherever she was every damn minute.”
“You’re right,” Ava said.
Sarah hesitated, as if sensing some kind of trick.
“I did see that you were happy. And maybe I should have backed off, and let you have more time with her. But I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about you at all.”
Sarah nodded. “That’s right. That’s what you always used to do, when we was kids.”
“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “For doing it then, and for doing it now. But, Sarah, people do see you. Helena sees you. And you can still have that friendship you wished for.”
Sarah looked at Ava for a long moment and Ava could see that she was thinking about it, considering the possibility that these things she had been telling herself for so long were not so. But then she shook her head. “It’s too late,” she said again, then turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.
***
Ava awoke in the middle of the night to a strange smell. She sat up in bed and sniffed the air. The scent was heavy, but she could not put a name to it. She got out of bed and went to the door, which was open a crack, and out into the hallway. The smell was stronger out there and she followed it, down towards Sarah’s room. The door was open and Ava went inside, and the smell wrapped all around her. She turned on the lamp by the door and in the light she saw Helena asleep on the bed. There by the window, the wooden case she’d spotted in the cellar sat on the floor, open, its contents—tubes of paint, brushes, palette knives—spilling out around it. She crouched down beside it. The paint tubes were old and dusty, some of them squeezed empty, others still plump and full. Helena had opened one of the tubes and squeezed out a drop of the paint, and the bead of color shimmered in the lamplight. Ava dipped her fingertip in it and brought it to her nose. And the smell of red filled her. It moved fast through her body like a drug, the crumbly scent clinging to her skin. She stood up and caught her reflection in the dark window. She stared at herself. Something at the back of her mind, in the farthest reaches of her psyche, stirred. She moved closer to the window and reached out, touching her oil-red fingertip lightly to the glass, and traced the contours of her face, the curve of her jaw, the slant of her nose, the shapes of her eyes and lips and brow. The tips of her fingers tingled, and the tingle moved all over her skin, as if her body was remembering something her mind did not yet realize had been forgotten. She got as close as she could to the window, her nose almost touching the glass, and looked into the deep, dark eyes of the woman looking back at her, and something unlocked, unraveled, came undone.
Ava knelt down again and took the tube of red from the wooden case and something at the back of her mind said, Don’t. She ignored it, and squeezed more red onto her fingertips, and touched the paint to the glass of the dark window.
Stop it, Ava.
She reached into the case and took out every shade of red she could find. Using her hand as a palette, she squeezed globs of paint onto each fingertip, and down each finger, and onto her palm. With the fingers of her other hand, she painted the curve of her own jaw and she remembered again laughing with Geo at the kitchen table. Only this time the memory did not flash and go, it stayed, solid and sure as the pigment on the window. She painted her lips and remembered the smells of Christmases past and the hum of friends gathered around them. She painted her eyes and then stood there before the glass canvas, still and ghostly quiet, looking into the dark pools of paint that looked back at her, wild and happy.
She stood there before the changing canvas for hours, as the room got hot, as beads of sweat formed on her brow and nose and throat. At moments, she felt sick, nauseated, but she did not stop. At other moments, her knees felt too weak to hold her, but she stood there, shaking and pushing herself forward. Her vision blurred. Her heart pounded. Her joints ached. And still she painted.
She didn’t know Helena was awake until she felt a soft touch on her arm and turned to see her standing
there, her green eyes afire, her lips parted. Standing there in front of the canvas, both hands covered in paint, Ava recognized another feeling, one that filled her up and busted out of her, making her laugh out loud.
“Ava, what is it?” Helena asked her.
And Ava said, “Helena, it’s bliss.”
She reached out and touched Helena’s cheek. When she removed her hand, there were daubs of paint along Helena’s cheekbones.
“Oh,” Ava whispered. “Sorry. I got paint on you.”
Helena touched her face where Ava’s fingers had been and examined the scarlet that came off on her own fingers. She smiled at Ava. Then she bent down and took a tube of paint from the case and squeezed out a drop onto her fingertip. She touched Ava’s cheeks, leaving streaks of cerulean on her caramel skin. She traced the curve of Ava’s jaw and her heavy eyelids. Ava ran her thumb along Helena’s throat and along her collarbone. Helena brought her fingers to Ava’s mouth and touched her lips. Ava’s skin tingled, and her blood, excited as red paint on white canvas, rushed. She pressed her mouth against Helena’s and kissed her, and tasted every color. Helena put her hands on Ava’s shoulders and pushed her away.
Helena looked down at her hands, which were covered with paint. There was pain in her eyes and she trembled. Ava wanted to reach out for her, but she stood still, and waited. Helena looked at Ava and shook her head, as if answering a question that had not been asked, at least not in words. Then she turned and walked out of the room.
Ava sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the spot where Helena had been. All of the emotions that had been stirred up inside her in the last few days, and in the last few hours, all of the confusion and intensity, stilled, and she felt calm, almost serene, in the quiet of the bedroom. She felt as she had as a young girl, completely comfortable in her skin, entirely at ease in her mind, and in her soul. She felt like herself again.
The Summer We Got Free Page 24
