“I aint know that,” Regina said.
Lena shrugged. “Well, he don’t talk about it much.”
“How’d his father die?” Regina asked.
“In jail,” said Lena. “A cop shot him. They said he was trying to escape. At least that’s what I heard. I don’t know nothing about it firsthand.”
“Lord.”
“Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you know that I—that Chuck and I—been praying for y’all all these years. And if you ever want to come by again, Regina, just to talk, I hope you know you welcome to.”
“Thank you,” Regina said. A few minutes later, on the bus ride back home, her mind began to unclutter itself. The confusion and craziness of Saturday morning began to drop away and, several hours earlier than usual, her sanity returned.
Ava slept long into the morning and she awoke feeling deeply rested, as though she had slept for days, or months, or years. She showered and dressed hurriedly, eagerly, filled with a sense that the day ahead held great things. When she got downstairs, she saw the front door open, and she went out onto the porch. Paul was on the sidewalk, cutting the hedges. He looked up when he heard the screen door knock shut. “Morning,” he said.
Ava leaned over the porch railing. It was a magnificent day, the sky watercolor blue over white, with just enough cloud-wisp brushed in at the edges to balance the heavy color of the almost-too-yellow sun. The grass in the yard was a million strokes off the corner of a thin brush soaked with green, and the sunlight reflecting off the tips of the grassblades was like daubs of oily white, carefully, painstakingly placed. Each flower in the garden Helena had planted was a fat drop of lush pigment, lemon-yellow or vermillion, hot orange or rose or purple, and some of them seemed to spill into each other, as if they were made by an excited hand, tiny beads of orange dotting the edges of violets, and specks of purple clinging to buttercup petals. Ava watched Paul at the hedges, bare-armed and bay brown, and looking like a field hand from a Spanish fresco, superimposed against the backdrop of a city block, the size of his hands and the amount of sweat on his forehead exaggerated just enough to show that he was hard-working, a good, strong kind of man, the lines across his forehead etched in with the sharp edge of a palette knife, like the lines of the group of row houses that stood solidly behind him, sturdy and not changing, solid and achromatic, a constant captured in grays. The screen door opened and Helena appeared. Her skin was a saturate of all color, her body a chroma made up of angled brushstrokes, her bare shoulders like drops of oil-black thrown against the canvas in a fever, precarious and lovely.
“I’m leaving,” she said to Ava. And then, louder, so Paul could hear. “I’m leaving. I’ve decided to leave.”
Paul looked up at her. She looked from Ava to him. None of them said anything.
Suddenly a voice, loud and bellowing, filled the warm morning air. “Sinners, hear the name of the Lord and be afraid!” Ava turned and saw Pastor Goode crossing the street, followed by a small group of people. “The Lord will not let your evil go unpunished. He will hold you to account.”
“Oh, here we go,” Paul said, holding the hedge clippers aloft of the hedges.
“How many times will they flout the Word of God so boldly?” Goode stopped in the street in front of the Delaney house and the crowd, which included Doris and Dexter, Hattie, and Antoinette, stopped with him. He raised his hand and pointed his finger right at Helena, and the crowd turned its collective head and looked at her, as he said, “That woman is a homosexual and a home-wrecker!”
There were gasps from the crowd. Doris frowned and shook her head, while Hattie gripped her husband and held on to him as though an earthquake might come and shake the block to rubble any second.
Paul looked around at Ava and Helena, and back at the preacher as if he were crazy. Ava saw Helena sigh deeply and fold her arms across her chest. The screen door opened and George came out onto the porch, followed by Regina and Sarah.
“What’s all this?” George asked.
“That woman,” Pastor Goode hollered, still pointing at Helena, “was thrown out of the school where she was a teacher, down in Baltimore, for committing unnatural acts with the mother of one of her students. A married woman!”
The gasps this time came not only from the crowd, but from the porch. Sarah put her hand over her mouth and stared with wide eyes at Helena.
“She got run out of Baltimore,” the preacher said. “Disgraced. And now look who takes her in.”
Dexter yelled, “That don’t surprise me a bit!”
“Well, I want her gone!” Pastor Goode bellowed. “I want them all gone! Off this block! Out of this neighborhood!”
“Gone!”
“But I don’t think we gone have to wait much longer,” Goode said. “’Cause they starting to turn on each other now. It was Ava who came to me last night and suggested I look into this woman’s past.”
Everyone on the porch, and in the street, looked at Ava.
She shook her head. “He’s lying.”
“May the Lord strike me down right here, right now, if it aint the truth!” Goode yelled. He looked around at the crowd. “And y’all know when the rats start leaving the house, it’s about to fall.”
Paul paced the living room, looking shocked and angry, the veins in his forehead bulging. “Where do that fool get off?” he asked, looking around at them all. The street sermon had ended, Goode having made his point and returned to the church. “He think he can just say whatever he want about people, just make up lies, and get away with it?”
Regina and Sarah were sitting on the sofa, and Ava was sitting on the arm. George was standing in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. None of them said anything.
“Y’all don’t believe that bullshit, do you?” Paul asked, looking around at them.
Nobody said anything.
“I guess y’all think Ava put him up to it, too?”
“I would never do that,” Ava said.
“I know you wouldn’t,” Paul said, laughing at the absurdity of it. “I know that man is crazy. Y’all know it. He just made all that up to get to us.”
“He’s not lying,” Helena said. She was leaning against the mantle, looking shaken. “At least not about me.”
“Yeah, he is,” Paul said, sounding sure. “He’s always doing this; calling people devils and making up crazy shit. I told you, he out his mind.”
“It’s the truth, Paul,” she said. “I had a relationship with the mother of one of my students. The school found out about it, long after it was already over, and they fired me.”
Paul shook his head wildly from side to side, as if he was trying to push away the thought.
“Listen to your sister, Paul,” Regina said. “You aint listening to her.”
“I aint listening, ‘cause she aint making no sense,” he said. He looked at his sister. “If it’s true, then the woman must’ve made you do it, she must have—”
“She didn’t make me do anything,” Helena said, taking a step toward him. “I did it because I wanted to.”
Paul took a step back. He looked around at them all again, then back at Helena. “No,” he said. “You aint like that, Helena, you aint that way.”
“Yes, I am,” she said.
“It’s because of that girl,” he whispered. “It’s because of what that girl did to you when we was kids.”
“What girl?” Ava asked.
Paul looked at her. “The girl I…” He stopped. He looked at Regina and Sarah and George. “I walked in, and saw I her. She was doing things to my sister, she was hurting her. That’s why I grabbed her, that’s why I pushed her. I didn’t mean to—” He stopped again.
“To what?” Regina asked.
Paul shook his head, stared down at the floor.
“What’s he talking about?” Regina asked Ava.
“You have to tell them,” Ava said to Paul.
Paul had the hardest time raising his head. It felt like a pile of bricks on his shoulder
s. When his eyes met Regina’s, shame flooded through him. “I killed somebody.”
Regina’s eyes went wide.
George said, “What the hell you mean, you killed somebody?”
“I mean I killed somebody, Pop. A girl. When I was fifteen. I didn’t mean to do it.”
Regina looked at Ava. “You knew about this?”
“Not until a couple of days ago.”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said again. “She was hurting my sister.” He looked at Helena. “She was hurting you. And now you confused.”
Helena shook her head.
“Why you shaking your head like that?” Paul asked her, looking and sounding panicked now. “Don’t shake your head like that.”
“She wasn’t hurting me,” Helena said. “I liked what she was doing. She wasn’t hurting me, Paul.”
“Oh, Lord,” Regina said. “Oh, Lord.”
“You came in and saw us, and it seemed that way to you, but that’s not how it was. I tried to say something, to tell you, to stop you. But it all happened so fast.”
Paul put his hand over his mouth and retched, a dry-heave, and he doubled-over, losing his legs and falling on his knees to the floor. Ava hurried to his side, knelt down beside him, putting one hand on his back and the other on his arm.
“Afterward, I was afraid to tell you,” Helena went on. “I thought you would hate me. I’ve carried it around all this time.”
Paul did not think he could stand. He stayed there on his knees, with his forehead against the floor and his eyes squeezed shut, telling himself to wake up, that this was a dream, or a delusion, and that she was not really saying these things. It wasn’t possible that he had killed that girl for nothing. She had been hurting his sister. He had been trying to protect his sister. He had not meant to kill the girl, he had never meant to do that, but he had grabbed her and pushed her because she had been hurting his sister. Doing things to her. Wrong things. Through all these years, the one thing that had made it possible for him not to hate himself—not to forgive himself, never that, but to not hate himself—was knowing that he had been trying to protect his sister.
“That’s why I tracked you down. That’s why I came here,” Helena said. “To tell you.”
Paul raised his head off the floor, and looked up at her. She stood there, with tears pouring down her face. He wanted to grab her. Shake her. But she was too far away, and he did not think he could stand.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He needed to get up, to get out of there. He did not know what would happen if he didn’t get out of there. He put his palms flat against the floor and pushed himself up. He did not look at her again. He turned and left the room, walked into the foyer and up the stairs. In his bedroom, he took a small suitcase from the top of the closet and packed a few things—clothes and shoes for work, his hair pick. He went to the bathroom and got his toothbrush and razor. Every second he felt angrier, more ready to scream, to kill somebody, to kill her, and he knew he had to hurry and get out of there. He shoved his wallet into his back pocket and ran back down the stairs. From the corner of his eye he saw her still standing there in the living room, and Ava still kneeling on the floor, and all of them watching him, but he did not turn his head. He went out the front door, and when the screen door caught shut behind him, he thanked God that he’d got out of there without doing something crazy.
***
After Paul left the house, Helena shut herself up in Sarah’s room. The family remained gathered downstairs. George sat on the sofa now, while the women paced around the room, circling the furniture and talking in hushed voices.
“I can’t believe it,” Sarah said, shaking her head.
George was surprised, too. He’d been so busy worrying what Helena might see in him that he hadn’t imagined that she could be hiding the same shame. If she was even ashamed about it. Maybe she wasn’t. After all, she’d confessed it in front of all of them. Goode had opened the door, but she could easily have lied, especially knowing their history with the pastor and that no one in that house really wanted to believe anything Goode had to say. She could have gotten out of it if she’d wanted to, kept her secret hidden. But she hadn’t.
“I guess you never really know about people,” Regina said.
George looked up at her and waited for her to turn and glare in his direction, but she didn’t.
“What I can’t understand,” Sarah said, “is why Pastor Goode said that about Ava telling him to look at Helena’s past. Why would he say that?”
Regina shrugged. “Why do that man say any of the things he say? He always hated Ava, from the day he met her.”
“But he aint never lied before,” Sarah said.
“What you mean he aint lied?” George asked. “You think the devil’s in this house?”
“No. But he thinks so. It aint really a lie, because he believes it. That’s my point. He must believe Ava told him that.”
“You trying to make sense of that man’s ranting and raving?” Regina asked her. “That’s what you trying to do?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Ava was sitting on the arm of the sofa, not saying anything.
Sarah sighed. “I just can’t believe it,” she said again. “But, now that I think about it, I guess she is a little bit…boyish.”
Regina frowned. “Helena is still a guest in this house, and we gone treat her with respect as long as she here.”
George felt bile collecting in his stomach and rising up into his throat. “Since when you so forward-thinking, Regina?”
“I aint said nothing about being ‘forward-thinking.’ But she aint my daughter, so it aint none of my business.”
“You—”
“This aint about us, George,” Regina said.
He peered at her. There was a look in her eyes he hadn’t seen in years. Usually she was all set to bicker with him, poised, morning, noon and night for a fight. Whenever he entered a room, her shoulders tightened. Whenever he spoke, she got her mouth ready to argue. But not now. Now she stood there looking as though a fight was the last thing she wanted. George didn’t know what to think.
“What if it was your daughter?” Ava asked.
George felt a squeezing in his gut.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sarah asked.
“What if I was like that?” Ava said. “A lesbian.”
George shook his head. He didn’t want to hear this. He wouldn’t hear it. “That aint funny, Ava,” he said.
“I’m not trying to be funny, Daddy.”
Regina said, “Oh, Lord.”
“Are you a lesbian?” Sarah asked.
Ava shrugged. “Maybe.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “You aint no damn lesbian, Ava. Those women don’t have husbands.”
“Neither do you,” Ava said.
Sarah glared at her, but didn’t say anything else about what lesbians had or didn’t have.
“What you need to be thinking about right now,” George said to Ava, “is Paul. Where you think he went?”
Ava shrugged. “His cousin’s, maybe. I don’t know.”
“You don’t even care? He still your husband, aint he?”
“I don’t think he will be for much longer,” she said.
“What you saying?” Regina asked. “You and Paul splitting up?”
“I’m saying I don’t want to be married to him anymore.”
Sarah looked disgusted. “You never deserved that man.”
“Who deserves him, then?” Ava asked. “You? Did you wish for Paul, too?”
“Y’all stop this right now!” Regina said.
George got up.
“Daddy, don’t leave,” Ava said.
He ignored her, headed for the door.
She grabbed his arm. “Let’s see what happens if you stay,” she said, “just this one time.”
But George didn’t want to know what would happen. He wanted to get away from there before Regina remembered s
he was an angry, evil old woman and started blaming him for what Ava might be, the way he was already blaming himself.
Ava waited a while before knocking on Sarah’s door. She knew that Helena needed space, and time to sort through what had happened. She needed those things herself. After her father fled, yet again, from the house, she went and sat alone on the back porch, on the top step where Helena always sat, and thought long and hard about this woman who had come into their house and into their lives and thrown everyone and everything out of whack. She hadn’t been surprised when Helena had confessed to the scandal in Baltimore, in fact she knew the moment Pastor Goode said it that it must be true. Although Ava had not considered it before, the idea that Helena had loved a woman, had loved her that way, and that whatever feelings had developed between she and Ava weren’t entirely new to her, seemed a given now. Not because she was a little bit boyish, as Sarah had said. But because she was a little bit unconventional in every way, a little bit off-center of what every other woman Ava knew was like. A little bit bolder, a little bit more sure. A little more curious, and a little less concerned with other people’s opinions of her. A little bit like Ava herself.
The memory of the girl in the pastor’s nook had made itself solid in Ava’s mind, and she knew now that it was Ellen, Miss Maddy’s daughter, whose mouth had been pressed against hers in that tiny space. They’d snuck in there on their way from the bathrooms back to Sunday service. Ellen had looked at Ava with so much light in her large eyes that the small, dark room seemed to light up from within her. Ava was suddenly filled with an impulse to put her mouth on the girl and she did just that, moving quickly forward and pressing her lips against Ellen’s.
It was not the first time, either, that she had kissed another girl. The summer before, when she was twelve, she had been kissed by her sixteen year-old day camp counselor, a beautiful girl with skin like honey. But she had been a little scared then, a little tentative. That time with Ellen she was neither. The sensation of her warm lips against Ava’s made her dizzy, and so full of desire that she put her hands on the back of Ellen’s white dress, on her lower back, and pulled the girl into her. Ellen opened her mouth and Ava felt the wetness of her tongue flick against her bottom lip. Ava opened her mouth too, and their tongues touched and played as the preacher boomed from the pulpit, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
The Summer We Got Free Page 26
