The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  When she’d slipped past her brother on her way back to her seat at the pew, he looked at her suspiciously, and she knew that he knew she’d been up to something. But she never told him about it, because she never had the chance. He was dead only a few days later, and with him all of that, and all of everything else she had been, had faded away.

  Ava sat out on the back steps for a long time, for hours, and when she couldn’t stand it any longer she went upstairs and knocked on Sarah’s door. After a moment, Helena said, “Come in, Ava.”

  Ava entered the room and found Helena tossing clothes into her suitcase. “You’re packing.”

  Helena glanced over her shoulder. “Yes. I’ve imposed myself on your family long enough.”

  Ava sighed and sat down on the bed. She had no intention of letting Helena leave like this, just walking out like a stranger the way she had walked in. It meant something that she had come there and Ava wasn’t ready to let her go. “Were you able to get a hold of Paul?” she asked. Earlier, she’d seen the light blinking on the telephone in the kitchen and knew that Helena was using the upstairs phone.

  “No. I called our cousin’s place but the line is disconnected. I hate leaving with things so bad between us.”

  “Then don’t,” Ava said. “Stay a little longer. I’m sure Paul will call in a day or two, even if it’s just to speak to me. If you’re still here, maybe he’ll talk to you.”

  “What if he won’t?” She dropped a skirt into her suitcase and stared at it. “I guess I deserve it.”

  Ava shook her head. “You were only a child. How could you have known what to do, what to say?”

  Helena continued to stare down into the suitcase, and after a long moment of silence, she said, “I still remember the moment he walked in on us, the look on his face when he thought…when it seemed to him that she was hurting me. He really was just trying to protect me.” She sighed. “But she wasn’t someone I needed protection from. She was a sweet girl. A gentle soul. Afterward, after they took Paul away, I couldn’t stop thinking that she was dead because of how something had seemed. Not how it really was. I decided then that I would never be satisfied with how anything seemed—a situation, or a person. That I would always look deeper and try to see what was really there. I became obsessed with the idea of knowing things, and knowing people, really knowing them, underneath. Some people find it obnoxious, like your father. But it’s how I cope with what happened.”

  Ava remembered that first moment at the front door on that Saturday morning, and later when her eyes had met Helena’s across the kitchen table, and again when Helena had held out the drawing to her, and she realized that each of those times, and all the others since, when she had looked into Helena’s eyes she had seen, looking back at her, what Helena saw—what she saw because she had been looking for it. The reflection of her real self.

  “Well,” Helena said. “There’s no use crying about any of this now. It’s long past able to be fixed. The only thing to do now is try to get past it, to move on, finally, which neither I nor my brother have been able to do these past eighteen years.”

  As Helena talked, Ava watched her face and could see the strength in it, the determination to be tough, and she thought how lovely Helena was, and wondered why she had ever thought of her as plain. Then, for no reason she understood at that moment, Ava went and stood close to Helena, and put her hand on her shoulder. And right then Helena cried. Tears suddenly streamed down her face. Ava was already right there and Helena turned and put her head on Ava’s shoulder, and Ava held her. She cried silently, only the sound of her breathing meeting Ava’s ear, close and quiet. Ava closed her eyes and listened, and heard the tiny sound of teardrops falling on her shoulder. She felt the pump of Helena’s heart against her, the expanding and contracting of her chest as air filled and left her lungs. She smelled the bar-soap clean of her skin and the salt in the traces of sweat on the back of her neck. And although she had never been so close to Helena before, it all seemed so familiar. She knew then why she had gotten up and gone to her, how she had known before the tears had come that they would come. It was because, over these many days, as Ava had taken in the things around her, had come to see the colors and taste the tastes, she had also been taking in Helena. With the easy excuse that she was paying more attention to everything, she had indulged herself in the qualities of this woman, had heard and felt and smelled and tasted her as surely as she had tasted the butter that night. It was only that the melting of Helena on her tongue had been slower.

  “Stay,” Ava said.

  Helena moved away from her, sat down on the end of the bed. “I can’t.”

  “You were thinking of not going to New York at all.”

  “That was before.”

  Ava nodded, understanding. “I’m sorry I kissed you,” she said. Then she laughed. “I’m starting to sound like a broken record. And, anyway, it’s a lie.”

  “Ava, when I left Baltimore, I told myself that I would never do anything like that again. Fall for someone’s wife.”

  Ava grinned. “So, you haven’t fallen for me, then?”

  Helena didn’t look the least bit amused. “You’re my brother’s wife.”

  “You mean the brother who just left here completely disgusted with who you are?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Helena said, getting up off the bed. “You know that.” She crossed to the dresser and took out a pile of clothes, and put them into the suitcase. As she turned to go to the dresser again, Ava got between her and it, and closed the drawer. “Get out of the way,” Helena said.

  “No.”

  Helena peered at her. “Is this the new you?”

  “It’s the old me,” Ava said.

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  Ava laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

  Helena’s eyes flashed anger, but only for a moment. Then she sat down on the bed again. Ava sat down beside her, close. The moment their shoulders touched Ava felt a sudden, searing pain in her temple. She took a deep breath and waited for it to subside. When it did, she said, “Stay.”

  Helena sighed, nodded. “Alright. But just until we hear from Paul.”

  Chuck lay on his back on the choir-room couch, bare-chested, the light coming in through the stained-glass window falling in colors on his face. George lay curled next to him on his side, watching his closed eyes moving beneath his eyelids.

  “What you thinking about?” George asked.

  Chuck smiled, his eyes still closed. “Nothing. Just us.”

  “That’s something to smile about?”

  Chuck opened his eyes. “I think so. You don’t?”

  George sat up, then stood. He crossed the room to where his clothes were lying on the floor and picked up his drawers and pulled them on. Then he dug into his pants pockets and pulled out his cigarettes. Chuck sat up, too, and watched him light one and take a long drag. “Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s go to New York. I got a cousin lives up there, and he know a lot of good places to go. We could spend a weekend.”

  George laughed, shook his head. Where was he supposed to tell his family he was going for a whole weekend? ‘Out’ wouldn’t cut it. “Where you gone tell Lena you going?”

  Chuck shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, I guess you don’t,” George said, hearing the disdain in his own voice. “I don’t like New York no way. It’s filthy.”

  “Philly aint?”

  “Maybe,” George said, “but I’m already here.”

  Chuck got up and went over to where George was sitting on the floor. He sat down beside him and put his arms around his shoulders, and kissed his cheek. “I’m just trying to make you happy. Be like a real couple, and go places together.”

  “We aint a real couple,” George said. “We two men, fucking.”

  Chuck frowned. “That’s all? This aint nothing more to you than that?”

  “Shit,” George said. “You sound like a damn woman.”

  Chuck
moved away and George felt a sting in his chest. He wanted to say he was sorry, but those words never came easily to him. And, anyway, he had nothing to be sorry for. Chuck was the one being stupid, talking about them as though they were a couple, like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, or some shit. It was better if they just stopped this now, this pretending, this foolishness, before somebody stood in the middle of the street and preached a sermon about them.

  He watched as Chuck pulled on his clothes in the stained-glass light. When he was dressed, he looked at George. “You gone call me later on?”

  George shook his head.

  Chuck didn’t say anything. When George looked up at him, his eyes were wet. “This aint what’s supposed to happen,” Chuck said. “This supposed to work, some kind of way. If it don’t, then I don’t know what else to try. I don’t know where else to look for my life.”

  George took a drag off his cigarette. “I got urges. Needs. I aint pretending otherwise. But all this is something else, and I don’t want it. It aint right.”

  “But I love you,” Chuck said.

  “Don’t even say that.”

  “It’s the truth, George. I—”

  George lunged at Chuck, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “Don’t say it, goddamnit. I don’t want to hear no more of this faggoty shit. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Chuck said.

  George let go of him. He grabbed his clothes and put them on, hastily, almost frantically, wanting to get out of there fast, before the thing in him that made him do these things, that made him return, time and time again, as hard as he tried not to, to this secret, shameful life, could take hold of him again.

  ***

  One evening, a couple of days after Paul left, Sarah was in the kitchen, cooking beef stew and thinking about all the things that had happened that summer: Helena’s arrival, her time with the fire-eating man, Ava’s strange behavior, Chuck Ellis showing up in their living room, Helena’s revelation, and Paul’s disappearance from the house. She knew that it all had to mean something. She thought about the ghosts and wondered if death was coming, if that’s what all of it was really about, all this upheaval.

  She could hear Helena moving around in her bedroom upstairs. She still found it hard to believe the truth about her exodus from Baltimore, hard to believe that she was that way, when she had seemed so normal. She wondered if Helena had ever thought of her that way, even if for a moment. She doubted it. It was only Ava who held Helena’s attention, and she imagined now that Helena’s feelings for her sister included those kinds, that she loved Ava just as Kenny Goode had. And, just like Kenny, that she had no such feelings for Sarah herself. Not that it mattered, anyway, because Sarah wasn’t that way. Neither was Ava, no matter what she’d said the other day. Sarah sighed. Really, with Ava, who the hell knew?

  Regina came into the kitchen then. “What you fixing?”

  “Beef stew,” Sarah told her.

  “Where Ava and Helena?”

  Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably somewhere together.” She threw the onions into the pot, and stew splashed onto her blouse.

  Regina frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Sarah shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it, any of it. But she couldn’t help herself. “She took her from me. She was my friend, and Ava took her from me.”

  Regina’s eyebrows drew close together on her forehead. “Took? Is she a person or a pair of pantyhose?”

  “You don’t understand, Mama,” Sarah said. “I wished for her. I was so lonely. I prayed for somebody to come. And she came.”

  Regina looked hesitant. “What you saying? You got those kind of feelings about her?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “Of course not. I’m not saying that at all.”

  Her mother looked relieved. “I was starting to think it’s something in the water.”

  “But she was my friend,” Sarah said. “My only friend. And Ava took her from me.”

  Regina breathed a long, heavy breath, and sat down at the table. She looked up at her daughter. “Sarah, listen to me. Put that spoon down, and listen to me.”

  Sarah put down the spoon.

  “You don’t need to be praying for nobody to come to you here in this house,” Regina said. “You ought to be out there in the world trying to make some kind of real life for yourself.”

  Sarah shook her head. “That’s not the point, Mama.”

  “I know it must be hard living in Ava’s shadow,” Regina said. “But it don’t reach everywhere. I promise you, it don’t. You just need to find out where it stops and go a little farther than that.”

  Sarah shook her head again. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  She started to say that it was because she didn’t want to leave her family, or that she didn’t want Pastor Goode to feel like he was winning by running her off. But those words wouldn’t come. In their place came the truth. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?” Regina asked.

  “Of the world. What if nobody out there sees me?”

  Regina got up from the table and stood in front of her daughter, took Sarah’s hands in hers. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to sit back and blame other people for how your life turned out. I done that for years. But it don’t serve no purpose, ‘cause in the end all you gone get is a life that went ahead and turned out while you was busy pointing fingers, and by then it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it.”

  Sarah knew her mother was right, but it was too hard to change now. It was easy to blame Ava, and even easier to blame the pastor, and maybe it was their fault. It didn’t matter, though, because it was her life that was passing by, thirty-two years of it gone already, nearly two decades of it spent hiding in this house. She thought about the fire-eating man. Maybe he had seen her. Maybe he meant the things he said.

  “Mama, there’s a man,” Sarah said. “His name is…” She shook her head. “I don’t even know his name. He invited me to come and see him do a show tonight. Now.”

  “So, why you here?” Regina asked. “Go.”

  “But what if he—”

  “Go,” Regina said again. “Go. Go. Go.”

  Sarah was halfway up the block between Radnor and Chestnut when she saw the twenty-one bus pull up to the stop. She ran to catch it, waving her arms so the driver would see her, but he pulled out from the stop. “Wait!” she called. “Wait!” The bus stopped with a loud screech of brakes and she hurried up onto it, breathing hard.

  “I almost didn’t see you,” said the driver.

  She paid the fare and took a seat near the middle of the bus, which was more crowded than she had expected. She checked her watch. It was already eight-thirty. There was no way she would make it all the way to Penn’s Landing before nine. Maybe the show would run longer—maybe, because it was his final performance, he would want to make it last. Maybe he would linger a while after, talk to the people who had come to see him, say goodbyes. Surely she was not the only person he had invited.

  She sat on the bus feeling fidgety and anxious. She wished she had left sooner. She wished she hadn’t wasted ten minutes changing clothes and putting on eye-shadow. She wished she hadn’t wasted thirty-two years being afraid.

  The bus made damn near every stop between Fifty-Ninth and Front and by the time Sarah got to Penn’s Landing, the fire-eating man was nowhere in sight. She hurried down the length of the landing. She stopped to ask a couple passing by if they had seen the show, but they had not. The next couple of people had, and she asked whether they knew if the fire-eating man was still down here somewhere, but they didn’t know. She walked over to Market Street, and then back, past Chestnut again and all the way over to Locust, but saw no sign of him. Finally, she returned to the spot where they had sat that day when he had offered her peanut butter. She sat on that bench and looked out at the water.

  The night was very warm, very still, and she felt that now that she had got here time had slowed down. She looked t
oward the city and the lights in the tall buildings didn’t flicker. She wished he would come. She thought about what Ava had said, that people really did see her, and she wished it were true.

  A homeless man walked by and leered at her. It was getting darker. She was too late. He was gone. She wished she’d asked his real name or where, exactly, he worked security, but she had been too busy worrying about what Ava was taking away from her, so consumed with turning a lie into the truth—a lie that, she could see now, had never really mattered much anyway—that she hadn’t bothered. Now she would probably never see him again.

  When she left Penn’s Landing, the bus wasn’t coming, so she walked west toward home. She passed couples walking hand in hand, and friends in groups, laughing or whispering confidences to each other. The bus ride back to West Philadelphia was a little faster, with more people heading into Center City on a Saturday night than away from it. Through the large windows of the bus, she watched the city skyline, and wondered if the fire-eating man was inside one of those buildings. She wondered if he was thinking of her the same way she was thinking of him right now, if he was remembering their brief time together—the peanut-butter sandwich, the way she’d leaned into him as he’d held the fire before her, the sun on the Delaware River as they’d sat together by the water. And she decided, this once, because she didn’t see how it could hurt, to believe with all her might that he was.

  Regina sat out on the front porch, looking out at Radnor Street. Night had fallen and the streetlights glowed pink and purple and soft orange. She could hear teenagers on darkened porches, laughing and singing along to their radios, the sounds of popular rhythm and blues songs hanging in the warm summer air. She looked down the street, at the church, and she could see the light on in Pastor Goode’s office. He was in there all the time, it seemed. He had no family anymore. His wife had had a stroke and died less than a year after their son. Regina wondered what he was in there plotting now. He was surely incensed that Helena hadn’t left immediately after his performance in the street. Paul had gone, though, and she figured that had made him very happy.