The Summer We Got Free (30 page)

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 she 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.”

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?”