The Summer We Got Free (33 page)

George Jr. was not in his bed when Regina rushed into
his bedroom with Ava on her heels. They went downstairs to see if he had
slipped by them when Regina was in Ava’s room, but Ava knew he wouldn’t be
there, though she could not tell her mother that.

“He must have gone
to that damn party last night,” George said, seemingly concerned only with his
son’s lack of adherence to his instructions and not the question of why, if he
had gone out, he had not yet returned. “I’ll take care of him when he gets
back.”

“I’m going to
get him,” Regina said.

Ava wanted to
tell her not to go looking for Geo. That finding him would be worse than these
moments of mere confusion, these moments when he was simply absent from the
house, but maybe still existed, these moments before the answer came, and that
once it came it would come forever, over and over every day and night. But Regina
was trading her slippers for her shoes and moving for the door.

“Mama,” Ava
said, and Regina turned to look at her, but Ava couldn’t say anything else
before the scream came. It came through the open window at the front of the
house, the big one Regina had opened to let in some air, and it slid into the
house like smoke sometimes did when Mr.
Liddy
sat smoking
his pipe on his porch. Regina opened the door and ran outside.

Another scream
pierced the air and Vic and Malcolm ran by the house towards the church. Ava
could see other people running that way. Regina moved to go down the front
steps and Ava was there
beside
her, holding her back.

“Mama,” she said
again, and nothing else came out.

Regina pulled away and walked off down the street
towards the crowd, slowly, with Ava right beside her, while others ran past
them towards the church, drawn by the screams that were rising into the air
every few seconds now. The crowd was crowded in such a way that they could not
see what they were screaming about until they were right there, squeezing past
the broad shoulders of Malcolm and Vic. There on the ground were two dead
bodies. Kenny Goode was lying on his stomach with his cheek against the ground,
his light eyes staring blankly at the shoes of the gathering crowd, a deep red
gash at his throat. A few feet away from him, curled up in a ball like a tiny
child, and leaning against the back wall of the church, was Geo. He was badly
beaten, his face bruised and cut and bloodied, his lips busted, a spray of his
blood staining the white paint that covered what had been, for a very little
while, Ava’s mural.

When Regina saw her son lying broken on the ground the
whole world disappeared. For a moment, all her senses failed, and she could not
hear the screams of the gathered crowd, or feel the
disrespectfully-bright
sun on her arms, or see the horror, laid out like a gruesome diorama before
her. For a moment, it hadn’t happened. In place of what was real, she saw what
was desperately needed—Geo running up the street on long, strong legs,
laughing. When that moment passed, though, when it cleared away like a leaving
fog, she was assaulted by what was really there.
The
screaming, like sirens following each other around in circles on the air.
The sun,
a perfect
, terrible warmth against her skin.
And her
boy,
bashed up and discarded like an outgrown
toy, lying in a heap against the church. The sight of it punched through her,
knocking her back, and her legs gave out. She dropped to the ground, her knees
smashing hard against the hot asphalt. Beside her, Ava stooped down, tried to
help her to her feet, but Regina pushed her away and crawled on all fours
across the few feet that separated her from her son, as people stumbled over
each other trying to get out of her way. She got to the place where Geo lay,
and she reached out and put her hands on either side of his swollen head, and
when she felt
a squishiness
beneath her fingers, she
felt something snap and come apart inside her. She heard a sound come up out of
herself, like the growl of a feral thing, a terrified, trembling sound, and all
the people around her became dangerous. She threw her own body over her son’s,
shielding him from them. “I got you,” she whispered to him, as she rocked him
back and forth in her arms. “Mama’s got you now.”

Ava was looking down at her mother and brother on the
ground, and although she didn’t see him arrive, she knew the moment Pastor
Goode appeared on the parking lot. A hush fell over the gathered crowd, like
none but the pastor or Jesus himself could affect. When she looked up, she saw
him standing over Kenny’s body, his face like a changing mask, first confused,
then shocked, then horrified, then overcome. His bottom lip trembled and for a
moment it seemed his legs might give out too. He stood there, teetering, as Vic
and Malcolm stood with their bodies in almost-motion, their arms out, ready to
catch him if he fell. He didn’t. He looked over at Regina cradling Geo in her
arms, then back at Kenny again, and Ava could see his mind working, his eyes
flashing through possibilities, the way they had when Ava had sat in his office
watching him writing the end of his sermon. Now, as then, Ava thought, he was
trying to decide what God had to do with it. And she knew the moment his eyes
met hers that he had made up his mind.

“This is the
Lord’s judgment,” he said, his eyes wide as he raised his hand and pointed at
her. “This is his judgment on you.”

Every head
turned towards Ava at once, even Regina’s.

“I told y’all
something was gone happen,” Goode said, glaring at Ava. “I said the Lord would
send down his wrath on this family, and he has! This is his punishment for your
arrogance and your blasphemy! And
my son
got caught in it!” He looked down at Kenny again, and his voice was wet and
quivering. “I told him to stay away. I
told
him
!”

Ava wanted to
say something, like how absurd it was to suggest that God had punished her by
letting her brother be killed. That it was a ridiculous, bizarre thing to say.
But besides her mother, who was shaking her head, no one in the crowd seemed to
appreciate the absurdity, the downright craziness of it. Most of them were
staring at her as though she might sprout horns from her forehead at any
moment.

Pastor Goode
grabbed Vic by the collar of his bathrobe. “Didn’t I tell y’all?” he said, his
face close to Vic’s. “Didn’t I?”

Vic nodded. “You
said so, Pastor. You said something was gone happen.”

Goode turned Vic
loose and crouched down on the ground beside Kenny, laid his head on the boy’s
chest and sobbed.

Vic turned and
glared at Ava. “You the one caused this.” Vic looked at Malcolm, who nodded his
agreement. Then Vic and Malcolm both looked around at the rest of them. Sister
Hattie nodded, too, her hand over her mouth. Antoinette clutched her sister’s
hand. Miss
Liddy
looked at Ava and shook her head.
“Lord,” she said, “Oh, Lord.”

“Y’all talking
crazy,” Miss Maddy said.

Miss Lucas shook
her head. “The Lord
don’t
work like that.”

But no one else
seemed to hear them, or to care if they did.

Ava watched them, these people she had known almost
her whole life, who had eaten in her mother’s kitchen and worshipped beside her
family for nearly a decade, watched them, right there on the parking lot, as
they turned away from her family right before her eyes.

1976

G
eorge made a
promise to himself on the night he left Chuck at the church that he would never
go back. That the years of stealing around, of debasing himself and everyone
who loved him, would end right there and then. He vowed never to see Chuck
again, nor Butch, nor any of the other men with whom he had lain himself down
in shame, like hogs in shit. He didn’t want to go home, either, in the evenings
after work, didn’t want to look at his family and see the ways he had failed
them. Instead, he walked. Leaving work he headed farther east, towards the city,
seeking invisibility in the shadows of the tall buildings, anonymity on the
crowded sidewalks. Walking among businesspeople,
shopgirls
,
and construction workers, he might be just an ordinary person, a holder of no
secret any worse than any of theirs, a caring husband and father, a trustworthy
friend, a loved son. No one could say he wasn’t all of those things, this
perfectly normal-looking man in his city-worker’s uniform.

He walked for
hours every day for more than a week, as far as his legs would take him without
too much protest, and when he was good and tired, and night had fallen
entirely, he would stop for a bite somewhere, and then
hop
on a bus or find an el station and head home. One evening, he stopped in a little
pizza joint and ordered a slice, and as he sat eating in a corner he looked up
and saw a boy sitting a few tables away, staring at him. He was around nine,
light brown with kinky, reddish hair, and he reminded George of a boy he’d
known back in Hayden, a boy he tried never to think about. He looked away,
closed his eyes and tried no to let the memory seep into him, but it came
anyway, pulled him with it from his seat in the pizza place to a back porch
railing in Hayden, Georgia.

It was a chilly day, windswept and leafy. George, then
ten years old, sat watching two cats fighting in the grass behind his house.
Red came around, carrying a jar with a garter snake in it. “I caught it under
the bed,” he said, grinning and proud. “I’m gone take it out to
Els
Field and turn it loose. Come on with me.”

“I can’t. I’m waiting on my daddy to get home.”

His father was stopping by the dump on his way home,
which meant he’d be making art that night, and George would be able to stay up
late and watch him, and tell him stories.

“It won’t take that long,” Red said.

George liked Red, when he wasn’t being mean, wasn’t
showing off for other kids the way he sometimes did. And he was bored, sitting
there waiting for his father. He looked down the road and didn’t see his father
coming yet. He could usually see him when he was a quarter of a mile away. He
hopped down off the porch railing and called through the back window into the
house, “Mama, I’m going to
Els
Field,” and then
hurried down off the porch before she could come out and tell him he couldn’t
go.

They walked down
back roads to
Els
Field. Years ago there had been a
factory there, but now it was only a shell, with broken windows and overgrown
plant life. Red stood on top of a rusty steel drum and opened the glass jar,
tossing the snake out into the high brush. For a moment, it coiled in the air
like a paper spiral.

“You
ever been
in there?” Red asked George, pointing at the factory.

George nodded.
“Couple times.”

“I want to see
inside.”

“It aint nothing
in there to see.”

Red shrugged. “Still.”

They walked down
a short, overgrown path to a side door, and Red pushed it open. Inside, the
place was empty and caked everywhere with dust, and full of broken glass from
all the busted windows. The glass shimmered in the light streaming in from
outside. From a corner, a field mouse scurried across the floor and squeezed
itself into a hole in the wall.

“You right,” Red
said. “It aint nothing to see in here. I can see mice at home. I bet it’s scary
at night, though.”

George agreed,
then
turned to go.

“Hold up a
minute,” Red called.

George stopped,
and looked at him.

“You want to do
something?”

George frowned.
“It aint nothing to do in here.”

“You want to see
each other’s dicks?”

George blinked.
Hesitated. It might be a trick, he thought. Sometimes Red was mean that way. He
liked to put bugs down the backs of girls’ dresses and gum in their hair and all
that kind of foolishness. But the possibility that it wasn’t a trick intrigued
George. He’d never seen another boys’ dick, and he wanted to. “I guess,” he
said.

Red grabbed his
wrist and pulled him farther into the factory, back towards the end of a long
corridor. They stood there looking at each other. “You go first,” Red said.

George shook his
head. “No. You.”

Red unzipped his pants and let them fall down around
his knees. His white drawers were dingy and the elastic band was almost too
stretched out to hold them up. He pulled them down, too, and stood
there
facing George, his small, reddish-brown penis
hardening before George’s eyes. “Now you.”

George pulled down his pants, his own erection already
pressing eagerly against his zipper. For a moment they stood there, just
looking at each other, then Red reached out and touched the tip of George’s
penis. A breath caught in George’s throat. Red’s eyes widened. He took hold of
it then, rubbing it from shaft to head, and George closed his eyes and let the
pleasure melt over him. No one had ever touched him down there before and it
was so much better than when he did it himself.

He heard a flurry of movement and opened his eyes,
expecting to see another mouse, but instead he saw his father, standing down
the corridor, staring wide-eyed at him, a look of horror and revulsion on his
face.

George scrambled away from Red, who said, “No, don’t
quit. It feels good, don’t it?”

His father had closed the distance between them before
he knew it, and was reaching out and grabbing him by the throat, throwing him
down on the hard floor. George heard Red running away, his bare feet slapping
hard against the ground. His father looked enraged, his face contorted into something
monstrous, and he slapped George hard across the face and head, over and over.
Then he grabbed the boy by the shirt, and shook him, growling at him through
clenched teeth, “I didn’t raise you to be no filthy queer. I work myself to
death every day to give you a life, and this what I get?”

“No,” George cried. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“What did I do wrong?” his father asked. “Huh? What
did I do?”

The chewed pizza in George’s mouth tasted cold and
oily, and he couldn’t swallow it. The reddish boy was still staring at him, and
George began to wonder if he was really there, and not some ghost come to haunt
and torment him, to make him remember that day in the factory, that day when
his father had stopped loving him. After that, nothing between them was the
same. There was no more hitting, no more epithets hurled, no more mention at
all of what had happened.
 
But the
days of watching his father turn broken things into art ended all at once.

George peered at the reddish boy and thought about all
the times he had returned to that old factory, with other boys and, later, men,
all the times he had recreated that awful scene, only without his father bursting
in, and all the times he had recreated it in other places, in Butch’s basement,
in the church with Chuck, his father’s disgust always there even if the man himself
was not. He wished he could go back and undo it. He wished that about so many
things, but that thing more than any other. He wished Red had never come up to
him as he sat on that porch railing. “You ruined everything,” he whispered to
the reddish boy, who only blinked at him. George got up from his seat and
closed the distance between himself and the little boy and stared down at him,
shaking his head. “You opened that door, and after that I couldn’t shut it.”

The boy looked up, wide-eyed at him.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and when he looked a
man was standing there, frowning hard at him. “What you say to my son?” he asked.

George looked down at the boy, and saw now that he
wasn’t Red, or a ghost of any sort, but only a kid with rust-colored hair.
George swallowed, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said to the father.

“Well, get away from him, then,” the man said, putting
himself between George and his son.

George turned and left the restaurant, and made his
way over to Market Street, and the el that would take him home, not because he
wanted to be there, but because he had nowhere else to go.

***

Ava was painting on the back porch because the house
was hot, too hot. She had gone to work that morning an hour early, and had spent
that time, as well as her lunch break and an hour after work, tucked away in
corners of the museum, wrapping herself in paintings, in color that stretched
out for hours. Into the planes and angles of
Fernand
Leger’s
Animated Landscape
, she had
folded herself. Into the contours and curves of Georgia O’Keeffe’s
Peach and Glass
, she had balled herself
up. On the edges of Paul Cezanne’s
Mont
Sainte-
Victoire
, she had perched and observed the
world below. On her way out of the museum, coming down the steps, she’d seen Ben
Franklin Parkway as she hadn’t seen it in seventeen years, the wide boulevard lined
with trees whose green was lush and stark against the blue-white sky, and whose
domed and columned edifices—the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, the
Free Library of Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute—contrasted with the
many-windowed office buildings that winked from the city skyline, out of which
City Hall rose. When she’d gotten home, she’d helped Sarah and Helena with
dinner, and while eating she’d planned the painting she would make, designed it
in her mind from top to bottom. The skyline had inspired her and she thought to
set that inspiration down on canvas. When dinner was over, she’d wanted to bolt
from the kitchen, but she forced herself to be considerate and help with the
dishes. When everything was clean and put away, she dragged the easel, and her
case full of paints and brushes, out onto the back porch. She stayed out there
for hours, as the sky darkened. She could hear her family moving around inside,
but for a long time no one disturbed her. As she painted, her head throbbed. It
had been throbbing on and off all day. She kept painting, determinedly, as
though it would help. Hours later, Helena came outside, and when she peered at
the image on the canvas she said, “It’s you again.”

“I meant it to be the city skyline,” Ava told her.

Helena tilted
her head to one side and squinted at the painting. “It’s not.”

“Hmm.”

The day before,
Ava had begun to draw a picture of a butterfly alight on a flower in the
garden, and had ended up with a sketch of
herself
,
watching the butterfly. Now she stood back from the canvas and examined yet
another unintended depiction of herself, this time with no hint of the scene
she had set out to paint, only her visage looking out from the canvas.

“Well,” Ava
said. “That is interesting, isn’t it?”

Helena nodded. “Any
word from Paul?” she asked, leaning back against the porch railing.

“No,” Ava said, dipping
her brush in brown.

Helena frowned. “You’re
not very upset about him being gone, are you?”

“I hope he’s safe,” Ava said, “and that he’s not hurting
too much. But no, I’m not upset that he’s gone.”

Helena went and sat down on the steps, lit a cigarette
and stared out at the garden. After a few minutes, she said, “It’s because of
me. You’re angry with him for keeping that secret from you. But it’s my fault
there was ever a secret to begin with.”

Ava shook her
head. “That’s only part of it,” she said. “I’ve actually been thinking a lot
about Paul.”

“Have you?”

Ava put down her
brush and palette, and sat down beside Helena on the step. “So much has happened
to me in these last few days.
So much memory returning, so
much emotion filling me up.
Everything feels so much more…” She sighed.
“So much
more
. You know?”

Helena nodded.

“Everything,” Ava said, “except Paul. My feelings for
Paul haven’t changed. They haven’t gotten bigger, or heavier, or…more red.”

“Maybe they will,” Helena said.

“I’ve been waiting for them to. I’ve been waiting to
feel something so intense that I couldn’t deny it. But I haven’t. I don’t feel
any less about him than I did a few days ago, but a few days ago it was enough.
It’s not anymore. I don’t love Paul.” She thought Helena would argue, would try
to convince her that she did still love her brother, for his sake, but Helena
was silent. In the light of the moon, Ava could see Helena’s eyes, fiercely
green against the dark, watching her, half afraid of what she might say next,
and half eager to hear the words. “Of all the things I have felt these last few
days, of all the things I feel now, there is nothing I feel so intensely, so
thoroughly, as I feel you.”

Helena shook her
head no, the way she had when Ava had kissed her a few nights ago, and Ava
thought she would get up and leave, but this time Helena did not move away. She
moved closer. She leaned her body into the empty dark that separated them and
kissed Ava, hungrily, and put her arms around her waist and pulled her closer
still. Ava met the kiss with an equal rush of passion, and her tongue tasted
red and coffee and butter, and every good thing. They kissed and kissed, for
many minutes, there on the back steps, kissed until their lips were raw, and
long after that. It was late when they went into the house, upstairs, and in
the hallway Ava said, “Sleep with me.”

Helena shook her
head. “I can’t. Paul—”

“I mean sleep,”
Ava said. “Just sleep.”

Paul had been gone from the Delaney house for two whole
days. He was staying at Tyrone’s place in North Philly, but he’d barely seen
his cousin at all. He’d requested night shifts at the cleaning company, less
for the money than for the distraction, thinking that dirty windows and toilets
would keep his mind off much worse things. They didn’t. In every
window pane
, every shiny surface, he saw the face of the
girl he had killed, killed for
nothing
,
trying to protect a sister who hadn’t wanted protecting in the first place. He
wished that he had been the one who died that day, twenty years ago. He
wondered if that girl would have grown up to be something.
Something
more than he had turned out to be.

During the few
hours that he slept on his cousin’s floor each morning, his mind, his
conscience, gave him a reprieve from the image of the girl, and in those
moments he dreamed about Ava. He saw her the way she was before, without the
emotional eruptions and fainting spells, when she was steady and easy, and they
were happy.

It was all
connected to Helena, this misery he felt now, though he didn’t know exactly how
her presence had caused the changes in Ava. He only knew that after she came,
everything had come undone. His life had crumbled in the wake of his long lost
sister’s return. He hated her for what she was, for what she had let him do,
but most of all he hated her for coming back, for showing up on his doorstep,
for not having the decency to just stay away, to let the lie remain, for not
caring that the truth would be so much harder for him to live with.