No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Henry let the bottle drop to the ground. The last dregs of liquor spilled on his shoe. Henry paused and willed the wildness in his chest to settle.

  CARRIE LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW at the men in her yard, standing in the shallow light from the trailer porch, their expressions unreadable, passing a bottle between them. She sure as hell knew how to pick them. But how could it be her fault when all of them, every last one, was an ass? Carrie let the curtain fall back closed. They hadn’t noticed her watching. They didn’t care. She thought about crying and she almost did, but she didn’t come from people who respected crying even in children. Crying was at best embarrassing and at worse a sign of unforgiveable weakness. She would not cry. She opened the front door. “Y’all go now.”

  “Go where. Come on, Carrie.” She looked first at Jay’s face and then Henry’s. Was it that hard to understand that she didn’t want two men at her house talking about another woman? She wasn’t about to come on. Men tried to make you believe in your own crazy. If you are hysterical they don’t have to see you as an equal, look you in the eye like a person they have to respect. It suited them to make you think that all the shit they pulled, all the lies they told, were in your head. The only crazy part was that most women did believe their men or chose to pretend. Most kept on believing right up to the point the men walked out the door or killed them.

  “You can sit and be an idiot anywhere, Henry. Get away from my house.” Carrie spoke in the calmest voice she could manage. She wouldn’t have her son awakened to a scene. “I told you for the last time.” Carrie almost closed the door, thought better of it, and opened it wide again. “And you better believe that she knows. I saw her and she knows everything.”

  “What did you tell her?” Henry yelled.

  “Keep your voice down. I didn’t have to tell her anything.”

  “What did you say to her?” Henry said, his voice wavering with emotion.

  “I said hello. I didn’t say anything.”

  “What did you tell her then, goddammit?” Henry yelled.

  This whole night, this whole twisted episode of their lives, and Henry reserved his real feeling, his true emotion for what his wife felt. “She came up to me and said how beautiful Zeke is. But I’m telling you she knows. I can tell. And you better hear me,” Carrie said, her voice strong though she never in her life felt more like sobbing. “I’m glad she knows.”

  “She might not know. Right?” Henry directed his question to Jay.

  “You were supposed to be here,” Carrie hissed. “He wanted to see you. He always wants to see YOU. He asks all the time about when you’re coming. I didn’t even tell him this time. I knew you wouldn’t come. I knew it. He is always counting on you and you let him down over and over. Now we don’t have to count on your sorry ass.”

  “Sorry, sorry, Carrie,” Jay said as he walked down the steps to his car.

  “Don’t try to come here and act like you know anything,” Henry yelled.

  “I’m leaving. I shouldn’t have come here,” Jay said and opened his car door.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. That’s all. You don’t know.” Henry kept his eyes on Jay.

  “You don’t know me,” Jay said.

  “Five more minutes and I’m calling the police.”

  Henry opened the door to his own car. “Don’t judge me by this,” Henry said.

  Jay got in his car, turned the ignition, and the engine hummed on, the radio pulsed a slow jam from a generation ago. Henry went down the steps to his own car.

  “I should get drunk for real,” Henry said.

  Jay shook his head, not sure what to say. Listening to Henry, seeing his crumbled face, knowing the mess that spread out around him in sad concentric circles, a lonely child, betrayed and disappointed women, made him so defeated and exhausted, he could barely speak. Maybe that’s why he’d come. He’d wanted to get angry, hate Henry, so when he exploded Henry’s life the way he dreamed of doing, he wouldn’t blink an eye at the carnage. He had not counted on being sad. The thought had not occurred to Jay, at least with such clarity until that moment.

  “Get it together, man.”

  “What do you think showing up here?” Henry sounded like he was asking a genuine question. “You don’t know. You better believe that. And another thing, Ava is never going to be with you. She can’t do it man. She’s messed up. I love her, but she’s messed up. I’m telling you.”

  “Henry, your secrets are out, you better figure out some way to get behind that.”

  “Is that what I need to do, JJ? You know everything about my life now? Is that it?” Henry stood up straight and walked to the passenger door of Jay’s car. “You know, huh?

  Carrie bolted and chain locked the door. Both Jay and Henry looked up at the sound of the locks connecting.

  Jay backed out the driveway just as the light in the trailer went out, but Jay could just make out Henry’s outstretched body on his hood of his own car.

  “Get off the car, Henry,” Jay yelled out of his passenger window.

  “I’m not a bad man,” Henry said.

  “Who thinks he is?” Jay said.

  Henry opened the door to his own car, but Jay didn’t wait to hear the engine start.

  18

  Ava went home early the next morning from the motel. Lana asked her then told her that she was staying the night, and Ava did stay almost. She wanted nothing more than to sink down into Lana’s couch under a blanket and let Lana bring her popcorn as they watched episode after episode of trash television. But a heaviness was settling in her like sand swirling then settling in water that made her feel like moving, keep moving or she might plant to the spot and never move again. She went back to the motel but got up before the sun rose to get back to her own house. She hoped that Henry was home. She dreaded the idea that Henry was at home. She craved seeing Henry at home. Henry wasn’t there, which made Ava alternately sad and angry and relieved and sad again.

  Once in her bedroom, her first act was to take a long, hot shower. Henry hadn’t been home. He probably hadn’t come home all night. After the twentieth time he’d called her, texted her, left messages, she’d finally had to turn the phone’s sound off. After the first call or two she silenced her phone, let it vibrate in her pocket. Let him think about her. Let him wonder. Let him ride around town trying to find her. The bed had not been made from the day before and Ava attempted to straighten the covers but it looked a baggy mess like an old man’s neck. She had not decided what she would do if Henry been there but she had worked out three or four scenarios in her head for confronting then hurting Henry: she would catch him in a lie; she would pretend to know nothing and see how he reacted to her seeing his son; she would beat the hell out of him the second she saw him. All of the options had their merits.

  Ava had texted Sylvia early in the evening with a lie her mother would not believe, that she was out with friends until late, she might stay over with a friend, she’d said. Ava had plenty of acquaintances she’d go to lunch with from time to time, like Tommy the skinny white teller at the bank who told her that his other coworkers “oppressed his identity.” He really said that. Ava wasn’t sure how she managed to plump his identity back to normal, but whatever made him happy. Ava had a few more casual acquaintances and no friend she would trust with the dirty secrets of her marriage. The only friend Ava was likely to stay over with was her mother. Her mother knew that too.

  Ava had called in to work but she had almost decided to get dressed and go in. The sheets felt good though. She folded her thin pillow into a sandwich and propped her head on the top of it. She had not been able to believe her luck when she found the four-poster bed at a yard sale. The couple selling it even brought it to the house, refused the twenty dollars she’d offered as a delivery charge. More than once Ava had thought the couple had passed on a curse of an unhappy, unfruitful bedroom. Sometimes she thought she remembered clearly that there had been no large plastic kids’ toys in the yard, no outgrown baby clothes
for sale. Though now she wasn’t sure if that was a true memory or just a sad attempt at an explanation. No matter what happened to her in the rest of her life, she would get rid of that bed.

  Had that woman been in her bed? Impossible? Thank god for her mother. Even Henry wouldn’t risk running into her mother at the house. Though she couldn’t help but torture herself with the image of their little one who had probably crept between them in the early morning, snuggled warm against his chest. That was supposed to have been her life. Ava folded her arms over her chest, closed her eyes. That’s it, she thought, keep hating him, cauterize the wound as quickly as possible.

  Ava entered Devon’s old room beside her own on the second floor. She’d moved the few wire hangers of sloop-shouldered button-down shirts, the picture of sartorial disappointment, that their mother had bought for him to wear to church during one of her many tries at religion. A couple pairs of shiny polyester dress pants lurked with the shirts in a box somewhere. Devon was a private boy and a private man, and all of them had given him his space. She had understood that he was a boy with collections, for the art he found and claimed, for strangely shaped rocks, bent pieces of metal, including an iridescent sliver of silver plate he kept on his dresser. Nothing else would wiggle back into her thinking. Ava sat down on Devon’s bed. If she closed her eyes she was sure that she could picture what the walls had looked like back then, but no image appeared. But the disco glitter ceiling looked the same. Devon had wanted to paint over the dirty cloud places where water had leaked and stained. A teacher had told him that Michelangelo had taken years to finish the Sistine Chapel. “You got to be joking if you think you’ll be under my roof wasting time painting,” their mother had joked. But she hadn’t meant it.

  The room now said little about the boy who had lived there. An old painting of a clipper ship Devon drew when he was in eighth grade, a WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA mug he’d loved was still somewhere. Years ago she’d found several of his notebooks under the bed, full of drawings of cars, airplanes, caricatures of people they all knew in the opening pages. She’d leafed into the notebook and had come upon drawings of young women, topless with strange expressions, like they weren’t aware of their naked selves but were instead doing ordinary things like picking apples or watching television, topless girls as wholesome as the farmer’s daughter. And every girl was the same girl, the sad little white girl he worked with, the puny little thing he brought around the house a few times. Devon was a loner but hadn’t seemed lonely. She’d had no idea he had longed for her. Joy, that was her name! Never had a child looked less like a Joy. Of course he had loved her. Ava said the first prayer she’d uttered in a long time, maybe since she was a child beside her grandmother on her knees. Please let her have loved him back.

  Ava took the drawing of the ship off of the wall, a good one for a boy his age, what had he been, about twelve, thirteen? to straighten the frame. On the back of it Devon (who else?) had drawn a cartoon sheep with a thought bubble above the sheep’s head. The caption said, IT AIN’T SO BAAAD. Ava laughed. “It ain’t so baaad,” Ava said aloud. She would get on with it. She was going to work.

  19

  “Ava Bailey, how may I help you?”

  “Is this Ava?”

  Ava drew in her breath. She knew he would call, it was just a matter of time, but hearing his voice startled her anyway. Her office had glass walls, a glass-topped door. She could be seen by the tellers in the front of the bank, by the customers in line if they decided to look around for anything of interest as they waited to make their deposits and withdrawals. Ava shifted in her chair and rested her head in her hand. She glanced up quickly and sat up straight. For the thousandth time since she started the job she wondered what the tellers or the customers had seen. She quickly adjusted, and erased the expression from her face.

  “Ava? Are you there?”

  Ava knew the voice from the first word, even after all this time. She had slept with two men in her life, her husband and the man on the phone. “This is Ava,” she said.

  “Ava?”

  Ava cleared her voice to try to keep it steady. JJ Ferguson had finally called.

  “This is Jay Ferguson. How are you?”

  “I know who you are, JJ,” Ava said and held the phone, not sure what to say next.

  “Are you still there? Can you talk now?”

  “It’s about damn time, JJ.” Ava paused on the line. She felt a glad rush like her body was taking in light except it was a stinging like she’d just released a long-held breath. This was nothing like her feelings for asinine Henry. For him, for Henry, she was overwhelmed, like walking in the ordinary world and suddenly and inexplicably falling in a hole. She’d wanted Henry, her body reacted to him, with an aggressive hum that surprised even her. She ached for Henry, but not like hunger—hunger is unpleasant, not hunger at all more like the tingle of bicycle bells bright and insistent and impossible to unhear. Her feeling for JJ was pleasure, the warmth of real pleasure. A feeling that bounced back to her through the detritus of almost twenty years. She had chosen Henry all those years ago and JJ had disappeared from her life. She had not known that she would lose JJ entirely. How could she have known that? “How are you?”

  “I’m going to be your neighbor,” JJ said.

  “Everybody in town knows that, JJ.”

  “I forgot about the grapevine around here.”

  “Did you?” Ava asked, but she was sure the grapevine was the last thing JJ forgot.

  “You’re right. I was hoping you’d know.” JJ laughed. “You sound the same.”

  “Ha! I’m not even close. You wouldn’t believe what’s happened even if I told you,” Ava said. Ava and JJ paused on the line.

  “Can we meet? Can I see you?” JJ said.

  “Why not? This is my week for crazy. Why not?” JJ hesitated unsure what Ava might know about what had happened with Henry.

  “Okay then, that sounds like close to yes.” He laughed. “I’ll take yes any way I can get it. How about today? We can eat somewhere, get a drink maybe.”

  “Not in this town we can’t. Still dry.”

  “I heard that. Unbelievable. You know we don’t have to stay in Pinewood. I can take you anywhere you want, girl.”

  “Your rap is still weak, JJ.”

  “I’m the king of weak raps.”

  Ava laughed and imagined the grown man on the other end of the telephone line. He was not fat and he had hair and teeth from all reports, but he couldn’t look exactly the same. No one ventures into middle age the same as he started. She was different too in ways that she felt more than saw with her own eyes. Though she was sure other people could tell. A woman, sixty years old at least, had asked her if they’d gone to high school together. That moment had ruined a few days in a row for Ava. “I’ll get some lemonade with you, but I’ll be here until late. Besides, I’m pregnant, JJ.”

  “Well, I’ll come by the bank.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you.”

  “You’re only the second person I’ve told. You and the Goodwill woman.”

  “What, Ava?”

  “I’m pregnant. Knocked up. I’ll see you later.”

  “What else did you say?”

  “It doesn’t matter, JJ. I’m just talking.”

  “I’ll pick you up there.”

  Ava wished she’d dressed better, with her highest heels. It was probably better that she looked like she normally did. People would notice differences in her appearance and get suspicious. For sure somebody would see her get in Jay’s car and whisper to the others and by the next workday everyone in the bank would have heard that she was with a man they did not recognize, a black man yes, but not her husband. “Come by at six. I’ll try to be done by then. If you aren’t here at six, I’ll be on my way home,” Ava said.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time. I’ll be there. I’ll be early.”

  “Don’t be early. You’ll just be waiting. I won’t be done until six toda
y. Okay, JJ?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  20

  “I can take you to a nice place, Ava. Let’s go to Hickory.” Jay kept his hands on the steering wheel, determined to drive away from the Simmy’s parking lot.

  “This is fine. I just want a greasy burger. Just don’t tell Mama, JJ. I mean, Jay. I’ll get used to calling you that,” she said. She had not drunk the whiskey she’d asked Lana for, so she thought she deserved the greasy food. If she was lucky someone would tell Henry and he would know that she hadn’t wasted a second before she’d forgotten completely about him. “You probably don’t remember how she is about this place.”

  “I’m not telling.” Jay doubted Mrs. Sylvia cared anything about Simmy’s anymore. What more damage could happen that hadn’t already been done anyway? Everybody was keeping the wrong secrets. Jay looked around the restaurant as they walked in. Don’t let Carrie be working, please, please, he thought. Ava waited for him at a booth in the corner. “One second,” he said to Ava as he walked to the front counter and got the attention of the fifty-ish white woman behind the cash register. “Y’all can sit anywhere you want,” she told him.

  “Is Carrie working?” Jay whispered.

  The woman looked hard at him, like she wasn’t sure if she recognized him or not. “She’s not coming in tonight.”

  Jay nodded and joined Ava at the table. He had no idea what he would have done if Carrie had been there. Gotten Ava the hell out of there was all he knew.

  “What’s going on?” Ava said.

  Jay shrugged and sat down across from Ava.