No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Devon almost made it.

  Two miles from his house. A young man, still a boy, walking the road, watching the red hills melt one into the other. Apple trees sprung in rows. Did they dance when no one was looking? He never saw the car. When Devon was a boy he would lie down in the middle of the dirt road outside his trailer. He didn’t mind the rocks and the sharp pressure poking through to his back. From miles away, he could hear a car coming down the road. Feel the car as the warm earth began to rumble, his pelvis bouncing with the rotation of the faraway wheels. He smelled the rising dust kicking up around him as the car got closer. In this secret game, he’d lie there longer and longer never really close to being hit. A secret game, since every other time, long before the driver ever saw him, he would be safely on his way home.

  31

  The nights were quiet unless you knew where to look. In the country (the real country, not the tourist-rural) there was precious little to lure a grown person off the couch in the middle of the night. Ava loved being up when the world was asleep. Pinewood lacked detail, like the time before Ava got her glasses and the objects and the people she saw were misted, blurred, all their pocked skin and yellowed teeth fixed in her poor eyesight. Ava’s glasses had made the landscape much too ugly. The night improved Pinewood, and it was no longer gray and beaten down but sleeping with striking silhouettes. “Go to bed. You’re not missing nothing!” her mother had told her a thousand times. But the voices that carried through the walls, the flatulent sound of shuffled cards, barked laughter from adults, from the center of town, from the cities way off in the distance, called to her. Always had.

  Television no longer went off anymore, and the test pattern that used to signal to decent people that it was time for bed had gone the way of the dinosaurs. These days televisions from the neighbors’ houses flickered all night long courtesy of the satellites like Derby-worthy fascinators stationed on their roofs. Ava liked to be outside in that relative silence when the air was warm enough for only a long-sleeved shirt or light sweater. The sounds of dogs barking in some distant yard the only voice she heard. Some of the girls she’d known in high school and college smoked to have something to do with their hands when they found themselves alone, anything was better than looking cheesy and vulnerable

  Some nights, when she was young, Ava would sneak out and just drive through her ghost town, hers the only car on the streets. Back then, she’d park in front of Cynthia’s, a boutique that catered to middle-aged white women, and imagine the women who exited the building the way they’d adjust their sunglasses and purses in casual clothes that the initiated knew to be expensive; held their shiny lavender Cynthia’s shopping bags, with ownership on their faces. Ava and her family had gone to the five-and-ten store with the rows of discount socks and familiar woodworked crafts, its wild, wild west saloon doors that separated the customers from the employees, the squeak and give of the soft wood floor. Simmy’s Homestyle was still right there, the sole survivor from all those years ago. The sign was a prominent one on their mostly signless landscape, though even Simmy’s was dark by nine, earlier if the town was dead. If her mother ever knew that Ava wandered Pinewood in her car, she hadn’t let on. But there was no real danger that Ava could see. She rarely got out to explore. And only once when she walked Main Street, did she see another person, a thrill that almost gave her a heart attack when she happened upon him humming to himself on the courthouse steps.

  Ava did not drive in town in the middle of the night anymore. Those days were long in the past, but Ava found herself up anyway on the deck at Jay’s house, waiting for something she knew was coming. She hadn’t slept at all. It had been a long time since she’d had a true all-nighter. Ava half hoped she would interrupt Jay’s quiet snoring with her restlessness and he would wake up so she would have company. She’d hoped that he might reach for her during some blurry haze of a dream. Jay had not moved.

  SO MANY YEARS AGO, she and Jay had ridden to the spot where Devon was killed. “This is it,” he’d said and tried to sound matter-of-fact and not scared out of his mind.

  “It feels like a horror movie out here,” Ava had said but she was immediately embarrassed. What they were seeing was worse than any horror movie. Dust swirled in the light, like in a dream, the light a living thing pushing back the dark, a losing battle anyone could predict.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Ava had said.

  “Let’s just go. Come on, Ava.”

  Ava opened her car door and stepped out onto the dark road.

  JJ followed her on the road, picked up a package that held a grocery store bouquet, dyed improbable colors, from the side of the road. “What’s this?”

  “Put those back,” Ava’d said.

  “Flowers,” he said as he looked them over, like he’d just realized what they were.

  Joy, the strange little girl Ava had found slumped in front of Devon’s bed one day, clunky military looking shoes, a parrot green and blue dress bunched up around her thighs, picking crud from under her fingernails. “I’m waiting for Devon’s nap to be over,” she’d said, like that explained everything. She must have left the flowers.

  “Put them back,” Ava said.

  JJ placed the bouquet back where he found it. “Are you ready to go?”

  “What a terrible place, JJ. It’s worse than I thought.”

  JJ did not speak but took Ava’s hand and led her back to the car.

  “Not yet,” Ava said as they watched the dust swirl in the headlights. Moths were coming already into the white beam. “We might feel him here. Do you think that’s possible?” she’d whispered.

  JJ had been afraid of that very idea. “No, Ava. That’s the last thing that will happen.”

  “What are you doing, Ava?” Jay said. “How long have you been up?” Ava hadn’t turned to see Jay approaching. “Come back to bed.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Jay stopped just behind her. The deck was a large one and looked like it went on forever, since the night was too dark to see where it truly ended. A body could get confused easily in the dark and take one too many steps thinking there was a solid surface underfoot.

  “You want me to go back inside?”

  “No, no, you can stay,” she said.

  Jay moved beside her but not close enough to touch her. He stretched his legs in front of him, but couldn’t see his feet at the end of his body.

  “You should put on a shirt. It’s chilly out here.”

  “It’s not cold. I’m okay,” Jay said. The air actually felt punishing and good on his skin.

  “I don’t feel the baby anymore, Jay.”

  “It’s too early, right? Too small? Even I know it’s too soon, Ava.”

  “I just feel like me.”

  “You’re tired. There’s a lot going on.”

  “I feel like me. I was almost there. Close to seven weeks.”

  Jay put his arm around Ava, but she did not lean into him. He patted her shoulder, held her for an uncomfortable time as she sat still as a rock. He finally let his hand drop behind her back.

  “Don’t worry. That’s not good for you or the baby. You don’t know anything yet,” Jay said.

  Ava said nothing. She couldn’t imagine what she could say that Jay might understand.

  Jay listened with Ava to the wind skittering through the maple leaves. He imagined their red stems like the stems of jarred cherries holding on tightly to the branches. There were so many things that deserved to be really seen.

  “Do you ever feel your mother, Jay?”

  Jay shrugged. Talk about his mother made him nervous. He had tried to ignore his mother for years as she sat quietly in the corner of his mind. He clicked her away like an image from the Viewfinder toy he’d had long ago. He would not think about her on purpose. But she persisted and skittered along the edges of his brain, popped up when he least suspected she would. Though she was smaller than she’d been, she did not disappear. “I’m still here,” his mother said to him every onc
e in a while. “No, I don’t really feel her anymore,” Jay said.

  “But you did, right? You did?”

  “For years I did. At least I think so.” Jay had met Ava soon after he’d been sent to town to live with Alice Graham. He’d been lucky, at least that’s what the caseworker said. Alice was willing to take him right away and he wouldn’t have to languish in limbo without a home. Jay knew the other kids whispered about him but he was too numb to care. That wasn’t entirely true. He did care, but only in retrospect could he appreciate how deeply he was wounded, and only the onslaught of years would reveal to him how much he had truly lost. The pain would come to him by degrees and for years. But there at the beginning, Ava had come to him. She approached him in the way of beautiful girls, like she had nothing to lose, like she was unaccustomed to a man saying anything that sounded like no. He had never forgotten that moment after school as he waited for the bus. She said hello. She’d asked him where he was from. He had been drowning. He’d wanted to touch the downy sideburns on her face and melt into her thank you, thank you, thank you. Ava’d had no reason to be kind to him. He could have broken down at that moment in worship to her. Only the idea that she might run away stopped him. We are not ashamed to be saved.

  “Come back to bed.”

  “Do you want to go for a ride?” Ava asked.

  “No, baby.”

  Ava nodded but Jay didn’t see.

  “I don’t want to drive, Ava. We’re okay.”

  “Why not? Let’s drive and keep going. We could drive to Alaska if we wanted to.” For a quick exhilarating moment, Ava saw a way out. She could pack a bag of clothes in five minutes. They could make sandwiches, grab a jar of peanut butter and bread from any convenience store, get some fruit and soda for a cooler, she could drive until she collapsed from lack of sleep.

  “Nothing’s going to help, Ava. You can’t outrun it,” Jay said. “Whatever is going to happen, we can deal with it.”

  Ava yawned and thrust her arms above her head in a dramatic pose visible even in the faint light from the house. “You think you can deal with it?” Ava asked. “That’s good, Jay, because I’m fucking exhausted.”

  32

  Sylvia knocked on the door to Ava’s room though she could see Ava with her eyes closed, head leaning against the headboard. She almost walked back down the stairs. She’d half expected Ava to have ransacked the room in anger at Henry and emptied out the drawers and closets like robbers had come. But that destruction was more her style. She would have made a mess, and then she would have to be the one to clean up later. The fact that little looked disturbed was somehow not surprising either.

  “I thought I’d find you here. Are you going to the doctor’s?”

  “In a couple of hours,” Ava said. She wondered how her mother knew, but maybe it was obvious. She hoped so.

  “Why are you going by yourself? Don’t I go with you every time?”

  “They’re just going to test my blood, Mama. Just a quick check. I spend longer in the lobby than with the nurse. I don’t want you to have to wait around.”

  Sylvia would not look at Ava’s face. “Well, I’m ready now. I just need my pocketbook. You should have somebody with you.”

  The memory came back hard in her chest. More than forty years had passed, but her first time in Dr. Nathan Yount’s office at the Carlisle Hotel remained. Dr. Yount delivered the black babies in the county. He was the only one. Too bad he was a mean man. So much so that the beautiful black women in town, even they, the ones unaccustomed to scorn at their naked bodies, found themselves both uncovered and ashamed in his presence. What was hard for the beautiful women was even worse for the ugly ones, worse still for the fat ones and Sylvia Ross was among the fattest, her homemade dresses as wide as the bedroom windows. Sylvia wished invisibility when the jokes turned to fat girls, when the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More with No Big Fat Woman” came on at the nightclub, or when somebody announced something clever and original like “ain’t that girl big as a house, a cow, an elephant?”

  Sylvia had been pregnant once before, though it had not taken. That was probably the reason she ended up with Don in the first place, who was a good part of the reason she packed on pounds like insulation, like protection from the hurts of being someone who loved him. But that first baby didn’t stay, and losing it left her raw and sensitive head to toe, inside and out. No baby would ever survive in her, that same Dr. Yount told her. But Sylvia saw an unmistakable pregnancy mask around her almond eyes. Though her stomach was prominent already, she knew that she felt what the other women called a flutter, what she thought felt like kernels of popping corn poking in her belly.

  Sylvia Ross waited at the Carlisle Hotel in a washed-out gown that did not begin to close around her frame, seated herself on the examining table. The small room was dim and gray like old meat, though she could point to nothing that seemed soiled. In came Dr. Yount. Sylvia watched him look at her fat drool like maple syrup off the side of the narrow examining table. There was no chipper banter, no what seems to be the problem, not even hello, but Dr. Yount snapped the gown up, attempted to lift the massive dimpled belly that obstructed his view. “Goddammit,” he said and walked out, leaving her legs exposed in the stirrups, embarrassment on the old nurse’s face. Sylvia’s brown ringlets like the flutes of a pie surrounded her broad, pretty face. She did not twist in pain. A crying fat woman she would not be. A crying fat woman blubbered in the retelling—she knew enough to know that. Dr. Yount and his nurse returned in ten minutes, fifteen, Sylvia stretched back out while the nurse held the red sea of her stomach away from the doctor. It is important to remember her name, she thought. She was Sylvia Ross, not anything outside of that. After the exam, with the doctor out of the room, the nurse whispered to her, “You okay, honey?” It was not until then that Sylvia began to cry.

  “I’M GOING WITH YOU,” Sylvia said.

  “Okay, Mama. We have a few minutes. I’m going to rest.”

  Sylvia didn’t move but sat at the edge of Ava’s bed. Her daughter had not taken off her clothes from the day before. “Do you need a shower?” Ava smelled of new paint.

  “You tell me.” Ava laughed. “I showered at Jay’s. I’m just here to change clothes. I don’t need much time.” Ava knew her mother had more questions than she knew how to answer, but she just wanted to close her eyes for a few minutes.

  “When are you going to work?”

  “I sent you a text.”

  “I know you did. I might not send them, but I can read. Don’t mess around and lose your job.” Sylvia went to the closet and moved the hangers one by one. Ava’s pants and blouses hung on padded hangers like in a showroom. “Everything reminds me of something else. I can’t help it. Seeing you there in bed not sleeping, reminded me of when you were a baby and not sleeping.”

  “I know, I know, I wasn’t a good sleeper.” Ava closed her eyes.

  “I had to hold you on my chest, rub your back. Every night. For years. I think you were seven before you grew out of it.”

  “I wasn’t seven, Mama.” Ava smiled.

  “Maybe not seven.” Sylvia scooted her backside more comfortably on Ava’s bed, rubbed her daughter’s leg. “I’m leaving don’t worry. Just a minute.” The nurses told her to let her babies touch her skin to skin, it comforted them, they’d said. What did she know of comfort? Sylvia held her daughter’s baby-smooth leg.

  “Mama.” Ava began speaking with her eyes closed. “Henry has a son, Mama. He has a child.”

  The blood rushed from Sylvia’s head to her chest. For too many years she had expected to hear about Don’s child, lived in fear of it. Someday, some pitiful woman would show up at her door. Or worse, some skinny, hard-mouthed child with a high forehead like Don’s would come knocking, saying with Don’s lips that he didn’t want anything that she could give him, didn’t need anything he had any access to, but had to meet his father. With all the dirt that Don had done, Sylvia knew it would catch up with him someday.


  “What do you mean?”

  Ava shrugged. “It means what it means.”

  Sylvia twisted the bedspread in her hands. “Are you sure?”

  “I saw the boy.”

  “Did he tell you that, Ava? Did he say it?”

  “Of course he didn’t say it. Am I supposed to ask him? I saw his son.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “Some girl from high school.” Ava didn’t want to say white girl. White girl would have brought on her mother’s pity. She would not understand that the woman being a slut trumped the fact that she was white. Her mother would never see the world in those terms.

  “Do you know her?”

  “Not really. She’s not from here.”

  “Then how do you know for sure?”

  “I. Saw. Him. Mama,” Ava said slowly and too loudly.

  “Then you don’t know,” Sylvia said and crossed her arms over her chest. She hoped that if she believed it enough maybe she could wish it away.

  “You are hilarious. You know that. You don’t even like Henry. Aren’t you the one who said, ‘I give it three years’?”

  “How many times are you going to bring that up? Yes, I said that. I wish I’d been right. You have to know,” Sylvia said and set her lips.

  “Mama, what would knowing mean? Do I need a DNA test? All that would tell me is he could be the father. Isn’t that enough? What will that tell me that I don’t already know?”

  “I can’t believe it. Do you know her?”

  “Mama, I said I don’t. I knew it. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

  “So you do know her? Is she from high school or not? Is it that Kim? You know I never trusted her.”

  “Mama, please just let me rest a minute. I don’t know her. He does. It doesn’t matter. What could it possibly matter?”