No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Zeke was still young enough to be excited to hear his voice and to hear his father’s stories about the beach, his poverty that sounded like adventures to a child, the sights Henry would share with him when the time came. Zeke didn’t know yet that his father fouled everything he touched. It could be he didn’t have to know. Either way, Henry had to make sure his son loved him, so if he found out the truth, the real truth, he would consider his father with kindness and forgiveness and not pain. Henry had met Zeke three times at a McDonald’s half the distance from Pinewood. Carrie drove their son to his father for them to eat and play together, but she would not stay. She smiled at Henry when she saw him and she even talked cordially to him in front of Zeke, but no part of her wanted any part of Henry Bailey. She would do better, and if she couldn’t do better, she’d do without. Henry decided he would do better too. Just in time for his fortieth birthday.

  Ava pointed to the little boy, a skinny little thing with big eyes and long lashes that girls would always covet, smaller than most of the girls in line at the ballet barre. Girls would admire him, giggle with excitement behind their hands when he passed. He would avoid the chunky stage so many boys struggled through and sail into his old boyhood and manhood as straight and lean as a dancer, though this class would be the closest he’d ever get to that profession. “See there, I keep telling him. He won’t follow directions.” As if on cue, the only boy in the line of ballerinas glanced up at her. Warned by the teacher against waving during practice, he held his hand in front of his chest and gave Ava a tiny peace sign with two fingers.

  You need to mourn your pain or it will rot you. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Ava spent months on her couch watching every game show and every real housewife that came on television, wishing for a different reality and then not wishing at all. After a few months her mother said, “It’s time.” And to Ava’s surprise she realized that it was. She got up. On the North Carolina Adoption Services site pictures of her children popped up. Free and open for adoption the caption said. The pair wants to stay together. They are bright, happy children. Wesley loves music and loves to play board games. May is a pretty, sweet girl who wants to be part of a family. Ava called the agency the next day and they began visitations.

  “Look at him trying to be slick,” Ava said and tried giving him a stern look. “He’s the only boy in the class. Free lessons.”

  “The only boy? He’ll appreciate that in a few years,” Henry said.

  “Actually he’s the only boy in the whole school,” Ava said. The children were aged four and six, a sibling pair. How it happened that she couldn’t remember her life before their arrival was a balm and a miracle to her. Some glorious trick of memory inserted their sweet faces into every circumstance and location of her life past, present, and future.

  “Well, he’s making the most of the lessons looks like.” Henry laughed. The little boy counted on his fingers, marched in place while the little girls in line moved their feet from first to second position.

  “Look at May.” Ava pointed.

  “She’s getting good,” Henry said, though he had only seen her dance on a video. Their time together now was the longest he’d spend with Ava in almost a year. “They look just alike.” The little girl tried hard not to look in Ava’s direction and concentrate on the precision of her feet, her tiny pointed toe.

  Ava and Sylvia had cleaned out their house. They considered having a giant yard sale but instead stacked the junk in a pile and put a FREE sign in front of it. The room that used to belong to Devon was now a room for the kids, full of hard plastic toys in cheerful colors. Ava liked to think that Devon had been too good for this world and he must have been raptured, but with her children in his room she could not believe that he was fully gone. There had been no rapture, because the rest of them had not been left behind.

  “Zeke is coming to Daddy’s tomorrow. I told you Sean got out, didn’t I?” Henry asked.

  “He is? Home already? No, you didn’t tell me. I want to see him. You don’t tell me anything. Tell him to come by and see us.”

  Ava smiled but kept her attention on her May’s serious face. She would have to remember to tell her to have fun, to not worry about being perfect, that she is loved and can make mistake after mistake with the certainty that her mother, her grandmother, and a small but passionate group of people would open their arms, cluck their tongues, but keep their arms open to her every single time. “I told my May about perennials, you know the flowers? You know what she said?”

  Henry shook his head no.

  “She said, ‘Mama, if I die, I’ll come back, but maybe not in the same way.’ Can you believe that?”

  “Kids. They kill you, don’t they?”

  Ava and Henry watched the little dancers run through their jetés and frustrated leaps across the room. Miss Parsons’s slicked-back brown hair was clasped into a neat bun at the base of her neck. She was very young and full of the zeal of the young. Marking time with claps to the music, pointing to errant feet and arms, her mouth in a grim set. Though the kids were babies, she did not smile. She would make dancers of these preschoolers and they would return to her in a few years, thank her for the hard lessons, the harsh instructions that had seemed angry at the time but now felt necessary. They would all name her as their inspiration. She clapped her hands, the signal for the kids to surround her.

  “I’ve got an Atari for the kids,” Ava said.

  “Atari. Where did you find that, Goodwill?”

  “No, they make new ones now. Everything comes back if you wait long enough,” Ava said. Ava almost told Henry to bring Zeke to her house to play. She could feel the words forming in her mouth, but she couldn’t yet say them. Maybe in time.

  “How long have we been here, a week? Is it Sunday yet?” Henry whined.

  Ava laughed. “It’s almost over.”

  “You know, I didn’t used to think that black people did this.” Ava turned to look full-face at Henry.

  “Did what?” Henry said.

  “Spoke to each other after they hate each other.” Ava half-smiled.

  “Me neither, tell you the truth.”

  “I thought it was like if I wanted to talk to you, ever, I would have stayed married to you.” Ava laughed.

  “Well, we don’t have to be what everybody else is,” Henry said. “I think we’ve proved that enough times.”

  Henry had begun calling her every couple weeks and Ava looked forward to talking to him. She even let him talk to her children. He asked them stupid questions like did they drive, did they work? did they know how to plow a field? Ava wanted to talk to Henry. She couldn’t remember when she’d wanted to talk to him while they lived together. For a couple of fleeting moments she had considered taking him back into her home and her life, but the simple truth was he had killed that part of her. She didn’t want him. Lana was right. She’d been lucky or at least lucky enough. Maybe she would welcome another man into her life when the time came, but right now, too much had happened that could not be overcome. She felt peace. Her mother had asked her if her heart was healed with her babies in the house. “What is dead is dead, Mama, not gone. But I’m like you, the part that keeps on living, lives large.”

  “Did you hear Plant Four is closing this summer?”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Henry said, but the news sucker punched him. Both his parents had spent years pacing that concrete floor imagining that life might be lived differently behind a desk or at a job with clean, unstained clothes. He had spent his young adulthood there himself. Good lord how he had hated it, and every single day he felt the fist clench of his shrinking soul contract a little tighter in his gut when he knew he had to punch that clock. What a disappointment that the place, even the death of it, could still move him. He was glad he wasn’t in town to see it happen.

  “You look sad. Are you sad about it?” Ava said, an incredulous look on her face.

  Henry shrugged away the tears that threatened his face. “Hey, I was young the
re.”

  Ava squeezed his hand. The children stood in a line and waited for the teacher to adjust their posture. They were supposed to keep the bowl of their pelvis straight not tilted.

  “Keep the milk in the bowl,” Miss Parsons said.

  “Stop fidgeting. It only seems like a long time. Wait until the recital,” Ava said.

  “I’m busy recital day,” Henry said.

  “You’re coming,” Ava said.

  The house on Development Drive was full of sounds and movement and people, again. Devon’s room made the perfect space for toys and two small beds. How could she have ever wanted otherwise? What will she do when they want separate rooms? They will have to cross that bridge later. Ava had insisted that her father come around. Children need old people, even trifling run-down old people like Don Ross. We all enter the story too late, and old people can tell us what they know about the past, at least some of it, at least the important stuff. Thank God the old tell it slant so the jagged edges don’t kill the babies. That’s what family does, sanitize the filthy or at least dust it off, give it to us in bite-size morsels. Sylvia didn’t seem to mind him anymore. It occurred to Ava maybe for the first time that her mother loved her father. Not loved, loves. There had never been a past tense. Her good mama had loved wrong, but not for nothing. They say that life can give you another chance, but don’t believe it. You choose to find another chance. Either way, don’t strike out for the territory, there is no undiscovered country.

  The children knew to walk, not run to collect their bags and shoes. Ava stood up to gather them, to say the warm things, to encourage and envelop.

  “Was Simmy’s already closed when you left?”

  “Oh yeah, I was here.”

  “The time runs together, I can’t remember anything,” Ava said. She missed the sloppy king burger, but she was glad her children would not ever remember seeing it on the landscape of the town, would never even know the place existed. One day she would tell secondhand stories her mother had told her, and her children would listen to them with skepticism and wonder at the unbelievable bad old days. Or maybe if there was mercy, they would shrug off the terrible old news, shift their eyes to their own bright futures, the past as indecipherable and finally over.

  “I thought Jay might be here,” Henry said.

  “We see him a good bit, but he travels. His house still hasn’t sold. A house that big will sit for a while. Not many people are working around here.”

  “The Google people will buy it. They must have some money,” Henry said.

  “It’s a hike to there, but maybe,” Ava said, but she hoped not. She’d hoped a local person, a local black person, might live there after all.

  “I know you love him,” Henry whispered. “I know you do. You deserve it, baby.”

  The last time Ava went to Jay’s house was to see the completed deck. “Somebody will buy this house just for the view,” Ava had told Jay. And many would have if they could. Group after group came through the oversized doors, remarked on the fireplaces, the glorious view, the winding secluded road. Only one couple had been serious enough to put in an offer, but they’d been unable to get bank financing. Jay hadn’t seemed to be crushed by it the way she thought he would be. He worked in his garage when he was at home, and slept in his bed. Houses come and go, he’d said. But both Ava and Jay had understood that what had lived between them, years ago and then for a few days in that house on Brushy Mountain Road, would not be revived.

  And, though Ava would see Jay often and talk to him on the phone even more frequently, Jay was not a live presence in her mind. He was not insinuated into her memories or her dreams, and he lived only in the spaces where he had actually moved and existed with her. If Ava were being entirely honest, even some of those honest memories of him were now leaving her, sloughing off in her brain and becoming unstable, their half-lives not even as long as her trek into middle age. The tragedy of that was almost too much to bear. A whole swath of feeling, entire departments of her brain had gone to knowing, loving, and missing JJ Ferguson. He was a past with a name. This is what it all amounts to, all that feeling a footnote, a relic of a bygone time and mind. But gone too was the shame, the hurt and embarrassment of acting without knowing enough, acting without being sure enough. But there is mercy. Jay was one of the few friends she’d ever made. He loved her. She would love him as long as she lived. There is mercy.

  Ava paused and watched May help her brother put on his jacket. She had to remember to tell her what a kind girl she was to help. She would remember to tell May that someone would be there to help her too. She’d asked herself how she felt about Jay many times. She’d even considered going back to him, letting him transform from the person of her youth, her best friend and witness to her pain. But her feelings for him had fossilized and though she didn’t know if Jay could believe it now, his feelings for her were trapped in amber too. That didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. Love was too small a word for how she felt about him. But her feelings for Jay would not grow—not then and not now.

  “I don’t love him in the way he wants, Henry. I never did,” Ava said. “But you know as well as I do.” Ava paused and put her arm around Henry’s back. She was close to him now, their faces almost touching. Kinky gray whiskers sprouted out from his chin that she didn’t have to touch to know were stiff and would be hurtful if scrubbed against her own face. But his laugh lines, like large parenthesis surrounding his mouth! Black might not crack, but given time would fold. She almost ran her finger in the shallow gullies of Henry’s face. She and Henry were the same age. What she felt next to him was exhilaration, a gratefulness that threatened to make her weepy. They had made it and despite everything she would always love Henry too. “You know, love isn’t a cold, Henry. You don’t just get over it.”

  41

  The day Frank Ferguson showed up at her house, Sylvia was expecting him. Not really him, but a nasty wind, some bad luck. They say bad omens, bad signs, bad luck comes in threes. Don’t believe that. But be sure if you are feeling okay, if the world is off your back, even for a minute, you have forgotten something. At least that was how it felt to Sylvia most days. Jay’s father, Frank, showing up was just the very bad penny she’d missed.

  A thin man stepped out of a car, with a head full of hair combed up in a stiff Afro, like he’d stepped off the set of bad seventies TV, looking more out of place than if he’d had no hair at all. He was clean-looking at least, but ragged, like life had taken a distinct dislike to him. His clothes were too big, probably borrowed or thrift store. His mouth was sunken in from the loss of many if not all of his teeth. Even with all those differences, Sylvia knew without question that this man was Jay’s father.

  Sylvia walked outside her house. She had moved the few boxes and suitcases of her belongings and dismal wardrobe back to her home and turned in the key to her apartment. She would never have to see the stark white of the anonymous walls again. She would stay in the house she had loved from the moment she saw it. There is a blessing in that.

  Her neighbor’s music was obnoxious and full of bass. He knows he’s too old for all that mess, Sylvia thought. Forrest, the music man, was not a teenager who could be forgiven or at least assumed unknowing, but a fifty-eight-year-old doing some lazy man’s gardening pulling weeds from his seated position in his lawn chair.

  “Sylvia, how you living,” Forrest called out.

  “I’m okay, Forrest. Are you?”

  “I can’t complain. Doing a little yard work. Mostly sitting. You let me know if you need me,” he said. Sylvia was sure Forrest’s comment was more for the man walking up her driveway’s benefit than hers.

  Frank approached Sylvia with his arm outstretched to shake her hand, hurried to meet her in the middle of the driveway.

  “How you doing, ma’am? You must be Mrs. Ross. I’m Frank Ferguson. They told me I could find JJ Ferguson here.”

  “You’re his daddy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The man smiled, he
might have four teeth still remaining.

  “He left. I don’t think he’s even in town anymore.”

  “I went by his house. Any idea where he is?”

  Sylvia knew that JJ had driven to the beach for a few days, but she didn’t want to tell Frank that. “He’s selling his house. That’s about all I know.”

  “Never thought one of mine could do something like that.” Frank rubbed his face. He needed a shave, which made him look down on his luck, poor.

  “Do something like what?” Sylvia asked.

  “Anything really.” Frank laughed. “You always get told the apple don’t fall far. You pray that’s not true, you know it?”

  Sylvia paused. She wasn’t prepared to feel badly for Frank. She wasn’t going to. “He’s a good boy. You would be proud of him.”

  “I am proud.”

  “I can give him your phone number when he calls.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. I don’t have no phone, ma’am.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Not really. Not a permanent one.”