by Susan Vaught
“Pulled out?” My voice sounded choked, but curiosity jerked the words out of my throat. “You didn’t get out of the car on purpose—to go get Grandma’s books?”
“Of course not.” Avadelle’s loud grumbling seemed to echo in the small space. “Do you think we were total fools? It was stupid enough, going to campus that night. We knew it was historic, Meredith coming. Maybe we just wanted to be a part of it.”
“I only got to the bloodstain and the word riot,” I admitted. “But I’m going to read the rest unless you take the book away from me.”
Avadelle shined the light into her own face, probably so I could see her glaring at me. “I know you think I’m a monster, but I don’t hit little girls, even nosy, insufferable brats like you.”
I almost said thank you, then thought better of it. Instead, I worked my foot out of the open stair and pushed the board back into place, in case I really did have to make a run for it.
“I won’t take Ruth’s journals away from you,” Avadelle said. “But since you found them, it’s just as well that I tell you what that one says, later, months later, when Ruth was able to write again.”
That shocked me back into stillness, so I sat and rubbed my scraped ankle, holding the journal and waiting.
Avadelle moved the flashlight beam to the floor, and her dark shape shifted in the stairwell as she leaned harder on the wall, like she needed the support. “Her journal says the rioters broke our car windows and pulled us out into the middle of all that mess in the Circle. My arm got cut, and I bled in Ruth’s book, but she wouldn’t put it down, and she wouldn’t give it up even when they pushed us and taunted us and tried to take it. We ran, but they caught us.”
Her voice trailed off. “Lord, but there were so many of them, and not all students. People I’d never seen in my life.”
She sounded sad, and scared, and when she went quiet, I almost couldn’t stand it. “In Night on Fire, you talked to them,” I said. “You made them think you were an Oxford town lady on campus by accident, and you shamed them into letting you go.”
“I know what that book says, girl,” Avadelle snarled. “I wrote the godforsaken thing, didn’t I?”
“So, you didn’t talk to the rioters?”
Avadelle laughed, but it sounded angry and almost hopeless. “Oh, I talked to them all right. I babbled on about running a charitable errand, and how we had just come to get books for children, and didn’t mean any harm. I told them my family was rich and could make a lot of trouble for them.” She stopped. Sniffed. Her arm moved in the semidarkness, like she was wiping her face. “I thought they’d let us go. Such a little idiot, I was.”
I waited, and I waited some more, but she went quiet, and I tried to figure out the best question to ask. My fingers twitched against Grandma’s journal, and if Avadelle meant it about not hitting kids, I could get up and push past her and read it for myself. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, though.
“They let me go,” she whispered all of a sudden, then dropped into silence again.
I worked on that statement, trying to make sense of it, to understand, and—
Oh.
“You,” I said, and I went cold inside. “They only let you go, not Grandma.”
“And God save my soul, I went,” Avadelle whispered.
I reached one hand out to the center pole and steadied myself. “You left Grandma with the mob.”
“They beat her,” Avadelle talked right over me, as if I wasn’t even there. “They left Ruth lying on the ground, clutching that book you’re holding. They left her for dead, mind you—and she probably would have been killed if she hadn’t crawled down into that steam tunnel. I don’t know if the fall broke her back, or the beating. She was down there nearly all night before somebody heard her screaming and they pulled her out.”
I tried to absorb everything she was saying, but I didn’t want to believe it. I had wanted to know so badly, but this—this, how could I even begin—
“But in Night on Fire—”
“That was a book, girl! A novel. The riot was real.”
I swallowed a few times and tried to keep my voice steady as I asked my next question. “So . . . Grandma stopped being friends with you because in the book, you made yourself a hero, but in real life you ran away and left her to get beat up and nearly die?”
Silence. Total. Not a creak or a groan or a breath.
And then another laugh from Avadelle broke the quiet into pieces. “No. That’s the worst part, don’t you see? She forgave that. Ruth said anybody with half a brain would have run—should have run—just like I did. I won’t say we were as close after that, but we tried a while longer.”
“Then what was it that stopped the friendship?”
Avadelle pulled off her fedora and shined the flashlight into it, like answers might be swimming around in all her head sweat. Some time later, she said, “After she got hurt, Ruth started writing the story of what happened to her that night. A nonfiction piece, for magazine publication, or maybe as the start of an academic paper. I launched off writing a novel instead. Fiction. I never could do truth like Ruth did, at least not on paper.”
“Did she know you were writing the novel?”
“Yes, and no. I didn’t show her the work, and she didn’t show me hers. We just talked about what we were doing, now and again. I got finished and sent my manuscript off to New York for consideration and didn’t even have to wait a month to hear from an editor.”
Now I felt confused. “It made her mad that you—what? Got your novel published before her articles?”
Avadelle kept studying that hat like it had answers. Her voice got whisper-quiet. “Ruth was furious that I wrote Night on Fire through her eyes—and changed my role in it to the hero, like you said.”
“Wait—that—I mean, so? I mean, I get the part about her being mad that you made yourself a hero. But people write stuff through other people’s eyes all the time.”
“Writing that book was Ruth’s dream. But back then, as a Black woman from Mississippi, Ruth never would have gotten a novel published.” Avadelle put her fedora back on and shifted the flashlight beam to my feet, like she might be checking my ankle to see if I had gotten hurt when I fell. “Nobody would have even read the manuscript. I took her experiences and everything she went through, and I used it for my own. Appropriation. You know that word?”
I gazed down at my ankle, at the small trickle of blood running into my shoe. Just a scratch. “I don’t, no. Sorry.”
As I said that, I cringed and waited for her to call me stupid. Instead, she said, “I stole Ruth’s story. That’s the short and long of it. Because a White woman told it instead of a Black woman, the book got published, and the world listened. That’s what Ruth couldn’t abide. It festered inside her, until she pretty well couldn’t stand the sight of me.” She paused, and her voice dropped lower. “Ruth never even tried to write her own novel about the riot, or anything else. She just got busy with her scholarly work, and told her truths with nonfiction.”
She must have taken my confused silence for judgment, because the next thing she said was, “Before you ask, we did try to talk it through. Some days, some weeks even, we’d do all right, but then something else would happen. A good review. A bestseller list. An award. Ruth watched me living her dream at her expense, and I didn’t even have the gumption to own up to it in interviews and articles.”
Avadelle let out a wheezy breath, and coughed. “I tried to sign over half the profits to her, but she refused. Said she wouldn’t take food from my babies’ mouths when they were innocents in the whole mess, and she could make her own way in life for her and hers, thank you very much. That seemed to break it, finally. Everything I did from that point, it just seemed to make things worse between us.”
“I get that,” I said, thinking about my tiny little hard times with Mac, and with my parents. Nothing up against what Avadelle and Grandma went through, at the hands of others, and between themselves, but
I understood how once something started heading south, it picked up speed on its own.
“Why haven’t you tried to explain that to the press, to anybody, since you got older?” I kept my eyes fixed on Avadelle’s shadow, alert for any sudden movements. “Is it the being-a-coward part that stops you?”
“No. My family’s scared to death it’ll hurt my income, but that’s not why either. I don’t try to explain because Ruth asked me to let it be. That, and half the world still wouldn’t understand. They might think Ruth had the wrong of it, and I know she didn’t. She loved me even though I was young and stupid and a coward. It was the thieving of her story and her dreams that she couldn’t get past.”
“I think she wants to see you,” I said. “She’s said your name over and over, and sometimes, she cries when she does it.”
Avadelle went so still I wasn’t sure she was still breathing. She stood like part of that turret wall, the flashlight focused on her fedora. The longer she stayed frozen, the more I worried she was about to really melt down, maybe fall out or finally come at me and throw me straight out a window.
“I think—I think Grandma forgives you,” I said. “Maybe that’s what she wants to tell you.”
Of all things, Avadelle chuckled. “Ruth doesn’t forgive me. She probably wants me to come by to slap me bug-eyed when I try to sit by her bedside. But that’s okay. She doesn’t owe me forgiveness. She knows I care about her anyway, just like she cares about me no matter how many rotten things I’ve done.”
All of a sudden, a big clamor broke out below us. Doors knocking open. Voices. Feet running up the steps. I heard Dr. Harper come out of his office and start calling out to whoever had come in.
Avadelle called out next, a wavering, almost tentative, “Hello?”
“Dani!” Mac called.
Indri said, “Oh, thank God.”
“Well, that’s it,” I told Avadelle. “I’m fried toast. If my friends are here, they’ve come to say good-bye before my parents kill me and bury me in Dad’s garden.”
Avadelle gave a grunt that might have been a laugh. “Just hope nobody called the police. When it’s me, people always call the police. They arrest me just for fun these days.”
It sounded like an entire herd of horses had gotten loose in Ventress Hall. Dr. Harper got to us first, and he flicked on the lights in the stairwell. When I could see again after getting used to the glare, I didn’t like the look on his flushed face. His wide eyes and open mouth made my heart beat funny, and I glanced from him to Avadelle, then to Mac and Indri, who crowded into the door behind him.
They both looked awful and sad and scared. I stood, clutching Grandma’s book, just as Ms. Wilson pushed into the stairwell. She ran up the steps past Avadelle and dropped to her knees in front of me. My fingers felt numb against the journal.
Ms. Wilson put her hands on my cheeks, making me look into her tear-streaked face. I tried to breathe, couldn’t, and felt dizzy. The white plaster walls and all the graffiti and ghosts of the past seemed to revolve in a slow, sick arc, blurring the whole world.
“Honey, I’ve got to get you over to the hospital,” Ms. Wilson said. “Your father’s had a stroke.”
23
FOR THE VERY LAST TIME
* * *
MY FIRST THOUGHT AS MS. Wilson hustled me into the intensive care room was, That’s not my father.
And then louder in my head. THAT’S NOT MY DAD!
The ride over to the hospital spun through my memory like a Ferris wheel cut loose to roll away from a fair.
Stoplights, blinkers.
Ms. Wilson staying within the speed limit but holding the steering wheel so tight her arms didn’t move.
Was Indri right? Does God get mad and punish you when you don’t keep your deals? Did all the stupid stuff I’ve ever done cancel out Dad’s luck and health?
Indri and Mac in the backseat, saying nothing at all.
Headlights from the car behind, Dr. Harper following us, with Avadelle riding shotgun.
Each time we went under a streetlight, I saw flickers of Indri’s tears and guilty expression. It’s not my dad, her eyes had told me. I’m so sorry, but it’s not my dad.
Indri and Mac didn’t come into the intensive care unit with us. They stayed outside the door with Dr. Harper and Avadelle while Ms. Wilson and I went inside.
It’s not Dad. My brain repeated what I had seen in Indri’s expression on the drive over.
My father was strong, with wooly hair and a woolier beard and big eyes and a bigger smile and so much energy he made rooms vibrate. He wore jeans and bandanas, and he smelled like gardens and spices.
This man in the white hospital gown lying on the big blue air mattress, he was motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest every time the machine next to his bed pumped and clicked. The stench of alcohol and rubber wrinkled my nose as I studied the big tube taped in his mouth, and the white squares taped to his head, and IV lines running into his arms. All his hair had been shaved, and his beard, too.
This bald, flat man couldn’t be my father. He seemed too small, and way too weak. Only, that was my mother, crying and kissing the man’s bald head, all along the awful-looking line of staples and bandages that started at his scalp and disappeared into the pillow. At the very top of his head, a metal probe stuck out of a wad of tape, like some horrible antenna.
“I should pull that out,” I said, and my voice sounded dry and cracked and like somebody else was talking. “It’s got to hurt.”
I walked forward, but Ms. Wilson held me back. I tried to pull away and she held on harder. Mom seemed to notice me then, and she let go of not Dad not Dad not Dad the man in the bed and came around to my side of the bed.
“Dani,” she whispered, but I wouldn’t look at her.
Ms. Wilson kept a tight grip on both my arms. My eyes had moved to the monitor hanging above the man’s bed. His blood pressure was sixty over thirty. Too low. His pulse—I didn’t have to take it to see it switch from thirty to twenty then shoot to one hundred and drop back to forty again. The machine showed all that to me every few seconds. His lips had a bluish color, and the machine breathing for him meant he probably couldn’t breathe right on his own.
A man in green scrubs came into the room, and I looked at him long enough to note the stethoscope and surgical mask hanging around his neck. He was bald too, but nobody had stapled a zipper into his head.
“Is this his daughter?” the man in scrubs asked.
“Yes,” my mother said in a voice too tiny to belong to a grown-up. “Dani, this is Dr. Albert.”
I glanced at him again, but my eyes went straight back to the man in the bed, and I couldn’t help mentally tracing the nose, the jawline, then looking down at his hands. Strong hands that dug and pulled and held and hugged and patted and weeded. Dirt crusted under every single fingernail—that’s excellent dirt, baby girl, I made it myself—and I knew they’d never be clean, and I knew Dad didn’t want them to be clean, because—it’s good dirt, Dani, and it means I’m working hard—that was garden dirt under his nails.
“Dad,” I whispered, and pain spiked so deep into my chest and belly that I opened my mouth and yelled without making any sound and stopped feeling like I was even wearing my own skin.
The real me floated up to the ceiling and looked down on the crowded room, where Mom held my dad’s shaved face in her hands and Ms. Wilson held my arms and the doctor said, “Dani, your father suffered a massive bleed on his brain. We tried to take the blood out, but there was too much, and it was too late.”
“We were asleep,” Mom said. “He started moving. Flailing in the bed . . . I thought it was a nightmare. . . .”
Ms. Wilson let go of me and went over to Mom. Mom leaned in to Ms. Wilson and closed her eyes. I couldn’t close mine. All I could do was stare at Dad from the ceiling it is him oh God that’s my father that’s my dad as the doctor came up with things like, catastrophic and no chance for meaningful recovery and explained how the b
ottom part of my father’s brain got crushed from all the weight on top and it was probably due to his blood pressure and maybe genetics and how he didn’t get good health care growing up and his age and possibly dehydration from working in the sun all day and everything faded in and out because none of that mattered because it’s Dad it’s Dad in that bed and he’s not moving, Dad please move please move please open your eyes and the doctor said, “Your father’s advanced directives were very clear about how we should proceed in the case of cessation of brain functions, but your mother asked us to wait until you got here.”
He gestured to the machines.
After that, he kept talking, and Mom talked, and I think I nodded or shook my head, but it was all just noise.
The click-hiss of that machine breathing for Dad took up all my awareness as it kept moving and kept moving and kept moving until click-hiss—click—
It stopped.
The doctor pulled the taped lines away from my father’s head, and took out his IVs, then took out that tube in his mouth. He even reached up and pulled out the antenna, and patted down the bandage around that spot. After he cleared everything away, the doctor stepped back and left the room.
I saw all this from way up on the ceiling, but then I dropped down from the ceiling, tumbling into my body like jumping off a high dive, but it hurt and I didn’t want to be there and my mouth tasted like throw-up please, please let me go back to the ceiling again let me just fly away I can’t do this I can’t stand this I can’t I can’t I can’t.
My eyes darted to the monitor over Dad’s head, but the doctor had switched that off too. There were no numbers. There was no light on the screen at all.
I felt like I had been turned to concrete and plastered in place, but Ms. Wilson came back to my side of the bed and gently moved me forward. She picked up my hand and put it on my father’s arm. Habit made my fingers move to his wrist, to that spot where I always checked Grandma’s pulse. All the hospice teaching came back to me then, and the pamphlets I’d read, and yes, this was it, those imminent signs I had been looking for every day, every few hours, with my dying grandmother, but no, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be Grandma. It was Grandma’s secrets I had been trying to learn, so I could help her find peace. Her, not Dad. It wasn’t supposed to be Dad who died. How could it be Dad?