The Turner House

by Angela Flournoy

  Brianne swiped at a tear with the back of her hand.

  “So Rob’s gonna take care of you? After all this time of him not doing enough. You’re just gonna throw away the work you’ve done by yourself and go lay up under some man? You know I did that with your father, and it didn’t work. I was trapped cause I wasn’t makin my own money. No, me and you were trapped down there, Brianne. He beat the shit out of me and if it wasn’t for Cha-Cha comin to pick us up maybe he would’ve killed us, or I’d have killed him. That’s what layin up under a man gets you.”

  Lelah realized she was yelling because Bobbie startled awake. He looked over to his mother, saw the tears in her eyes, and began crying too. Brianne reached across the table and took him out of Lelah’s arms. Lelah had never told Brianne about Vernon hitting her, about the long hours of night when she sat in a corner of the living room with Brianne on her lap, with her right eye swollen shut and her lip split open, waiting for Cha-Cha to arrive. Terrified that Vernon would come back from wherever he’d gone. She always just told her that things had not worked out, and she’d forbidden her siblings from contradicting her. She had planned to tell Brianne the truth just as soon as she could tell the story and not feel the old terror and rage. That day had never come.

  “You should go,” Brianne said. It was nearly inaudible, but she got it out.

  “Leave? What about Bobbie?”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Brianne said.

  Lelah looked around the room for something, anything that might help her salvage her case.

  “Come on now, Brianne. I didn’t mean to shout, but there’s no reason I can’t watch him today. You gotta go to work. I’m not saying Rob is like Vernon, I just—”

  She watched her daughter move to the front door and hold it open for her. On the TV Donnie rode a miniature fire truck around a playground. A euphoric smile spread across his face.

  “I need you to go,” Brianne said. “Right now.”

  So Lelah went.

  Brave, or at Least Brash

  Cha-Cha dreamed of Alice. In that fancy bed, next to his wife and following their failed attempt at sex, he dreamed of her, and for the first time in a week he looked poised to sleep through the night. It wasn’t quite a sex dream, but it produced a similar effect when he awoke. He dreamed of stop-motion glimpses of her, first behind her desk as usual, her hair gathered up in that halo style from his last visit, her arms bare. Then she was sitting on the mauve fainting couch, still clothed, a coquettish smile on her lips. Another moment saw her reclining on the couch in a lavender negligee, one of those lacy, strappy getups that Cha-Cha found enticing in catalogs but cumbersome in real life. Just as he registered his own hands extending toward the brown expanse of Alice’s hips, he snapped awake. The windowsill was aglow.

  He remembered Lonnie’s advice, to try to talk to it.

  “Hello?” he tried. “What do you want?” He felt ridiculous. He took himself too seriously to talk to a blob on the wall.

  He nudged Tina. She didn’t move. He shoved her, perhaps too hard, but she only mumbled, “Uh-huh, right there on the counter,” and rolled over. Cha-Cha let her sleep. He lay there on his back, his eyes trained on his haint, and pondered his dream, his post-dream erection, and what it all might mean. It frustrated him that even in his dreams he could only limn the line of infidelity, could only imagine a PG-13 encounter with Alice. He always let himself down in this way. His entire life might have been different if he’d figured out a way to be braver, or at least brasher. He might have made more money, garnered more respect. In the late eighties a couple of black truckers Cha-Cha knew from the union had approached him about starting their own company, buying a few trucks and contracting out service. It had seemed very risky to Cha-Cha back then, but now he couldn’t recall why. His boys were both nearly grown, and the small-business loan required was modest. It must have been that Francis was already sick, and Cha-Cha had felt his impending role as patriarch required stability. Two decades later, before gas prices went crazy and work disappeared, those black truckers sold their business for an admirable profit, and Cha-Cha was still a Chrysler peon. The same quality that read as dependable and even-keeled in his youth had crusted over and become stubborn and pitiable. Tina pitied him, and Alice likely did, too. Well, he thought, there might be time yet to change one of their opinions. He rolled over so that he no longer faced the haint. Instead he lay face-to-face with his wife. She slept with both hands tucked under her cheek, as if in prayer.

  Around six-thirty Tina woke up, dressed, and looked in on Viola. Cha-Cha remained in bed, feigning sleep. At seven-fifteen he heard the doorbell ring and the booming voice of Andrew, the young Lebanese man who worked for the medical transport service Cha-Cha hired to take Viola to her physical therapy and hospital visits. He heard Andrew explaining things to Viola—“I’m going to count to THREE, then lift you UP”—in the loud voice young people who feared the elderly used. A single squeak from Viola’s wheelchair, a front-door slam, and they were gone.

  In the car outside of Alice’s office Cha-Cha had second thoughts. It was true that this was his regularly scheduled session time, but had his episode last week canceled it? Alice might have given his time slot away. And then there was the more nerve-racking issue of what he’d say. He’d decided this morning to chance it, tell Alice how he felt about her and see what came of it. An easy enough plan, but how to execute it? He’d always valued romantic stability—knowing where his sex and his meals would come from—over the thrill of someone new and the anxiety of living a lie. In this respect he differed from his brothers. Of the seven Turner boys, four had outside children they claimed, and there were always jokes and jabs about other children out there, waiting to be brought into the ever-fattening fold. No one called these children illegitimate, and none of their fathers ever denied patronage (at least not after DNA tests), but they were living, lovable proof of the weaknesses of the Turner man. Cha-Cha had never felt so weak before.

  “Charles, I wasn’t expecting you,” Alice said.

  But was that the truth? She stood in her office doorway looking more put-together than usual. Her eyebrows, often unruly, were regulated by some sort of makeup pencil, or maybe she had plucked them. She wore a sleeveless blouse and for the first time ever a skirt, a black and white polka-dotted one that stopped just below the knee. Her legs looked freshly shaved and well greased. To Cha-Cha, everything about her appearance suggested extra, premeditated effort.

  “I’ve unfortunately scheduled this hour for some errands I need to run,” she continued. “But you’re welcome to walk out with me.”

  The girl behind the counter looked as surprised and suspicious as Cha-Cha felt. He gathered himself up from his chair and followed Alice into the hallway.

  Once out of earshot of the receptionist, Alice spoke.

  “I don’t have any errands to run right now, Charles, I just thought we might need to talk outside of my office. I didn’t think you’d show up for your appointment, but I’m glad you did. Would you like to get coffee?”

  “Coffee,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Great,” Alice said. “There’s a shop right on Grand River and Farmington; I’ll drive myself and meet you there.”

  “Okay.”

  This could be either the beginning of something new for them or the end of everything, Cha-Cha realized. Alice busied herself with her phone as they waited for the elevator, only looking up at him once. She pretended this was normal, what they were doing, that he wasn’t a patient but a colleague, perhaps, that getting coffee wasn’t a new and interesting activity within the scope of their relationship.

  But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with his heart. Trusty, pragmatic Matthew. The sin was already in motion, Cha-Cha reasoned, so he might as well see it through.

  They stepped into the empty elevator, bringing their awkward silence with them. Cha-Cha wanted to start the conversation immediately, get his apology out of t
he way, but it seemed Alice wanted to wait until they were out of her building to say anything. She smelled like citrusy perfume—another first, Cha-Cha observed. He leaned forward with one hand extended toward Alice’s face, the other supporting him on his cane.

  In movies, it always seems easy enough to kiss a woman, even if she doesn’t really want to be kissed. The heroine will stand there and take the leading man’s advance—eyes wide open if she doesn’t want it, eyes closed if she does. Reality is more complicated.

  Cha-Cha leaned in to kiss Alice, and because he’d closed his eyes he couldn’t see the shock and confusion in hers, nor did he feel her duck out of kissing range. His lips grazed her forehead. She tasted like salt.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Shit,” Cha-Cha said. If he could have pushed a button to eject himself from the elevator and into oblivion, he would have.

  The door opened on the first floor and Cha-Cha followed Alice out. She walked briskly through the main lobby. Cha-Cha wondered if she was running away from him, if he was chasing her. He slowed. Alice slowed as well, waited for him by the door.

  On the curb outside, Cha-Cha said he was sorry, although he didn’t feel sorry. Alice shook her head quickly, like a child shaking water out of her ear.

  “You were confused. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. The coffee shop is on Farmington and Grand River,” she said.

  There would be no affair. How had he ever thought otherwise? He now feared he’d ruined their relationship for good. What had he thought—that she’d accept his kiss right there in her office elevator, then retire with him to the back of his SUV and they’d get it on? He hadn’t thought, was the problem. He’d tried to be brash and ended up looking like a creepy old man.

  Inside the coffee shop Alice had her drink in hand and was prowling around for a place to sit. It was one of those tiny, over-furnished places where the unemployed and entrepreneurial set up camp for the day. Alice poached two facing armchairs near a fake fireplace. Cha-Cha wasn’t supposed to drink coffee anymore, so he joined her without ordering anything.

  “Look, Alice,” he said. “I don’t know why I did that in the elevator. I haven’t been sleeping—”

  Alice shook her head.

  “We don’t have to talk about that, Charles. I’d prefer very much that we didn’t.”

  She spoke quickly, not waiting for him to agree.

  “Obviously our conversation last week ended very badly. You don’t have to apologize, because we both said the wrong things.”

  “I do have to apologize,” Cha-Cha said. “It was out of line for me to bring up your parents. And I never should have yelled.”

  “But I understand your frustration,” Alice said. “I undid months of trust and sharing on your part in fifteen minutes. It wasn’t entirely professional, and you deserve better than that.”

  “Thank you,” Cha-Cha said. He couldn’t fully commit to the conversation; his brain was busy replaying his kiss attempt over and over.

  “I’ve been talking to my own therapist, who is also my mentor,” Alice said. “And we think it’s best for both you and me if I stop being your therapist.”

  “Oh,” Cha-Cha said. “I see.” He had no way of knowing whether she was happy or sad to be cutting him off.

  “And I’ve decided it would be best to explain a little bit about why I handled things between us the way I did. You do deserve an explanation, Charles, because the way I’ve behaved is particular to you.”

  “What is particular, Alice? The friendship we’ve created? Or all of the flip-flopping you did about my haint?”

  Alice frowned. Her fingers fluttered with no desk full of pens to distract them.

  “Both, I suppose,” she said. She took a long drink of her coffee. “I wanted to know more about you, so I deliberately broke my own protocol in regards to several things, the haint just being the most glaring example.”

  Cha-Cha reasoned that his first suspicions about her must have been true; she’d used him for a little cultural voyeurism, some risk-free socioeconomic slumming.

  “But I wasn’t interested in you because my parents are white,” Alice added. “This is Detroit, after all, Charles, and I’m an adult. I know black people. It didn’t have to do with you being black, but it did have something to do with your background. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate what exactly it was had it not been for the conversations I’ve had with Gus.”

  “What was it then?” Cha-Cha asked. “I’m not that interesting.”

  The truth, when finally revealed, is sticky like wet dough. The majority of it stays in place as one handles it, but pieces break off and adhere, making certain facts seem larger, more portentous, than others. Alice told a story that was more than Cha-Cha imagined hearing from her, a story that made him look at their entire history differently.

  Over a decade earlier, at thirty-one years of age, Alice discovered she had uterine fibroids. Despite the best efforts of doctors to minimize these growths and even an operation to remove them, they persisted, large and painful inside of her. Her doctors determined that a hysterectomy was the only viable option to ensure her health. Faced with the reality of barrenness, Alice developed a desire to learn more about her birth parents. She wanted to know whose genes she’d inherited, whether she had siblings out there in the world, and what other conditions crouched in her DNA, waiting to incapacitate her at a later date. Alice knew that her adoptive parents, the ones Cha-Cha had seen online, had been Freedom Riders in the sixties, and that after many visits and considerable bureaucratic rigmarole they’d adopted her from a small orphanage in Mississippi. Throughout her twenties that explanation sufficed, but now that Alice needed to know more, additional information proved elusive. After weeks of correspondence with county clerks, records officials in Jackson, and even a few priests, Alice learned that she’d been the youngest of seven children, and that all of them died shortly after she was born.

  “No one over the phone or through the mail would tell me how they died,” Alice said. “So I took a trip down there and started asking around. I questioned people at the grocery store and after church in the town where I was born. A lot of the older people remembered my family, but were cagey about what had happened to them. I eventually got the number for the retired county clerk’s house and called her.”

  She met the elderly woman for lunch at a nearby Cracker Barrel. The woman told her that at the time of their deaths, the eldest of Alice’s siblings, a boy, had been fifteen years old, and the youngest, a girl, had been two. The retired clerk also seemed hesitant to go into the details of her siblings’ deaths, but Alice pressed her.

  “They died in a car accident,” Alice told Cha-Cha. “The car spun out of control on a bridge and ended up in a lake. Everybody but my birth father and me was inside, and for whatever reason, my birth father eventually dropped me off with a church lady and left town. It’s a sad story, and I was upset about it, but it didn’t explain why the whole town acted as if there was a terrible secret behind it all.”

  The secret wasn’t based on fact at all, just a mass of rumors that over time people took for truth. The retired county clerk said the eldest son had been driving on the day of the accident because Alice’s birth mother didn’t know how. There were rumors that he’d tried to run away several times before the accident, but each time he’d run out of money before he got very far and come back home, or else his father would find him, give him a good whipping, and bring him back because he needed help on the farm. The rumor was that this eldest son drove the car off the bridge on purpose, and while there was no way to substantiate it, the rumor persisted, even thirty years later.

  When Alice came back to Michigan she often found herself thinking about them. Bodies folded inside of an old car, overcome by silty lake water. She thought about this eldest son, and the possibility of so much responsibility so young making a person desperate. How feeling trapped within such a large family might affect one’s psyche. Not until years l
ater, when she met Charles Turner, eldest of thirteen and possibly prone to hallucinations, would she get an opportunity to talk to someone at the center of a similarly complex web.

  “So,” Cha-Cha said. “You humored me all this time because you wanted to know if being in charge of things for my family was making me murderous?”

  Alice winced, and he knew that despite his best effort to sound empathetic, his question had come off cruel.

  “There’s no one-to-one correlation, Charles. What matters is that I saw something in you that interested me, so I decided to perhaps not do what was best for you in pursuit of my own interest. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Every time Alice apologized, the possibility of the two of them remaining friends seemed more unlikely. She was being this honest with him because she never wanted to see him again.

  “But do you think that . . . that I’m hallucinating?”

  Alice chewed on her bottom lip. Her hand traveled up to her hair, and she raked a stray coil back into the larger formation.

  “I’m not speaking in a professional capacity—”

  “I know,” Cha-Cha said. “We’re done with all that. I just want to know what you think; I’m not going to sue you.”

  Cha-Cha felt uncomfortable in his armchair. The back was too straight and the seat wasn’t deep enough. He was aware of his belly hanging low and his knees spread too far apart.

  “Honestly, Charles, I don’t know what to tell you about the haint.”

  “I just want to know what you think, in your gut.”

  Alice took a deep breath, and her cheeks puffed out like a child’s.

  “In my gut I think you’ve always believed in this thing. And I don’t know that you want to get rid of it.”

  Cha-Cha opened his mouth, but Alice raised a hand in the air to silence him.

  “I think you have a position within your family that affords you a lot of respect but not much true friendship, or a sense of individuality. This ghost, or the memory of it, has bothered you your whole life, but it’s also made you feel extraordinary, chosen.”