Sarah rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“No, really, I don’t.”
It was hard sharing a body with her dead brother’s soul. What had happened to Geo had broken him. Not just his body, but his spirit. Being murdered had fractured his soul, so that he was little like the brother Ava had known. He was always scared, and Ava often had the feeling now of being consumed with fear. The fear often came upon her without warning, so that she might be buying something at a little store and jump at the sound of the bell as the door opened. Or she might be walking down the street, on her way home from school, trying to ignore the evil looks being hurled at her by the Brown sisters from their porch, and the sound of a car horn would frighten her almost to tears. A few weeks after Geo’s death, at the dinner table, Sarah dropped her fork onto her empty plate, and the clang caused Ava to scream.
Over weeks, Geo’s soul became less easily frightened, but in place of that panic came a solid disinterest in the world and the people in it. Ellen and Jack Duggard, and Rudy Lucas, were the only friends she still had, the only kids whose parents would let them go near her, but she felt less excited to see them now, less eager to spend with them the long summer days that came.
Ava’s own soul was hard-pressed to hold up under the weight of the busted-up soul of her brother. Painting helped. In the months that followed Geo’s murder, she painted endlessly, spent every dollar her parents gave her for school supplies or clothes or toiletries on canvas and brushes and paints. At first, she painted abstracts. Colors and shapes that seemed to represent the things she was feeling, the bewilderment, the unsteadiness. But soon that wasn’t enough, and she began to paint what was happening around her, as horrible as it all was. She painted her mother in bed, with dry, cracked lips and an empty look in her eyes that seemed to beg death to take her, too. She painted her father, his shoulders rigid with grief. She painted Sarah surrounded by the dishes she was always washing, and the broom she was always pushing around the floors. Finally, she started painting herself, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, other times with her full lips pursed as if trying to decide whether to laugh or cry, often naked with unkempt hair, and always with smoldering fire in her dark eyes. She filled the house with art. Her father and grandmother, the latter having gotten on a train from Georgia within two hours of receiving the phone call telling her that her only grandson was dead, complained about what they called the disturbing pictures of Regina, and hollered about the naked ones of Ava, demanding she stop hanging them above the mantel and in the foyer and everywhere else all over the house. Mother Haley was scandalized when Miss Maddy came by to drop off a pecan pie for Regina, hoping her favorite dessert would get her eating, and caught sight of a painting of Ava, naked and brown as a raw pecan, with hard nipples and wiry pubic hair and a fire like the devil in her eyes, holding a huge paintbrush that dripped dark red paint down her hand and arm. Maddy had gasped when she saw it, her eyes wide. Mesmerized, she did not look away until Mother Haley said, in her best normal voice, “Come on bring that pie into the kitchen, Maddy.”
Later, Mother Haley screamed at Ava. “Stop hanging those filthy pictures all over this house! You trying to get rid of the last little bit of friends y’all got around here?”
By then, nearly everyone on the block had turned against them. The fact that nobody seemed to know anything about the murders, that there seemed to be no reason for them, reinforced the idea that it had been the Lord raining down a judgment on Ava, and poor, innocent Kenny getting caught in the torrent.
Ava didn’t care what their neighbors thought, not even Miss Maddy, who, along with Miss Lucas, were the only people who still called themselves friends of her family. She looked at her grandmother with disinterest from her seat in front of her easel, where she was painting her father with wood-like skin. “This aint your house, Grandma. This is my mother’s house. If she wants me to stop hanging my art, then I will.”
“Regina don’t know what day it is, let alone what’s hanging on the walls!”
Ava shrugged. “Well, then.”
“It’s your father’s house,” Mother Haley said. “And he don’t like them, either!”
Her father came later. Ava was surprised by his calm voice and demeanor. “Can’t you just stop hanging them where everybody can see them?”
“It’s art, Daddy. It’s supposed to be seen.”
“People don’t like walking into a house and seeing the family’s thirteen year-old daughter sprawled naked everywhere they turn.” His calm had gone, and he was hollering, his hands balled up in fists at his side. “Now, I’m not going to tell you again to stop it!”
Ava didn’t stop painting the pictures, but she did stop hanging them where the very few people who came by could see them. She hung them all over her bedroom, until no sliver of the pink and green wallpaper could be seen underneath. When she ran out of places to hang her paintings, she started stacking them in the corners of the bedroom. Seeing herself, seeing herself everywhere she looked, helped her to remember who she was when Geo’s broken soul surged up within her and pushed aside her own self. When she felt the fear and anxiety she knew was his, she quickly turned to see herself, and the fear subsided, and her own emotions returned. When she was away from home, and not able to get to a painting of herself quickly enough, she would look for her reflection in any shiny surface, and that often worked, but not as well. When she couldn’t see herself at all, Geo’s feelings would overwhelm her, and his fear and anxiety would become real for Ava, even though it was connected to nothing.
It became a slow battle. Over time the paintings helped less and less. Geo’s fear was otherwordly and Ava began to weaken beneath it. Lost in their own grief and guilt, no one in the family noticed, except Mother Haley, who liked the change and said nothing.
1976
Ava dreamed she was walking with Kenny Goode. They were on a dark street that seemed to go on forever ahead of them, streetlights glowing far into the distance.
“Where’s this party, anyway?” Kenny asked her.
“Wanda’s,” she said, in a voice that was not her own.
Kenny laughed. “You still trying to get in that girl’s pants?”
Ava laughed, too. “I’m trying to get wherever she’s gone let me get.”
They skipped ahead in time, and suddenly they were farther down the street. Somebody called out to Ava from behind. “Hey, Geo!” Ava turned, and saw Sondra and Lamar coming up the street. She kept walking, Kenny close at her side. “Geo!” Lamar called again. “I know you hear me, nigger!”
“Let’s just keep going, Geo,” Kenny said. “You know Sondra and Lamar always want to start something.”
Ava was afraid. She put her hands in the pockets of her jeans so Kenny wouldn’t see them shaking. She quickened her pace, and Kenny followed suit. Ahead of them, a large white dog ran across the sidewalk, disappeared behind parked cars. Time skipped ahead again, and Ava and Kenny were coming up beside the church. Kenny grabbed her arm and pulled her into the alley behind it. They hurried down the narrow passageway, at the end of which there was a bright light. Behind them they heard Sondra yell, “There they go!” and suddenly there were footsteps running toward them. They ran toward the light, into it, and came out behind the church. Sondra and Lamar were there waiting for them.
“Yo, man, why you running?” Lamar grabbed Ava’s arm and she jerked away from him.
“What you want, Lamar?” Kenny asked.
Lamar pushed him. “Shut up, preacher boy. Aint nobody talking to you.”
Sondra looked at Ava. “Where your sister at?”
Ava didn’t say anything. Inside her pockets, her hands were still shaking. She clenched her fists and willed them to stop. She didn’t want them to see that she was afraid.
Sondra got up in her face. “I asked you where Ava at.”
There was a flash of light, and Lamar was behind her, holding a knife to her throat.
Kenny said, “We don’t want no static w
ith y’all.”
“Didn’t we tell you to shut the hell up?” Sondra said.
Ava elbowed Lamar in the gut and he groaned and stumbled back, dropped the knife on the ground. She lunged at him, swinging, but he ducked and punched her in the kidneys. Sondra ran up and hit her hard in the face, and she fell against the back wall of the church. They kept coming. A searing pain ripped through her ribs, then her gut, then her side. Another hard blow to the face whipped her head around, slamming it into the wall, and the night turned red before her eyes.
She awoke to the taste of blood in her mouth, Geo’s blood, and she winced in pain and shock and sat up in the bed. In a moment the blood-taste was gone. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, tried to get her bearings in the dark room. Her head was spinning; the faces of Sondra and Lamar blinking in and out like images in a broken viewfinder. Fear and dread came over her. She knew that they were both gone, past hurting her or anyone else. Lamar was on death row out in Kentucky somewhere. Her mother had read about it in the paper more than a year ago. And Sondra was already dead, succumbed to some kind of cancer before she was thirty. They’d heard the screaming from next door when the news had come, Miss Doris in hysterics. Nevertheless, a sense of alarm took hold of her, and seemed to move around like a live thing in the dark room. Ava blinked, and saw, standing in the doorway, a dark silhouette. “Geo?” she whispered.
He looked small in the light coming in through the window, diminished in the darkness. The pain coming from him was palpable. It hummed in the air. He did not move or speak. Ava sat up in the bed. He took a step forward and she saw that he was not her brother. She reached over and shook Helena awake.
“What is it?” Helena asked, groggy.
“My husband is here,” Ava said.
Helena flicked on the lamp by the bed and everything came into the light. Paul looked from his wife to his sister, his face so mangled with pain and rage it was like a mask, nearly unrecognizable.
“Paul,” Helena said, “You came back.”
Paul looked at his sister. “That’s my wife,” he said. “That’s my wife.”
Helena got out of the bed.
“That preacher was right about you,” Paul said. “It’s bad enough what you did to some teacher’s husband down in Baltimore, but you’d do the same to your own brother? You some kind of animal that can’t control itself? Or maybe you just like hurting people.”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not…we’re not…” She couldn’t even get the words out. “We were sleeping.”
“Since when y’all sleep in the same bed?”
Ava got up and took a few steps toward him. “I’m going to tell you the truth, Paul.”
“Ava,” Helena said. “Don’t.”
Paul laughed. “I think I already heard more truth today than I can handle. I don’t need to hear no more. I can see for myself.” He pointed at Helena. “I guess I aint surprised that she would do this. But why would you, Ava? This aint you.”
“It is me,” she said.
He peered at her. “Wasn’t I good to you?”
She nodded.
“But it wasn’t enough?”
“Paul, this is not about you being enough or not enough,” she said. “I know this is hard to understand, but you were never married to me. I wasn’t there.”
He shook his head. “That aint true. Where you getting this crazy shit from? You aint been yourself this last week or so. You been going crazy or something, Ava. But it don’t matter. ‘Cause I still love you.”
“I don’t love you,” she said. “I never loved you, Paul.”
For a moment, everything stopped. No one spoke or moved, or breathed. Just as it hit Ava that she should take that back, say that some different way, she saw the look in Paul’s eyes and knew it was too late. He lunged towards her, and past her, crossing the room in one bound and grabbing Helena by the throat. He pushed her down on the bed and crouched over her, his thick hands squeezing her windpipe as she clawed at him, struggling for breath. Ava wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to pull him off. Paul took one hand off Helena’s throat to push Ava off, and Helena was able to get half a breath, and with it the strength to hit Paul across the face, stunning him for a second, long enough to get loose from his grip and push him off her onto the floor. Ava reached for Helena, and together they tried to get past Paul, hurrying towards the door, but Paul reached out and grabbed Ava’s ankle and she fell face first onto the floor. Now his hands were around Ava’s throat, squeezing. She struggled to fight him off, clawing at his hands and face. His eyes were blank and empty as he looked down at her. “Why did you have to come here?” he said, through clenched teeth, and she knew that in his rage he did not realize it was her that he was choking. Helena was on his back, trying to pry him off of Ava, but he was too strong in his fury. Ava felt her herself losing consciousness. A hush fell. Her lungs burned. Greens and yellows and, especially, reds, appeared before her eyes. She thought of her brother, and she wondered if it had been like this for him, in that last moment: quiet and bursting with color.
***
This time Ava knew she was dead. She was standing alone in the foyer of the Delaney house and the hum of her brother’s presence was so palpable that she thought she could reach out and touch him.
Geo?
He appeared suddenly in the doorway to the dining room. He looked small, not at all like the tall, broad boy she thought she remembered. He looked at her with eyes like pools of oil, shiny and dark and wet. His voice came out in a whisper. They killed me because of you, Ava.
I know, she said.
He came into the middle of the foyer and sat down on the floor beside her feet, cross-legged, and stared up at her. You too wild, he said. You too much.
She sat down beside him. Up close, he looked more like the brother she had known, round-faced, his thick hair like a swatch of wool on his head. She reached up and touched it, and it felt just the same as it used to. You’ve been here with me all this time, she said.
He nodded. Looking out for you like I always did. Keeping you from being wild. From being too much. So they won’t kill you.
You made me talk to the pastor. That was you.
She need to leave here, he said. She making you too much again.
Ava sighed, and shook her head. You have to go, Geo. You have to let me be.
I protect you.
I don’t need your protection. I don’t want it.
They’ll kill you if you too much.
They’re gone. They’re dead and gone. They can’t hurt me.
Not them.
Who, then?
He leaned close to her and whispered. Everybody.
She sighed a long sigh. I would rather die than lose myself again.
He stared at her. His whole self trembled.
Go, she said. Rest.
Rest? He looked comforted by the idea.
Ava stood up and reached out her hand to him. Geo hesitated, then took her hand and let her help him up off the floor. He stared into her face, his eyes searching hers. Don’t be mad at me.
She shook her head. No.
Be careful.
Yes.
He turned and started walking away, towards the back of the house.
Geo.
He stopped, looked back at her.
Thank you.
He came back, put his arms around her. She could feel all the weight of him, and she held him tight and close, buried her face in his chest, smelled the butterscotch he always ate, breathed it in, filled up her lungs with it. In another moment, he turned out of her embrace, and was gone.
***
Paul was crouched in a corner of the bedroom he had shared with Ava for the last four years. He was down on his knees, staring at his wife’s lifeless body on the floor. He didn’t understand what was happening, how he’d got there. He watched Helena, who was kneeling over Ava, her mouth pressed against hers, blowing breath into her body. Paul tried to put it all together, but only
pieces, fragmented things, occurred to him. He had been coming home. Goode had been talking crazy to him out in the street. And then his hands had been at Ava’s throat, squeezing the life out of her. He shook his head, hard, tried to clear away the fog that clung to his brain. “Ava,” he called. She did not answer.
Helena’s hands were shaking. Her lips trembled on Ava’s lips.
“Please, God,” Paul whispered. “Not again.” He dropped his face into his hands and screamed.
The first thing Ava heard when she woke up was Paul’s screaming, but the first thing she saw was Helena’s face, looking down at her, tear-stained and determined, her mouth so close that the first breath Ava inhaled was hers. The trace of a smile crossed her lips as she thought to herself that it was Helena, again, who was bringing her back to life.
***
In the first hours after Geo left, Ava felt a deep and heavy sense of loneliness, and the anguish that had eluded her seventeen years before, when she saw him dead and broken on the ground, finally came. All through the night she cried, let herself be lost a while in grief and sorrow, and anger. She cursed the names of Sondra Liddy and Lamar Casey, but even in her pain she knew it was a waste of energy. They were dead and gone, and there was nothing to be done about them now. Still, she cried. Cried alone, like a sick dog, shut up in her room, growling at anyone who came near.
During a lull in her wailing, Paul came into the room, said something about being sorry and that he was leaving and that he hoped she didn’t hate him. Weeks later she would tell him that she didn’t, and that she was sorry, too. When he left, she saw, through the open bedroom door, her family, standing in the hallway, looking anxious and protective, even Sarah.
She fell asleep crying and dreamed of nothing. When she awoke it was morning, and the room was hot, the sun streaming heavy and lush through the window. The loneliness had gone, and in its place she felt complete. Her first thought was of Helena, and she got out of bed and hurried down the hallway, and burst into Sarah’s room. Sarah sat up in her bed, and squinted at her through tired eyes.
The Summer We Got Free Page 31