The Summer We Got Free (20 page)

“That story
about the fire was pretty terrible,” he said.

She looked at
him, nodded.

“That’s what you thinking about?” he asked.

“No.” She took a
drag off her cigarette and looked thoughtful. “I was thinking about Ava’s
drawing. Have you seen it? The one I told you about?”

“Oh,” he said,
surprised. “No. I forgot to ask her.”

She looked at
him a long moment, then asked, “What was it about Ava that made you go to the museum
cafeteria three or four times a day just to smile at her?”

He laughed. “She
told you that?”

“Yes. Is it
true?”

“Yeah, it’s true.
It’s like I told you—she just seemed less complicated than the other
women I was around. She wasn’t always gossiping or worrying about how she
looked all the time. She never tried to get nobody’s attention, least of all
mine, and I liked that. Then, when I talked to her, she was easy to get along
with. She wasn’t always trying to pick a fight or get her way.”

“Easy. That’s
what you said before.”

“Yeah. What
about it?”

“Nothing. Once
you got to know her, though, you saw that she was more than that, didn’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Like what?”

“She’s
hardworking,” he said. “A good cook.”

Helena frowned.
“That’s not what I mean.”

“Well, what do
you mean?”

“I want to know
if you think Ava is different than she seemed to you at first.
Less easy.
Less uncomplicated.
More funny, more creative.
More intense.”

“Not really. I
mean, that don’t sound like Ava. She aint really none of those things.”

Helena seemed
agitated now. “But she is. She is all of those things. Maybe you’re not paying
enough attention to see it.”

“You saying I don’t know my own wife?”

“No. I’m not
saying that.”

It seemed to him
that was exactly what she was saying and he wondered where she got off,
thinking she knew Ava better than he did. “I been married to Ava for four
years. I knew her for nearly two before that. You just met her a few days ago.
And she aint even been acting like herself lately.”

“How not?”

How not
?
he
thought. She sure had learned to speak uppity in the years they had been apart.

“Ava aint
usually so…emotional,” he said. “Maybe that’s where you getting ‘intense’ from,
but I’m telling you, that aint her, that aint what she’s really like.”

Still frowning,
Helena crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Why we even
talking about Ava?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She
sighed, and pushed her glasses up on her face. “You off tomorrow?”

He nodded.
“Yeah.”

“Let’s go up to
French Creek and spend the day together,” she said. “
You been
there lately?”

He shook his
head. “I aint been there since we was kids, with daddy. What you want to go up
there for?”

“I loved it
there. So did you. Remember how we used to roast marshmallows and fish and
chase after deer?”

He grinned.

“Let’s go,” she
said. “It’ll be nice to get out of the city for a day.”

“I’m supposed to
look at another house.”

“You can do that
anytime,” she said.

“Well. Maybe I
could borrow
Milky’s
car. Guy I work with. We could
pack some food.”

She nodded,
eager.

“Alright,” he
said. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

***

Regina sat in a chair by the window, beside the only
lamp in the room, its shade tilted slightly so that her face was illuminated
and her nose and chin cast light shadows. Helena sat on the bed with her legs
folded and her drawing tablet in her lap, staring at her for many minutes. She
had asked Regina if she would be willing to sit, so that she could make a
drawing of her, and Regina had agreed.

“You gone draw
me,” Regina asked now, “or just look at me?”

Helena smiled.
“I’m just studying the structure of your face.”

“Can I talk while you do that?”

“Of course. I
wish you would. It helps me catch the nuances, the lines.”

“I don’t know
about nuances,” Regina said, “but it’s a lot of lines to catch.”

“Oh no. For
someone your age, you have very smooth skin.”

“Well, dark skin
always hold up better over time,” Regina said.

Helena smiled.
“Well, then, I guess I’ll look thirty forever.”

“Child, you
don’t even look thirty now. You look twenty, if that.”

Helena got up
and went to the lamp, adjusting the shade again.

“You know,”
Regina
said, “Ava used to do this all the time.”

“Did you sit for
Ava a lot?” Helena asked, returning to her seat on the bed.

“I never ‘sat’
for her. She would just watch me doing whatever I was doing at the time.
Cooking. Folding laundry. Watching television. Working in my garden. I used to
tell her to quit drawing and help me prune the roses. But she wasn’t
interested.”

Helena laughed.
“Drawing while other people work. Sounds like an artist to me.” She had a
little pencil in her hand and she began to sketch.

Regina watched, her
eyes moving over Helena’s face. Whenever she looked at the younger woman, the
first thing she saw was the blackness of her skin. Taking that in seemed to
leave little room in her mind’s eye for anything else. Looking at her now, though,
really looking at her, Regina saw the way her skin glowed, the way her eyebrows
and eyelashes, which were slightly lighter-colored than her skin, complimented
her eyes, which were the greenest green Regina had ever seen on a dark-skinned person.

“Now who’s
studying who?” Helena asked.

Regina chuckled.
“I was just gone ask where you got them eyes from.”

“My father. Where
he got them from, I couldn’t say.”

“Things like
that can skip generations. He probably got it from his mother’s uncle’s
granddaddy’s sister.”

The both
laughed.

“Your husband
has interesting eyes,” Helena said.

“George? You
think so?”

“Yes. You
don’t?”

“Well, I guess
so,” she said, considering it. “I aint really thought about it in a while, but,
yeah, he do.”

“He must have
been a handsome young man.”

“He wasn’t bad.”

“How did you
first meet?”

“We didn’t. Not
that I can remember. Town we grew up in was so small, everybody just knew
everybody else from the time they was kids.”

“It must have
been a huge change, moving to a big city like this.”

George was right
about one thing—this girl sure did ask a lot of questions. Regina didn’t
mind it, though. In fact, she liked it, even if she suspected the questions
were leading somewhere. She didn’t know where, but she was content to go along
and find out.

“Oh, it was a
change alright. I hadn’t never even visited
nowhere
big as this. To move here seemed crazy to me. I couldn’t get my head around
this city for years. I wanted to go home to Hayden so many times. But George
said we could have a better life up here.”

“Was he right?”

Regina thought
about it,
then
said, “Depend on what you think a
‘better life’ is. Yeah, I guess we did
alright
for
ourselves for a while there. Before our son died.” She wondered if this was
where it was going, if Helena wanted to know more about George Jr. and how he
died. But Helena didn’t ask about it, she just continued to sketch and said
nothing for a while.

Regina thought
about Hayden. She still missed her home. She had never wanted to leave and had
been sure she would be instantly miserable in Philadelphia, so far from her
family and everything she knew. The first few years here had been good, though.
It was only after they had moved onto this street, when George had begun to
change, that everything started to go downhill. He had grown distant in the
space of a couple of years and the man she had married had become like a
stranger to her. He wasn’t lying or sneaking around back then, but what he was
doing was just as bad. He was shutting himself off from her and from their
children, closing himself up, while at the same time opening himself up to
someone else. Chuck Ellis. Regina had sat there and
watched
as Chuck had become the person George talked to and went out of his way to
spend time with. She had resented it. She had left her home and everyone she
knew because George had told her
their
lives would be
better, but he had not told her that she would be living that better life
without him. She was glad when Chuck stopped coming around, although she had
dreaded knowing the reason why. She never asked. Instead, she had tried to get
close to George again, thinking that with Chuck gone there might be space for
her again. But he had only become more distant. And when Geo died, Regina had lost
the strength to try anymore.

When she came
out of her head again, Helena was watching her with intense eyes, her drawing
hand moving rapidly on the page.

Half an hour
later, Helena’s hand stopped and she smiled over at Regina. “Done.”

“Let me see it.”

Helena shook her
head. “Not just yet. I have to put some finishing touches on it first. I’ll
show you when I’m all finished.”

“
Alright
, then,” Regina said, getting up. “I better get
myself to bed.”

“Thank you,”
Helena said, “for sitting. And for talking.”

“Well, it’s nice
to be talked to, instead of talked around, for a change,” Regina said, and she
went off to bed.

Late that night, Paul lay awake in his bed, staring at
the wall that separated his bedroom from Sarah’s, where he knew Helena was
still up, because he could hear her moving around on the creaky floors, which,
he noticed, were a lot less creaky than usual. She had always been a night
person. When they were children and shared the same room, Paul often awoke in
the middle of the night to find his sister sitting at the end of her bed, reading
in the little light that came in through the window from a nearby streetlamp.
Usually, it was one of the adventure books their father brought when he showed
up once every couple of years, which were full of stories of sinking boats and
dark, wave-washed caves, and jeweled treasure. Or sometimes she would just be
sitting there at the window, looking up at a heavy
moon,
her green eyes alight with imagining. “What you thinking ‘bout?” Paul would
often ask, from across the small room. “How to get free,” she would sometimes
say.

Lying there in
bed now, staring at the wall that separated them, he missed those long-ago
nights, missed under-the-covers giggling and the warmth of a sister, which was
unlike any other kind, a warmth that seeped into the fibers of blankets and
held there all through even the coldest nights. He had always felt lucky to
have a sister, especially in February.

He turned away
from the wall and lay on his back instead. He was tired and he wanted to sleep.
Every time he tried, the past pushed in. He didn’t like it. It wasn’t the real
past,
anyway, it was a sweeter, happier version, a half-lie,
with all the pleasures and none of the pains. It was a trick, a falsehood that
omitted its own
ugliest
parts and pretended to be
something it wasn’t, the way the past liked to do. Paul wasn’t fooled.

He turned his
body again, this time over onto his other side, his back to the wall, and it
was only then that he realized Ava was also awake and was lying there staring
at him. He saw something in her eyes, a flash of excitement, something carnal,
like he had never seen in her before. She had never, not once, initiated sex
with him. But now she reached out and touched his face and moved her body close
to his on the bed. He kissed her, meeting her excitement with his own, pulling
her to him and wrapping his arms around her. They kissed feverishly, for many
seconds, and then Ava pushed his head down between her legs. Paul pushed up her
nightgown and pulled off her panties and gave her, gladly, eagerly, the
pleasure she was asking for. They made love in a fever of heat and sweat and it
was like it had never been before. Ava took complete control, straddling him,
then lying on her back with her legs around his waist, and when they were done,
when she was satisfied, which took a while, they lay there in the dark,
breathing heavily, the sheets soaking wet and sticking to their skin.

“That was…” He
shook his head. “I don’t even know a word for it.”

She was lying on
her back, staring up at the ceiling, and she didn’t say anything.

“You thirsty?”
he asked.