The Summer We Got Free (22 page)

“Was
juvie
as bad as I imagine it was?” Helena asked, finally.

Paul shook his
head. “You can’t imagine it. However bad you think it was, it was worse. You
might think I aint a killer, but some of them boys
was
killers for sure. Some of them
was
worse than
killers.”

“Worse?” she
asked. “What’s worse?”

“Worse is somebody
that gets his kicks from hurting people. Not killing them, that’s too final.
Nothing left to torture if somebody already dead.”

Helena fell
silent again and Paul thought maybe she was afraid to go on asking questions,
afraid of what the answers might be.

“It was this one
gang of boys,” he went on, “called
theyselves
the Slammers.
Went around beating on younger guys when the
guards wasn’t
paying attention, which was always. They busted me up the first night I was
there. I wasn’t
no
little punk, either, I was a tough
enough kid. But they
was
meaner than me by a lot. They
liked to see people hurting. They liked it on their own, and being in there,
they found other boys who liked it too, and then they really had fun with it,
made it a team sport. They used to burn kids. Hold them down and stick a lit
match to their nipple, or somewhere worse. Or they’d put you in a headlock and
squeeze until you passed out. They did that to me a couple times. Once, they
held me down on the floor and held my mouth shut, and poured water over my
head, so I felt like I was drowning. I always fought them, though. I never
stopped fighting them. I had black eyes and busted lips. A couple times I got
taken to the infirmary with broke ribs.” He sighed. “The Slammers wasn’t the
worst in there, though. They’d kick your ass, but they wouldn’t—” He
stopped.

Helena sat up on
the blanket. “Wouldn’t what?”

Paul watched a
broad-winged bird alight onto a thin branch above them.

“This one gang,
the Rippers, was a bunch of boys from some projects in North Philly. They used
to go into boy’s rooms at night and do things to them. All night long, any
night, you could hear it.
The moaning and the whimpering.
One night they came for me. I tried to fight them, but they knew how to hold a
boy down. I was lucky, ‘cause one of the guards came in and stopped them before
they had really done anything. But after that, I knew I had to get in some kind
of gang myself, or I was gone get fucked or killed, or both, real fast. I
joined up with these boys from southwest. Remember Kareem? Used to live across
the hall from us?”

Helena nodded.
“With the one small ear?”

“Yeah, that his
crazy mama burned half off.
 
He was
one of them, and he remembered me and got me in with them. Milky, the one whose
car we drove up here, he was one, too. It was seven of us altogether. We called
ourselves the Southwest Seven. We
wasn’t
that
creative.”

“Were you safe
then, with them?”

“It aint no such
thing as safe in a place like that,” Paul said. “But I was less of a target. And
that came for a price. I still had to fight.
All the time.
I had to fight for my boys, help protect them so they would help protect me. I
still got beat and cut and damn near killed, but now somebody had my back, so
the bruises and scars
was
divided between us. But none
of us was safe.

“All I thought
about while I was there, the whole three years, was getting out and getting
home.
And staying home.
It wasn’t until I got out I realized
home didn’t exist no more. Mama was gone. You
was
gone.”

“I wasn’t gone,”
Helena said. “I was still there, living with Auntie and Uncle when you got out.
I kept expecting you to show up. Expecting you to come find me.”

“I did,” he
said.

“What?”

“I did come.
First thing I did when I got out was go to Uncle’s house. I was so happy to see
him when he opened the
door,
happy to see anybody that
looked anything like family. I asked for you. He said you
was
at school. I asked if I could wait and he said no. He looked at me like I was
dirt. I told him I was gone come back when you
was
home. You know what he told me? He said if I cared anything about you, I
wouldn’t. That I couldn’t do nothing but ruin your life. That you was a good student,
and a good girl, and you aint need no ex-con, killer for a brother, dragging
you down.”

“Why did you
listen to him? He was a fool if he said that.”

“You can’t
understand. What being in a place like I was in can do to your
mind.
You spend every day getting told that you aint
nothing.
That you worse than the lowest nigger crawling the
face of the earth.
You ruined your life early and got it out the way, so
you might as well just drink up, or smoke up, or shoot up, and wait to die.
Aint no way nobody can love you anymore.
You aint who you
was.
You aint that boy that your mama held.
You
a
ex-con, a killer, a piece of nothing, and you a damn
fool if you think different. I used to be Uncle’s favorite. Remember? But he
looked at me like he didn’t know me. He couldn’t love me no more after what I
did. I know he saw in my eyes what those years in there did to me, too, and he
didn’t want it in his house. That made me know what I was told all those years
was true. I wasn’t
nothing.
They
was
right. So, I left, and I aint come back.”

“Where did you
go?” Helena asked him.

“Nowhere worth
naming,” he said. “I just rolled with guys I knew inside who had got out, too,
guys in my gang. We cheated people, and robbed them. Sold smack. Any old fucked
up thing you can think of, I did it. I never got caught, though. I always
thought that was funny. Getting sent in
there
for
something I never meant to do, and then coming out and getting away with all
sorts of shit I did on purpose. It was years before I got it together. I don’t
even know how it happened. Just one day I got tired of feeling like the scum of
the damn earth and decided not to be. By the time I got a real job and pulled
some kind of life together for myself, and went back to find you, y’all was
gone. And wouldn’t nobody tell me where.”

Helena was in
tears and Paul had a hard lump in his throat. She moved closer to him on the
blanket and put her arms around him. He swallowed the lump in his throat and
took a deep breath, the fresh air soothing him. “It’s alright,” he said. “It
don’t
matter now. We here together now.”

They spent all
morning and afternoon out there. They ate their lunches, huddled close, and
talked about old times on the lake, fishing, and swimming, and building
campfires. Late in the afternoon, Paul suggested they hike further up into the
hills.

The terrain was
steep and they both got out of breath within minutes. They looked at each other
and laughed. “We old!” Paul said.

They walked
further into a thick of high trees.

“You hear that?”
Helena asked him.

Paul listened.
It was the rush of a waterfall.

By the time they
found it, having gone around in circles like Helena in her dreams, it was
getting late, but they both wanted to sit a while and enjoy the sounds and
sight of it. It was small, but lovely, the heavy white water rushing against
dark rocks that jutted out of the side of a hill. Helena took her shoes off and
dipped them in the cool stream at the base of the fall.
Paul
sat beside her
,
his shoulder leaned into hers
.

“I told Ava,” he
said.

Helena nodded.
“I thought so.
 
I guess she didn’t
take it well.”

“For anybody
else, I’d say she took it great. For Ava, she damn near threw me out on my
ass.”

“She said you
left.”

“I did,” he
said. “But only so I could feel like I had some say in it.”

“You’re going
back, then?”

He nodded.
“Where else I’m gone go?”

Helena checked
her watch. It was near six and it was already getting chilly. She put her shoes
back on and they started walking back down through the trees. The downhill
slope of the terrain was tricky to maneuver in some places and both of them
slipped a few times. They were at the lake again, coming down a hill of lush
mountain laurel, when Paul lost his footing and fell.

“Helena!”

She turned and
saw that he had fallen and came back the few feet, kneeling beside him.

“Are you hurt?”

He grimaced. “My
ankle. I twisted it.” He couldn’t walk on it easily. He tried, holding on to
Helena, but after several feet, he said, “Stop, stop. It hurts. I need to sit a
minute.”

She helped him
down onto the ground, then stood and looked out past the lake. “Is that the
ranger station? Maybe I can run down and get somebody.”

“Don’t
run
down,” he said. “You might end up
like me.”

She frowned.

“Just come on
and sit here with me a minute,” he said. “I’ll get it together.”

She sat beside
him on the rocks and grass, folding her arms around herself in the chilly air.
Paul put his arms around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“Do you think
it’ll be alright?” Helena asked. “Between you and Ava?”

“I think so,” he
said. “It might take some time, but I think we can get past it.”

“Good,” she
said.

“You like her?”
he asked.

She nodded. “I
do like her, Paul.”

He smiled. “I’m
glad.”

She put her arms
around his waist.

After a few minutes, Paul said, “Alright, we better
get the hell out of here ‘fore they find us froze to death on the side of this
hill. Or eaten by a family of bears.”

His ankle hurt like hell. Every step was agony. But he
gritted his teeth and, leaning on his sister, made it back to the ranger
station. The ranger on duty asked him if he wanted an ambulance and Paul said
no, so the ranger got his first aid kit and bandaged his ankle, noting that it
looked more strained than sprained to him. They got back to
Milky’s
car and Helena drove them back to the city.

When Paul came home hopping on one foot, with his
ankle bandaged, everyone rushed to his side, looking concerned and asking
questions about what had happened. Everyone except Ava, who hung back and
watched from the doorway of the dining room, as George helped Helena get Paul
situated on the sofa.

“What in the
world happened to you?” Sarah asked.

“He hurt his
ankle out at French Creek,” Helena told them.

“
Lawd
,” said Regina. She grabbed a couple of pillows from
the other end of the sofa and propped them up under her son-in-law’s injured ankle.

“What was y’all
doing up there, anyway?” George asked. “Climbing mountains?”

“Hardly,” Helena
said.

“We wasn’t doing
nothing but walking,” said Paul. “When we was kids, we used to run all up and
down there and never got a scratch. Now I damn near kill myself
walking
. I guess I’m getting old.”

“Ava, what you
doing over there?” George called to his daughter. “You don’t see your husband
over here hurt?”

Ava came and
stood beside the sofa and looked down at Paul’s ankle. “Is it bad?”

“Not too bad,”
Paul said. “I just twisted it.”

“Well, good.”

“It
coulda
been a lot worse, though. If I’d sprained it, I
might have got stuck up there and then who knows what. Right, Helena?” he
asked, looking at his sister.

“I guess,” she
said.

He looked at Ava
again. “I might not be here for you to glare at right now.”

“I’m not
glaring,” Ava said, though she was unsure whether she was glaring or not. She
still felt angry and disgusted by what Paul had told her last night, about what
he had done. Seeing him hurt, she felt some sympathy for him, and was glad his
injury wasn’t worse, but she did not know what, exactly, she felt about his
return.

“You don’t look
worried, though,” he said, sounding agitated. “Matter fact, you looking at me
like I’m some strange man who just wandered in here and put his feet up on your
couch.”

“Y’all come on
in the kitchen and let’s get dinner started,” Regina said, and Sarah, Helena,
and even George, followed her out of the room.

“You just said
yourself it’s not bad,” Ava reminded Paul.

“But when you
saw me come in you aint know how bad I was hurt.”

“If your sister
brought you here, and not to the hospital, you can’t have been very hurt,” she
said.

He frowned. His
ankle throbbed.

“You want some
aspirin?” she asked.

“No,” he said,
out of spite, even though he did want some.

On the drive home, he had been sure that whatever
anger she felt over what he had told her would give way to love and nurturing
when she saw that he was hurt. She had never doted on him, not in all the time
they had been together, which never bothered him because he knew it wasn’t her
nature, but whenever he was sick or hurt she would tend to him, bringing him
medicine and food and checking to see if he was feverish by pressing her lips
against his forehead, a thing he loved and always responded to, no matter how
sick he was, by putting his arms around her. He knew she had no reason now to
check him for fever, but he wished she would, wished she would at least touch
him, would at least come near him, instead of standing on the other side of the
coffee table looking indifferent. “I guess you don’t even want me here,” he
said.

“I never said
that. I didn’t throw you out, Paul. You left.”

He folded his
arms across his chest. “I don’t remember you trying to stop me.”

“After what you
told me, I didn’t mind seeing you go,” she said.

He took a deep
breath and closed his eyes. He was tired of this. Tired of saying he was sorry
for this thing he’d done half his lifetime ago. Tired of feeling like shit for
it. “I’m sorry for what I did,” he said again, looking up at her. “I been sorry
for it for eighteen years. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. But it
aint nothing I can do to change it now. I can’t go back.”

“I know that,”
she said.

“Can’t you forgive me?” he asked her. “Aint I done
enough for you, Ava, been enough for you, taken care of you enough, loved you
enough, that you can forgive me for this thing?”

She thought
about his love and about the kind of husband he had been. In all the time they
had been together, he had never once treated her badly, never abused her, never
neglected her,
never
left her. He had been attentive
and loving, and he had also given her time and space to herself, almost never
crowding her or demanding her attention. He was the only man she had ever been
with, so she had no one to compare him to, but she believed he had been a good
husband and that he was a good man. Still, looking down at him now, lying there
with his ankle bandaged and a look of sincere regret on his face, she felt
unable to move past it.

“I don’t know,” she told him. “I need some time, Paul.
It’s only been a day.”

He nodded.
“Okay. You’re right. I can go back to Tyrone’s, if you want me to.”

She wondered
what Helena would do if Paul went back to their cousin’s. “I don’t mind if
you’re here,” she told him. “I just don’t want any pressure.”

“Alright,” he
said. Then, “You tell your folks about what I told you?”

“No.”

“Then, I wish
you wouldn’t. I mean
,
I got to tell them sometime. But
I’d rather wait and see if you and me can patch things up, first. I don’t want
everybody hating me at all at once.”

She knew he
wanted her to say that she did not hate him, but instead, she said, “I’ll let
you tell them, then. But don’t wait too long. They deserve to know.”

***

On the second floor of the museum, several rooms back
from the Great Stair Hall, in a tucked-away room into which few visitors seemed
to find their way, Ava stood before a small etching of two little girls. They
were
peasants,
it seemed to her, dressed in modest
clothing and, according to the plaque on the wall beside the drawing, they were
from the Netherlands. One girl was older than the other, who was very small,
just a toddler. The older girl held out a toy to the younger, a doll, and the
smaller girl reached for it. Ava studied the details of the etching, its shades
and lines, a broom leaning against a wall in one corner of the room, a jug and
basket of laundry in another. She considered the posture of the two girls, the
older one holding the doll on some kind of circular hook and the smaller one reaching
with one hand. The longer she looked at it, the more she thought that the older
girl was not, in fact, holding out the doll for her sister to take, but was
only holding it in place, unconcerned with the younger child’s desire for the
toy. Or perhaps even holding it back, Ava thought, away from the little child’s
grasp. Ava tilted her head to one side, squinted at the scene, wondered.

After a few minutes, she got up and walked through
that room and into another, then out into a larger room, where the painting of
the woman in front of the mirror was hung. There were a few people in this
room, but not many, and there was a muffled quality to the sounds of the museum,
the footsteps and whispers all
far-away-sounding
. Ava
sat down on a bench and stared up at the painting, not thinking, not trying to
remember anything, just sitting and viewing. After a while, she felt someone
watching her, and when she turned, Helena was standing a few feet away. She
blinked,
at first thinking she must be imagining her.

“I didn’t mean
to lurk,” Helena said, coming closer, her voice echoing softly in the
high-ceilinged, wood-floored room. “You looked like you were thinking about
something, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Ava patted the
empty bench beside her and Helena came and sat down. There was a little dirt
under her fingers and Ava knew she’d been planting flowers for Regina.

She had not
decided whether or not to tell Helena about the things that were happening to
her. She did not know if she could explain it right, if it would even make
sense, or if she would seem like even more of a crazy person to Helena. Seeing
her there, though, she wanted to. She thought it might help to know what Helena
thought about it, and, too, she felt a desire to confide in her.

“My mother told
me that I used to be different than I am now,” Ava said. “That I used to be
wild.
And happy.
When I was a child. I don’t think I’m
that person anymore.”

Helena nodded,
thoughtfully. “Most people aren’t the same as they were as children, Ava.”

“I guess.
But just in the last few days I’ve been feeling a lot of
things I haven’t felt in a long time. Remembering things I’d forgotten.”

Helena looked at her, and Ava knew what she was
thinking.

“Since you
came,” Ava said.

Helena peered at
her and the look in here eyes was cautious. “Do you think that’s a
coincidence?”

The question
surprised Ava. She shook her head, vehemently. “No.”

“But why? Why
would my being here cause you to remember?”

“I don’t know,”
Ava said, sighing, feeling suddenly very tired again. Her head hurt. She rubbed
her temples with the tips of her fingers and looked at Helena curiously. “What
are you doing here, anyway?” she asked.

“Oh. Well, I
hadn’t been here in such a long time. I felt like being around art today, so I
came.”

“Have you been
here long?”

“A couple of
hours. I timed my visit so I could leave with you.”

That pleased Ava
and she smiled, and the pain in her head got worse, a sharp stabbing in her
right temple. She closed her eyes.

“Ava, are you
alright?” Helena asked, and Ava felt her hand on her shoulder.

The pain
subsided quickly and Ava nodded, opening her eyes. “I have a headache, but I’ll
be alright. Are you ready to go?”

“Before we do,
I’d like to show you something.”

Ava followed her
out of that room and into another, and through several more, until they reached
a small room with dark yellow walls. In one corner there was an expressionist
painting of a train station, with people rushing along the platform towards a
waiting locomotive. The scene was painted in rich colors, dark reds and browns
and blacks, and everything in it seemed to be in motion.

“It’s lovely,”
Ava said.

“I was nine,”
Helena told her, “when I first saw this painting. I was on a school field trip.
I remember wondering where the train was going. I hoped it was somewhere very
far away.” She looked far away herself for a moment,
then
she smiled at Ava. “It was the first time I was ever moved by art. It made me
want
to go places, and see things.”

“Well, you’ve
done that,” Ava said. “And you’ll be on a train again very soon.” Ava wondered
if, when she left, the memories she had sparked would leave with her.

“Should we go?”
Helena asked.

Ava shook her
head. “Not yet. Let’s stay a little longer.”

They sat there
on the bench, in the emptying gallery, close together with their shoulders
touching, and the weight of Helena against her made Ava feel warm all through
her body, and steadier than she had all day.

That evening, when George got to the back entrance of Blessed
Chapel, Chuck was already holding the door open and peering around for him.
When he saw him he smiled and said, “Wait there while I grab my things,” and
started to shut the door, but George pushed it open and entered.

He hadn’t been
inside Blessed Chapel even once since Pastor Goode had thrown his family out of
the congregation. He looked around the small room they were standing in, a room
where Sunday
School
classes met, and thought how
everything looked the same.

“My car’s right
outside,” Chuck said. “I thought we could drive up to Fairmount Park.”

George walked
past him, further into the church. From the small back room, he entered the
larger basement area, where a small stage and a baptismal pool were located.
The sound of his shoes against the tile floor was familiar and he remembered
all the Easter breakfasts and Mother’s Day luncheons he had attended here. He
stepped up onto the stage and looked down into the empty pool where the twins
had been baptized. He went up the back steps to the main floor of the church
and into the main chapel. The familiar smell of bibles, and air perfumed by so
many years of ladies in their Sunday bests, made his nostrils tingle in the
dark. He found his way behind the pulpit by touch, remembering every square
inch of the place, where each pew began and ended, which steps led where, and
with the flick of several switches he raised the lights. Not much had changed
in all those years. The colors, the dark wood of the pews and the lush red of
the carpet, had lost some luster, but not much. The stained glass windows,
through which no light shined at this hour of the evening, depicted the same
new-testament bible stories as they always had. The annunciation. The
sermon on the mount
. The crucifixion. The ascension. The
resurrection. The black, hard-back bibles, and the red, hard-back hymnals, sat
neatly in the racks on the
back sides
of the pews. He
ran his finger along the top edge of a hymnal and stared up at the choir box,
remembering the music.
The drums and cymbals, the piano and
the tambourines, whose sounds had coursed through his veins like blood every
Sunday for so many years.