The Summer We Got Free (27 page)

1976

T
he dark fell
like a brick that night, the sunset coming fast across the sky,
daylight giving
way to moonlight in little more than an
instant. Coming home, George got caught in it, as if in a sudden rainstorm. It
was strange, eerie, and he walked faster up and across the streets, eager to be
indoors again.

When he came up Radnor, he saw Ava sitting on the
front steps of the house, alone in the spanking new dark. He felt anger and
humiliation stir inside him, remembering the knife at the dinner table, but
when he got closer and saw the look on her face, it dissolved, and he spoke
tenderly to his child.

“Ava? What you
doing out here?”

She looked at
him blankly, as if she didn’t know who he was.

“Ava? What’s
wrong with you?”

She blinked and
shook her head, looking around her.

George crouched
down and looked into her face. “Ava?”

He saw focus
slip into her gaze. “Daddy?”

“Yeah, it’s me,”
he said.

“How did I get
out here?”

George put his
arm around her shoulders and helped her up off the step and inside the house.
He took her up to her bedroom and she lay down in the bed again. He stacked the
pillows behind her head and rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment,
before turning to go.

“Daddy?” Ava
called to him, and when he turned she said, “I’m sorry.”

He looked at
her, amazed at how much she seemed like herself as a young girl again these
last few days. “You know, when you was a child, I was always lecturing you,
always trying to get you to follow the rules. I know you hated it. But I was
just trying to keep you safe. That’s what fathers
is
supposed to do. But sometimes that becomes the only thing there is between you
and that child, and next thing you know you aint got no other role in they life
than that. It aint nothing worse than watching your children doing things you
think—you
know
—is gone
get them hurt. You got to try and stop it, even if that means hurting them
yourself some, ‘cause at least then you know where the hurt is coming from, and
you can control it. You hurt them, so somebody else
don’t
kill
them. Or, at least, you hope it
works out that way.” That’s what he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Not out loud,
because the words were too hard to get out, the truth of it almost too much to
bear. Instead, he said, “It’s alright. Just don’t do
nothing
stupid like that again.”

A little while later, Helena came into the room and
sat down beside Ava on the bed. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Alright,” Ava
said. “Fine.”

“I just heard
your father telling Paul he found you on the front steps and you didn’t know
how you got there.”

Ava laughed.
“Well. Besides that.”

Helena shook her
head. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. This is my fault.”

Ava could see the worry in her eyes. “It’s not your
fault,” she said. “I wanted to push. I still do.”

“I think you
should take it easy, Ava,” Helena said.

Ava shook her
head. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because what if
this is all I ever get? Just bits and pieces, outbursts and fainting spells?” A
few days of it had already begun to take a toll. She couldn’t imagine months
and years of this.

“The rest of it
will come,” Helena told her.

“You don’t know
that. What if it stops when you leave? What if I forget myself all over again?”
She got up from the bed and walked over to the window. Outside, the dark was
heavy, thick clouds covering the moon. She could see Helena’s reflection in the
window pane
, watching her from the bed.

“I won’t leave,
then,” Helena said.

Ava peered at
Helena’s reflected self.

“I’ll stay in
Philadelphia. I won’t go to New York.”

Ava turned and
looked at her. “But your job—”

“There are jobs
here,” she said. “I looked at a place out in
Wynnfield
.
There are three schools nearby it. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of them will
need an art teacher.”

There was a soft
rustling in Ava’s chest, like fallen leaves in a breeze, and she felt suddenly
warmer, as if she had just been wrapped up in a soft, invisible something. She
remembered being very small, sitting in her father’s lap, with her head leaned
back against his chest, and George’s arms folded around her. She remembered her
grandmother reading her fairy tales and kissing her goodnight. She remembered her
sister tending to a scrape on her knee with a tissue and some spit, carefully,
gingerly,
gently
. She remembered what each of those
things felt like—the rustling, and the warmth on her skin, the same as
she felt now.
The feeling of being loved.
She felt a
swelling in her throat, a tingling, and when the tears came they were warm on
her face.

“I’m upsetting you,” Helena said.

“No. I’m not upset. I’m grateful,” Ava told her. “But
you have to go to New York. I don’t want to disrupt your life.”

Sarah knocked on the open door. “Helena, Paul is
looking for you.”

When Helena had gone, Sarah stood there staring at
Ava. “You know, I almost believed you, when you said you wasn’t trying to take
nothing away from me. But deep down I always knew you would.”

Ava sighed heavily. “Sarah, I’m tired. I don’t want to
do this with you. If you want to say something, say it. I don’t have the energy
to break your code.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “She came here
for me.”

“Helena?”

“Yes, Helena!” Sarah said, stomping her foot hard on
the floor. “Who the hell else?”

“How do you figure that?” Ava asked.

“I wished for her.”

“You
wished
for Helena?”

“For somebody to come and make it better,” Sarah said,
nodding fervently. “And then she came. And I was happy. But you didn’t care.
You did what you’ve always done. You took her.”

“Took her where?” Ava asked. “She’s still here, Sarah,
she just walked out of the room not three minutes ago, you can go and talk to
her right now if you want to. Instead of standing here accusing me of…I
don’t
even know what you’re accusing me of.”

“It’s too late!” Sarah yelled. “She can’t see me anymore!
All she can see now is you, just like everybody else. She
don’t
know I exist. Maybe I don’t.” On those last words, her voice cracked, and she
started to cry. Ava went over to her, put her hands on her sister’s shoulders,
but Sarah took a step back away from her. “Just leave me alone, Ava.”

“You’re in my
room.”

Sarah glared at
her, anger flashing through her tears. “Everybody thinks you so great. Everybody
loves you so damn much.”

“Who? Who are
you talking about?
When
are you
talking about?”

“But I can see
what you really are,” Sarah said. “You are selfish. You have always been
selfish. You
don’t never
think about anybody but yourself.
What you want, what you need.
That’s how you
was
with Geo, always dragging him somewhere he didn’t want
to go, or into something he didn’t want to do.
Up a tree, out
on the roof, into a fight.
You wasn’t never scared, so you didn’t care
if he was.”

Ava sighed and
sat down on the edge of the bed.

“And when Helena came here, you saw I was happy, I
know you did. But that didn’t stop you from placing yourself wherever she was
every damn minute.”

“You’re right,”
Ava said.

Sarah hesitated,
as if sensing some kind of trick.

“I did see that you were happy. And maybe I should
have backed off, and let you have more time with her. But I didn’t think about
that. I didn’t think about you at all.”

Sarah nodded. “That’s right. That’s what you always
used to do, when we was kids.”

 
“I’m
sorry,” Ava said. “For doing it then, and for doing it now. But, Sarah, people
do see you. Helena sees you. And you can still have that friendship you wished
for.”

Sarah looked at Ava for a long moment and Ava could see
that she was thinking about it, considering the possibility that these things
she had been telling herself for so long were not so. But then she shook her
head. “It’s too late,” she said again, then turned and left the room, closing
the door behind her.

***

Ava awoke in the middle of the night to a strange
smell. She sat up in bed and sniffed the air. The scent was heavy, but she
could not put a name to it. She got out of bed and went to the door, which was
open a crack, and out into the hallway. The smell was stronger out there and
she followed it, down towards Sarah’s room. The door was open and Ava went
inside, and the smell wrapped all around her. She turned on the lamp by the
door and in the light she saw Helena asleep on the bed. There by the window,
the wooden case she’d spotted in the cellar sat on the floor, open, its contents—tubes
of paint, brushes,
palette
knives—spilling out
around it. She crouched down beside it. The paint tubes were old and dusty,
some of them squeezed empty,
others
still plump and
full. Helena had opened one of the tubes and squeezed out a drop of the paint, and
the bead of color shimmered in the lamplight. Ava dipped her fingertip in it
and brought it to her nose. And the smell of red filled her. It moved fast
through her body like a drug, the crumbly scent clinging to her skin. She stood
up and caught her reflection in the dark window. She stared at herself.
Something at the back of her mind, in the farthest reaches of her psyche,
stirred. She moved closer to the window and reached out, touching her oil-red fingertip
lightly to the glass, and traced the contours of her face, the curve of her
jaw, the slant of her nose, the shapes of her eyes and lips and brow. The tips
of her fingers tingled, and the tingle moved all over her skin, as if her body
was remembering something her mind did not yet realize had been forgotten. She
got as close as she could to the window, her nose almost touching the glass,
and looked into the deep, dark eyes of the woman looking back at her, and something
unlocked, unraveled, came undone.

Ava knelt down
again and took the tube of red from the wooden case and something at the back
of her mind said,
Don’t.
She ignored
it, and squeezed more red onto her fingertips, and touched the paint to the glass
of the dark window.

Stop it, Ava.

She reached into the case and took out every shade of
red she could find. Using her hand as a palette, she squeezed globs of paint
onto each fingertip, and down each finger, and onto her palm. With the fingers
of her other hand, she painted the curve of her own jaw and she remembered
again laughing with Geo at the kitchen table. Only this time the memory did not
flash and go, it stayed, solid and sure as the pigment on the window. She
painted her lips and remembered the smells of Christmases past and the hum of
friends gathered around them. She painted her eyes and then stood there before
the glass canvas, still and ghostly quiet, looking into the dark pools of paint
that looked back at her, wild and happy.

She stood there before the changing canvas for hours,
as the room got hot, as beads of sweat formed on her brow and nose and throat.
At moments, she felt sick, nauseated, but she did not stop. At other moments,
her knees felt too weak to hold her, but she stood there, shaking and pushing
herself forward. Her vision blurred. Her heart pounded. Her joints ached. And
still she painted.

She didn’t know Helena was awake until she felt a soft
touch on her arm and turned to see her standing there, her green eyes afire,
her lips parted. Standing there in front of the canvas, both hands covered in
paint, Ava recognized another feeling, one that filled her up and busted out of
her, making her laugh out loud.

“Ava, what is it?” Helena asked her.

And Ava said, “Helena,
it’s
bliss.”

She reached out and touched Helena’s cheek. When she
removed her hand, there were daubs of paint along Helena’s cheekbones.

“Oh,” Ava
whispered. “Sorry. I got paint on you.”

Helena touched her face where Ava’s fingers had been
and examined the scarlet that came off on her own fingers. She smiled at Ava.
Then she bent down and took a tube of paint from the case and squeezed out a
drop onto her fingertip. She touched Ava’s cheeks, leaving streaks of cerulean
on her caramel skin. She traced the curve of Ava’s jaw and her heavy eyelids.
Ava ran her thumb along Helena’s throat and along her collarbone. Helena brought
her fingers to Ava’s mouth and touched her lips. Ava’s skin tingled, and her
blood, excited as red paint on white canvas, rushed. She pressed her mouth
against Helena’s and kissed her, and tasted every color. Helena put her hands
on Ava’s shoulders and pushed her away.

Helena looked
down at her hands, which were covered with paint. There was pain in her eyes
and she trembled. Ava wanted to reach out for her, but she stood still, and
waited. Helena looked at Ava and shook her head, as if answering a question
that had not been asked, at least not in words. Then she turned and walked out
of the room.

Ava sat down on
the edge of the bed and stared at the spot where Helena had been. All of the
emotions that had been stirred up inside her in the last few days, and in the
last few hours, all of the confusion and intensity, stilled, and she felt calm,
almost serene, in the quiet of the bedroom. She felt as she had as a young
girl, completely comfortable in her skin, entirely at ease in her mind, and in
her soul. She felt like herself again.