The Summer We Got Free (31 page)

“Yeah, I hear
you,” Chuck said.

George let go of
him. He grabbed his clothes and put them on, hastily, almost frantically,
wanting to get out of there fast, before the thing in him that made him do these
things, that made him return, time and time again, as hard as he tried not to,
to this secret, shameful life, could take hold of him again.

***

One evening, a couple of days after Paul left, Sarah
was in the kitchen, cooking beef stew and thinking about all the things that
had happened that summer: Helena’s arrival, her time with the fire-eating man,
Ava’s strange behavior, Chuck Ellis showing up in their living room, Helena’s
revelation, and Paul’s disappearance from the house. She knew that it all had
to mean something. She thought about the ghosts and wondered if death was coming,
if that’s what all of it was really about, all this upheaval.

She could hear
Helena moving around in her bedroom upstairs. She still found it hard to
believe the truth about her exodus from Baltimore, hard to believe that she was
that way
, when she had seemed so
normal. She wondered if Helena had ever thought of her that way, even if for a
moment. She doubted it. It was only Ava who held Helena’s attention, and she
imagined now that Helena’s feelings for her sister included
those kinds
, that she loved Ava just as
Kenny Goode had. And, just like Kenny, that she had no such feelings for Sarah
herself. Not that it mattered, anyway, because Sarah wasn’t that way. Neither
was Ava, no matter what she’d said the other day. Sarah sighed. Really, with
Ava, who the hell knew?

Regina came into
the kitchen then. “What you fixing?”

“Beef stew,”
Sarah told her.

“Where Ava and
Helena?”

Sarah shrugged. “I
don’t know. Probably somewhere together.” She threw the onions into the pot,
and stew splashed onto her blouse.

Regina frowned. “What’s
wrong with you?”

Sarah shook her
head. She didn’t want to talk about it, any of it. But she couldn’t help
herself. “She took her from me. She was my friend, and Ava took her from me.”

Regina’s
eyebrows drew close together on her forehead. “
Took
? Is she a person or a pair of pantyhose?”

“You don’t
understand, Mama,” Sarah said. “I wished for her. I was so lonely. I prayed for
somebody to come. And she came.”

Regina looked
hesitant. “What you saying? You got those kind of feelings about her?”

“No,” Sarah
said. “Of course not. I’m not saying
that
at all.”

Her mother
looked relieved. “I was starting to think it’s something in the water.”

“But she was my
friend,” Sarah said. “My only friend. And Ava took her from me.”

Regina breathed
a long, heavy breath, and sat down at the table. She looked up at her daughter.
“Sarah, listen to me. Put that spoon down, and listen to me.”

Sarah put down
the spoon.

 
“You don’t need to be praying for nobody to
come to you here in this house,” Regina said. “You ought to be out there in the
world trying to make some kind of real life for yourself.”

Sarah shook her
head. “That’s not the point, Mama.”

“I know it must
be hard living in Ava’s shadow,” Regina said. “But it don’t reach everywhere. I
promise you, it
don’t
. You just need to find out where
it stops and go a little farther than that.”

Sarah shook her
head again. “I can’t.”

“Why?”

She started to
say that it was because she didn’t want to leave her family, or that she didn’t
want Pastor Goode to feel like he was winning by running her off. But those
words wouldn’t come. In their place came the truth. “I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”
Regina asked.

“Of the world.
What if nobody out there sees me?”

Regina got up
from the table and stood in front of her daughter, took Sarah’s hands in hers.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world to sit back and blame other people for how
your life turned out.
I done
that for years. But it don’t
serve no purpose, ‘cause in the end all you gone get is a life that went ahead
and turned out while you was busy pointing fingers, and by then it’ll be too
late for you to do anything about it.”

Sarah knew her
mother was right, but it was too hard to change now. It
was
easy to blame Ava, and even easier to blame the pastor, and
maybe it was their fault. It didn’t matter, though, because it was her life
that was passing by, thirty-two years of it gone already, nearly two decades of
it spent hiding in this house. She thought about the fire-eating man. Maybe he
had seen her. Maybe he meant the things he said.

“Mama, there’s a
man,” Sarah said. “His name is…” She shook her head. “I don’t even know his
name. He invited me to come and see him do a show tonight. Now.”

“So, why you
here?” Regina asked. “Go.”

“But what if
he—”

“Go,” Regina
said again. “Go. Go. Go.”

Sarah was halfway up the block between Radnor and
Chestnut when she saw the twenty-one
bus
pull up to
the stop. She ran to catch it, waving her arms so the driver would see her, but
he pulled out from the stop. “Wait!” she called. “Wait!” The bus stopped with a
loud screech of brakes and she hurried up onto it, breathing hard.

“I almost didn’t see you,” said the driver.

She paid the fare and took a seat near the middle of
the bus, which was more crowded than she had expected. She checked her watch.
It was already eight-thirty. There was no way she would make it all the way to
Penn’s Landing before nine. Maybe the show would run longer—maybe, because
it was his final performance, he would want to make it last. Maybe he would
linger a while after, talk to the people who had come to see him, say goodbyes.
Surely she was not the only person he had invited.

She sat on the bus feeling fidgety and anxious. She
wished she had left sooner. She wished she hadn’t wasted ten minutes changing
clothes and putting on
eye-shadow
. She wished she
hadn’t wasted thirty-two years being afraid.

The bus made damn near every stop between Fifty-Ninth
and Front and by the time Sarah got to Penn’s Landing, the fire-eating man was
nowhere in sight. She hurried down the length of the landing. She stopped to
ask a couple passing by if they had seen the show, but they had not. The next
couple of people had, and she asked whether they knew if the fire-eating man
was still down here somewhere, but they didn’t know. She walked over to Market
Street, and then back, past Chestnut again and all the way over to Locust, but
saw no sign of him. Finally, she returned to the spot where they had sat that
day when he had offered her peanut butter. She sat on that bench and looked out
at the water.

The night was very warm, very still, and she felt that
now that she had got here time had slowed down. She looked toward the city and
the lights in the tall buildings didn’t flicker. She wished he would come. She
thought about what Ava had said, that people really did see her, and she wished
it were true.

A homeless man walked by and leered at her. It was
getting darker. She was too late. He was gone. She wished she’d asked his real
name or where, exactly, he worked security, but she had been too busy worrying
about what Ava was taking away from her, so consumed with turning a lie into
the truth—a lie that, she could see now, had never really mattered much
anyway—that she hadn’t bothered. Now she would probably never see him
again.

When she left Penn’s
Landing
,
the bus wasn’t coming, so she walked west toward home. She passed couples
walking hand in hand, and friends in groups, laughing or whispering confidences
to each other. The bus ride back to West Philadelphia was a little faster, with
more people heading into Center City on a Saturday night than away from it.
Through the large windows of the bus, she watched the city skyline, and
wondered if the fire-eating man was inside one of those buildings. She wondered
if he was thinking of her the same way she was thinking of him right now, if he
was remembering their brief time together—the peanut-butter sandwich, the
way she’d leaned into him as he’d held the fire before her, the sun on the
Delaware River as they’d sat together by the water. And she decided, this once,
because she didn’t see how it could hurt, to believe with all her might that he
was.

Regina sat out on the front porch, looking out at Radnor
Street. Night had fallen and the streetlights glowed pink and purple and soft
orange. She could hear teenagers on darkened porches, laughing and singing
along to their radios, the sounds of popular rhythm and blues songs hanging in
the warm summer air. She looked down the street, at the church, and she could
see the light on in Pastor Goode’s office. He was in there all the time, it
seemed. He had no family anymore. His wife had had a stroke and died less than
a year after their son. Regina wondered what he was in there plotting now. He
was surely incensed that Helena hadn’t left immediately after his performance
in the street. Paul had gone, though, and she figured that had made him very
happy.

She wondered why
it had come to this, why something that had been so good at first—their
lives on this block, their relationships with these people—had gone so
terribly bad. Ava’s defiance of the pastor had been the beginning of it, but
the death of their sons had set the worst of it in motion. Goode had blamed them,
hadn’t been able to see reason. Regina had never understood it. She had loved
her son as much as he had loved his, had been torn to pieces by the loss of
him, but she had not looked for anyone to blame.

The light in
Goode’s office flickered as a shadow moved past the window. Regina got up,
intending to go to the porch railing and get a closer look, but without even
thinking she went past the railing and on down the steps, on to the sidewalk. She
was determined, although she wasn’t sure about what, exactly. When she got to
the back door of the church, she tried it and it opened. She went inside, and
in the
dimly-lit
cool of the sanctuary, she was met by
the familiar smell of old bibles and hymnbooks. She marveled at how the sense
of smell could instantly transport you to another time, and her skin tingled
with memory as she recalled Sunday morning services, and Saturday morning
meetings, evening prayers, and bake sales. Her hands found the back of a pew in
the dim light, and the feel of the wood against her fingertips erased, for a
moment, the seventeen years that had passed since she had last been in here,
singing and giving praise, her family all around her, her friends close, her
God even closer. She had never disconnected herself from the Lord, and still
prayed every day and night, but here, in this church, her experience of God had
been bigger, more, wrapped up like a gift in the sounds of lifted voices and
stomping feet, in the sight of soft, stained-glass light through the picture
windows, in the feel of friendship and community all around her. She had left a
piece of herself behind here, the piece that was a part of something bigger
than Regina, bigger than just family, or just friends, or just God, but was all
those things together, and more.

She was pulled
from memory by the sound of creaking floorboards and she made her way through
the sanctuary to the pastor’s nook, just behind the pulpit. The door was open
and light spilled out onto the altar. Regina peered inside and saw Pastor Goode
pacing the floor. She watched him in silence for a moment. His shoulders were
hunched, his head down, his eyebrows drawn tight together on his forehead. He
looked like an old lion in a cage, trapped and troubled, too proud to rest and
too tired to roar. Regina remembered him again as a young man, handsome and quick
to smile, and she tried to see some of that person in him now, but could not.

She reached up
and knocked gently on the doorframe. The pastor looked up, surprised, and when
he saw her, his light eyes grew dark. “You aint welcome in here, Regina.”

Regina had not
expected to be welcome in the first place, so she entered the room anyway,
without hesitation. “It’s time you and me had this out.”

Pastor Goode
watched her for a moment, his eyes taking her in, and she was sure he was
thinking of the woman she used to be, all those years ago, and not finding much
of her left, just as she had seen nothing of his younger self left in him. “It
aint nothing to ‘have out’. You on the side of wrong, and I’m on the side of
right. Right don’t need to have it out with wrong, right just needs to—”

“Oh, stop it
with all that damn sermonizing!” Regina yelled, her voice echoing through the
quiet church. “Talk like a normal person for change!”

He folded his
arms across his chest.

“You used to be
one of those,” she said. “A normal person. We used to like each other.
Remember? We was both parents of young children, both devoted to the church. We
had a lot in common at one time. I didn’t even know it then, but even our
tragedy was the same. My father was killed when I was a child.
By white men.
Just like yours.”