The Summer We Got Free (35 page)

1976

A
va 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 with 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.

“Where’s
Helena?” Ava asked her.

“Gone. She left
last night with Paul.”

Ava looked
around the room. Helena’s things were gone.

Downstairs, the
house was warm, but not hot the way it had been for days. The hum of unsettled
things that had risen up, that had clung heavy and greasy to every surface, had
faded away. The sense of ghosts had gone. Ava went into the living room and
stood at the front window, peering out. The congregation of Blessed Chapel was
heading to Sunday service the same as always. They moved up and across Radnor Street,
the women in their linen dresses and wide-brimmed hats, the men in their
short-sleeved dress-shirts and wide ties, the children in shoes that snapped
against the concrete sidewalk like fingers snapping to the choir music that
wafted through the air. Ava watched as a little girl in a dress with lacy
collar and cuffs stopped in the middle of the street and spun, the pink of her
skirt making a twirl of blush around her. She saw Doris and Dexter
Liddy
walking down their front steps, Doris’ dyed-red hair
peeking out from under her blue-feathered hat. Across the street, Malcolm
Hansberry waved to them as he came out of his front door. As she stood there
watching, she saw Hattie Mitchell and Clarence Nelson and Antoinette Brown, and
she was struck by the fact that so many people had stayed on this block for so
many years. Most of their children had grown up and moved away, but they
remained, attached to the community and church they loved and felt part of. As
they made their way to the church, Ava thought how strange it was that nothing
outside her house had changed in the last week, while to her almost everything
and everyone inside it felt different.

She left the
window and went to the kitchen, suddenly craving coffee and butter. She put
coffee on, and made toast, and she was getting the butter from the refrigerator
when the doorbell rang. Despite the week she’d had, the sound was as strange
and unexpected as ever, only now she hurried, interested and eager, to see who
was there.

When Ava pulled
open the door, Helena turned, and this time Ava did not feel the rush of
confused emotions, or the overwhelming urge to reach out. This time she felt joy,
all by itself, pure and
unbemused
. She stepped out
onto the porch. “I thought you left,” she said.

Helena nodded.
“I took Paul to our cousin’s.”

“All your things
are gone.”

“Well, I
couldn’t stay here forever, Ava.”

Ava knew that,
understood that, but she didn’t like it one bit. She was getting her mouth
ready to say so, when Helena said, “I took that place out in
Wynnefield
.”

“You didn’t!”

Helena laughed.
“I did.”

Ava came forward
and threw her arms around Helena, and Helena held her, too, so tightly that she
could hardly breathe, but she didn’t care, because just breathing wasn’t the
most important thing. After a long, long moment, Helena said, “People are
watching us.”

“Good,” Ava
said. “This is just the kind of thing they need to see.”

They stood there like that for a long time, wrapped up
in each other, and for the first time since she was thirteen years old, Ava
felt free.