The Turner House (38 page)

He had been taking sleeping pills since that night on Yarrow Street. He didn't know if the haint was still coming to him, but since he was still alive and well, he liked to believe that it was not. He was also now determined to disprove Alice's main hypothesis; he wasn't so pathetic that he needed a ghost to give his life purpose.

“I can't keep thinking about something I can't control.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lonnie said. “You been by that shrink's house again?”

“What makes you think I been to her house? I've
never
been to her house. Lelah's been runnin her mouth to you, and she don't know what she's talkin about.”

Lonnie tugged at his crotch and shrugged.

“I would've gone to her house. I'da gone to her house and no one but us two would've ever known anything, I'll tell you that much. Specially if I'd have been as good as you been your whole life. You got a picture of her?”

“Yes. No. Not anymore.” Cha-Cha turned on the radio to discourage further conversation.

Someone had stolen the garage. The aluminum-sided late addition to the house was gone, and if it weren't for the fact that the brick on the back of the house there looked fifteen years cleaner than the rest, it would be as if it had never existed.

“Mother
fuckers
,” Cha-Cha said. He pulled the car into the back alley.

Lonnie whistled.

Some sort of ingenious, stealth operation must have taken place because the back gate lock was intact. Save for the heap of geriatric sundries on the ground, one would have been hard-pressed to find a fingerprint or scrap of evidence.

“I was just here two days ago,” Cha-Cha said. He jiggled the handle of the kitchen door. Still locked.

“Somebody missed their calling in life,” Lonnie said. “This right here's some MacGyver shit. A multiple-man operation. For scrap metal! They musta dragged it over the fence in sections. Why not just cut the fence? They already had the tools.”

“Where the hell were the police? Where the hell was
McNair
, huh? The hell I'm payin him for if he can't even tell me somebody up and stole a piece of my house?” Cha-Cha circled the pile of junk on the floor like a carrion eater. He kicked a box of Depends as hard as he could. Its side crumpled too easily. He hit the walker with his cane, lacquered wood to cheap aluminum.

“Mother
fuckers!
”

“Calm down, Cha, before you throw that hip out,” Lonnie said. He smacked at something between his teeth. “Thought you was lettin the bank have the house anyway.”

“I never said that! Nobody ever said that! I was
just here
with Lelah. And Troy. I never said that. I'm paying almost seven hundred dollars a month for this place, gotdamnit.”

“We got insurance?” Lonnie asked. “They might cover somethin like this, maybe.”

“Mother
fuckers!
”

Lonnie stood and witnessed Cha-Cha's tantrum. His round, ungainly brother cursed and swatted at the air and cursed again. For a moment Lonnie worried whether Cha-Cha could rile himself up into a heart attack, but since he had never been one to stand between a man and an outpouring of emotion, he let it continue. Lonnie looked at the house, then to the corner, where a car stopped longer than the sign required before driving on. He muttered a quick thank-you to God—a more open-minded and ethereal god than the one Cha-Cha envisioned—that he had never developed a taste for the truly hard stuff, the kind of stuff that made a person snatch a rickety garage under cover of night.

Lelah saw the moving van parked in Brianne's reserved spot but refused to believe it belonged to her daughter. It had only been two days. It was too extreme for her to have rented a van already, too final. She parked in a guest spot and walked over. From what she could see through the rear windows, the van appeared to be empty. That was a small relief. But then she saw Rob standing at the top of the apartment stairs with Bobbie in his arms. Bobbie spotted her and called out.

“Gigi! Gigi, come here
now.
” His squeaky voice mimicked the bossy tone of an adult's.

She climbed the stairs with her hands outstretched for her grandson, offering Rob the smallest amount of eye contact one could dole out without appearing rude.

“Hi, Rob, hi.”

“Hi, Ms. Turner,” Rob said.

He actually seemed to be mulling over whether he was going to hand Bobbie to her, weighing his options, as if he had options. After about five seconds he passed Lelah her grandson. Lelah kissed Bobbie, squeezed him so tight he squirmed, and then handed him back.

“Brianne's inside,” Rob said.

Rob was an inch or so taller than Lelah, with a smooth, medium-brown complexion and the sort of swirly, light brown eyes that made boys look more innocent than they were. He was likely not used to people staying upset with him for long—those sparkling eyes underneath his thick eyebrows compelled you to forgive him. But Lelah had not forgiven him for his early absence in Bobbie's life, nor had she forgotten the hypocritical, self-congratulatory behavior of his parents. Once Rob had changed his tune and decided that he did in fact want to be a father, his parents had thrown a belated baby shower at their house in Grosse Pointe. Lelah, Marlene, Francey, Netti, and Tina had gone together. The unapologetic bourgieness of his parents—with their not one but two Romare Beardens on the front-room walls that they just
had
to point out—the way they lavished attention and affection on Rob, the baby boy of his family, as if he were doing a valiant service by deigning to be a father to his son, never mind his short-term negligence—it had all been too much bullshit for the Turner women to stomach. Francey had made a very Francey-like comment—not out of malice but for the sake of small talk—about how times had surely changed, because she could remember when a black family couldn't even buy a house in Grosse Pointe thanks to their now infamous point system. Rob's parents had looked at her blankly and changed the subject. Every Turner woman but Lelah and Brianne had left within the hour. She pushed those memories down now and gave him a shoulder squeeze.

“Thank you, honey,” she said. “It's good seeing you.”

Inside the apartment, the scene reminded Lelah of her own recent eviction, the sort of chaos that resulted when there was no time to see one packing project through from start to finish. Heaps of clothes in every corner, dishes stacked on the couch, a wastebasket overflowing with ripped-up documents. A foreboding sense that many items would be permanently lost or trashed in a mad rush to get everything out the door. Brianne, in pink sweatpants and a white sports bra, dragged a duffel bag through the hallway to the kitchen. She plopped it down with a grunt.

“So you're moving out today?”

“Yep,” Brianne said. “Gotta give the landlord keys by three o' clock.”

Lelah's phone said that it was already 11
A.M.
No way this place would be packed in four hours, not with Rob futzing around with Bobbie. Brianne left the room and came back with a plastic bin of toys. She set the bin outside the front door and yelled downstairs for Rob to come pick it up.

“Can I help?” Lelah asked. “I'm pretty good at moving out in a hurry.”

Bad joke, she realized too late.

Brianne shrugged. “No, we got it. Thank you.”

“So Rob's driving the van, and you're gonna follow in your car? Tonight?”

“Yep, as soon as we drop off the keys.”

“Oh.” The lack of eye contact rattled Lelah. “Well, are you gonna come back Saturday for Grandma's party?”

“Don't think so. We need to get settled, and Bobbie's been on too many long car rides lately.”

“You know, Grandma's sick.”

“I do know that.”

“Like for-real sick. Really sick. Worse than whenever you saw her last.”

Brianne knelt in front of the couch and wrapped dinner plates with bath towels from a hamper. She carefully placed the wrapped plates in a box.

“Do you think you guys can wait? It's just two days until the party, and then y'all can leave early Sunday morning.”

Brianne's hands stopped moving.

“I am turning the keys in at three, and we are getting on the road to Chicago before it gets dark.” She said this like a chant, as if saying it repeatedly might make it come to pass.

“Alright, well. I want you to have this.”

Lelah reach into her purse and pulled out the thousand dollars she'd set aside for Brianne at Cha-Cha's that morning. She held the money out to her, but Brianne did not budge. Lelah set it on the arm of the couch.

Brianne went back to wrapping plates. Rob walked in with Bobbie, saw Brianne sitting on the floor, the helpless look on Lelah's face, the money on the couch, and turned on his heels.

“Please take it, Brianne.”

“You want me to take that?” Brianne pointed her chin at the stack of cash.

“Yeah. Why not? I don't want you moving to Chicago with nothing. If you're determined to go, then I support you, fine. But you shouldn't go empty-handed. It's just some just-in-case money.”

Lelah wanted to add something about not moving in with anyone, especially a man, with nothing to offer, but she thought better of this.

“Where's that money from, Mommy? That's the money Auntie Marlene gave you?”

“Yeah. Well, kinda, yeah. It's some of her money in there.”

“Oh my
god
,” Brianne said under her breath, but Lelah heard her. Brianne pursed her lips and went back to wrapping plates.

Rob returned, holding Bobbie.

“I'm sorry,” Rob said. “I just, I'm gonna pack up more stuff in the room so we can make time. Sorry.” He shuffled through the living room and shut the bedroom door.

Brianne stood up, picked up the cash, and held it out to Lelah.

“You want me to be codependent with you. That's what you want.
Co
dependence. But I won't, Mommy. I can't. I can't take this money. I know where you got it from.”

These practiced lines—perhaps Googled, perhaps fed to her by that Tawny person she kept mentioning the other day, or Rob himself—didn't sound right coming out of Brianne's mouth. Lelah split the money in half, put one stack of bills in her purse and held the other stack back out.

“Just take a few hundred. Gas alone for that van, plus your car is gonna be a couple hundred. I don't want nothing for it. I swear.”

Brianne dumped the papers from the overflowing wastebasket into a big black trash bag. She stopped a few times to fish out certain slips of paper and tear them into smaller pieces.

“I am sorry, Brianne, genuinely
sorry
for the other morning. I came at you all wrong, cause I was embarrassed to have lost everything. But I'm okay now, money-wise, for a little while. And I didn't mean what I said about . . . about anything I said.”

It was very hard to say. Evidently Troy wasn't the only one who was out of practice with apologies.

“How about this?” Brianne said. “I'll take the money if you promise to go to GA.”

Lelah could picture her searching online for such a solution. Brianne had always been solution-oriented; a list maker, a task manager. Lelah tried to focus on the obvious love behind an action like that, but it was humiliating. How did Brianne have all of the bargaining chips? She was
giving
the child money, damn near throwing it at her, and still she had no leverage. No leverage at all.

“GA stands for Gamblers Anonymous, Mommy.”

“I know what it stands for. I been there before. I don't know. I gotta keep looking, maybe something else besides GA is for me. I'm not gonna sit here and promise to go do something, and then maybe not go. I'm done lying to folks.”

Brianne shook her head and laughed, incredulous.

“Okay,” she said. “Well. Here's what you can do for me. This is about the
only
thing you can do for me at this point, so if you say no, then I guess it just is what it is. You tell me everything, from beginning to end, about Vernon Greene, and you and me, and Missouri. Everything you can remember, and I'll take that money.”

A not unreasonable request. It troubled her that her daughter might consider this the hardest thing she could ever ask her for. What sort of person denied her child such basic information? And how had Lelah convinced herself that Brianne would be fine without having it? Flawed as it had been, it wasn't a fling that conceived Brianne but an actual marriage to a person whose last name Brianne still carried. The things we do in the name of protecting others are so often attempts to spare some part of ourselves.

It took nearly three hours for Lelah to re-create Vernon for her daughter, starting from the very first time she'd seen him jumping hurdles at a track meet at Cass, to that final afternoon she'd seen him nodding off in the freezing rain. Lelah filled the stories with details she hadn't thought about in decades, like his first car, a 1980 Cutlass Supreme, and what she'd worn to their courthouse marriage (a baby-pink knee-length dress with aggressive shoulder pads). She took her time, because she never wanted to repeat these stories again. The two of them folded clothes into bags, packed boxes, and sorted through piles and piles of junk. By three o'clock they'd gotten Brianne in good shape to leave her mother and Detroit behind.

Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we're gone. Cha-Cha knew his family was no different. The house on Yarrow Street was their sedentary mascot, its crumbling façade the Turner coat of arms. But it disintegrated by the hour. Mold in the basement, asbestos hiding in the walls, a garage stolen. He understood these things pointed to abandonment. He knew he should walk away from the place, let it become one more blasted-out house in a city plagued by them. But what to do with the house and what to do about his mother's sickness were problems to which Cha-Cha possessed no simple solution. In both cases his impulse leaned toward preservation, but at what cost? If Viola wanted to die, who was he to stop her? If the house was destined for atrophy, why fight it? What he'd felt in that backyard with Lonnie was helplessness; it had only looked like rage. What happened to control? Control used to come effortlessly to Cha-Cha, and not because he was power-hungry or ego-starved. A pack of wolves. A murder of crows. All groups needed order. He felt the loss of control like a loss of basic reason. A dark splotch on his frontal lobe. Why not give in to every impulse, break free and go insane, if he lived in a world where people made structures disappear overnight?