The Summer We Got Free (29 page)

“I’m leaving,”
she said to Ava. And then, louder, so Paul could hear. “I’m leaving. I’ve
decided to leave.”

Paul looked up
at her. She looked from Ava to him. None of them said anything.

Suddenly a voice, loud and bellowing, filled the warm
morning air. “Sinners, hear the name of the Lord and be afraid!” Ava turned and
saw Pastor Goode crossing the street, followed by a small group of people. “The
Lord will not let your evil go unpunished. He will hold you to account.”

“Oh, here we go,”
Paul
said, holding the hedge clippers aloft of the hedges.

“How many times
will they flout the Word of God so boldly?” Goode stopped in the street in
front of the Delaney house and the crowd, which included Doris and Dexter,
Hattie, and Antoinette, stopped with him. He raised his hand and pointed his
finger right at Helena, and the crowd turned its collective head and looked at
her, as he said, “That woman is a homosexual and a home-wrecker!”

There were gasps from the crowd. Doris frowned and
shook her head, while Hattie gripped her husband and held on to him as though
an earthquake might come and shake the block to rubble any second.

Paul looked
around at Ava and Helena, and back at the preacher as if he were crazy. Ava saw
Helena sigh deeply and fold her arms across her chest. The screen door opened
and George came out onto the porch, followed by Regina and Sarah.

“What’s all
this?” George asked.

“That woman,” Pastor
Goode hollered, still pointing at Helena, “was thrown out of the school where
she was a teacher, down in Baltimore, for committing unnatural acts with the
mother of one of her students. A
married
woman!”

The gasps this
time came not only from the crowd,
but
from the porch.
Sarah put her hand over her mouth and stared with wide eyes at Helena.

“She got run out
of Baltimore,” the preacher said. “Disgraced. And now look who takes her in.”

Dexter yelled,
“That don’t surprise me a bit!”

“Well, I want her gone!” Pastor Goode bellowed. “I
want them all gone! Off this block! Out of this neighborhood!”

“Gone!”

“But I don’t think we gone have to wait much longer,”
Goode said. “’Cause they starting to turn on each other now. It was Ava who
came to me last night and suggested I look into this woman’s past.”

Everyone on the porch, and in the street, looked at
Ava.

She shook her head. “He’s lying.”

“May the Lord strike me down right here, right now, if
it aint the truth!” Goode yelled. He looked around at the crowd. “And y’all
know when the rats start leaving the house, it’s about to fall.”

Paul paced the living room, looking shocked and angry,
the
veins in his forehead bulging. “Where do that fool
get off?” he asked, looking around at them all. The street sermon had ended,
Goode having made his point and returned to the church. “He
think
he can just say whatever he want about people, just make up lies, and get away
with it?”

Regina and Sarah
were sitting on the sofa, and Ava was sitting on the arm. George was standing
in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. None of them said anything.

“Y’all don’t
believe that bullshit, do you?” Paul asked, looking around at them.

Nobody said
anything.

“I guess y’all think Ava put him up to it, too?”

“I would never do that,” Ava said.

“I know you wouldn’t,” Paul said, laughing at the
absurdity of it. “I know that man is crazy. Y’all know it. He just made all
that up to get to us.”

“He’s not lying,”
Helena said. She was leaning against the mantle, looking shaken. “At least not
about me.”

“Yeah, he is,”
Paul
said, sounding sure. “He’s always doing this; calling
people devils and making up crazy shit. I told you, he out his mind.”

“It’s the truth,
Paul,” she said. “I had a relationship with the mother of one of my students.
The school found out about it, long after it was already over, and they fired
me.”

Paul shook his
head wildly from side to side, as if he was trying to push away the thought.

“Listen to your
sister, Paul,” Regina said. “You aint listening to her.”

“I aint listening, ‘cause she aint making no sense,”
he said. He looked at his sister. “If it’s true, then the woman must’ve made
you do it, she must have—”

“She didn’t make
me do anything,” Helena said, taking a step toward him. “I did it because I
wanted to.”

Paul took a step
back. He looked around at them all again, then back at Helena. “No,” he said. “You
aint like that, Helena, you aint that way.”

“Yes, I am,” she
said.

“It’s because of
that girl,” he whispered. “It’s because of what that girl did to you when we
was kids.”

“What girl?” Ava
asked.

Paul looked at
her. “The girl I…” He stopped. He looked at Regina and Sarah and George. “I
walked in, and saw I her.
She was doing things to my sister
,
she was hurting her
. That’s why I grabbed her, that’s
why I pushed her. I didn’t mean to—” He stopped again.

“To what?”
Regina asked.

Paul shook his
head, stared down at the floor.

“What’s he
talking about?” Regina asked Ava.

“You have to
tell them,” Ava said to Paul.

Paul had the
hardest time raising his head. It felt like a pile of bricks on his shoulders.
When his eyes met Regina’s, shame flooded through him. “I killed somebody.”

Regina’s eyes
went wide.

George said,
“What the hell you mean, you killed somebody?”

“I mean I killed
somebody,
Pop
. A girl. When I was fifteen. I didn’t
mean to do it.”

Regina looked at
Ava. “You knew about this?”

“Not until a
couple of days ago.”

“I didn’t mean
to do it,” he said again. “She was hurting my sister.” He looked at Helena. “She
was hurting you. And now you confused.”

Helena shook her
head.

 
“Why you shaking your head like that?” Paul
asked her, looking and sounding panicked now. “Don’t shake your head like
that.”

“She wasn’t
hurting me,” Helena said. “I liked what she was doing. She wasn’t hurting me,
Paul.”

“Oh, Lord,”
Regina said. “Oh, Lord.”

 
“You came in and saw us, and it
seemed
that way to you, but that’s not
how it was.
I tried to say something,
to tell you, to stop you. But it all happened so fast.”

Paul put his
hand over his mouth and retched, a dry-heave, and he doubled-over, losing his
legs and falling on his knees to the floor. Ava hurried to his side, knelt down
beside him, putting one hand on his back and the other on his arm.

“Afterward, I
was afraid to tell you,” Helena went on. “I thought you would hate me. I’ve
carried it around all this time.”

Paul did not
think he could stand. He stayed there on his knees, with his forehead against
the floor and his eyes squeezed shut, telling
himself
to wake up, that this was a dream, or a delusion, and that she was not really
saying these things. It wasn’t possible that he had killed that girl for nothing.
She had been hurting his sister. He had been trying to protect his sister. He
had not meant to kill the girl, he had never meant to do that, but he had
grabbed her and pushed her because she had been hurting his sister. Doing
things to her. Wrong things. Through all these years, the one thing that had
made it possible for him not to hate himself—not to forgive himself,
never that, but to not hate himself—
was knowing
that he had been trying to protect his sister.

“That’s why I
tracked you down. That’s why I came here,” Helena said. “To tell you.”

Paul raised his
head off the floor, and looked up at her. She stood there, with tears pouring
down her face. He wanted to grab her. Shake her. But she was too far away, and
he did not think he could stand.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He needed to get up, to get out of there. He did not
know what would happen if he didn’t get out of there. He put his palms flat
against the floor and pushed himself up. He did not look at her again. He
turned and left the room, walked into the foyer and up the stairs. In his
bedroom, he took a small suitcase from the top of the closet and packed a few
things—clothes and shoes for work, his hair pick. He went to the bathroom
and got his toothbrush and razor. Every second he felt angrier, more ready to
scream, to kill somebody, to kill
her
,
and he knew he had to hurry and get out of there. He shoved his wallet into his
back pocket and ran back down the stairs. From the corner of his eye he saw her
still standing there in the living room, and Ava still kneeling on the floor, and
all of them watching him, but he did not turn his head. He went out the front
door, and when the screen door caught shut behind him, he thanked God that he’d
got out of there without doing something crazy.

***

After Paul left the house, Helena shut herself up in
Sarah’s room. The family remained gathered downstairs. George sat on the sofa
now, while the women paced around the room, circling the furniture and talking
in hushed voices.

“I can’t believe
it,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

George was
surprised, too. He’d been so busy worrying what Helena might see in him that he
hadn’t imagined that she could be hiding the same shame.
If
she was even ashamed about it.
Maybe she wasn’t. After all, she’d
confessed it in front of all of them. Goode had opened the door, but she could
easily have lied, especially knowing their history with the pastor and that no
one in that house really wanted to believe anything Goode had to say. She could
have gotten out of it if she’d wanted to, kept her secret hidden. But she
hadn’t.

“I guess you
never really know about people,” Regina said.

George looked up
at her and waited for her to turn and glare in his direction, but she didn’t.

“What I can’t
understand,” Sarah said, “is why Pastor Goode said that about Ava telling him
to look at Helena’s past. Why would he say that?”

Regina shrugged.
“Why do that man say any of the things he say? He always hated Ava, from the
day he met her.”

“But he aint
never
lied
before,” Sarah said.

“What you mean
he aint lied?” George asked. “You think the devil’s in this house?”

“No. But he thinks
so.
It aint really a lie, because he believes it.
That’s my point. He must believe Ava told him that.”

“You trying to
make sense of that man’s ranting and raving?” Regina asked her. “That’s what
you trying to do?”

Sarah shrugged.
“I don’t know.”

Ava was sitting
on the arm of the sofa, not saying anything.

Sarah sighed. “I
just can’t believe it,” she said again. “But, now that I think about it, I
guess she is a little bit…boyish.”

Regina frowned. “Helena
is still a guest in this house, and we gone treat her with respect as long as
she here.”

George felt bile
collecting in his stomach and rising up into his throat. “Since when you so forward-thinking,
Regina?”

“I aint said
nothing about being ‘forward-thinking.’ But she aint my daughter, so it aint
none of my business.”

“You—”

“This aint about
us, George,” Regina said.

He peered at her. There was a look in her eyes he
hadn’t seen in years. Usually she was all set to bicker with him, poised,
morning, noon and night for a fight. Whenever he entered a room, her shoulders
tightened. Whenever he spoke, she got her mouth ready to argue.
But not now.
Now she stood there looking as though a fight
was the last thing she wanted. George didn’t know what to think.

“What if it
was
your daughter?” Ava asked.

George felt a
squeezing in his gut.

“What’s that
supposed to mean?” Sarah asked.

“What if I was
like that?” Ava said. “A lesbian.”

George shook his
head. He didn’t want to hear this. He
wouldn’t
hear it. “That aint funny, Ava,” he said.

“I’m not trying to
be funny, Daddy.”

Regina said,
“Oh, Lord.”

“Are you a
lesbian?” Sarah asked.

Ava shrugged.
“Maybe.”

Sarah rolled her
eyes. “You aint no damn lesbian, Ava. Those women don’t have husbands.”

“Neither do
you,” Ava said.

Sarah glared at
her, but didn’t say anything else about what lesbians had or didn’t have.

 
“What you need to be thinking about right
now,” George said to Ava, “is Paul. Where you think he went?”