The Summer We Got Free (16 page)

Sarah frowned.
Already the two of them had a private joke.

“I’m sorry,”
Helena said. “I’m being silly. How are you, Miss Sarah? How was your day?”

“Wonderful,”
Sarah said.

“As good as
that?”

“Yes,” she said.
“I…I saw the fire-eating man.”

Helena clapped
her hands together. “Did you?”

“I did.” She
hadn’t.

“Tell us,”
Helena said. She leaned over and looked past Sarah at Ava. “Do you know about
your sister’s fire-eating man?”

Ava did not know
of any man who could be called her sister’s anything,
fire-eating
or otherwise. She shook her head, no.

Now Sarah wished
she hadn’t said it. She had panicked when she saw the two of them together, connecting,
and she remembered how interested Helena had been in the fire-eating man, and
blurted out that she had seen him. And while the idea of sitting there telling
some elaborate lie to Helena was one thing, because at least she would be
rewarded for her deception with Helena’s interest, sitting there telling it to
Ava, who could rarely muster enough attention for anything to qualify as being
interested, would be nothing but tiring. Already, Ava was brushing ash off her
skirt and looking like she couldn’t care less.

“Well,” Sarah
began, looking at Helena. “I took a long lunch today so I could go down to
Penn’s Landing and see if he was still there.”

“And he was?
After all this time?”

Sarah nodded.
“Still in the same place and everything.”

“Did you talk to
him? Tell me you talked to him.”

“I did. I
introduced myself and asked him how he did all those tricks without burning
hisself
to a crisp.”

Helena laughed
and Sarah laughed with her, enjoying her own story.

Ava, sitting
there fiddling with a loose thread at the hem of her skirt, thought she heard a
strange something in Sarah’s voice.

“He said it was
just so many years of practice,” Sarah went on.

“Did he remember
you?” Helena asked.

Sarah nodded.
“He said he remembered me coming around a few years ago, and asked why I
stopped. I told him I changed jobs.”

Ava thought
maybe there was a tinny-ness in Sarah’s voice, a flinty little something. It
had been a long time since she had really listened to the sound of her sister’s
voice.

“We talked a
little while,” Sarah was saying. “And he asked if I’d come down and see him
again when I get the chance.”

Now that she
really listened, Ava was sure there was a flinty little something and, thinking
more about it, she remembered that, years ago, when she had regularly listened
to the sound of Sarah’s voice, that tinny, flinty thing had only ever been
there when Sarah was lying.

“You’re making
this up,” Ava said, suddenly, after not having spoken the whole time.

Sarah turned and
glared at her.

“I can hear it
in your voice,” Ava said.

Sarah looked at
Helena, who said, “Ava, she’s not. She told me about this man before.”

“I don’t know
what she told you before,” Ava said. “But she’s lying now.”

“I am not
lying,” Sarah said, through clenched teeth.

Ava was not
trying to hurt Sarah. It had not yet occurred to her that her sister was lying
for a reason, and nor had it yet crossed her mind that being called out on the
lie would embarrass and humiliate her.

Helena put a
hand on Sarah’s arm. Tears welled in Sarah’s eyes.

It was only then that Ava realized what she was doing.
She looked at her sister. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Sarah got up and
stalked back into the house, slamming the screen door as she went.

Ava felt
terrible. She really hadn’t meant to be so inconsiderate, so thoughtless. Still,
she didn’t understand why Sarah would tell such a strange, pointless lie.
For attention?
Was she that desperate for attention? She tried
to remember whether Sarah had always been that way or if, like herself, like their
mother, she had changed after Geo’s death, but she couldn’t. She sighed,
thinking of the toll it had taken, a toll she had probably never had a chance
to appreciate, and still, probably, couldn’t. She felt suddenly, deeply sad.

“Ava?” Helena asked,
“Are you alright?”

Ava looked at her. “My brother was murdered.”

She could see
the instant horror in Helena’s eyes.

“He was beaten
to death.”

Helena put her
hand to her mouth.

“I can stop if
you don’t want to hear,” Ava said.

Helena shook her
head. “No. But you can stop if it’s too hard.”

It wasn’t hard.
Ava was surprised by how easy it was to say, how it did not stick in her throat
or stutter off her tongue the way she thought it would. How it came smoothly
and surely. “Geo and Kenny, the pastor’s son, were found in the church parking
lot. Kenny’s throat was cut.”

Helena seemed
almost unable to speak. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She reached
out and took Ava’s hand, then tried again. “Who killed them?”

“I don’t know.
No one was caught.” She remembered the dream she’d had two nights ago, of the
dodgeball
game, the fight, Geo’s trembling hand in hers,
and Pastor Goode watching from above.

“Do you know why
it happened? Why they were killed?”

“No,” Ava said.
And another flash.
This time, only voices.

Where’s Ava?

Leave my
sister alone.

Ava felt a rush
of lightheadedness and she leaned her head back against the railing. “I think
it had something to do with me. I heard someone asking him where I was.”

“When?”

“Right before, I
think.”

“Right before
what
?”

“Before they
started beating him up.”

Helena shook her
head, looking confused. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Ava. Were you
there?”

Ava felt
confused herself. “I don’t think so.”

The screen door
opened and Paul peered out at them. “What a brother got to do to get some
dinner around here?” he asked, grinning.

Sarah had wished for Helena. Prayed for her. Just a
couple of weeks before she had shown up at their door, Sarah had got down on
her knees and asked God to send someone. It had been the end of a bad day and
she had gone to bed feeling lonelier than usual. Most of the time, she could
handle the isolation. After so many years, she was used to it, and at some
point she had even come to rely on it. It kept her safe from the unseeing eyes
of people. But some days, and that day especially, it had been bad. She felt
deeply alone, more alone than she thought any human being ought to be able to
feel and still
be
a human being. She
felt like a rock in a riverbed, or a leaf at the end of a tree branch, close
enough to see others like her, but helpless to reach out, to speak, to hold or
hope to be held. That day it had rocked her. Coming home from work on the bus,
she had seen a little boy touching the hand of a little girl and it had torn at
something inside her. It had made her lean her shoulder against the shoulder of
the woman in the seat beside
her,
so desperate was she
in that moment for some connection. The woman, reading a book, had not seemed
to notice. When she had arrived home, Ava was there, and Sarah had gone right
up to her and put her arms around her and hugged her close. Ava had been her
normal self: when Sarah pulled out of the hug, she’d asked, “Did you have
something garlicky for lunch?” Sarah had nodded and gone to start dinner. When
the family had sat in front of the television that evening, she had looked
around at every one of them and tried to feel some connection. Her mother had seemed
disturbed. Her father had looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. Paul had
been exhausted. They barely spoke to each other. When the show was over, George
had left. Regina had gone to stare at the tiny television in her room for the
rest of the evening, while Paul had pulled Ava away upstairs. Sarah had gone to
bed early, having seen no reason not to. Lying in her bed, she had prayed for
someone to come. It had not been a thought that had occurred to her before,
that there could be someone who could show up and make it better. It was an
absurd idea, because, well, people didn’t just show up and make other people’s
lives less unbearable. She had wished for it, anyway. Once she had, the moment
she had, it had become something she thought she could not do without,
something she was sure she would not be able to go on without having. It had
seemed so necessary that she had got up out of her bed and kneeled on the floor
like she had when she prayed as a child, her palms pressed together, her
fingertips against her forehead. “Please send somebody, Lord,” she had prayed.
When she awoke the next morning, the prayer had still been on her lips. She
waited. Not because she expected anyone to come, but because she could not bear
the thought of no one coming, and the only way not to think it wouldn’t happen
was to wait for it to happen. Days had passed. A week. Two. Then the doorbell
had rung. And Sarah knew Helena had come for her.

Now she lay in
bed, beside her mother, who was snoring softly. She had returned to Regina’s
room after Ava had called her a liar in front of Helena, and she had decided
that sleeping on the sofa, exposed, unable to hide herself away, was now too
high a price to pay for being righteously angry with Regina. She felt like a
fool. She’d had such a good time with Helena, especially when it had been just
the two of them in the house. They had talked and laughed like old friends.
Now, Helena probably thought she was ridiculous.
A silly
liar.
Or worse, much worse, Helena might not be able to see her at all anymore.

She had to do
something. She lay there, trying to think what. She could not erase the lie
after it had been told and she was sure Helena had believed Ava. Helena was a
nice woman and probably wouldn’t even mention it again, but that would be even
worse, because she had been so interested in the story of the fire-eating man,
so interested in Sarah because of it. Sarah still wanted that. She felt she had
to have it.

She realized
what she had to do. Lying there in the dark, she knew there was something, one
thing,
she could do to fix it, and erase the lie forever.

1956

S
arah had loved
Kenny Goode from the third minute she saw him, on a Sunday morning at Blessed
Chapel, only two weeks after the
Delaneys
had joined
the church. Kenny, who had been away at his grandparents’ house in New Jersey
the whole week before, appeared that Sunday standing by the pulpit with his
father. Sarah, who had been at Sunday school alone because the twins were both
sick with colds, barely noticed the small boy in his grey suit. By six years
old, she had already figured out that nobody really saw her. Ava was the one
who got all the attention, and Geo sometimes, too, just because he was Ava’s
twin. But no one ever really noticed Sarah. Even her own parents, it seemed to
her, had trouble remembering she existed when Ava consumed so much of their
thoughts and energy. That day at church was different, though. Without Ava
there, Sarah had her parents to herself. When the buckle on one of her Sunday
shoes came loose, her mother actually noticed it and refastened it for her. As
they walked together up to the main sanctuary, her father held her hand. So,
she was already happy, already smiling, when Pastor Goode brought his son over
to meet the new family—or just the three-fifths of them who were in
attendance that day.

“This here’s my
youngest boy,” the Pastor said. Then, to the child, “Say hello to our new
neighbors, son.”

That was when it happened. Kenny looked at Sarah and
saw her. She could tell by the way his pupils widened and the way he swallowed
hard and the way his voice shook when he said, “Hi, I’m Kenny.” He was looking
right at her. Not by her, or through her, or around her, but
at
her. He knew she was there, standing
right in the spot she was standing in. His eyes took in her face, and the lacy
edges of her dress-sleeves, and the barrettes in her hair.
 
He
saw
her. And she loved him for it.

For a whole week
after, they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, the way five and six year-olds
sometimes call each other those things. From the front porch of the Delaney
house, Sarah could see Kenny playing on his own porch down the street, and they
would wave to each other, and giggle, smitten. When she played with her dolls, she
called them Sarah and Kenny and made them kiss. When Ava asked her who Kenny
was, she said, “You don’t need to know nothing about it.” When she said her
prayers at night, in between the usual God-Blesses, she added a “God bless my
boyfriend, Kenny.”

The next Sunday, after Sunday school, as they entered
the upper sanctuary for church service, Kenny ran right up to her, with his arms
wide open, and she stepped forward into his sweet, five-year-old embrace,
without the fear she usually felt when hugging people, a fear that came from
knowing the hug would be brief and loose, done out of politeness so that she