The Turner House (24 page)

Mr. McNair pulled the basil out of his pocket and sniffed it once more. He nodded.

“I suppose she's got as much a right as any of the other ones to be in there. You tell Betsy I came by.”

David watched Mr. McNair cross the street and round the corner. He wondered what he'd really been trying to get at. The conversation had a doublespeak quality to it, like the way two spies in a movie can appear to be discussing holiday travel plans when they're really plotting an assassination.

When Lelah dropped Bobbie off the night before, Brianne had pressed $40 into her palm, and Lelah took it without protest or question because she was eager to get to David's. In the big room she'd added the money to her meager stash in the pocket of a duffel bag under the bed. She should have questioned Brianne about the money, tried to put up a fight for appearance's sake, but also it was about time her daughter compensated her a little. Childcare was expensive. Maybe Rob had finally made good on his promises of child support. At the very least Lelah should have found out if the money would be recurring, or where it came from. Something in Brianne's behavior suggested a secret, and under normal circumstances Lelah would have drawn it out by now. Maybe she was seeing someone new. That could be a good thing, Lelah supposed. Far be it for her to begrudge someone a chance at romance. But taking money from a man was a different story. No time like the present to find out what's going on, she thought. She showered and dressed. She had hang-dried her clothes on the bathroom shower rod, and the wrinkles in her jeans didn't disappear after she squeezed herself into them. She took the $40 back out of the duffel bag. She'd stop by Eastern Market for some of that pineapple-coconut cake Brianne liked, then pop by her daughter's apartment, clearing-the-air cake in hand.

A man stood on the porch in front of the window. Lelah could tell from where she stood on the staircase that it was David. His body was already that familiar. His pointy elbows were up and out, his long hands over his brow. He was trying to see through the curtains. It's going to be over already, she thought. She opened the door.

“Hey,” he said. “I, uh.”

“Come in if you want.”

David ducked as he walked in, as if the doorframe wasn't tall enough for him. He smelled like fresh dirt, cut grass, and sweat.

Lelah looked him in the eyes, reminded herself that days ago he was any old person she used to know on the street. He looked away, past her to the living room's bare and dingy walls.

“I don't know why I'm here,” he said. “I was just over at my mom's, and Mr. McNair told me he saw you.”

She could laugh. Of course it was McNair—he'd likely known since the first morning, and told everybody on three blocks each way from Yarrow. She hadn't put enough thought into this. How easy it was to fool oneself when desperate.

“What do you want from me?” she asked. She sat down on the second-to-last stair. David stood above her at first, but he seemed to still be having trouble making eye contact and opted to sit down next to her. Their hips touched. He did not turn to look at her.

“What do you mean? I just heard you were here, and I don't know why he was telling me in the first place, like he was asking me for advice or something. I guess he wanted me to tell Troy, but I couldn't do that, considering.”

“Considering what?” Lelah asked. She looked at the side of his face.

David stretched his long fingers away from one another.

“Considering,” he said, “that I didn't even know if it was true, or what the situation is.”

The skin of David's palms had none of the pinkish undertones of Lelah's own. It was yellow, and his lifelines deep and dark.

“Also considering that we been seeing each other, Lelah. And if
that's
none of Troy's business—”

“It
isn't
,” Lelah interrupted.

“Then I figured I'd come over here and see what this is all about. Maybe this ain't any of Troy's business either.”

He looked at her now. He had no right to come here, she thought. Asking for an explanation, expecting to get one just for showing up.

“I don't need saving, David. I'm here, you've found me out, that's fine. But I don't need anybody to save me.”

“God, nobody's trying to save you,” he said. “I don't know. I didn't think everything out before I came over, but here I am, right?”

Lelah felt the situation was plain; she was there because she had nowhere else to go. But maybe it wasn't clear for someone like David, someone who had likely never been evicted and had connections all around the city.

“Your apartment,” David began, and Lelah saw that he was going to make her say it all out loud, that he wouldn't just break off whatever they had and leave.

“My apartment does not exist.”

“Your job?”

“May or may not exist, it's still up in the air.”

“What happened to your stuff, like furniture and clothes?”

He's never been evicted, Lelah thought.

“I'll show you,” she said. She jumped up and turned to climb the stairs. David followed.

Lelah stepped into the big room, and David lingered in the doorway. She didn't know what she hoped to accomplish with this. Maybe the meager furnishings—an ancient twin bed, a flimsy chest of drawers—would repulse him into leaving her be. David did not appear repulsed.

“This used to be Troy's room, huh? I remember this upstairs window.”

“It was everybody's room at some point,” Lelah said. “Except mine.”

And then, because waiting for his questions was excruciating, Lelah confessed. Not a true confession, but an abridged, smoothed-over version of what she'd done to end up back on Yarrow. That she had fallen behind on rent because she “used to gamble” and had some “bad debt.” That Dwayne the lonely widower sexually harassed her at work. That she'd borrowed a couple hundred dollars from him long before that, and because of this the phone company was investigating.

David didn't say anything after she finished talking, so she felt compelled to repeat, “I'm not looking for you to save me. I'll have it all taken care of soon.”

“Why not stay with your daughter?”

Lelah sighed and passed her hand through the air in front of her.

“Have you talked to someone about the gambling?”

“Yes,” she said. “I been to Gamblers Anonymous. I haven't gambled in a long time.”

“That's good,” David said. “Addiction is real.”

How was it possible that Troy and this man were friends? Lelah wondered. “Addiction is real” were three words Troy Turner would never say, and words for which Lelah had no response. They were three words that cut to the heart of a certain kind of truth but still failed to capture the seriousness of the problem. Lelah and David sat quietly, and the sounds of the street amplified. The chirrup of squirrels making mischief in the lot next door. A distant tire screech and the bass-induced rattle of a car's cheap sound system.

“Why do you, I mean, why
did
you do it?”

Lelah couldn't say. She could have talked about Missouri, and Vernon chasing her around their little apartment and the fleeting look on his face of genuine hate before he punched her in the stomach, the chest, the mouth, and finally the eye, but wasn't that a long time ago? Lelah knew she was supposed to be past it. She wanted to say something about the nature of the stillness, but she didn't have the right words to explain that feeling. She thought of comparing it to David's own cherished meditating, his need for silence, but she knew they weren't the same thing. When David meditated, he wanted nothing. When Lelah was still at the roulette table, she wanted everything. The story of her day-to-day stopped and was replaced by possibility for as long as she could maintain the stillness. She could walk out and be anyone, and more than a specific fantasy, the multitude of outcomes captivated her. Just turning the idea over in her head right now made her crave it. She could feel it in her thumbs.

“I can't explain,” she said, and David nodded, as if he'd never thought she would. They sat in silence again.

“Really,” David said finally. “You're grown, and you don't have no overhead here.”

Lelah wasn't sure if he was trying to convince himself or her. It was too soon for her to be so desperate for his approval, but she was. He didn't need her, yet it was clear he still wanted her, and even though she hadn't told him the whole truth, she felt unburdened for finally telling someone a portion of it. He hadn't left yet.

“You ever been up here before?” she asked.

“Me? No, I feel like every time I used to come see Troy your mother was in her chair right by the stairs, ready to pounce on me if I went up.”

Lelah smiled.

“Yeah, by the time Troy and me were growing up she'd gotten real paranoid about being robbed, so she didn't let anybody up who wasn't family.”

She stood. If she did not act crushed by his presence here, if she could act natural, then he still might respect her.

“Let me give you a tour, then,” she said.

She showed him the tiny teal-painted bathroom, thankfully devoid of her drying underwear. She told him about how she and Brianne had lived in the girls' room when they first moved back from Missouri, and her sister Marlene, newly divorced, had lived in the boys' room. When Brianne was four she'd announced that she needed her own dresser, a place where her clothes weren't up against her mother's. Marlene and Viola found her a child's dresser and vanity at a flea market, miraculously painted a terrible shade of pink similar to the girls' room walls. Brianne had insisted on taking the dresser with her when she and Lelah moved off Yarrow, and she continued to drag it from little apartment to little apartment, all the way up until she went away to college. Lelah wished she knew what had happened to it.

Back downstairs she re-created the living and dining rooms for him, where furniture used to be, who used to like to sit where at the table. In the basement Lelah told David about Lonnie's band practices, and did her best to seem uninterested when he pulled a clump of track and field medals out of a memories box to inspect.

In the center of the basement, over a drain in the cement floor, an ancient water hose hung over an exposed beam. The other end of the hose was attached to the sink against the wall.

“You ever use this?” David asked.

“Not since I was twelve,” Lelah said. “That was for the boys in the summer. They'd take showers down here so us girls could have more time in the bathroom upstairs.”

David walked over to the sink and turned the faucet. In the light coming through the high windows Lelah saw the hose twitch, then the water gush out brown. She took a step back from it. Soon it ran clear. David took off his shorts and shoes and shirt and smiled at her, a look she'd come to recognize. Although it was chilly and she feared spiders or mice, she undressed as well. She joined him under the hose, pressed her breasts against him for warmth. He lifted his arms up, reached behind her head and unwound her hair band. In another life this would have been presumptuous, wetting her hair without asking. But in this life in which she hadn't felt another person touch her scalp in too long, his fingers were welcome. She kissed his collarbone, reached up for his neck.

When David entered her, what Lelah felt was relief. She didn't need him to save her, but she did need this, whatever it was and no matter what it meant, for as long as she could manage to hold on to it.

After being denied three times (the biblical significance was not lost on him), Cha-Cha drove around Detroit for several hours. All the way down Grand River to Warren, up Warren to Van Dyke and past Kettering High School, where Russell had been among the inaugural class. He wound his way through smaller residential streets, surprised by his ability to navigate them intuitively. They were like a system of familiar tributaries leading to a vital body of water. He lacked the nerve to face the house on Yarrow, ostensibly the site of his undoing, so he made his way to East Grand Boulevard instead. The old Packard plant stood in more or less the same state of decay since the last time he'd driven by it—blasted-out windows, cryptic messages graffitied across the walls, the scars of past fires evident here and there. What depressed him more than the ruined factory were the houses farther up the boulevard that he'd coveted growing up, now blighted and abandoned. Those big houses, with their high porches so far off from the street, could have easily housed a family with thirteen children. Now the wide center islands on some blocks were so overgrown with weeds and grass, a child could hide in them. He took Mack over to Gratiot and drove north for more than a half hour until he reached the cemetery where Francis Turner's remains resided.

In the center of a row of flat gravestones, Francis's own stone was so besieged by untended lawn that only

ANCIS R. TUR

ELOVED FATH

I Corinthians 13:

could be made out in the center. Cha-Cha kicked back the weeds, whacked at them with his cane. He considered stooping over to yank up a few tufts but knew the effort would be futile. Viola was the only one who visited the place, and even she hadn't been by for at least a year. The space of grass next to Francis's stone remained empty in anticipation of the day that Viola would occupy it.

He stood there for a long time, looking to the rest of the cemetery like an estranged son or brother finally paying his respects. The urge to cry rose up again, but Cha-Cha knew better and tamped it down. His father would not have wanted tears at his gravesite or anywhere else. It was likely the reason so few Turners visited this place; they could not imagine their father encouraging them to talk to the ground, to whisper or weep before a granite slab. There was a wrought-iron bench several rows out from Francis's grave, closer to the narrow road. Cha-Cha sat down. His left eyelid twitched, as it used to when he drove long distances overnight. Fatigue. There could be haints here, Cha-Cha thought. The entire cemetery could be populated with ghosts that chose not to show themselves to him. His father could be among them.