The Turner House (18 page)

Lelah had never been worried. Once she was in David's apartment she hadn't thought past kissing him and feeling his weight on her and putting her hands on his back. But she said okay because he seemed to need it.

David kissed her on the forehead, then the neck. His hand moved to her thigh. Lelah stood up, took off the basketball shorts and straddled him. She did not think of Troy or Jillian, or Brianne or Viola. Only herself.

Speak something into existence. Give it a name and give it life. Had Cha-Cha done this? Did he believe this could be done? Certainly not after so many years of relative peace, and not as quickly as it was happening.

There was someone, something, sitting on the windowsill in Cha-Cha's bedroom.

This is how it begins. A moth-like sound, and a light too blue in a corner of your bedroom. If you ignore it, it does not exist. But speak its name and you've invited it into your mind. Like hearing voices, or seeing the face of Christ in a freshly laundered shirt. What happens cannot be manipulated, refuses to be controlled. But what we
acknowledge
as having occurred, what we tell others, can metastasize, grow ubiquitous overnight. He'd acknowledged it there in Alice's office, and now the control he had over what happened was gone. Cha-Cha hadn't started recording his feelings as Alice suggested, or thought about patterns, or visited the big room, but he had started remembering.

He couldn't show Tina because Tina was on a Women's Ministry retreat; somewhere along Lake Huron she slept on a cabin bunk with proverbs swirling through her dreams. He couldn't carry or wheel Viola in to see his haint because the old woman's sleep was precious. He couldn't even get out of his bed and down on his knees to pray like he had prayed so long ago because the truth was that he couldn't move. Fear didn't paralyze him as much as surprise. And disappointment with himself. He awoke because he felt the air in the room shift, as subtle as a single hair falling on his skin, and tried to keep his eyes closed. A futile attempt because the noise was there, too. Like the beating of wings so papery and thin a drop of water could have dissolved them. He'd recognized the sound.

Two hours and the light on the windowsill hadn't moved. Just an orb of brightness like the spots of light one saw after blinking too fast. It hadn't condensed into the glowing, wispy-haired man-child marauder of the big room. Hadn't grabbed him by his ashy foot and dragged him into the dewy April night. This was the surprise. No confrontation at all.

I am here, was all it seemed to want to say. I have always been here.

When faced with the fantastic, those unfamiliar with that world often regard the phenomenon through the safe lens of logic. Logic was how Cha-Cha made it through the night. When the sun came up the haint slipped away, or perhaps it dissolved during those hours of exhausted delirium when Cha-Cha was neither fully asleep nor awake. In either case, before dawn an uncontrollable curiosity gnawed at the kernel of fear tucked deep within his body. This haint had always been a presence. He was willing to accept that as fact. A blue thing on the edge of his life. But was it a menace, or merely a benign constant that he'd misinterpreted as threatening? Perhaps it existed somewhere between the two. He needed to figure out how it worked.

He edged out of the bedroom, careful not to get too close to the window. Would that spot be hot or cold from the haint's visit? He didn't dare find out. Wrapped in the protective terry cloth of Tina's purple bathrobe, he made his way to his office nook—a desk and a swivel chair—in the living room. A few days before he had stacked the pages he'd printed from websites about haints into two piles: “likely” and “unlikely.” Those tales that felt too tall, the ones that seemed ripped out of a B-movie thriller, he stacked in “unlikely.” The “likely” pile was smaller, as feasible information on haints proved hard to come by online. He'd learned that in the Carolinas people painted their porches, doorjambs, and even their tombstones haint blue. Blue to mimic the ocean, because haints were thought incapable of traveling across bodies of water. They tended to stay in the house or the town where they lived when they were alive. In the New Orleans hoodoo section of
Mules and Men
, Hurston also mentioned that water was a barrier. Sedentary ghosts. Perhaps his haint glowed blue because it was proud to go where it pleased.

He wanted to send Alice some of the likelier links, but he didn't have her email, so he looked her up online. The “images” tab popped up. He clicked it. There on the first page of results, underneath all of the Alice Rothman, PsyD's who were not black, was a captioned image of Alice and her elderly white parents at a gala downtown. He didn't know what to make of the picture, besides that she was obviously adopted, but he printed it out nevertheless. He broadened his haint search by inputting “blue light ghosts.” He scrolled through the results. These websites, old and shoddily put together, offended Cha-Cha's limited web-presentation sensibilities. Ancient Angelfire, GeoCities, and LiveJournal pages featured everything from Blue Light Ghosts: A Rockabilly Band to poorly spelled firsthand accounts of UFO probes. Haints, Cha-Cha decided, must be relegated to oral accounts. But they were the only type of ghosts he knew. Even Francis never denied their existence; he just did not believe them capable of traveling so far north. And Viola's sisters, his aunts Olivia and Lucille, had been full of haint tales when Cha-Cha visited them in Arkansas as a child. Olivia and Lucille were dead now, but Viola was not. He went to her bedroom.

“Mama?” Cha-Cha knocked twice, softly.

No noise from within. He edged the door open.

“Mama? Are you awake?”

Cha-Cha moved closer to Viola in her adjustable hospital bed. She slept on her back, her eyes scrunched closed. Under any other circumstance, waking Viola would have been heinous. Not this morning.

“Mama,” louder this time. “Are you up?”

Viola's eyelids fluttered, her lips parted.

“Get me some water,” she said.

“I will. But I have a question.”

“Lord, water first, please,” Viola croaked. “Then questions.”

Was she always this cranky in the morning? Cha-Cha couldn't recall. In fact, Cha-Cha could not remember the last time he'd been alone with her for more than a few minutes.

Water in hand, straw positioned to Viola's lips, he tried again.

“Mama, last night I think I saw something, like a light or something in my room? I think it was the haint.”

“Where's Tina?” Viola asked.

“Tina? Mama, I'm tryna talk to you about something. To tell you about the haint.”

Viola looked up at Cha-Cha, scrutinized him anew, as if she'd just now realized her firstborn, and not some other person, was in the room.

“What haint?”

“You know, the haint from the big room and the accident,” Cha-Cha said.

“I don't know nothin about no haint, Cha-Cha.”

She looked past him to the doorway. Cha-Cha smelled the Pond's face cream that Tina helped Viola apply every night.

“Mama, how are you gonna sit up here and say that? The haint? The ghost that me and Francey and everybody saw and then I saw again when I had that accident?”

Viola took the cup from Cha-Cha's hand and drank the water down. The veins in her neck pumped as she swallowed.

“Mama—”

“You remember what your daddy said?” Viola's voice was low, deliberately cold. She waited for Cha-Cha to nod, or respond at all, but he didn't move.

“You remember. ‘Ain't
no
haints in Detroit.' And he was right. You know what else he said to me?”

Cha-Cha did not respond.

“He said maybe somethin's off up in Cha-Cha's head.” She took a finger, the nail painted a thick, dull pink, and tapped her temple.

“Come on now, Mama,” Cha-Cha said. “He never said that.”

“Yes he did. So you be careful who you go runnin around tellin stories to.”

There never seemed to be a point in being angry at Viola. Even when old age wasn't her excuse, she was overworked, underappreciated. This morning felt different. Cha-Cha was angry, but underneath that anger lay something more terrifying. Viola had planted doubt.

“Mama, you don't mean that.”

“My legs are startin to hurt, Cha-Cha. I need my morning pills. Where is Tina anyway? You don't never take care of me like Tina does.”

He imagined shaking her, denying her the pills, turning her out onto the street, but he knew he would not. He counted out the pills and left them in a pile on the nightstand.

T
HERE WERE DUES
to be counted at church, Women's Ministry members to track down and shake down for money, but Tina headed home the morning after the Lake Huron retreat. Cha-Cha should have been at work, and she didn't like to leave Viola alone for long.

When she walked into the living room, Cha-Cha was asleep on the sofa. His mouth hung open, as did the purple bathrobe, exposing his bare sagging belly and his blue and yellow checkered boxers. Printer paper fanned out on the floor around his feet. At first Tina feared the worst: heart attack, hours ago when he was getting ready for work, and no one around to help him. She stood frozen in the entryway, her own mouth open, no single thought caught in her head. But then, praise God, he snored. Tina shoved him awake. Cha-Cha jerked up and yanked his bathrobe close.

“What are you doing home, Cha?”

“I called out from work.”

“You called out from work. You sick? What's wrong?”

Cha-Cha was a strategic hoarder of sick days. Nothing short of a harrowing case of food poisoning could make him waste a day. He sat up straight and made room for Tina on the sofa, but Tina remained standing.

“I saw the haint,” he said. His eyes were wide, and for what couldn't be but felt like the first time, Tina noticed a cluster of tiny moles on both of his temples, like three-dimensional liver spots.

“You saw the haint. When? Where?” Tina knew Cha-Cha hated it when she repeated him like this, but she couldn't stop.

As he told her about the night before, about a light both natural and unnatural, about the air shifting, Tina was conscious of her purse sliding to the floor, her arms folding, her brow knotting up. But did she realize these gestures screamed I DON'T BELIEVE YOU to her husband? Not really.

Tina was both a believer and a skeptic. She understood the value of practicality as well as the power of miracles. There were events that could only be processed and accepted through faith: raising the dead, angelic visitations, praying cancer out of a body. But she did not believe a haint had been in her bedroom the night before. In the room she'd decorated in earth tones and cherry wood. Where the pillow shams matched the curtain tiebacks. Near the remote-controlled bed she'd picked out less than a year ago. Her bedroom was too ordinary, too familiar to be the site of an event as fantastic as what Cha-Cha described. On a mountaintop, in the middle of a blustery summer storm—these were settings where she could imagine something amazing happening.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Tina, I'm sure. Now you're soundin like Mama.”

“What Mama say?”

“She didn't say anything helpful, that's for sure. She damn near called me crazy.”

Cha-Cha gave Tina a searching look, and Tina quickly shook her head to let him know that she didn't think he was crazy.

“You know what,” Cha-Cha said. “I'm gonna go try and see Alice.”

“You're gonna go see Alice? Why?” Tina hoped her panic didn't show on her face.

“Alice is the reason it came back. She got me to thinking about it, and how I grew up.”

“She
got
you, is right. You paying that lady an arm and a leg to talk about your feelings, and now you think she can help you with spirits? You gotta go see Pastor Mike, if anybody.”

She wiggled her cell phone out of the front pocket of her jeans, feeling glad that she'd gone ahead and put the pastor's personal number on speed dial.

“I just saw Pastor Mike an hour ago, matter of fact. I'm sure he'd love to talk to you today.”

Cha-Cha hoisted himself up from the sofa and snatched the phone out of Tina's hand.

“I don't
know
Pastor Mike, Tina. I know Alice.”

Tina blinked away the tears she felt welling up in her eyes.

“But does Alice know God? She doesn't even
believe
in him, Cha.”

This should have been the end of the argument, Tina thought. Why would anyone want to go to someone who didn't believe in the spiritual for help with spirits?

Cha-Cha bent down to gather up the paper at his feet and stacked them into a messy pile on the sofa.

“Alice is my friend,” he said. “I can trust her to help me sort this out.”

“Alice is your
friend?
You
pay
her, Charles. Don't you forget that. You pay her a whole heap of money for this so-called friendship. If anybody is your friend, it's
me
, isn't it?”

Cha-Cha sighed heavily. He might as well have rolled his eyes. He walked past her toward the guest bedroom, where he kept his casual clothes. Was he afraid of their bedroom? Tina wondered. He would probably have the nerve to try to sleep on the couch tonight.

“How can you know she won't just tell you what you wanna hear, huh? Are you that afraid of this thing that you want somebody to
lie
to you?” She said this to his back.

Cha-Cha turned around in the doorway. The look he gave was one she'd seen before but never directed at her. Chucky's first wife, Yvette, cheated on Chucky when he was deployed during Desert Storm, and she'd come around to the house begging Cha-Cha and Tina to convince their son to take her back. Cha-Cha gave her a look Tina had never seen him make before, devoid of the intimacy and flicker of empathy that he afforded everyone in his family. His eyes were cold, and something in the way his lips sat suggested disgust. It was a look that at the time Tina thought appropriate, but now, on the receiving end of it, she thought poor Yvette didn't deserve a look like that. Who was this Alice Rothman? Tina was suddenly afraid to find out.