The Turner House (2 page)

Cha-Cha was driving a full load of SUVs to Chicago during a storm. His rig at full capacity was a sight to behold—five-ton gas-guzzlers stacked like toys in two rows behind him. One, supported by a metal overhang, perched right above the roof of Cha-Cha's cab. He had reached the M-14, just past Ann Arbor, when, according to the police report, a deer darted onto the highway, causing a sedan to swerve into Cha-Cha's lane. Cha-Cha, in turn, veered off the highway and into a ditch.

“He ran me off the road” was the first thing Cha-Cha said when he woke up in the hospital.

“Who ran you off the road, baby?” his wife, Tina, asked. She put a plaintive hand on his arm cast.

“I knew he'd come back.”

“Who? Come back from where?” Lelah asked.

Cha-Cha put his free hand on the bed, made to sit up and see who else was in the room.

“Just sit still, Cha,” Tina said. “I got the remote right here.”

In the awkward seconds it took for the mechanical bed to raise him, Cha-Cha remembered the night before. He saw the car to the left of him swerve into his lane. And he'd swerved, true enough, but only onto the shoulder. Then blue light, that familiar, flickering, and fear-inducing blue from the big room, filled his cab. He couldn't see the road to pull back onto it. He remembered clamping onto the wheel then, and hunching his shoulders forward as he tried to make out the road. He couldn't do it, and just as he conceded this point, he heard a fluttering, similar to the fluttering of the curtains that had roused him from his sleep so many years before. A sound like a multitude of moths, then silence. His old haint had found him and almost destroyed him in a matter of seconds.

His truck dragged along the brush for several hundred feet before slamming against a tree that was big enough to hold its ground. His seat belt did not catch the way it was supposed to in such an accident, and Cha-Cha's body bounced around the cab—up to the roof first, then hard against the driver's side door. He broke six ribs, his left arm, his collarbone, and, as if someone somewhere saw fit to initiate him into old age, his left hip.

Once propped up in the hospital bed, Cha-Cha gained a better sense of the owners of the voices in the room. His mother, Viola, stared at him from her wheelchair. Her neck muscles looked tense, as if the strain of supporting her head was getting the best of her, like a newborn baby. He wondered how long she'd waited for him to wake up. It annoyed him that someone, likely his sister Lelah, considering her proximity to Yarrow Street, had put Viola through the trouble of an unnecessary hospital visit. His boys, Chucky and Todd, leaned against the bathroom door. Francey was there, as was Troy, still in his police uniform. And someone else, too. Someone male, and white, and professional-looking, presumably the doctor, by the door.

“You said somebody found you, Cha?” Viola asked. Her voice sounded weak, weaker than the last time he'd heard it.

“The haint, Mama, remember?” Cha-Cha asked. “There was that same blue light from the big room.”

“Cha-Cha, you've got a lot of painkillers in you right now,” Francey said. She put her hand on Viola's shoulder, looked around the room in a way that made Cha-Cha nervous.

“Francey, don't look at me like I'm crazy. It was that same haint in my cab, I—”

“Dad,” Chucky cut in. “Not. Now.” He and his brother wore the same nervous expression. A half smile usually reserved for police officers—and, Cha-Cha recalled, schoolteachers.

The man in the doorway cleared his throat.

Perhaps it was his over-starched dress shirt, or maybe that he'd displayed patience few doctors could have mustered during the previous exchange, but Cha-Cha realized this man could only be one person.
The
INSURANCE MAN is here
, he thought, and then,
Oh, hell.

Milton Crawford was not an unpleasant man, but Cha-Cha quickly decided he had no sense of humor. He was fond of peppering sentences with
actually
, even if he wasn't clarifying anything.

“Actually, GM Life and Trust takes its employees' state of minds before accidents quite seriously,” he said.

“I'm sure they do,” Cha-Cha said, “but what you heard wasn't me before the accident, it was me after surgery, and sitting here getting this”—he reached unsuccessfully for his drip bag—“put into my bloodstream for a few hours.”

“I do understand that, Mr. Turner, but actually what you just described, a vision of a ghost, has to be included in the report. It may actually amount to nothing, but I'm obligated to transcribe our entire conversation here.”

“But he wasn't talking to you,” Lelah said. Her hands moved to her hips. “He's lucky to be alive right now. Can't you come back tomorrow?”

“Lelah, let Cha-Cha handle this,” Francey said.

“Lelah's right,” Troy said. “He didn't even notice you were here. He thought he was speaking in confidence to
us.
You can't go holding him accountable for that.” Ever since joining the police force, Troy was quick to become litigious.

Cha-Cha cleared his throat.

“Look, Milton, truth is, I'm tired. If you have to include it in your report, feel free to do so. I'm sure it'll amount to nothing, like you say.”

Actually, it did amount to something. Three weeks into his Family and Medical Leave Act insurance, a letter arrived from a Mr. Tindale, who claimed to be Milton Crawford's boss. He said Chrysler would offer Cha-Cha his normal wages for the duration of his recovery, on the condition that he see a company psychologist, who would determine whether he was “personally culpable” for any aspect of the crash. All drivers had to submit to drug testing after an accident, and often a trace amount of alcohol or cocaine (used by the younger guys to help them stay awake) would be the reason they didn't get the money they thought they deserved. Cha-Cha had never heard of a driver being required to have a psychological evaluation.

“They wanna make sure you're not crazy,” Tina said. She knelt on her knees in their master bathroom, running water for his bath. Cha-Cha sat on an ottoman near the door, one of Tina's old bathrobes pulled tight around his frame. It was purple and his favorite since the accident.

“Ain't nothing crazy about seeing a haint.”

Tina turned to look at him.

“Says you and your family. Sooner or later you're gonna realize that just cause a Turner thinks a thing is normal doesn't mean it is. Not at all.”

SPRING 2008

Lelah stuffed fistfuls of her underwear into trash bags. She was too busy thinking about what to pack next to be embarrassed in front of the stranger who watched her. The city bailiff seemed disinterested anyway; he leaned against her front-room wall and fiddled with his phone. The other bailiff waited outside. Lelah saw him through the front window. He did calf raises on the curb near the dumpster, his pudgy hands on his hips.

She'd always imagined the men who handled evictions to be more menacing—big muscles, loud mouths. These two were young and large, but soft-looking, baby-faced. Like giant chocolate cherubs. It had never come to this before, the actual day of eviction. Lelah had received a few thirty-day notices but always cleared out before the Demand for Possession—a seven-day notice—slid under her door. Seven days might as well have been none this time around; before Lelah knew it the bailiffs were knocking, telling her she had two hours to grab what she could, that they would toss whatever she left behind into that dumpster outside.

Humidity made her wrecked living room oppressive. It was the end of April, but it felt like June. The bailiff leaning on the wall carried a gray washcloth in his back pocket, and he swiped it across his brow from time to time. He pretended not to be watching her. Lelah knew better. He had a plan ready for if she snapped and started throwing dishes at him, if she called for backup—a brother or cousin to come beat him up—or if she tried to barricade herself in the bathroom. He probably had a gun. Mostly, all Lelah did was put her hands on the things she owned, think about them for a second, and decide against carrying them to her Pontiac. Furniture was too bulky, food from the fridge would expire in her car, and the smaller things—a blender, boxes full of costume jewelry, a toaster—felt ridiculous to take along. She didn't know where she'd end up. Where do the homeless make toast? Outside of essential clothing, hygiene items, and a few pots and pans, she focused on the sorts of things people on TV cried about after a fire: a few photos of herself throughout her forty-one years, her birth certificate and social security card, photos of her twenty-one-year-old daughter and her eighteen-month-old grandson, Francis Turner's obituary.

The second bailiff stopped his calf raises when Lelah walked outside with another box. She imagined that the neighbors peeked at her through their blinds, but she refused to turn around and confirm it.

“I'd give you a hand, but we can't touch none of your stuff,” he said.

Lelah used her shoulder to cram the box into the backseat.

“I know you're thinkin, like, if we're not allowed to touch your stuff, then how are we gonna dump everything at the end.”

Lelah did not acknowledge that she'd heard him. She took a step back from her car, checked to see if anything valuable was visible from the windows.

“We hire some guys to come and do that part,” he said. “Me personally, I'm not touchin none of your stuff. I don't do cleanup.”

The bailiff smiled. A few of his teeth were brown. Maybe he was older than he looked.

Back inside her apartment, the other bailiff, the sweaty one, sat legs splayed on her sofa. At the sight of Lelah he stood up, leaned against the wall once more. Her daughter, Brianne, called her cell phone, and Lelah ignored it for the third time that morning. She surveyed the room. What to take, what to take, what to take? It all looked like junk now. Cheap things she'd bought just to keep her apartment from looking barren. She snatched her leather jacket from its hook on the hallway closet door. That's it, she thought. The only way to hold on to some dignity, to maintain the tiniest sense of control, was to leave now, with an hour and a half to spare.

Later that night, at her mother's vacant house, she claimed the big room for sleeping.

As the youngest Turner child, Lelah had no siblings to escape from growing up, no reason to seek the cramped comfort of the big room's walls. Still, when her older brother Troy went off to the navy, she'd expected to take his place across the hall, spend her final years at home on that narrow twin bed for tradition's sake. Before she could gather her things to move, her mother had claimed the big room for sewing. Viola Turner claimed so little for herself, who could deny her this luxury? Not Lelah, the child who had the privilege of seeing her parents at a slower cadence. Fewer mouths to feed at the table, long-awaited fair wages keeping the bill collectors at bay. Francis and Viola were older, a bit slower getting around, but she was the Better Times Baby, something she'd known since plaits and barrettes. She'd stayed in the too-large, run-down, Pepto-pink girls' room until she too got grown, and found a way to get gone.

That night, nearly a year after Cha-Cha's accident, and six months since Viola went to live with him in the suburbs, Lelah claimed that long-denied right of passage. One small triumph on a day marked by defeat. She climbed the narrow stairs and creaked down the hall, using her cell phone as a flashlight, and imagined her younger self, sleepy-eyed and ashy-kneed, peeking out of the girls' room door to watch an older sibling take quarter in the big room.

The porch light had been on when she drove up, which meant Cha-Cha still paid the electricity bill. A relief. A house with electricity couldn't be classified as abandoned, and an individual with a key to that house didn't fit the definition of a trespasser. She considered conducting a thorough search. It was warm enough for someone—a niece or a nephew, or, God forbid, a drug-addled interloper—to set up camp in the basement. But she was too tired. After leaving her old apartment, Lelah had driven around the city, no idea of where to go. She refused to beg Cha-Cha or one of her nearby sisters for a place to stay this time. She'd wracked her brain for an alternative solution, some cheap, temporary lodging or genius scheme to hustle up money for a new place. Nothing surfaced, so she'd waited until the sun set and driven to the east side.

The big room had its disadvantages. It was right next to the bathroom, and water knocked on the wall as it traveled through old pipes to the toilet, which continuously ran. The lone window faced the street, which in this part of the city—ever changed, further decayed between each visit—put Lelah at risk of being struck by a stray bullet, or kept awake by intermittent car horns, hoots, hollers, and alley cat screeches. But on this, the first real, spring-feeling night of the season, she thought people had better things to do than shoot up the old Turner house, and having lived here in the eighties when the final, fatal arrival of crack cowed the neighborhood, Lelah felt Yarrow Street had already given her its worst. She hunkered down on the old twin bed, shoes on and jacket draped over her torso, and fell asleep.

She overslept. She'd planned to leave at five, before the block's working residents got up and about their business. She didn't bother to change clothes. She hurried down the empty house's narrow stairs.

Daylight flooding the front room halted her on the first-floor landing. Lelah knew that nearly all of the furniture in the house had been divvied up, save for the old bed and dresser in the big room, which no one had wanted. It hadn't occurred to her that the walls would be bare too. Dozens of brown outlines on the yellow wallpaper—ovals and rectangles—highlighted where picture frames once hung. Not long ago, every descendant of Francis and Viola Turner smiled from the front room's walls. Four generations, nearly one hundred faces. Some afro'd, some Jheri curled, some bald, more balding. Mortarboards, nurses' scrubs, swelling bellies, and wedding tulle. A depression in the floorboards opposite the front door marked the spot where Viola's armchair had stood. Lelah had spent whole afternoons on the floor in front of that chair, watching the comings and goings of Yarrow Street as her mother or an older sister greased her scalp and combed her hair. The memory made her feel safe for a moment, like maybe she'd made the right choice coming back here.