The Turner House (30 page)

In the car outside of Alice's office Cha-Cha had second thoughts. It was true that this was his regularly scheduled session time, but had his episode last week canceled it? Alice might have given his time slot away. And then there was the more nerve-racking issue of what he'd say. He'd decided this morning to chance it, tell Alice how he felt about her and see what came of it. An easy enough plan, but how to execute it? He'd always valued romantic stability—knowing where his sex and his meals would come from—over the thrill of someone new and the anxiety of living a lie. In this respect he differed from his brothers. Of the seven Turner boys, four had outside children they claimed, and there were always jokes and jabs about other children out there, waiting to be brought into the ever-fattening fold. No one called these children illegitimate, and none of their fathers ever denied patronage (at least not after DNA tests), but they were living, lovable proof of the weaknesses of the Turner man. Cha-Cha had never felt so weak before.

“Charles, I wasn't expecting you,” Alice said.

But was that the truth? She stood in her office doorway looking more put-together than usual. Her eyebrows, often unruly, were regulated by some sort of makeup pencil, or maybe she had plucked them. She wore a sleeveless blouse and for the first time ever a skirt, a black and white polka-dotted one that stopped just below the knee. Her legs looked freshly shaved and well greased. To Cha-Cha, everything about her appearance suggested extra, premeditated effort.

“I've unfortunately scheduled this hour for some errands I need to run,” she continued. “But you're welcome to walk out with me.”

The girl behind the counter looked as surprised and suspicious as Cha-Cha felt. He gathered himself up from his chair and followed Alice into the hallway.

Once out of earshot of the receptionist, Alice spoke.

“I don't have any errands to run right now, Charles, I just thought we might need to talk outside of my office. I didn't think you'd show up for your appointment, but I'm glad you did. Would you like to get coffee?”

“Coffee,” he said. “Okay.”

“Great,” Alice said. “There's a shop right on Grand River and Farmington; I'll drive myself and meet you there.”

“Okay.”

This could be either the beginning of something new for them or the end of everything, Cha-Cha realized. Alice busied herself with her phone as they waited for the elevator, only looking up at him once. She pretended this was normal, what they were doing, that he wasn't a patient but a colleague, perhaps, that getting coffee wasn't a new and interesting activity within the scope of their relationship.

But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with his heart.
Trusty, pragmatic Matthew. The sin was already in motion, Cha-Cha reasoned, so he might as well see it through.

They stepped into the empty elevator, bringing their awkward silence with them. Cha-Cha wanted to start the conversation immediately, get his apology out of the way, but it seemed Alice wanted to wait until they were out of her building to say anything. She smelled like citrusy perfume—another first, Cha-Cha observed. He leaned forward with one hand extended toward Alice's face, the other supporting him on his cane.

In movies, it always seems easy enough to kiss a woman, even if she doesn't really want to be kissed. The heroine will stand there and take the leading man's advance—eyes wide open if she doesn't want it, eyes closed if she does. Reality is more complicated.

Cha-Cha leaned in to kiss Alice, and because he'd closed his eyes he couldn't see the shock and confusion in hers, nor did he feel her duck out of kissing range. His lips grazed her forehead. She tasted like salt.

“Oh God,” she said.

“Shit,” Cha-Cha said. If he could have pushed a button to eject himself from the elevator and into oblivion, he would have.

The door opened on the first floor and Cha-Cha followed Alice out. She walked briskly through the main lobby. Cha-Cha wondered if she was running away from him, if he was chasing her. He slowed. Alice slowed as well, waited for him by the door.

On the curb outside, Cha-Cha said he was sorry, although he didn't feel sorry. Alice shook her head quickly, like a child shaking water out of her ear.

“You were confused. It didn't happen. Nothing happened. The coffee shop is on Farmington and Grand River,” she said.

There would be no affair. How had he ever thought otherwise? He now feared he'd ruined their relationship for good. What had he thought—that she'd accept his kiss right there in her office elevator, then retire with him to the back of his SUV and they'd get it on? He hadn't thought, was the problem. He'd tried to be brash and ended up looking like a creepy old man.

Inside the coffee shop Alice had her drink in hand and was prowling around for a place to sit. It was one of those tiny, over-furnished places where the unemployed and entrepreneurial set up camp for the day. Alice poached two facing armchairs near a fake fireplace. Cha-Cha wasn't supposed to drink coffee anymore, so he joined her without ordering anything.

“Look, Alice,” he said. “I don't know why I did that in the elevator. I haven't been sleeping—”

Alice shook her head.

“We don't have to talk about that, Charles. I'd prefer very much that we didn't.”

She spoke quickly, not waiting for him to agree.

“Obviously our conversation last week ended very badly. You don't have to apologize, because we both said the wrong things.”

“I do have to apologize,” Cha-Cha said. “It was out of line for me to bring up your parents. And I never should have yelled.”

“But I understand your frustration,” Alice said. “I undid months of trust and sharing on your part in fifteen minutes. It wasn't entirely professional, and you deserve better than that.”

“Thank you,” Cha-Cha said. He couldn't fully commit to the conversation; his brain was busy replaying his kiss attempt over and over.

“I've been talking to my
own
therapist, who is also my mentor,” Alice said. “And we think it's best for both you and me if I stop being your therapist.”

“Oh,” Cha-Cha said. “I see.” He had no way of knowing whether she was happy or sad to be cutting him off.

“And I've decided it would be best to explain a little bit about why I handled things between us the way I did. You do deserve an explanation, Charles, because the way I've behaved is particular to you.”

“What is
particular
, Alice? The friendship we've created? Or all of the flip-flopping you did about my haint?”

Alice frowned. Her fingers fluttered with no desk full of pens to distract them.

“Both, I suppose,” she said. She took a long drink of her coffee. “I wanted to know more about you, so I deliberately broke my own protocol in regards to several things, the haint just being the most glaring example.”

Cha-Cha reasoned that his first suspicions about her must have been true; she'd used him for a little cultural voyeurism, some risk-free socioeconomic slumming.

“But I wasn't interested in you because my parents are white,” Alice added. “This is Detroit, after all, Charles, and I'm an adult. I
know
black people. It didn't have to do with you being black, but it did have something to do with your background. Honestly, I wouldn't have been able to articulate what exactly it was had it not been for the conversations I've had with Gus.”

“What was it then?” Cha-Cha asked. “I'm not that interesting.”

The truth, when finally revealed, is sticky like wet dough. The majority of it stays in place as one handles it, but pieces break off and adhere, making certain facts seem larger, more portentous, than others. Alice told a story that was more than Cha-Cha imagined hearing from her, a story that made him look at their entire history differently.

Over a decade earlier, at thirty-one years of age, Alice discovered she had uterine fibroids. Despite the best efforts of doctors to minimize these growths and even an operation to remove them, they persisted, large and painful inside of her. Her doctors determined that a hysterectomy was the only viable option to ensure her health. Faced with the reality of barrenness, Alice developed a desire to learn more about her birth parents. She wanted to know whose genes she'd inherited, whether she had siblings out there in the world, and what other conditions crouched in her DNA, waiting to incapacitate her at a later date. Alice knew that her adoptive parents, the ones Cha-Cha had seen online, had been Freedom Riders in the sixties, and that after many visits and considerable bureaucratic rigmarole they'd adopted her from a small orphanage in Mississippi. Throughout her twenties that explanation sufficed, but now that Alice needed to know more, additional information proved elusive. After weeks of correspondence with county clerks, records officials in Jackson, and even a few priests, Alice learned that she'd been the youngest of seven children, and that all of them died shortly after she was born.

“No one over the phone or through the mail would tell me how they died,” Alice said. “So I took a trip down there and started asking around. I questioned people at the grocery store and after church in the town where I was born. A lot of the older people remembered my family, but were cagey about what had happened to them. I eventually got the number for the retired county clerk's house and called her.”

She met the elderly woman for lunch at a nearby Cracker Barrel. The woman told her that at the time of their deaths, the eldest of Alice's siblings, a boy, had been fifteen years old, and the youngest, a girl, had been two. The retired clerk also seemed hesitant to go into the details of her siblings' deaths, but Alice pressed her.

“They died in a car accident,” Alice told Cha-Cha. “The car spun out of control on a bridge and ended up in a lake. Everybody but my birth father and me was inside, and for whatever reason, my birth father eventually dropped me off with a church lady and left town. It's a sad story, and I was upset about it, but it didn't explain why the whole town acted as if there was a terrible secret behind it all.”

The secret wasn't based on fact at all, just a mass of rumors that over time people took for truth. The retired county clerk said the eldest son had been driving on the day of the accident because Alice's birth mother didn't know how. There were rumors that he'd tried to run away several times before the accident, but each time he'd run out of money before he got very far and come back home, or else his father would find him, give him a good whipping, and bring him back because he needed help on the farm. The rumor was that this eldest son drove the car off the bridge on purpose, and while there was no way to substantiate it, the rumor persisted, even thirty years later.

When Alice came back to Michigan she often found herself thinking about them. Bodies folded inside of an old car, overcome by silty lake water. She thought about this eldest son, and the possibility of so much responsibility so young making a person desperate. How feeling trapped within such a large family might affect one's psyche. Not until years later, when she met Charles Turner, eldest of thirteen and possibly prone to hallucinations, would she get an opportunity to talk to someone at the center of a similarly complex web.

“So,” Cha-Cha said. “You humored me all this time because you wanted to know if being in charge of things for my family was making me murderous?”

Alice winced, and he knew that despite his best effort to sound empathetic, his question had come off cruel.

“There's no one-to-one correlation, Charles. What matters is that I saw something in you that interested me, so I decided to perhaps not do what was best for you in pursuit of my own interest. I shouldn't have done that.”

Every time Alice apologized, the possibility of the two of them remaining friends seemed more unlikely. She was being this honest with him because she never wanted to see him again.

“But do you think that . . . that I'm hallucinating?”

Alice chewed on her bottom lip. Her hand traveled up to her hair, and she raked a stray coil back into the larger formation.

“I'm not speaking in a professional capacity—”

“I know,” Cha-Cha said. “We're done with all that. I just want to know what you think; I'm not going to sue you.”

Cha-Cha felt uncomfortable in his armchair. The back was too straight and the seat wasn't deep enough. He was aware of his belly hanging low and his knees spread too far apart.

“Honestly, Charles, I don't know what to tell you about the haint.”

“I just want to know what you think, in your gut.”

Alice took a deep breath, and her cheeks puffed out like a child's.

“In my gut I think you've always believed in this thing. And I don't know that you want to get rid of it.”

Cha-Cha opened his mouth, but Alice raised a hand in the air to silence him.

“I think you have a position within your family that affords you a lot of respect but not much true friendship, or a sense of individuality. This ghost, or the memory of it, has bothered you your whole life, but it's also made you feel extraordinary, chosen.”

“It doesn't make me feel special. I can't even sleep. I don't want it.”

“Your wife has her church involvement, which from what it sounds like makes her feel purposeful, but what do you have, Charles? You have this haint.”

“I still think it's real,” he said.

“Charles, you're focusing on the wrong thing. Does it even
matter
one way or the other?”

It was a hypothetical question, Cha-Cha knew, so he saved it for some later mulling over. What he worried about now was that Alice had stood up to throw away her coffee cup, that she was digging in her purse, presumably for keys. One last opportunity to be brave. Cha-Cha stood up.