The Turner House (33 page)

“And Brianne hates me because I don't know when to fucking
quit
with her and I feel like I'm ruining her with my guilt and bullshit. And I was sleeping with Troy's friend and now he hates me. I hate
myself
, Cha-Cha. I don't have
anything
and I'm tired of it. It's disgusting.”

“Aw, Lelah, don't say that,” he said. “Just slow down, and try to breathe.”

She stopped talking. Her body heaved.

“I'm not angry at you,” he said, although he wasn't sure she cared either way. “So you came back home. That's what it's for, right? It's no big deal. We'll figure all the rest of it out.”

At this Lelah sobbed louder and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “No, I don't wanna be saved anymore, Cha.
I'll
figure it out. I have to.”

“Alright,” he said. “You'll figure it out. I'm just tryna say it's not as bad as it feels.”

How easy it was for him to slip into this paternal role, even when despairing in his own right. It was a gift and a burden. He thought back to the summer of '67, before fires and bricks and trains to Glory, when it was still Lelah's summer. How vastly different Lelah's experiences must have been from his own, even though they grew up in the same family, in the same house, in the same neighborhood, in the same city called Detroit.

Lelah's breath finally slowed, and she felt her heartbeat relax. This was the final confession, she promised herself. No point in telling people about her problems if nothing changed. She leaned her head against Cha-Cha's shoulder. Through the shirt his skin felt soft and clammy. Her ears rang from the sobbing, and she marveled at how the one person she especially didn't want to find her out was sitting next to her in the big room. Then, remembering the beer cans and him slumped in front of the door, she sat up.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I uh, I . . .” Cha-Cha started.

“Why are
you
up in here getting drunk on a weeknight?” Lelah asked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

After several seconds of searching the corners of the room for an answer, Cha-Cha shrugged.

“You really don't wanna tell me,” she said. She couldn't imagine any reason for him to be here, no cane in sight, passed out drunk at 10
P.M.
Not Cha-Cha, leader of the family, paragon of propriety.

“Don't wanna tell you what?” he said. “I just needed to think. I've got a lot of things stressing me out.”

He wouldn't tell her. That was always the way. She dumped her problems on others, they helped her solve them, but they didn't trust her. It never even occurred to them that she might be able to reciprocate.

“Will you do me a favor and turn the light off?” he asked. “My eyes sting.”

Lelah flipped the switch, and the room became so dark that on the way back to the bed she used her phone as a flashlight. Cha-Cha laughed.

“What? What's funny?”

“Your phone,” Cha-Cha said. “I saw your phone when you came busting in here, and I thought it was the haint. I thought a
gotdamned
cell phone was a ghost.”

He laughed more and burped once. The smell of chili dogs mingled with the smell of beer.

“Marlene was trying to tell me about you and a ghost yesterday,” she said.

“What
she
know about it? She calls herself being mad at me.”

“Francey told her what it was about, you calling everybody.”

“Oh,” Cha-Cha said, then, “Oh! When you called yesterday I was in a bad mood. I shouldn't have snapped. Had I known you were here, I would have—”

“You would have been mad, Cha-Cha. It's fine. I'm not supposed to be here, and I haven't answered anybody's call for weeks.”

“Nothing is decided anyhow,” he said. “But you been here, Lelah. You know Mama can't come back here. It ain't safe. The stairs are steep; we'd have to put up some kind of ramp to the porch.”

“Mama's dying,” Lelah said, and just as soon as the words were out she wished she could take them back. Too painful a thing to just come out and say, even if true. Cha-Cha said nothing, and Lelah tried to formulate a sentence to undo her previous one.

“Tell me the story of the haint,” she said.

“You know it. Everybody knows it.”

“
I
don't, not really. There's all kinda stuff I don't know, Cha. All I know is Daddy didn't believe you.”

“Shit, now Mama is claiming she don't either,” Cha-Cha said.

He recounted that first visitation with the same animated certainty other people employed to tell the story of how their parents met, or the story of their first child's birth. It was his origin story, he realized, and if it turned out not to be true, he wasn't sure what would replace it.

“My therapist, Alice, says I hold on to this idea of a haint because it makes me feel extraordinary,” he said. “But one, I don't
need
to feel extraordinary, I'm fine with feeling ordinary. And two, why would I make this up?”

“I don't know,” Lelah said.

They heard a faint buzz through the window, and the streetlight popped on. Cha-Cha and Lelah sat in the orange glow of tenuous Detroit Edison favor, and the increased visibility in the room made both of them feel vulnerable.

“I didn't know you were still seeing the therapist,” she said. “I thought she was expensive.”

“She is,” Cha-Cha said. “And I'm not seeing her anymore. That's how I ended up here. We got into it cause she said I was hallucinating and I got mad. Then she tried to refer me to somebody else. So I got mad again, got some beers, and came here.”

“After all that money she never even helped you?”

She watched Cha-Cha scoot back further on the bed and lean against the wall. She couldn't imagine what secrets he might have told a therapist. His sons, her nephews who were nearly her own age, never seemed to have any real drama, and he and Tina's relationship was more solid than any marriage she'd ever seen, including Francis and Viola's.

“No, Alice helped me,” Cha-Cha said. “Like I said, I got other things stressing me out, and she was helping me with that kind of stuff.”

“That's good.”

“What's your game?”

“What, you mean my gambling game?”

He nodded.

“I don't wanna talk about it, Cha. It doesn't matter.”

“But you been to the casino tonight,” he said. “I can tell cause you smell like a chimney full of cigarettes.”

She looked surprised that he would notice such a thing.

“Roulette.”

“Not slots? I thought all you girls liked slots.”

“No,” Lelah said. She grimaced. “I don't like playing a computer, and you don't get any chips when you win, not even coins nowadays. You just get those receipts.”

Cha-Cha could remember going to buffets at Motor City, Greektown, and MGM with Lelah and his other sisters, but had he ever seen her play before? Perhaps if he'd seen her in action, even once, he would have been able to tell she was hooked.

“Marlene gave me some money last night. And you know how people say they can't win for losing? Today was the only time I
wanted
to get rid of some money and I couldn't lose to save my life. I've got a few thousand now, and I don't deserve it. At least I can give Marlene her money back.”

“Nobody
deserves
anything, Lelah,” he said. “It's called favor. And all we can do is thank God for giving us a little bit, and do the right thing moving forward.”

“You sound like your wife.”

Cha-Cha shrugged.

“Have you figured out if this haint shows up at a certain time?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. “Between midnight and three.”

Lelah checked the time on her phone.

“It's already eleven-thirty.”

“I know.”

“And you say it's been coming every night?”

“Yep.”

“So it could show up whenever and I'll see it?”

“I doubt it. Tina didn't even feel it last night, and I figure if she couldn't feel it, then nobody but me can see it, cause it feels stranger than it looks.”

“But Tina's not blood,” Lelah said. When she was younger, and had felt left out, the last one still on Yarrow, she'd subscribed to this notion of blood. No matter that she didn't know the stories behind every joke, or that the Yarrow Street that Lonnie and Netti and Quincy might reminisce about had nothing to do with the one that she knew; the same blood pumped through all of their veins. When Francis held baby Brianne to his chest, she got to hear his heart, the source of his blood, the source for all of the others after him. Blood still mattered to Lelah.

“Also, you said everybody saw it that first time,” she added.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“And you think Mama knows something about it but doesn't want to tell you?”

“I know she knows, Lelah.”

“Maybe she thinks she's protecting you by playing dumb.”

He wished Lelah would leave. Let an old man be alone with his demons, or angels, or hallucinations, whatever they turned out to be. She added another variable to his experiment, and what would it mean if she didn't see the haint? It might not be so bad, acknowledging that he'd held on to this thing like children cling to imaginary friends, but to have to admit it to himself and Lelah? Cha-Cha wasn't ready. Pride pride pride pride pride. It threatened to ruin him.

They heard a crash outside, very close to the house. It didn't sound like breaking and entering, not like a window kicked in, not even like a car rear-ended. It sounded like a heavy stack of dishes smashed on the ground. Cha-Cha saw no one on the street. From the big-room window he couldn't see the porch, just its roof, but he saw a shadow stretching from the porch onto the front walkway.

“Somebody's on the porch,” he whispered. “They knocked over a planter.”

“What should we do? You have a gun on you?”

“No I don't have no
gun.
Do you? You're the one who's been here alone.”

“I'ma call the police.” She opened her phone, and the room filled with light.

Cha-Cha snatched it and snapped it shut.

“Let's just wait a minute. Could be a drunk. I'm not tryna call the police on a drunk neighbor. They'll probably leave. They can't kick in that storm door, not with those bars.”

Lelah tried to control her breathing, but was unable to be as calm as Cha-Cha looked. She remembered recent news and rumors she'd heard about the neighborhood. That a fourteen-year-old girl had been walking home when two men in a nineties-model sedan pulled up beside her, tossed her into their trunk, raped her in an abandoned house, and left her there. That a shootout with the police near Baldwin last February had ended with a six-year-old boy shot dead. She felt like a fool.

Someone paced the porch in heavy shoes, the footfalls loud enough to reach Cha-Cha and Lelah upstairs.

Someone banged on the storm door with the toe of a boot, or a strong fist. Another empty planter crashed to the porch floor.

“Maybe they know somebody's home,” Lelah said.

Someone stomped around the porch again and after a few minutes began whistling a cheerful-sounding tune. A tune that Lelah vaguely recognized, she couldn't recall from where.

But Cha-Cha knew where the song was from, as well as the lyrics:

This train is bound for Glory, this train

This train is bound for Glory, this train

This train don't pull no winkers, no crap-shooters, no whiskey-drinkers

This train is bound for Glory, this train

Lelah felt her brother's body jerk. He jumped up off the bed.

“I'm not doing this no more,” he said. “I'm tired.”

He was out of the room and lumbering down the stairs before she could stop him.

Francis Turner had hummed the song when the two of them went fishing, when he drove them to football games, or when he worked in his tiny garden behind the house. Troy had never thought to ask Francis what the words were, but throughout his life, particularly when he was agitated, he'd caught himself whistling the tune. His eye hurt from where David Gardenhire had punched him, and he stopped kicking things over to poke at the swelling above his orbital bone. The storm door swung open, the front door after that. Cha-Cha came out, wild-eyed.

“You are not you! I know you're not you! Leave me alone!”

Troy had no time to decipher what this meant because Cha-Cha barreled toward him, low and shoulder-first like a wrestler. Troy had failed at subduing David earlier; his long, noodly limbs moved too quickly. But Cha-Cha was solid and slow. Troy bested him as he'd been trained to by the Detroit Police Department: firm downward pressure between the shoulder and neck. Cha-Cha dropped to the floor. Troy rolled him onto his stomach, put his knee into his back, bent Cha-Cha's arm behind him. The perfect position for cuffing.

“His hip! You're gonna crack his hip,” Lelah said.

“Fuck his hip. He was tryna tackle me.”

Cha-Cha gurgled.

“He can't breathe! What's wrong with you?”

Troy eased his knee off Cha-Cha but kept him pinned by the twisted arm. He didn't want to kill Cha-Cha, but his gut told him not to let his brother up.

Cha-Cha sucked in air as best he could. The porch was filthy, and broken terra cotta from the planters pressed into his cheek. Grit coated his tongue. He smelled the liquor sweating from Troy's pores. I should be more surprised, he thought; I should be more surprised, but I'm not. He wasn't even as angry as he deserved to be. Not yet, anyway. He'd come to Yarrow to face a supernatural being head-on, and instead it was his own kin betraying him, hurting and confusing him. And not just any kin, but the two he'd helped to raise before his own children were born.