The Turner House (34 page)

“I came by here to take you home, cause I felt bad for you,” Troy was saying to Lelah. “David told me how you two, you two been sneakin
around
, and how you been livin here just like them crackheads in that abandoned house up the street.”

“You're out your fucking mind,” Lelah said. “Let him go or I'ma call the police.”

Cha-Cha heard Troy laugh—a fake, movie-madman cackle—and the pressure on his back slackened. He freed his hand and rolled away, up against the porch railing. He sat up, balled his fists, ready to defend himself as best he could, but Troy did not pursue him.

“Like I said. I came over here to see if what David said about you was true, but then I seen Cha-Cha's car outside. And I figured . . . I figure let me come inside and tell this nigga about himself for
once
, cause ain't nobody tellin Cha-Cha the truth, are they?”

Troy looked over to Cha-Cha with watery eyes. He'd clearly been crying, and now his black eye was swollen shut so that he seemed to be winking fiercely.

The streetlight blinked off and back on, which reminded Lelah that they were sitting on the porch past midnight, making a scene. She knew she should go to Cha-Cha, help him to stand, but she didn't move.

Troy sat with his back against the porch's stair railing. He pointed at Cha-Cha. “You had me out in the snow. Why?”

“I'm not doing this with you,” Cha-Cha said. “I don't know what you want from me.”

“Just leave him alone, Troy,” Lelah said. David must have confronted Troy about that knife, she realized. He must have gone to Hamtramck looking for answers that Troy did not have, because Troy couldn't articulate why he'd stolen that knife any better now than he could have twenty years prior. But Lelah could imagine her brother's motives easily enough. It was rooted either in jealousy or in pride, and likely disguised as a prank. The sailor, Tasaka, might have been better with the ladies than Troy, or smarter, or perhaps just too flashy for Troy's liking. She felt sorry for Troy, for Cha-Cha, and for herself. Their attempts at getting answers, or respect, or even a modicum of stillness inside their own minds were pathetic.

A car drove by and all three of them watched it pass. None of them moved to go back inside.

“I just wanted team shoes and a fuckin jersey. That's all I wanted.”

“Jesus, what
shoes?
” Cha-Cha said. He spat the dirt out of his mouth. “I bought you and Lelah whatever you asked for, whatever I could scrape up some money to get.”

Troy shook his head too many times and then put his hand on his temple as if he were dizzy.

“Nah. You had me waiting out in the cold. You made me wait, and Chucky and Todd were up in that house warm.”

“Oh God, Troy,” Lelah said. “Let it go. You gotta—”

“No, no, no. He can go ahead,” Cha-Cha said. “Everybody thinks I owe them, or did something to them. Let him get out what he thinks I did.”

With permission granted, Troy wasn't sure what he wanted to say. Jillian had come home shortly after David punched him. She hadn't administered aid or provided much comfort; she instead asked what he'd done to provoke David. Even the woman who supposedly loved him did not expect him to be on the right side of a disagreement. Why would she want to be with someone like him? He'd left the house and drunk most of a fifth of Hennessy in his car, and then he'd driven here to save his little sister, to be the bigger person. But Cha-Cha's car out front thwarted even this feeble, drunken attempt to do the right thing. It seemed clear then that Cha-Cha, whether directly or indirectly, had been behind many major disappointments in Troy's life.

“You . . . you're the reason I'm back here, you know. Back in Detroit. I wanted to help with stuff.”

“What stuff?” Lelah asked. Troy scrunched up his face at her. His lips trembled as if he might vomit.

“I'm talking to Cha-Cha, 'scuse me. I came back here for
you
, Cha, to help you take care of things. I even stayed here with Mama.”

“Just until you could get your own place,” Lelah said. “Don't lie.”

Troy ignored her.

“You don't listen is the problem, Cha. Like, with this house? I told you we should just short-sell it to Jillian, but no. It wasn't a good idea cause it wasn't one a
your
ideas. I was finna do it behind your back, too, you know that?”

Cha-Cha felt too many things at once. Rage: he wanted to smite Troy, to smack the taste directly out of his mouth. Disillusion: Alice had said that his role in the family earned him respect but not friendship. Now he saw that he'd never had respect, either. And finally, confusion: was he really so bullheaded, so closed off to his siblings, that they would spend real money just to do something without his consent? These feelings pinballed inside of him, and he felt like giving up, retiring early, selling his house and moving to a place where he was one of one, not one of thirteen. He no longer wanted to devote his life to these people.

“Yeah, I was handling it,” Troy said. “But then Lelah had to go and fuck my friend. Know what? I don't even
care
you and David were fucking. But what you
do
to him, huh? He was damn near crying, saying we're a toxic family and some shit about the both of us . . . the both of us needing help. Like I need help!
He's
the one who can't even get his own brother clean. And you somehow got him thinkin we're worse than that.”

Lelah stood up, dusted off the butt of her jeans.

“I do need help,” Lelah said. “But look at you! You're a grown-ass man, coming over here crying, looking for answers from Cha-Cha like he's your daddy. Your daddy's dead, he's
been
dead! You got nobody to blame for your shitty life but yourself.”

Troy stood up as well. He had to lean on the porch railing to steady himself.

“You been up in this house like a squatter. Like a fuckin bum!”

Lelah advanced on him until they were nearly nose to nose. His breath was terrible, but she did not back away.

“And you tried to do some underhanded shit to
sell
this house, or whatever you had planned. You're no better than me, Troy. Fuck you for even thinkin you were.”

They were screaming. Cha-Cha knew he should separate them. Lelah was a woman, and Troy shouldn't be in a woman's face like that, but separating them reminded him too much of how he'd intervened in their squabbles as children. So he sat and watched them, a little proud of how Lelah refused to back down. These two were his proto-children, and he had failed them. He had done better with his actual sons, but that was with Tina's help. These two he'd tried to shape and mold when he was perhaps too young for such responsibility, and had failed. He was tired of failing, physically exhausted. In fact, he was just tired-tired. He could go to sleep right here on the porch. He thought about going to sleep as he looked down the length of it, to the far corner. There stood his haint. Or rather, there stood a new iteration of his haint, in the form of a skinny man in baggy slacks and an undershirt, its body backlit by a familiar shade of blue.

“Do you see it?” he whispered.

Lelah and Troy continued arguing.

“There there THERE! Right there! You see it?”

The haint reached both arms up over its head in a stretch. Opened its shadowy mouth and yawned. As if it was tired of haunting Cha-Cha, as if it had better things to do. But then it took a step toward him. It seemed to not register Lelah and Troy at all.

“Shut up shut up and look,” he said, but they ignored him. The haint took three more steps. Cha-Cha felt the air leave him—the world's worst sucker punch—and then nothing.

Troy noticed Cha-Cha first. Out the corner of his eye he saw him slumped forward, mouth open. He ran to him and put his ear to his mouth. He was still breathing.

He slapped him lightly on the cheeks, and when this failed to revive him, he tried not to panic. He suddenly felt sober.

“Shit,” he said. He slung Cha-Cha's arm over his shoulder. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

“Should I call 911?”

Troy thought about response times and cross streets. He did not trust his fellow first responders to do right by this address tonight.

“No, we gotta just drive him. Come on.”

It was slow going—Cha-Cha's body sagged like dead weight—but Troy and Lelah got him into the back of the SUV. Troy made Lelah squeeze into the back too.

“Make sure he stays breathing,” he ordered.

In the rearview Troy saw Lelah shake Cha-Cha's shoulder, then pinch him on the flabby underside of his arm. Cha-cha groaned but did not wake up.

“I'm gonna just keep messing with him,” Lelah said. “He's gotta wake up.”

Troy sped down Gratiot with his hazard lights flashing. He was positive this was his fault. He must have used too much force when he subdued Cha-Cha, maybe leaned on his chest too hard. What the hell had he wanted? To be acknowledged? Even if Cha-Cha survived, Troy imagined he'd be excommunicated from the Turners forever. The desire to vomit returned.

“I found a water bottle,” Lelah said.

She uncapped it and dumped a good amount of its contents onto Cha-Cha's face. When this didn't wake him, she let out a terrible moan.

“What are we gonna do if something's really wrong with him?” Lelah said.

Troy could not answer her. At the hospital he parked the car in front of the ER and ran in for help.

Cha-Cha opened his eyes as soon as the EMTs slid him onto the stretcher.

“Wait, he's awake!” Lelah said, but they were already wheeling him into the building.

“How do you feel?” she called out.

Cha-Cha hurt all over. But besides physical pain, he had no idea what or how he felt.

He was conscious, talking, and not showing signs of a heart attack, so the ER staff parked Cha-Cha in a wheelchair near a nurse station. They would not let Troy and Lelah back to see him, not even after Troy flashed his badge around. Not even after Troy put his badge back away, apologized for having flashed it, and tried to ask nicely. So they sat in the urgent care waiting room, next to people with more visibly urgent ailments than Cha-Cha's. A teenager with a wound to the side of his neck taped over with bloody gauze. A child with a gruesome, purple-black bruise on his bony shoulder. An older man with swollen, pus-caked feet crammed into Nike slippers. A young woman with bald spots on her short salt-and-pepper hair who moaned and sniffled. Troy begged Lelah not to call Tina, or anyone else, and she obliged because she too felt guilty.

Cha-Cha waited in the back, drinking water and trying to figure out what had happened to him, until a tall male nurse with a neat beard finally came over to talk to him.

“What happened tonight? Your son said you fainted?”

“That's not my son; that's my brother. I don't know if I fainted. I saw a . . . I had lot to drink earlier, haven't slept in a while.”

The nurse repeated the procedure that Cha-Cha had already been subject to twice since arriving. He flashed a light in his eyes, checked his throat and ears. He listened to his heartbeat, stood up straight, folded his arms, frowned, and listened to his heartbeat a second time.

“You may have fainted. The fatigue and dehydration might have had something to do with it. I'm going to put you in a chair and get an IV with fluids going into you for a little while, to take care of the hydration part. And I'll take some blood to run a couple of tests, just to be safe.”

He ushered Cha-Cha through the hallway into a windowless, holding cell-like room, where half a dozen patients whose ailments didn't warrant a private room but who were awaiting clearance to leave lay on beds and sat in cushioned chairs.

Cha-Cha could no longer lose sleep over this haint, he decided. He had to stop killing himself with hysteria. His brother Quincy had used that word on the phone:
hysteria.
He would take sleeping pills. At his age it was a miracle that he only took blood pressure medicine and a multivitamin; he reasoned one more pill a day for a while would not kill him. He hadn't considered sleeping pills before because he had been game to see what the haint was about, get to the bottom of it one way or the other. Now that it had reappeared in human form, moving, perhaps able to inflict harm, he was game no longer. Better it killed him when he wasn't awake.

“Did you see anything?” Lelah asked. “Like a ghost?”

“No,” Troy said.

“What's the difference between a haint and a regular ghost anyway? Is a haint just a southern ghost? A black-folks ghost? Too bad Auntie Lucille and Olivia died when we were kids. They had all the stories, I bet.”

She and Troy had disparate tactics for coping with guilt. Lelah tried to smother the tension with chatter, more words than Troy had heard her utter in at least a year. Troy sat very still and tried to say nothing.

Lelah pitied him. Even if it was an entitled, wrong-headed, destructive little tantrum, his outburst on the porch had been an appeal for Cha-Cha to love him. Turner men did not admit to needing love. While Cha-Cha was having his moment with his haint—Lelah very much wanted his haint to be real—she had chopped Troy down more than she'd ever chopped down anyone in her life. Called him out on selfishness dating all the way back to the hoarded boom box of their teens. Accused him of being manipulative, of emotionally abusing Jillian. Of being a cheating-ass coward (her exact words) with his ex-wife, Cara. It had felt very good to say these ugly things to him, things that were true but not really hers to say. She neither forgave him for what he'd said in return (that she was various combinations of bum-loser-liar and had ruined his friendship with David) nor needed an apology. In the game of sibling mud-slinging they had reached a draw.

The nurse returned and told them he thought Cha-Cha was fine, that after getting intravenous fluids he'd be free to leave.