Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (29 page)

A person coming closer.

Dr. Harper?

My heart danced against my ribs, and I had a sudden memory of that look on his face when I thought he was going to take the key from me.

Footsteps—definite footsteps—echoed in the office below the turret, near the door. The door I had left standing open. I gripped the book and flashlight tight but switched off the light as I stood.

The door bumped the wall as someone opened it.

I started to climb, put my foot in the open step, and fell backward on my butt, hard. If I hadn't bumped against the center pole, I would have fallen head first, all the way down
to the bottom. Breath rushed out of me, half from the fall, half from terror. The flashlight went flying out of my hand. It banged down the stairs and smashed on the wood floor below. I heard it clatter into pieces, and I clutched the book tight to my chest.

“I know you're up there,” came a scratchy voice. Thumping and bumping made me want to scream, but before I could even move, a flashlight beam, twice as big and strong as mine had been, blazed up the circle of steps and nailed me right in the face. “I saw the message on Mackinnon's phone. It's in the study where it got taken up from him over that metal detector fiasco. Idiot thing kept buzzing on the desk where I was writing, and I couldn't make it stop. I came here to make sure you didn't break your fool neck, running around this building in the dark. I owe Ruth Beans that much.”

I didn't say a word. I just sat there and held Grandma's 1962 book, blinded by that flashlight, with my butt hurting like I'd taken a good, swift kick in the pants.

“I owe her a lot more than that.” Avadelle Richardson sighed. Then she asked, “You okay from that fall?”

Her grumbly tone made me think she was kind of hoping I wasn't okay at all.

I wanted to hide the books back in the step, but my stupid foot was still stuffed into the space, and anyway, Avadelle would see any move I made. I blinked and blinked, trying to get used to the harsh light, and as I saw a bit more, I realized
that her lumpy, fedora-crowned shadow filled up my only escape route behind that flashlight beam, unless I did want to plunge to my death down the middle of the twisty staircase.

The beam moved from my face to my hands, to the volume I was holding.

“So,” she said, “you found her old journals. I thought you might be getting close to hunting down her hiding place. I never could.”

My lips stayed pressed together and my heart kept right on hammering as Avadelle diverted her flashlight beam to the wall and leaned on her cane, her shoulder pressed against some of the stairwell's cracking plaster. “Time was, Ruth wrote every word of her life, right up until we got pulled out of that car in the Circle.”

“Pulled out?” My voice sounded choked, but curiosity jerked the words out of my throat. “You didn't get out of the car on purpose—to go get Grandma's books?”

“Of course not.” Avadelle's loud grumbling seemed to echo in the small space. “Do you think we were total fools? It was stupid enough, going to campus that night. We knew it was historic, Meredith coming. Maybe we just wanted to be a part of it.”

“I only got to the bloodstain and the word
riot
,” I admitted. “But I'm going to read the rest unless you take the book away from me.”

Avadelle shined the light into her own face, probably so I could see her glaring at me. “I know you think I'm a monster, but I don't
hit little girls, even nosy, insufferable brats like you.”

I almost said
thank you
, then thought better of it. Instead, I worked my foot out of the open stair and pushed the board back into place, in case I really did have to make a run for it.

“I won't take Ruth's journals away from you,” Avadelle said. “But since you found them, it's just as well that I tell you what that one says, later, months later, when Ruth was able to write again.”

That shocked me back into stillness, so I sat and rubbed my scraped ankle, holding the journal and waiting.

Avadelle moved the flashlight beam to the floor, and her dark shape shifted in the stairwell as she leaned harder on the wall, like she needed the support. “Her journal says the rioters broke our car windows and pulled us out into the middle of all that mess in the Circle. My arm got cut, and I bled in Ruth's book, but she wouldn't put it down, and she wouldn't give it up even when they pushed us and taunted us and tried to take it. We ran, but they caught us.”

Her voice trailed off. “Lord, but there were so many of them, and not all students. People I'd never seen in my life.”

She sounded sad, and scared, and when she went quiet, I almost couldn't stand it. “In
Night on Fire
, you talked to them,” I said. “You made them think you were an Oxford town lady on campus by accident, and you shamed them into letting you go.”

“I know what that book says, girl,” Avadelle snarled. “I wrote the godforsaken thing, didn't I?”

“So, you didn't talk to the rioters?”

Avadelle laughed, but it sounded angry and almost hopeless. “Oh, I talked to them all right. I babbled on about running a charitable errand, and how we had just come to get books for children, and didn't mean any harm. I told them my family was rich and could make a lot of trouble for them.” She stopped. Sniffed. Her arm moved in the semidarkness, like she was wiping her face. “I thought they'd let us go. Such a little idiot, I was.”

I waited, and I waited some more, but she went quiet, and I tried to figure out the best question to ask. My fingers twitched against Grandma's journal, and if Avadelle meant it about not hitting kids, I could get up and push past her and read it for myself. It didn't seem like the right thing to do, though.

“They let
me
go,” she whispered all of a sudden, then dropped into silence again.

I worked on that statement, trying to make sense of it, to understand, and—

Oh.

“You,” I said, and I went cold inside. “They only let you go, not Grandma.”

“And God save my soul,
I went
,” Avadelle whispered.

I reached one hand out to the center pole and steadied myself. “You left Grandma with the mob.”

“They beat her,” Avadelle talked right over me, as if I wasn't even there. “They left Ruth lying on the ground, clutching that book you're holding. They left her for dead,
mind you—and she probably would have been killed if she hadn't crawled down into that steam tunnel. I don't know if the fall broke her back, or the beating. She was down there nearly all night before somebody heard her screaming and they pulled her out.”

I tried to absorb everything she was saying, but I didn't want to believe it. I had wanted to know so badly, but this—this, how could I even begin—

“But in
Night on Fire
—”

“That was a
book
, girl! A novel. The riot was real.”

I swallowed a few times and tried to keep my voice steady as I asked my next question. “So . . . Grandma stopped being friends with you because in the book, you made yourself a hero, but in real life you ran away and left her to get beat up and nearly die?”

Silence. Total. Not a creak or a groan or a breath.

And then another laugh from Avadelle broke the quiet into pieces. “No. That's the worst part, don't you see? She forgave that. Ruth said anybody with half a brain would have run—should have run—just like I did. I won't say we were as close after that, but we tried a while longer.”

“Then what was it that stopped the friendship?”

Avadelle pulled off her fedora and shined the flashlight into it, like answers might be swimming around in all her head sweat. Some time later, she said, “After she got hurt, Ruth started writing the story of what happened to her that night. A nonfiction piece, for magazine publication, or maybe as the start of an
academic paper. I launched off writing a novel instead. Fiction. I never could do truth like Ruth did, at least not on paper.”

“Did she know you were writing the novel?”

“Yes, and no. I didn't show her the work, and she didn't show me hers. We just talked about what we were doing, now and again. I got finished and sent my manuscript off to New York for consideration and didn't even have to wait a month to hear from an editor.”

Now I felt confused. “It made her mad that you—what? Got your novel published before her articles?”

Avadelle kept studying that hat like it had answers. Her voice got whisper-quiet. “Ruth was furious that I wrote
Night on Fire
through her eyes—and changed my role in it to the hero, like you said.”

“Wait—that—I mean, so? I mean, I get the part about her being mad that you made yourself a hero. But people write stuff through other people's eyes all the time.”

“Writing that book was Ruth's dream. But back then, as a Black woman from Mississippi, Ruth never would have gotten a novel published.” Avadelle put her fedora back on and shifted the flashlight beam to my feet, like she might be checking my ankle to see if I had gotten hurt when I fell. “Nobody would have even read the manuscript. I took her experiences and everything she went through, and I used it for my own. Appropriation. You know that word?”

I gazed down at my ankle, at the small trickle of blood running into my shoe. Just a scratch. “I don't, no. Sorry.”

As I said that, I cringed and waited for her to call me stupid. Instead, she said, “I stole Ruth's story. That's the short and long of it. Because a White woman told it instead of a Black woman, the book got published, and the world listened. That's what Ruth couldn't abide. It festered inside her, until she pretty well couldn't stand the sight of me.” She paused, and her voice dropped lower. “Ruth never even tried to write her own novel about the riot, or anything else. She just got busy with her scholarly work, and told her truths with nonfiction.”

She must have taken my confused silence for judgment, because the next thing she said was, “Before you ask, we did try to talk it through. Some days, some weeks even, we'd do all right, but then something else would happen. A good review. A bestseller list. An award. Ruth watched me living her dream at her expense, and I didn't even have the gumption to own up to it in interviews and articles.”

Avadelle let out a wheezy breath, and coughed. “I tried to sign over half the profits to her, but she refused. Said she wouldn't take food from my babies' mouths when they were innocents in the whole mess, and she could make her own way in life for her and hers, thank you very much. That seemed to break it, finally. Everything I did from that point, it just seemed to make things worse between us.”

“I get that,” I said, thinking about my tiny little hard times with Mac, and with my parents. Nothing up against what Avadelle and Grandma went through, at the hands of others, and between themselves, but I understood how once
something started heading south, it picked up speed on its own.

“Why haven't you tried to explain that to the press, to anybody, since you got older?” I kept my eyes fixed on Avadelle's shadow, alert for any sudden movements. “Is it the being-a-coward part that stops you?”

“No. My family's scared to death it'll hurt my income, but that's not why either. I don't try to explain because Ruth asked me to let it be. That, and half the world still wouldn't understand. They might think Ruth had the wrong of it, and I know she didn't. She loved me even though I was young and stupid and a coward. It was the thieving of her story and her dreams that she couldn't get past.”

“I think she wants to see you,” I said. “She's said your name over and over, and sometimes, she cries when she does it.”

Avadelle went so still I wasn't sure she was still breathing. She stood like part of that turret wall, the flashlight focused on her fedora. The longer she stayed frozen, the more I worried she was about to really melt down, maybe fall out or finally come at me and throw me straight out a window.

“I think—I think Grandma forgives you,” I said. “Maybe that's what she wants to tell you.”

Of all things, Avadelle chuckled. “Ruth doesn't forgive me. She probably wants me to come by to slap me bug-eyed when I try to sit by her bedside. But that's okay. She doesn't owe me forgiveness. She knows I care about her anyway, just like she cares about me no matter how many rotten things I've done.”

All of a sudden, a big clamor broke out below us. Doors knocking open. Voices. Feet running up the steps. I heard Dr. Harper come out of his office and start calling out to whoever had come in.

Avadelle called out next, a wavering, almost tentative, “Hello?”

“Dani!” Mac called.

Indri said, “Oh, thank God.”

“Well, that's it,” I told Avadelle. “I'm fried toast. If my friends are here, they've come to say good-bye before my parents kill me and bury me in Dad's garden.”

Avadelle gave a grunt that might have been a laugh. “Just hope nobody called the police. When it's me, people always call the police. They arrest me just for fun these days.”

It sounded like an entire herd of horses had gotten loose in Ventress Hall. Dr. Harper got to us first, and he flicked on the lights in the stairwell. When I could see again after getting used to the glare, I didn't like the look on his flushed face. His wide eyes and open mouth made my heart beat funny, and I glanced from him to Avadelle, then to Mac and Indri, who crowded into the door behind him.

They both looked awful and sad and scared. I stood, clutching Grandma's book, just as Ms. Wilson pushed into the stairwell. She ran up the steps past Avadelle and dropped to her knees in front of me. My fingers felt numb against the journal.

Ms. Wilson put her hands on my cheeks, making me look
into her tear-streaked face. I tried to breathe, couldn't, and felt dizzy. The white plaster walls and all the graffiti and ghosts of the past seemed to revolve in a slow, sick arc, blurring the whole world.