Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

“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.