The Wonder of All Things

by Jason Mott

  She watched them walk closer.

  “How are you doing with everything else?” Macon asked softly.

  Ava kept her eyes on the deer.

  “The world has gotten so big so quickly,” Macon said. “I can hardly keep up with it. So I can only imagine what it must be like for you.” He wanted to stop talking, but he could not. There was a question he wanted to ask. “People are going to want you to do it again. That damned Eldrich keeps calling, saying that he wants to do more tests. He keeps talking about ‘controlled conditions.’ He says maybe it’ll help them understand why you’re not feeling right. Like maybe if you do it while they’re watching, while they’re monitoring everything, then maybe they can learn what’s actually happening.” Everything inside of Macon was conflicted. “Do you think you could do it again, Ava? Just once? Maybe then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “What does everyone want?” Ava asked.

  “It’s a little different for each one, I think,” Macon replied. He thought for a moment. “What do you want, Ava?”

  “I want to know if I could have saved Mom,” Ava said. She said it in a voice so small it could have been birdsong. Then she loosed her arrow. She fired wide, missing the deer. She exhaled and watched the family of animals bound into the bracken, trembling with life for another day.

  * * *

  For Carmen, the morning came on the heels of another night of sleeplessness and pain. She had spent most of the hours in the bed taking shallow breaths and trying not to wake Macon, trying to convince herself that everything would be okay. Her doctor told her that everything was fine and that the baby was developing just fine and that, in the end, everything would be fine. Fine was one of Dr. Arnold’s favorite words. He even hinted that much of what was bothering Carmen, much of her pain, might be rooted in her mind rather than her body. And she had, eventually, been willing to admit that perhaps that was true.

  Macon told her not to think about it. He gave her daily reassurances that everything was going to be okay, that she was doing everything correctly and that she had done everything correctly the last time. He tried his best to take away from her the guilt of losing her child. And, sometimes, it worked. There were days when she could believe that she had not caused the death of her first child. She would find her steps lighter than they had been the day before, and she would not be so irritated by the way people drove or by the rude things they said. And on those days, she could spend the day seeing other children in the world and she could be genuinely happy for them and for their parents. She could look upon them and smile and think to herself that the world was not such an unbearable place.

  But then those days would pass—as they always did—and she would once again rise in the morning and think to herself the name of the child who did not live to see a single sunrise on this earth: Jeremy.

  He’d been born early in the evening and spent the late hours of the night in an incubator while Carmen faded in and out of consciousness, always asking about him every time she woke. Again and again, the nurses told her that everything was okay and they smiled at her and squeezed her hand gently and told her not to worry. And then one time she was greeted by the sight of her mother crying and she knew then that her child was dead.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. But instead she only closed her eyes and stopped clinging to the waking world and the medicine in her veins took her into a deep, dark sleep.

  When she awoke it was to the sound of soft crying as her mother sat in the far corner of the room watching her through puffy eyes and with trembling lips. “He went before sunup,” was the first thing Carmen’s mother said.

  Then she went back to dabbing the corners of her eyes gently with handkerchief and watching her daughter. Carmen wept, as well, but it was a strange type of weeping. She felt numb and empty, as if she were outside her body seeing herself mourning the loss of her child. She did not know how long the weeping went on. The next thing she remembered was her husband coming into the room and standing next to her bedside. He looked down at her with a face made of stone and he squeezed her hand. “It’s okay,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she replied.

  “We’ll get through this,” he said.

  “No, we won’t,” she replied.

  And that was the truth. It all came apart in less than a year. One day he came home from work and stood in the center of the kitchen while she sat in the living room, watching him, and he looked over at her and said, “I’m going to my mother’s.” He looked down at his feet like a child. “I feel like I should say more,” he added.

  “You don’t have to,” said Carmen.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just...it’s just too much to carry around. It’s too much to hold on to all the time. I just don’t have it in me.”

  “So you’re going to leave it here with me?”

  “No,” he said. “But maybe, if I leave, there’ll be less of it.”

  “There won’t,” she said.

  And that was the end of that.

  The next several years were composed of drifting from one city to the next. She was a teacher and managed a year in a school before the faces of the children she taught would come to her dreams and then she would have to move again. And then she found a town called Stone Temple with something that could barely call itself a school and a sheriff named Macon and his daughter, Ava. And, for a little while, the hurt that she had been feeling was lessened and she could smile and wonder.

  But now she was pregnant again and her body was always in pain, and even though the doctors told her she was fine, she knew better. There was a child within her that could be lost at any moment. It had happened before, after all.

  The autumn came on quickly and without warning. The town of Stone Temple awoke one Thursday morning to find the trees ablaze with gold and red leaves and the temperature hovering above freezing. Ava saw it as a splendid thing. She’d never much cared for the summertime. There was a quietness that came with the autumn and the winter that could not be found in any other time of the year, so when the temperatures fell and the leaves changed and the migratory birds took to the air, she went to school each day with a smile upon her face and a spring in her step.

  The autumn also brought with it the county fair. She was only six and she had never been to the fair, but she’d heard enough about it that she knew it would be a magical and breathtaking event. And when her father told her that the entire family would attend the fair that weekend, it was all the girl could do to sleep at night. She tossed and turned in her bed, and when she closed her eyes there were lights from Ferris wheels shining and the sound of men in elaborate hats standing atop boxes yelling for her to “Take a chance! Test your luck! Win it all!” And she saw strange and mysterious animals in her mind. She saw a lion with a snake for a tail and she saw a monkey that wore a suit and sat at a table sipping tea like a person. And then there was the scent of foods—sweet and salty and chocolaty. It was like a song given substance and placed upon her tongue.

  When the Friday evening of the fair finally came, the girl could not sit still. From the time she came home from school, she raced around the house, doing chores that were not even assigned to her. She did not ask how long it would be before they left because she knew that would do nothing but frustrate her parents. So she simply cleaned and swept and made her bed and picked up stray items lying around the house and tried to find their proper place until, finally, Macon said, in a playful voice, “Well, I suppose I can’t deny you forever, can I?”

  The drive to the fair was one of excited babbling. She asked her mother about fairs that she had been to when she was young and, in return, Ava was regaled with stories of bearded women and men with crocodile scales for skin and contortionists that could fold themselves into suitcases. “This world can be amazing sometimes,” her mother said. But, as she spoke, there was a hollowness in her words. It happened to Ava’s mother sometimes—a type o
f sadness that her daughter could hear in the folds of a laugh or see in the edges of the woman’s smile.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Ava asked as they rode.

  “Of course I am,” her mother replied.

  Not long after sunset Ava could make out the glow of the fair just over the mountains. Her stomach fluttered and she sat forward in her seat with her mouth agape. “There it is!” she shouted, the excitement of things pushing from her mind the uncertainty that had been there.

  “Yes, it is,” Heather said with a smile.

  Ava could hear the music—a tinny, high-pitched sound of revelry—and she rolled down the windows to better let the sound in. A wall of cold autumn air filled the car and raised chill bumps on her flesh and she expected her mother or father to tell her to roll the window up, but they never did. There was a genuine excitement among all of them.

  When they arrived, Ava raced from the car, shouting and calling for everyone to come after her. Her heart beat between her ears at the sight of the lights and the rides and the men spitting fire—just as she imagined them—and the men standing above the crowd wearing strangely ornate hats, shouting that there was a wonderful show to be seen. “Step right this way!” they called, and Ava could not be stopped from following.

  She rode every ride. She ate until her stomach could hold no more. She played every game of chance and, even when she did not win, she came away smiling.

  The hours came and went. When the night was late Heather took her daughter’s hand and said simply, “That’s enough.”

  “Do we have to go?” Ava protested, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes.

  Heather reached down and took from Ava a large bag of cotton candy and passed it to Macon, who took the bag and sampled the candy and smiled.

  “Can we come back?” Ava asked. And then she felt her body being lifted from the ground and suddenly she was resting on her father’s shoulder. She could smell that Macon was wearing cologne, another indication of how special the night had been.

  “We’ll see,” Macon said.

  “We’re not coming back,” Ava said.

  “We didn’t say that,” Heather replied.

  “You didn’t have to,” Ava said. She was half-asleep now, lulled by the gentle up-and-down rocking as her father carried her across the parking lot toward the waiting car. Through her drowsiness, through her fatigue and the burgeoning sadness inside her, Ava looked back once more at the fair.

  Lights and rides and fire jugglers and contortionists and bearded women and giraffes and animals she could not name. She saw her mother, tired and walking slowly, but smiling. She saw the back of her father’s shoulder. She felt the texture of his hair against her face, the strength of the man beneath her, as solid as the earth.

  Before the darkness of sleep took her, Ava caught one more glimpse of her mother. Walking behind her husband and daughter, Heather turned for a moment, like Lot’s wife, for one final glimpse. And when she had taken it in she started back after Macon and Ava, but her face was hard and dim. Her brow—normally smooth—was furrowed. Everything that had been there before—the joy, the excitement, the bright sense of adventure that her mother had worn all evening—was gone, consumed as quickly as a room in a house in the depths of a moonless night, when the last flickering candle is extinguished.

  “Mom?” Ava called.

  Her mother’s smile came back, as if it had never left. “Yes, Ava?”

  “It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Ava said drowsily. She was still in her father’s arms, her head resting on his shoulder.

  “What isn’t?” Heather replied.

  “When things come to an end. Sometimes, they’re just supposed to. You don’t have to be sad.” Ava closed her eyes and, in the way it does, sleep took quickly and completely.

  She did not see the way her mother suddenly began to cry. She did not hear how, when Macon asked what was wrong, Heather’s only reply was, “I smile, but I’m never sure if I mean it.”

  FIVE

  “I WISH WASH were here,” Ava said.

  “Try saying that three times fast,” Macon said. He leaned forward and kissed her brow.

  The two of them sat at the kitchen table. It took two days for Macon, Ava and Carmen to all agree to Eldrich’s proposal. Their decision came with the stipulation that they did it here, at home, and not in Asheville. Macon was tired of seeing his daughter in hospitals.

  There were electrodes placed all over her body that monitored everything from her blood pressure to her heart rate, and atop her head was a rubbery helmet laden with wires and more electrodes. The man hooking up the device told her it was designed to monitor her brain waves, her thought patterns, “the how and why of everything,” he said proudly.

  “I’m just going to be in the next room,” Macon said to Ava. “If there’s anything you need, if there’s anything about this that you don’t like, all you have to do is say the word. Okay?”

  Ava smiled faintly.

  Macon left the room and did not look back over his shoulder. He passed the team of doctors and technicians and videographers who were all waiting for him to leave. They glanced at him as he passed, the way one looks at a squatter who has been too long clinging to a property that was never his to begin with. He passed Carmen and Dr. Eldrich in the living room and did not speak. Carmen had been grilling Eldrich about the test, about Ava’s safety, about what Eldrich would do if something went wrong.

  Macon left the house and walked into the front yard. It was a chilly day—another early blow of the hard winter that was promising to come—and the sun was high. Around the yard there were cars and vans and trucks and an ambulance sent down from Asheville just in case things should happen to take a turn for the worse. At the sight of the van a knot formed in Macon’s stomach. He remembered the sight of Ava and Wash at the air show. He remembered the blood on her hands, the fear in her eyes, the sight of her falling unconscious.

  He had thought she was dead in that moment. He didn’t know what he would do if he lost her, and suddenly he felt himself start to panic. He wanted to throw out all of the doctors and technicians and cameramen—the crowds of people who were the cause of the fear he now felt, who represented the rest of the world that was waiting and watching, each and every day, to know more about Ava. To know her secrets, her truths, to put her on display.

  He was losing his child to the world.

  He stood in the center of the yard looking at the house. He took in the sight of its worn and withered clapboard. The faded paint. The holes chewed through its eaves by woodpeckers and wood bees and perhaps even mice. For the first time in a great many years, he was able to see everything that his house was, pure and unfiltered by the familiarity of seeing a thing day in and day out.

  He saw the house as it was and, consequently, he saw the life of his family. And the sight of it all made his stomach tighten. If he were driving along the highway and happened to come across a house like this, a house like the one in which he was trying to raise a family, he would think it was abandoned. He would cast judgments about the people who lived within it. He would wonder how they had allowed their lives to fall so far. He would wonder how they lived that way, how they did not see the desperate state they existed in. Few things breed contempt like a life viewed in passing.

  Still Macon’s legs would not carry him forward, to kick out the doctors, the cameras, to return their lives to what they had always been. “Please,” he whispered to himself. “Let this be the right decision.” He stood and waited, as if there might come an answer from someone else, as if there would be a sign that would vouchsafe his decision, reassure him that, after all, he was doing the correct thing and, in the end, his family would endure unharmed.

  He waited and waited and waited.

  * * *

  Ava sat up straight in her chair as the group of doctors entered the room. They formed a half circle around the other side of the table at which she sat.

  “Do you understand what will happen now?
” Eldrich asked. His thick comb-over was out of sorts, but there was excitement in his face.

  “I think so,” Ava said.

  “We’ll bring in the animal,” Eldrich began. “There will be cameras to document all of this, obviously. We’ll hand the animal over to you and, well, you’ll do whatever it is that you do, or did, or allegedly did.” He chuckled gently to himself, as though he had made a joke.

  “And then what?” Ava asked.

  “Well,” the dark-haired man replied, “then we’ll see what we’ll see, won’t we?”

  The people behind the cameras pressed buttons and the red lights came on, one by one. There were three cameras placed around their living room: one in front, and one on each side of Ava, angled just a little behind her, as well. She assumed it was so that they could tell if she was doing something behind her back. It was very much like they were attempting to catch a magician in the act, she thought.

  “We’re ready,” Dr. Eldrich said. The front door of the house opened and a young woman in a lab coat came in with a small dog in her arms. The dog was furry and it had a face that seemed specifically bred for viral internet videos.

  “It’s okay,” the woman said, speaking to the animal, stroking it gently.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Ava asked softly. The animal eyed her skeptically.

  “For the sake of the experiment,” the woman said, “I think it’s best that I give you as little information as possible about exactly what the condition of this animal is.” Then she turned and faced the cameras. She stated her name and the date. She referred to what was about to happen as “Experiment Number One.”