The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  “Sure, well, you can order it in ebony or chaparral or you can order a custom and I’ll tailor it any way you want.” He laughs. He sounds so gregarious. He doesn’t sound like a guy who just uploaded a picture of wasted balloons for his vanished daughter’s birthday. He’s switched into the Other Life world where he is not Ben Rivers, unemployed man living in basement, father of the disappeared. He is Sergio Ontario, owner of a high-end men’s fashion store by day, singer-songwriter by night. I know exactly what he looks like right now without even having to go downstairs to look—he’s got his headset on, ogling the enormous computer monitor, cigarette in hand.

  I close the door gently, so he never knows it opened.

  7

  I’M GOING TO become an elementary school teacher. I’ve wanted to forever. Children are pure, delicate faces open and bright as flowers. There are wicked people out there and bad weather you can’t help. But a teacher can be a lighthouse. You are all worth love. Words are your best advocates and friends. Never trust a stranger.

  8

  FOR NOW, I’M a part-time princess. A few days a month, I put on a blue-yellow taffeta dress and a red ribbon in my bobbed black doll haircut and simulate Snow White. Get in my beater car, drive at my usual granny speed, and take every back road possible to a children’s party within a forty-mile radius. Since graduation, I’ve been working as a contractor for a company called Funmakerz. It’s funz. Who can be in a bad mood after hanging out with a bunch of gussied up, sugar-drunk kids?

  Today I’m going to a five-year-old’s birthday party in the Uplands, which is essentially Berkeley’s Bel-Air. Mansions. Plotted elms. Impossibly green squares of lawn. Why children’s parties start at god-awful times like eleven in the morning, I will never understand. To drive the knife in deeper, the slave drivers at Funmakerz insist I get there half an hour early. I slept through my alarm. My stomach is growling. I forgot to brush my teeth. And on my way out of my car, the only POS-mobile parked on Uber Fancy Lane, I spill coffee on my dress.

  “Shit!” I yell.

  I look up and see about a dozen tiny pigtailed heads staring at me through the picture window.

  “God, I hope they didn’t hear that,” I whisper as I arrange my face into a smile and give a little princess wave. My hand will stay right there and cover the coffee stain. I pick up my skirt and tiptoe across the lawn—which must have been recently watered because squelch squelch (damn it)—and ring the doorbell.

  The door opens. A smiling mother with bags under her eyes opens her mouth to speak to me, but I am overwhelmed by a sea of tiny hands. My ears fill with excited screams.

  “I heard someone here was having a birthday?” I say, widening my eyes.

  “Me!” screams a blonde with a long French braid.

  It’s like a girl at an Elvis concert circa 1956. She can hardly contain her enthusiasm—I wouldn’t be surprised if she peed her party dress. I give her a hug and wish her happy birthday. She smells like cinnamon and cake.

  “Me too!” yells a dark-haired girl in a tutu with zombie-chocolate lips.

  “You too?” I ask.

  The mother smiles, nods. “They’re twins.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I . . .”

  All shiny eyes point up at me. I force the smile to stay on my lips and look down at the two girls, who stand in front of the tiny crowd. They hold hands. I can see the resemblance in their faces now, in the way their different-colored hair hangs, in their thick eyelashes and the shapes of their lips. A prick begins in my throat and travels slowly to my nose and threatens my eyes. I don’t finish my sentence.

  “That’s wonderful,” I say instead. “How lucky you are.”

  I lead everyone into the living room and sing about how someday my prince will come, and never mind the stinging.

  The father pays me with a check. He asks me my name and when I tell him, he pens it slowly into his checkbook and then looks up at me to do a double take. “Rivers—any relation to Michelle?”

  “She’s my mom,” I say.

  “Thought I saw a resemblance,” he says.

  Which shocks and flatters me. I’m always flattered when people think I look like my mom, even when I don’t totally see it. My mom is half Mexican, half Iranian, and 100 percent stunning—high cheekbones framed by inky waves that would make a hair commercial jealous, and brown eyes that burn with a fiery intensity. Even the wrinkles age and worry have given her seem somehow elegant on her.

  “I own a diner on Fourth Street,” he goes. “She brings flyers by every month.”

  “Ah,” I say.

  His face changes as he tears the check out and hands it to me. He looks at his own little girls, running around the backyard in their party dresses. “I just can’t even imagine,” he says. “I’m so sorry about everything you guys have gone through.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, even though it never is.

  I look down at the check. He gave me way too much. I’m embarrassed to take it but don’t know what to say.

  “You and your folks take care, now,” he says, patting my shoulder like I’m sad and injured. “Come by the diner anytime and tell them Lalo says lunch’s on him.”

  As I’ve grown up, I’ve learned there are monsters in the world, and you never know who they are, yes—but there are so many more kind people. It makes me feel bad in this inverse way that’s hard to put into words. I appreciate strangers’ compassion, but more than that, I wish I didn’t deserve it or need it at all. I wish I wasn’t a magnet for generosity—I wish I was just a girl.

  9

  SOON I WILL be in an IKEA-fresh dorm room with zany characters who are majoring in art and philosophy and queer studies. I’ll go on hikes in the forest and date tattooed ladies and gents with peculiar hair. My parents, my brother will be names programmed into my phone. I’ll forget what color eyes Madeline has. I’ll have classes with complicated titles and my professors will give me A-plusses and I’ll never once wonder if it’s because I’m related to Ava Rivers.

  10

  MY MOM TAKES me out for a movie night, which isn’t a regular thing. I’m leaving soon, and suddenly my parents have been pretending to be a family again, ordering takeout and suffering through it together with the little TV on in the kitchen. Hello and goodbyeing instead of ignoring each other as we pass through rooms. They say they’re going to miss me, and the worst part is I believe them.

  The movie theater’s carpets look like clown vomit. I know because I’ve been studying them for minutes now as Mom tries to find out what kind of animal the hot dogs are made out of and whether or not they were fed hormones. The poor cashier just keeps saying, “Uh.” There’s a clearly not-amused couple behind us. And my mom won’t stop, she keeps going. Now she’s asking the poor cashier about the calorie counts in Sour Patch Kids versus Twizzlers and whether they’re made with “cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.”

  “High-fructose corn syrup’s terrible for you,” she tells him. “There’s this documentary about it—let me write down the name for you—”

  The dead-eyed, overworked twentysomething does not appear interested in the sweet syrup of my mom’s conversation or the info she’s penning onto a napkin. I leave the line and pretend to be riveted by my movie-postered surroundings. I stop to admire a man-sized cutout for a movie about a Nordic god, my eyes begging him to zap me away with his paper lightning fork. I should be appreciating this though. Mom time. When was the last time my mom and I went out alone? Probably when she took me bra shopping in sixth grade.

  I kid. Kind of.

  She’s empty-handed when she approaches. “So many artificial dyes in everything.”

  The couple that was behind us in line turns around to eye us. One whispers to the other and I think, They know who we are. The guy at the drinking fountain we pass, standing up and wiping his chin with a glance—he knows us, too. I can’t help the paranoia, especially when I�
�m out with my mom, who has been on local TV so many times and who wears her lipstick so bright and is so damn beautiful you can’t forget her.

  Wasn’t that woman on Unresolved Crimes?

  Wait, I think that’s the lady who ran for city council . . .

  It’s that girl who was kidnapped—Ava Rivers—it’s her family.

  I can hear them thinking. And even in the dark theater, when the credits begin blasting bright, Mom’s presence beside me on one side’s like a moon, and the negative presence of my twin sister on the other side’s like a sun. Both burn.

  11

  BERKELEY’S NOT A small town, but when you’re semifamous it might as well be. There are many ways to be famous. Not all are good. Our family has been in the paper, featured in blogs and on local news, highlighted on nighttime crime shows and daytime talk shows. My dad does the PR end from the basement, emailing producers and reaching out to anyone with press releases who will hear our story. My mom is the face. She flyers the town on the weekly and meets with our PI, Ozzie, for coffee to discuss any new tips called in. Ozzie looks like a bear of a man, ex-LAPD with the clichéd cop ’stache and all, but behind his persona he’s a bit of a new-age softie. He meditates. He bought my mom an aromatherapy set. Once, after he drank a bit of bourbon many Thanksgivings ago—a few years after Ava went missing, right after his wife left him—Ozzie told me ghost stories. He and my mom go way back, to high school. Apparently they dated. Ozzie still looks at her with the adoration of a puppy-eyed teen sometimes, after all these years.

  About four years ago, when I was a freshman, I was so excited to start over. I got a haircut and some new clothes. The public high school is way bigger than my private middle school was, and there was a good chance some people might not know that I was Ava Rivers’s sister. But then the tip came in on the hotline—some anonymous prick said he heard some so-and-so boasting that he had killed Ava Rivers years ago and buried her in the high school football field. The day before the homecoming game, tractors ravaged the entire stadium and rumors spread around campus like some rampant disease. They were looking for the dead body of that little girl who disappeared all those years ago. By fourth period, everyone had connected me to her—oh, that’s her sister?—my teacher gave me these pitiful smiles and students whispered and pointed. When I passed the football field at lunch—green grass razed, police dogs sniffing the freshly upturned soil, news vans and reporters flocking to report on the dig, students pressed up against the fence watching—I felt like I couldn’t hold the contents of my stomach in a second longer. I was lucky Ozzie was there, the only familiar face among the uniforms and scanners and cameras and microphones. He put his arm around me and steered me away from the scene, made me walk the other way.

  “Tip’s a load of BS,” he told me.

  “Okay,” I said, exhaling in relief.

  “They’re just chasing their five o’clock story.”

  At that moment, a woman popped out from behind a building and asked if I was Vera Rivers. She had some kind of audio recorder in her hand.

  “Are you a human being?” Ozzie asked her.

  It was such an odd question, the woman knit her painted eyebrows.

  “Yes . . .” she answered.

  “Then act like one,” he said.

  She backed away.

  He walked me to the library and told me to go hang out there until lunch period was done. “Besides, the library’s the world’s best-kept secret,” he said, surprising me, because he never for one second struck me as a bookworm. “It’s the only place where anything’s possible and everyone will leave you alone.”

  I tried to tell him how much I appreciated everything, but he, as usual, brushed it off. Ozzie ignores any and all effort to thank, compliment, give credit. It’s like everything he does is owed.

  Ozzie was right. They didn’t find anything. The tip was completely bogus. After that I ate lunch as far away as possible from that football field, in the corner of the library, sneaking my sandwiches in a cubicle and escaping into books. High school wasn’t bad. People were really nice to me. Sometimes I wondered if they were too nice. I was quiet, although sometimes people commended me on my dark sense of humor. I sat in the back of class and took excellent notes. I was friendless, but friendly. Never let anyone get too close. Never knew how. I had three loves—one lasted days, one lasted weeks, one lasted months. But more than anything I read a lot of books.

  12

  SINCE I GRADUATED, on Sunday nights I try to pick up dinner for Dad and me to have some time together. Mom is always out, the woman of a thousand acquaintances and obligations, but I worry about my dad. He never leaves his basement. To even see him upstairs these days is a shock. I know he keeps busy with Ava stuff and Other Life stuff and when I visit him, he seems cheerful, but I don’t think his day-to-day is anywhere near healthy. I’ve tried to ask Elliott to come by and spend time with him but Elliott’s always got an excuse. Deep down, I know Elliott just hates this house and hates Berkeley and hates everything that reminds him of our childhood. He acts like it’s my parents who don’t want him around, but it’s exactly the opposite. Elliott can convince himself—and other people, too, sometimes—of pretty much anything.

  Tonight it’s Wexican food. You know, corporate white people faking Mexican food. I step down the wooden steps and into Dad’s low-roofed, cream-colored hovel. There are stacks of books everywhere, an unmade futon bed, a rowing machine that seems to be serving as a dryer for his boxer shorts, and a very bitchy-looking obese tabby cat in the one window, which is covered with a floral sheet yellowed from cigarette smoke. I sit and unsheathe the plastic bag and paper wrapping and tinfoil and reveal tonight’s bounty.

  “God, this burrito is delicious,” Dad says, wolfing it down like he hasn’t eaten in days. He has some stubble growing in. It’s getting harder to see his blond hair in all the gray that’s taking over. “Where’d you get it from?”

  “Jalapeño,” I say.

  “Don’t tell your mom,” he says. “She hates those fast food chains running out the local businesses.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” I say.

  I pick at my burrito. Bastards put lettuce in it even though I asked them not to.

  “Do you think you’re going to come visit me?” I ask.

  “Where?” he asks through a mouthful. Then he realizes and says, “Mmmm.” Chews and swallows. “I keep forgetting it’s coming up so soon. I’m so proud of you.”

  He didn’t answer my question. Which kind of answered my question. I think my dad’s actually come to the point where he’s afraid of leaving the house. My dad, who used to travel for business, who won awards for his ability in advertising, who used to leave early and come home late, is phobic and lives in his pajamas. It didn’t happen overnight. He cut down his hours, he took a leave of absence, he freelanced instead. For a while he was certain he was going back to work full-time. Now it’s so many years later and he never did. Never will, I fear.

  What is going to become of him when I’m gone?

  Sometimes I get flashes of anger. It’s not at Ava, of course, poor Ava—but it’s because of her. It’s not fair. I wish we could know the truth already. It’s been almost twelve years—twice as long as she’d even been alive when she went missing. I wish we could all move on and Dad could be like the dads of other people I know, who are thinking of retiring and getting into sailing and entering a new stage of life when their kids leave the house. He’s beyond frozen in time. He’s paralyzed.

  “I worry about you in Portland, though,” he says, crumpling his foil into a little ball. He ate that burrito in record time. “It rains so much—it’s easy to get depressed in a place like that.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I say. “Everything’s green. It’s not depressing.”

  “Just promise you’ll get help if you start feeling that way, okay, Ladybug?”

  “I will,” I say.


  Will you? I wish I’d said instead. Will you get help? Then I get a surge of fearlessness, of say-anythingness. I am leaving soon. I am free.

  “Will you?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Get help if you need it?”

  “Of course.” He laughs, as if this is funny.

  “Here,” I say. “Eat my burrito.”

  “You’re not hungry?” he asks, amazed.

  “Not as hungry as you.”

  “Well, I won’t let good food go to waste,” he says, opening it up and devouring it. “Man, these are just the best burritos I’ve had in a long time.”

  It makes me happy to watch him lost in something simple and purely pleasurable for a moment. On his desk behind him is a book called Inside the Mind of a Child Predator and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. On the ground I count at least a dozen empty Cup Noodles. On his bed the new flyers are spread out—updated, with that computer-aged picture of Ava where she’s my age and looks like an avatar from one of his Other Life games. A forensic artist volunteered to do it for us. See? All it takes is a well-publicized tragedy to prove there are Good Samaritans aplenty.

  “Have you seen this?” he asks excitedly as I peer at the flyers. “Your mom got a spot on the six o’clock news to share them.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “Who knows what kinds of tips this will bring in,” he says. “This picture might jog a lot more memories than the first-grade picture.”

  “If—”

  I stop myself. I was about to blurt, if she’s alive. I can’t believe I was just about to say that.

  “It’s been so long,” I say.