The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

“Feels like it just happened,” he says.

  I think that’s the fundamental difference between me and my parents. My eternity is their blink.

  13

  “DID YOU SEE the news last night?” Mom asks the next morning when I come down for breakfast.

  “I did,” I tell her.

  “How’d I do?”

  “Great.”

  “How did you think that violet jacket showed up? Too violet?”

  “It was just perfectly violet, Mom.”

  “Oh, I love you I love you I love you,” she says, bending down as her pugs grunt and shuffle in excitement.

  “I love you, too. And your violet jacket.”

  “Your dad is already wading through a bunch of new tips,” she says, standing up. “He said the inbox was overflowing this morning.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Oz thinks it might be more trouble than it’s worth,” she says lowly. “You know how it is with those tips. Up the reward, and everyone calls in with a bunch of dead ends.” She sips her coffee. “I mainly did it for your father. You know how excited that computer-generated-picture idea made him.”

  “You weren’t excited?” I ask her.

  “We’ll see,” she says.

  She pours the rest of her coffee out and says, “Got to run.” Kisses my forehead and leaves the room, her dogs running after her.

  14

  WHEN I WAS in sixth grade, my mom was contacted by a famous psychic who had her own TV show. She was a white woman named Cassie with a Long Island accent, long tacky fingernails, and a platinum mullet. Cassie wanted to do an episode on my family since Ava’s case was so high-profile. Her story had recently aired again on national news for the fifth anniversary of her disappearance; there’s always renewed interest around anniversaries.

  My mom was thrilled. She knew that Cassie had worked for the FBI at certain points and helped to reunite people with their loved ones. Mom flew to New York. I remember waving goodbye to her at the airport. Her grin was huge, her eyes flashed with hope and life. She brought one of Ava’s favorite stuffed animals—a ragged button-eyed lamb—for Cassie to “read its energy.” When Mom came back from New York, she was like a different person. Something had left her expression. Even her posture had changed. Then I watched the episode weeks later, and I understood.

  “You sweet woman,” Cassie said, after touching the stuffed lamb for some time. She sighed and held my mom’s hands over her crystal ball. “You sweet woman, I’m so sorry, but your daughter is no longer with us in this world.”

  “No,” Mom said.

  “She’s moved on,” Cassie said. “What I’m seeing is a tree.”

  “A tree? What do you mean a tree?” Mom cried.

  “Her resting place,” Cassie said. “She’s on the other side now. I’m hearing her saying, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m okay now.’”

  “NonoNO—”

  You don’t know suffering until you’ve seen your mom scream-weeping on daytime TV.

  15

  I WOULD NEVER say this out loud, but I remember hardly anything vivid about my sister. The past I see when I shut my eyes was built with family photographs. I’ve studied pictures so many times, trying to imagine life back then, at moments convincing myself I really am remembering. But I think my memory is imagination and images, nothing more. We were just too young.

  I do remember telling people we were twins and seeing their eyes widen because we looked so unalike. I remember thinking people liked her better because she was louder and knew how to make people laugh. I remember that there was something secret to being a twin—an amazing fact that would make other people react in surprise, a bond we shared alone in the room when we spoke in tongues all our own and finished each other’s sung sentences. I remember wishing I was the goofy one with the mane of blond curls, but being happy I resembled our mother the most. I remember going to the drugstore together and buying matching mood rings on our sixth birthday and promising we would never take them off—and I didn’t, until years after she went missing, when my ring finger got too big for it. It stained my skin green and lingered like a scar. I remember all this, but it’s blurry. It could be a story I read somewhere for all I feel.

  16

  ONCE UPON A time, Ava and I shared a room.

  On one side, a canopy bed with violet mosquito netting; on the other, a bunk bed with Peanuts sheets. One end had a chock-full bookshelf. The other had paint stains on the carpet and dirty skirts strewn like debris. In the middle, a line of gray duct tape. I still live in this room. The duct tape has long been pulled but it’s still imprinted there in the middle like a permanent memory.

  In a blink, the space was all mine, but her belongings haunted it. I lived with the silence of her paint stains and her neatly lined-up shoes. Her bed, disheveled, still unmade, seemed to hide her ghost. My parents kept her side of the room pristine for nearly a year as their hope wouldn’t budge—then it became some sort of monument, an archaeological site dedicated to Rivers life before the disappearance. Finally Elliott convinced them to pack up Ava’s things and move them out. I was eleven. I spread my clothes out on the closet’s rod. I moved my bed and finally enjoyed the view—our back lawn stretched long and green, an enormous ash tree reaching for my window. Lastly, I pulled the duct tape off the carpet, wadded it up into a sticky mound. Guilt sickened me as I shoved it down into the trash, but I told myself it was only duct tape. It wasn’t my sister.

  That was how I ended up with the biggest room in the house.

  Elliott’s dim, blue-walled room became the exercise room, where the only thing that seems to actually get any exercise is the dust that dances from corner to cobwebbed corner. If I had to bet, I’d say my room will soon be an office. Airy, light-filled, inviting—a place you imagine yourself but never really end up.

  17

  ELLIOTT CALLS ME from a new cell phone number. He’s always getting new cell phones, and by the time you’ve programmed his number in he’s disconnected it or lost it and it doesn’t work anymore.

  “Um, like, hi, is this, like, Vera?” he asks in a dopey surfer voice.

  “Chya, bra,” I tell him.

  He tells me he’s fixing up motorcycles now. I didn’t even know he could ride one. I tell him I’m leaving for Portland in two weeks.

  “You excited to get out of the house?”

  “Yeah. A little worried about Dad though.”

  “He be aight,” Elliott says. I can’t tell if he’s being ironic or if that’s how he really talks nowadays. You just never know with Elliott.

  “I wish you’d come visit before I go,” I say. “It’s been, like, years since we all ate dinner together. Who knows the next time we’ll do it again.”

  I hear him light up a smoke. “I’m not allowed there—you remember.”

  “Stop being a martyr, they both love the crap out of you.”

  “When we got in that fight, I remember—” (The “fight” was actually Mom asking, curiously, “Are you on drugs?” after Elliott went on a random, paranoid rant about chemtrails at Thanksgiving dinner years ago, and Elliott responding by throwing our organic turkey through the sliding glass door and yelling, “You guys all look down on me!” before storming out the door.) “I remember Mom said, ‘DON’T COME BACK.’”

  It is aggravating how many times Elliott and I have had this conversation. It’s like reading from a script at this point.

  “You’re getting the punctuation wrong, and that changes the meaning entirely. She said, Don’t exclamation point. Come back exclamation point.”

  “If they want me to come over, they can call me,” Elliott says.

  “Dad emails you.”

  “I forgot my password.”

  “Mom would call if she had your number.”

  “Don’t give her this number,” he says.

  Usually I keep my
feelings to myself but right now, I’m so tired of having these same conversations. I’m so tired of nodding or agreeing when really I want to yell or shake someone. My tongue has permanent bite marks in it. When I imagine my future—which is green, green as Oregon—I imagine a new me there. One who says whatever’s written in her heart, even if it hurts.

  “Bro, you do this to yourself.”

  How good it feels, the unadulterated truth hot on my lips.

  “Over and over and over again,” I go on. “You just have to be the victim. Doesn’t it get tiring? Don’t you feel sometimes like you’re ready for a new role, a new game?”

  “You don’t get it,” he insists. “They hate me. They blame me for Ava.”

  He says Ava like she’s an event and not a human being. Which she kind of is at this point.

  “But they don’t,” I say calmly. “You’re full of bullshit, Elliott.”

  It is the first time I have firmly contradicted his warped truth in my many years alive. I tingle like I just discharged a weapon.

  Believe me, I’ve tried for years to gently tackle Elliott’s lies. Problem is, he actually believes them. I don’t know if it’s the drugs he’s done over the years or if it’s just the way he’s wired. Like most things, it’s most likely a mix. Anyway, I’ve learned to speak to him using careful logic and to not get upset by his ever-ridiculous responses. But this is the first time I’ve called him out.

  And of course he glides right over it.

  “I’ll visit you up in Portland,” he says. “Pot’s legal in Washington, right?”

  “Portland is in Oregon, and yes, pot’s legal.”

  “I wonder if you can just buy a pound and drive over the border with it.”

  “Please don’t turn a college visit into an opportunity to go to prison.” I say it jokingly, because hey, we both know it’s all talk. He’s never coming to visit me.

  “I love you, little sis,” he says. “How are things over there?”

  “Mom was on the news the other night,” I say. “This forensic artist worked up a picture of what Ava would look like now, and they’re sending it to all the local stations.”

  I can hear him breathing, smoking. “What’s she look like?”

  “I don’t know, she looked like a computer game character.”

  “Can you send me a picture?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can send it on the phone as a text,” he says. “I can get pictures on my phone.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” I say.

  We say our I love yous. Elliott’s surprisingly undrunk, although it’s late and he’s oddly chipper and talking about lifting weights now. I’ve always got to wonder.

  I go downstairs and take the flyer that’s been sitting on the dining room table for days. I hold it up in the light and take a picture. I can see how the image grew from the seed of her first-grade portrait. The eye shape. The nose. She’s just so different. The connection is lost.

  I send the photo.

  18

  JESUS FIREWORKS-EXPLODING CHRIST, I am going to Portland in a week. My future is so close I can taste it in my mouth, and it’s rich and honey-sweet.

  I paint my room white. My life is draped in plastic fog. Even though I loved the dark walls and the quotes I inked on pages of paper in beautiful penmanship and tacked up, I’m not sad to erase myself from this room. My childhood wasn’t all loneliness, but there was a lot of wishing in here. I spent my childhood wanting so badly to grow up, to be free, to be far away.

  I’ve lived my life in a hurricane eye of mourning that I plain do not feel sometimes. I look at my room and know I lived here with someone else once upon a time, but it’s been so many years alone now that I can’t sense it. I can’t sense it in the way my parents sense it. In a way, it’s been a rift between us—their constant obsession with finding Ava, and my resignation to never knowing her. I’m eighteen years old and acquaintances still apologize to me and give me the pity stare.

  I still remember the first night Madeline spent the night in high school—Madeline, who I met in Greek Mythology, the first girl I ever kissed. We ate dinner with my parents, and the whole time they were gushing about some tip that Ozzie was chasing to New Orleans. When we got back upstairs, Madeline said to me, “It feels like there’s a ghost in this house.”

  That’s what I thought she said anyway. My arms goose bumped. When I said, “Excuse me?” she clarified.

  “It feels like you’re a ghost in this house,” she repeated.

  A hurt bloomed in my middle. I nodded my head yes.

  Madeline was my best friend and then she was more, and then she sold an exclusive to the Enquirer last year about our family called “The Ghost in the Rivers House,” betraying me and swearing me off intimacy. Eventually, thankfully, she ended up moving to Canada and I didn’t have to see the painful sight of her beautiful face any longer. I still remember the way her hair smelled—cloves and vanilla.

  19

  ON A STREET corner near my house, latte in hand, I’m waiting for the light to change when I check my phone and see a missed call. Suspicious unrecognizable number. I listen to the voicemail and almost spurt hot caffeinated beverage out my nose when I hear Max singing a passionate song about me calling him back. It’s stream of consciousness, confident as hell, and almost bursts my eardrum.

  I tell myself my blood pressure is high right now because I’m walking home so fast. No big. It’s not because some sexy weirdo called me. Maybe I shouldn’t return his call. It would be easier that way, because I’m leaving soon, and I don’t find the fluttery lungs-bursting effect attractive humans have on me particularly fun. But today I don’t mind. Plus, I have to practice being brave—because that’s who I am inside and who I’m going to be once I move. I’m going to look people in the eyes and I’m going to tell them what I think and, most of all, I’m going to let myself near them.

  When I call him back, he asks me if I want to go for a walk and I say yes and he tells me that he thinks walking is a religion and I say that might be going a little far but okay. We meet at the corner of our old elementary school, which is only a few blocks from my house. We stand underneath a mural of hand-holding, butterfly-chasing children. Neither of us says anything about how this was once our school and it’s pretty much the last place either of us said more than a handful of words to each other. There’s a ghost between us, but we don’t mention her.

  The sunshine spills everywhere and turns every tree and leaf gold. I take in the sting-you-with-its-blue sky, music drifting from open doorways, college kids lazy on porch swings with chatter and beer bottles, the friendly walkers we pass who say hello. Max tells me his mother thinks their hot tub is contaminated with mold and he spent the day trying to convince her that this wasn’t true. We meander through downtown and construction zones, past campus, up into neighborhoods with picture windows, elaborate landscaping, and luxury cars. Max beatboxes and scats randomly, not caring if people we pass hear him. We talk about books. He’s surprisingly well-read, but he’s all into beatniks and I give him a hard time about it. He teases me because I love Dickens so much, calling me a seventy-year-old woman trapped in a teenage body. I laugh. Apparently he paints and wants to be an art teacher. The cutest freaking thing.

  We end up walking up a huge hill, and I complain freely the whole way. Max tells me to “chill” my “funk,” he has something to show me. We reach the huge rock formations pushed up into the sun, climb up the stairs carved into the immense rock, faded orange and rough as a tiny planet, and sit at the top and catch our breath. The sun has just started to sink over the skyscraper-infested hills behind the water, San Francisco’s TV tower jutting up glorious into the screaming sunset at the hilltop across the Bay. The water glitters blue, wisped with sailboats, strung with bridges, and all the cars sparkle on the streets and in the roads.

  “I forgot how bea
utiful everything is,” I tell him.

  Our hands are right next to each other on the rock. I put my pinky against his, my blood pulsing wild. I can feel my life beginning—my life, not just a life I was given, but one I made.

  “I forgot, too,” he says.

  He watches me. I see something special in his eyes, something like water, deep and always moving.

  “I’m moving to Portland in a week,” I tell him.

  I swear I see a disappointed flicker in his expression, but then he just breaks into a smile and congratulates me. He pats my hand and we get up and walk back, through the darkening streets, until we hit Ashby and go our separate ways, promising to keep in touch. I know we won’t. It’s just one of those things you say when you don’t have the right words.

  20

  IT’S MY LAST Friday. Next Wednesday morning, my plane leaves and angels will sing. We’re supposed to have an official family dinner tonight. As in, my choice. As in, leaving the house. I choose Italian even though it makes my mom cringe (“Carbs!”) and my dad pale (“Outside!”). I get fancy, in a black poofy dress and heels—my goodbye dress, I think—and wait at the kitchen table. Long shot of the century, I texted Elliott to come earlier but he responded, k @ jkyd pickn u jkbx wif laur, which I honestly don’t know what to make of except I’m sure it means he’s not coming and anyway, if I’m being honest, Elliott can be a little loud and embarrassing in public, so it’s for the best.

  At ten till, Dad comes up the stairs. He hasn’t brushed his hair. Sinking, but kicking myself for my surprise at this moment, I realize he’s about to make an excuse to not go to dinner and pretend it has nothing to do with something that begins with “agora” and ends with “phobia.”

  “My ears have been ringing all day,” he says.