The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  “Yeah, she’ll keep existing.”

  He says it so robotically I can’t tell if there’s bitterness. I want to pick his brain and ask him more. There’s something comforting about someone else who, after graduating in June, is going to be sticking around town because destiny interfered.

  “She is here, right?” Max asks.

  I don’t know what I was thinking—that he was here for me. Foolish girl. Get it together.

  “Yeah, sorry, she’s upstairs. I’ll go check if she’s up for a visit right now. Don’t be offended if she isn’t. It’s just been so hectic.”

  “I get it.”

  Upstairs, I knock on Ava’s door. She answers. Her room is a sea of open cardboard boxes and bubble wrap tsunamis. There’s a shiny new computer on the quilted bed and she’s holding a shiny new phone.

  “Look,” she says excitedly. “Mommy bought it for me!”

  “I can show you how to use that later,” I say.

  “I’m figuring it out,” she says. “I took a picture.”

  She shows me a blurry selfie. I’m impressed. It took me like an hour to figure out how to take selfies on my first phone—not that I take many.

  “I always wanted a phone,” she says.

  The infantile excitement is too cute. I mean, this is elation. Over a phone. A thing I let fall off counters and run out of batteries and curse for freezing up during Scrabble games. But to Ava, it’s a jewel.

  “Well done!” I check myself, reminding myself she’s not actually six years old. “Max is here.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She puts her phone on the bed and sits on the edge. “He was my friend.”

  She’s saying it like she’s telling herself a story.

  “Your best friend,” I remind her. “We showed you the pictures.”

  She nods.

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “No, I do.” She bites a nail. “Just not a lot. I mean, it was a while ago.”

  “There won’t be a test,” I tease her.

  “Ha. Thanks, Veer.”

  We’ve apparently moved into nickname territory. Chalk up another victory.

  “So you’re up for it?” I double-check.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  We smile. She follows me out of her room.

  Max stares at Ava as she trails behind me on the staircase like she’s Venus descending from Mount Olympus rather than a scared-faced girl who hasn’t brushed her teeth or hair.

  “Hey,” he says, eyes lit up.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he gets close to her. I can tell his instinct is to hug her, but then he checks himself and steps back, shoves his hands in his pockets.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Ava.” He shakes his head. “Damn. This is just . . .”

  “Hi, Max,” she says.

  They laugh for a second, tears flashing, shiny threats.

  “Been a minute,” she says. “Right?”

  “Oh, man . . . you dazzle,” Max starts. “I mean, it’s just, you know, blowing me away to see you at all, to see you at all is just, like . . .”

  His tongue will never find what he’s looking for. To my amazement, there are some things words just can’t do.

  Instead of gawking at their intimate moment, I excuse myself—begrudgingly, I’ll admit—and slip into the kitchen. I knock on the basement door.

  “Come in,” Dad sings.

  Down, down I go.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Dad’s in the corner, at his desk on a rolling chair squinting at the computer. I can tell from here it’s Ava’s website.

  “Whatcha doing?” I ask.

  “Just going through the comments again,” he says. “I’ve been attacked by spambots lately, gotta keep on it.”

  “How’s Serge?”

  “Serge?” he asks, turning around.

  “Your Other Life guy.”

  “Ohhh,” he says, making the word all long, like he’s completely forgotten.

  “Have you been neglecting your little computer man?”

  “I’ve been kind of busy, Vera.”

  I know what he means. These long, lazy family days spent hiding from the cameras and well-coiffed people with mics feel busy somehow.

  “Max is here,” I say.

  “Max Spangler!” Dad says. “That kid still play music?”

  “‘That kid’ is seven feet tall and has a goatee now.”

  “She remember him?” Dad asks in a low voice.

  “Seems like it,” I tell him.

  “Memory is such an odd thing,” Dad says. “To remember Max and us and Elliott, but have entire days where she says she can’t remember anything about That Monster.”

  “Well, like Ozzie told Mom, it’s probably more that she doesn’t want to remember him.”

  “I know,” he says with bitterness.

  The remembering and the not-remembering have both been—behind closed doors, away from Ava-ears, of course—points of contention between us and the police. The feds and the police want answers. Ozzie wants constant contact, grilling her with graphic questions. We want Ava to feel okay. It’s hard because we want That Monster, as his household name has become, behind bars paying for what he did. But at the same time, the more anyone presses Ava for info, the more upset she gets. So it’s a tricky balance.

  Yesterday the alarm company came by and installed their most expensive system around our rickety Victorian. Cameras, automatic floodlights, wailing alarms. I have to say I slept better last night knowing. The pugs aren’t exactly comforting protection against wandering monsters or sleazy paparazzi.

  When Max takes off, he and Ava shake hands like business partners and he shoots me a bright smile on his way out the door. After the door thuds shut, Ava and I exchange a wild-eyed look. I can’t describe what we’re saying with words but it’s like we shared something warm—something from the past, future, and other world outside these walls and this tragedy that has become a news story confining us here. A boy. A visit from a boy.

  36

  AVA IS GOING to appear on the Flora Daly Show.

  If you haven’t heard of the Flora Daly Show, you’ve clearly been living beneath a stone for the past decade. Flora Daly has her own clothing line, magazine, charity, and book club. Flora Daly is a brown woman with layered hair who is timelessly, almost eerily unaged, a compassionate do-gooder with a talk show on channel 3 every afternoon.

  Why Flora Daly? Why not any of the other ten thousand TV and radio shows—three-letter acronyms that all run together after a while, CBSNPRNBCCNN—that have approached Ava? Why not the dozens of classy glossies that solicited interviews? Ava didn’t want to talk to the press, and then suddenly a few days ago she told our lawyer she wouldn’t mind a daytime TV chat with Flora Daly.

  “I used to pretend Flora Daly was my friend,” Ava tells us over dinner. “I know it’s weird. I’ve always wanted to talk to her about the things that have happened to me. She’s, like, a hero.”

  We get it. She’s a frigging screen queen.

  “Also,” Ava says.

  Tonight, for the first time since she came home, she’s eating salad. Granted, it’s slathered in ranch dressing, but I’ve grown concerned about her appetite. Pop Tarts and Cup Noodles and other Kmart food. I mean, this is Berkeley, the land of yoga and quinoa and kale. Also, holy hell: My mom—queen of to-go food and restaurant delivery apps—made a salad!

  “Also,” Dad repeats.

  “I want to help people,” Ava says. “I’ve been thinking about it, ever since that lady came up to me and Vera at the park and got all confessional about what happened to her.”

  We exchange a look. Mom and Dad watch on curiously, clearly unfamiliar with this story.

  “I want to go on TV so other girls—girls who are locked up and abused and s
tuff—they can see that there’s hope. Or maybe they’re like me and they didn’t even really understand it was wrong. ’Cause I was manipulated.”

  That’s a word I’ve noticed coming up since she started attending therapy—“manipulated.” “Sexual assault” are another two. And “consent.” And “survivor.” She’s beginning to understand parts of her own story and all the vocabulary that comes with it.

  “Like, I want girls to know it’s wrong if men use their power to hurt them,” Ava continues, picking out the tomatoes from her salad and pushing everything else to the side. I smile. Some things are the same. When we were kids she used to eat tomatoes whole like apples. “It’s not right to be locked up like that, no matter how nice they are to you sometimes or what they tell you about protecting you or whatever. Everyone deserves to be free.”

  What she says is so plain and yet so passionate—it would be a platitude if she hadn’t lived through its opposite. Mom, Dad, and I stop eating and watch her in amazement as she eats her tomatoes. Our hearts are spilling-over full or our hearts are breaking. I can’t tell which. Feels the same.

  “Right on, baby girl,” Dad says.

  Ava stiffens; her color goes ghostly. She puts her fork down and her lip trembles. “Please, don’t ever. Don’t.”

  Dad’s stunned face is a sight I won’t soon forget.

  “Ava,” Mom says. “Don’t what, honey?”

  “He called me that,” Ava says, lip quivering.

  The room goes so still. I don’t think I’ve ever truly known silence until now. This is bunker silent, deep-space silent. This is end-of-the-world silent.

  Ava puts her head in her hands and begins to cry, and when I try to touch her shoulder and say “hey,” she shrinks away. “Lemme work through it, okay?”

  We sit, our hands folded on our napkin-covered laps as she sniffles into her hands. I am throbbing. I exchange shiny, frozen gazes with my parents as we blink and wait through the excruciating helplessness of this inescapable moment.

  The façade of recovery, of healing is so delicate.

  Each joy, each horror so fleeting.

  37

  THERE’S THIS MOMENT every morning when I wake up and upon my first breath I get this sick nail in my stomach that digs in, like maybe it’s all been a dream and I’m waking up to the way things were before, there is no Ava again anymore, and then the sweet release as the pain untwists and lifts and I breathe because it wasn’t a dream, no, it’s real, over and over and over again it’s real it’s real it’s real.

  38

  THE FIRST DAY I take Ava downtown, we BART together. I expect her to be terrified of the subway and its loud, weird people, like the guy yelling Bible verses and the seated woman reading calmly with a taxidermy squirrel on her lap. But Ava watches it all with wild, wide eyes and doesn’t flinch. When we reach the street level, she just says, “Interesting.”

  We’re supposed to go shopping to get her some clothes, something “fresh” for Flora Daly. But before we do she goes to therapy—my first time taking her—and I wait for her in an office with a tiny fountain that requires me to get up and pee three times. When she gets out, I expect her to be teary-eyed, but she just gives me a small smile and tells me she’s hungry. You’d never look at her and think trauma queen.

  Ava hesitates as we pass street kids with cardboard signs and cute puppies. She pulls me aside, near a planter.

  “Maybe we should help them,” she says.

  “They just want money.”

  “Maybe we should give them some,” she whispers.

  One of them has a sign that says SPARE A NUG?

  “I think they’ll be okay,” I tell her. “They’re just crusty kids.”

  I’ve learned this blank stare she gives me means, I don’t understand you but I’m too timid to say it.

  “Travelers,” I say.

  “But they’re homeless,” she says. “We have a couch, maybe—”

  “Um, Ave, Mom is not going to go for that plan.”

  The look on her face as she tries to comprehend this is classic.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “You can’t get sad about it.”

  I pull her to the crosswalk, amazed that she has space in her heart for pity for strangers who are spare changing for weed after all she’s been through.

  “They have dogs,” she says. “How do they feed their dogs?”

  “Their dogs are fine,” I say.

  But she keeps turning to look back at them, the white kids with Mohawks and battered cardboard signs and spikes on their clothing. The kind of people I walk by without a stitch of sadness on a regular basis and rarely even spare a glance at. Am I unkind?

  “How come so many dudes in Berkeley look like wizards?” Ava asks me at a streetlight. A man who does look particularly wizardlike is handing out flyers in front of a store with copper goddess statues and sarongs in the window.

  “I am a wizard! Tax the one percent,” he tells us.

  “I’ve never noticed, but you’re right, there are a lot of wizardy dudes,” I agree as I ignore him and keep walking.

  We eat pizza and stare through a breath-cloudy window. The punk moms and their strollered babes, the woman in the jacket too large for her who is standing on the bench pontificating to no one in particular about China and Tibet. I see it all like it’s new, too—I’ve become so accustomed to Berkeley’s weirdness. But today I’m like, what would this all look like to someone locked away from the world for twelve years?

  We stand in line at a coffee shop and I watch Ava watch everything as I wonder when the police are ever going to catch That Monster and what her days were like in there exactly and what she talked about in therapy, knowing it’s not okay for me to ask any of these things and I have to pretend everything is peachy. When I think about it too much I get a lump in my throat and I have to swallow and remind myself I don’t know. I don’t know the whole story. I just know a few dust-sized clues.

  The blankness, the I-don’t-knowness, is somehow both a barb and a blanket of comfort these days.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Two mochas,” I tell a barista with a ring in her septum.

  “With whip?”

  I look at Ava, who shrugs.

  “Sure,” I tell the barista.

  I put cinnamon in my mocha, so Ava puts cinnamon in hers. Her copying my every move is endearing as hell. She sips it and mmms. I ask if she’s ever had a mocha and she says nah. As we walk down the street sipping our drinks I rack my brain—was it okay to ask that? Too much? Was I prying by wanting to know about her history concerning sugary caffeinated beverages? I haven’t seen her smile today. I forget what her teeth look like. She probably hates me.

  We wander into a vintage clothing store and Ava’s expression is like a four-year-old at Disneyland. She seems confused about what would or wouldn’t look good on her and wants to know my opinion about everything she sees.

  “Is this cute?” she asks, pointing to an off-shouldered dress with a frilly skirt.

  “It is cute,” I say. “You wear a small?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I think so.”

  “Weird that I don’t even know what size you are.”

  “What are you?”

  “A medium.”

  “Wow,” she says, like this is impressive.

  I smile. “Try it on.”

  “Would you wear it?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “It would make me look like I’m having my quinceañera.”

  That trademark blank stare. Ava must have forgotten the pictures of Mom at her quinceañera plastered all over our grandma’s house. I didn’t have a quinceañera. Mom thinks they’re sexist now. Plus it would have embarrassed the crap out of me being the center of all that attention. But we used to love looking at the photos of Mom in that giant pink dress when we were kids.


  “Birthday party for a fifteen-year-old girl,” I say. “It’s a Mexican thing.”

  “Are we Mexican?” she asks, confused.

  “Among other things,” I say.

  A woman holding a pair of leopard-print flats eavesdrops on our odd conversation. Trying not to stare. I have to wonder if she recognizes us from the news. They’ve left us alone more this past week, but still.

  “Mom’s half Mexican and half Persian,” I say, turning around so the lady can’t gape at us. “So we’re a quarter.”

  “I’m a quarter Mexican?” Ava asks in disbelief. “And Persian? I didn’t even know there was a Persia anymore.”

  “It’s Iran now.”

  “So, like, our grandparents live in Iran?”

  “No, our grandpa immigrated. But he died before we were born. RIP.”

  “What else are we?”

  It is such an odd question. It shocks me that she’s forgotten all of this about us, about our family, but I know it shouldn’t. It’s been so long since she was part of us.

  “You know, European mutt on Dad’s side,” I say.

  She puts the dress back on the rack, brow furrowed as she thinks about her ethnic background. Our family didn’t talk about this stuff much when we were kids. It just was.

  “I’m a quarter Mexican,” she repeats. “And a quarter Persian.”

  Yes, we are of mixed race. People have actually asked me “what” I am, as if I’m a different species. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, it’s super annoying. But lucky you, Ava, you got Dad’s blond hair, and Mom’s olive complexion just looks California-girl on you.

  “You don’t remember Nana Maria?” I ask.

  My mom’s mom. She lived in New Mexico and smoked long cigarettes, taught us to make tortillas, was a painter with a house full of color and artwork, used to dance around the kitchen when we were tiny, and had the most insanely decorated house at Christmas.

  “I do remember a little bit. She cooked for us, right?”

  “Yeah! The tortillas,” I say.

  “They were gooood,” Ava says with a smile, then wanders off to a stack of T-shirts.