The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  I have this moment of clarity as I greet the little ones, some of them brave and dashing straight up to touch my skirt, others hesitant, holding on to their mothers’ legs and peeping at me shyly. Party children. Right now they’re so pure. They don’t know hurt beyond skinned knees and not getting the things they want. Even their hair glitters like something special in the sun. And the love—the protective, watchful love of their parents—is their armor in the dark, mean world. For most, that will be enough. Most of the world are lucky ones. Now I’m like them.

  After the party, I get in my car and check my phone. Mom texted the word ELLIOTT!! The phone drops to the floor, my foot hits the gas, and I burn a little rubber out of the parking garage and almost hit a tourist or two on the way out.

  42

  MY WHOLE FAMILY hasn’t been in one room since I was six years old—since I was a squirt who played with Barbies and had gaps in her smile. And guess what? I missed it. By the time I get home, Mom has left for a fund-raiser and Ava and Dad are on the couch eating popcorn. They mute the crudely drawn cartoon show they’re watching and relay the whole thing to me.

  Break me in pieces. I missed it.

  “Mom almost pepper sprayed him,” Ava says, covering her mouth like she shouldn’t be laughing.

  “What?” I say.

  “Well, he didn’t ring the damn doorbell, he came in through the back and scared her,” Dad says. “How he tripped the alarm system I still do not understand. And he looks like a yeti, I mean, he’s hardly recognizable.”

  I sit in a velvet butt-worn armchair. “And?”

  “And he was . . . good,” Dad says.

  The pause is all he needs to insert in order for me to extract the truth—it was hard to tell.

  “He brought me this,” Ava says.

  She beams as she shows me a drugstore makeup kit and a throw pillow with a cat’s face silk-screened on it.

  “Um, okay,” I say.

  “No, I like it!” Ava says.

  She smiles and hugs the pillow.

  Dad shakes his head once, like whatareyougonnado.

  “But . . . he’s gone,” I say.

  I’m more popped balloon than girl.

  “He had some rodeo thing to go to,” Dad says.

  “Huh?” I ask.

  “He’s gonna come back next Saturday,” Ava says.

  No he’s not, I want to say. Elliott’s Saturday is Scarlett O’Hara’s tomorrow. But then again, everything’s different now. Elliott might come around and visit now that Ava’s alive. It would take a resurrection, wouldn’t it?

  “Did you remember him?” I ask.

  “I mean, yeah, but he looks different now,” Ava says.

  “Did he hug you? Did he cry?” I ask.

  Damn stupid tear ducts. I would like to get them surgically removed. But I am so sorry I missed him, that I missed Elliott and Ava’s reunion, I missed the whole family together again.

  I hate the feeling that I’m here, I stayed, Ava’s alive, Ava’s home, and somehow I’m still missing things.

  43

  I’M TRYING TO catch Ava up. Not just teach her how to use an iPhone, which until weeks ago was a magic she’d only seen on-screen, but fill her in on the secrets of culture and common knowledge that TV never spilled. Like politicians are all liars and most of the world isn’t white or skinny. Like the amazing underground music that MTV never told her about. I try to teach her about Berkeley and the Bay Area and its particularities, which is hard, because my hometown shaped me into what I am and it’s thus sweetly invisible to me. But we revisit places I’ve gone a billion times and they take on a new sheen as I watch Ava watching them through her eyes.

  The downtown post office, which is occupied with tents and their occupants’ hand-painted signs about not being for sale. Ava asks why and I realize I can’t tell her. I’ve never even stopped to read the signs and figure it out, exactly.

  Scuzzy, Nag Champa–stinking, record-store-dotted Telegraph Avenue, which dead ends randomly into the stunning university with all its lucky, bright-eyed, eager students. Ava asks me why I don’t just go there. Well, it would take an hour to explain the eternal admissions process and the fact that my SATs probably wouldn’t be good enough anyway. I tell her I want to take time off to be with family. And, oh yeah, I have to explain what a bong is to her on the way home as we pass the glimmering head shop windows.

  San Francisco, with its techies and businessmen and tourists crowding cable cars and pissed-on sidewalks. “Why is that man sleeping in a cardboard box?” she almost screams, and even though I’m sure all of Market Street heard, everyone pretends they didn’t, because that’s how city life works, kid. And I have to pull her sleeve to get her to stop from leaning down and offering him money. Ava’s big heart is a magnet pulling her every which way.

  We plan to do touristy things as a fam. Alcatraz, Sausalito, Fisherman’s Wharf—the kind of stuff we only do when someone’s in town and wants to see it. On our first trip, a wind-whip-you walk on the Golden Gate Bridge, I don’t know how to answer her question, “How do you build a bridge? Where do you start?”

  “On both ends,” Dad says.

  Yes, Dad came. It should be blaring on a marquee, breaking news: DAD LEFT THE HOUSE. Dad put on a coat and looks like some surly mountain man or something with his unbrushed hair and unshaved face. I hardly recognize him outdoors, bundled up in clothes so forgotten they’re new.

  “You start on both ends and meet in the middle,” he says.

  Mom, I swear, hasn’t put her phone down since she got here.

  “Just one more picture,” she says. “I want a good one to share online.”

  Ava and I stand next to each other, and she opens her mouth wide and does jazz hands.

  “You goofball.” Dad laughs.

  There’s this bittersweet tickle in me as I stand next to her, freezing so cold my teeth chatter even though the sun is high—the knowledge that we’re making a memory. We’re building something. Ava holds my hand and puts her head on my shoulder for the picture, and I vow never to forget this. It’s so meaningful, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of things being this good, all together like this, twinned again, because pain and loss are somewhere below and you can’t sit on the apex forever.

  44

  THE DOORBELL RINGS so much these days, even so many weeks after Ava’s return, that I usually ignore it. It’s never for me. Often, if I peek through the peephole, it’s some stranger anyway who’s probably just going to ask if they can write a blog post about us or whatever. I know every damn cop in the city by name. They probably have Ava’s number memorized. But one Saturday after a kid’s party in the nearby suburb of Pleasant Hill, which was incidentally neither pleasant nor hilly, I peek through the peephole and it’s Max Spangler. He shaved. And he looks fresh. He’s got a salad bowl in one hand and a skateboard in another.

  “Hey,” I say, opening the door.

  “Um . . . hi?”

  His eyes travel up and down and up again. At first, I get a sweet quiver like he’s checking me out. It’s been a minute since that happened. But then I look down and realize I’m dressed like a secondhand princess.

  “Yeah, this is how I spend my Saturdays,” I say.

  “Decent,” he says.

  Not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult or what.

  “Ava’s off at another lineup or something,” I say.

  “Oh hells yeah,” he says. “You think they’ve caught the guy?”

  “She’s done so many at this point, we’ve stopped getting our hopes up every time.”

  “Logical.” He hands me the salad bowl. “Brought you guys this.”

  It’s greens and a bunch of stuff that looks like squirrel food. I swear there are acorns and pinecones in there.

  “No lid?” I ask. “You skated all the way here with a salad bowl with no lid?�
�

  “I maneuvered,” he says.

  “Sketch.”

  “I almost dropped it like fifty times,” he admits, laughing. Then he stops abruptly and gets serious as a confession. “My mom actually made this salad.”

  “Thanks, Max’s mom.”

  In the silence, my heartbeat’s a thud. As if I have some reason to be nervous around a guy who peed his pants at my house once upon a time.

  “How is your mom?” I ask.

  “She’s quality. She’s good. You know.”

  Max points his brown stare full of feeling at our doormat that says GO AWAY. Which Dad ordered, of course, and Mom hates. She wanted something with poppies on it.

  “’Cause you said once she was ‘infirm,’” I say.

  One part of me wants him to look at me, because it makes me warm and glowy. Another part is aware that I’m sweaty and wearing a not-so-clean Snow White dress.

  “Oh yeah, she’s still illin’. She’s always illin’.”

  “What’s she have?” I ask.

  “It’s complex. It’d take me, like, several eons to break it down.”

  “I have several eons if you want to come in,” I say.

  But I shouldn’t have said that. I sounded desperate. I sounded pathetic. I’m gross and he’s glorious. He would never.

  “Yeah, I should—I should mosey,” he says.

  “I’ll pass the salad along,” I say, ignoring my loud disappointment. “Thanks for bringing it by.”

  “Sure, yeah, it was no thing. No thingy thing. I would like to explain sometime, I just—I got somewhere to be. We should hang again soon. You, me, and Ava.”

  “Yeah, that’d be fun.” I nod and squeeze a smile. But I know it’s just Ava he wants. Everyone everywhere seeks Ava. I’m just the bridge to the prize.

  When Ava gets home, she takes one bite of the salad and spits it in a napkin. “Hell no,” she says.

  She gets up and makes popcorn and eats that for dinner instead, melting cheese on top of it in the microwave. Ava’s dinners are semihorrific sometimes. And I was right, she was at another lineup.

  “Any luck?” I ask.

  “They’re never going to catch him,” she says.

  Her expression goes dead and she turns on the TV—a commercial for face wash with a blissed-out chick splashing her cheeks with milk is on. If the remote were in my hand, I’d change the channel, but Ava always watches ads.

  It’s like a chill blew through the room. We’re silent. The TV is loud. I don’t ask any more questions.

  45

  AVA REDECORATES THE guest room, because it’s not a guest room anymore—it’s hers. Now it’s hot pink with stenciled white unicorns running along the trim and glittery handprints Ava added randomly in the middle of it. Her new bed is a princess bed with a purple canopy. It looks like a child’s bedroom. The pugs sleep with her in her new bed. She’s crazy about dogs. She still wonders out loud about Madonna and talks about how she misses her and how she used to paint her toenails pink. Ava talks more about Madonna than That Monster. Mom tells me it’s because it’s a positive memory. Mom’s all about positivity these days—KEEP IT POSITIVE! screams the permanent Post-it note on her steering wheel. It’s hard though, in the middle of such uncertainty. “Positive” has more than one definition, you know.

  46

  WHO KNEW CRIME victims needed publicists? I’ve learned all sorts of fun facts since Ava came home. One of them is that apparently victims of complicated, high-profile cases need an entourage. Ava is a sick kind of star. Being a victim of an unsolved case is basically a full-time job with nonstop appointments. Publicist, lawyer, tutor, FBI agents, advocates, therapists, and of course the ubiquitous police officers and good old Ozzie, who stinks like the cologne section in a drugstore every time he steps his motorcycle boots into our foyer. Now we’ve got a new member of the entourage, this media specialist who was recommended by another specialist of some sort.

  The media specialist is a woman with the world’s brightest eyeshadow who is a total fifty-foot-fake-out for a twenty-year-old but who is, up close, my mom’s age. Maybe it’s the peroxide-pixie hairdo. In the living room, the media specialist coaches Ava on posture and eye contact and video cameras. Our day-trip luggage is in a neat pile. Dad and I stand off in the foyer cramming breakfast bars in our mouths. Dad’s dressed in a suit jacket and he trimmed his hair himself and is it weird to say he looks handsome? Mom, pure Martha Stewart Living meets Glamour, takes notes on her phone as the media specialist explains about the better side of the face and how to talk to the camera.

  Two months, almost, since Ava got home, and this is the first and only interview that she’s doing. If it were me I’d have gone for NPR. You don’t have to worry about pretty on radio. But Ava’s doing Flora Daly and I’m a little afraid the ticking time bomb of fame is going to blow back in our faces after this one. All hope of fading into the proverbial wallpaper is smoke once Ava’s visited with the superstar of daytime TV.

  Thankfully, all I have to do is sit in the front row with Mom and Dad. I don’t have to say a word. I’m basically an extra. But just in case, I did have to pick an outfit that would look good on camera. Gray button-up dress. Gulp.

  We’re accidental celebrities, us Riverses, living someone else’s life. We ride in a shiny Lincoln Town Car with a uniformed driver. We have first-class tickets and are boarded first on the airplane. Ava and I sit next to each other in our own little row. She’s glowing. Reflective as the moon; so am I. Since she came home, she’s put on a few pounds and rosied up, and she’s in a pink party dress that flares out in an explosive tutu with fishnets and her glittery Converse, her hair ever-wild. People stare at her everywhere we go. And it’s not just because they recognize her from the TV pictures and the ’loids. She looks so much more alive than the paparazzi snapshots of her with her bandaged head or hiding her face while ducking into our house in sweats. She’s an eyeball magnet. She puts a staring-problem spell on everyone around her.

  “I got bad butterflies in my tummy right now,” she says, white-knuckling the cushy divider between us. “I’ve never been up in the sky before.”

  “You have,” I say. “We flew to New Mexico to see Nana Maria when we were five.”

  “Nana Maria,” she repeats.

  I look across the aisle to see if Mom’s ears perked up. I expect the usual flinch she gives when I mention her mother’s name, who up and died within three years of Ava’s disappearance and whose quick and mean exit absolutely devastated Mom at a time when she was already absolutely devastated. But Mom’s got her headphones on and eyes closed already while Dad mutters words like “ridiculous” and “capitalism” as he flips through a SkyMall catalog.

  “How’d she die?” Ava asks.

  “Cancer.”

  “Oh no! Was it brain cancer, like Priscilla DuMont?”

  “I have no idea who that is.”

  “She was on An Extravagant Universe.”

  “Ah,” I say.

  Daytime soap. Cheeseball central.

  “It wasn’t brain cancer,” I say. “I forget what kind of cancer it was, to be honest. Mom doesn’t really like talking about it.”

  I whisper the last part.

  Ava drops her voice, too. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. It’s not you—Mom’s not a fan of feelings.”

  Ava rests her head back and turns to look at Mom, who must be listening to some audio-meditation or something because she appears to be in some Buddha-like state as she smiles and closes her eyes.

  “I’m glad she can be happy now,” Ava says.

  “Me too.”

  “And you’re happy, too, right?”

  I smile. “No, I’m totally miserable.”

  She squeezes my hand. A stewardess gives us a patronizing smile, like we’re adorable kids, and I suspect she recognizes us.<
br />
  I need to stop.

  It shouldn’t matter anymore what strangers think they know.

  47

  LA IS EXACTLY what I expected, sparkly city-sprawl screaming with billboards. Clogged freeways, smoggy palm-peppered horizons, and people who look as if they spent way too much cashola on faces. The studio is past a few kiosks and gates. It’s a big, unmagical cement building. Inside, the set is cheerfully lit, the chairs lined up in rows and waiting for asses. I can tell Ava is in heaven, though, her eyes as bright and wide as studio lights before she’s whisked away to “makeup and prep.” Mom accompanies her, protectively, touching up her lipstick as they walk away down the hall toward the doors with the stars and the word GUESTS on them. Dad and I take our seats in the front row of the audience that says RESERVED. Several tech show employees come and introduce themselves to us as we sit here, raving about how totally honored they are to have Ava Rivers on the show and how amazing our story is and how they seriously broke records with requests for studio audience tickets and it’s just so awesome and such a miracle and an inspiration to not just America but women everywhere.

  I don’t mean to be cynical, but you can see it in their eyes; this is their job, they say things like this, they eat family tragedies up like mimosas and pancakes. Blah dee blah. I am so proud of Ava and I’m sure she’ll be magnificent, but I stare up at the blinding lights and beg the universe to please just let this pass quickly and don’t make us any more famous. I exchange glances with the off cameras and plead, Please don’t point yourself at me.