Where is there?
“You won’t,” I repeat.
She watches her hot-pink toenails. “I don’t want him to find me. Not that I think he’d look. But what if he did?”
I can’t help the words. They leap from my mouth. “Where is ‘he’?”
“He’s probably sitting in his house right now,” she whispers. “If it’d been a while ago, he’d be playing video games. But now I’m sure he’s just reading his Bible. Or who knows—maybe he’s turned on the news and he knows what deep trouble he’s in. Maybe he doesn’t even care—turned his worries over to God—or maybe he got chicken and ran off. Thing is, he’s not the type to run.”
Ava grasps her hands so hard her nails dig into her knuckles. They make marks. I put my hand on hers again and say, “Stop, stop.” She looks down with this robotic expression, like her fingers don’t even belong to her and she doesn’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
“I just want it to be over,” she tells me. “But it’s never going to be.”
I wait and breathe.
She watches the TV, a muted deodorant commercial.
“You can tell me anything,” I say. “I’ll just listen.”
She breaks her gaze with the commercial. Dry.
“You know, sometimes it wasn’t so bad. It was mostly boring being there. I was alone most of the time, upstairs, in my own room. The attic. I watched a lot of TV.”
I nod, thirsty for every drop, every crumb of story. I’m quivering here on the edge of the bed.
“I looked out the window. There were paintings in my room, of flowers. Sometimes he let me downstairs and I sewed up his pants or swept or whatever. It wasn’t that bad, except for those things, it wasn’t that bad.”
So she does remember. It throbs. Everything I already knew in my deep, dark ocean comes floating to the horrible surface. She was raped. She was kept. This is real now, not a dry news briefing.
“Have you told anyone else what you’re telling me?” I ask. “The paintings, the flowers . . . these are all clues.”
She nods, shrugs. “I tell.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say. “Did you ever see yourself on TV?”
“Couple times.”
“Didn’t that give you hope, to know we were looking like crazy?”
“By the time I saw stuff, I was older. I wasn’t even sure if it was me. Jonathan didn’t call me Ava. He said I didn’t have a family. Nobody wanted me. Nobody’d bother looking for me and they’d never find me.” For the first time since she began talking, her eyes flash with emotion. “Don’t look so sad. I’m here now.”
Instantly, with no warning, I’m blubbering into my hands. Damn me.
“You crying only makes it worse,” she tells me, her voice rising, breaking.
“I know.”
We turn and face opposite walls, and then I hear her sniffing. We both turn back to each other, teary-eyed and fighting a losing battle with the weepies.
“I’m dealing with it. There’s a lot to be thankful for. We should be here now,” she says in a high-pitched voice.
“I know, this is so great,” I agree, voice a squeak.
“So lucky.”
“So damn lucky.”
Our expressions are both about to disintegrate when one of us smiles—I’m not sure who, it seems to happen so quickly and multiply. The grins grow. The tears are laughed out and wiped away. She squeezes my arm. I yell jokingly into my hands. And the conversation shatters into a joyful jargon that is kind of hard to explain. We talk about crazy Elliott, and Ava throws the kitten pillow at me. We talk about Max and his silly scats. We hear Dad’s singing through the radiator and imitate him and burst into giggles.
We lie side by side and say nothing.
Before I leave her room, after a silent hour of TV watching on her bed, I notice the Ramona book splayed open on her floor. I’m about to say something when Ava grabs her phone and takes a selfie of us.
“Looklooklook,” she says.
In the picture, our eyes are different colors but identically glowing. My short jet-black doll haircut and her wild blond curls. I want this picture. I want this moment. I want forever to be real and I want it now.
55
LATE ONE NIGHT later that week Ava comes to my room and says she’s got a craving for chicken wings. Or “chicken wangs,” as Ava likes to call them in a weird nasally voice. Probably from some commercial. I drive us to a diner decorated wall-to-wall with Barbies and with punk music blasting. Ava and I never go out at night like this. We order milkshakes. I feel our age exactly, in the most refreshing way.
“I love Mom,” Ava says. “But sometimes I wish she’d, like, take a break from me and my case. You know?”
I chomp a celery stick, surprised. It’s the first not-100-percent-positive thing I’ve heard Ava utter about our parents. “Her full attention can be rather overwhelming.”
She gnaws a dainty chicken bone. “She took me out to lunch a few days ago . . . she was all therapisty with me. At one point, we were looking at the menu and I was like, ‘I don’t like tuna.’ She was all, ‘Does it trigger a painful memory?’”
I roll my eyes, and both of us giggle.
“Tuna,” she says.
“She’s just trying to help in her own weird way.”
“I wish people would just treat me normal,” Ava says. “Like you do.”
I point to my mouth. “You have sauce right here.”
“Exactly,” she says.
She wipes it off with a napkin.
“Can I ask you something? What’s the deal with Mom and Dad?” she asks. “Are they okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s downstairs, she’s upstairs.” She pushes the plate of bones away. “I’ve never seen them touch.”
“It’s temporary,” I say.
My throat’s constricted. I gulp water.
“We seem like a happy family,” she says, searching my eyes for an answer. “We’re happy, right?”
“We are now.”
After I get up and pay the bill and use the stickered, graffitied bathroom, I go outside and see Ava’s seated on the hood of my car, her glittery Converse moving back and forth in a little dance. I see what I think is foggy, cold-night-air breath exiting her mouth—and then my eyes move down her arm and hey, whoa, she’s smoking a cigarette.
“Where did you get that?” I ask, shocked.
“A guy.”
“A guy?”
“He was outside smoking. I think he worked here. He just went back inside.”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I haven’t in a minute,” she says.
Her eyes look sad-shiny under the moon. I want to know it all—when was the last time you smoked? Where have you been and who were you? But I can’t bring myself to press her. Her trust is this delicate, tamed thing. She talks to me and laughs with me and she’s not the way she is with my parents. I don’t want to jeopardize that with careless curiosity.
I can’t bring myself to sit on the hood of my car, POS that it is. I lean against it, next to Ava, and we both watch steam pour from a vent coming out of the dark wall of the diner.
“Let me have a drag,” I say.
She hands me the cigarette, and I take a puff before handing it back.
“He bought me smokes and peanut butter cups on Mondays,” she says almost too softly to hear it.
My mouth purses up with a question.
“Like some reward,” she continues.
I watch her profile as the smoke billows out. I don’t know you, I think, even though you feel so familiar. I don’t really know you at all.
“I never want to eat a fucking peanut butter cup again,” she says.
I ask before I can stop myself. I just kind of exhale th
e one-word question. “Who?”
“Him. Jonathan.”
“But Jonathan who?”
The front door to the diner opens, yellow light illuminating the blue-with-dark street, and a couple comes out, arguing about something. Their conversation disappears as they climb into the car and close the doors. Ava’s dead-to-the-world eyes are fixed on a streetlamp.
“Why does it matter what his last name is?” she finally asks. “Why does everyone keep bothering me about it?”
“Everyone’s . . . bothering you?”
“Ozzie’s the worst. Sitting there asking me the same questions over and over. Like he’s trying to trap me.” She exhales the cigarette through her nose like a pro. Ava. A smoker. “I mean, say I knew—which I don’t—but pretend I did. What then? Who cares? What’s done is done.” She hops off the hood of the car. No dent. “Nobody’s getting those years back and the best thing is to not keep focusing on all this bad that happened—just . . . let’s move on, people.”
“Right.”
Wrong. He needs to be in jail. Electric chair? I won’t pretend I haven’t joyfully entertained the idea.
Ava bought a fake fur coat two sizes too big for her at a thrift shop recently, and this is her first time wearing it. It engulfs her. It’s ridiculous. I love it.
She puts a fake fur arm around my shoulders. It’s like getting hugged by a yeti, but I don’t care.
“I wanna make the world a better place,” she says. “I can’t undo the ugly that happened. But I can spin it, you know, into something better.”
“You remember more than you act like you remember, don’t you?” I ask. And the second I feel her arm drop—the cold night nipping my neck again—I regret it.
“There’s still a lot of blurs,” she says. She takes another drag of the cigarette. “You think I’m a liar.”
“I didn’t say you were—”
“I’m trying my hardest,” she says in a shaky voice. “I can’t remember it all at once. Pieces. Shelly says puzzle pieces. Don’t tell me I ‘act like.’”
“That was stupid. I—I didn’t mean that at all. I said it weird.”
“This was my puzzle piece today,” she says, holding up the glowing butt of the cigarette and then inhaling. “Cigarettes and peanut butter cups.”
She throws the butt on the ground in the parking lot, and I instinctually step to it and put it out with my boot. I don’t know why. I’d rather be the kind to let it burn.
In the car, we’re quiet. Ava settles the radio on a college radio station playing Ethiopian music. “Listen to these jams,” she says. “Now this I’ve never heard before.”
I bite my lip as I drive. Stoplights. Crosswalks. Bikers. Pedestrians.
Ava asks, “Why do you grab the steering wheel like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like—I don’t know—you’re choking it.”
I look down at my hands. Jesus. They are choking it. Is this how I always grab the steering wheel? Is this how tense I am? I release my hands and hold it again, looser.
“I hate driving,” I tell her. “I just got my license senior year. I’d been avoiding it.”
“Why? I can’t wait to drive.”
“I’m just . . . I don’t know. It’s scary. Tons of steel maneuvering around other tons of steel at so many miles per hour—I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
She rolls down the window as we pass the bright lights of stores. “Once my TV got stuck on the shopping network for a month.”
I try to imagine Ava in That Monster’s attic, with her flower pictures and her TV, her cigarettes and peanut butter cups, eyes glued to the shopping network.
“For a month,” she repeats, smiling.
“Jesus.”
“It’s funny,” she says, laughing. “Not everything is tragic.”
“Do I look tragic?”
“Yes. Anyway, there was a commercial for this program—this I-know-everything guy. Inspirational, you know. It was about building your own reality. I probably watched that commercial, I don’t know, a hundred times. And it was about how you think negative things, well, negativity comes. You think about car crashes, you’ll get in a car crash. Veer, you’ve gotta build your own reality like that stupid I-know-everything guy.”
“I’ve always wished I was a stupid I-know-everything guy,” I joke.
I want to believe it’s that easy. But wishes and will have never seemed to steer my life anywhere useful. And the best stuff in life—Madeline (in the beginning), getting into college in Portland, and Ava’s sudden return—they were all uninvited surprises.
“Don’t kill me,” Ava says. “But I’m going to ask you to stop for cigarettes. I got a taste for them again.”
“Mom’s going to hate it if you smoke.”
“Not in the house,” Ava says. “I promise. Or basement with Daddy only.”
I sigh and pull into a 7-Eleven parking lot. Ava goes inside and I track her through the fluorescent-lit window. Some ripped dude in a muscle shirt is in front of her in line, and he turns to talk to her. A surge of protectiveness electrocutes me and I fight the urge to run inside and tell him to leave her alone. But she just laughs at something he says. I realize she’s an adult. And she’s not delicate and broken. She’s strong as hell. Love bursts, paralyzing me for a second, it’s so potent. I grin and turn up the Ethiopian music as I watch her jog back to the car, back toward me, and I think, This is reality.
She climbs in and sticks two cigarettes in her mouth. She lights both of them and hands me one. I roll down the window and blow clouds out into the fresh night air. I ask her if she wants to go home, and Ava’s face goes blank and she seems to stop breathing. She gets too still to even blink.
“Ave?” I ask softly.
She looks like a still picture, eyes wide at some unseeable thing, mouth hanging slightly open.
“Shhh,” she says. “Just let it pass.”
She reaches out and turns off the radio. We sit in silence and she finishes her cigarette with that glazed expression. My mind becomes horribly blank.
“I’m okay now,” she says as she throws her cigarette butt out the window. She turns the radio back on. “Thank you.”
She smells the tips of her hair, and I drive into the night, still quiet, still in the dark.
56
THE DAY FLORA DALY airs, Max comes by to watch it. He sits between Ava and me on the couch. I can’t help noticing he smells like he’s been chomping mints and has the top two buttons of his polyester shirt unbuttoned. Who is he trying to impress? Because it’s working. Elliott joins the party, too, about twelve and a half seconds before it’s due to air, of course. He drove a sad-looking Vespa here this time and says he and Desrea-Jean called it quits.
“She gave me lice,” he says. “Don’t worry! I shampooed it out before coming.”
“Jesus, Elliott,” Dad says. “If you bring parasites into this house again—”
“Shhh,” Mom says, turning up the TV. “It’s starting.”
Dad turns the lights off like we’re in a theater, and the room quiets. I steal a glance at Ava’s face as she watches the screen. Max is there between us, gaping at me with shiny puppy eyes.
“What?” I mouth.
I actually touch my face, thinking I have a booger on me or something.
He shrugs and goes back to watching. But when the Flora Daly logo flashes and the applause rushes in full stereo, I feel his hand beside my hand, warm, soft, his fingers ever so slowly creeping up mine.
Hello, goose bumps, my old friend.
I can’t even concentrate on the TV. For one eternal second, I contemplate how sweet his mouth must taste, how perfectly my arms would probably fit around him, how much I would enjoy ripping his shirt open. I pull my hand away, slowly. When I turn my head again, he’s watching the screen as if nothing happe
ned. It takes way too long to get my heart rate back to normal—like, a whole commercial break.
Elliott jokes so much through it about the stupid faces Flora is making—I mean, he’s right, it does look like different nuances of fartface—that Dad has to keep shhhing him and Ava giggles her ass off and I pretty much miss everything. I actually don’t look bad on TV. I look like someone else.
Later, in the privacy of my room, I pull it up on my computer and watch again. It’s a half hour long and a lot is added in besides the interview, mostly vague background on her abduction I’ve heard before, although some details in the voice-overed intro are new—how he told her the neighborhood was full of criminals so he was protecting her when he kept her locked inside. How he kept the radio blasting techno in the bathroom so no one could ever hear her call for help out the one tiny window if she ever tried to.
Ninja star in my heart.
How she never tried to scream or escape, not even the one time he left the upstairs door to the attic unlocked, because she was afraid of murderers and thieves and the big bad world he told her about. How eventually, after years of this, she started realizing it was lies and asked for her freedom. How she also barely remembered where she came from at that point and was simultaneously terrified of him ever granting her wish.
And then a lot of it is Flora talking as if she knows so much about the epidemic of girls kept in attics.
At the end of the half hour, after Mom’s unspun several monologues about how awful it was all those years searching for Ava’s body and thinking Ava was a lost cause, Flora asks Ava, “If you could see Jonathan right now, what would you tell him?”
Ava looks up nervously.
“Look at the camera. Say it to the camera, in case he’s watching,” Flora urges her.
“I’d say . . . I’d say . . .” Ava blinks rapidly as she stares into the camera, into me, and into everyone watching. “I’d say, why did you do that to me? Why did you hurt me like that and just dump me in a parking lot after all those years?”
I don’t know what it is, exactly—the evident pain in her expression like human prey, the confusion, the way she looks away at the end and doesn’t seem to care when Flora Daly flashes the forensic sketch of That Monster again—but I’m sure of something deep and dark and strange at this moment that never even crossed my mind when I was there in the studio watching this in real time.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 15
