The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  I step out, dressed but shoeless, and fluff my hair in the mirror.

  “You’re so purty,” Ava says in a yokel voice that is very Elliott.

  “Thankee.”

  “And smart.”

  I roll my eyes, secretly flattered.

  “That book you’re reading is, like, a thousand pages long,” she says. “Confession—I tried to read a page and I felt like I didn’t know half the words.”

  “It’s a Freud reader. He has his own lingo. It was for a class I was supposed to take.”

  “You were supposed to go to school.”

  I shrug. “You were supposed to never be kidnapped.”

  “I made you stay.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t you just, like, go to Cal Berkeley?”

  I don’t tell her the deadline is in less than a week and there’s no way that’s going to happen.

  “Or how about you and I move to Portland? You help me write my memoir. Wouldn’t that be cool?” she asks, excitement striking her face for a moment.

  “You’ve never even been to Portland.”

  “I’m sure if you love it, I will, too.”

  I shake my head. Sometimes her admiration is so pure I feel I don’t deserve it. And although I’ve had my own fantasies of leaving town and starting over and taking her with me, there is no way I could do that to my parents. I mean, she can’t live with them forever. But at least longer than a few months. They’ve missed out on so many years with her.

  “Why you all sad-faced?” she asks.

  I smile at that way she’s adopted my phrases.

  “I don’t know,” I lie, staring at my stockinged toes, black against the white carpet.

  I’m an anvil. Paralyzed. A stone in the stomach of this big house, Ava. I’m filled with an anger for the person who hurt you that is transformative. It’s hard to explain.

  She comes next to me in the mirror and puts her head on my shoulder. When we were girls, we never slowed down for such gestures. We were busy as bees. We bickered and hollered and thumped our sneakers up and down the stairs. Our eyes are different colors now—different from each other, different from how they used to be, hers paled, mine darkened. We are women. Not just our shapes and our features. Our expressions. The shadows. I snake my arm around the furry back of her coat and squeeze.

  “I’m must be PMSing,” I say.

  “Tampino—the ‘ladylike’ tampon,” Ava says in a commercial-lady voice.

  We crack up for a minute and then head downstairs.

  “Whoa,” Ava says when she sees the decorations and the actual silver platters Mom has assembled. Mom stops her neurotic search for napkin rings and is still for a moment, gripping the counter with her fingers. Her nostrils flare and she smiles and shakes her head.

  “Yes, yes, this is really happening,” she says.

  Louis Armstrong sings about skies of blue and clouds of white in the silence.

  “Is Elliott coming?” Ava asks.

  Louis sings about the bright blessed day and dark sacred night in the silence.

  “He’s bringing pie,” Mom says with the same amazement someone might say, He has risen from the dead.

  Mom comes over to us, and we hug. The rush is potent, druglike, and—for one blissful moment—it erases the tension I’ve been carrying with me.

  67

  THE HOUSE IS full of music and noise. Dad slicked his hair back and is wearing a suit jacket from his marketing days. On the bottom, worn pajama pants and slippers. The conversations overlap. Dad splashes wine in his favorite elephant-head mug and tells Elliott about some random book he read about feces. Elliott, who, by the way, shaved and looks boyishly handsome as he sips (doesn’t guzzle!) wine, too, coaxes Dad on with an overeager tone and poo puns—“Book sounds like the shit”—that Dad either totally misinterprets as genuine interest or chooses to ignore. Meanwhile, Ava relays the plot of some reality show to Mom. See, okay, it’s about a gang of bikers who pick up people’s litter, track down the litterers, and throw the litter back at them or disgrace their yard with it or whatever. My mom’s like, and you think these people are making the world a better place? Ava says, well, yeah, why not?

  Take a picture, brain. Now. Right now.

  I can’t remember the last Thanksgiving Mom and Dad spent together. It’s usually been just Dad and me and some frozen meals or maybe takeout and a movie, Mom off at a soup kitchen. Ever since the Turkey Incident, Elliott’s had excuses to get out of any holiday. Or, more recently, he hasn’t even phoned to bother to coin an excuse. Last year Dad and I were at Denny’s and we didn’t seem to be thankful for anything. If I remember correctly, the word “sorry” was exchanged multiple times over sliced pie. Ava has no idea. She thinks this Whole Foods spread and the bone china and cinnamon candles are our tradition. We’re fancy and classy and conversational. This is us. We hold hands and thank the migrant workers for the vegetables, the free-range organic birds that gave their lives, the Chinese workers who assembled the table we’re eating on and the clothes on our backs. We’re less than half joking. Dad, whose lips are wine-kissed, whose plate is a mountain of turkey with a small mustache of gravied potatoes, has these wrinkles around his eyes—sun wrinkles, smile wrinkles—and he looks so unstoppably happy. Like right now his smile actually means something, it’s not just a flash that says I’m okay. Look around the table. We’re all smiling that way. Ava, to my right, is smiling biggest of all.

  Mom is thankful for Ava. It’s the obvious answer. Elliott, of course, grins and says he’s thankful he was born a man and not a turkey. Then he gets more serious and says he’s thankful for second chances.

  What am I thankful for? “I’m thankful for this,” I say in a whisper.

  Ava squeezes my hand and says she’s thankful she’s home and she’s thankful for me.

  “My best friend,” she says. “My soul sistah.”

  My cheeks bloom warm and I say, “Awww.”

  But I tell you, add up all the sunlight I ever stood under and it still wouldn’t feel as good as those six words.

  Dad raises his elephant mug. “I’m thankful,” he says, tearing up. Oh, geez. I have to look at the mangled foothill of turkey on his plate or else I’m going to cry. “I’m thankful that we finally found Ava after all these years, that all those hours and heartache looking for her were worth it.”

  “Cheers,” we all say, raising our glasses.

  Thank you, hope, for not making chumps of us.

  68

  AVA AND I sit near the window, Ava up on the bed, me cross-legged on the floor near her. We both wear my pajamas. Outside the window, the ash tree swishes. In the moonlight, it appears midnight blue against the paler backdrop of evening.

  “I don’t mean to sound like a cheeseball or nothing, but do you realize how lucky we are?” Ava asks. “I mean, a lot of people out there don’t have this. They don’t have turkey and silver dishes and they don’t even have family.”

  “I do know.”

  “And, like, Berkeley, man. Everyone seems like they’re in a good mood everywhere I walk. You got houses painted with rainbows and old ladies riding their bikes and random strangers with their drum circle at the flea market on Sundays.”

  “It’s not all like that.”

  “It is to me.” Ava exhales out her nose. “There was this little hole in one of the window boards, marble-sized. I used to just stare out the window through that hole sometimes, just stare at the weeds and the house across the street and the kids shooting each other with Nerf guns in the yard. Running through sprinklers. The way the sun hit their mom’s silver car, how she washed it on Sundays and the dad pulled out the trash bins to the curb cursing and grunting on Mondays. The highway behind—I’d count cars—how many red, how many blue, how many white cars.”

  I’m startled. Everything she said is a clue. There has to be
more to this, some reason she wants to keep this to herself, but I can’t figure it out. I bite my tongue. I want her to keep talking.

  “I’d think, it looks so pretty out there, I want to be there. I want to go home, I want to have a home like the ones I see on TV. But it was so confusing because he said where we lived was so dangerous. Thing about danger is, you can’t see it. First he said there were murderers and kidnappers out there.”

  Her kidnapper scared her with threats of kidnappers. I mean . . .

  “Then after some years I gradually started catching on, seeing out the window, all the quiet houses and nothing ever happening except maybe a dog chasing the mail lady or whatever. I was like, it’s not dangerous out there. Then he went through trying to tell me there was radiation poisoning, like from a nuclear something or whatever, and I was like, well, then why isn’t anyone in those hazmat suits like the movie I saw about nuclear winter? He was mad I’d been looking out the window again and he boarded them up even better after that, but he couldn’t really argue and so I knew then, I knew he was a liar. Then one day everything got different, everything changed. He became suddenly religious. He told me I was the evidence of his sin. He didn’t hit me or lock me up anymore. He said he was sorry, he cried and asked me to forgive him. But it was confusing to know he’d been lying to me.”

  I’m trying to memorize the clues in her ramble. Why? Why? Why is she saying these things now? Why to me and only me?

  “He said he had lied because he was afraid of losing me, that he was weak,” she says. “I did believe that. I mean, he got real sad sometimes. I felt bad for him.”

  “Don’t you dare pity him.”

  “I can’t help it. He was all I had. You know his mom used to burn his arm on the stove when he was a kid? He had scars all up and down his arms. His dad was a drunk, split his skull with a wine bottle.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have room in my heart to excuse anything he did based on his childhood. A lot of people have bad childhoods and they don’t steal little girls from the street.”

  “Never mind, I hate it when I start talking like this. It doesn’t solve anything. Just shut me up.” She clamps her hand over her mouth for a minute, closes her eyes. My mind races for the proper response. The details have piled up so quickly they’re overwhelming.

  “Don’t shut up” is all I can say, even though the thought of her continuing to talk makes my gut twist.

  Ava releases her hand from her mouth. “I just—I just was trying to say I wanted this all along. Staring out that window. Or at the TV. I mean, this is even better than my hopes. A mansion with gourmet food and a twin who’s, like, the best friend I could ask for and a big brother who could be a model. I mean, we’re rich.”

  I shake my head.

  “I guess rich just depends on where you been,” she says.

  “I love you,” I tell her. “I hope you know.”

  And I don’t just love at that moment, I am one step inside love, I experience love in 360. She puts her hand on my head for a moment and we giggle tiredly.

  We end up watching dumb reality TV in her room. Ava’s transfixed by the screen, talking to it like it can hear her. “Girl, no. Don’t even act like you’re that stupid, you really think you’ve been dating a dude online who’s a famous rapper but doesn’t own any cameras?” I laugh along with her, but the sickness in my belly is more than holiday overindulgence. It’s the details swirling around my head. The sad window that looks out onto the lawn of a family she watched. The fact That Monster was once a kid whose mother held his arm to the stovetop’s fire. And I have to sit here and take it, and not bring it up or ask questions for fear of pushing too hard, take what Ava offers me calmly and never urge her to tell anyone else.

  I get up to go to bed, so silently sick, like I will never be anything but sick, like being well is the passing feeling and sick is the permanent state.

  69

  “IT’S BLACK FRIDAY,” Ava keeps saying. And then a random vampire laugh. “Mwha ha ha ha!”

  We’re both still in our PJs, eating leftover pie and watching TV in the living room. Commercials currently on mute.

  “I love how evil you make it sound,” I say.

  “It is evil. Didn’t you see on the news how that lady got trampled to death outside a mall?”

  “Humanity is gross.”

  “Agreed,” she says. “Hey, we should dress all goth and go visit a cemetery or something. For Black Friday.”

  I laugh. “Um, sure.”

  “I’m serious. Let’s, like, make our own holiday.”

  I savor the pumpkiny heaven in my mouth for a generous moment before realizing Ava’s not joking.

  She’s so infectiously, awesomely weird.

  I shrug. “Sure.”

  We finish our pie and head upstairs to pick out black outfits, each changing behind the closet door. Me: miniskirt, fishnet leggings, leather jacket. Her: black jeans, black shirt, black eyeliner on her lips. Even the eyeliner is mine.

  We look ridiculous, and I couldn’t love it more.

  Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland is more than a cemetery—it was designed by the same dude behind Central Park. It’s more than dead people. It’s green slopes and colorful trees and picnicking lovers and dog walkers and wine-drinking hipsters. Max waits for us by the fountain at the entrance, playing his guitar, wearing shades on a cloudy day. Pure album-cover material. Max is so lovely and his voice is such honey that the sight of him almost hurts. I park and we get out.

  “You ladies look hip,” Max says.

  “Happy Black Friday,” Ava says dramatically.

  Max’s laugh is infectious and hilarious in itself. It hasn’t changed since grade school.

  We hoof it up a hill, passing contemporary headstones etched in Chinese and featuring pictures of smiling people, freshly flowered graves. Max drops a few details of his Thanksgiving, alone with his mother, with a burnt Tofurky and a fight about wailing.

  “Excuse me—did you say wailing?” I spell it out for him.

  “No, like Save the Whales. Whaling.”

  “You don’t want to save the flipping whales?” asks Ava.

  “I do!” he shouts. “We both want to save the whales. I don’t even know how we were fighting about it. That’s how it is with my mom.”

  “God, I’m so glad we don’t fight with Mom like that,” Ava says to me.

  “Yeah, Mom’s not a fighter,” I say.

  We stop in front of a bunch of dead Bakers and Smiths and Doolittles who never saw the twenty-first century. Mothers, daughters, sisters, men.

  “Nobody fights in our house,” Ava tells Max. “It’s like—it’s like a sitcom without the annoying laugh track. Everybody’s always in a good mood.”

  I smile, no teeth. It’s cute that’s all she knows.

  I don’t know why people say “naïve” like it’s a bad thing.

  “We have a good family,” I say. It isn’t a lie.

  “Your family’s cake,” Max says. “I have this memory, your mom painting with watercolors while your dad was on guitar, board games stacked in the living room—all that noise and music.”

  It floods back to me as he describes the scene, the buried years before everything changed.

  “Your mom’s transformed,” Max goes on. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s fierce either way. It’s just . . . she used to be different.”

  I’m surprised he noticed. This boy, who only stopped by to send a balloon heavenward on the missing girl’s birthday.

  “How?” asks Ava.

  “You don’t remember?” I ask.

  I don’t know why I keep expecting her to remember. She was so young.

  Mom used to be like a mom, is all I can think to say. She spent her hours at home, gardening, cooking, making art, reading books with us. She tucked us in at night. Then it all
stopped. She was out. Her calendar inked and full, her car never in the driveway. She became cold, coiffed, a queen. How to explain it? Like even when she was studying you she wasn’t really listening? Like there was no space inside her left for anyone, like there wasn’t a spare moment?

  “She was really busy for a long time,” I say.

  “Hella busy,” Ava chimes in, as if I’m not explaining this for her benefit. “You know how many lives that woman’s probably saved?”

  This is true. I’ve been so selfishly zeroed in on the holes that I forgot that somewhere, she’s an angel to many faceless someones—filler of soup bowls, soothing voice on a crisis line, sage advice-giver.

  We pass a green pond with a graffitied cement bank. The sun blankets the oaks and graves in gold. Ava takes Max’s arm. We make it to the rich people’s monuments up top, the ones that could be stone houses with steps and etched angels and marble rooms. We climb over Merritt’s and Crocker’s mansion-graves and descend a long set of stairs and a few paths to pass Gwin’s pyramid. I leave Ava and Max on the steps of a steepled mausoleum and step inside a cool tomb where my own blood stops in my ears.

  My very breath seems to echo off the walls.

  “I am in the heart of something,” I whisper silently.

  Right here in this cemetery, remains are quiet, spread out beneath the hillsides, armies of skeletons, all once people. Real people. With families and sadnesses and epiphanies and moments where they felt so not alone it seemed eternity was possible. Ava’s voice drifts from outside. What if I lost her again? What if we had lost her? Inevitably I’m going to lose it all someday, and boy does that thought sting.

  Kiss me, nothing.

  But Jesus jazz-handsing Christ, they’re laughing so loudly in the graveyard. It squashes the seriousness. I step into the sunshine. They’re chasing a balloon down the road, a balloon slowly sinking in the air. Max leaps and finally reaches it and they shout hoorays.