The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  “We got it!” Ava screams at me.

  And it seems so significant, I have to wait a second before joining them, make sure the burning in my corneas will not lead to an emotional display. I’m cool. It’s all good. I join them and guess what, the balloon says HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

  70

  WE TREK UP to the apex, to a point that overlooks everything. Oakland, the Bay, the bridges, the hills of San Francisco. Reminds me of when Max and I climbed up to Indian Rock that short forever ago.

  “You”—Max stands, holding the balloon—“got, like, a worlds-deep stare.” As if he’s one to talk, with his molasses slay-you-pretty eyes.

  Ava’s pissing in the bushes.

  “So?” I ask.

  “You’re like a forest of girls.”

  “You’re a forest of weirdos.”

  He laughs wildly, and I can’t help joining him. Then we get serious in unison, and the quiet is so loud.

  “I don’t know what’s going on between you,” I whisper, hurried. “Not my business. But please be careful with her, Max. She’s so delicate.”

  “What? No, we’re not— She’s like a child. I mean, not— I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just—”

  “Exactly,” I agree. “She is.”

  And for a brief moment, the clouds pass, the sun shines. Maybe the dynamic among us three is different than I thought. It isn’t him and her and then me standing outside their flirtatious bond; it’s him and me, the adults, and her, forever-child stunted by stolen years.

  Ava comes around the corner, wiping her hands on her fur coat, the moment broken.

  “I think I splash-pissed on Priscilla Diller’s grave,” she stage-whispers. “Am I haunted?”

  “Well, it is Black Friday,” Max tells her.

  We wander, studying gravestone after gravestone, until it’s almost dark. Ava insists we find a grave with today’s date as the birthday to leave the balloon at. The confidence with which Ava leads us up and down knolls as we all squint at tombstone dates makes it easy to forget what we’re doing is as silly as dressing like a goth on Black Friday.

  “There!” shouts Max finally.

  We sit at the grave of Heidi Little, with a dirty white lamb etched on her stone. Max plucks his guitar strings. That zing I get listening to my dad or Elliott play—the hairs-on-end deliciousness of sound—it comes back as we sing her the happy birthday song.

  71

  WE GET HOME past dinner. My phone is dead. Apparently so is Ava’s, which is why our parents stand outside, greeting us with murderous glares as Ava and I get out of my car after I park on the street.

  “Why are you home so late?” Dad asks.

  “It’s not even eight,” I say.

  “And you don’t answer your phones?” Mom hisses.

  Ava shoots me a what-the-hell glance. “They both died.”

  “You don’t charge them?”

  “Sorry,” I say, hands in the air. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Well, we’re not telepathic,” Dad says.

  Wouldn’t that suck, I think loudly.

  I’d rather run up the street and hide in a neighbor’s bushes, but we go inside the house.

  I can feel how uncomfortable the anger makes Ava as we put our purses away in the foyer. Mom stands there, Dad behind her, the hall light behind them making them both dark figures. As Mom steps closer to us, I can tell she’s been crying. Her mascara’s a mess, which Mom does not let happen.

  “Mom?” I ask, alarmed.

  “Let me look at you,” Mom says to Ava. “Come here. Come here right now.”

  “Mommy,” Ava says in a small voice, stepping back into the coat rack.

  “Come here right now and let me look at you,” Mom demands.

  “Michelle,” Dad says.

  Ava comes forward, wide-eyed and almost cowering. Mom steps up to her and takes Ava’s chin in her hand, as if she’s surveying Ava’s face to make sure she has no scratches or is indeed sober or something.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” I ask.

  Mom lets go and steps back. “See?”

  “See what?” I ask.

  “Mommy?” Ava asks again.

  Ava and I exchange a look.

  “Everything’s fine,” Mom tells us as she stands with crossed arms. “Sorry. Charge your phones next time.”

  “Um,” I say.

  “I’m going to bed now,” Mom tells us.

  “Michelle,” Dad says to her back as she leaves the room and closes her bedroom door.

  I swear everyone can hear my raging heartbeat in the thick silence. Dad’s sorry blue stare meets mine. “We had a rough night. If you see Ozzie, let us know. Your mother wants a restraining order.”

  “Why?” Ava asks, clearly scared.

  “I don’t want to go into it,” Dad says. “I just—if you see him—if he tries to call you, Ava, tell us.”

  “Dad, what did Ozzie do?” I ask.

  I can’t imagine what must have happened while we were out. All sorts of bizarre, frightening possibilities play out in my mind.

  “Nothing for you to be concerned about,” Dad says.

  “Is it about Jonathan?” Ava asks.

  Every time she utters his name, it threatens my stomach contents.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad says. “You’re safe. It’s really nothing to do with you.”

  We say our good nights, and Ava and I go upstairs to whisper about what happened.

  “Mom’s never like that,” I say. “Something must have gone down.”

  “I’m hella creeped out right now,” Ava says. “Like, why won’t they tell me? It must have something to do with the case, so why wouldn’t they—”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with your case. I think it had something to do with . . .”

  The stupid love triangle, I almost say. You know, Ozzie loves Mom, Dad resents it, Mom pretends to not notice. But Ava doesn’t know anything about that.

  “. . . with?”

  “I don’t know, actually,” I say. “But you know Mom. If it was anything sketchy, she’d have the feds send someone to watch us.”

  She bites the inside of her cheek. “True.”

  We settle on my bed and pass a bottle of nail polish back and forth. We blow on our fingertips and watch music videos on my computer. A commercial for diamonds comes on, a stupid commercial telling men that what we women really want are sparkling stones that kids halfway around the globe died for. I’ve never liked diamonds. Now I truly despise them, because that was his name for her.

  “I don’t know if I ever want to get married,” Ava says.

  “Me neither. I mean, I want to fall in love. And live with someone. Maybe adopt a kid or something. But I don’t care about getting married.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t really get married when I was away.”

  Away, like she was off at summer camp.

  “I kind of tried to kiss Max last week when he took me to Barney’s,” Ava says. “I didn’t know he was gay.”

  “I didn’t know he was gay either,” I say, shocked.

  Shocked because he’s totally flirted with me. Shocked because we went to high school together and I can think of three different girls he dated, arty types with heavy eyeliner. Shocked because my sister tried to kiss him, shocked at the jealous sting in me.

  He can’t be . . .

  “It’s probably better anyway,” Ava says. “I just thought it would make me happy to kiss him. For a second, I thought it’d make me happy. But I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know if I like him like that.”

  “He’s just a good friend,” I say. “He’s a really good guy.”

  I mean it, too. Maybe I’m right now realizing the full strength of his goodness—no ulterior motives, no weird crushes, he’s just a damn go
od person.

  “I do wish I could cuddle sometimes. You know, be held,” Ava says.

  I wrap my arms around her. The scent of my fake coconut shampoo has never smelled so delicious as it does in her crimp-wavy hair.

  She relaxes as I hold her. She doesn’t make a peep. And I’m aware, in the warm, perfect here, that nothing lasts. Love is an excruciating delicacy. Maybe that is its force.

  72

  IN THE COMING days, I try many different tactics to extract the truth of what happened with Ozzie the other night. I approach Dad in the basement all casual-like. “Not going to talk about it with you, Ladybug.” I beg Mom as she powders her face in front of her vanity. “Vera Rose, it’s not your business!” I corner them both early in the morning at the breakfast table and swear myself to secrecy over my own dead body, which makes no sense to me really but hopefully conveys just how serious I am.

  “It’s over,” Mom says. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Where are you going?” I ask her.

  I assume she’s about to say, to the station. Which is where she’s usually heading off to—something police-slash-Ava-related, where she brings her briefcase filled with notes—or off to meet Ozzie, although obviously not that anymore.

  “I’m taking a class,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “An improv class.”

  “Whoa. Way to go, Mom.”

  “I just . . . I need to do something. For me.”

  “Words I never thought I’d hear out of your mouth.”

  “Yeah, well, took me long enough,” she says.

  The self-awareness, the sudden subtle shift in her—I find myself staring at her like I hardly know her, like she is full of surprises.

  Dad’s on the floor, doing his pre-jog stretches. “Maybe it’s time for you to find some new hobbies, too,” he tells me. He says it gently, but man, it stings.

  I go upstairs, swallowing, thinking, I could be a visitor like Elliott. But I stayed because I wanted to do the right thing. I go back into my room and confront the sight of my boxes, those stupid boxes I can’t bring myself to unpack filled with items that apparently don’t matter that much. Ava’s still sleeping. I soften, seeing her hair and the way the sun catches it. I grab a book. I sit in the corner. My eyes fall on the page, and I disappear into the ink.

  73

  AVA AND I buy a shimmery pink Christmas tree for our room and drape rainbow lights around our bed, and by the first week of December, Ava has learned to pluck every bad earworm carol on my ukulele. She bought a terrible sweater with a homemade felt elf on it that has googly eyes and wears it daily. Usually I hate the holiday season, all drugstore hype and fake family cheeseball bullcrap and the same movies on TV and people stringing lights up on their Berkeley Victorian houses that they won’t take down until February, but this year it’s like it used to be—Dad fixed the fireplace, Mom bought hot chocolate K-Cups for the Keurig machine, and we decorated the banister with tinsel that clings to our hair and clothes for days. When we put the leftover decorations back in the garage, I show Ava her boxes—dust-kissed and Sharpied with her name. I open the top one up and pull out a tiny turtleneck with ice cream cones on it.

  “We saved all your stuff,” I tell her, proud.

  The weather in my sister visibly changes from sunshine to a chance of rain. She won’t reach out or step closer or touch the fabric in my hands.

  “Remember?” I ask.

  “Don’t.” She turns to the wall and shakes her head. “God, that makes me sad for little Ava.”

  I keep holding the turtleneck for a moment. But she doesn’t turn back around to look at me until I’ve put it away, closed the cardboard on it again, and tucked it back in the dark corner it’s been in for ten years, where it will probably be for ten more.

  74

  THE MEDIA HAS a toddler-level attention span. Reporters and photographers never seem to come around anymore, and the ones who do aren’t big shots with fancy digital cameras and release forms, they’re local bloggers. Ava agrees to meet with the feds and the police again, although not as much as she did in the beginning. And obviously she doesn’t see Ozzie anymore. I drive her to appointments at the station sometimes and watch her sit at a desk and look at pictures and say, “No, not him. Not him. Not him.” The police are always super apologetic about how long it’s taking and promise they’re going to find him.

  “Not unless they knock on every door a thousand miles in every direction,” Ava tells me privately as we sit in the car in the police parking lot. “And at this point, if he saw the price on his head, he’d be running now anyway.”

  “Not even a tiny part of you wants to see him behind bars?” I ask. “Suffering the way you suffered?”

  Ava thinks about it. She doesn’t move, and I wonder if I pushed her into one of her stuck trances.

  “I think it would be better if I never saw him again,” she says finally. “A part of me wants to, though. Part of me wants an explanation. An apology.”

  I don’t know how to respond.

  “I really hate it that I even want those things, but it’s my truth,” she says.

  It takes me a moment to gather my thoughts, weigh them on my tongue, form them into words.

  “You’re brave to say it,” I say. “And you’re an incredible person to not want revenge.”

  “You’re an incredible person to just let me be myself. And love me even though I’m all messed up.”

  “You know you could tell Mom and Dad and they’d still love you, too, right?”

  “Nobody loves me like you,” she says.

  Her eyes shine. I reach out and squeeze her cold hand, start the car, and drive into the cold night.

  75

  AVA AND I have our own little Christmas Eve, after dinner, after Dad and Mom go on their nightly walk. Ava and I trade a few gifts upstairs near our tiny pink tree. She got me strange things: a tie-dye shirt that says BEZERKELEY, knit mittens, and a Snow White diary with a lock on it, gifts I swear a nine-year-old girl would give. I love them and tell her I love them, wearing the mittens. They smell like Nag Champa. She bought them at the street fair where Max’s mom works.

  “I found the journal in a free box,” she says. “Reuse, recycle.”

  “Nice.”

  I pull out my gift for her. It’s a photo album, shiny black leather and Bible-thick, filled with color-copied pictures I picked from every photo album in our house. It begins when we’re babies, side by side, identically shut-eyed and wrinkled in pink beanies and blankets. Flip the pages and we’re toddlers, in matching strawberry dresses, my hair already a shade darker, hers golden and wild. Us bigger, on a carousel, or blowing out candles in a half-and-half cake. At the beach, digging girl-sized holes. Next to Dad at a baseball game, Dad’s arm around each of us back before he became a vampire afraid of the sun. Elliott, me, and Ava on Christmas morning, bed-headed and greedy-eyed. I didn’t know whether I should put the picture there at the end, of Halloween. For starters, there are shadows everywhere and the quality could have been better. It was our last photo. Two angels, six years old. I included it.

  She seems stunned by the gift—stunned good, stunned bad, I’m not sure yet.

  “This was my life,” Ava says.

  She traces our shapes in the Halloween picture.

  “This is how it was,” she goes on.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I was gone.”

  The room is so still. Even with the window open and the sound of salsa music and hooting coming from a party nearby, the nothingness is big.

  “This is . . . the nicest present, Veer.”

  “I wish there were more pictures. I mean, I wish we weren’t cheated out of so many years.”

  “What if I wasn’t locked up at all,” she says. “What if I was here. What if this was my life.” She points to the Christmas Day picture. “Lik
e, what if we’d shared all these Christmases together, and this was just, like, another.”

  The Christmas lights on our pink tree go blink, blink, blink.

  We agree to go on a walk. Ava heads downstairs to grab her coat. As I put on my boots and a pair of leopard-print earmuffs, I stop and flip to a random page in the photo album. I know I put this picture in there, but it’s unfamiliar to me for a second. The table—glitter-flecked Formica—I don’t know it. My mother, in pigtails, frown lines on her face and bags under her eyes. There’s a broom behind her, and my father is asleep in the background, on the couch. He has a mustache, and his plaid pajamas don’t match. I can’t place the time. Judging by the domestic gloom that seems to shade the picture, the palpable exhaustion, I must have copied a photo from after Ava’s disappearance and placed it in there by mistake. But then I see the babies in diapers in the corner on the floor. The babies that are actually us. This picture is old, eras before disappearance, back when everything was supposed to be different. In one way, everything was. I close the book.

  “Ready?” asks Ava when I meet her downstairs.

  The dogs think they’re going on a walk and race around the enormous tree in the living room.

  “All right, you little slobberpuffs,” Ava tells them, grabbing their leashes.

  We walk out into the midnight blue, the smoky smells of chimneys and maybe even barbecues, the twinkling promise of red-green lights strung lazily on porches. We walk so long we pass Ashby and head down California, wordlessly heading back into the neighborhood where we once lost her.

  “Merry Christmas, my friends!” a probably drunk man with a cane calls out to us as we step into the street with the gasping, scampering pugs. “Christ our Savior is born!”

  “Also Santa!” yells Ava.

  As we walk, I remind her about how she broke the news that Santa wasn’t real to me when we were six, because she’d asked Elliott and, of course, he’d told her the truth. She nods and smiles, but I can tell she doesn’t remember.