The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  We stop in front of a possibly abandoned hoarder house that’s been there as long as I can remember. A bunch of laminated paperwork hangs on the chain-link about the development coming in here soon and the permits it requires. An eerie hush floods me. Far away, a group of off-key voices are caroling, “It came upon a midnight clear,” and my eyes hurt in a way that burrows down, deep down, into a place in me even I can’t touch.

  “Vera,” Ava says in a quiet voice. “I’m glad it happened just like this.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  She squeezes my mitten and for a brief, unclenched, blissful second, there are no questions.

  76

  ELLIOTT CALLS US on New Year’s Eve afternoon, and the three of us—Ava, Elliott, and me—talk on speakerphone. Ava and I sit up at a lookout point at the graveyard. You can see the bridges reaching silver across the Bay, the puddle of Lake Merritt in the middle of Oakland buildings, Angel Island far out in the water, oil tankers like alien robots along the lip where Oakland meets the Bay. We sit on the marble steps of a dead rich man’s tomb and have a telephone conversation. Jokes and funny voices, cheerful catch-up about our holidays. Elliott’s got a “new pad that is killer,” he assures us. We need to see it. In fact, get in the car and party New Year’s with him and see his new “killer pad” and he’s just doing so well, he’s so proud, he’s made all this money landscaping, he’s gotten really into landscaping and he would drive to visit us but his car is being painted right now so why don’t us girls come down and spend New Year’s with him?

  The invitation, out of nowhere, stuns me especially because in all these months and years we’ve spoken on the phone, he’s never once asked me to hop in my car to see him. But I know. I know I’m special now that I’m Ava’s twin sister again. Obviously I understand why. Everyone loves a ghost. I am not bitter.

  “Sure,” Ava says.

  We exchange looks. A nearby grave is etched with a name, DEWITT. I snicker and say okay.

  A while later, it’s seventy-something mph, we’re munching gas station snacks, mariachi music blasting, robot-lady smartphone GPS leading us to see Elliott. The I-5 freeway is ugly, treeless, brown, slaughterhouse-stinky, and superstore-dotted, but at night, tonight especially—with the thunder of the car’s movement and the lights beating by in a flicker-flicker-flicker, the dull stars’ secrets overhead, it’s a New Year, there’s speed and momentum in it already—it is beautiful and we are lucky.

  We play twenty questions. Turns out Ava is thinking of a woman who was the assistant on a game show I’ve never even heard of. Once we’re more than halfway there Ava gets contemplative and doesn’t talk for a long time, even when I say her name. She watches out the window, night bleeding everything blue.

  “I feel sick.” Ava throws her fur coat in the backseat and fans herself with a map. She rolls down the window even though it’s capital letters FREEZING.

  “You going to throw up?” I ask.

  Her eyes are closed, fingers to temples. “Wish I could.”

  I watch her out of the corner of my eye.

  “Vera,” she says. “Vera, you can’t tell anybody, but this is where I was.”

  I have to remind myself to do very simple things—keep my foot on the gas, hold the steering wheel, inhale and exhale.

  “Two freeway exits ago, that’s where I lived with Jonathan.”

  Two exits ago—in the forgettable nothing-burb of Satterfield, California. Here, really? Here?

  “You’re kidding me,” I say.

  “No, no, I’m not, and I didn’t even think I was going to tell you, but there it was, I did.”

  “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because here we are,” she says hoarsely. “I’ve been dying to tell you. It sucks that you trust me so much and then I haven’t told you the whole story. But here we are. I can’t drive by it and not tell you.” A bead of sweat drips down her forehead. “Turn around. I’ll show you.” She covers her mouth with her hand. “I can’t believe this.”

  I get off on the freeway exit and turn back onto the same freeway, going the other direction.

  “So—what do you mean?” I ask. “You know where you were?”

  “Don’t hate me. He took me out on drives a couple times. Kept me locked in the van. I recognize this. It’s something I never told anybody. It’s like I didn’t fully remember it until now, till I saw the signs.”

  Maintain, Vera. Keep the tone down and don’t flip. “I don’t—I just—I thought you had no idea.”

  “I knew a little more than I said I did.”

  She weeps, shriek-like, and I swear to God I’m about to crash the car into the median right now. She muffles her face in her hands and then recovers as we approach the exit.

  “You were in Satterfield, and you knew this all along?” I ask.

  “I knew I shouldn’t’ve told you—”

  “No, it’s okay, Ave, it’s good. You realize how good this is?” I ask, unable to stop my voice from shaking. “Now they can get him.”

  “No, no, no. That’s what I didn’t want—I didn’t want them—never mind. I’m not going to show you.”

  “But it’s this exit? Hopper Street? This is where you were?”

  “Please. Don’t ever tell anyone.”

  “Ava, I’ve never broken your trust. I will never tell anyone anything. Is it Hopper?”

  Hopper is a hundred feet away, and we’re speeding toward it. I keep turning to look at her for a reaction. Frozen, staring ahead, finally she nods and I exhale, letting off the gas so the car slows to a halt on the exit ramp. We sit at a stop sign on a lampless street.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You were here.”

  “I was here.”

  “That’s—that’s amazing—amazing that you—you remember.”

  “Yes.”

  “I—I—I don’t even. I don’t know what to say.”

  A car honks behind us.

  “Right,” she tells me.

  I drive down a long road flanked by dry fields and windmills. In the distance is the garish glow of big-box stores.

  “When I saw those signs, I was like, no, no, no. I closed my eyes. I thought I could make it disappear,” Ava says.

  “Why didn’t you say something to the police?”

  “Because I don’t want anybody knowing where I was.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated,” she mumbles.

  We pass the big-box stores. Now we drive into the dark, seemingly approaching nothing.

  “If we knew where you’d been we could help you,” I say.

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want—help.”

  Her fingers absentmindedly trace the shapes of the scars on her arms.

  “Oh no,” she moans. “It’s coming, I think.”

  “What?” I ask, bracing myself.

  “Turn left here,” she says lowly. “Willow Point. Promise, Veer, promise, like, on every mom’s grave ever that you won’t tell nobody.”

  “I promise.”

  We turn left into an oasis of tract housing marked by a wooden sign that says WILLOW POINT. She tells me to slow down as we pass conjoined twin town houses. She’s disoriented at first, we make a wrong turn, but then she sees a playground with its plastic gym shining and knows where we are. She doesn’t know most street names, but knows landmarks—the swimming pool, the bench, a big oak, and then a row of houses all the same. A cul-de-sac. The end of a cul-de-sac. I park and turn off the lights. We can hear the freeway, airplanes, and I swear I hear my own blood cells speeding through my body.

  “There,” she says, nodding toward a brown cookie-cutter house like all the others, except with an ugly rock lawn. The lights are off.

  “That’s where you were.”

  I appe
ar calm, but I am a fireworks factory of questions.

  “I don’t want to stay.” She chews her lip. “I’m afraid.”

  “We have to call someone.”

  “No, no, we have to just go.”

  “If you won’t then I have to go to the police, Ave.” I try a stern big-sister voice on for the first time. “I have to. I can’t keep this secret.”

  “I thought I could trust you,” Ava almost screams, her voice wet, animal, terrified. “Please. Please don’t. I thought I could trust you.”

  I have never heard this desperate version of my sister. It’s scary.

  “Don’t betray me,” she begs. “I shouldn’t have shown you. I’m so dumb.”

  “You can trust me,” I say, breaking.

  “Don’t betray me, Vera. Please.”

  I am broken.

  “I won’t,” I whisper.

  I sit for a moment longer. I imagine that I have a stick of dynamite I can put on the doorstep and KABOOM, and I picture a swarm of police and uniformed heroes storming the house, a flood breaking the windows and smashing the doors and swallowing it all up. The end.

  But I have to drive away. Ignition. Lights. Gas.

  “Okay,” I say as I turn out of the cul-de-sac and the hellish town houses disappear in my rearview.

  Tears run down Ava’s face. Normally I would catch them like the virus they are, but instead I go cold. I am a girl made of metal. I grip my steering wheel and grit my teeth.

  “It’s so complicated,” she says, wiping her face on her arm. “I can’t even talk right. It’s just—it’s an ocean, all this. And every time I start talking about it I think it’ll feel good but then—then I feel like I’m drowning.”

  “Hey, me too. I feel like I’m drowning, too.”

  “Oh, man,” she moans. “That’s why I hate the truth, look at your face, look at what it does to you.”

  The mirror reflection of pain and knowing is the worst.

  “I like knowing this,” I correct myself, in a tone that nears sarcasm. “I feel honored you showed his house to me.”

  “Can you believe that there are times I even miss it?” she asks.

  I don’t answer.

  “Shelly says it’s normal,” Ava says softly. “That’s some freaky kind of normal.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  The silence is long and somber. The silence is filled with sighs and bumps beneath the tires. My brain keeps circling back to that cul-de-sac. Once again, I relive the shock of the freeway exit, the town house one of many in a row. She was there all along. There, upstairs, my sister.

  We get home to a dark house and get ready for bed upstairs. We don’t talk about what happened. Ava fell asleep in the car and her eyes are only half-open now as she brushes her teeth and gets into her pajamas. We sit on the bed, and she says hoarsely, “Thanks for driving.”

  I hug her, hard. She hugs me back. I pull away and touch a scar on her arm.

  “Don’t ever miss that man,” I say. “He hurt you. And all of us.”

  “Those?” she asks, looking down at her arm. “But I did that.”

  “I know,” I say after a moment. And I do. So I’m not sure why hearing her say it sends a shock through me. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” she agrees.

  We get in bed and turn off the light. She reaches out and touches my hair.

  “Happy New Year,” she says.

  “Happy New Year,” I echo.

  77

  IT’S A BIZARRE-heat-wave-in-the-middle-of-winter kind of Sat-urday, and Elliott comes over for some “fam-damily fun time.”

  “Look at this,” Elliott says. “Now, this’s some Corona-and-limes kinda weather right here.”

  “Climate change,” Dad says sadly at the gorgeous sunshine.

  The whole fam pitches in to clean up the backyard. Ava and I complain at first, but once we’re out there weeding the clover and sour grass, trimming back the bougainvillea, sweeping the porch, wiping down the chairs, and busting out the barbecue, cracking jokes and weird voices, it’s an almost perfect afternoon.

  I think everything’s going to be all right. I really do. I can feign forgetting. Jonathan who? Satterfield where? We eat veggie shish kebabs. Mom tells a story about when us kids threw rocks at a beehive in the ash tree back here and got stung. Elliott turns it to the most hyperbolic tall tale of all time—“They stung my eyeballs and my spleen”; “The bees were like three inches long, some kinda superbees”—and we all laugh, especially when Dad jumps into the story and talks about how he came running out in a panic hoping to save us, swatting the hive with a broom. Of course, he got stung worst of all. His face was swollen up. He looked like a cartoon.

  I haven’t thought about that in so long. I don’t remember it happening—just the cleanup afterward, the shock of ice on my forearms. Seems strange that Ava didn’t react to the bee stings then. She said she was allergic. That Monster saved her life. Must have developed over time, the way my asthma did.

  Elliott’s charm is cranked to ten today. He grins and chews gum, and his knee dances. I study his actions throughout the evening but eventually come to the conclusion that maybe this is just him. He tells my parents he’s been house-sitting for his boss, who owns a dozen iguanas that roam free around the house with him. He wishes, he tells me with a bit of a side-eye, that we’d come to see it.

  I catch him alone at the end of the night. He lingers in the kitchen, staring at the open refrigerator.

  “I don’t need another beer,” he says, and closes it.

  “Hey, sorry we bailed on New Year’s.”

  “No big.”

  “Ava got really sick—”

  “I know. Chill, sis. Why you got your face all scrunched up like that?”

  “It’s not scrunched up.”

  “You look like this.” He flexes every muscle in his face inward. It’s amazing a person so attractive can, in one second flat, turn so unrecognizably hideous.

  “I do not,” I say, in a voice that’s a throwback to ten years ago.

  Outside, Dad’s picked up his guitar and plays a song about a woman named Lola with a dark brown voice. I start toward the door.

  Elliott pulls my sleeve kind of hard, and I stop in place.

  “Ow,” I say, even though it didn’t hurt. I snatch my arm back.

  He half hugs me. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, you big weirdo.”

  “I am a pretty big weirdo, huh?” he asks almost proudly as we walk back outside.

  The yard looks so trimmed and prettied. I put the shovels and hoe away while Elliott takes the guitar and starts playing a song about a zombie possum that I’m pretty sure he’s making up as he’s going along.

  Still, though, I can’t stop thinking about Jonathan’s house. How he lives there. In disguise. A monster in human skin.

  I have a secret.

  I have a big, burning secret.

  And I don’t know how much longer I can live with it.

  78

  MAX SWINGS BY to visit with me on nights when Ava’s out with her tutor. I haven’t told Ava that he’s done this now multiple times. I don’t want her to feel like I’m stealing her closest friend, although I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. That first time Max stopped by, we hung out on the porch with the moon and the chocolate. The second time we sat on the couch in the living room and I put the TV on mute and we shared some Thai food he brought over and talked about books and art and lucid dreaming and music and traveling. Tonight, though, I’m ready for him, his visit isn’t a surprise, and I brushed my teeth and put on a dress and tights before the doorbell rang. He’s got vegan taquitos and guacamole and we spread it all out like a little picnic on the floor of my room. The way his eyes linger on my stockinged legs makes me positive he likes girls. Or, at least, he likes me
.

  I want to enjoy him; I was so looking forward to his visit tonight, and my pulse shot up when I heard his skateboard coming up the sidewalk. But I’ve been so dark lately, my thoughts have been so black and preoccupied and sick with the knowing since Ava showed me Jonathan’s house last week, that it’s hard to pretend to be happy right now. Also, vegan Mexican food? Enough said.

  “Some crazy weather,” he says. “Right? The weekend was freaking tropical, and now it’s arctic out there.”

  I shrug.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re all melancholy.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “Is it Ava?” he asks. “Something happening with the case?”

  “Nothing’s ever happening with the case.”

  “Look at you, all downhearted.”

  “Have you ever heard of a high-profile case like hers taking this long?”

  He shrugs and holds a taquito like a cigar between his fingers. “I’m not some expert on the subject or anything.”

  I swirl my taquito around in the guacamole. I can never tell him the truth about anything. Not the big truths, like the fact Ava knows where Jonathan lives and is protecting him for some sick reason and I’m a crazy person who has had cinematic fantasies of blowing his brains out. Not the medium truths, like the fact that I have a growing crush on Max and I can tell he reciprocates but that there is no way we could ever be a thing because Ava. Not the itty-bitty truths either, like vegan Mexican food is gross and shouldn’t exist.

  My stupid eyes well up.

  “Um . . . spicy?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, spilling over and crying. “It’s spicy.”

  “No it’s not.” He watches my face with wide-eyed panic. “It’s mild. I asked for mild. What’s wrong?”

  I shake my head and weep into a napkin. It feels cathartic to cry, it feels horrible to cry. I wish I could suck back all the tears and seize the heaving, but it’s taken me over now and I have no control.

  “Okay,” he says. “Um—clearly there is something really up right now.”