“About a week ago,” Pete says.
“Jonathan is dead? How did he die?”
“Overdose.”
I clamp my hand over my mouth. Little does Pete know I’m actually fighting to keep myself from smiling. It’s not a happy smile. It’s a smile that is my face not knowing what to do with itself. Crocodilic.
“Holy shit,” I say, taking my hand away.
I suck the air into my lungs the same way I have my whole life. But suddenly I can’t get enough oxygen.
“I still can’t believe it myself,” Pete says.
“Was it intentional?” I ask.
I don’t care if I seem heartless. I want to know exactly why he’s dead. Guilt for what he did? Fear of getting caught? I’m glad he’s dead, I am, but what a chickenshit. What an easy answer. He never had to face a single second in jail. Never saw a day locked away for what he did. Never faced the public.
I wish I believed in hell.
“We don’t know,” Pete snaps. “And excuse me, who are you?”
“No one. Never mind.”
I head back to the car. My throat is so tight. I spin around again and stop to look at Pete.
“Your brother was a horrible human being,” I say loudly. “I hope you know that.”
I can see, even from ten or so feet away, his expression darken.
In my car, I catch a glimpse of a little girl now standing with Pete as he remains in the doorway and watches me drive away.
I drive into the eyeball-searing sunset, the sound of wheels purring. Moments later, I’m on the highway, hands shaking, tears sliding down my expressionless face.
Jonathan is dead.
There is no way I can break the news to Ava. She didn’t even want him to go to jail, she certainly doesn’t want him dead. What if this pushes her over the edge?
No. This has to be something I never tell anyone, not ever, that I force myself to never think about and erase from my own memory by telling myself a story that this never happened.
Breathe. It’s okay. Pretend you’re dreaming.
I sniff and dry my eyes with my sweatshirt sleeve.
The worst person in the world, who it sickened me to know was free, is dead. He is a corpse. He will never touch a little girl again. The world is better for his suicide.
Then why, why am I so filled with bizarre rage?
Nobody ever had the satisfaction of handcuffing his sorry ass. He never felt the spotlight of hatred, the cold walls of a locked cell.
Simply, very simply, it’s not fair. It’s. Just. Not. Fair.
I hate that his life was his to take in the first place.
I hate that I got what I wanted, really—That Monster is slayed—yet nothing is right.
Maybe nothing is going to be okay. Maybe it doesn’t matter who lives or gets locked up. Maybe nothing, not even death, can undo the scars that decorate the people we love.
82
THE SECRET IS a ghost that sits at the table during dinnertime. The secret lies, invisible, between Ava and me in my bed at night as we brush each other’s hair and watch laptop TV. The secret buzzes loud over the conversation when Max stops by one night and we stand on the porch as he fishes for a reason as to why I haven’t wanted to see him. The secret weighs heavy on my lips and is the reason it takes physical exertion to smile. The secret is why I can’t eat, I go to sleep early, I wake up late. The secret is the reason Ava thinks I’ve got “depression problems” like her and I should go talk to someone. But I would never talk to someone, because of my secret.
83
I GAZE INTO the bathroom mirror.
I know I’m a girl, a slight girl with poor posture in need of a haircut. But I feel like a dam about to break. I touch the circles under my eyes.
“You need to eat, lady,” Ava says as she steps behind me and we stare at our reflections.
She’s in chunky boots, her hair is enormous, and she appears taller than me right now.
“I know,” I say.
My face tingles, aches, because it wants to shatter and it can’t. It has to keep existing, being a face that looks normal to the world. I don’t know how I can keep going sometimes. Knowledge can be a desert island.
“Whatever you got going on,” Ava says softly, her voice behind me, sweet in my ear, “you can tell me. Don’t be scared. Is it about me? I’m strong now. I can deal.”
Maybe the world would be a smoother operation if we zapped the fakery and just let our truths fly free, even if they sting like bees.
“Ava,” I say to the mirror.
The dam breaks. Water, water everywhere.
“What’s going on?” she asks, alarmed.
“I can’t tell you.”
“You have to tell me,” she says, voice climbing. She reaches out and moves my hand from my face, so I have to see her, so I have to see her wide, shining eyes. “Tell me, Vera. You’re the one person in the world I trust. You have to tell me.”
I don’t want to tell her, though. I really don’t.
“Tell me,” she says again, in almost a shriek.
“Jonathan is dead.”
Her expression doesn’t change. She doesn’t move. Mannequin sister.
I turn around. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to tell you—you seem so happy—Jonathan—it was apparently an overdose.”
I swear, in two seconds, her color changes.
She disappears. I hear her go to her room and shut the door. I don’t follow her. I don’t knock when I hear the sobbing. For once, I just leave her alone.
84
I LET HER sleep in, but as soon as I hear Ava up, I go to her room and sit on the edge of her bed and make her talk to me. I tell her the story of how I found out the news. I say it’s time she tells the truth about him—the man he was, his address, his ending. Time to share this info with my parents and the police and even the glossy, vomitous magazines. But Ava begs me not to mention it to anyone.
“I’m not ready,” she insists. “I’m processing.”
“The police are wasting time looking for a dead dude.”
“Can you just give me a little time?” she begs, shrill, on the verge of perpetual tears.
So I give her the day. I focus on getting myself together. I eat three regular meals. I finish a personal statement for college applications it’s too late to send. It gives me something to do.
That night, Ava and I settle back into the quiet peace of upstairs life. We go back to snickering at dumb TV together. The next day we go thrift store shopping, we try a new hike. Something in me has relaxed, has let go.
Look at my sister there, on the other side of the bed, a grown woman now with the bright, bothered face of a little girl. Think of all she’s been through, the stories buried deep inside her. He’s dead now. What’s been done is irrevocable. Monsters live, monsters die, but survivors? They survive.
85
JUST TWO DAYS after the Jonathan news, my parents go missing.
Ava notices first when she’s up early getting ready for a doctor’s appointment. She’s downstairs blasting pop music while making a smoothie and sees that my dad’s basement door is open and he’s gone. Odd, because he never leaves the door open. We guess he’s out on a run. We check the master bedroom and find that Mom has vanished, too. Car still in the driveway. Well, maybe they went for a walk together—they do that sometimes. But we call their cells, leave messages, texts. Nothing.
“Maybe they’re celebrating Valentine’s Day,” Ava says.
But there’s doubt in her voice. Even Ava’s seemed to pick up on the fact that our parents are not exactly the love story of the century. Also, who celebrates anything this early in the a.m.? I drop Ava off at her appointment, stop by the drugstore to pick up some shampoo, waste a half hour looking at hair dyes and then decide I don’t want to be a redhead anyway, and at that point
it’s time to pick Ava up again. We go home. My parents are still gone.
Now it’s noon and getting weird.
Mexico and Canada are whimpering and have no food. Which means my mom left today without feeding them. Not usual. I notice, in my dad’s basement, he didn’t turn off his computer and his wallet is sitting on his desk. Also not usual.
In the foyer, my mom left her makeup bag on the ground.
Shit, they’ve been kidnapped.
At first it seems like a crazy thought, but think about how high-profile Ava’s case was, how many unbalanced people probably watched us on TV, how plenty of people know where we live and everyone in the neighborhood saw the paparazzi harassing us months ago. Maybe people think we have money and decided to kidnap my parents for ransom.
I say this out loud to Ava, and she pales.
“I don’t understand—who are you saying could have kidnapped them?” she asks, pulling my jacket sleeve. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he’s dead, Vera,” she says.
“Not him, obviously.”
We have referred to him, since the secret news, simply as “him” and “he” and only in fleeting moments. We have silently agreed to not discuss it anymore. Together, we swallowed the truth, processed it separately, and moved past it in shared silence.
Oh, my dear sister.
The things we never say.
“I don’t like this at all,” she says loudly.
At 2:00 p.m., we’re Googling how long we have to wait to file a missing person report (twenty-four hours). At 4:00 p.m., Ava and I get in the car and drive around the neighborhood at sharklike speeds, peering out the windows, calling their names as if they’re lost cats.
“What if this is all just a joke on us?” Ava says hopefully.
“That would be a really messed-up joke, especially in this family.”
“I texted Max. He says we should tell the cops we know. They’d probably rush it because of my case.”
“That’s true.”
“Wait, is that them?” Ava asks, knocking her window.
Right now we’re approaching a stop sign, a large church with a pointy roof on the right corner of the intersection. A bunch of overdressed people stand outside, spilling onto the sidewalk; a few even spill out into the crosswalk.
“Is who them?” I ask.
“They just went inside that church,” Ava insists. “I saw them.”
A car honks in back of me, and I weave around the people who seem to think standing in the street and talking is okay as long as you’re into Jesus. I turn the car right, parking in a red zone.
“I would bet that Mom and Dad did not just run into a”—I check the rearview mirror to verify—“a ‘community Baptist church.’”
“Why not? I saw them. I saw the backs of them. Mom was wearing that orange dress.”
“Mom doesn’t wear orange,” I remind her.
“I saw them.”
“Ava, you didn’t see them. You know you didn’t see them.”
Ava’s brow scrunches. She pulls her hair back in a tight bun on the top of her head.
“Something’s really wrong lately,” Ava says. “With you. I can feel it.”
“With me? Because I don’t think our parents ran off to a late-day church service today?”
“Not because of them,” Ava says. “You know why.”
I don’t say anything.
The emotions I own lately, there aren’t words for. It’s sweet guilt, it’s a disgusting sense of relief, it’s barbed love I try not to touch.
“Yep,” I finally respond.
“You just . . . feel far away.”
“Yeah, I am.”
I have covered myself in Teflon, Ava, since I learned your kidnapper and rapist is dead. Since I scoured the Satterfield obituaries and learned his last name, Kenneth, a stupid first name for a last name, a fat pharmacist who loved video games and stray animals and was once a failed art school kid. Since I saw his black-and-white photo and noted how different his real-life face was from the forensic sketch. You must have known that, Ava. You must have let it slide, nodded yes to that inaccurate picture and let it be circulated far and wide, his fake face pudgier and his facial hair more filled out, his eyes closer together, glasses, his hair too dark.
“I am far away,” I say.
“How do I bring you back?” Ava asks softly.
“I want you to tell the truth.”
She flinches at that, just a twitch.
Ahead, a streetlamp on the busy corner flickers on and off, making a passed-out homeless man appear and disappear, appear and disappear.
“Tell the police,” I say. “This changes everything. He’s dead now. Let’s just move on, please. Let everybody else move on. Think of what it would mean to Mom and Dad—”
“I can’t,” she whispers.
“Why?” I ask, turning to stare at her.
Her eyes are lined in cat-eye swoops. Her cheeks have filled out these past few months, and I don’t know if it’s her neo-hippie diet or what but her skin has cleared up. She looks older, brighter than the Ava who showed up in the hospital at the end of the summer. She’s different from the magazine pictures, too. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is. I guess she just looks . . . normal.
She shakes her head. Her eyes are full. I don’t push.
“I think we should go home and I should call the cops and ask if there’s anything they can do for Mommy and Daddy,” Ava says.
“You want the cops to help you?” I ask sharply. “Wow, isn’t that new.”
I start the car and drive toward home. We’re close. The drive is so familiar I could be blindfolded right now and it’d look the same.
Great, now she’s sobbing beside me.
“What?” I say, annoyed.
“Vera, I feel like I don’t even know you right now,” she says. “I’m stunned. This is stunning.”
“Really?” I say in a sharp voice that’s unbelievably my own. “Is this really stunning?”
“I didn’t think you could be so mean.”
“Oh, come on, you refuse to tell the police anything. He’s dead and you’re still protecting him. It’s disgusting.”
She looks like I smacked the air out of her.
“He was a kidnapper and a rapist!” I nearly scream. “He deserved to go to jail. And now that will never happen. Guess what, Ava? If you had been more cooperative, he’d probably be in jail right now.”
“You sound like you hate me,” she says.
I emit a short shock of a scream. “Come on.”
Hold my breath. Bite my lip until there’s blood. I’m not used to this feeling, the anger at her. I don’t know how to stop. I keep driving down MLK, past our turnoff, because this conversation isn’t over and I don’t know where to go or what to do. Ava doesn’t even seem to notice, she’s so focused on me, studying me with worry I can physically feel as I keep my eyes on the dusk-gray streets.
“Max said you were depressed. I didn’t realize . . .”
“Max can mind his own business.” I look in the rearview at my swollen, dumb eyes. Then I look at Ava’s. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” She dabs her eyes with her fingers. “I’m scared is all. And I can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
I’ve left our neighborhood and am creeping toward the hills. Then I see a street sign I recognize and park the car. We’re right near Indian Rock, where Max took me last summer, which feels forever ago. Back when I was a girl with a future, a girl ready to run away from Berkeley and start over. That girl is gone.
“Why you stopping?” she asks.
“Want to get some fresh air?”
Our tired eyes match.
“All right,” she says. “But what abou
t Mom and Dad?”
“Let’s clear our heads and then go home and deal with it. I called them both again and texted Elliott. Let’s wait and see if they call back.”
We climb up the stairs carved into the building-sized rock. Amazingly, no one is up here. The sky is inky and star-scarred, the Bay shining slick below it, the houses and streetlamps glowing.
“Wow,” says Ava. “What is this place?”
“Indian Rock. Max took me here once.”
“When?”
“Oh, before you came home.”
“Huh.” Ava rubs her temples. She pulls at her bun and lets her hair down, a crimped explosion. “So . . . was that our first fight?”
“Definitely not our first.”
“First since I came back,” she corrects herself.
“We get along pretty well.”
“You’re, like, the sister I always wanted.”
My brow wrinkles. “I’m the sister you always had.”
She doesn’t respond.
“What did you mean by that?” I ask.
“If we got to choose our family, I’d still choose you to be my sister, Vera.”
“I’d choose you, too.”
“You really love me no matter what?”
“You need to ask?”
“’Cause there are things about me so ugly that I’m afraid if I told you, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”
I shake my head. “How many times do I have to say that you can tell me anything?”
“I don’t believe you,” she says, hugging her legs. “I know you believe yourself, but I don’t believe you. Maybe someday.”
I sigh, not knowing what else I can say to convince her.
“I hate feeling like there’s something off between us,” she says. “You know how important you are to me, right?”
I turn and we hug. Her shoulder, soft fur that smells like my own shampoo on a stranger. I close my eyes. Jonathan’s dead now, I think. At some point the truth about him will come out. But it doesn’t change anything. What I wanted was to kill the thing that hurt and forever changed my family and stole her from us. But that thing can’t be killed.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 23
