We pull apart. Ava fixes my eyeliner with her spit-wet finger.
“It’s gorge up here,” she says. “You always know the best spots.”
All the houses. They run together, same same same—dark squares with lit windows. I couldn’t find ours if I spent an hour trying.
I check my phone. Nothing.
“We should go find Mom and Dad,” I say.
“Just one more minute.”
We sit, her head on my shoulder, watching the planes blink by in the sky, the freeway crawl with car lights like a candle river, and I remember again when Max took me here and how different the world seemed then, how I thought I knew what I wanted, how I thought I could escape my sister and the shape her absence gave me.
How wrong I was. How right it can feel sometimes to be wrong.
86
BACK AT THE house, Mom and Dad still aren’t home.
Though I want to go into panic mode, I suggest Ava relax and take a bath upstairs. I’ll call the local police to see what we should do. Adrenaline pumps; my heart is a techno throb. I walk around the rooms downstairs, turning lights on, doing one more search for my parents with my phone in my shaking hand. Mom’s room is last. I stand over her desk. A stack of books about surviving sexual assault, a neat pile of printed maps of different areas of California with highlighter pens circling various areas, a yellow legal pad with indecipherable notes and timelines. An envelope from the police department sits on top of the recycle bin next to the desk. I sit on her swivel chair, grab it, and pull the letter out of it.
Words and phrases jumble together. DNA testing. Cooperation. Final request.
I try to make sense of what I’m reading.
I read it again and again and again.
The message is the same every time: Ava’s DNA was never tested. The police are threatening to drop the case.
My stomach drops. I dig through Mom’s recycling and find two more letters saying the same, with dates spanning the past couple of months. I read the first letter again. Final request. My vision blurs.
Why the hell wouldn’t my parents comply?
I peek out the blinds in the living room and notice a car with lights on across the street: the police, sitting creepily in the dark, parked beneath an ash tree.
“Boo,” Ava says, sneaking up behind me.
Her hair is wet and she’s wearing my pajamas.
“Not funny right now,” I say.
“Sorry. You’re right. What are you looking at?”
I point through the window at the cops parked outside and Ava nods, seeing them, widening her eyes.
“Been a minute,” she says nervously.
And it has. For a short period, we had something resembling normalcy—no media, no law enforcement, just our house with our cars parked in front of it. Black-and-whites used to lurk so constantly when Ava first got home that we barely noticed them. I close the curtain.
“You called them?” Ava asked.
“No. I don’t know what’s going on.”
And it’s true. I’ve never been so bewildered in my life. I look down at what I’m holding, a simple piece of paper with the power to put my whole world into question.
“What is that?” Ava asks, reaching for the letter.
I crumple it into a ball and drop it on the floor. “Nothing.”
No use in scaring her. It has to be wrong. This doesn’t make any sense.
Ava raises her eyebrow, glances at the ball on the floor, and opens her mouth as if she’s trying to find the right word.
Someone knocks hard on the front door—twice—the way only a cop knocks.
Dread rises as we hurry toward the door.
“Something happened,” I whisper.
I open the door. Two cops and—thank God—my parents stand there, all with stone-blank faces. In this handful of seconds, my blood pressure skyrockets. The inkling that something is wrong can only be described as “gross.” Sudden and sickening as a roller-coaster plunge.
“Ava?” one of the cops says.
I don’t recognize these ones.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Ma’am, we’re going to need you to come with us,” the second cop says.
“Me?” I ask.
My chest is exploding, my knees have turned to jam.
“No—me,” Ava says quietly.
I watch as one of them takes her by the arm, hard, pulls her outside to the front yard, and leads her toward the cop car. Ava looks back at me, eyes wide, like a girl who sees the flashing white tunnel of the end before her. She mouths something at me before she turns away: “Sorry.”
“Wait—wait—” I yell.
Mom and Dad walk inside like a couple of zombies. They don’t even turn around to see what is happening.
What is happening?
“The cops took Ava to their car,” I tell them. “Are you seeing this?”
I step onto the porch. What is going on? It’s dark except for a meager orange streetlamp, but the cops have her against the car and are handcuffing her.
“Stop!” I scream at the top of my lungs, so confused, so full of fire.
A hand grabs my shoulder, hard, and pulls me inside. I trip over my own legs. Stunned, I find my footing again. The door slams behind me. I face my parents in the foyer and that’s when I know something is not just wrong, it’s devastating. How do I know? Because my mom’s makeup is skid marks along her cheeks. And my dad’s eyes are so red there is no white.
“Ben, is she still out there?” Mom asks. “Ben, is she gone yet?”
“She’ll be gone any second,” Dad says in this wrecked voice.
My mother breathes loudly, her head nodding with a tremor like a woman who has officially lost her mind.
“Bad news,” Dad says to me, his voice breaking.
I know “bad news” is a goddamn euphemism. I know whatever they are about to tell me is going to shatter my universe.
The moment hangs so long, I hear a distant BART train whirring loud and whiny as a high-speed ghost. I hear a freeway, a man yelling, a bicycle bell.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Ava’s dead, Ladybug.” Dad starts weeping loudly. It’s not a weep. It’s a howl. It’s a vocal corkscrew and it makes me sick with hurt.
“She’s dead. She’s dead,” Mom repeats, as if she’s trying to convince herself. “She’s actually dead.”
“What do you mean she’s dead?” I say.
My throat has shrunk to the diameter of a pin. I make a strange laugh noise, although it’s more like choking. I don’t understand, I can’t get air, I have never seen my parents like this, all spooky-eyed and pale and insane like this, and I’m afraid of them and afraid of the word “dead” ringing in my ears.
“She’s right outside,” I remind them. “With the cops.”
“That girl out there is not your sister.” Mom’s voice sounds shredded. “Your sister is dead; they found her bones.”
She dry heaves.
Dad squeezes his hands into quivering fists. Mom joins him, weeping. And now I can’t see anything. Now the world has lost its lines and shape. I’ve lost my sight to tears.
“They found Ava’s body?” I ask in sheer disbelief.
This also makes no sense to me, because Ava is outside, but my parents are breaking down in front of me and even though I don’t understand what’s going on I blink my tears out because I am watching my creators self-destruct.
“Yes,” Mom says. “She was less than a mile away the whole time.”
“Where?” I manage. “What?”
“It was Ozzie,” she says. “He went back to the neighborhood where she disappeared again. He started back at the beginning. He got a warrant, searched a yard of a condemned house . . .”
It’s like Mom’s voice has left
her. She keeps moving her lips, but no noise.
“A condemned house—across Ashby—they found her body when cleaning out the backyard—” Dad finishes.
“It was an accident,” Mom says. “She . . . locked in an old refrigerator . . .”
We’re all crying now, and hugging, and it’s horrible.
“She was still wearing her angel costume,” Dad says.
“It was a DNA match,” Mom says. “That . . . person outside . . . is not my daughter.”
With those three letters—D-N-A—all this information comes together in my mind in the worst possible way.
My voice is almost a whisper. “You already knew, didn’t you?”
They don’t answer.
“I found the letters in your room,” I say.
They’re silent, which is so much worse than any words they could possibly utter.
“You never confirmed her DNA,” I say. “Why?”
“We were going to,” Mom says. “We were going to so many times but . . .”
“We didn’t . . .” Dad says.
“You didn’t want to know,” I finish, a mess of hot tears. “You didn’t want to know.”
“We did,” he insists. “We were going to.”
But he doesn’t sound convincing. I’m not even sure he’s convincing himself.
I’m so overwhelmed. I’m ablaze. I’m burning down. No. No. I close my eyes. Each breath becomes a boulder pushed up a hill. The words they’ve said to me unravel in all these directions—my sister, shrinking back into that tiny person in the angel costume, the one on all the flyers we saw for years, the one in old photographs. Then in another direction—this girl in her fur coat, my best friend, Ava, she’s real, she’s out there—how can she be two people? I can’t make sense of this. It can’t mean what they’re saying it means.
“Even when they took her away just now,” Mom says, “I wanted to hug her. But she’s not mine. I want my daughter. I want my daughter.”
Mom runs to her room and we follow. She screams at the top of her lungs and punches her thighs. Dad has to pull her wrists and yell, “Michelle, Michelle, Michelle, Michelle,” as I chant, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,” and finally she stops. She goes limp on the bed and Dad covers his face with his hands, seated next to her, a statue of defeat and anguish.
“Ava died over twelve years ago,” Dad says so slowly, the words so heavy and foreign that for a breath I’m really not sure if they’re English.
And the sadness rolls in, a permanent cloud, choking, black, stifling, thick sadness I swear I will never see through again. I was such an idiot. I was so taken.
“Then who is she?” I ask, pointing toward the direction of the front door.
“I don’t know,” Mom says with this blank, sheer horror that sends shivers up my arms.
“This is insane,” I say. “No. You realize how insane this sounds? Someone made a mistake at the lab or something. Ava’s alive. She’s right out there.”
“She isn’t,” Dad says, defeated.
“No,” I say. It seems impossible, existentially impossible. “No, I can’t—I can’t accept this.”
Can’t. But must, somehow.
The truth is oppressive. It sucks the life out of us. But as the shock settles in permanently, the room quiets, and we all three sit there together stewing in the silence, something different is born. An ending, I guess, one that stings, but it is an ending.
My brain is a revolving door of strange, terrible realizations. Ava is gone. Ava is a little girl, forever gone, like I’d always suspected. An imposter was here in her place. The imposter is now gone. Anger, despair, no this can’t be real, yes it’s real, rinse, repeat.
“She’s dead,” we keep saying. “She’s dead.”
We try the words out as if we’ve just learned them for the first time. Truth is, we learned them a long time ago. We buried them in hope. There is something so horribly familiar about this night, about my parents’ soul-wrenching despair, about the three of us grieving together as time bleeds and my mom’s room grows quieter and quieter. A recurring nightmare. Déjà vu. My sister has been dead before. Now she’s dead again.
They shouldn’t ever call it “acceptance” when it comes to this kind of shattering, shape-shifting loss. It’s only ever surrender.
In the drip, drip, drip of the minutes that pass. In the sharp breaths that suddenly never feel enough. In the forever of a night I spend with my parents in Mom’s blood-lit room, in her soft perfumed bed, together, weeping, shuddering asleep and jerking awake with a yelp, to hug and be held, to mourn, to turn the television on, then off, in the ticktock of three heartbeats, broken but still keeping time.
87
WE KEEP OUR house’s doors double–dead bolted, alarm set, curtains drawn. Next morning, the sun’s hardly up but the vultures are back and they’ve multiplied. They have deployed a helicopter. They stand staring at our windows and if I look out at them, they get excited, flapping and squawking.
Elliott shows up super early. I hear him outside shouting, “Why don’t you shove your stupid news story—” and I open the door, yell his name, and let him inside. My parents come running and shouting his name. It’s a tearful, endless group-hug reunion.
My parents stay in their pajamas, practically comatose, sharing tranquilizers and making quiet phone calls to funeral homes and police. Elliott cleans the house, not knowing what to do with himself but wanting to help. I go out to pick up a food order at lunch, dressed like I live in Antarctica to hide myself. I break into a run the second my boots hit the pavement. A woman in thick makeup and two cameramen chase me for an entire block, yelling things like:
“Did you ever suspect it wasn’t your sister?”
“Are you bringing charges against Anna Joplin?”
That last one makes me trip on the asphalt. Luckily I catch myself and am able to keep jogging away from the vultures toward the neighborhood Creole restaurant where I’m headed. I lose them after three blocks. Finally. Jesus space-invading Christ. As I slow down and catch my breath, the words “Anna Joplin” reverberate in my head.
Anna Joplin.
That’s the first time I’ve heard her name. She was Ava to me. She’s still Ava to me. I hate her, I miss her, I still don’t get it.
I know the facts. Tell them to my heart.
I don’t go home with the gumbo. I keep walking past my street, zombielike. I don’t think it consciously, exactly, but my body knows where it’s taking me. Down Ashby. To California. Neighborhood of ghosts and pain.
Besides the different vultures and the news vans double-parked on the street, there’s what appears to be a rainbow mountain in front of the hoarder house. I squint my eyes and see dozens of bouquets, stuffed animals, candles. My eyes and nose sting. It’s the type of useless drugstore merchandise you buy for a hospital visit. It’s the cheap way strangers voice sympathy for tragedies they plain cannot understand. Tied to the fence of the hoarder house are Mylar balloons that catch the sunlight and blind my already burning eyes. I don’t know what it is about that sight, the hive of unrecognizable people and vultures buzzing around it, the cheerful balloons, the fresh flowers in their plastic sleeves, the posters people made in memoriam with the ever-present first grade picture of my dead sister. But I get this wave of something blowing through me that I’ve never felt before. It’s a quiet, sad nothing of a feeling I have no word for.
I turn and make the long walk home. I ignore the question-shouters and camera-stalkers and microphone-thrusters on the sidewalk and make it into the dim darkness of our house again, locking, double-locking, listening to the person outside say, “Still can’t get a statement.” Heels clicking away. Someone else yelling that they need an extra camera battery.
“It’ll be over soon,” I tell the empty room.
I catch my breath and realize what that feeling was back there. It’s st
ill in me, a subtle shift, a change in the air of me. It’s relief. Because it will be over soon. Because we know the god-awful truth. Because nothing can really get worse. Because the whole world can come for us in a screaming mob, can open its jaws and swallow my sister, can make fools of us, but we’re still standing.
We’re Riverses. Keep trying, world. I dare you. You can’t break us. I won’t let you.
“Lunch,” I say, entering the kitchen.
My parents are seated at the table with Elliott. Dad hasn’t shaved. His eyes are permanently bloodshot. Mom’s are like those of a different person, almost, her face unmade, puffy and shadowed with lines. Elliott is still as a statue, elbows on the table, chin in his hands.
“Let’s try to eat,” I say.
We open the to-go containers and slurp our lukewarm food in silence. I could tell them about the vulture infestation that has consumed our block, or how people built a memorial for Ava with shiny balloons and toys, or that the name of the imposter is apparently Anna Joplin. I’m sure they could relay details of the funeral arrangements or news from the police. We don’t though. We just eat. After the meal’s done, Dad stands and cleans up the table.
“Thanks, Ladybug,” he says hoarsely.
“I wanted it to be her. I needed . . .” Mom murmurs.
“Mom,” Elliott says, rubbing her shoulder.
She shakes her head.
Our day is dazed. I seem to have lost the ability to read. I sit staring at pages instead. Likewise, I see shapes moving on TV, I know what they’re doing, but I don’t understand them right now. My head is lost, parsing the same thoughts. Devastation that Ava died a little girl, that she died that way, trapped, gasping, frightened, alone. Despair that my parents are so wrecked. Relief that Ava at least wasn’t the victim of some horrible serial killer. Guilt for feeling any kind of relief. Confusion as to who the pretend Ava was, and then Jonathan, her whole story—it makes no sense. Then I go through all those emotions and thoughts again. That’s what I mean—my horrible revolving door.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 24
