The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

I only break down and cry three times today. We go to bed early, in our own rooms, Elliott crashing on the couch. I can’t seem to find comfort in my bed—the bed I shared with Ava—excuse me, Anna. I try to imagine where she is and what is happening to her. And why. Why?

  “Brain,” I say.

  I finally drag my blankets and pillow to the floor. It’s hard on my back. This is not going to happen. I get up and go downstairs, knocking on my mom’s door.

  “Mom?”

  I don’t wait for her answer. I go in and see, to my shock, my parents sleeping in the same bed together. We all slept in her room last night, but Dad had taken the chaise lounge in the corner and slept curled up, fetus-like. Tonight, he’s holding her. Their eyes are shut and they snore. They look ashen. They look old. They look like pictures of themselves someone computer-engineered to age all of a sudden. I love them so much. I want to protect them from this forever hurt. I want to be everything for them. I want to resurrect Ava from the dead. I want a time machine to go back and make it so she never disappeared. I can’t. I can’t do anything.

  I lie down at the foot of the bed and doze. It must be comfortable, because I only realize I slept when the sun is up and it’s morning. And there’s Elliott on the floor near me, wrapped in a blanket, sleeping soundly.

  88

  MY PARENTS DON’T really care about Anna Joplin right now. They’re, understandably, grieving Ava with the help of professionals they should have sought out a long time ago. They’re coming to terms with the fact that they should have moved on, but that they couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. We believe the things we want to believe, I guess. That’s the horror they orbit in these days after the Monstrous Truth, these days spent hiding from the camera-ready vultures and planning Ava’s memorial. But I think about Anna Joplin. Often.

  The best friend I ever had was a big fat lie.

  Her wig still sits on my dresser, her glitter still clings to my pillowcase, her computer with the stickers all over it sits in the corner next to the ukulele. She was here. She was real. But she wasn’t Ava.

  I’ve gone back and studied intensely; she looks exactly like the forensic projection of what Ava was supposed to look like. And she wasn’t lying about Jonathan. She really was found in a Starbucks parking lot, and everything about her life in Satterfield was true. After the cops heard her story, they went and searched his house and found the attic. The boarded-up windows. The small TV. The crude letters written to Flora Daly in a child’s scrawl. The pictures of flowers on the walls. It was exactly like she always told it. The drugs. The abuse.

  What kind of sick world . . .

  My sister—the old, I mean, the young one—died of an unthinkable, stupid accident. She snuck into some hoarders’ yard, climbed into an old refrigerator, and shut herself in there, waiting for me, waiting to be found, sealed away in the dark. What a claustrophobic nightmare. Dying there in that backyard barely a mile away from our house.

  Sometimes I ask myself, Why do we keep on living this horror show?

  I visit the marina and watch a fiery sun sink into the cool jewel hand of the water one afternoon, right after the time change when the days feel longer. A seagull with one foot and missing feathers stands proudly on a jagged stone. The wind is mean, but she picks herself up and dives into the water. It must be so cold. She comes back up and does it again, again, into the water and out.

  I take my old mood ring out of my pocket, studying its dull silver band, letting the glittery stone catch the light. It’s green, whatever that means.

  I throw it in the water.

  89

  I’VE ONLY BEEN to Max’s house once, when we went to his Halloween party. It looks different now, half a year later, in the daytime. A bungalow painted blue and green, yard cluttered with defunct fountains, potted plants, and mismatched, half-painted patio furniture. I knock on the door and his mother answers, a small woman in tinted wire-frame glasses with curly gray hair who wears a tie-dye shirt and a neck brace. I haven’t seen this woman in many years. She immediately wants to talk to me all about “the case,” which is juicy again, trending hashtag everywhere in the news, and isn’t a case anymore but a too-weird-to-believe true story, although really to me it’s just my life. My life that I’m pretty tired of talking about at this point. Everything from my conversation with my bank teller to my revised personal statement for college centers around the Ava/Not-Ava tale. It’s hard to find anyone who wants to talk about anything but.

  Except Max, of course, who just texts things like, feel you.

  here.

  whatever u need.

  As his mother picks me apart with hungry questions, Max comes out of his room and begins yelling, “Excuse me, no. No, Mom, I love you but stop, Mom. Mom, for the love of everything holy, stop.”

  We leave his house together, and he slams the door as his mother yells something at him about how disrespectful it is to raise one’s voice. We walk west through the neighborhoods. His sunglasses are enormous and purple. He puts one arm around me. I haven’t seen him in months, not since Not-Ava was still Ava. But he just puts his arm around me like we were always this thing and it was always this easy.

  We talk about yesterday’s rain. He tells me about how his mom has taken to wearing a neck brace because it feels more supportive. She’s on a special no-gluten diet that is driving him insane. And she has put so much stress on herself with the diseases she thought she had over the years that she now has real heart problems from the stress.

  “Super discombobulating,” he says. “Now I’m all worried about her all the time. Like, actually worried, and not just worried about her being too worried.”

  “So you’re sticking around.”

  “I have to take care of her. Are you sticking around?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any reason really to be anywhere.”

  We’re stopped at a crosswalk now, in front of a church. He presses the button, and we wait for the light to change. He pulls his sunglasses up and looks at me with such warmth that the blue sky behind him seems dim.

  “Make a reason, then,” he says.

  “What? You?” I ask jokingly.

  He’s frozen, not smiling.

  The light changes but we don’t move.

  “I love you, Vera,” he says.

  “Max,” I say.

  “I loved you, I am loving you, I will keep loving you.”

  “Stop,” I say quietly.

  “I keep thinking about all this completely wacky stuff that’s happened to you. I mean, I’m grieving, too, over your sister. Both of them. At least—I know it’s a penny in an ocean, I mean, believe me—but . . . some things are possible now.”

  “I feel so alone,” I tell him. “Like, untouchably, indescribably alone.”

  He leans down and kisses me. The shock of tenderness seems to go farther than me, spilling out and reaching into the air around me. I put my arms around his neck and pull him in farther. I am falling. I am free.

  When we pull apart, my eyes water as I laugh.

  “What about now?” he asks.

  I lean my head on his shoulder and hold his arm in mine. “I feel less so,” I say.

  “See?” he asks softly. “That easy.”

  I wipe my eyes.

  I tell him I love him, because I do.

  We cross the street. At the church behind us now, the lawn is staked with white crosses, one for every murder in Oakland this year so far.

  Ahead of us, there’s a cupcake shop that stinks of sugar.

  90

  THE VULTURES SEEM to have flown away from the neighborhood all at once. Occasionally I spot a news van. Funny how quickly the public grows bored with the Rivers drama. We have to live with it for the rest of our lives.

  The night of the memorial service, Elliott asks if he can stay with us for a while. I kind of figured this was already happening—
he hasn’t left once since the morning he arrived. Elliott helps Mom dismantle Anna’s room. He rents a truck and goes to Goodwill. I still have her things she left in my room in a bag in my closet.

  He’s also been sober, as far as I can tell, and super into using Mom’s discarded gym equipment. He’s looking fit.

  I love that my brother is home. He’s the only one I talk to bluntly about what happened, because Ava was his sister, too. We have the gravest conversations. When we revisit the truth, the sickening story of a little girl who wandered into the wrong place and died so alone, his bluster is gone. He’s all sadness—honest, defeated, accepting.

  “God, what that little girl went through,” he says in a shaky voice. “I shouldn’t have—”

  But he doesn’t finish his sentence.

  I give him a hug. He can’t quite muster forgiveness, but like the rest of us, he seems to have accepted his role in the unforgettable.

  I catch myself more than once thinking to myself, I can’t wait to talk to Ava about all this. Well, if that isn’t a mental cul-de-sac.

  Life, it keeps going. That’s pretty much all it is when you boil it down: perpetual motion.

  91

  THERE ARE LOOPS I fall into, though, where the preoccupied feeling darkens everything, my brow constantly knit, my cheek chewed raw, trying to find a reason. Why did Anna Joplin, a foster kid kidnapped and kept in an attic in Satterfield, end up in our lives? How could this have ever happened at all? How on earth did we not know? Ozzie suspected it. It was why my parents cut him out. We’ve made amends with him. My parents invited him over for coffee, said they were sorry. Ozzie was sorrier.

  We wanted her to be real. We made her real. We relived our old memories and told ourselves she was remembering, too. We were dazzled by how perfectly she fit the description. Her features, down to her cowlick, the mole on her cheek. My mom saw the mood ring and her lightbulbs went ding. We didn’t stop to think about how we bought the mood ring from a drugstore chain. One of a million.

  I should hate Anna Joplin more than anybody, because I loved her most. But it doesn’t work that way. Hurt is prickly and love-barbed. I just want closure. Mom and Dad don’t want to see her, and Elliott acts like he has no interest in her, but who knows. Maybe they will someday. She wasn’t Ava, but there was a lot of truth to her.

  People keep contacting me: strangers from high school, Madeline, old teachers saying they’re sorry. Everyone wants to be my buddy and tell me they understand. Good-hearted liars, all.

  I saw the long-form news article, shared in someone else’s feed as if it had nothing to do with me, about Ava’s found remains and the fake Ava living with us. Many of the people who used to protect us were quoted: publicists, lawyers, Shelly, experts of various shapes and sizes. Vultures. The first comment on the article just said, WTF?? Dumbasses didnt figure out it wasnt her??? It made me mad at first, but then somehow I laughed. And then I stopped reading. I shut it off. They’ll never know what it’s like to be us. What it’s like to want something to be true so badly, you are blind. Now FindAvaRivers.com just has Ava Rivers’s first grade picture and the dates of the years she lived and died.

  It’s always going to be sad, but it gets more real by the day, and that’s something.

  My two twin pinholes of light in this dark time are Max and the acceptance letter I got to UC Berkeley for the fall.

  Did you know it’s one of the best public universities in the United States?

  Not too shabby for a slacker like me.

  92

  I SPEND ABOUT half my nights at Max’s these days. Max draws my portrait while I read books. I draw silly cartoons of him while he plays guitar. We watch old musicals, plan out imaginary trips to Europe. We have conversations dotted with long but comfortable silences. Together, we suffer the same simultaneous mourning of both a dead six-year-old and a fake teenage betrayer who we were pretty smitten with. I mean, he gets it. We occasionally stop to marvel about the times we spent with Ava-Anna and how we didn’t figure it out.

  “It was something like destiny,” he says. “You know? To look that similar to the real Ava?”

  “Yeah,” I have to agree.

  I still want to know why.

  Every time I think about her being here and me getting to ask all the questions that worry my sleep in the wee hours, I don’t know, I shut down. It halts me, the missing her, and makes me so ashamed.

  Max’s friend with the dolphin tattoo, Pilar, has two rooms open in her rickety purple Victorian near Telegraph Avenue. She lives with a sculptor, a theater student, and a professional weed grower. Max and I talk it over, go look at the rooms one day. Big windows that face a backyard with fruit trees and a fire pit. Someone’s cooking curry and listening to jazz in the kitchen.

  We smile at each other, dust dancing in the gold late-afternoon light, possibility a damn sweet high.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Yep,” he agrees.

  93

  MY PARENTS ARE surprisingly well.

  It seems that the same way Ava’s disappearance used to unite them into this productive team, Ava’s death has spiraled them further into their own directions. It’s for the greater good. Dad’s training for a half marathon. Mom’s got a part in a local one-act play. Elliott’s landed a manager job at a frozen yogurt place he takes very seriously. We live parallel lives except for Saturday nights. Then, we laugh loudly and discuss the world with gravity. Silly accents have resurfaced—turns out the world can’t take that away from us. We are bound, because we miss Ava. We know she’s not coming back. At least there are still the four of us. You can trick us and break our hearts but we are still a family.

  94

  ONE NIGHT, MOM’S footsteps creak up the stairs; I realize how long it’s been since I heard that noise and I ache.

  On the floor, I’m packing again. My to-chuck pile is considerably larger than my to-keep.

  “Vera,” Mom says on the other side of the door. “You’re home!”

  “Come in.”

  She opens the door. It’s the middle of the day but she’s in her pajamas, men’s pajamas, with transparent face cream on that gives her face a plastic glow. I used to never see her like this. Mom only came out of her room fully dressed, coiffed, jewelry twinkling.

  “Wow, look at this,” she says.

  “I know.” I stand up, uncomfortable in my own room like it’s a half-painted set. I assume she’s about to comment on the mess, but she seems to be studying the place. I hope I’m not breaking her heart by leaving. Come on, I’m not really leaving though. I’ll be less than a mile away.

  “Your bed used to be over there,” she says, pointing to the other side of the room near the closet.

  “I moved it so many years ago.”

  She sits.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “I just wanted to be near you.”

  I sit next to her, rest my head against her head.

  “I love you,” she says. “I’m so sorry. You deserved so much more.”

  “Mom, it’s not your fault.”

  “Yes it is,” she says in a tight voice. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  “I know.”

  I have to silently scream at myself to not crumble. I am a woman now.

  She opens her mouth and makes a hhhh sound like she’s trying to fog up a windowpane.

  “So don’t feel bad,” I say. “Just—just let things be the way they are. It’s okay.”

  “I wish I had given you more time,” she says. “Instead of always chasing Ava’s case or keeping so busy. Now I look at you and you’re all grown up and I feel like I missed it.”

  When she begins to cry, years melt away and my mom seems to slip younger, younger, almost teenage.

  “If you were a stranger, I’d still pick you out of all the moms,” I tell her.

  Sh
e sputters a laugh. It’s what I used to tell her when I was a little kid. I loved her so much I’d choose her if I could.

  Still would.

  My small mountain of giveaways and puddle of keepers sit there on my floor, nearly sorted. I can tell you exactly what will be coming with me: clothes, books, a shelf, a box of keepsakes. Everything else will sit in the garage or out on the curb, waiting to be taken and loved by passersby.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to move in with Max Spangler,” she says, wiping her eyes.

  “We’re not moving in together like that. It’s a big house. He’s one of five housemates.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll leave your room as it is for a while, in case you want to come back.”

  “Liar. You know you’ve already got plans for it.”

  “Never,” she says facetiously.

  I’ll bet she has the whole thing picked out, down to the drapes and throw pillows.

  “Are you going to stay here?” I ask.

  “For now.”

  “You and Dad are . . . together?”

  “It’s hard to explain to you what all this—everything—has done to us,” Mom says. “In some ways, your dad and I are bound; we have shared this . . . hell together that no one else will ever understand. But we’re also different people because of it. We’re not who we were before.”

  I hide my heartbreak with an understanding smile.

  “I don’t know what’s ahead, Vera,” she admits. “Except that I’m your mom, and I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Can I hug you?” she asks, almost shyly.

  I nod. We come together and, as she hugs me, I feel her bones, her smallness. Like the last time we hugged this long and hard we were other people, me tiny, she a giant.

  95

  WITH A LOAD in my car, I’m gone.