The Backward Season

by Lauren Myracle

  “Huh,” Ava said. “So, if my knee-jerk reaction is to be the opposite of Natasha and Darya, then I’m still letting them say who I am, basically.”

  Aunt Elena looked surprised. “You are one smart young lady.”

  Ava tried not to be offended. “Thanks. I’m still not planning to use slipcovers, though. Now that that’s settled, what secret are you keeping?”

  Aunt Elena grew sober. She placed her hands flat against her thighs.

  “Your mother thinks I forgot about Emily just like everyone else. She thinks that I . . .” She faltered. “That I remembered our middle-of-the-night discussion, but not the actual girl we discussed. Emily.”

  “Go on.”

  “The next morning, after Klara climbed Willow Hill, after Emily wasn’t there to meet her, that was when everything got so messed up.”

  “I thought the Emily-disappearing part was when things got so messed up.”

  “Yes, just . . . let me tell this my own way.” She raked her hand through her hair. “Just as your mother never told anyone but me what she wished for, I’ve never told anybody—anybody—what I’m about to tell you.”

  Yikes, Ava thought. Did she want to know?

  “The next morning, at breakfast, everybody congratulated Klara on winning the Academic Olympiad,” Aunt Elena said.

  Ava nodded, digging her fingernails into her palms.

  “Klara asked about Emily. Everyone said, ‘What? Who?’ Vera, my parents—they acted as if they had no idea who Klara was talking about.” Aunt Elena looked as shaky as Ava felt. “I played along. I was confused. I was scared! If it was a practical joke, it made no sense. My parents weren’t the sort of people to make practical jokes.”

  Aunt Elena glanced toward the back of the apartment. She lowered her voice. “Your mom pulled me away from the breakfast table. She dragged me into the kitchen and gripped me by the shoulders. She gripped me so hard.”

  “And?”

  “‘You remember her, don’t you?’ she said.”

  “My mom said that, to you,” Ava clarified.

  “When I didn’t answer, she shook me and said, ‘Elena. Do you remember Emily?’ I did, and I admitted it. But no one else did. Not at school, not the waitresses at Rocky’s, no one.”

  “Wait,” Ava said. “Just ten minutes ago, with the cookies. We were all talking, and Mama said that you didn’t remember Emily that next morning.” Ava regarded her aunt. “Mama told you to forget what she’d said in the middle of the night.”

  “That evening, your mom pulled me into her room and shut the door,” Aunt Elena said. “Her eyes, Ava. Her eyes were so wild. And she was thirteen. I was only ten! She said, ‘We’re the only ones. We’re the only ones who remember her, Elena. What are we going to do?’”

  Aunt Elena swiped at her eyes. “And I thought, ‘We? What are we going to do?’ Because I didn’t wish Emily away. She did!”

  “She didn’t ‘wish Emily away,’” Ava said. “You know she didn’t.”

  “Same difference,” Aunt Elena said, and she sounded like a child.

  Ava sat with it all. She stared at her aunt. She finally said, “You changed your story? Mama thinks she convinced you that you’d never had that conversation about Emily. But really, you convinced Mama that you’d forgotten Emily, just like everyone else?”

  “It wasn’t as if I could bring Emily back.”

  “You left Mama all alone.”

  “Klara left Emily all alone!”

  “Did she? What does that even mean? Nobody has a clue what happened to Emily!”

  Aunt Elena visibly made an effort to gather herself. “I tried. I told your mother I didn’t remember Emily, yes. But I searched for Emily. I tried finding her father, your dad’s dad who lives in California.”

  “Grandpa Dave.”

  “We didn’t have the internet back then. There were phone books at the library, but California is a big state. Still, I found four hundred and fifty-seven listings for David, Dave, or D. Blok. It took time, but I called them all.” She made a funny sound. “Oh, and we didn’t have cell phones or data plans or any of that. I couldn’t use my parents’ phone. They’d see the calls on the bill. So I used pay phones, the most out-of-the-way ones I could find.”

  Ava saw a girl her own age—no, younger—enclosed in the glass box of an old-fashioned telephone booth. Ava had never seen a real telephone booth. In the picture in her mind, young Aunt Elena wore a dress like Laura Ingalls from the old TV show Little House on the Prairie, which Ava had seen reruns of. Young Aunt Elena wore her hair in plaits and rose on her toes in black lace-up boots, hooking her finger into the holes of the rotary dial seven times, rotating the wheel to the stopping point, swoosh, before letting it return to starting position, click-click-click-click-click.

  Actually, ten times, because of the California area code.

  Actually, eleven times, because in the olden days, didn’t people have to dial “1” before long-distance calls?

  “It took me two years to call all those numbers,” Aunt Elena said.

  “What?! That’s ridiculous!”

  “No. Long-distance calls were expensive. On a weekday, it cost eighty cents to make a three-minute call to California. My allowance was two dollars a week. I earned money babysitting, and my mom could never understand where all that money went to.” She gave a slight shake of her head. “Chewing gum. I told her I spent it on chewing gum.”

  “You didn’t find him,” Ava said flatly.

  “I never reached a Dave Blok who was the father of Nate and Emily Blok, no,” said Aunt Elena. “I couldn’t rule out the possibility I’d missed him. People didn’t always pick up. Some people never picked up. I could have dialed a wrong number . . .”

  She faced Ava square on. “Your mom eventually moved on, or pretended to. I was furious. The weight of knowing that a girl had disappeared, that because of my sister, a girl had disappeared . . . it crushed me. I started feeling as if I were going crazy. People said Klara was crazy; maybe I was, too. So, when it was finally my Wishing Day, do you know what I wished?”

  Ava dealt out possibilities like playing cards: maybe Aunt Elena wished for Emily to come back, for everything to go back to normal, or for Klara not to have made that stupid wish about the contest in the first place. Maybe she wished she hadn’t woken up that night, wanting a sip of water.

  Ava discarded them all, because if Aunt Elena had made any of those wishes, she and Aunt Elena wouldn’t be sitting here now. Mama wouldn’t have shut herself up in her bedroom. There wouldn’t be an Angela in Papa’s life.

  “I wished to forget Emily too,” Aunt Elena said softly. “That was the wish I could make come true myself, and I suppose I did.” With her eyes, she begged Ava to understand. “Denial is a powerful force.”

  Ava was dumbfounded. She understood that Aunt Elena was hurting, and she didn’t want to dig a knife into her wound or whatever. And yet, seriously?!

  Ava snapped a sugar cookie in half. She snapped one of the halves in half.

  “So now, when you think of Emily . . . ,” Ava began.

  “I didn’t, not for years and years,” Aunt Elena said. “But after Natasha’s Wishing Day, bits started creeping back. After Darya’s birthday, more crept back. You girls, with all your questions. And your mother! She can’t go a day without mentioning Emily!”

  “So now that you remember her again, why don’t you tell people?”

  “Because I don’t remember her again!” Aunt Elena exploded. She pressed her lips together and shot a look down the hall. “I remember the events that happened, but I remember them the way I’d remember the plot of a play. Act One: Klara made a wish. Klara told me her wish. Her wish made a girl named Emily disappear.”

  She leaned forward, holding her head with her fingertips. “Act Two. I searched for the girl named Emily. I found no trace of her. So, on my Wishing Day, I wished to no longer remember her.” She peered at Ava through the hair falling into her eyes. “The end.”

&
nbsp; “I hate that play,” Ava said.

  “Yes. You’re not the only one.”

  “Shouldn’t there be an Act Three?”

  Aunt Elena moved her hand to suggest it was out of her control, and Ava felt a surge of frustration.

  “You’re acting as if . . . as if it were a play for real, and you’re just doing what the script says to do!” she said.

  Aunt Elena lifted her head. “What an odd thing to say, Ava.” Something was going on with her features, some internal battle playing out that sent a shiver up Ava’s spine. “What a very. Odd. Thing to say.”

  “Is there anything about any of this that isn’t odd?” Ava demanded.

  Aunt Elena shook her head. It seemed as though she had one foot planted in the world in front of them, the now world, and the other foot planted in another place, another when.

  “Is there any way you can prove what you’ve told me?” asked Ava.

  “About Emily? No.”

  “And there’s no one who can confirm your version of things, since I’m the only person you’ve told your story to.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” said Aunt Elena. She frowned. “Unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “There is something. It might matter, or it might not.”

  “About Emily?”

  “I can’t grab hold of it,” said Aunt Elena.

  “Is it about Mama?”

  “No, I don’t think so . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “You asked if there was anyone who could confirm my story,” Aunt Elena said. “I said no, but I think there might be, after all. It’s . . . it’s like a toothache, but in my mind. It’s there. I just can’t get to it!”

  Ava got a crazy idea. An absolutely ridiculous idea. She took Aunt Elena’s hands and said, “Did you know that scientists, lots of them, think telepathy is real?”

  Aunt Elena looked bewildered.

  “Telepathy,” Ava repeated. “The ability to read another person’s thoughts.”

  “I know what it is,” said Aunt Elena.

  “Scientists also say that more people have it than maybe we know. That a person could be telepathic and not even know it!”

  Aunt Elena’s smile was fond, if amused. She returned to Ava, present again and no longer in the world-between-worlds she’d seemed trapped in. “Do you want to try and read my mind, sweet niece?” She spread her arms, flopped against the sofa, and closed her eyes. “Go for it.”

  Ava set her shoulders. She had no clue what she was doing, but the papers she’d read mentioned focus, concentration, and single-mindedness of purpose, so . . . okay. She closed her eyes and mentally reached out to Aunt Elena.

  Jellyfish tentacles, she thought, imagining slender tendrils floating from her mind to her aunt’s. Then she thought, No! Yuck! She didn’t want jellyfish tentacles connecting them. Jellyfish were pretty, but they stung people.

  She tried again. She imagined probes. Pleasant, well-intentioned probes, not UFO-abduction-story probes. She imagined electrodes, but without the skullcaps. She imagined energy from her mind seeking energy from Aunt Elena’s mind, and for a moment, she felt something! A door, edging open. Brilliant light seeping through the crack, tiny wings fluttering and surrounding Ava with Aunt Elena-ness . . .

  And then, gone.

  Calm. Neutral. A door merging seamlessly with a wall, a lake without ripples.

  “You can open your eyes, Aunt Elena.”

  Aunt Elena did. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.” Ava tried to hide her disappointment.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Aunt Elena said. “Don’t feel bad.” She stood and took the cookie plate into the kitchen.

  Ava trailed behind her and put her Coke can in the recycling bin. “So . . . guess I’ll take off.”

  “It was good to see you,” Aunt Elena said. “Come anytime. And Ava?”

  Ava paused.

  “Don’t ever stop trying. Even if it seems silly, even if it seems pointless—never give up hope.”

  “Okay.”

  Aunt Elena adopted an I’m-about-to-quote-something expression. Speaking clearly, she said, “‘Hope is the thing with feathers— / that perches in the soul— / and sings the tune without the words— / and never stops—at all.’”

  She smiled sadly. “That’s one of your mom’s favorite poems. It’s by Emily Dickinson.”

  “It’s . . . nice,” Ava said.

  “Who knows?” Aunt Elena continued. “Maybe there will be an Act Three in this play we seem stuck in. We can hope, can’t we?”

  Ava opened the back door. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “We can all sprout feathers and hope.”

  Aunt Elena clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “What?” Ava said.

  Aunt Elena dropped her hand. “Yes! That!”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know how I forgot. I can’t believe I forgot! But just now, it came to me out of nowhere!”

  “Aunt Elena—”

  “The Bird Lady! I was in the woods by the lake, and she called to me from her hideaway in the forest. Do you know the spot I mean? In the trunk of the huge oak?”

  Ava knew nothing about a forest hideaway.

  “She was looking for me,” Aunt Elena continued. “It was my Wishing Day, and the Bird Lady was looking for me because . . .” Wonder illuminated Aunt Elena’s face. “She told me what to wish for!”

  Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Ava’s fingertips grew numb. That happened now.

  “She knew I was unhappy,” said Aunt Elena. “She called me over, and I went to her, and she said, ‘You’re quite troubled, Elena Kosrov, but you needn’t be.’ Needn’t. Such an archaic word.” Her gaze went distant. “She told me I should wish to forget Emily.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There was a bird in her hair, and another on her shoulder. How could I have forgotten?”

  Ava experienced the sensation of falling. Or of flying?

  “The Bird Lady told me to forget Emily,” Aunt Elena said again. She looked at Ava intently. “If you can get her to admit it, you’ll have the evidence you’re looking for.”

  Ava swallowed twice before she could speak. “Thanks, Aunt Elena. Will you say bye to Mama for me?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, just hurried out of Aunt Elena’s apartment and headed for the forest.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Emily, Age Eleven

  By the summer before sixth grade, Emily’s dad had taken to sleeping on the sofa every night. It was awful. Sometimes, Emily slept downstairs with him, on a sleeping bag on the floor. Emily suspected Nate wanted to as well, but felt like he was too old. Or maybe he didn’t want to upset their mother.

  “You’re enabling your father to leave this family!” Emily’s mom told Emily. “You should be punishing him instead. If you let him sleep downstairs alone—if we all leave him down there alone—he’ll return to the upstairs bedroom, where he belongs.”

  Emily knew that secretly, her mom wanted to punish her. One afternoon, Emily looked up from a sketch she was working on and caught her mom staring at her with slitted eyes.

  You, her mom thought. If only you—

  Then those thoughts blanked out, as if a lid had been slammed down. Sometimes her mom did want to punish Emily, but she was never proud of herself when she thought such things.

  It’s not Emily’s fault, Rose, her mom told herself. If Dave would just support me when I need him to, instead of arguing with me about everything!

  Except her parents didn’t argue about “everything.” They argued about Emily. It gave Emily a stomachache.

  “Can I see your drawing?” her mom asked, approaching Emily with red-rimmed eyes.

  Warily, Emily tilted her sketch pad.

  “The willow tree,” her mom said. Her voice faltered. “It’s lovely.”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Emily said. The town associated the willow tree with magic, and since her mom hated magic, Emil
y knew she wasn’t a fan of the willow. “You don’t have to like it. It’s not, like, the law or anything.”

  Her mom’s eyes welled with tears, and she stalked away. They both tried to reach out to each other, and they both failed, again and again. Were some daughters simply not meant to be born to certain mothers?

  No. Emily didn’t accept that. One far-off day in the future, if Emily was a mom, she’d make sure she did right by her daughter. If she had a daughter.

  Tension continued to grow between her parents, and Emily, like most kids in her situation, knew the “talk” was coming. The divorce talk. She knew it was coming, yet when it did, it nevertheless sucked the air out of the room.

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” said her mother.

  “Nate? Emily? You’ll always come first,” said her father.

  And, each in his and her awkward way, used empty sentences to explain that they’d grown apart from each other, that’s all.

  The worst part was when Nate cried.

  Emily wanted to cry, but she felt numb inside. Her parents’ claim that they grew apart from each other was true. They didn’t laugh anymore. Their conversations were strained. But if Emily wasn’t in the picture . . .

  Her mom wanted to change Emily, to increase her chances of blending in with kids who colored within the lines. Her dad wanted Emily to be who she was, and to feel good about who she was. But how could she? If she was different—normal—her parents wouldn’t have been at odds with each other.

  In August, her dad took a job all the way across the country.

  “California,” he said the day he loaded up the U-Haul. “In California, oranges grow in people’s backyards. When you kids visit, you can have fresh-squeezed orange juice whenever you want. It’ll be great!”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” her mother said. “Nothing will ever be great again.”

  “Rose . . . ,” Emily’s dad said.

  Emily went to her dad and hugged him. She smelled his aftershave. She smelled his sweat, which was tangy. “Take me with you,” she whispered.

  “What’s that, honey?” her dad said.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled.

  She and Nate stood at the end of the driveway and waved until he was out of sight. Behind them, their mom closed the front door with a bang.