by Amy Jones
“Are you asleep?” Mags asked.
“Yes,” Ava said.
“We should go before it really starts to rain.” She didn’t want to leave, and she didn’t want to go home. But she had run out of options. It was time.
Mags pushed herself to her feet, then held her hand out to Ava, hoisting her up too. Then she brushed the sand off her coat, letting out a sigh. The lake sighed back in response, the ice cracking along the shoreline, restless for spring, for change, for renewal.
If only it were that simple, Mags thought.
* * *
—
When they got back to the apartment it was freezing. But it wasn’t just the air making the room cold. It felt hollow and unfamiliar now, as though she were stepping into a stranger’s apartment. That feeling lasted only a few seconds before the old, familiar grief began snaking its way back into her system, as comfortable as an old sweater. She suddenly wished Ava wasn’t there, so she could be alone with it, slip it on, wrap it around herself.
She went directly to the kitchen and took out a bottle of rum from inside the microwave—one of several hiding places she had around the apartment. When she came back into the living room, Ava had taken off her parka and was sitting on the couch with the copy of the National Chronicle that Mags had picked up on their way home, from a box outside the Tim Hortons when Ava had run inside to use the bathroom. She had skimmed it, keeping her eyes half focused, not wanting to linger too long on any of the words. But now, the thought of Ava reading it filled her with a gnawing dread.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Ava unfolded the paper. “I need something to do with my hands,” she said. “Is the Jack Francis article in here?”
“No,” said Mags, snatching the paper from her. “Just leave it.”
“Sorry.” Ava stuffed her hands into her pockets. “Do you want to go get breakfast or something? I’m starving.”
“I don’t think so. I need to start packing for Europe.”
“You’re actually going?”
“Of course,” said Mags. She took a swig of the rum and immediately felt the warmth spreading through her body, the comforting embrace of an old friend.
Ava stared at her. “Mags, you can’t. It’s going to kill you.”
“I have to.” Mags put the bottle down and cleared her throat. “I have to keep singing.”
“So just sing. Forget Europe. Forget all this big tour media bullshit. Just sing.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ava sat up excitedly. “You could go out to some small bar and just play your guitar, and it would be this amazing moment, like a redemption moment, but it would be on your own terms. People would be talking about it for days.”
Mags studied Ava’s face. There was something fractured about her, two versions of herself superimposed over one another but slightly askew, like a photograph taken as someone is moving, so Mags was never quite sure which one to focus on. “This is reality, Ava, not some stupid television show,” she said. “Life doesn’t have redemption arcs, it just has people who fuck up and then have to live with the consequences. There is no beautiful resolution, and you can’t script one. When you lose everything, all you have left is yourself, and the decisions you make.”
“Why not?” Ava asked. “You’re infuriating. Why are you so attached to your pain?”
“Why am I attached to my pain? I have never met anyone more attached to her pain than you.” She clasped her hands to her chest. “Oh, Antonio, I miss you so much! I’m going to fucking throw myself off a balcony because nothing matters without you. If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have ended up splattered all over the street.”
“Oh. I get it, you think you’re my saviour now, do you?” Ava narrowed her eyes. “When I first got here, you were passed out naked in the hallway outside your apartment.”
“I was not.” But Mags knew it was true. She took a drink of rum as flashes of memory came back to her, gripped the bottle to keep herself from decking Ava in the face.
“What is going on with you right now?” Ava asked. “You’ve been acting weird since we got back here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had the monopoly on tragedy,” Mags said. “Or did you forget my husband died?”
“How could I forget? You’ve been using it as an excuse to drink yourself to death.”
“Jesus Christ, Ava, it’s not an excuse. I need to keep performing.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t need to keep doing anything that hurts you.”
“Yes, I do. I need to go to Europe and do this tour, and it needs to go well.”
“You don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, Mags. You can quit.”
“Like it’s so easy to walk away. I mean, I know it was easy for you, but you don’t give a shit about anything or anyone but yourself. The rest of us, we actually care about things, you know. We make commitments to people and we keep them. We don’t just give up because we’re sad or because things get too hard.” She brought the bottle to her lips, taking a deep drink. “Maybe if you stuck it out more, you wouldn’t have to turn to a stranger for help.”
“What is wrong with you? Why are you being so mean?”
Mags could see the hurt in Ava’s eyes, but she didn’t give her an answer because she didn’t have one. She felt as powerless as she did when she was fifteen and the rage would build up inside her and she didn’t know where it came from or how to control it.
“You know,” Ava continued, “where you see commitment, I just see you letting Emiko walk all over you. No manager should be prioritizing a stupid tour over your health and well-being.”
Mags laughed. “Oh, right. Like Antonio prioritized your health and well-being. Let me ask you, Ava, did you ever think he might have slept with your sister too? Is that why she pushed you into the ocean?”
Ava paled. “Fuck you,” she said, but her voice was shaking, and Mags knew she’d done it. She had found the perfect spot for her knife.
“You’re so obsessed with Antonio, with your ridiculous childish heartbreak. But I’ve never even heard you talk about your sister once. Not once. Did you think I didn’t know about her? About how she tried to drown you? I read up on you, Ava, after you tried to throw yourself off that balcony. I know all about your sister in rehab. Do you even know if she’s still alive? She could have died of an overdose months ago and you wouldn’t even have noticed, would you?”
Ava’s lip trembled, but she didn’t cry. “Well, if she had, at least I wouldn’t try to capitalize on it.”
Mags sucked in a breath. “Get out,” she said. “Get the hell out of my apartment.”
Ava stared at her in disbelief. Then she grabbed the parka and walked out the door.
After Ava left, Mags went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror for a long time, watching as her reflection waxed and waned as she focused and unfocused her eyes. How can I do this? she thought. How can I go out there and do this alone? What kind of monster am I?
In the shower, she calmed herself by watching the water swirl down the drain, taking with it the coating of sand from the beach, the alcoholic sheen, the chlorine smell of the pool, the dried blood from the guy she had hit, the high-frequency buzz of her heart slowing with every layer of grime that fell from her body. The calmness, she knew, wouldn’t last—it would disappear the second she shut off the water, no matter how much she tried to hold on to it. So she stayed in the shower until the water got cold. Then she found herself standing naked and dripping in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the toaster, thinking about Sam. She tried to remember him in that room, the way he had turned the dials on the stove, the way he had placed his hands on the cupboard handles. The way he made toast—how much he had hated their toaster, how he could never get the settings exactly the way he wanted, and instead of just being able to toast his toast he would have to stand there and wait until the perfect moment and then make it pop up himself, because there was no settin
g on the dial that was his perfect toast setting. His perfect toast setting did not exist outside the realm of his own imagination. But she couldn’t picture it—did he stand on the left-hand side of the toaster, or the right? Did he lean against the counter, or did he bend down, hands on thighs, peering into the slots? She couldn’t remember.
She exhaled slowly. It had been seven months since Sam had died—of course she was starting to forget things. And not just the things that she’d purposefully forgotten through the drinking, but things she had assumed were so ingrained in her memory that she would never lose them: the sound of his voice in the mornings, when he woke her up with his mouth on her ear to tell her the coffee was ready; the shape of his body as he moved around the apartment, his bass hanging from a strap around his shoulders at all times, like an extra appendage. The smell of his soap, which she still washed with, the scent changing with the chemistry of her own skin, so that it didn’t even come close to smelling like him anymore.
The feel of his hands on her body, which she had known since she was fifteen, the way they traced around her edges, reaching with their softness the places she could never reach herself.
These things had all started to fade, and she had noticed and yet hadn’t noticed, the drinking muting everything, including the noticing. And when she did notice, with the drinking, it didn’t matter. The feeling of Sam’s memory slipping away was floating in a bubble at the edge of her peripheral vision. She could watch it floating there with a detached curiosity, but it didn’t touch her. It didn’t reach into her gut and pull everything out onto the floor.
She thought about those first days and weeks after Sam died. Those had been the worst months of her life, and she knew it was the fear of returning to that place that had kept her on the road, kept her running. But she suddenly felt an aching nostalgia for those months, for a time when there was nothing standing between her and her pain.
She spent ten minutes looking for her phone before she remembered smashing it in the alley. So she went into the bedroom and opened Sam’s drawer, which she hadn’t touched since he died. His phone sat on top of his pajama pants, the ones he’d been wearing when she took him to the hospital. She closed her eyes, reached in, pulled out the phone, and slammed the drawer shut.
When she turned it on, she discovered it still had battery life, which momentarily stunned her, a choked sob rising up from her chest. At least there were no new notifications. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to handle that.
“Jesus, Mags, you almost gave me a heart attack,” Emiko said when she answered. “I thought you were Sam phoning me from beyond the grave.”
If Emiko were actually having a heart attack, Mags thought, would anyone even notice? “I’ve changed my mind. I need some time off,” Mags said. “I can’t do this right now. I’m not ready.”
“You had time off,” Emiko said coolly. “You had two days. That’s the length of a weekend, which is what most normal working people get. How much more time could you possibly need?”
“I don’t know. I need some time to get better.” Mags lit a cigarette, hand shaking, and moved toward the open window. She had given up on not smoking in the apartment. “I don’t want to keep living like this.”
Emiko sighed. “What do you want me to do, Mags? Cancel the tour?”
“Yes, I want you to cancel the fucking tour!” Mags said, although she hadn’t known that was what she wanted until she said it out loud. “You shouldn’t have planned the tour in the first place, Em. You should have known it wasn’t going to work.”
“If you do that, you kill the band.”
“At least it’s better than killing myself.”
“Is it?”
“Jesus, Em.” Mags pressed her forehead against the window, feeling a cold ache spread across her skin. “I feel like everything is spinning out of control.”
“Save it for your shrink.” Mags could hear water running on the other end of the phone, and she tried to imagine Emiko standing in her apartment, washing her hands, pouring a glass of water, filling a sink with water to do dishes. But she couldn’t picture it. Mags had never seen Emiko’s apartment; she didn’t even know if she lived in an apartment. As far as Mags knew, she lived in an airtight pod. “We are not cancelling the tour. You have a contract. If you don’t show up to the airport tomorrow, the rest of the band will sue you. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” Mags said, and hung up the phone. She stubbed her cigarette out and lit another immediately, not even bothering to blow the smoke out the window. What did it matter anymore?
ChatterFuel
Celebrity
February 22, 2015
Quiz: Are You a Mags or an Ava?
Because everyone knows that BFFs are always a binary
By Stella Stewart
Pick an ice cream flavour
Vanilla
Rum raisin
Pick a movie
Knocked Up
Ghost
What feature do you like most about yourself?
Your hair
Your boobs
You’re stranded on a desert island. How do you get rescued?
Using a seashell as a horn, you call your lobster minions to ferry you across the water in a seaweed chariot
You flash your boobs at a passing helicopter
What’s your favourite kind of spider?
Diving bell spider
Red widow
What did you have for breakfast this morning?
Lobster benedict
A cigarette and two shots of whiskey
The year is 2057. The robots have risen up and taken over the Earth. What are you doing?
You’re in cyberprison for murdering several televisions
You flash your boobs at a passing robot and they make you their queen
13 Comments
Mari Jarvis Mags!
Like • Reply • 8 min
Annie Yee Mags
Like • Reply • 8 min
Rachel Billingsly Mags
Like • Reply • 8 min
Colleen Olsen Ava!! Yay
Like • Reply • 7 min
Cassandra Dwyer I got Ava! lol
Like • Reply • 6 min
Kyla Roland oh cass you are such an ava
Like • Reply • 6 min
Cassandra Dwyer Right? Vanilla forever.
Like • Reply • 6 min
Michael David What is even the difference? they’re both trashy rich white sluts with too much time on their hands and not enough supervision
Like • Reply • 5 min
Shenika Savoy They’re not children
Like • Reply • 5 min
Michael David They might as well be
Like • Reply • 5 min
Pete Knudson They are two grown-ass women who should know better
Like • Reply • 4 min
Cordie Rauch I got Ava but I’m sure I’m much more of a Mags
Like • Reply • 3 min
Natalia Huggins an Ava in the streets a Mags in the sheets
Like • Reply • 3 min
Ava
Sunday, 11:56 a.m.
Ava stepped out onto the street. Her entire body was humming, as though she were trapped in the hollow of a ringing bell, all sensation obliterated by the vibrations. She watched the cars driving by in front of her without hearing them, dug her feet into the snow on the edge of the sidewalk without feeling the cold. A few lazy snowflakes drifted down from the sky and landed on her eyelashes, melting into drops of water that trickled over her cheeks and fell onto her parka in dark splotches like tears. She reached up to wipe her face and realized they were tears, hot and briny on her hands. She hadn’t even felt them at all.
Without any place to go, she went into the cupcake store beneath Mags’s apartment, ordered a red velvet cupcake, and sat at a table in the back corner. She had wanted something sweet to take the edge off, but she could barely taste it as she chewed, the cake dry in her mout
h, the frosting sticking in the back of her throat. How long she sat there—staring straight ahead, trying not to think about Mags’s words—she didn’t know. Eventually, she tried to kick her brain into gear, to figure out where to go from here. She hadn’t thought about much in the past few days except surviving in the gravitational pull of Mags’s orbit. Now that she had broken free, she had no idea what to do.
As she stepped back out onto the street, she heard a voice call her name.
“Thank god,” he said as he got closer. “It is you.”
She stood there staring at him, stunned. He looked dishevelled, his chin shaded with stubble, his hair standing away from his scalp on one side. Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe. “Antonio. What are you doing here?
“I drove here. From New York. I needed to talk to you, and you weren’t answering my calls.”
It had only been six days, but it felt like six years. The enormity of this only fully hit her when she heard his voice. How something could be so strange and so familiar, as though he were speaking to her from a memory, or a dream. “I lost my phone,” she said. “How did you find me?”
Antonio shrugged. “You’re not exactly keeping a low profile. I called in a favour at Align Above’s label and got Mags Kovach’s address.” His eyes travelled down her body, then back up again. “You look different.”
I am different, she wanted to say. “Okay,” she said instead. “Here I am. Talk.”
He was silent for so long that Ava wondered if he was going to say anything at all. She watched him inhale and exhale, his chest rising under his down vest. He’s making himself breathe too, she thought.
Finally, he ran his hands through his hair. “Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to say.”