“Any word on Ava?” Marcus asked.
Cole shook his head.
“Still waiting to be called in.”
At the desk, the receptionist glanced up, motioning to the chairs behind them.
“Lieutenant Alvarez will be out as soon as she can. Feel free to grab a seat.”
Cole didn’t move until Chim took hold of his arm, steering him to the waiting area.
“C’mon, man,” he said quietly. “You’re not getting called any sooner by standing here lurking.”
Cole nodded, allowing himself to be led. Suzanne sat on one side of him, Chim on the other, leaving Cole feeling like a child. Angela and his father had used the same tactic when he misbehaved. For a brief moment, he wondered what kind of parents Chim and Suzanne would be someday... good, he’d guess.
“Here,” Suzanne said briskly, handing him a magazine. “Keep yourself busy.”
Cole flipped through the pages. It was a celebrity gossip magazine and the pictures flashed by in a rush of saturated smiles, his mind lost elsewhere. They were essentially sitting in the same position Cole had been in when he was here earlier this year, when he’d come to pick up Ava the first time. At that time, Cole thought bitterly, he’d been excited to have her back. Happy that she was okay. By that time his temper had already cooled when she’d been making her final report to Lieutenant Alvarez.
He wasn’t settled like that tonight.
Deep inside him, like jagged rocks under dark water, sharp edges of jealousy fought with his relief that Ava was okay. Cole knew she’d been doing something when she cancelled plans two weekends in a row. He knew he’d seen her driving out of town and down the coast and he thought he’d known where she was going... but then again maybe he hadn’t. His chest tightened as guilt began filtering its way into his relief. Tonight, and the sudden terror that Ava might have been hurt, had left him unmoored. Cole frowned as a young couple walked out hand-in-hand, and with their passing, a memory floated forward.
This image was of Kip and Raya. They’d argued on their way out that long ago morning. Cole remembered Simpson’s face seething with envy and then Kip’s face when she’d accused him. He’d been shocked and incredulous.
“She’s no goddamn ‘kid’! And don’t think I haven’t seen the looks you give her. God, I’m so fucking mad at you I could just—”
“You’re jealous...”
“And you’re an asshole!”
Guilt rose up in a wave inside him. ‘Perhaps,’ Cole’s mind prompted, ‘it’s nothing to do with Kip at all…’ The thought left him squirming. Uncomfortable, he shoved it underneath his impatience and went back to flipping the pages of the magazine.
The phone beeped at the desk and the young man glanced up.
“Cole Thomas,” he said, motioning him forward. “Lieutenant Alvarez will see you now.”
Chim put a heavy hand on Cole’s shoulder.
“Look Cole, I know Ava,” Marcus said quietly. “Something’s gotta be up, but if you want my honest opinion – and I think you should listen here, man, – I really don’t think she’d cheat on you. Ava’s a lot of things, but she’s not that.”
Cole nodded as Suzanne added in her two cents.
“Let her do the talking, okay? She’ll be pissed that they’d even called you.”
Cole nodded again, feeling like he’d sudden had two parents watching his every move.
“Thanks guys,” he muttered, heading up to the desk, acutely aware of the eyes following him.
: : : : : : : : : :
Cole sat in the uncomfortable hard chair while Lieutenant Alvarez closed the door to her office and sat down.
“Thanks for coming, Cole,” she said with a grin, shaking his hand.
Cole nodded, wondering how old she was. She had ponytailed hair, a thick fringe of bangs, and a happy smile. Maybe her early twenties at most, though the paperwork he just had to fill out, certainly suggested thoroughness.
“Can I ask what’s going on?” Cole asked. He was irritated. No one had told him anything yet, though he’d had to provide plenty of documentation of who he was in the meantime.
“Of course,” she said, opening a drawer in her desk and pulling out a pen and photocopied papers. “A squad car picked up Ava walking out in the river bottom tonight,” she said glancing up at Cole. “There’s no law against being out... but public drunkenness is an offence. She was pretty intoxicated.”
Cole wrinkled his nose, feeling the prickle of annoyance. ‘Drunk, too…’
“Ava had a pack on, but she obviously wasn’t out on a nature hike, not in her state.” She chuckled. “Not with what she was carrying.”
“Fuck!” Cole snapped, his temper flaring. He knew she’d been out spray-painting.
“Please watch your language, Mr. Thomas. Do I need to remind you where you are?” The woman’s tone was sharp; she suddenly looked more than old enough to be a police officer.
“Sorry,” Cole mumbled contritely.
“Now, if you’d just hear me out,” Lieutenant Alvarez said, pulling out a manila folder and closing her desk drawer with a metallic bang. “I’ve had some time to look through Ava’s file, and have decided not to press charges.”
Cole blinked, taken by surprise.
“Why?”
“Well, the thing is,” the officer continued, hands playing with the edges of the folder in front of her. “There are extenuating circumstances with Miss Brooks.”
At her words, Cole’s temper dropped, guilt replacing it.
“Our fight,” he said quietly.
She shook her head.
“No... not that.” She was watching him now, appraising. There was a long pause in her words. “Did I do the right thing by calling you, Cole?” she asked, voice brusque.
He blew a gust of air from his lungs, leaning forward, dropping his elbows against his knees.
“I honestly don’t know,” he said, frustration sharpening his words. “Because I’ve got no idea what’s even going on!”
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, fingers drumming on the desk as if deciding something.
“I remembered you from the last... incident,” she said. “I had your character witness report – that’s how I got your number.” She eyed him suspiciously. “It said you were close friends.”
Cole sighed, running a hand over his face.
“We are friends. More than friends. I just have no idea what’s been going on with Ava the last couple weeks. She’s been away a lot... distant.”
Lieutenant Alvarez shrugged.
“Makes sense.”
She watched him, then reached into the folder and pulled out a sheet of paper. She slid the upside-down scanned document across the desk. Cole could read the header: ‘Ocean View Detox and Rehabilitation Centre.’ He stared down at it. Things weren’t making sense.
“What is...?” Cole stopped, not sure what he wanted to ask. “Who?”
Ava’s words were suddenly in his mind: ‘I’ve been dealing with a family emergency…’
The officer nodded at the document, her face softening.
“Ava’s mother came in for treatment of a meth addiction about a month ago. I understand she and Ava had been estranged for many years. That’s in her file, too. As part of her treatment she’d requested, and been granted, contact with her daughter. They’d been talking for a few weeks when the incident happened.”
“Incident?”
“According to Ocean View, Shay Brooks left the facility, unescorted, Wednesday the fifteenth. She OD’ed two days later, though her remains weren’t located until the following Sunday.”
“That was the first weekend Ava cancelled…” Cole muttered under his breath.
“Once everyone knew what had happened, her daughter, Ava, was notified and an autopsy performed. Last week, Ocean View contacted Ava regarding Shay's remains. There was a small, private memorial this weekend,” she added. ‘The day she left, and we fought,’ Cole’s mind noted in horror. “One of the
items we found in Ava’s backpack was an urn of her mother’s ashes…”
: : : : : : : : : :
Ava lay on the hard mattress in the cell, staring at the cinder block wall a few inches away. The lines of mortar swirled and danced before her, leaving her brain feeling unhinged, a boat without a keel. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, quelling the wave of nausea.
The cell stank, partly from when she’d been sick an hour ago. The toilet in the corner had come in pretty handy. In fact, the police had taken her blood alcohol levels twice, concerned that she might’ve had alcohol poisoning. She didn’t. It was just a good old bender.
Ava coughed, wincing as the noise stabbed into her brain. Her stomach was empty now, though she wished she had a glass or mug. Cupping water in her fingers at the small sink attached to the wall made it hard to get enough to counteract the alcohol, especially as she could hardly stand. Now that she was no longer vomiting, she didn’t even have the strength to get up and try to drink again. It was easier to stay here and wait it out. She wanted to curl up into a ball and go to sleep forever.
‘She’s dead,’ her mind chanted. ‘Gone...’
It still didn’t feel real.
Ava felt wrung out, tired beyond exhaustion, as if she was only a shell and nothing else. The reaction she was having was shock (she knew that in some part of her logical mind,) but that didn’t change it.
‘It’s finally over,’ her mind assured her.
That thought left her close to tears, though she couldn’t tell at this point if they were anger at her mother for fucking up rehab, or simple grief that the tentative peace they’d forged in the last weeks had been torn away. She wondered if there was even a difference any more. She took a breath, waiting through hot tears, swallowed again and again, closing her eyes and remembering the message that had changed everything.
“Ms. Brooks, this is Terrence Colby from the Ocean View Rehabilitation Centre. We have a patient here by the name of Shay Brook: your mother. As part of her ongoing treatment, she’s requested a meeting with you...”
There’d been a phone number from the facility and details on how to contact the counsellors. There’d been nothing from Shay at all. No “I love you” or “I’m sorry” or anything like that. Just a statement of fact: her mother was in treatment for meth addiction and she wanted to see her daughter.
The choice had been Ava’s alone.
A sob heaved from the interior of her chest, fighting its way out like a trapped animal. She gasped for air, feeling the ache settling once more. ‘Over now. All over...’ the voice repeated soothingly. Ava could distantly hear the guards on shift changing, people talking in the hall. It was late, near midnight for sure. Time lately had had no meaning.
She hadn’t called Ocean View back for days. She’d spent a full week thinking about it, in fact. Distracted. There had been at least fifty times she’d almost told Cole, twice that many times she’d picked up the phone to dial her father, then changed her mind. She’d had her reasons, though the logic in them now eluded her. For Cole, it’d had to do with his own progress with his own father; he’d been trying so hard to get past his own issues that she felt guilty burdening him with her own. That, and the shame. Her mother had never featured in regular conversations with Cole, and Ava liked it that way.
She hadn’t wanted to share that dark part of herself with him.
The reasons for not telling Oliver had been far more complicated. He’d known the whole story. He’d been the one to come back from his tour to fight for (and win) sole custody during the divorce, to change his whole life to be at home with her. Ava curled tighter, pain mixing with homesickness. ‘Should’ve called Dad,’ her mind hissed. ‘He would have understood.’ But that was the thing. She didn’t know for certain that he would, because even Ava had difficulty explaining why she’d wanted to see her mother again. She just knew that she had.
She’d driven the hour up the coast to meet with her mother for the first time in over a decade in early March. The meeting had… changed things.
Ava rolled onto her back, throwing her arm over her eyes as she did. ‘Why the hell do they leave the fucking lights on all the time?’ her mind snapped irritably. Her head would hurt less in the dark, and that’s where she wanted to be, to have a few minutes of peace now that the turbulent push-pull of fear and need, guilt and love, was over. She’d been icy cold walking the trails of the river-bottom, numbed at her mother’s unexpected death. Inexplicably relieved. She winced at that thought.
Ava had gone to the train yards for one last night of painting, her mother’s ashes in the backpack with the spray cans. It had seemed like a fitting memorial, since Shay had been the source of so many of Ava's early, angry pieces, but she hadn’t gotten far.
A jogger had seen her stumbling along the road to the river bottom (and then up to the train yards beyond). She’d apparently looked distraught enough that he’d called the police, and two officers had met Ava along the trail and brought her in for questioning. She’d known they couldn’t charge her with anything except public drunkenness, but she was angry that they’d stopped her. They’d offered Ava her one phone call, but she’d declined. She intended to sleep this off first, then call Chim tomorrow; she refused to think of Cole. It was too painful to consider him.
It still was.
Ava heard the metal door opening at the end of the line of cells. It scraped inside of her skull like rocks along the bottom of a hull, her eyes squeezing shut in pain. In a flash, Ava was back in the detox centre, looking in the doorway of her meeting room...
She sat in a chair next to Terry, an open book in her lap. Shay’s body, always lean, was skeletal from years of hard living. Her arms had withered down, like the cordwood you find on the beach. It was the drugs, Ava knew, eating her body from the inside out. The difference between her own mother and Nina Thomas was thrown into shocking contrast as she stared at her. Ava knew – the way her father sometimes did – that, clean of drugs or not, her mother didn’t have long to live.
She hadn’t realized how close the vision was to coming true.
Her mother glanced up, placing the novel she’d been reading into the large pile of books on the side table, sitting taller. While her body had whittled away to nothing, her face was much the same. It was younger than Ava expected, now that the flesh had been worn away. Her eyes seemed preternaturally large. She had the same fair blonde colouring as Ava, though her eyes were brown. Her cheekbones were high and wide. She might even have been pretty in her day. Her stature was probably no more than Ava’s height, her body almost childlike as she sat in the chair, an oversized hoodie and worn blue jeans swallowing her small frame.
The sight of her mother shocked her. In her memory, Shay had always been so much larger.
Ava waited at the door, hesitant to step into the room. Terry was the first to move.
“Ms. Brooks,” he said gently, “I’m Mr. Colby – please call me Terry. I’m so glad that you made it.” He stepped forward, shaking her hand. “Come in, come in.”
Ava waited, unwilling to step into the room, to put herself near her. Her whole body was pulsing with the primal need to run.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” her mother said. As much as everything else had changed, Shay’s voice was exactly the same.
“Neither did I...”
Chapter 17: Letting Go
Cole followed the guard and Lieutenant Alvarez to the holding cell. All was quiet except for the sound of someone coughing wetly. As they made it to the end of the row, Cole's body flooded with déjà vu. This was so much like the last time he’d picked Ava up from the police station... except that she hadn’t called him tonight.
She lay in the bunk with one arm flung over her face, body perfectly still. He knew as soon as he saw her that she wasn’t sleeping; there was a tautness to her posture that made him long to step inside the cell and touch her. The guard moved forward, putting the keys in
to the lock, and Ava dropped her arm at the sound, squinting to see who was there.
Her face flared with colour as she saw Cole. Without conscious intent, he smiled, impossibly happy she was okay. Since Lieutenant Alvarez had told him about Ava’s mother, he’d had time to come to terms with the fact that he’d been wrong to accuse her. Chim had been right; Ava wouldn’t do that... and though he was frustrated that she hadn’t told him about her mother, he was appalled that he’d assumed the worst about Ava without asking first. He needed to rebuild some bridges here. (He and Marta had talked about this skill at length.)
Cole intended to start tonight.
“Thought you might need to be busted out of here,” he said, stepping up to the bars. “You know I’m your guy for that.”
He couldn’t keep the grin off his face, and Ava glanced at him nervously, walking to the cell door. He could tell she was tense and wary as she wrapped her arms around herself. Her gaze flicked to Lieutenant Alvarez.
“I’ll need you to fill in some paperwork, Ava,” the officer explained, “but you’re free to go. We’ve dropped the charge, given a very...” she smirked, looking at Cole, “...glowing character witness report you had on file, and based on your mother’s recent death. I talked to Mr. Colby from Ocean View, too. He explained what happened last week.” Her voice grew softer. “I’m sorry to hear about your loss.”
“Thank you,” Ava answered, her eyes on the lieutenant first, then Cole. With a screech, the door finally swung open and she stepped out.
Cole pulled her into a tight hug the moment she was out with them. Her body was motionless as he pressed his face to her hair. She smelled of beer and smoke and day-old sweat, but Cole didn’t care. His hands rubbed up and down her back as he breathed her in. He could feel her hands hovering lightly on his back, like the wings of a bird, uncertain if it should settle down to stay.
Intaglio: Dragons All The Way Down Page 11