by Jason Mott
“That’s the same thing you said the last time I came in for an examination.”
“Because it was true the last time, as well,” he replied. He smiled. “Face the facts, Carmen. You’re healthy and you’ve got a healthy baby inside of you.”
“I just feel pain some days,” Carmen said. She rubbed her stomach rhythmically. “Everything hurts. Everything except the baby. Sometimes it feels like I’m the weak link here...if that makes any sense.”
“How’s your diet?”
“Good. Eating everything I’m supposed to.”
“Good,” Dr. Arnold said, nodding heavily. “Have you talked with Macon about all of this?”
“Of course,” Carmen said. “But he’s not the doctor, now is he?” She grinned, but her tone was serious.
“Listen,” Dr. Arnold said. He shifted his weight on the rolling stool he was sitting on and folded his arms in front of him. “I’ll do anything I can to reassure you that everything is okay. If you’d like another opinion, I know someone up in Virginia who I trust. He’ll give you a thorough examination and, when it’s all over, you can come back here and we’ll talk. But you really will be fine. Few are capable of more worry than expectant parents.”
His expression was full of warmth and comfort and trust and confidence, and Carmen could not help but believe him, as she always did. He had been the town’s doctor for almost all of his life. He had delivered more children than the town could hold—something he was fond of saying at parties when people asked him if he was staying busy.
“You’re going to be okay,” Dr. Arnold said.
“You’re sure?” Carmen replied. Her voice trembled a little.
“I’m sure,” Dr. Arnold replied. “You’ve got to believe that you’re going to be okay, because you are. And that’s my professional opinion. You’ve just got to have faith,” he said.
It was the height of summer and the air was electric with the insect songs and the humidity that pressed down upon everyone like an anvil, but still Heather stood beneath the summer sun on the far side of the yard with a shovel in her hand, digging a hole. Ava stood at the window of the house watching her mother dig. The ground was hard at times and she would gouge the earth with the shovel and the streams of sweat dripped down from her mother’s brow so much that it looked like rain.
Ava listened to the noise made by her mother’s digging—the heavy chuff, chuff, chuff of the shovel entering the earth rhythmically. She could not understand why her mother was digging a hole in the ground, but because it was hot outside and her mother looked exhausted Ava decided that the best thing she could do was help. So she climbed down from the window and went to the kitchen and fixed a large glass of iced tea and walked out of the house and carried it to her mother.
“Mom?”
“Yes,” Heather answered. She looked up, huffing, sweat dripping from the end of her nose, and saw her daughter with the glass of tea. “Thank you,” she said, taking the glass.
“Are you okay, Mom?” Ava asked as Heather gulped at the drink.
“It’s hot,” the woman said eventually.
“Can I help?” Ava replied.
“Grab a shovel.”
Her mother never said exactly why they were digging this hole on the far edge of the yard and Ava did not ask. Her mother was full of magic, and that was not something a child questioned.
They dug through the hottest part of the day with Heather sending the girl back and forth to the house now and again for more water and tea. She took more care about the temperature now that her daughter was with her. When the afternoon had stretched on late she sent the girl in and asked her to make a meal for them. Ava returned with bologna and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and more tall glasses of tea. The two of them took a break for nearly an hour in which they stretched out on their backs beneath the sun, stared up at the sky and said nothing. The sun did not seem quite as hot as it had been. There was a coolness radiating out from the hole that they had dug—it had filled partly with water and Ava couldn’t be certain just how far down they had dug, but the hole was above both her and her mother’s head and that felt like a feat that few people in this world could ever hope to achieve.
When they had eaten and rested they slipped back down into the unfinished hole and they went back to digging and Ava’s mother began to tell her daughter stories. She told her about a man several counties away that, according to legend, had lived to be over one hundred and fifty years old. It was only because of a farming accident that he finally met his maker, just two years ago. “If it wasn’t for that,” Heather said, “he’d still be alive and kicking.”
And then Heather spoke about two men who were digging a root cellar and came upon a large mound of ice, like an iceberg hidden inside the earth. The men dug and dug and dug and, as they went farther down and more of the ice was exposed to the sun, the ice began to melt and so they took to covering it with tarps and shades and blankets in the hopes of keeping it intact. And then one morning, on the third day of digging, the men came out and found the ice melted and there was a great, gaping chasm left in the earth large enough to fit a house into. “And then it all collapsed,” Heather concluded.
The two worked until after sunset and then—sore and tired and aching—they went into the house and bathed and they were too tired to eat and so they both stretched out on the floor of the living room and fell asleep. When Ava awoke the next morning she found that a blanket had been placed over her and her mother and, in that moment, she could believe all of the stories her mother had ever told her.
The world was grand and sometimes prone to unexplained acts, and that was the beauty of it.
FOUR
THE ARNOLD HOUSE was at the end of a large, wooded lot of land on Highland Street. It was the area of town where most of the wealthy northerners who migrated to Stone Temple built their houses. Dr. Arnold, though he hadn’t actually made himself wealthy working as the general practitioner of a small town, had built a house here before all of the new money came. And over the years he’d gotten by well enough that, even though his house was visibly more fatigued than the rest standing along the street, he’d kept it up enough that it did not seem out of place among all of the newness.
Privacy fences wrapped each of the yards along the street, including the doctor’s, but Ava had been to Dr. Arnold’s enough times over the years to know which of the boards in his fencing were loose enough to be pushed aside and slipped past. Every six months, like clockwork, Macon came to Dr. Arnold for a general checkup. He had always been a man that believed in the power of preventative medicine. And while he underwent the checkup, Ava, when she had answered all of Delores’s questions and eaten her fill of the woman’s food, would come into the backyard, slide through the loose board in the fencing and explore the large expensive houses of Highland Street.
Now, after leaving Carmen in Dr. Arnold’s examining room, and with Wash racing after her, Ava came out of the house, crossed the yard at a lope, wriggled through the loose board in the fencing and started up a narrow, wooded path that, eventually, emptied out again on Highland Street several houses down. It was a discreet enough path that anyone unfamiliar with the town, such as reporters, would not have been able to see her, and yet it afforded her the safety of having a way to get back to Dr. Arnold’s if someone did find her and she needed to get away from them.
She was hot with anger and the coolness of the day did nothing to detract from it. Only the sound of Wash, stumbling and panting as he struggled to catch up to her, did anything to relax the girl. “Ava,” Wash called out. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he barked in pain as a tree limb Ava pushed aside suddenly snapped back and slapped him across the face. “That was straight out of the Three Stooges,” he said, and there was a strange pride in his voice. In spite of the gravitas and bedlam swirling in the world around them, it was only the comedy of the moment that the boy cared to acknowledge.
She did not want to go far—with a
ll of the people that had come to town, she was afraid of what might happen if she strayed too far away from the Arnold house. But she needed air. She needed to be away from things. She needed to be alone...or as close to alone as she could get. And Wash had the uncanny ability to make her feel like she was away from everyone, but not alone in this world.
So it was with some degree of comfort that she made her way through the wooded path, around the back of the houses, and returned to the openness of Highland Avenue.
“Jeez,” Wash said, coming out of the bramble behind her. There was a large red mark on his cheek where the tree branch had smacked him. He rubbed it with the palm of his hand to soothe it. “Is it as bad as I think it is?” he asked, presenting his face to Ava.
Ava held back her laugh. “It looks like you got punched by a feather duster.”
“Funny,” Wash said, but there was lightness in his reply. He rubbed his cheek a little more, then looked back and forth along Highland Street. It was empty and quiet. Ava turned on her heel, and began slowly walking up the street.
“You do realize,” Wash began, falling into step beside her, “we shouldn’t be out here. You know how everyone is. There’s no telling what kind of people we might run into. There’s a reason you have police escorts now.”
Ava tucked her hands into her jacket pockets. The cold that lingered within her since waking up in the hospital tightened its grip on her. She straightened her back and tensed her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. Then she walked and looked at the large houses lining the street.
They were grand and majestic. They had swimming pools—empty now in preparation for the winter—wrought-iron gates, sweeping, pristine lawns and statues. Ava imagined that everything inside those houses smelled new. She hated the houses as much as she loved them.
“What are you going to be?” Ava asked Wash.
“Excuse me?” he replied, caught off guard by the question. Then he immediately understood what he was being asked. “I don’t really know,” he said. “A teacher, maybe. I like reading enough for it. I’d have a class where people sat and read to one another. That’s the only thing I never really liked about reading at school—we do all of it at home. We should do it more in groups. Make a really big deal out of it. That way everyone gets to hear the story at the same time, you know? It turns into something we share instead of something we just do by ourselves.”
“But what if someone doesn’t read well?” Ava asked.
“Then the class teaches them to get better at it. Next silly question?”
Ava bumped him with her shoulder playfully. She was getting used to the cold. “What about you?” Wash asked. “What do you want to do one day? If that was your house,” he said, pointing to a large multigabled estate tucked behind a wrought-iron gate. “What would you do for a living? What kind of person would you be?”
The two of them stood before the house as if its gates might suddenly open and beckon them to enter and take up the lives of their imaginings. “I’d live alone,” Ava said finally. “Away from everybody. I’m not sure what my job would be, but if I could, I’d have a gate just like this and I wouldn’t let anybody come and visit me.”
Wash laughed. “I’m not sure I like that idea,” he said. “It can go one of two ways—Master Yoda did it, and he came out okay. But Gollum from Lord of the Rings did it, too, and that didn’t turn out okay. But, now that I think about it, in both cases they came out green and weird looking. So...if that’s what you’re shooting for...” He shrugged his shoulders comically.
He waited for Ava to smile, but when it did not come, he continued. “People don’t really live like that,” he said. “Not really.”
“Yes, they do,” Ava replied.
“No, they don’t,” Wash replied. And then he bent down and lifted a small pebble from the street and, with a grunt, tossed it over the fencing. “And, even if they did, why would you want to? People live with people. That’s just the way it works. Everybody needs someone.” He paused for a moment, as if grasping an idea in his mind but then immediately losing his handhold on it. “Or something like that. And I know you feel like everybody wants something from you right now, like everybody expects something. But that still doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to have people. You can’t build a wall in front of the world.”
“Maybe I’ll have dogs,” Ava said. She started walking away from the house and Wash hurried to catch up to her. “Maybe I’ll do what your grandmother does and just have dogs.”
“But she doesn’t just have dogs,” Wash said. “She’s got me.”
“You’re not much smarter,” Ava said, and she smiled.
“I’m smarter than the average Pomeranian.”
“What about a dachshund?”
“I figure I could hold my own in a game of chess against a wiener dog,” Wash said. On his forehead, his thought trenches had sprung up, denoting the seriousness of his thinking.
“You don’t play chess,” Ava said.
“I get the idea of it, though.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But I’m cute, though,” Wash said, and he laughed.
Ava paused and took in the image of the boy. “Maybe,” she said finally. Then she tugged his ear and continued walking.
But in their playfulness and conversation, neither of them saw the man walking down the street behind them. It wasn’t until he spoke, standing less than twenty yards away, that they spun, startled, and saw him. “Hi,” the man said. He stood on the far side of the street with his arms at his sides and a look of pleasant excitement across his face. “My name’s Sam,” the man said, his face beaming. He was tall and very large, with the frame of a man who had been an athlete in his youth and whose body, though it was in its forties now, had not relinquished its hold on its former glory. Beneath the dark crown of hair on his head—parted awkwardly on one side—Sam’s face was clean-shaven and with a tinge of childishness about it. “You’re really her, aren’t you?” Sam said.
Ava’s stomach tightened. Macon had told her that there would be people who wanted to meet her, people who would go to great lengths to do so. “The world is full of strange types,” he had said, his face full of conflict, as if he would not allow himself to say what he really wanted to. “Be careful of those kinds of people,” he said.
“We should go,” Wash said quickly. He took Ava by the elbow and stepped back.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man said, holding up his hands passively. He took a step backward almost as quickly as the children did, furthering the distance between them. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” Sam said. His voice was full of innocence. “I’m just, well, I’m just excited to meet you. My name’s Sam,” the man said again. He waved at Ava as if they were recognizing each other across a crowded room.
“We heard you the first time,” Wash said. He tugged Ava’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said, never taking his eyes off Sam. The two of them began walking back down the street, headed to where there was the path that would lead them back to Dr. Arnold’s. Ava walked with her eyes forward, the way she had learned to walk when there were reporters snapping her picture. Wash walked beside her, on the side facing the street and Sam.
“You’re that boy, aren’t you?” Sam called out to Wash. He remained on the far side of the street, but matched their pace as they walked. “You’re the one she healed!”
“Just keep walking,” Wash whispered to Ava.
“No, please,” Sam said, his voice quavered. “Please, I just want to talk to you. Please.”
Perhaps it was the apologetic tone of his voice. Perhaps it was the childishness in his face. Or perhaps it was the infinite courage of youth, with its inability to understand the harshness that the world is capable of. Whatever the reason, Ava stopped walking away.
“What are you doing?” Wash asked her.
“What do you want?” Ava asked, turning to Sam.
“Ava...” Wash whispered.
“Nothing,” Sam sa
id. “I just wanted to meet you.” Sam still remained on the far side of the street, doing nothing to try and close the distance. His arms still rested at his sides, and there was something awkward about the way they did. There was something awkward and off about everything Sam did, Ava thought.
“I’ve got to go,” Ava said.
“Wait,” Sam replied. “Please.” He lifted his hands in a show of submission. He looked down at his feet for a second, and then he eased down onto the ground and sat with his legs folded. He tucked his hands beneath his, so that he was sitting on them. “Is this better?” he asked.
Ava and Wash both stared at the man. The size and width of him, which has been intimidating at first, was diminished now that he was sitting on the ground with his hands beneath him. Even Wash felt that, perhaps, the man really did only come to talk. And maybe he wasn’t as bad as first expected.
“Why did you come here?” Wash asked Sam.
“To meet her,” Sam replied. “Because you’re something amazing.” The smile he wore widened just a little. “I’ve followed all of this since the very beginning. Since the very first story, my brother and I both.” His voice rose and his body rocked and swayed with the energy of his excitement. “You’re amazing. You really did something!”
Ava studied Sam. She watched him as if she were watching an envoy of the entire world.
“How long have you been able to do it?” Sam asked.
“Can we go, Ava?” Wash said. He tugged Ava’s arm, but still she remained. “I don’t like this guy,” he said. “He’s...I don’t think he’s a hundred percent.”
“My brother is like you,” Sam said. “He’s a healer.” Then Sam’s smile cracked for a moment, as though an unpleasant memory were intruding upon the moment. “He does what he can to help me,” Sam said, and his voice was full of apology, “but I’m still not better.”
“I should go,” Ava said. The air was suddenly colder than it had been. A tremble ran through her body and she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I should get back,” she said.