by Jason Mott
She did not know exactly when she had fallen asleep, but she was jarred by the sensation of waking. She was afraid of how much time might have passed and how the world might have changed. “Ava?” she called out. “Ava, where are you?”
“Settle down,” Dr. Arnold said. He motioned for Delores and Brenda to help hold Carmen down. She was sweating heavily, and the bed beneath her legs was drenched with blood.
* * *
Brenda had come out of the room to get water for Carmen when she passed the window and first caught sight of the people. There was a small crowd, perhaps only seven or eight of them as best she could make out in the dimness of the streetlights lining the road. But, behind them, she could see that there were more on the way. “Delores?” Brenda called. “Delores, come here. Come quick.”
Brenda could hear the shuffling of Delores’s feet as she rushed to the front door. “Lord, Brenda. What’s so important that you’d pull me away?”
Brenda nodded to the window. The group of people were coming across the front lawn now, looking up at the house. She could see that some of them were hurt. Behind them, down the street, she could see more coming. The fire department of Stone Temple only had one ambulance, and it could take up to a half hour for the paramedics to show up from one of the nearby towns—and that was before the roads were crowded with people hoping to get a glimpse of the Miracle Child. So, now, the people came, with more following, to where the doctor lived and where the healing girl was being kept.
“Goodness,” Delores said. “I’ll get my husband.”
“I don’t think they came for your husband,” Brenda said.
“Of course they did,” Delores replied. “What else could they have come here for?” She walked past Brenda and opened the door. “Come in,” she said, waving her hands. “Come in and we’ll get you taken care of.” Her hands flapped in front of her, motioning for people to come inside. “I’ll get my husband,” she said. “We’ll get you all taken care of until we can find some more help here.”
“Is Ava in there?” someone asked.
“What?” Delores asked. Her hands stopped moving.
“I told you,” Brenda said, backing away from the door. “Shut the door,” she said.
“I’ll do no such thing,” Delores said. Then she turned back to the crowd. “Well, yes, Ava is in here. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. You folks need medical attention. I’m a nurse and my husband is a doctor. What’s that girl got to do with anything?”
“Shut the door,” Brenda repeated. She backed to the stairs, blocking them and, at the same time, listening upstairs for Ava and Wash, but not hearing them.
“It’s okay,” Delores said, her voice thin.
There was still the sound of the fire burning in the center of town. There was the glow of the fire and the glimmer of the lights from the fire trucks. There was the sound of people yelling, giving orders. Perhaps one of those voices was Macon’s. Then a woman standing in the crowd before Dr. Arnold’s house stepped forward, holding a child in her arms. “Please,” a woman said, holding her child. “You’ve got to do something.” Her child was young, no more than four or five, and his shirt was covered in blood. There was a large gash on the child’s head and the blood was running down his face and onto his clothes in spite of the way his mother held a cloth against the wound. “You’ve got to do something,” the woman said.
“Oh, Lord,” Delores said. “Come inside, quick!”
“Not you,” the woman said. “Not the doctor. The girl. Ava.”
“Ava can’t help you,” Brenda said, stepping forward into the doorway. “But there’s a nurse and a doctor here who’ll do everything they can, every single thing possible. Now get in here.”
“Yes,” Delores agreed. “Your boy needs help.”
“I want Ava to help him,” the woman said. “I want to know that he’s healed. I want to know that he’ll be okay. She’s the only one who can do that.”
“She can’t help everyone,” Brenda said. She looked over the crowd as she said it, hoping that they would somehow understand, but knowing full well that they would not.
“Just help my child,” the woman said.
“We’ll get your son to a hospital as soon as we can,” Delores said. “My husband will do everything he can.”
“I don’t want a hospital,” the woman yelled. “I want her help!”
“She can’t help you,” Brenda said.
“Who are you to decide?” a man said. He pressed forward and stood beside the woman with the injured child. “Who are you to say? What gives you the right?”
“Settle down,” Brenda said.
“We deserve help,” someone yelled. “She needs to help us.”
“This will all be sorted out properly,” Reverend Brown said, his voice booming. He raced up the front yard, his voice booming ahead of him as he spoke. The crowd parted to let him through. His coming impressed upon the crowd that they should behave as best they could, a sense that there was a judgment that might be passed upon them. But the lull it created did not last.
The arguing began quickly. The man standing in the front of the crowd bolted forward, past Brenda and Delores, and into the house. “Where is she?” he yelled. “Where is she?”
“Get the hell out of here,” Brenda yelled. The man dashed from room to room, calling Ava’s name. “There’s help here if you need it,” Brenda said, “but the girl will stay out of it.” She stood at the bottom of the stairs, planted and firm as an oak.
After he was done checking the rest of the house, the man looked at her thoughtfully, his mind adding things up. “She’s upstairs,” the man said, as if both creating and confirming the theory at the same time.
“And to hell with you if you think you’re getting past me,” Brenda said. She made her hands into fists at her side.
“You’ve got to stop this,” Delores said. She spoke with her hands flapping around her. Her nerves had always been weak, and the way things were turning was doing nothing to help that. “My husband and I can help everyone,” she said. “Or, if we can’t, we’ll make sure you’re okay until we can get you over to the hospital.”
Still Brenda and the man locked eyes on each other. He walked over to the old woman. Brenda was tall, but the man was taller. He looked down at her with a hard, angry face. “Move,” he growled.
“You’ll have to kill me,” Brenda said. “And even God Almighty ain’t figured out how to do that one yet.”
The moment stretched out. The man stood firmly and stared down at the old, red-haired matriarch. And like the mountains themselves, Brenda waited, and did not move until, finally, the man turned and walked out of the house.
Brenda sat on the bottom stair as the people entered the house and Delores and Dr. Arnold began hustling to take care of them. She would protect the children at any cost.
But it was not until sometime later, when she finally had a moment to check on them, that she would find them missing.
Ava and Wash were already half a mile way—escaped through the upstairs window, dipping between the houses, disappearing into the night, into the loneliness of the mountains.
They woke in the short hours before dawn and her mother had breakfast ready even though the day was still far off. Ava’s eyes burned with drowsiness but her mother had made cocoa and the house was thick with the smell of pancakes and the television in the living room was turned on to a low murmur that was warm and welcoming.
“How long until sunrise?” Ava asked.
“About an hour,” her mother said. “But we’re going to have to make it on up the mountain soon. So don’t dawdle with breakfast.”
They ate quickly and left the house into the cool darkness with the smell of maple syrup and coffee clinging to the collars of their jackets. The crickets trilled and the wind was still and it seemed that they could make out the sound of the dew falling through the leaves of the trees—a gentle tapping, like a small question being asked again and ag
ain by the earth.
They made their way in silence up the mountain. Heather carried a small flashlight and swung the beam of it back and forth on the path even though her legs knew the way well enough. Ava held her hand as they walked and the morning dew wet her shoes and dampened the bottom of her pants. She liked the smell of the grass and the loamy stench of the earth they left behind them as they trekked up the mountain.
When they had crested the mountain, Ava’s mother turned eastward and led the child into a small clearing with a stone outcropping that looked out over the entire mountain range—a shaggy band of blue-black beneath the moonless night sky.
“Come sit,” Heather said. She settled upon a large slab of stone and folded her legs and stared off to the east. Then she reached into the pockets of her large jacket and waited.
“How much longer?” Ava asked, settling onto the stone beside her mother. The rock was cold and slightly wet beneath her. It was a detail that she knew would stay with her.
“Not long,” Heather said. “Look.” And then she pointed off to the east and, with a quickness that Ava could not have imagined, the sky was already casting off its darkness, the stars receding gently.
“Look through this,” Heather said, handing Ava a dark piece of square glass from her jacket pocket.
“Why do I need this?”
“Because you’ll go blind otherwise. That’s how the sun works, kiddo.”
And then there was fire in the east. A bright torch from behind the trees that grew into a well of light that swelled and swelled—perfectly circular—and when Ava looked, her mother was holding the smoked glass in front of her, staring into the sun, and Ava did the same.
“The sun gets smaller when I look through the glass. What happened?” Ava asked.
“That’s what the sun really looks like from this far away.”
Ava took the glass away from her eyes and the sun was a huge glowing ball of fire that sent pinpricks of pain into the backs of her eyes. And then, with the glass, it was smaller than a dime again.
“Magic,” Ava said softly.
The two of them sat and watched the sun clear the horizon and then they saw when the moon rose up and conquered a third of the sun, and Ava was torn between watching the eclipse through the smoked glass that would protect her eyes and staring headlong into the brightness. She felt that there was something being lost in the transition between the glass and the naked eye.
“Is that really the moon?” Ava asked.
“It’s the moon,” Heather replied.
“Is it going to block out the sun?”
“Not completely. Today it’s only a partial eclipse. There won’t be another full eclipse for a few more years.”
“And that’s when the moon completely blocks out the sun?”
“That’s right.”
Ava continued to watch the sun and moon dance with each other through the smoky glass. Already the moon was receding, the dark spot of ink slowly marching out of view. Ava pictured the sun and moon and the earth in her mind. She had trouble giving them scope and distance. They were simply three large orbs—one yellow, one blue and one white. In her mind, the sun changed size, going from large and blindingly bright, to the small yellow dot she saw through the smoky glass.
It was a universe difficult to contain in her mind, but she did her best.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Heather said finally. And when Ava looked she saw that the moon had completely passed from the sun. It had returned to being simply a small, perfect dot of yellow in front of her.
Ava stopped looking through the glass and suddenly she could feel the warmth of the sun pouring over her. The world looked different from anything she had ever remembered seeing. The bushy green rug of trees and brush and rocks and earth stretched out before her. Suddenly the world felt small and large at the same time. It seemed to breathe.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Heather said.
It was only two days later—when the echo of this time together still reverberated in her daughter’s mind—that Heather would hang herself.
NINE
THEY COULD JUST make out the radio tower blinking in the distance above the trees and above the mountain. Ava pointed and told Wash that was where they had to go. “Why?” Wash asked, huffing from the effort. He had not yet thought of how they would achieve this escape.
“Trust me,” she said, and then she pulled him forward.
When they first got out of town and into the woods she gave him one of her sweaters to wear so that he had some layers of his own. It smelled of her, and he liked wearing it beneath his jacket more than he cared to admit. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get some of your clothes,” Ava said. “I didn’t really plan this.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Wash said.
Ava trudged onward and, as if pulled by gravity, Wash followed. They treaded through darkness and underbrush, moving as fast as either of them could manage. Sweat beaded up on Ava’s brow. Her head lolled. She stumbled now and then.
“Maybe we should stop,” Wash said. He could not ignore the way her clothes hung loosely from her body. They swallowed her up, even with the layers she wore. She seemed to be disappearing, even as she stood in front of him.
“We can’t stop,” Ava huffed. But she had already come to a standstill. Her body swayed in the cold wind racing up the mountain. She closed her eyes and held her breath and Wash watched her, not knowing what to do or what to say to bring back the Ava he used to know.
“We’ve got to stop,” Wash said. He found a fallen log that would hold them. “Come sit.” He tucked his hands into his pockets and waited. After a moment Ava walked slowly toward Wash and sat on the tree beside him. “What’s going on, Ava? I mean, what’s really happening?”
“I wonder what happened in town,” Ava said. She looked in the direction of home, but the mountain blocked her view. She rubbed her temples to push away the headache that was growing steadily inside her. “You think Dad and Carmen are okay?” she asked.
“I’m sure your dad’s fine,” Wash answered. “I’m not sure we should have left Carmen, though.”
“I know,” Ava replied. She prepared to add to the statement, but she chose to swallow the words instead.
“I wonder if they’re taking her to the hospital.” Wash stood and, as Ava had done, looked in the direction of Stone Temple. He knew there was no way to see the town from where they were. There was too much distance between them—too much stone and earth, too many decisions they probably shouldn’t have made. But regardless of whether or not he thought they should have run away, there was never any question as to whether or not he should have followed Ava. They were caught in the gravity of each other, just as they always had been.
If he had stayed, she would have stayed. But since she left, he left.
“We should go,” Ava said. She stood slowly. Her body swayed and she stumbled a little, but finally she caught her balance. After a few deep breaths, she gathered herself. “I’m okay,” she said preemptively, looking at Wash. He was worried enough about her that it would not take much for him to turn back, and that was not part of her plan.
“They’ll catch up to us eventually,” Wash said. “You know they’re not going to just let us run off like this.”
“I know,” Ava said. She tucked her hands into her pockets and shrugged away the cold. Her teeth had begun chattering and she tightened her jaw to stop them.
“Then what are we doing?” Wash asked.
“Just trust me, Wash,” she replied.
“When haven’t I?”
And off they went.
The two of them high-stepped over the underbrush and rocks and fallen branches and mysterious things that reach out from the darkness of a nighttime mountain and hinder progress. Wash had always been a little clumsy, and not being able to see much of where he was going now did not help things. He tripped over rocks, stumbled at dips in the path and generally had a tough time of things. His legs quickl
y grew tired and his ankles were sore from being rolled. There were a dozen things he wished he and Ava had done differently. They should have brought flashlights. They should have brought food. They should have brought more clothes. They should have chosen another path.
The fact that Ava was taking them north was of particular concern to Wash. The mountains around Stone Temple were formed so that, of all the cardinal directions a person could choose, north was the most difficult. The mountain rose and fell with both swiftness and suddenness. There were jagged patches where a bad stumble meant landing on the point of a rock. And there were places where the rocks were smooth and flat and, as the night brought dew, it was easy to slide and tumble down a long, unforgiving slope.
And to worsen matters there was no moon to see by. Over time Wash’s and Ava’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, but it was only the fact that they had traveled upon this land before that they made any headway and were not yet injured.
All of the worry about the mountain, all of the thoughts of the town, all of the stress over what they were doing, all of it swirled around in Wash’s mind. He needed a distraction to keep himself from taking Ava by the hand and screaming for her to go back to town. Whatever it was she was leading them to, he wanted to let her have it. There are times in a life when one person follows another, regardless of where it leads. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid.
“I wish I’d brought my copy of Moby Dick,” he said. He decided not to call attention to the fact that it was night and the sky was moonless and, even if he had brought his book, he would have no way of seeing the words. “We need something to talk about,” he added.
“I want to go back to that house,” Ava said. She was ahead of him on the trail and marching slowly, but in the stillness of the night, her voice carried. It was full of fatigue.
Wash was surprised by the topic. He didn’t want to think about houses because that meant thinking about being indoors and warm and not alone in the middle of the woods. He tried to think of a joke, any joke at all, to lighten the mood, to further distract them. But nothing came to mind. “What house?” he asked.