The Wonder of All Things

by Jason Mott

  “Hey, Dad,” she said softly.

  Macon crossed the room at a lope and placed his arms around her. He hugged her and, simultaneously, began checking to see if she was injured. “Are you okay?” he asked, then he turned to Wash. “Are the both of you okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Wash said.

  “Ava,” Macon said, taking his daughter’s face in his hands. “Ava, what were you thinking? You could have been killed. You have to know that.”

  “I needed to get away,” Ava replied. “Even if it was just for a little while.”

  “Where did you think you were going?”

  “Nowhere. Just here. Just away from everyone.”

  “Jesus,” Macon said, and he hugged her again. He held her tightly and kissed the top of her head. “You could have been killed,” he said. “I could have lost you.” He took a moment and studied her face, and it was as though he were seeing her for the first time in years. Finally, more clearly than he had before, he saw the thinness of her face, the way the skin seemed stretched too tightly over the bones. He saw circles of exhaustion around her eyes. He felt the texture of her hair—dry and brittle, as if it, too, were worn too thin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for all of this. But running away isn’t the answer.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Ava said.

  “I know,” Macon replied. “I know you don’t.” He sat beside her. Wash eased down onto the other side of the girl. “I know you want to get away, you want for all of this to end, but I’m sure you also know that we can’t sit here and pretend that the two of you running away into the night is something that we can just let happen.” He sighed and looked down at his hands, as if laying blame upon them. “We’ll go back and things will be different,” he said.

  “No, they won’t,” Ava replied. She leaned against Wash. “They’ll never leave me alone. This will never stop.”

  “That’s not true,” Macon said, though he wasn’t sure if he believed it. “I’ll find some way to make all of this better, to make everyone go away and leave us alone. I can fix all of this. I can get our lives back to the way they were, back to normal.”

  “She’s not going to do it anymore,” Wash said. “Not for you, not for anyone.” He looked into Macon’s eyes as he said it. Even though he was still a child, and a Southern child—raised with all the rules of formality between adults and children, indoctrinated with the belief that parents knew what was best and it was a child’s position to do as they were told—regardless of all of that, he still cared for Ava and he had promised to take care of her. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  “I know you won’t, Wash,” Macon said. “And neither will I. I promise it’ll be different. It’ll be like it was. It’ll just take some time to sort out, is all. I’ll admit, people won’t forget quickly or easily.” Macon sighed. “You’re able to help people, Ava,” he said, taking his daughter’s face in her hands. “You’re able to help people and give them hope and do things that no one else in this world is able to do.”

  “She deserves her own life,” Wash said.

  “And she’ll have it,” Macon said.

  “They’re always going to want something,” Ava said. “There’s always going to be someone who wants me to help them. And I’ll have to tell them no—over and over again. I’ll have to say no like I did to the boy at the church and I’ll have to see that look he had in his eyes.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to have to do that,” she said. Her voice began to tremble. “But I can’t keep doing this, either,” she said.

  Both Macon and Wash searched for the words to comfort the girl. They knew what they wanted to say, how they wanted to reassure her that there was another possible outcome to all of this. But when they both imagined all the ways that the future might unfold for Ava from this point forward, the consequences of her gift upon a world that longed for such things was irrevocable and undeniable.

  She would never be allowed to rest. Never be allowed to live a normal life. She would always be imposed upon, always hounded, pulled in a million and one directions.

  “I’m sorry,” Macon said.

  “I want to help people,” Ava replied. She looked up at her father. “If it was just that I got tired or sick after I did it, I could handle that. I’d get through it. I’d keep doing it. But every time I do it, I remember Mom. Every single time, something that I had forgotten about her comes back to me. And that wouldn’t be so bad, but I wonder...I wonder if I could have helped her. I wonder if I had it in me to heal her before she killed herself and I missed it.” She was crying now. “I can’t help but think it was my fault.”

  Macon pulled her close and hugged her tightly. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.” He repeated the sentence again and again. Saying it to Ava, but also saying it to himself.

  “Why did she do it, Dad?” Ava asked. Her voice was full of years of pain and longing, full of too long spent not understanding how it could be that a mother, a wife, could end it all, step off into the darkness of eternity, leaving a family adrift in the world behind her.

  “I don’t know why she did it,” Macon said. His voice shook, and he was crying, as well, though he did not know when it had begun. “I wish I could say why she did it, but the truth is that I don’t know. I’m not sure one person can ever truly know or understand why someone does something like that. But I do know that it doesn’t mean she loved you any less. It doesn’t mean you missed something or failed to do something. It doesn’t mean it was your fault,” he said.

  And then the two of them wept together, and Macon rocked back and forth slowly and squeezed his daughter more tightly and he wished that he, finally, started to believe for himself that his wife’s death had not been his own fault. He had carried inside himself, over the years, just as much guilt about Heather’s death as Ava had. Likely as not, he carried more, because Ava had only been a child at the time when, if Heather had given any signals about what she was about to do, they might have been noticed. But he was the one who had missed the signs. He was the one who had been too busy or too distracted or whatever it was that made a person not realize when something so terrible was on the verge of happening.

  He had blamed himself for his wife’s death. Each and every day he blamed himself, though he did not realize it until now, when his daughter wept in his arms, begging to be forgiven for something that was not her fault.

  “It was nobody’s fault,” he repeated. “We both loved her. And she knew that we loved her and she loved us back. That’s all we can ever hope for in life.”

  * * *

  The march back to town was long and winding. Macon carried Ava in his arms. She was limp, drifting in and out consciousness. Eventually they emerged from the forest with Macon, and a crowd raced to them, cheering.

  Macon called for an ambulance and, maybe because he was the sheriff but more likely because the Miracle Child was sick and needed help, the paramedics came immediately and they began the long drive to the hospital.

  Wash would not let Ava out of his sight. “We’ll get her to the doctor,” everyone said. She was placed on a stretcher in back of the ambulance and she, Macon and Wash started off over the mountain. There was a crowd of people and cars along the road, but they parted when they heard that the ambulance was carrying Ava.

  “You kids gave everyone a good scare,” the paramedic in the ambulance said. He monitored Ava’s vitals as he spoke. “I can’t believe I’m the one who gets to save you,” he said to Ava. Outside the van, as they passed alongside the mountain, they could see the flashing of camera lights as they zoomed over the two-lane road out of Stone Temple. The world would not let her go. They would be there in Asheville, she knew, waiting, snapping photographs, waiting for her to tell her story.

  But she would disappoint them all. For now, she simply had to hold on.

  “Has anyone heard anything about my wife?” Macon asked the man in the back of the ambulance.

  “Who’s
your wife?” he responded, though his attention was still focused on Ava

  “Shit,” Macon said. He took out his phone and called Carmen. No answer. When he tried Brenda, the result was the same.

  “Is Carmen okay?” Ava asked.

  “I’m sure she is,” Macon replied quickly. “She’s at the hospital with Brenda. We’ll check on them when we get there and get you squared away.”

  “Did she have the baby?” Wash asked.

  “I don’t know,” Macon replied. “I don’t know anything,” he added.

  When they had finally made their way through the sediment of people and were starting down the mountain properly, the paramedic driving reached into his pocket and took out his phone and started a conversation with someone. “She’s right here,” he said proudly. “I get to bring her back. Can you believe that?”

  Macon reached out and snatched the phone from the man’s hand. He dropped it to the floor and stepped on it without explanation or apology.

  Wash hated the man driving just then. He hated whoever it was the man was talking to. He hated all of the people who had been there when they had emerged from the forest, watching them pull away and start down the mountain. He hated everyone who had come to Stone Temple looking for some kind of salvation, and everyone sitting at home watching television and surfing the internet, waiting to hear that Ava had been found. He hated the world.

  “I wish we could have done it,” he whispered. “I wish we could have gotten away.”

  “We weren’t supposed to,” Ava whispered back, low and soft, her head rocking back and forth gently on the stretcher. Her thick dark hair formed a crown and framed her dark skin. She looked like a painting.

  Wash flinched. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was,” Ava said, “but I heard your voice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Ava replied. “That wasn’t how I meant it.” She coughed, and it was a wet, hacking cough. “I heard your voice the way I heard it that day in the hospital. You’ve got a good voice.”

  Ava shivered. Wash asked the paramedic for another blanket. Behind the ambulance there were the bright lights of others driving down the mountain, following the Miracle Child.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ava said softly.

  “Are you doing any better?” Wash asked.

  “No,” Ava said. Then: “You smell like pine needles.” She laughed softly.

  Wash looked out the window. The mountain fell away and, up ahead, he could see the lights of the town rising up from the darkness. Now and again they passed people parked along the edge of the road. Already the news that Ava was being brought back to town had spread and everyone was preparing. Some of the people held up signs. Others cheered and clapped as the police car passed. “I’m sorry,” Wash said.

  “For what?” Ava replied.

  “For being excited about all of this when it first started. For, I don’t know, for everything.”

  “Do you want to know something?” Ava asked.

  “Sure,” Wash replied.

  “I actually don’t mind Moby Dick. It’s not as bad as I always say it is.”

  Wash smiled, but with his face turned away, Ava could not see it. “That’s good to know,” he said. “It’s one of the best books in the world, you know.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing,” she replied. “Thank you for coming with me tonight. Thank you for making that fire.”

  “We had to stay warm,” Wash said.

  “I wasn’t asleep when you were making it,” Ava answered. “Not completely. I saw you. I could see your face in the light of the fire. You looked scared, but you kept going.”

  “You could have helped out,” Wash joked.

  “I liked watching you,” Ava said. “I liked the way your face looked.”

  Wash giggled. “First I smell like pine needles. And now you’re all obsessed with how my face looked. What happened to the Ava who told me I reminded her of the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters?”

  “They’re the same person,” Ava replied.

  Then there was a moment of silence in which Wash’s mind began to ponder the nature of their conversation. In all of his life, he had never heard Ava speak in the tone she had now. There was a quiet reservation in it, a type of “giving up.” As though, finally, she had stopped resisting something that she had been fighting against for a very long time. All of the talk of smells and how he had looked, as though she had been trying to capture images of him.

  It was then that the thought came into his mind. “Ava,” he said sharply. “Ava, open your eyes.”

  She hesitated. She grinned, but her expression was full of fear.

  “Please, Ava,” he said. He squeezed her hand and, slowly, she opened her eyes. Then, in the passing glare of the streetlights as they entered Asheville, he saw it: her eyes were filled with gray. It was as if she had captured the winter sky within them.

  “Ava,” Wash said slowly, “you can’t see, can you?”

  * * *

  When they reached the hospital Ava had vomited in the back of the ambulance. Hordes of people had gathered and were there to see it all when the doors were opened. But even the sight of it was not enough to quiet them. They still called her name, still yelled for her to turn and look at them so that they could better frame their photographs.

  The nurses raced her down the hall and into an examination room. Wash chased after, and when they told him he could not come with her, Macon told them simply, “He’s coming.”

  Then the onlookers became nothing more than a wall of flashing light and sound. The cameras flashed in brightness and everyone clamored. It took a line of policemen standing with arms interlinked to keep them all back.

  Though Ava could not see the lights and the people, she could feel their fervor. It was like the crashing of the ocean against the shore. But through it all, there was the sound of Wash’s voice—constant and familiar as a cone of light reaching out from a lighthouse—just as it had been that day in the hospital.

  “We’ll get you fixed,” Macon said.

  “Okay,” Ava said.

  The darkness in which Ava existed was not as terrifying as she had expected it to be. She was thankful that neither Wash nor her father could see the pain she felt. It was the same pain that she had felt every day since the beginning of all this: a constant type of hollowness, an emptiness in her bones and blood, as though certain parts of her did not exist anymore. The pain was rising, slowly. Filling her up like sand. She was better at controlling it than before. She was finally understanding how to navigate it, how to take it in small doses rather than to have it wash over her all at once.

  “Here we go,” Macon said as they finally placed her on the mattress. He stroked her head.

  Macon looked around for a doctor but there was none nearby. There were too many other patients with serious injuries that had been arriving from Stone Temple. The explosion and the fire that followed had injured more people than Macon expected. So the doctors did what they could, helping who they could. People were shouting for nurses and being rushed into surgery. The room was a maelstrom of people.

  Macon needed help for his daughter, and he also needed to find his wife.

  “Damned doctors,” he said in frustration.

  “Where’s Carmen?” Ava asked.

  “I’m going to find out,” Macon asked. “I just need you to stay here for a minute. I’ll be back,” he said, and he kissed Ava’s brow. “Just...just let me see that they’re okay.” A nurse came over and began checking Ava’s vitals. Macon said something to the woman, then raced off to find Carmen. In that one moment, he felt like a horrible father and husband. Nothing was going the way it should have gone. He did not want to leave Ava, but he had left Carmen for too long already. If things turned a certain way, he could lose a wife and two children tonight.

  There were no right decisions anymore. There were only the consequences of the decisions he made.

  “Where’s
Carmen?” Ava asked after Macon was gone.

  “I don’t know,” Wash replied. He looked around, just as Macon had done, but he saw nothing.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” Ava said softly. “I was asking the nurse.”

  The woman had been checking Ava’s blood pressure. She stopped. “Excuse me?”

  “Do you know who I am?” Ava asked. Though she could not see the nurse, she imagined her with a kind face, not unlike her mother’s and, at the same time, not unlike Carmen’s.

  “Of course I know who you are,” the woman replied. There was a small degree of reverence in her voice. To be sure, she knew who the Miracle Child was.

  “I need to find my stepmom,” Ava said. “Can you help me?”

  “You’re in no condition to go anywhere,” the woman said. The awe in her tone was lessened as her training as a nurse began finding its footing again. She was used to people trying to get up in the middle of an examination. People were stubborn when they were hurt, no matter if you were simply trying to help them.

  “Please,” Ava said. “I’m worried about her. Please.”

  Ava heard the clicking of camera shutters. “Get out of here!” the woman shouted. Then there came the sound of people shouting Ava’s name followed by more camera shutters. The reporters had made their way into the hospital. But still the nurse would not allow Ava off the examination table.

  It was Wash who ended the standoff.

  “She just wants to see her mother,” Wash said in a loud, pleading voice. Ava could only imagine the reaction on the woman’s face. Suddenly the sound of the cameras was louder than before. “She wants to see her mother and father and this woman won’t take her to them!” he shouted. Since the start of all this, the boy had learned, like Macon, that being the center of attention could be turned to one’s benefit when they needed it.

  The nurse protested, but Wash repeated it over and over again until it became an accusation that, with all of the cameras watching and recording it, the nurse could not ignore.