The Wonder of All Things

by Jason Mott

  “Okay,” the woman said finally.

  Ava was helped into a wheelchair and rolled down the corridors of the hospital. Wash walked beside her. She was tired and cold and hurting and there were people shouting her name, asking for help, asking for healing. But all she thought of was Carmen.

  * * *

  “What are you doing here?” Macon asked when they entered the room. “What are you doing bringing her here?” he asked the nurse. His voice was bitter and hard. “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “It’s not her fault,” Wash said. “I made her bring us. Ava wanted to come.”

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I just didn’t know what else to do. She kept demanding to be brought in to see her stepmother. I tried to stop her, but the two of them...they—”

  “Get out,” Macon snapped. “Go get a doctor.”

  The woman left without a word.

  “Where’s the baby?” Ava asked. She was still in the wheelchair, with her arms folded across her stomach. Because of her blindness, Ava could not see the incubator in front of which Macon was standing. She could not see the way his face was streaked with tears. And she could not see the small, fragile child inside the incubator—attached to hoses and tubes, struggling to breathe each breath.

  “She’s here,” Macon replied. The hardness was gone from his voice, replaced by the weakness of a frightened father. “You’ve got a sister now. Her name’s Elizabeth. She’s beautiful—just like you, just like Carmen.” He paused. “But the baby’s struggling. She’s got blood in her lungs.”

  “Let me help her,” Ava said.

  The statement floated in the air. It expanded until it filled the entire room and pushed into Macon’s chest and made his lungs tighten. “No,” he said. Ava could not see the way he trembled when he said the word. “You’ll die,” he continued. “I’ve already lost your mother. I won’t lose you, too.” He looked at the baby. “I won’t lose anyone else. I won’t.”

  “Dad,” Ava called. She sat up straight and tried to look as strong and confident as she could. She needed to convince her father to let her do the thing that he was afraid to. She needed him to believe that she could survive helping the child, that everything would be okay, that the entire family would survive the night.

  She needed him to hold to that truth, even if she was not certain of it herself.

  “Dad,” Ava repeated when Macon did not answer. “I’ll be okay. You won’t lose me. Let me help my sister. Let me help Elizabeth.” Then, with Wash’s help, she stood and followed as the boy led her across the room to where Elizabeth lay.

  Macon made a move to stop her, but he did not follow it through. A part of him knew that she would not be okay, no matter how much his daughter wanted him to believe it. But what about his other daughter? What about Elizabeth? If Ava could help the child, shouldn’t she be allowed to try? He could no more bear the thought of losing one of them than he could bear the thought of losing them both.

  He was trapped between two horrors, and they paralyzed him into inaction.

  “She’s right in front of you,” Wash whispered into Ava’s ear when they reached the incubator. There were latches that sealed it, and the boy released them. “Here,” he said, and guided Ava’s hand.

  Ava reached forward into the darkness until her hand touched the edge of the bassinet. It was cool to the touch. Then her hand felt the softness of a blanket. She slid her hand forward slowly, afraid that she could hurt the baby, but knowing that her intentions were just the opposite. The baby was impossibly soft when she finally touched her. With skin like cloth itself. And her mind marveled at how small she was, how tender. Anything in the world could break her, she thought.

  “Ava...” Wash said.

  “It’s okay, Wash,” Ava replied. Then she placed her hand atop the child’s.

  What came next was like falling—a lifting off and a pulling down all at once. Memory upon memory rose up in her mind. Everything that she had lost of her mother after the woman’s death came back to her, as though a door had been unlocked in her mind. She remembered the night a bear came to their house. She remembered the clanging pots and pans, all the ways the family hoped to keep the outside world at bay. She remembered going to the fair, being carried on her father’s shoulders, the way her mother smiled that night. She also remembered the way the smile faded at the end of the evening, and how that change was the beginning of her understanding of her mother. The day the two of them spent digging in the backyard, the day they went off and found a puzzle box at a yard sale...all of it came back to her and, for the first time ever, she saw the entirety of her mother—all of her mother’s grandness, all of her terror, the ebb and flow of her mother’s emotions, the shifts between happiness and joy. All of it Ava could see and understand suddenly.

  An entire lifetime came and went and, in the scope of understanding its entirety, Ava could finally see the long, winding road that led her mother to the rafters of the barn that day. And she could see that, upon that road, there was no guilt. She had loved her mother. And her mother had loved her. And, sometimes in life, love and loving can still lead to an ending that we would otherwise choose. A fate with no blame to be taken. She understood that, in this world, there are unexplained wonders and faultless horrors both.

  * * *

  “We’re going to get you help, Ava,” Wash said. His voice was low and far away, like the calling of a bird in the deep of the night. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his in reply. She could not tell how long he had been speaking to her. “You did it,” he said, his voice heavy with sadness. “You healed the baby.”

  “Good,” Ava said, slowly waking. Before her eyes she still saw only darkness, but at least the pain was gone. Replacing it there was simply a numbness, a type of drifting off that her body seemed to be doing, getting farther and farther away from the girl. She wished she could have seen Wash’s face.

  “Don’t go drifting off,” Wash said, and Ava could hear the tears in his voice just as clearly as if she had been able to see them on his face.

  Somewhere far away Macon was yelling, calling for help. Screaming for people to rush from whatever they were doing. But then the sound of his voice drifted away into the darkness, the way her body was doing. She could not feel her feet or her legs. And her arms were little more than imaginings—like constructs of dust and air.

  But she could not let go of Wash’s voice.

  “Talk to me, Wash,” Ava said.

  “Talk about what?” he replied.

  “Read to me,” she said. She could feel a weight on her chest, rising up and down slowly. She could count by the rhythm of it. Up, down...up, down... The weight continued. But it was slowing, ever so slightly, as time marched forward. “Where’s your copy of Moby Dick?”

  She heard Wash laugh. Or perhaps it was a sob hidden within a laugh.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. “The truth is I hate that book. I always have.” His voice was confessional and apologetic—as if he had held the words within himself for too long. “Honestly, I don’t understand it. It’s a mess. But I always wanted you to think I was smart and it’s a book that smart people like.”

  Ava laughed, and she hoped that it did not sound mocking. It was not meant to. Again, she wished that she could see Wash’s face. “I know,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you say anything?” He laughed now, and it was genuine. “Why’d you suffer through it?”

  “Because I can’t think of a single time when I didn’t want to hear the sound of your voice,” Ava replied. The up-and-down sensation she felt in her chest was still fading. She understood now that the feeling was that of her lungs, slowing. “Just talk to me, Wash,” Ava said. “Sing something to me. I just want to hear your voice a little more.”

  “All the songs I know are about people dying,” Wash said. He spoke slowly, as if each word were an anvil falling upon his heart. Then, after a moment, Ava heard the boy clear his throat. The song he sang then was one that she h
ad never heard before. It was a ballad, soft and somber. It spoke of a man and a woman, of love, of loss, of the moment between the loving and the losing, of the starlight that shined down upon her body as she lay by a slow-moving river and he held her and wished that things could be different than they had been.

  He sang beautifully. His voice was rich and deep. It did not falter the way it always had. He did not stagger, he did not pause. She could see the story of his song. She could see the words themselves in the darkness of her mind. They shined like a sea of fireflies.

  The song broke off halfway through. She could hear him crying. “Don’t cry, Wash,” Ava said.

  “I’m not crying,” he sobbed. She heard his sniffle. “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

  “You are, too,” Ava replied softly.

  The boy paused. He put together the pieces of their time together that night, and the terrible truth of it washed over him. Then, after a moment, he said, “It was up on the mountain, wasn’t it? You did something when you kissed me.” His voice found its footing. “That’s when you started getting sick. You healed me when you kissed me, didn’t you? And that’s why you got sick, isn’t it?” He swallowed. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, sorrow clouding his words.

  “How does the song end?” Ava asked.

  “What?”

  “Your song,” she said slowly. “How does it end?”

  “It ends the way all those songs end,” Wash said after a moment.

  To Ava, his voice became heavy and old, as though all of the years of his future life had come to settle inside of him all at once. As if he would never again be a child from this point forward.

  “But it doesn’t have to end that way,” Wash said. Then, without pausing, he cleared the sadness from his throat and, after a moment, resumed the song that he had been singing for Ava. There was still death and sorrow in the tale, but it began to turn. It became a song of love, a ballad of renewal, a story that, at the end of which, just when the two lovers were farthest apart, they found each other, and lived.

  They both lived.

  Then the faraway feeling in Ava’s legs and arms, the numbness, disappeared. The darkness created by her blindness became deeper and she felt as if she were moving through it at an impossible speed, flying, free and liberated. There was no fear in this moment, in this letting go that was happening, because behind it all—soft and warm and almost calling to her—was the sound of Wash’s voice. It was everything: that sound, that cadence, that piece of the boy that she would never let go of, not even in death. And his voice pulled her toward it. It became a beacon, a mixture of light and sound at the end of a tunnel walled in by darkness. She raced toward it, toward the light, toward the voice of the boy she loved.

  It was October, the time of the Fall Festival. Stone Temple’s final celebration before the snow and the hard, cold nights—that long, lethargic continuity of winter—would come and settle upon the town and its inhabitants. Each year the townspeople assembled at the sweeping, open field that sat in the bowl of the mountains. They set up bleachers and sheltered them around the old grain silo that was no longer used and vendors came and there was popcorn and cotton candy and funnel cakes and pies and exotic decorations, the likes of which the children of small towns are seldom to find in their portion of this world.

  Each year everyone in the town attended, and when Ava was six years old her mother and father bundled her up for the cold wind that would come sweeping down off the northern mountains once the sun set and the lights of the festival began to glow and they took her to the festival, hoping that she would finally be old enough that the memory of it would stay with her.

  She spent most of the evening in a dream of amazement. The sights and sounds and the smell of sweet, candied fruit that her parents rarely allowed her was intoxicating. She rode the Ferris wheel for the first time just before sunset and craned her neck to look up into the sky as a man in a small airplane performed stunts in the fading light. He rose and fell through the sky as it slid from blue to gold to purple and the blackness of night encroached. And then the announcer in the grain silo made a remark about the pending darkness. The man in the airplane landed in the far end of the field and the crowd cheered. Ava asked her father how it was that planes were able to fly and he smiled at her and said, simply, “All things are possible in this world.”

  It was after the Ferris wheel—when the night was fully stretched across the earth—that Ava met the boy. She was standing in line for cotton candy with her parents when she saw him in front of her looking back at her with an expression of great curiosity. He was small for his age and very pale, with brown hair and a sharp nose and he sucked his thumb.

  Around the two of them there was the buzz of people talking and vendors shouting for patrons to test their luck and calls for people to buy tickets to the haunted house at the far end of the festival and on and on. It was an ocean of sound that could become so loud at times it made Ava’s ears hurt. But in spite of all this, she heard very clearly when the boy in front of her took his thumb out of his mouth and waved at her and said in a polite voice, “Hi. I’m Wash.”

  “I’m Ava,” she said.

  And then he stepped forward and took her hand in that gentle way that children do and said, “Do you want to come over to my house and play?”

  Ava nodded happily.

  Ava’s parents and the boy’s parents looked down at the children and they laughed. And the laughter was light and full of joy and free of worry. “Instant friends,” Wash’s father said, and the adults laughed again.

  The children stood and looked at each other and they could not help but smile at the exuberance of their parents. They shared the cotton candy they had both been waiting in line for and, for the rest of the night, they would not be parted from each other. They walked among the lights and glitter of the evening, talking and holding hands, and creating the future that they would share together.

  Ava held Wash’s hand for as long as she could that night. In her heart, she made the childish promise to never let him go.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE RETURNED by Jason Mott

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO Michelle Brower and Erika Imranyi, the best agent and the best editor I could have ever asked for. And let me give a particularly huge verbal hug to Erika for everything she’s done for me as an editor. Too many good deeds to recount, but they are all remembered and appreciated.

  A huge round of high fives to the usual rogue’s gallery of friends and family who continue to love, support and encourage me. There are too many to list here, but I pray that you all know how much I love you and how grateful I am to have you in my life.

  Lastly, I would like to especially thank my readers and fans. I’ve discovered many wonderful, warm and loving people in the past year, and I cannot thank you enough for the kindness you have all shown me.

  “The Returned transforms a brilliant premise into an extraordinary and beautifully realized novel. My spine is still shivering from the memory of this haunting story. Wow.”

  —Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  If you loved The Wonder of All Things by New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, be sure to read his spellbinding emotional debut, The Returned. Available now wherever ebooks are sold.

  “Exceptional.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Breathtaking.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Eloquent.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “This is a masterly first novel for Mott.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

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  “A twisty, roller coaster ride of a debut. Fans of Gone Girl will embrace this equally evocative tale of a missing woman, shattered family and the lies we tell not just to each other, but especially to ourselves.”

  —Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fear Nothing

  If you’re looking for an addictively suspenseful and tautly written thriller, be sure to catch The Good Girl, a compulsive debut by Mary Kubica, where you’ll find that even in the perfect family, nothing is as it seems…

  Available in ebook. Order your copy today!

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  Deeply Moving

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  If you’re looking for more addictively compelling and emotional reads, be sure to catch these outstanding titles, only from Harlequin MIRA Books:

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  Available in ebook format. Order your copies today!

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