“Nothing,” I say. “Cake’s good.”
Dad sips wine from a paper cup. Trust my mother to bring a seventy-dollar bottle of wine to the park and my father to grab Dixie cups. But seriously, it’s good to see my dad in something other than sweats. He even shaved and put in his contact lenses. My mother is busy on her shiny phone. Up in the sky, the balloons are rainbow pinpricks in the blue. In two months, I think, I will be living in Portland, Oregon, and my life will be green and growing and new. I hear it’s different there in the fall. I hear they have something more like seasons.
Across the lawn, some young hippie types are having a barbecue, reggae on full blast. I smell the skunk from here. I squint my eyes at a guy in bell bottoms and big old-lady sunglasses resting on his ’fro. Even from thirty feet away, his staring problem is obvious. It’s probably the balloons. Then again, his eyes are very fixed down here on earth, specifically on me. A strange man’s gaze usually chills me. But everything—the tree-spotted park, the shouts of partygoers, the shuffle of my family’s nonconversation—becomes a green blur and white noise. The guy points at me. I point at myself. For one second, it’s as if there are only the two of us in this world and it’s quiet and full. Happy birthday to me.
That’s when I realize I went to elementary school with that guy, to junior high and high school, too; that guy’s slept over at my house. Once upon a memorial he used to come release balloons with us, but now he’s all grown up and probably stoned and having a blast, and here I am with my family and our sad-ass tradition.
Ava had a million friends, but her one best friend who was like her inseparable conjoined twin was such a usual sight in the house he had his own monogrammed placemat and napkin the way the Rivers kids did. He was a firecracker with a puff of amazing blond-tipped Afro hair and freckles on his brown face, who played piano and was a total Stevie wunderkind type and even his name made you go, yeah, this kid’s going places. Maximus Presley Spangler—aka Max.
Max Spangler has a name you almost have to say like that—Max Spangler, surname and all—no matter how many times he’s thrown water balloons at you and called you a smelly poo-poo face.
At the annual birthday balloon-a-palooza, Max used to write notes that were superlong poems and spent all this time drawing classy borders on the cards with several colors of Sharpie. The last time he showed up, he was fourteen, I think. It was our freshman year. He didn’t stay long. He had buzzed his head and grown so many inches I barely recognized him. We exchanged polite small talk sans eye contact. I saw him around the halls in high school, passed a smile back and forth now and then, but no words. And maybe this is crazy, but that look he gave back then—stuck on me, mouth corners turning down, glass-shine in his brown eyes—made me wonder if he wished hard it had been me and not Ava.
And now there are our juxtaposed barbecues and an impromptu staring contest. I’m slightly mortified, but he waves me over.
Me?
Really?
Lil old me?
My parents are opening a card and gazing at it together. FOR YOUR SPECIAL DAY, it says in glitter. Mom oohs and Dad grunts, unimpressed.
“Look,” Mom says. “Ozzie sent you a gift card. He’s sorry he couldn’t make it today.”
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
Maybe it’s the wine I gulped out of Dad’s cup a few minutes ago, but I’m a little bold at the moment. I mean, soon I’m going to be thrust into a new, stranger-filled habitat, so I’d better learn to schmooze it up like a normal human, right? I stride across the lawn toward Max as he loiters among his boho gang. Someone is doing a headstand for no apparent reason. A white girl with dreadlocks is dancing—poorly, I might add. Bongos are being played. It’s a group portrait of Berkeley stereotypes. Max stands there grinning with Mars-red eyes.
“Vera!” he says, and gives me a hug like this is normal, when actually we went through about ten-odd years of school together without exchanging multiple syllables at a time. I accept his embrace awkwardly, patting him once on the back.
“Nice glasses,” I tell him.
“Oh,” he says with a goofy, hyena-like laugh. He takes them off his head. “They’re my G-ma’s.”
“That’s cool she let you borrow them.”
“Yyyeah . . . she’s dead.”
“My condolences.”
“She’s been dead for a long time, actually, since, like, fifth grade,” he tells me, putting the glasses back on his head. “So, you know, it’s kosher.”
“Glad to hear.”
“But I found these old specs in our garage and I’ve been rocking them.”
“Suits you.”
This, I think, is why I usually avoid social interaction. But no. I refuse to give up. This is the new me, the new girl I’m going to be in Portland. I’m going to start conversations even if it means randomly discussing dead grandmas’ sunglasses with boys I hardly know.
My parents squint at me from their picnic table. Even from this distance, their suspicion reeks.
“So what’s the haps?” Max asks. “You having a . . .”
“Party,” I finish.
From here you can’t see the cake, and the balloons are all up in the atmosphere now.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s hard to tell,” I go on. “Pretty pathetic, right? Three people.”
“Intimacy’s tight.”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Happy birthday!” He turns around and yells at his friends. “Yo—this is Vera. It’s her birthday!”
The bongo guy bangs maniacally for a moment, I guess in celebration?
“Rad,” someone says.
“Um, thanks,” I say to Max.
My parents are now whispering to each other from the picnic table as they gape at me.
“I should go,” I say. “Back to the ‘party.’ You know, it’s her birthday, too, so that’s why we did the whole balloons thing.”
Max nods slowly.
“Ava,” I remind him.
“Yeah,” he says.
His face changes, a shadow passes over it, his smile disappears.
“Right,” he says. “That.”
That—my forever missing sister. The bummer bomb thrown into every interaction ever. I can’t wait to live a life far enough away from here that no one ever sighs and gets all sad-faced and says the word that. Like that.
“See you around,” I say.
“Man,” he says, shaking his head, suddenly sober.
I start to walk away, but he tugs my sleeve once.
“Sorry—I mean—we should hang sometime,” he says.
I turn, surprised.
“Um . . . sure.” I tell him my number, and he punches it into his phone. I consider letting him know I’ll be gone in two months, but think, Why bother? He won’t call.
I get back to my parents and they’re all questions. Do I know those people? Who was the boy I was talking to? It would take too long to explain it was Max, who they knew as a wee one, and they might even embarrass us all by trying to go say hi to him or something totally unnecessary like that. Dad chastises me for associating myself with “such inelegant bongo players.”
“Are there any other kinds?” I joke.
“Touché,” he says, patting my back.
I blink to watch an airplane pass the shrinking spectacle of balloons, and when I look back, Max’s back is turned to me. He’s got his arm around some long-haired dude with a didgeridoo. I hear laughter. I smell barbecue. And I realize how thirsty I am.
Dad gulps the last of his wine, crumples his cup, and tosses it in the trash while I pour myself a splash. He sits on the bench and opens his guitar case. His fingers find their places and he strums, watching the sky with squinty eyes. He sings lines about real life and fantasy and landslides and reality. His voice is so sincere and sweet, the guitar’s every string plucked s
o perfect, even the birds still themselves to listen.
My Dad, like Elliott, is a gifted guitar player and can sing as well as any radio star. Dad doesn’t do it often anymore, but when he does, even my mom stops what she’s doing. I try to imagine my dad when my parents first met—that shoulder-length hair in their wedding picture. And my mother, sans makeup, letting her freckles show. They are holding hands in that picture, and it breaks my heart. So simple. A thrilled clasp as they stood before the future unknown. The last time they held hands was so long ago that I had a sister.
I chime my tone-deaf voice into Dad’s song, belting the next line about being a poor boy and not needing sympathy. I add a falsetto Cockney accent just because why the hell not.
Dad laughs as he sings the next line and my mother says, “Oh Vera,” for the zillionth time in her life.
Oh Vera, oh Vera, oh Vera.
“Elliott call?” Mom asks me when I look at my phone.
“Yeah,” I lie.
Because he will. I know my brother. He will call. He will.
She shoots me a steely-eyed X-ray look that means, I know you’re lying, Vera Rose. She gives me a side hug and whispers happy birthday. But she’s not entirely happy. And it’s not entirely my birthday.
I love them, I do. But next year when I’m in Portland, I’ll be at my birthday with friends I haven’t even met yet, with people who have no idea who Ava is. And how free I’ll be then. How me I’ll be.
We pack up. The stoner barbecue has left a mess of beer cans on their picnic table. Max is nowhere to be seen. Look up—neither are Ava’s balloons.
6
ELLIOTT CALLS AFTER midnight. Let’s not get into technicalities, though. I’m still awake in bed, playing a game on my phone when it rings. I sit up. It’s a number I don’t recognize, which I know means it’s my brother on someone else’s phone.
“Yo,” I say.
“Well, happy birthday, little sister. Is that Vera-Bo-Bira-Nana-Fana-Fo-Feera I’m talkin’ to?”
He sounds, shall we say, festive. I can always tell how drunk my brother is by how southern he sounds. He’s not from the South; he’s from California, like me. But he has these characters he falls into—he’s been known to adopt a cartoonish French accent at the dinner table, leaves me voice messages in a weird Irish leprechaun voice, and acquires a southern drawl when he drinks. Only a couple of beers and we’re barely into Texas. But I can tell right now he’s probably near a twelver in. Right now he’s good old Mississippi drunk.
“Guilty,” I say in a high southern belle voice because, well, my brother’s characters are contagious.
“If I had ma old git-fiddle, I’d pluck ye a lil ditty,” he says. “But I sold the doggone dag-nab thing.”
“Wait—seriously? Are you being serious?” I ask, sans southern belle.
“I did,” he says, dropping the accent. His voice gets closer. “These jerks keep upping my rent, you know what I’m saying? First they’re like, ‘You can sleep here for free,’ and then they’re like, ‘Actually, we need money.’ Because I’m living with a couple of druggies.”
“You shouldn’t live with druggies.”
“Maybe they’re not. I don’t even know what they’re into.”
“But you sold your guitar.”
“Not really sold, because it’s like, it’s in a shop and I can get it back. And I will get it back, after this paycheck.”
“How’re you going to play with the band now?” I ask.
My brother’s funk-metal band, Vomitstain, truly lives up to its name. I wish Elliott would just play sweetly sung acoustic Ramones covers the way he used to in secret at home. Unfortunately I don’t control the world.
“Band’s dag-nab broke up,” he says.
“Shame.”
His voice becomes normal again. “How’s your birthday?”
“Eh. You know. Park, balloons to heaven, sheet cake with plastic sprinkles. I swear those sprinkles aren’t supposed to be consumed by humans.”
He speaks seriously now. I can hear the puff of a cigarette. “They still doing that?”
He’s not talking about the sprinkles.
“Yep. Come, now, don’t act so shocked.” I pick at my polish, black glitter that has chipped away to tiny islands in the middle of my fingernails. “I’ll bet you’re bummed you couldn’t make it.”
“I sure am,” he says with a sigh, my sarcasm soaring over his head. Whoosh. “Too long a drive.”
Heh. Two hours is too long a drive . . . if your license is suspended. He’s in Los Banos now, which literally translates to “the bathrooms.” This conveys just how desirable a location it is. Flat, treeless land dotted with chain restaurants. It’s a couple hours away, which might as well be another continent. It’s not just two hours and a suspended license that keeps us apart. I’m afraid of freeway driving. His relationship with my parents is shadowed by his paranoia. Booze, pills, sketchy girls.
“It’s too long a drive.”
My brother is drunk and repeating himself. That sentence, in my life, is like saying, Oh, look, the sun is in the sky again. But it could be worse. These days I try to think optimistically—he’s only drunk. Gold star for Elliott.
“But it was a good birthday?” he asks.
“It was fine. Mexico ended up eating the cake and diarrheaed all over Mom’s car seat on the way home—kind of a party pooper. Hey, I wonder if that’s where the expression came from.”
“Mexico,” Elliott says wistfully. “That lil fatpile.”
“Mom’s pugs really are the most disgusting creatures in history. They’re like mini furry pig-walruses.”
In the silence, I hear people in the background on my brother’s line. Cheesy jukebox tunes ooze. Glasses clink. Men holler.
“What’d you do for your birthday, anyway?” he asks. “The big one-eight.”
“Other than get sad about Ava with the family in the park? Oh, I bought a load of porno and cigarettes and lottery tickets. Registered to vote. Joined the marines. Fun stuff.”
His voice gets muffled. “Just a second, just a second—don’t get your panties in a bundle, man.”
“I’ll let you go,” I say.
His voice gets closer. “Sorry.”
“You can get going. It’s late. I’m tired.”
“I wanna talk to my sister,” he says. “I feel bad I didn’t see you graduate.”
He’s talking about an incident weeks ago when I put on a very expensive muumuu gown and a square hat no one in their right mind would call fashionable and listened to my name being called and walked on a stage to receive a piece of paper from a dinosaur in a three-piece suit. It was no biggie, really. Millions of humans do it every June.
“I wouldn’t have gone to my graduation if I hadn’t had to,” I say. “So stop getting all emo about it.”
Portland was so vibrant and sharp and rained on when I visited—the bookstores and coffee shops and strangers everywhere—it was almost like everything was in focus, like I put on a new pair of glasses and only then realized I’d been half-blind.
“Don’t be a college dropout out now,” he says. “Don’t be a dummy like your brother.”
“Try my best.”
“You should buy one of them Tasers,” he says. “I’ll send you one for your birthday.”
“Sure,” I say.
Because sending someone a Taser is actually a perfectly acceptable gesture in my family. I have pepper spray in multiple colors. We live in a reality of always possible monsters that many other people have the luxury of ignoring. Also sure because Elliott’s big on talk and not so much on follow-through. If he even remembers his promise next conversation, color me impressed.
“One of these days I swear, I’m gonna come see you,” he goes on.
Someone starts yelling in the background on my brother’s end.
> Elliott yells back, “Beat it, okay? It’s my sister’s birthday.”
“Elliott,” I say loudly. “I have to go anyway. It’s cool.”
“I love you, sis,” he says, his lips sounding so close to the receiver I pull my head back. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.”
“You’re just—you’re so special to me.”
“I know, bro, I think you’re super-duper and we’ll talk soon.”
“I mean it. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” I say. “Night. Be safe. Talk soon.”
“Happy birthday, Ava.”
Those two syllables, those three letters—a word, a knife. I suck in air. I wait for him to realize his mistake.
I can’t wait forever.
“Yeah, thanks,” I say finally.
I hang up. I stand in the middle of my room. I recently steamrolled everything into my room’s corners and vacuumed, so my steps sink into the perfect carpet like footprints. I erase them one by one, rubbing my foot across them to make them disappear. I look in the mirror. There I am: short, almost-black hair; heart-shaped face; wide, hazel eyes. Mom’s cheekbones and arched eyebrows. Dad’s button nose. For a long time after Ava disappeared, I felt like I couldn’t tell if I was growing up or staying the same. I didn’t know if I was pretty or ugly, fat or thin, tall or short.
Once upon a time, I was one of two. I knew exactly what I was then. I had a comparison.
I go online before I go to sleep. I count the birthday wishes, even though I know it’s petty. It’s not that many. It shouldn’t matter. Thanks, nicefaces!! Birthdays are the best days. I stare far too long at the picture of a cat with a birthday hat on my page that Madeline put there, as if the silly image might offer some clue into my buried heartache. I see my dad just posted something to the FindAvaRivers group three minutes ago. It’s a picture of today’s balloons ascending skyward.
Happy birthday, Ava. You are with us every day. In our prayers, in our hearts.
Sigh. Poor Dad. He should be asleep. I go downstairs to refill my water glass in the kitchen sink—Mom bought some new purifier, and it takes me way too long to figure out how to operate it—and I stop by the door that leads to the basement. I crack it open to head downstairs, but then I can hear my dad talking.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 2