The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  “Okay,” I say after a beat.

  “I don’t want you to feel pushed aside.”

  “I don’t!”

  “I need to remember to show you I’m here for you, too,” he says. “I’m interested in your life.”

  The way the words come out, it’s as if it’s being rehearsed. I don’t have the energy to break the news to him right now—I’ve already felt pushed aside for too long for it to matter now. Plus, she’s home. As in, mere feet away from us—human, not angel. I just want a piece of her.

  29

  THAT FIRST NIGHT, she screams in her sleep. I fly up and into the hallway and stumble toward her room, lids half-sealed, dead-tired shut.

  “Get off me!” she roars with shocking force.

  I grip the doorway and enter, sitting next to her on the bed.

  “I can’t move!” she screams, higher. Her dark blond hair explodes from beneath the pillows and blankets. I perch on the edge, shaking a sheet-covered shoulder.

  “Hey,” I say gently. “Hey.”

  “Please stop, please just stop, no, no no, no, no,” she cries.

  “Hey,” I say, louder. My heartbeat’s a catastrophe. “Ava, you’re dreaming.”

  She sits up, eyes alarmingly wide. It’s dim in here, lit by the hallway’s slit of light, but I can see her fearful stare-shine.

  “It’s me, it’s your sister, Vera,” I say.

  She claps her bony fingers over her mouth, shaking. She draws her knees up into her chest. She pants.

  “You were screaming,” I say.

  “I thought I was back there,” she says, breaking.

  I reach to give her a hug, instinct.

  She shrinks back and yells, “Don’t touch me.”

  Instinct.

  I hold my hands up in the air.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  She sobs. I think I understand the feeling of being gutted, I do.

  “I had a bad dream,” she says. “I’ll be okay. It’s okay. Please, sorry . . . I’d like to forget about it and go back to sleep.”

  She asks permission a lot and is often all too thankful. It breaks my heart.

  “I’m right down the hall,” I tell her, getting up.

  “Can you just . . . leave the door open?”

  “Yeah.”

  I linger outside in the hall. Her snores come quickly, and there’s no more crying. Actually, strangely, there’s snickering, and then she sings a song. I recognize it, stepping closer in the dark to listen. It’s a jingle from a laundry detergent commercial.

  “Follow your nose

  To the cleanest-smelling clothes

  Courtesy of F-L-O-W . . . FLOW!”

  “Um,” I say.

  In bed, a new sound escapes me—something halfway between a whimper and a laugh.

  30

  THE NEXT MORNING I go downstairs and discover Mom and Dad crouched near the living room window in awkward, wide-eyed silence.

  “Shhh,” Mom says, then looks back out the window with that hawk stare. Even from this distance I can see that vein ticking on her forehead. I consider slipping a Xanax into her bubbly water. Dad, for some unknown reason, is sporting a neon yellow bandana.

  “What’s going on?” I come in for the huddle.

  “Your dad was sitting in here watching TV,” Mom says, “and some scuzzy photographer came onto our property, taking pictures through the window.”

  “They arrested him a minute ago,” Dad whispers.

  “I always miss the drama,” I say. “Where’s Ava?”

  “She has no idea, don’t say anything.” Mom points to the kitchen, and now that I listen for it, I can hear Ozzie talking to Ava in a low voice.

  A cop comes back in to brief my parents on the arrest that apparently just happened, and I go stand around the corner in between the kitchen and the living room and pretend to look at a back issue of Mother Jones. My sister is in there sitting at the table. My sister whose profile looks the same as it did when we were kids. My sister who changed in size but not in shape.

  I am wallpaper, I am want.

  And I can’t stop myself from eavesdropping.

  “You look nervous,” Ozzie says.

  Creak of a chair. “I feel like I’m in trouble or something.”

  “Why would you feel that way?”

  “I don’t know, all your questions, the way you stare at me and write stuff down.”

  “I want to find Jonathan, like everybody else.”

  A sniff.

  “I want to help you remember things—so we can help you,” Ozzie goes on.

  “What if I don’t want to remember things?”

  “Can’t say I blame you. How about, for fun, just to get the memories going, you think of something from before you got kidnapped? Something good, something with the family?”

  She sighs, long and measured. “Hmmm.”

  “Take your time.”

  The blood in my ears thumps like a clock.

  “Yeah,” she says softly. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore right now.”

  Chairs screech. I put the magazine back and step into the living room. Ava walks in and smiles, her hair up in a huge bun. She looks different than the night before—pinker, healthier, eyes whiter, better rested.

  The cops skedaddle. Ozzie takes the longest, complaining to my parents about that guy Jean-Paul and how he clearly got flustered by the media circus. Ozzie mutters the word “rookie” more than once and says only amateurs get thrown off by idiot reporters.

  “The trespassing should never have happened,” he says. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  Then he moves on to asking my mom’s advice about orchids near the front door. Orchids. How to grow them. Right now. Our house has orchids in every windowsill, and do you know my mom’s secret? She lets them die and then buys new ones. But she tells Ozzie something about fertilizer as he stares at her red, red mouth and lingers with his hand on the knob. Finally, he leaves, saying he has some ideas to “flesh out” about Ava. The door slams behind him—Ozzie slams doors, it’s just his way, like how he stomps instead of walks—and we Riverses are alone. TV fills the tired quiet.

  Ava flips through the TV guide and marvels at how many channels we have. The whole family sits in here together and the room feels smaller. Mexico and Canada growl at Ava, and Mom tells them, “She’s your sister, stop that.” She says the same thing when Mexico opts for a different approach and humps Ava’s ankle. Dad comes to sit beside Ava with the family photo album and shows her pictures as she half watches a cooking show about bacon-flavored cupcakes.

  I sit on an ottoman a careful distance away, trying not to seem like I’m ogling Ava when I totally am. In fact, my every cell is screaming, LOOK AT ME LOVE ME I AM YOUR TWIN. Her face, her furrowed brow, relays a studious curiosity as Mom explains the pictures to her in a voice usually reserved for dogs and babies. I vow not to condescend when I finally get Ava alone.

  “That’s the swing set we used to have.” Dad points. “Remember?”

  “Kind of . . .” Ava says after a moment. “It was red?”

  Her voice is so hoarse, low, and different than I would have imagined. I might remember Ava’s voice as a child’s—silvery and full of sugar and song. I definitely remember it from videos.

  “Yes!” Mom’s face is a lit bulb. Pop. “Remember how Vera got her finger stuck in it and stood there crying for hours before anyone noticed her and then we had to have that neighbor guy with the saw get her out?”

  Not my favorite memory, but it gets Ava to look me in the eyes. And I get a faint half smile. So it’s fine. We can stroll down bad-memory lane all they want.

  “And then the swing set ended up getting recalled,” I say. “Thousands of children had their backyard fun dismantled and driven to the city dump,
all because of me.”

  Ava smiles wider and keeps her eyes on me. It’s like the sun after so much rain.

  “I think I remember the swing set,” Ava says. “Swinging on it.”

  Dad does this clap and then fist pump thing usually reserved for men who watch football games. “Good job!”

  He flips to another page.

  “This?” asks Ava, pointing.

  “Elliott,” Mom says.

  “My brother?”

  “Yeah,” Dad says. “He looks weird here—this was in his punk phase. He doesn’t look like that anymore.”

  “Where is he?” Ava asks.

  The silence is long and awkward. How to explain the slipping throughout high school, the dishonorable discharge from the army, the string of sketchy jobs and stripper girlfriends and pills, the stint in jail for forging prescriptions, the bitterness, the paranoia? The fact he now lives in The Bathrooms, California, and the last time we gathered as a family he threw a Thanksgiving turkey through the sliding glass door?

  “He lives far away” is all Mom says. She turns to me. “And I can’t believe you haven’t gotten ahold of him.”

  “I’ve called him and talked to some ‘CC’ person twice who has no idea who Elliott is and says she just got that number,” I say. “Clearly something happened with his phone.”

  Someone knocks on the door, and the four of us look at one another. Through the lace curtains we spy three news vans with subpar parking skills. Humans with cameras and microphones are oozing from the vehicles and making a beeline for our front door.

  “Vultures,” Dad mutters. “They want a statement?” He gets up. “Oh, I’ll give them a statement.”

  “I’ll go out,” Mom says, shooting up. She puts a fingertip to her tongue and then smooths her eyebrows. She’s been dressed for a press conference since she woke up this morning. As she strides toward the door, Dad peeks out the curtains and murmurs something about a restraining order.

  “I could talk to them,” Ava says, brightening. “It’s me they want, right?”

  “You don’t want that, honey,” Dad says. “They’re not good people.”

  “We can hide out upstairs,” I tell Ava. “Want to go to my room? Come on.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Ava stands up to follow me. Strange how something as easy as standing up and leaving a room together—exchanging a smile—seems like utter magic.

  31

  THE FEAR. THE blood-stopping fear when I walked home alone in my later years of elementary school, pretending not to be terrified by every stranger I passed on the sidewalk. The scream ready in my mouth any time a grown man made eye contact with me. The panic when I lost my mom in a shopping mall, afraid I would be gone, sucked up into the oblivion where my sister was. That one time my schoolmate’s mom slowed her car down when she saw me walking home to offer me a ride and I yelled, “No!” and put my hand out in the gesture I’d learned at my kiddie self-defense course. I could see her eyes were laughing at me while she bit her lip and drove on. She didn’t know. She didn’t know the barbed sadness that made me the jumpy child I was. She didn’t know the ghost I was tethered to.

  Ava being gone was always this bombshell. Every crush, every new friend I made, I had to at some point explain the situation to . . . that is, if they didn’t already know. And when I explained the void that was my twin sister—oh, you mean Ava Rivers?—there was this sad face those crushes or friends would make as they bit down on their lower lips and widened their eyes. I hated that look. Like I was disfigured by it. Like loss was this scar and everyone saw it.

  It occurred to me this morning that I have a new story to tell.

  32

  AVA STOPS INSIDE the room, and her eyes flit from surface to surface—the floor, with its brown boxes still taped up. The naked wall. The pile of quotes I’d pulled off it when I was getting ready to go to Portland.

  Portland. The word’s a sinking stone.

  “Are you moving?” she asks.

  “Not anymore,” I say after a sec. “I was supposed to go to college in Portland.”

  “Like that comedy show?” she asks brightly. “That Portland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How far is it?”

  “About a ten-hour drive.”

  “When are you going?”

  “I was supposed to leave . . .”

  I do the math. Count. No. Recount. Recount again.

  Holy mother.

  “. . . tomorrow,” I say.

  When I say it out loud, the truth sounds an alarm. I’ve pushed this out of my mind ever since Ava returned. Portland. It used to signal joy. Now it’s surreal, overshadowed by crisis.

  “Are you really leaving tomorrow?” she asks.

  “Of course not,” I say. “I honestly completely forgot it was happening until right now.”

  “Can I ask, what are all these?” she asks, stooping to pick through the ribbons of torn paper riddled with my best cursive.

  “Just quotes I like,” I say. “From books, writers, I don’t know.”

  “What’s your major?” she asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know yet.” A lie. I haven’t even started school but I picked out my major years ago. “But I think I want to be a teacher, so education, maybe a double major in education and English.”

  I say it all casual, like I just thought of it.

  “I’ve thought about being a teacher,” Ava says.

  My tongue hovers, searching for a response. My dumb heart flutters. All these years later, separated by a vague tragedy we’ve yet to pierce the surface of, could we really be the same?

  “Or maybe a detective like Leticia Munson,” Ava says.

  I have no idea who Leticia Munson is, but I nod.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “That’s cool,” I tell her. “You have lots of time to figure it out.”

  Ava tiptoes from the door to the window, arms folded over her chest. She’s probably thinking, Jesus lawn-mowing Christ, is that a jungle, a dump, or our backyard?

  “You remember this room?” I ask.

  She turns.

  “Your side was over there.” I point. “You had the window. I had easy access to the closet.” I draw the invisible line. “Duct-taped down the middle, remember?”

  She smiles at the floor. “Yeah.”

  The silence is long and burns with my own second-guessing. I am so inarticulate right now, it’s like I’m trying to schmooze at an excruciating party or attempting to charm an unattainable girl or boy.

  “It’s weird,” she says after a moment. “It’s almost like . . . there’s all this stuff.” She makes big circles around her ears. Her ears look like they’re never been pierced, even though we went to the mall and got them pierced together when we were toddlers. The holes have closed up, and now it looks like they were never there. “Right here, right behind me. Malingering or whatever.”

  I don’t correct her.

  “What kind of stuff?” I ask, immediately regretting it. Why, oh, why did I have to sound as cheesy as a school counselor?

  Her face assumes a blankness, unalive and strange. “Him, the past, everything.”

  “Right,” I say, my voice cracking with emotion.

  “I mean, everyone here’s so nice and patient, like all the FBI dudes and that therapist lady, Shelly—I really appreciate it,” she says. “And they’re nothing like police on TV, even their clothes—it’s so weird, all of it—but I just, I just . . .” She breathes heavy and her face changes. “I don’t know.”

  “Hey,” I say.

  “I feel so sick.” She balls up her fists. She rocks back and forth, back and forth. “I just need—just shhhhhut up. Shut up, Diamond. Shut up, Diamond. Shut up, Diamond.”

  Diamond? What is happening? Ava is wigging out and I don’t know what to do.
Maybe I should run and get my parents. Or say something. I can’t find the words; all my life I’ve relied on words, I use words to get everything I want, I love words more than life, and now words fail me.

  I put a hand on her arm.

  “I’m so sorry,” I hurry to say. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

  Everything goes still, like even the air has stopped to listen.

  Deep breaths. Ava opens her eyes. “Sorry.”

  “Stop being sorry,” I tell her.

  My hand is still on her arm. I squeeze it gently.

  “Really, you don’t need to apologize, like, ever . . . I understand.”

  Understand? How can I understand? But Ava smiles weakly at me.

  “I feel like I’m broken and I’m never going to be right,” she says. “There I was, wishing I was free all that time, and now here I am and I’m a mess.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Though is it? Every word that leaves my mouth seems like a lie.

  “He called me Diamond,” Ava says. “’Cause of my eyes. Sparkle, sparkle.”

  My posture changes when I hear this. “What happened to you that night?” I dare ask. “I mean, on Halloween? How’d you . . . just disappear?”

  The dead-serious silence grips my throat.

  “Dude with a van rolled up,” she says, expressionless. “White van, no windows. Said he’d help me find my mom and dad. Told me to breathe the cloth he had in his hand. Next thing I know, I wake up tied to a bed watching cartoons.”

  “I want to kill him,” I say, so much hate in me I feel new, not myself.

  “Please don’t,” she begs, meeting my eyes. “There’s enough hurt in this world already.”

  Ava is ten thousand times the person I am.

  She gets up and crosses to my closet, half-open and revealing clothes I haven’t packed yet.

  “Can I look?”

  “Of course.” I throw open my closet doors. It’s as if a nuclear bomb went off in a thrift store. A knee-high pile avalanches at our feet, my Snow White getup on top.