She buys a shirt with printed bows on it and some leggings with Mom’s credit card. She’s all tentative about it even though it’s barely twenty bucks. I’m surprised by the quirky things that catch her eye. What is she going to be like, all free to choose?
At a bookstore across the street, I’m stunned again to realize my sister can barely read. I don’t know what’s stranger—that she can at all, or to see a full-grown girl-woman barely able to sound out simple words. I pull her to the children’s section and pick up a book we read as kids—Ramona Quimby, Age 8—and she looks at it and says, “Ramen?”
“You don’t remember this book?” I ask. “It was our favorite. Ramona Quimby, Age 8.”
“Maybe,” she says vaguely. She touches the cartoon cover. “It’s about a girl named Ramona?”
“Yeah. And her sis, Beezus.”
“Beezus Christ,” she says in a funny voice.
I snort. I actually snort. The more she opens up, the more it’s obvious some things don’t change. Ava is a goofball.
“That’s nice you bought it for me,” she tells me as we go outside and step into the sunshine.
“Yeah, thank Mom. It’s her credit card.” I hand her the Ramona book I just bought for her. “We’ll practice reading together.”
“I’m supposed to meet with a tutor. That’s one of the things on my list—get a GED.”
Per Shelly, Ava’s been working on a list of things she wants to do with her life. She keeps the crinkled piece of lined notebook paper with her in her pocket at all times. I’ve caught glimpses of it. It’s penned with childish scrawl and says things like “LERN 2 COOK,” “HELP PEPLE,” and “GO TO FRANTS.”
“Totally doable,” I say.
“I mean, I’ll never be smart like you.” She hugs the book to her chest. “I’ll probably never go to college. I don’t know. I used to want to go to Chablis Online Academy.”
What? Oh, right. Scammy for-profit school. Commercials.
“You can do anything you want,” I tell her.
“I want to use my powers for good,” she says, looking at her shoes, which are actually Mom’s running shoes. They’re too big for her.
Her powers. Like she’s magic. Which she kind of is. Put her in a room and let people know she’s Ava Rivers and listen to it get bone-quiet. She casts a spell.
“Ava, you will. You’ll go on Flora Daly. Tell your story. Inspire other girls. And the more you work with the police, the more chance we have of finding Jonathan and making sure he never hurts anyone again.”
She doesn’t answer me for a second. She doesn’t move. Maybe I made a mistake uttering his name.
“I don’t think he’ll do that to anyone else,” she says so quietly it’s as if she’s talking to the sidewalk. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore today.”
A little coal lights up in my chest. “Sorry.”
She flips through the book for a moment. Then a wave seems to pass over her. She straightens up.
“But you were right,” Ava says. “Like—I can be anything now.”
“Exactly.”
“Shelly said today that now’s all about healing, love, fun, family.”
“It is.”
“No need to stress. Gotta get with the self-love.”
“Where’d you learn to be so wise?”
A guy with no shirt on and a tangled beard comes over to us and asks for change. I turn to ignore him. Ava says, “You hungry, dude? Let me buy you a sandwich or something.”
“Ava.” I pull Ava’s arm and we walk up the street and I can’t help laughing. “You can’t just say that to him.”
“What? Why?”
“I mean . . .”
“He looked all skinny and hungry,” she says. “We have a credit card. I don’t get it.”
Her chin’s in the air, and I’m in complete awe of her.
“Ava,” I say, looking back at him as he dances barefoot at the bus stop. “When you live in the city, you mostly keep to yourself.”
“I spent years doing that,” she says.
Her eyes are clear, sober, ringed especially blue around the edges and bleeding muddier in the middles. I can’t remember her eyes from when we were children, just that they were blue.
“Being afraid of people,” she goes on. “Thinking the world was dangerous and full of thugs and people getting shot left and right. I didn’t even try to find out for myself for so long—I believed all the things he said.”
Gulp. This conversation seems too deep for daylight, for a smoothie storefront surrounded by college students and businessmen shouting into cell phones.
“Now I want to find out for myself,” she tells me. “I believe you. But I wanna live and make my own mistakes. You know, most people aren’t dangerous. You know that? They’ve done the math. Way more people are good and safe.”
Why is she telling me this and not the other way around?
Tell me, how is she the wiser one?
“Roger that,” I say. “Now let’s go buy you some shoes.”
The sneakers she picks out are in the children’s section. I have to go up to the counter to the apathetic woman texting on her phone and ask if they make glittery Converse in a woman’s size 7.
“I don’t know,” the woman says without looking up. “They’d be on the wall if we had ’em.”
“Are you, like, so bored of shoes at this point?” Ava asks.
The woman looks up from her phone for a startled second. I’m ready to apologize for Ava’s childlike question when the woman shrugs and focuses on her phone again.
“Pretty much,” she admits.
Very helpful. We scan the wall but no luck. Ava’s sad about it. I tell her we’ll make her some with glitter and a pair of white Cons.
“Is it a stupid idea?” she asks me.
“Nah, it’s cute,” I assure her.
We stop by the drugstore for glitter. I buy her candy but remind her we need to eat dinner with the fam in an hour. I feel like I’m babysitting. Or explaining Berkeley to an alien for the first time. Why that man from Greenpeace is yelling at us with such eager desperation. Who those old ladies dressed in pink are and why they are so pissed about the Middle East. Why there are so many young Asian people with backpacks. And the fact that to get to San Francisco—I have to explain to her, no one who is actually local calls it “Frisco”—you have to ride underneath the Bay in a giant tube.
“No way.”
We descend the escalator together. I pull her to the right side.
“People passing go on the left,” I tell her. “If you’re standing still you stay right.”
I let go of her bony shoulder and bask in the fading sting her touch left on my hand. My heartbeat yammers in my chest, She’s real, she’s alive, she’s real. An echoing saxophone gets louder, louder, as we enter the yellow light of the bustling BART station. A guy in sunglasses is blowing into the sax at the bottom of the escalator to an eerie, oozy electronic song coming out of a boom box. Ava stops to watch him, dumbfounded, as we reach the floor. I steer her to the ticket machine and buy us tickets and lead the way through the turnstile, where the crowd thickens with people coming up—students with painted faces, middle-aged folks in Cal sweatshirts. We’re moving against the crowd of football fans. I get bumped and hang on to my purse and try to ignore the yelling. At the bottom of the stairs, Ava’s nowhere to be seen.
I press myself against the slick brick wall, peering past the marquee blinking news that a six-car train is coming in one minute. No reason to panic. My sister is flesh and blood and isn’t going to disappear in a heartbeat. She can’t get lost the way she was lost. I scan the passing faces for a burst of crimped-curled dirty blond and a stricken dust-blue gaze. But no. Football fans. College kids ogling smartphones. Patient old ladies reading paperback books. Ava is nowhere.
; Screaming erupts toward the front of the train coming to a stop on the platform. I still don’t see Ava. I hurry toward the noise. No doors are opening on the train, and the yellow-lit people inside bang on the window.
A shrill voice cuts through the commotion. “Someone got hit!”
Everyone swarms, and I get swept up in it, sucked toward the tragedy. I’m peeling my eyes left, right, craning my neck to look behind me and above, at the stairs I came down. My blood pressure rises with each step. Where is Ava?
As we get closer to the front of the stuck train, elbows poking me, the hive-buzz of the commotion, the smell of perfume and shampoo and BO all braided together into one indistinguishable aroma begins to wash over me in this sick way and my belly pitches. Panic keeps rising—where the hell is Ava? My ears ring, cold sweat dots my palms.
“A girl jumped in front of a train!” someone yells.
People cry and wail. A man shouts for everyone to stay back.
“A girl jumped in front of a train,” a woman reports to those of us behind her.
My mouth dries and knees buckle. Where is Ava? Then the horrible possibilities firework in my brain—she’s gone again. In less time than it takes to say, Vera, keep it together, I push through the crowd in front of me, or try, anyway—it’s thick with arms and legs and no one will let me though. I turn around to go backward, back up the stairs where I came from, knocking into people and their purses and skateboards as I make it upstairs, determined to enter the scene from another staircase so I can see who the girl was.
I hold on to the railing, not knowing what to do. Do I call someone? Do I scream her name? Do I go tell the attendant it could be my sister who fell in front of the train? The saxophone echoes faintly over the electronic music.
“It was a dummy,” someone yells.
The crowd hushes with the information, then buzzes with it.
“It was a mannequin,” a guy says. “Some punk kid tossed it onto the tracks.”
BART cops come to investigate. The crowd disperses.
Sniffing, I glance over the railing near the ticket machines and the escalator and that’s when I see Ava, watching the man with sunglasses blow into the saxophone, boom box at his shiny mismatched shoes. A woman with short hair and bright lipstick stands next to Ava, talking.
“Ava!” I choke.
The relief is a symphony. I sprint through the wide manual turnstile for bicycles and nearly collide with someone on an electric scooter and several high-looking fortysomething men. When I get to Ava and her talkative companion, I hear the woman’s words. “Most Wanted list . . . Amazing, inspiring story . . . Interview you for my blog?”
“You scared the crap out of me,” I say. “Don’t ever wander off like that.”
“This is my sister,” Ava tells the girl.
“Hi. We’re going now.” I pull Ava’s arm, and we walk away from the dumbfounded woman who was getting out her phone to, I don’t know, exchange information probably.
“She was a survivor,” Ava says.
“So? And that’s weird, random people coming up to you and telling you their secrets.”
“Why should it be a secret?” Ava asks. She pulls her arm out from my grasp. “Seriously, why shouldn’t people just talk about it? Ever watched Survivors on TV? You know how many girls are molested or raped? It’s not their fault, why do they have to be quiet about it?”
Okay, people are staring. I’m sorry I said anything. Ava is right. She shouldn’t be ashamed. But I hate the feeling that strangers know my business—and if they own TVs, which of course they do, everyone here probably knows who we are.
“You don’t,” I say quietly. Then, louder: “You don’t.”
“Yeah.”
My eyes heat up. I thought she fell in front of a train for a second, I really did.
“Are we still going to ride the subway?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “We’ll just take a Lyft.”
I don’t tell her I hate the way the man in the plaid shirt squints his eyes like he’s trying to place us, or how the two college girls whisper and point. I know we’re semifamous. I forgot it for a while, but when I look close enough, they were there all along. The hawkish strangers.
I pull her wrist, which fits easily between my thumb and forefinger. We step back onto the escalator. This time she leans right so people can pass.
“Didn’t you buy tickets?” she asks, turning around.
My heartbeat is resuming its normal pace. The way the sun hits her hair, she should be in a painting. Who cares about the mannequin?
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “Let’s go to the Halloween store.”
We buy wigs and weird glasses because why not. We wear costumes while we wait for our Lyft. Ava grins at me, her wig long and ginger-colored, generic nerd glasses. I see myself in her reflection—shoulder-length blond with cat-eye frames. Sisters. Strangers. We burst into laughter together until we have to wipe tears from our eye corners. I want to treasure this moment. And yet I can’t help noticing the silver tooth in the back of her mouth when she laughs, and wonder when she got it, what its story was, who paid for it. But I can’t ask. I have to bite my words and bide my time.
39
WE FORGET THE horror until a moment we can’t. Like the time Mom brings home In-N-Out and the sight of the branded bag sends Ava into a weird headshaking tizzy. “No,” she says. “I hate that stuff, I never want to see it again.” She gets up from the table and goes into the bathroom, where she audibly gags. (I hear Mom calling Ozzie after Ava retreats upstairs, whispering, “Look into In-N-Out locations, Oz, this could be big.”) Or the time she and I are on the couch together and she flips the channel and the Muppets are on and she gets flustered and teary out of nowhere, saying, “This was his favorite and he could do the voices . . .” And then that’s it, nothing else. Just me assuring her, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” the only thing I know how to say when in that moment nothing’s okay, nothing’s okay.
Mom, Dad, and I try to nod and understand and be levelheaded but it’s as if the moment the craziness subsides and we slip into routine, into the blissful everyday nothingness of togetherness, some little shard of hurt pierces it out of nowhere and I’m sure, a month after she’s been home now, that nothing will ever be anything but an imitation of normal.
40
TO BUST OUT of the anxious sadness that Ava seems to be in, one night we take a walk around the neighborhood and end up in a dark park. I stand in the sand, hands shoved in my pockets, watching as Ava goes down the slide with a grin on her face. I don’t let my sadness show—the sadness of seeing a grown girl’s joy at a playground because she wasn’t allowed to be a true child until now. I smile. I focus on the moon, how bright it is, how lovely Ava looks as she throws her head back and laughs.
“Ava! Vera!” someone sings through the chain-link.
I’d know that singsongy voice anywhere. It’s Max. He grins under a streetlamp on the other side of the fence, guitar strapped to his back, clutching a bottle of champagne. I can’t hide my shock.
“That was fast!” Ava yells. She turns to me, deadpan. “I invited him. Cool?”
“Cool,” I say.
It is cool. It is cool in every way, shape, and form. I think the word “cool” so many times it becomes alien. I just didn’t expect him here, interrupting our intimate sister moments. She texts him now and I don’t.
Ava and Max drink most of the champagne. I crane my head to take in the blackness littered with cheap star-shrapnel. We sit under the jungle gym, inventing histories. Like what would Ava have been like, had she never been snatched.
“I’d’ve been smart,” Ava says. “Mom and Dad would’ve sported bumper stickers: MY KID’S AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT.”
“In other words, you’d’ve been a big old nerd,” Max says as he plucks his guitar, the sound perfectly improvised a
nd dreamy. “Like Vera,” he adds, deadpan.
I show him how beautiful my middle finger is.
“Actually, calling me a nerd gives me too much credit,” I say after a moment. “I was invisible.”
“You weren’t invisible.”
What is that flicker in his eyes? I’m confused for a second, but then he looks away and hums some tune and plucks the strings.
“Then by high school I’d’ve become more, you know, bad. Fun,” Ava continues. “Punk rock. I could hang with dorks, sure,” she says, looking at me.
“Excuse me, I wasn’t a dork,” I say. “Max was a dork—always bringing his guitar to school trying to look ‘artistic.’”
Max stops playing his guitar and winces like I just burned him.
He climbs up on the jungle gym and hangs upside down, somehow still managing to pull off a guitar solo. I watch Ava and Max play tag on the playground, laughing like monkeys. I can’t help laughing, too.
Maybe joy is even more potent when you’ve known the depth of its opposite.
41
GOING BACK TO a job that you already said goodbye to is a serious lemon to suck. It’s not Funmakerz’ fault. It’s not the kids with their sugar-fueled birthday hysteria, or the finicky helicopter parents, or even the Snow White dress that smashes my chest in pancakey ways and—look close—is as stained as a pizzeria tablecloth. It’s me. It’s traffic and how bored it makes me to drive the same, same, same ways, staring out at the bridges and the skeletal, alien cranes of Oakland as I inch across the freeway. In Portland, I was going to ride my bike everywhere. I was going to wear my raincoat and go on long walks in the woods. Obviously I did the right thing by staying, and Ava is everything. That’s my purpose now—to be a sister. I can go to college and join the real world later. I can find another job. Miracles take priority.
Today’s party is at Jack London Square, which is at the end of downtown Oakland where the asphalt meets the Bay. Lawns and bike paths and plotted palms and American flags whipping on poles. It’s a one-year-old’s birthday, and she has no clue it’s her birthday or who Snow White is. There’s a balloon twister here and a human in a blue dinosaur suit who snubs me when I try to say hello, as if he/she/it thinks blue dinosaurs are on some social level beyond that of imitation princesses. The “Wheels on the Bus” song plays way too many times on the portable stereo. But the cookies are divine.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 11