“You are definitely my sister,” I say, putting the powder puff away.
Ava’s phone rings. She gets up and glances at it. “How about no.” She rejects the call and the ringing stops.
“Unknown caller?” I ask.
“Ozzie. Won’t leave me alone. It’s like, I have a life, dude. Chill.”
“Probably just has some questions to ask you.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, doesn’t everyone.” She checks her teeth in the mirror. “I’m a princess now. I don’t need to talk to detectives.”
Dad snaps a pic of us with his phone as we try to leave the house. He makes us pose against the banister.
“This is too cute,” he says. “My princesses.”
Ave rolls her eyes. “Daddy.”
He gets the picture, kisses us both on the forehead with a big mua, and we’re off.
The party is a big one. It’s a joint birthday celebration for two little girls. There’s a balloon twister and a Raggedy Ann–ish clown, a two-tiered cake and an overenthusiastic DJ playing music out of ridiculously large speakers.
Ava makes a hell of a Cinderella. I’m not just impressed by her singing—she remembered every lyric to the songs we practiced—but her social skills. She charms the parents and delights the little birthday crowd.
I wait for the dark shadow that sometimes follows her to appear, but it doesn’t. Not today.
She’s full and real and strong and courageous. I watch her flit around the back lawn with a gaggle of cake-smeared little girl faces following her every move—out here, in the screaming sunshine under the bluest cloud-free sky, she’s Cinderella.
51
OUR LOCAL GROCERY story is Berkeley Bowl, an overcrowded cornucopia of health food and organic produce. I’m not talking your ordinary apples and pears, I’m talking sunchokes, Mexican star fruits, and pineapple guavas. Ava and I walk over there sometimes and hit Max up, who lives on the way, and the three of us pick up lunch and eat it in a lawn-filled stretch in the middle of Adeline Street or a nearby park. Ava and I grabbed packaged sushi today, and Max is inside at the burrito bar. The sun shines like it has no idea it’s fall, and Ava and I sit on a cement bench out front next to bins of pumpkins and wait for Max.
Ava pets a dog tied to a nearby pole. He’s wearing a scarf. “You are adorable, dude. And so fashionable. No, you can’t have my sushi.” She sits next to me. We ignore a couple who stop to make out in front of us like they can’t help themselves before continuing on with their groceries. “Is it wrong that I find public displays of affection disgusting?”
“No. Agreed. You love each other, great, keep it to yourselves.”
“Right. Like, I don’t need to see your tongue. Ever.”
“I’m not even down with holding hands,” I say. “Like, why? Just so the whole world knows?”
Ava’s quiet, looking away, and I wonder what she’s wondering.
“Did you ever date someone?” she asks.
I think of Madeline for the first time in a while.
“Yeah. It didn’t work out,” I say. I don’t want to elaborate and she doesn’t press me to.
“It’s weird to think of you with someone,” she says.
“It’s been so long it’s weird for me to think of me with someone.”
“Is it wrong, I mean, I want you to find someone you like but . . . but then . . .”
“Then they’d be my everything,” I tell her.
“Exactly.”
“Is it weird I feel the same way about you? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be so happy when you’re at the point when you’re ready to date. But . . .”
“Always with the buts,” Ava says in a creepy old man voice.
I laugh.
“But seriously, I wouldn’t—I mean, I wouldn’t just blindsight you,” she says.
I never correct her Ava-isms. They’re too adorable.
“I’d never just, like, meet someone and be all ‘toodles,’” she goes on.
“I certainly hope you’d never say ‘toodles.’”
“Seriously. And I hope you wouldn’t ditch me either.”
“I wouldn’t. But, Ava—I mean, when you find someone, when you’re at that stage, I will be happy for you. You don’t have to worry about how that would make me feel. I’ll be okay.”
“Look, Veer,” Ava says, shoving a spicy tuna chunk in her mouth. She used to say raw fish sounded nasty, but after I made her try mine a few weeks back, it’s all she ever wants for lunch. “I’ma spell it out. You know where I came from and what happened.”
Barely, not really, I don’t say.
“I hate talking about it, even with Shelly,” she goes on. “But I’m all . . . jacked up. I don’t know what I want. All the jacked-upness, like, covers everything. You know? It’s part of me.”
A guy with a clipboard and no shoes on comes up and interrupts to ask us if we’re registered voters—it’s part of the Berkeley Bowl experience, the people who try to get you to sign about a thousand petitions—and Ava listens politely and signs everything he has. He says, “Have a blessed day,” and leaves.
“Go on,” I tell her.
“I just . . . I don’t know who I am yet.”
She stares at her glittery sneakers, which could use a touch-up job.
“Maybe I’m into chicks.” Ava devours more sushi, not even ashamed to talk with it in her mouth. “Who knows? Maybe I’m asexual. I’m just saying, the idea of, like—like, having a boyfriend, like, ‘Oh, hold my hand and talk about babies and—’” She shudders and almost gags. “Chills. Not good ones.”
“Understandable.”
“But if you found someone, I mean, it might be hard, but I’d be hella happy,” she says. “It’s gonna happen eventually.”
Hella. Ha. She’s officially an East Bayer now.
“Unless we’re spinsters,” I tell her.
“Spinster sisters,” she says with a grin. Then Ava finishes chewing and closes the sushi box. It’s empty.
“You ate it already?” I ask, unopened box still in my hand. “Max isn’t even out here yet.”
“I know. I was just so hungry. And it was soooo good.”
When Max comes out with his foil-covered burrito, the way he glances at me as he pushes back his mirrored sunglasses, how he stops in the rush of silver shopping carts as if he forgot himself for a moment, his wide, goofy, crooked smile, makes me wish things were simpler. But he’s too close to Ava now. I can’t complicate things.
We walk through the neighborhood, the three of us in stride, Ava in the middle. We pass a pot club painted with fish and a dog collar shop with a marquee that says YES WE JUST SELL DOG COLLARS. It isn’t until we linger at a stoplight and Max pushes the walk button to make some kind of beat and sings, “Let’s go, light, let’s change sometime tonight,” over it that I notice the acorn squash in Ava’s hand.
“Um,” I say. “Did you take that?”
“I did,” she says, looking down at it, surprised, a little guilty, as if she doesn’t quite understand why it’s there.
“Why?” I ask.
“I really don’t know. You want it?”
“No.”
The light turns green and we walk. A grandpa with a green mustache rides by on a bike.
Ava turns to me. She puts her hand on my elbow. “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispers. “I won’t do it again. I want to be good. I don’t know why I did that.”
“It’s okay.”
I’m just surprised. I’ve never seen Ava do anything even close to shady before now.
When a bearded man with a face tattoo asks if we can spare any change, Ava hands him the acorn squash. He ponders it deeply as we walk away. Once we get to the park, Max and I eat our lunches in silence as we watch Ava chasing birds. His knee almost touches mine. For a moment, I let mysel
f pretend he’s my boyfriend. We’re sitting here together, picnicking, me and my super arty cute boyfriend. Then I don’t even let myself pretend. I’m a bad sister. He’s my sister’s best friend. The only one she has besides me.
52
ONE AFTERNOON, AVA and I get back to the house from thrift-shopping and Elliott’s there. At the dining room table. Grinning and standing up to bear-hug us.
He looks older. Dark facial scruff and wavy brown hair that could use a trim. His grin, though, is the same—lopsided, contagious. And his muddy green eyes are clearer than last time I saw him. I judge the diameter of our hug. He’s not too skinny, he’s not too fat. He might be all right.
Here we are, together, the five of us, listening to Elliott’s insane story about riding ATVs in Mexico and getting held up at gunpoint by Mexican police. Laughing at his description of his latest girlfriend, Desrea-Jean, who is a “pawnshop owner with a heart of thirteen-karat gold.” Ava watches him with slack-jawed wonder—yes, girl, our brother is a comedic train wreck. He’s a one-man show. How long has it been since I’ve seen him? Was I still in junior high? He seems clean. He’s talking fast, though. My parents don’t look suspicious. I shouldn’t be so cynical. Of course he’s clean.
Dad at the head of the table opposite Mom. Ava and I on one side, Elliott on the other. No yelling. No tears. No holes. We’re whole.
53
MOM TAKES ME out to breakfast one morning. Me. Alone. By myself. Where are the reporters when you need them? Mom’s life is a never-ending train of obligations that surround Ava now. They lunch, shop, mani-pedi, attend meetings about the scholarship fund in her name, Mom chauffeurs her to Ozzie and the police station, etc. But Mom doesn’t have time for one-on-ones with me. I swear it’s been since that movie we saw before The Resurrection occurred. Seated across the table from her at a nose-in-the-air café that’s some French word I can’t and don’t care to pronounce, I expect a bombshell of some sort. But all she says is “I’m so glad you’re around for Ava. She really looks up to you.”
“Seriously?” I ask.
I hide my flattery momentarily behind a napkin.
“She talks about you constantly,” Mom says. “She’s your biggest fan.”
“Well, once she gets out in the world a little more she’ll realize how lame I am.”
Mexico and Canada are tied to a nearby parking meter we can see from the window. They watch Mom and me eat pancakes—excuse me, crepes. Such desperation on those little pug faces. I have to laugh.
“I’m still . . . having a hard time talking to her about what happened to her,” Mom says. “Making any sort of sense out of the details. It keeps me up at night—the scenarios.”
“Me too.”
“I mean, I ask her anything, she’s quick to change the subject, you know? Is it like that with you?”
“I don’t ask her details,” I say. “I figure she’ll share them when she’s ready.”
“I have a hard time resisting. I want the case solved so badly. I drive around all the time, every man I see—is that him? Is that him?”
“She wasn’t in Berkeley.”
“She was somewhere within driving distance, Ozzie thinks.”
“Is that what everyone else thinks?”
“They’re still entertaining ideas as far away as Canada.”
“There’s no use,” I say. “Driving yourself out of your skull trying to solve the mystery. I mean, there are people working full-time on it so we don’t have to.”
Mom, poised goddess—I so often misinterpret your clenched anxiety for strength.
“I hope she makes friends,” Mom says. “Has a normal life.”
“She will.”
“How can we put this behind us when he’s still alive and free? How?”
“We don’t. We put it aside, and we focus on everything that’s going right. Like Elliott.”
“Ugh,” Mom says, in a good way, clutching her heart with a fork still in her hand. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I was like, pinch me.”
“He has never called me since the Turkey Incident,” Mom confides. “I still to this day don’t understand what I did wrong.”
“You didn’t. He was high.”
“He said he was ‘whacked-out on espresso drinks.’ I don’t know what to believe,” Mom says.
Um, not that, Mom. Not that.
Mom’s eyes zero in on a man a few tables over with a camera up, taking a picture. We both freeze, but then realize he’s just taking a picture of the restaurant name in the window. We relax and go back to our jelly-bellied crepes.
“Did you see that rancid story in Us Weekly?” she murmurs.
“Yeah. I can’t believe they included that picture of Dad in that bathrobe—”
She shakes her head painfully. “This is why I hired that publicist. And still, all these awful stories from ‘sources.’ I can’t trust anyone. I asked your father—did you tell Us Weekly about our dinner with Elliott? Of course he denies it.”
Ava may be home, and we spend a lot of time together as a family, but that doesn’t seem to have moved my parents any closer. They still sleep one story apart and dress like they come from different income brackets. They still snipe at each other in quiet moments in the kitchen in ways that begin playful and end in resentment. Since Ava came home, it’s a shattering surprise to learn that not everything is destined to change.
“What drives me most crazy is I don’t know. I don’t really know what happened to her. She was gone twelve years, I could fill you in on twelve minutes of it, maybe. I hate how much I don’t know.”
“We don’t know.”
“Yet everyone wonders,” Mom says. “I mean, everyone’s minds goes to those sick places. I mean, how bad? Her details are so scant and everything’s so foggy from the drugs he gave her. I don’t want to know. But I have to know. You know?”
“Your mind goes to those sick places, Mom, because . . .” My throat hurts and I have to drink a sip of ice water to finish my sentence. “Because that’s what happened to her.”
We’re quiet for a moment—long enough that the waitress comes and asks if we’re okay. We’re okay. We’re okay. She goes away.
“I love you, Mom.”
She pats my hand. “You’re growing up to be such an impressive, strong young woman. And I’m a selfish mother, Vera, because I’m so glad you stayed in Berkeley. We need to have more ‘us’ time, don’t you think?”
The way she focuses on me, really focuses—it’s like she sees me for the first time in years.
I think about that breakfast all week. I live off that breakfast and those compliments and that hand pat. Is it disgusting that, at eighteen, I love and need my mom so badly? That the love and need aches because trying to hold on to her attention is like trying to harness the wind? In the drugstore, where Mom stops for mouthwash, we wait in line and pretend we don’t notice the cover story in the newsstand with Ava’s smiling face on it and the words MONTHS LATER, MADMAN STILL LOOSE—THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT AVA RIVERS.
I find myself staring at the picture like I don’t know her, wondering, what is the shocking truth about Ava Rivers? What is it? If only it were as simple as a five-dollar purchase to know.
54
LATER IN THE week, after a princessing gig, I come home late to a dark house that still smells like dinner. I pass through the kitchen and stop at the cracked door to the basement, where I can hear Dad strumming his guitar. Major chords. He’s singing something about a-rockin’ and a-rollin’. It’s the cheesiest. I laugh into my hand. I pause in the dark living room, eyeing the slit of light beneath my mother’s door, and freeze there for a moment. She’s supposed to be at some charity thing. I saw it on her jam-packed calendar. But her reading light is on, so I push the door open a sliver.
“You’re home?”
“I’m taking a hiatus from
some of the events,” she tells me.
Shock dumbs me. Mom is so loyal to her charities and so busytown that the last time I can remember her skipping out on anything, she had the stomach flu. Volunteering is a way of life for her.
“What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m cutting back on obligations to put more energy into Ava’s case. And spend time with family.”
“Groovy.”
I don’t know why I said “groovy” just now. I guess everything is so not itself that even my vocabulary is alien. My house is full of contented people in their rooms.
I head upstairs and stop at Ava’s closed door. Some kind of game show applause blasts from the TV. Remember when, not so long ago at all, a twist up the staircase meant a hushed, dark loneliness I shared with no one?
God, I love the comforting muffled noise of an occupied home.
I’m about to head to my room when the door cracks open, the blue TV light shining through the crack. Ava peeks at me.
“Thought I heard you,” she whispers. “Wanna come in?”
I step inside her room, which is messier than mine—and that is a feat. Her sheets and covers are even on the floor. I wonder about the psychology of it and then let it go. We sit on the bed together. She hugs her legs. She’s swimming in Mom’s silk pajamas.
“It’s hard to sleep sometimes,” she tells me. “As you know from my dumb outbursts, right?”
“Not dumb.”
She turns back to the TV. A world stirs behind her eyes. I want her to tell me everything. I place my hand on hers, our matching mood rings clicking as they touch.
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I still don’t know where I’m at. I think, ‘This is a mistake, this is a mistake.’”
I nod. “It’s going to take some time to sink in.”
“And I get scared . . . ’cause I feel so lucky.” Her eyes shine. “Like, I don’t deserve this.”
“But you do.”
“I’m never going back there,” she says quietly.
“Of course not.”
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 14