“You don’t want him to get caught,” I whisper.
57
THE WEBSITE FINDAVARIVERS.COM just has a static message now, courtesy of Dad, who has never quite learned the knack of subtle punctuation.
AVA CAME HOME AUGUST 4TH!!! ALIVE AND SAFE!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND YOUR INTEREST!!! WE ARE NOT DOING NEWS INTERVIEWS!!! AVA IS HAPPY AND ADJUSTING TO LIFE BACK HOME NOW!!!
The photo of Ava is the princess picture, with me cropped out.
58
HALLOWEEN IS DEAD to me. Bad memories. Plus we’re too old for that crap. The last time I trick-or-treated I wasn’t even in a training bra. The only thing going on is a “no costumes” party at Max’s house that Ava and I are invited to. I’d rather stay at home rereading my Poe anthology, but Ava’s insistent.
“A party,” she says, inking her lips with neon-pink lipstick. “We have to.”
“Since when do you care about parties?”
“I like Max. Don’t you?”
“Not as much as you.”
She gives me a blank look. “We have to,” she repeats.
I guess we’re going to a party.
Max still lives with his mother, an “infirm” neurotic who sells tie-dye on Telegraph Avenue. She has locked herself in her room apparently and left their small south Berkeley cottage to the partiers. Max’s house is filled with all sorts of weird bronze statues of ladies with a thousand arms and men with elephant heads. They have beanbags instead of couches in the living room.
“Yo,” Max yells over the drumming going on in the kitchen. He waves at us from the doorway to the back porch. His shirt is hot pink and says, THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. The room smells hotboxy. Between Max and us girls, a dude is banging on a conga drum while a girl in sandals dances. “Hey, kids, this is my buddy Ava and her sister, Vera.”
Ava and I wave with our unopened beer cans. The silence is long and awkward. I start inching backward, toward the safe, cozy, empty living room, but Ava inches the other way, toward the people on the back porch and the smell of clove smoke. I double back and follow her forward. Um, when did she become the leader?
I had friends in high school, mostly class friends who buddied up with me for assignments and drifted away once our schedules forked in opposite directions. I had Madeline, for a minute. Since then, I’ve had a hard time letting myself get super close to anyone. Though I want it so bad. I’m like a magnet, repellent. Or was, before Ava came home, I mean.
It’s been some time since I felt I had someone.
She holds my arm and pulls me with her to the porch. We stand next to Max, who’s telling a story about a man so wise he doesn’t need to eat.
“He’s called a breatharian because he just needs, like, air to live.”
“That’s fresh,” some dude with a goatee and a bottle of whiskey says.
“Incredible,” breathes a girl with a dolphin tattoo.
BS, I think.
“What a liar,” Ava says.
She lights two cigarettes and hands one to me.
Max laughs softly. “That’s what he claims, anyway.”
Everyone goes quiet, the spotlight of the moth-buzzing porch light on Ava and Max.
He puts his arm around her and pulls her closer to him, and I flinch a little as she moves away from me. Is he allowed to grab her like that? Is she okay with that kind of touch? But she doesn’t even seem to notice. “My girl was missing for twelve years.”
His girl? Those two words cut so many ways.
Ava drinks her beer as the people in the shadows murmur in response.
“Like, you ran away?” Dolphin Tattoo girl asks.
“I didn’t run,” Ava says. “I was stolen.”
The sound of my hand on the beer can makes everyone turn around to look at me.
“They still haven’t caught him,” I say.
“That’s crazy,” a guy says. “I just realized I saw you on TV. I mean, man.”
“But, like, what do you mean? Where were you?” a girl asks. “I don’t get it.”
“Bella, this is Ava Rivers,” the dude tells her.
“No way,” the girl says.
Ava swallows the rest of her beer—how she drank it that fast is beyond me—and drops the can on the porch steps with a plunk-plunk-plunk. Everyone is quiet, watching her. “Mind if I have another?”
“Go for it,” Max says.
I follow her inside. She swings open the fridge and stares into the yellow light.
“Don’t you think you should, like . . . not just start talking about this with strangers?” I whisper.
“What, why?” She closes the fridge and holds up her beer. “It’s what happened.”
“But it’s kind of private.”
“Is it? I mean, the freaking Enquirer knows.”
“You’re right. I guess I was just thinking, you know, it’s an open investigation . . . I don’t know what we can say and can’t without clearing it with our experts these days.”
She pops the can open and sips. “They’re never going to find him, Veer.”
My own voice echoes in my head from the other night—You don’t want him to get caught. Am I being paranoid? Why on earth wouldn’t she?
The deadness that has storm-clouded her expression is chilling. She doesn’t move for a second and honestly, I’m a little scared.
“Ave.”
“Shhh,” she says. “Just shhhhh.”
Ava doesn’t move. She closes her eyes. I freeze, too, respecting the silence. After a moment she breathes in and is back again. She blinks and drinks another sip and looks at me.
“Sometimes I need a little moment. And then I’m good. Hey, question.”
“What?”
“I don’t get what’s up with Max’s shirt. What’s a feminist, exactly? Is he making a joke?”
“Knowing Max, he’s probably dead serious,” I say with a pang, because is there anything dreamier than a boy proud to wear a pink shirt proclaiming he’s a feminist? “A feminist just means you recognize the world’s unequal—that we exist in a system of patriarchy where men enjoy privileges women don’t. And you want it to get better. You think women deserve to be treated well. You think they’re worth fighting for. You think the system of oppression and inequality has to end.”
I don’t think I’ve chosen words so carefully since my college admissions essay. I feel the fire in my throat.
Ava nods. “Are you one?”
“Loud and proud.”
I squeeze her arm and she smiles at me. Max comes in, cracking his knuckles and singing a loud, soulful whooooa. He’s too adorable. Make him stop. The bathroom calls, and when I return to the kitchen, Ava is slouched against the wall with a dreamy expression as Max leans into her and talks lowly. For a second, I am the invisible woman. The alarm I feel must be jealousy. I don’t recognize it.
He brought me chocolate. He tried to hold my hand when he was over, and I didn’t let him, but maybe I should have. Or maybe he’s like that with everyone. They pull apart and notice me.
“Hey,” Max says.
Ava’s got a simper on her lips, like the two of them share a secret now. I can’t believe that Ava is home and we’re attending parties and she’s flirting with boys. If someone had told me six months ago that this would happen I would have called that someone a mean-ass liar. I’m happy for her. But if I’m so happy, what is this hole in me? What is this heart-smashed wish blooming into self-pity? What is this fear she’s going to slip away?
Max’s mesmerizing brown gaze settles on my bangs. “We were just rapping ’bout . . . well, basically, the awesomeness of you. Rocking your Snow White dress. With your book smarts.”
I smile like the sun is shining on me.
Everyone hushes when the three of us step outside, back into the stinging cool air. Finally, af
ter an eternal pause, the girl with the dolphin tattoo asks Ava, “So . . . what’s it like being back?”
“It’s like . . .” Ava says.
All eyes are on her. No one out here is even daring to breathe.
“It’s like Marty McFly, walking out of a time machine . . . or, no. Wrong movie.” Ava swirls her beer in the can and gulps the rest, crushing it with her boot on a porch step. “I’m Dorothy back in Kansas, and I am finally awake.”
Everyone laughs and someone says, “Right on.”
I beam next to her. She’s fierce and unafraid. She can hush a group of people with her story. I wandered around the world for twelve years, half a person. I didn’t even really understand this until I stumbled into my other half.
59
AVA COMES AND knocks on my bedroom door one morning as I browse crappy-looking jobs on Craigslist. It’s cold outside, Novem-ber now, bust-out-a-scarf weather. Ava’s in her fur coat and pajama pants. She looks wide-eyed with worry.
“Didn’t sleep well last night,” she says. “These dreams.”
I give her a hug. The fur is soft on my cheek, and she smells like cigarette smoke. She goes limp in my arms.
“Want to go get coffee?” she asks when we pull apart. “I need something or I’m gonna go crazy.”
“Sure,” I say. “Maybe you want to call Shelly first?”
Besides her near-daily check-ins with various PD peeps and Ozzie, Ava sees Shelly at her office twice a week and calls her sometimes between to “process.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Veer, I want to just . . . I want to get coffee.”
“Okay.”
She goes back to her room to get dressed and I do the same. When she comes back, knocking on my door, she’s still wearing her fur coat. She’s also wearing that wig we bought at the Halloween store on our first hangout date.
“Um,” I say.
“Let’s wear wigs.”
“Why?”
She shrugs.
I stall for a second, not sure what to say. Then I ask myself, Vera, what are you afraid of? Looking stupid? You’re not the person anymore who’s afraid to be looked at. You’re twinned to the damn sun.
Funny how you don’t notice the changes in you until they’ve come and gone. Dead stars and starlight.
“That’s a great idea,” I say.
I fish through my knee-high closet mess and dig the blond wig out, give it a brush, and put it on over my short black hair.
The ride down the hill is quiet. It’s early. People are walking their dogs or babies and otherwise, the world is fast asleep. Ava puts a cigarette in her mouth and leaves it there, doesn’t light it. She’s wearing a huge pair of Jackie O sunglasses.
“Some days . . .” she says to the side mirror. “Some days the bad things just—they take up all the headspace.”
“I’m sorry.”
I let those words sit there stupid and useless for a moment.
“You can tell me anything,” I say.
“I know I can. You’re the only one. I could tell you anything—but some things I don’t want to.”
We pass a gospel music store and two Indian restaurants and rows of mismatched, multicolored houses. I get nauseated, a combo of no food and the sickening thoughts of Ava in that attic.
Will Ava and I ever be two sisters without a ghost between us?
“I have bad days, too,” I say. “Before you came home, most days were bad days.”
“That’s so sad,” she says, taking the cigarette out of her mouth.
“It was sad. Everyone was sad. Sad was, like, the default. Sad was this inescapable reality.”
“But the pictures in the albums, after I was gone. You guys still looked happy. I mean, you’d’ve made it. Right?”
“We survived,” I say. “But we didn’t exactly live.”
“I survived, too.”
“You really did. I don’t know how.”
“I never stopped hoping,” she says.
I did, sister. I lost hope pretty early on, and I’m ashamed.
“Always hoped I’d get out. Or, I don’t know . . . make it all better the way it was somehow, make it all okay.” She tucks the cigarette behind her ear and braids her fake red hair. “I fantasized about everything. I went all over the world when I watched the Travel Channel, you know? Amazonian swamps and Turkish mosques and crap. I went all those places. I watched the History Channel and visited the moon.”
“Reality’s overrated,” I say.
“Hella overrated.”
We pull in front of a coffee shop, a place with a fancy French name for “rooster” that we just call The Cock. It’s open early, it’s open late, there’s always seating.
“But I don’t get why you’d be unhappy.” She flips down the dash mirror and applies her red lipstick in the shape of a heart. “I mean, our family’s the best. Mom’s, like . . . this queen. You know? Always dressed to kill, always busy.” She smacks her lips and flips the dash mirror back up.
“Yeah, but busy means she used to never spend a day at home,” I say, holding out my palm. Ava drops the lipstick in it and I flip my dash down and redden my own lips. I look like a funny drugstore Marilyn in my cheap blond wig. “She was a beautiful stranger.”
“Mom is beautiful,” Ava says. “And Dad’s hilarious.”
I just keep going. I give it to her.
“I love Dad,” I say. “And now that he’s not super depressed, yes, he’s hilarious.”
“He was depressed?”
“He didn’t leave the basement for a long time. He quit his job, he started your website . . . he was just . . .” I shake my head. “You don’t have any idea, Ave. Everyone’s different now that you’re home.”
The silence is long, long, long.
“That’s good, right?” she says in a little voice.
“The best.”
She leans over and kisses my cheek. In the rearview, I see she left a little red blob. My fingers instinctually fly up to rub it away.
“Don’t!” Ava says, swatting my hand. “Just leave it.”
“But—”
“Who cares? It’s cute.”
“Easy for you to say,” I say. “You don’t have one.”
Ava points to her cheek. “Sock it to me.”
I lean over and kiss her cheek and leave an identical kiss mark.
“There,” she says. “Now we’re even.”
We get out of the car and as we walk toward the glass coffee shop doors, there we are in the reflection—in our wigs, with our big jackets and kiss-marked cheeks—and despite her nightmares last night and our depressing conversation, we’re grinning.
Then Ava’s face goes slack. Behind us, Ozzie’s getting out of his Prius at the curb.
“Girls,” he booms.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” Ava says without turning around. “I don’t answer my phone when you call for a reason.”
She pulls my arm so hard it hurts.
“Come on,” she whispers.
We go inside the coffee shop. My blood tingles in my veins.
I glance behind us at the glass doors, where Ozzie watches us with a stunned expression for a moment and then disappears. “What just happened?”
“I don’t like him.”
“He’s working your case. For free.”
“Whose side are you on?” Ava says in a hiss of a whisper. “I don’t want to talk to him. He follows me. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“He gives me the creeps, okay?”
Here’s the thing: Ozzie’s kind of derpy and aesthetically challenged. He wears too much cologne. He’s got puppy-dog eyes for Mom. But I’ve never been creeped out by him. Not even once.
Still, I don’t say anything.
We bo
th know whose side I’m on. Always.
60
IT’S BEEN A few centuries since we bothered with the family dinner thing. Nobody cooked in my house after Ava disappeared; we reheated. But soon as Ava came back Mom and Dad re-created this dinner tradition, and it’s funny how we all settle back into that oak table and gravitate to our old places. Dad finds his old HOT STUFF apron with the muscled man’s chest on it and cooks elaborate dinners on the weekend. I don’t tell Ava that we ate store-bought frozen meals in our rooms for years, that this family-gathering thing is Rivers 2.0. Wouldn’t that reflect badly? I want her to think we’re this version of us, always have been. Ava’s not the only one who gets the privilege of forgetting.
We Riverses do outings. We ogle paintings in museums. We are a party of four and sometimes five at restaurants. We get steamed drinks from trendy coffee shops and cruise bookstores. We go on walks to the police station to check for new news. We take the dogs to the park and throw a Frisbee. We go to a really bad play about GMOs spoken in rhyme because Mom wants us to. We go see an aging rocker forget the lyrics to his own songs at a club because Dad thinks it will be fun. We wait in a long line and get our pictures taken with drag queens from TV who Ava says are her heroes. One strange celebratory afternoon, we stand in a field and watch the sky and wait. Elliott has jumped from a plane, and the speck of his parachute gets closer, closer, until finally he lands in the grass with a look of bewildered horror on his face. There’s dirt on his mouth and he’s shaking, but he says he’d do it again right now. His instructor informs us as we pick up his keys and wallet from the Skydiving Adventures building that Elliott is no longer welcome there. None of us ask any questions. We sit in silence for good chunks of time. We are family.
61
WHEN AVA’S OUT getting tutored for the GED test she’s taking next month, Mom and Dad come to talk to me. They bring Greek takeout and we sit at the dining room table munching on soggy pita. They tell me that Ava announced to them this morning that she no longer wants to talk to Ozzie, the cops, the FBI, the sex trafficking nonprofit people, or Shelly.
The Second Life of Ava Rivers Page 16