The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  “College?” Ava had asked, incredulous. “I’m technically not even in third grade right now, Mom. And how exactly do they expect me to write a book when I can barely even read?”

  “Someone would ghostwrite it,” Mom explained.

  We had to explain the term to Ava, of course.

  Ava laughed nervously. “But first there has to be an end, right? I mean, there’s no end to this. They haven’t found him.”

  Of course, then Mom started back in about cooperating with the police and how important it is. But the way Ava’s eyes had flashed . . . I swear she looked afraid or saddened at the prospect of it—the end. I wondered why, because in my ending, in my head, that villain, That Monster, is orange-clad and stuck in a cell forever. And the thought of it explodes me with joy. It should her, too.

  Now, in Ava’s dark room, I don’t follow up with my question about police. I also skip over asking if she’s been taking her meds and seeing Shelly because I don’t want to be another voice in the nagging family choir. I listen to her talk about how Max took her to Albany Bulb, a stretch of nature built on a landfill, pocked with murals and sculptures and homeless people.

  “All this art,” she says as she watches the screen. “Made out of trash.”

  She changes channels restlessly. Frantic cooking shows, NASCAR, black-and-white movies, an outdated action flick, finally settling on Nickelodeon.

  The cartoons reflect in her shiny eyes. She’s got her blankets pulled up to her chin. Her skin’s dry around her nose, like she’s been washing it too much, and she has some acne that’s been picked at.

  “Are you okay?” I ask softly.

  “Fine,” she says. “And dandy. Spectacularizimo.” She wipes her eyes, and I put my hand on her shoulder. “I feel like I’m stuck here, stuck in time, like a kid in a grown-up’s body—I don’t know. I’m scared it’s all gonna go away. It’s like, I was so special for a minute, now what?”

  “How can you think you’re not special, seriously?”

  “Like—I don’t know—I haven’t gotten an email in three days,” she says. “From anyone! No one asking me for interviews or anything.”

  “You always turn them down anyway.”

  “And Mom said that one book publisher said never mind and took their offer away.”

  “But—you want to write a book now?”

  “No,” she says. “But I also—I don’t know. I’m like, I’m scared.” She sits up and looks at me, pained, honest. “Who am I? What am I going to do with my life if I’m not Ava Rivers anymore?”

  “You’ll always be Ava Rivers, even without the dumb-ass cameramen chasing you down.”

  “I want a normal life,” she says. “But I can’t figure it out.”

  “Can’t figure what out?”

  “What is a normal life?” she asks me.

  It’s not rhetorical. She’s leaning forward, desperate for an answer.

  “I really have no idea,” I tell her. “I’ve been trying to find one since I was six years old.”

  I put my hand on hers. Our mood rings shine, side by side, both turquoise.

  “Look,” she says. “We’re the same.”

  She gives me her hairbrush and asks me to brush her hair. I sit behind her and start at the bottoms, teasing out the tangles and snags with painstaking painlessness, then run the brush up higher, higher, until it goes from scalp to tip.

  64

  IT HAPPENS SUDDENLY, the way the nights turn cold. Ava withdraws, takes multiple showers a day, brushes her hair compulsively, and when I crack jokes she seems preoccupied. This is more than down day after down day. This is another d word I’m all too familiar with.

  Everyone notices. Dad pulls me into the basement one day and confides that he’s worried about her. She’s erratic. She’s skipping out on her appointments. When Ozzie tried to call from a blocked number the other day, she threw her phone so hard on the floor it shattered.

  “It’s not her fault,” I say. “He won’t leave her alone.”

  “This behavior’s not like her,” Dad says.

  But it is like her. I’ve seen this side of her—they haven’t.

  Still, I promise Dad I really will talk to her, make sure she stops skipping therapy appointments and is taking her meds. I know it’s weird and selfish, but I love the way my dad looks at me with pleading eyes and speaks in that low, confidential tone, like he needs me. For a bitter second, I think of all the years he never did until now.

  When Max calls, Ava will pick up and leave the room. I hear their voices through the wall sometimes when he comes over and they lie on her bed watching TV. The hairs stand up on my arms, and I wait for gross make-out noises or something but never hear them. Don’t be jealous, Vera. You’re her favorite, you’re her twin, nothing can take that away.

  One night she comes to my room, ghost white, rapping on my door. She’s hugging her comforter and a pillow.

  “Can I sleep in here tonight?” she asks. “My brain’s being ugly.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I want to sleep where my bed used to be,” she says. “Beneath the window.”

  She spreads the comforter on the floor and lies there.

  “I want to be a little girl,” she tells the ceiling. “Nothing bad happens to me. I live in this house. I have a family. My name is Ava Rivers.”

  “Ava?”

  “My name is Ava Rivers and everything’s okay.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath in.

  My heart. The truth rumbles deep, an imminent earthquake. It’s been so easy to ignore—those unthinkable, undescribed things that happened to her. But they’re there. Forever. Inescapable. Scars.

  “Ava.” I try to come and hug her. But she turns away, on her side, and faces the window.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. “Just shhh—let it pass.”

  The night is crickets and airplanes. I chew the inside of my cheek. There are new asterisks on her arms, scabby constellations that bring tears to my eyes like they are my burns, that is my skin. I know Shelly is working with Ava on not hurting herself. But all the help in the world doesn’t seem to work fast enough sometimes.

  65

  I SPEND THE next day trying to convince Ava to call Shelly. Call someone. Nope. She bites her fingernails, picks at her scalp. I find an excuse to stay by her side all day. Try to cheer her up with dumb suggestions: Let’s wear wigs. Let’s go thrifting. We do, but she’s joyless and spaced out. She doesn’t buy anything and doesn’t seem to care her wig’s crooked. I crack jokes, I’m met with silence. As we drive around and the college radio station plays weird experimental electronic music—which she switches off, saying, “I hate this crap”—I have to remind myself to breathe. She’s not going to do anything crazy. I won’t lose her. Because, man, the thoughts that happen, the quick montage of tragic possibilities, they terrify me.

  I have to cheer her up and get her smiling. I have to spit shine the world.

  As twilight bruises the sky, she runs into a liquor store for cigarettes. In the running car, my worried eyes in the rearview, I get an idea. She hops back into the car, and I drive to my—our—elementary school.

  “What’s this, a field trip?” she asks flatly as we park across the street from the cement buildings and the chain-link fence protecting a playground.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, unbuckling my seat belt. “We’re hopping in a time machine.”

  She doesn’t say anything as I get out. She follows me with her hands in her fur coat’s pockets, cigarette dangling from her lips. We open a gate in the chain-link fence, and I lead her across the blacktop, toeing over Four Square chalkings and passing handball courts and tether poles with no tetherballs. There’s a mosaic mural with children playing ball. As we head toward the swing set, she bends her neck up to catch an eyeful of the night-kissed air and its dull shine—a handful of star
s like glitter from yesterday’s party. She kicks the sand in the sandbox we trudge through.

  “School,” she says.

  “Remember?” I ask her as we get to the swings.

  We sit side by side, hands clutching the chains, not swinging in our black rubber seats. Sitting and hanging. She still hasn’t lit the cigarette between her lips. A part of me wants to ask her for one so we can smoke them together like sharing secrets. But a bigger part of me wants her to stop, to take care of herself, to never ever burn herself again. To make my mom proud.

  “Kindergarten,” I say, pointing up to the flat red building in front of us.

  She squints at the door up there, a small, dark mouth. There, inside, once we sat in the same classroom.

  “Who was our teacher again?” she asks after a short forever.

  “Ms. Rosario,” I tell her.

  “Ms. Rosahrio,” she repeats in a theatrical voice.

  “She was mean and too tan. She looked like a raisin. Silver hair to her butt. She hated me because I was always a problem during nap time.”

  “And me?”

  “You got in trouble for talking,” I tell her. “You and Max.”

  “Max.”

  She pulls her phone out and starts texting. I wait for her to come back, I wait for her to have that aha moment where the past comes roaring back and engulfs everything and we sit and get lost in it together. Instead, the light of the phone shines her face pale blue in the darkness.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hello?”

  She drops the phone back into her pocket. “Sorry.”

  “Do you remember?” I ask.

  “Moments,” she says. “Little . . . Yeah, I mean, that raisin, Ms. Rosario. The classroom, tiny desks, nap time.” She shakes her head, surveying the empty school, everything miniature. Once this place was a world. Now it’s a dollhouse. “Nothing before I came back here is real. It’s all just some weird déjà vu. I’m sorry I can’t sit back with popcorn and watch the memories with you.”

  Ava’s voice cracks on that word, “you,” and she pulls out her lighter. She flicks it and flicks it. A flame never comes.

  “Shite,” she says, and tucks the smoke behind her ear.

  I could take this silent moment to tell her smoking is dangerous, that the starry burns on her arms sting me, too. But I’ve got a concrete tongue.

  “I could imagine growing up here,” Ava says, her voice getting hoarse with emotion. “It would’ve been nice, you know, elementary school. Lunch boxes and recess and little backpacks. That wasn’t my life.”

  “It was for a brief—”

  “Right, but it wasn’t.” She wipes her nose. “It was this other place. I come here—it’s like seeing a stranger’s school, or some set in a movie I saw once or something. It’s not real.”

  Her cool dismissal of the past breaks me. I’ve never felt more alone, on this still swing next to my sister, in a dark, empty playground of my elementary school. Squint my eyes and I can see our little ghosts flitting around with jump ropes. Then mine, alone, bewildered, always scanning the playground for a sister who wasn’t there. Afraid of the bus driver. Afraid of my friends’ dads when they came to pick them up. Afraid of every man I didn’t know—potential kidnappers.

  “Sometimes I wake up and it takes me a minute to remember I’m Ava.” Her eyes, her voice, are full. “Because I wasn’t Ava before, you realize. I had a different name.”

  “Yeah.”

  It’s like she’s ripped from me all over again.

  “It’s important to keep talking about all this,” I finally say, the words hurting as they vacate my throat. “You need to keep on with the police. Who knows who might remember you from somewhere.”

  Her voice climbs. “No one knew I was there. No one cared. They’re never going to find him.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “He’s smarter than all of them,” she says. “And I’ve just been the flavor of the week. TV stations aren’t even airing it anymore. Ava Rivers, one-hit wonder.”

  I can’t tell if she’s joking. Nothing about it is funny.

  “No,” she says. “Nobody’s ever going to find him. Guess what? I don’t even know if I’d want them to.”

  There it is.

  Yep.

  I’ve wondered, I don’t say. Wondered so quietly within myself I barely heard my own wondering.

  She gulps and then goes on, her words coming out slowly. “It’s complicated. I’m so mad at him. And then also—don’t tell anyone I said this, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “I actually love him. I actually miss him sometimes.” The tears fall from her eyes, but her face is not crying. “He wasn’t all bad. Sometimes he just watched TV with me. He bought me coloring books and stuffed animals. Once, I had an allergic reaction when a bee got in somehow through a cracked window and stung me. My whole head swelled up like some crazy cartoon. He got me medicine. He saved my life.”

  I had no idea she was allergic to bees. And the idea that That Monster actually both stole and saved her life at one point makes me hate him more—his power, his ugly power.

  “I know what you’re thinking when you look at me—you’re thinking, she was raped. She was abused.” To hear those words roll out so unflinchingly always takes the wind from me. “You’re thinking, that’s the worst thing in the world, the worst thing that could ever happen—besides me being dead. But you’re wrong.” She holds her head back and sucks a huge breath through her nose, lets it out again. “The worst thing isn’t that part. The worst was being abandoned, forgotten about. Like when he didn’t come upstairs after work. He forgot about me for days and would just come by and give me cold pizza or read me the Bible. I was so hungry at the end. I needed him. He didn’t even want to look at me anymore. Then I was a ghost. I was a ghost girl.”

  I taste my tears before I realize they’re there. Ava’s are dropping onto her coat and not changing her expression in any way.

  “Sometimes it’s like I hate him most because he didn’t love me anymore,” she says.

  “Have you told anyone this? I mean, every detail? About what he did?”

  “Most of it. I’ve never told anyone I love him—you don’t understand, it’s—it’s gross.”

  I hide my disgust. Not at her, of course. At him. At the situation. “But you’re not gross. It’s totally natural to have feelings for your captor. You lived with him for years.”

  “I know it is, Shelly’s told me that. But I hate talking about it.” She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her coat. “Please, Veer, don’t tell nobody.”

  “You need to tell the police everything you know.”

  “I don’t need to do anything.”

  I sigh. “It hurts me so much that this person did this to you and he’s still out there.”

  “And I hate that it hurts you.” She sniffs and stands up. “I really do. But you can’t tell, okay? You’ve got to swear.”

  “I swear,” I say reluctantly.

  “On our sisterhood.”

  “I do.”

  God, I wish I could talk to someone about this. I think of telling Max sometimes—I’d love to hear what he thinks, and I trust him completely. But I can’t break a swear on sisterhood.

  We get in the car, the expansive nighttime city quiet transforming into the contained car quiet.

  “You mad at me?” she asks.

  “Not mad.”

  She lights a cigarette.

  “You should quit smoking,” I blurt as we turn past the mural and its empty lot and onto our street. “It’s bad for you.” I glance at her arms, her poor scarred arms. “You need to take care of yourself.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Sure, whatever.”

  She says it so dismissively, but after a second she throws her cigarette out the window just the same.

>   “Love you, Veer,” she whispers.

  “Love you, too.”

  We head inside and go to our rooms. If you could bulldoze the walls, there we’d be, the two of us, just twelve or so feet apart. In bed, in the dark, I’m a fiery swirl that begins in my chest and swirls outward. Love throbs fierce and mean.

  Ava comes knocking an hour later and sleeps on my floor again that night. I can’t sleep anyway. I keep thinking about That Monster, that demon my brain won’t stop painting pictures of out of the Most Wanted sketches—a Pillsbury Doughman with serial killer eyes. My imagination runs with the scant details, giving him a mouthful of bad teeth, a sick laugh. He-he-he. Vomitous. I’ve never hated someone I’ve never met so much in my life. Ava starts sleep-talking in the dark and I sit up, listening sharply for clues. But she just mumbles phrases like “Them legs though” and “I couldn’t eat all those pizza bagels” and “A few minutes can save you a few hundred in car insurance.”

  66

  I GET UP Thanksgiving morning and am greeted by an explosion of pumpkins, gourds, and spicy-smelling fat candles all over our house. A homemade banner that says TANKFUL hangs over the fireplace, one sheet of printing paper per letter. I point the typo out and Mom says, “Then please fix it. It was your father’s one job.” She’s in the middle of making a Thanksgiving playlist on iTunes. Her earrings are gold maple leaves that match the centerpiece.

  I go back to my room to hide with Ava, a little freaked out by the scene downstairs. Ava’s been happier—rays of sun peeking through the clouds. We sit on the bed in comfortable silence. She gets up and faces the window overlooking the backyard—the Rivers jungle. I scoot off the bed and go to my closet, pick a cranberry dress, and change behind the closet door. Since Ava sort of moved into my room with me, we have our unspoken agreement in regard to privacy. Though when it’s her changing behind the door and I pretend to be busy with my phone or making my bed or whatever, I can’t help wondering how her body is different from mine. I shudder to imagine more scars.