The Second Life of Ava Rivers

by Faith Gardner

  His hand’s on my back, hesitant, as he rubs a circle light enough that I might not even notice it’s there.

  I’m stuck in the terrible falling-apart for a moment and then it lifts, and then I take another napkin and wipe my tears and blow my nose. I can’t look him in the eye even though he’s staring at me with hard concern. I pretend to be interested in eating and reach for my food.

  “Can you maybe elaborate a little on why you’re having a mental breakdown?”

  “I’m not having a mental breakdown,” I say, annoyed.

  “Why you’re freaking out and sobbing all over the place?”

  “Thanks for being so sensitive.”

  “I’m just joking. I’m sorry. Hey, I just—I don’t know what to say right now. I’ve never seen you cry.”

  “Allergies.”

  “Um, yeah, okay.”

  “A lot of dust in the room right now,” I joke, cracking a smile.

  There is so much sweetness in his gaze, so much inquiring sweetness, that I have to look away again.

  “You can talk to me,” he says softly. “What we have here . . . it’s not like I’m going to run telling Ava anything you say.”

  “Ava doesn’t even know you and I have been seeing each other,” I say. “I mean, not ‘seeing’ seeing each other. Just—you know, she doesn’t know you come over and we hang out.”

  “I haven’t said anything either. You think she’d get heated about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how she’d react.”

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “I know she tried to kiss you. And she thinks you’re gay.”

  I look at his face for an answer, but he just nods.

  “Are you?” I ask.

  “I mean, she asked me if I was into guys, I told her yeah . . . she assumed it meant I was straight-up gay. Seemed simpler to just let her run with that.”

  “You’re bi.”

  “That a problem?”

  “No. So am I.”

  He shrugs. “I think everyone is, really.”

  “But you didn’t kiss her back.”

  “Nah, I don’t . . . feel that way about her. I love her, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t—you know—not that way.”

  He squeezes my hand, and I squeeze it back. His hand is so soft. It’s been so long since anyone touched me besides Ava. How electric even something as simple as a palm in mine feels.

  It makes me sad.

  “Sometimes, I can’t tell you why, it’s really hard being her sister,” I tell him, looking at our hands.

  “I know it is. I know.”

  “It’s been rough. Which is why I had that little allergy-related accident a few minutes ago.”

  “You know, I realize you’re not superhuman. You’re allowed to cry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You going to eat the rest of your food?”

  I can’t pretend to enjoy it anymore. “I’m over it.”

  “You were over it on the first bite, admit.”

  “I was.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you say and don’t say, Vera,” he says. “Your face has always told me everything.”

  What a delightful, terrifying prospect.

  He eats my food. This boy, I tell you, is string-skinny, and he eats like a human garbage disposal. Then we slip out of the house and go on a walk, shivering in our coats, and hop a chain-link fence into a closed playground. He pushes me for a while on a swing. Then he comes around the front and holds the chains to make the swing stop. He leans down and gives me a warm kiss, gently touching the hair falling around my face with one hand. His lips are just as amazing as I always thought they’d be. I don’t stop kissing him for a long time, because I know as soon as I do, I’m going to have to tell him that we can’t ever do this again.

  79

  I’M GETTING MY oil changed. I wait outside in a plastic chair, squinting at my Scrabble game on my phone, when a pair of boots appears on the asphalt in front of me. I recognize those black cowboy boots. More specifically, I recognize that precise stomp of them. I look up and see a dark, burly shadow against the bright sun. Ozzie. Oz. Ozzfest. He’s wearing aviators and, behind his giant mustache, he smiles.

  “What the hell?” I ask.

  “Hi, Vera.”

  “You getting your oil changed, too?”

  “Yyyeah.”

  “You’re not getting your oil changed.”

  “Can we talk?”

  I sit up straighter, put my phone away. “About what?”

  “I’ve tried to talk to your parents,” he says. “They . . . won’t listen to reason.”

  “They want a restraining order.” I get increasingly uncomfortable, taking my purse onto my lap. “You know, they wouldn’t like this—us schmoozing like this.”

  “Can we talk?” he repeats.

  He sits into the plastic chair beside me, screeching it along the pavement.

  “How you doing?” he asks.

  “Um . . . fine.”

  “How’s . . . school?”

  I roll my eyes. Cut to the chase, man. No one in life was ever in desperate need of some small talk.

  “I’m not in school,” I say.

  “I figured you’d be at Berkeley!”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “You know, my ex-wife is head of admissions,” he says. “I could introduce you. I don’t mind.”

  It’s been years since Ozzie sat down and had some kind of conversation with me that had nothing to do with my missing sister. I know he’s a kindhearted person, hence the whole years-long obsession with Ava’s case for free, but I also suspect him right now of buttering me up. This doesn’t feel right. He gives Ava the creeps and my parents cut him off so suddenly—who knows what went down. I cross my arms in front of my chest.

  “I’ll be quick here,” he says, as if he can detect my distrust. “It’s about Ava. I highly suspect she’s not telling you quite a chunk of change.”

  He words it in this weird way, like he’s trying to intrigue me. But really I just think he’s an idiot. Of course she’s not telling the truth. She’s trying to protect her captor, who lives in Satterfield. How’s that for the truth, sucker? Slap a badge on me and call me a detective.

  “Yeah, I don’t want to talk about this with you.” I stand up and sling my purse onto my shoulder. “You’re not on her case anymore, dude. Let it go.”

  He has to pry the plastic chair from his ass as he stands up, too.

  “Just hear me out, then I’ll go. I studied this case for years. Her story—there are holes, there are parts that don’t match up. She’s not—”

  As he speaks, something in me boils over. Deep anger. It happens in one second—snap.

  “This man is harassing me!” I shout to the world.

  His mouth hangs open, startled.

  People snap to attention, birds fly away.

  He has a kind face. Fierce, bright eyes that you know have studied violence and beauty. I’ve seen the way that he watches my mother—with a gentleness surprising for his loud, stomping frame. This man is lonely. This man cares deeply, perhaps too deeply, for my sister’s case. I don’t wish him ill, but I want him to stop talking, I don’t want to get in the middle of some fight he had with my parents, I don’t want to know his theories.

  I lower my voice. Almost a growl. “Please,” I say. “Just go away.”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  He backs up, his boots clicking on the sidewalk.

  “If you ever need anything, you know where I am,” he says in this gruff, official way.

  I turn away and walk up toward the lot where my car is. It’s ready. As I drive away, Ozzie’s nowhere to be seen, like I dreamt him up. Poor Ozzie. He probably feels like he sunk his goddamn soul into this case and now he’
s cut off. He’s probably driven himself insane trying to find That Monster. I shouldn’t’ve screamed. It was so unlike me, really.

  I look into the rearview, alarmed at the stranger there in my familiar face.

  80

  I DON’T KNOW how long it takes—days, weeks, some mix of both—but I slither into aimlessness. Sleep in late, later. Stop checking my email as often, let my phone die for hours on end, forgo leaving the house except to go pick up takeout at nearby restaurants, eyeing the sun with contempt. California can’t even manage to have a freaking winter. When Max texts me asking if he can come over, I fake sick so many times he tells me I’m starting to sound like his mother. I hang out with Ava when she’s around and try my best to be cheerful, watch god-awful reality shows and laugh at them with her, answer appropriately when my mom or dad comes through and asks questions of me, always about Ava anyway: Where’s Ava? if she’s out. How’s Ava doing? if they haven’t spoken in a day or so. Ava’s great, actually. Ava’s got three weeks before she takes the GED and she’s doing driving lessons and getting pretty damn good at the ukulele. It’s me who’s losing my mind, not that anybody notices, not that they should, because I feel I’m covering it up well. But my secret is eating me from the inside out.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Ava says. “Come on. You need cheering up.”

  “Walking outside when it’s witch-tit cold is not going to cheer me up.”

  “We’ll wear big coats. And wigs! Let’s wear wigs like we used to.”

  “I don’t want to wear—”

  Of course we wear them anyway, because Ava always gets what she wants.

  We walk through the neighborhood, saying hi to dogs and their walkers, stopping to pet a calico cat on a porch. Ava comments on the DRUG-FREE ZONE sign on a street corner as if she’s never seen it before.

  “Berkeley, I love you. Why do they put that there?” she asks in astonishment. “You think some druggie really looks up at that and thinks, ‘Ah, actually, I won’t do drugs now’?”

  I smile weakly.

  The ash trees hiss with wind. The streetlamps are worlds brighter than the moon or stars.

  “Something snapped in you.”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her.

  “I hope it wasn’t ’cause of me.”

  Her fake hair is blown back by the breeze, and I see her real hair, puffy and trying to burst out beneath it.

  “I hope what I told you—and showing you that house—didn’t drive you off the deep end or whatever,” she goes on.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  We walk for a bit, holding hands. We head down Ashby and turn on California, and I wonder who is leading whom. A few blocks up there are police lights and fire engines parked. The chain-link fence appears to be blocked off by yellow tape, and cops are barricading the streets around it.

  “Shoot,” Ava says, adjusting her wig. “I guess we’re not going that way.”

  We head back. Even though the short walk and sharp wind and quick chat with Ava reenergized me, the second I saw the police cars and fire engines and the street blocked off like bad news, like a movie crime scene, it clicked inside me that what I need to do is very simple.

  It doesn’t matter what Ava wants. If she doesn’t want the cops to know where he is, fine.

  But tomorrow I am going to drive to Satterfield, California, and I’m going to see Jonathan.

  81

  NEXT DAY AT noon I’m about to sneak out the door as Ava comes in, running around to show everybody her printed page that says PASS for the GED. Mom is bathing her dogs in the backyard, but I hear her cheer. Dad comes up from the basement and calls Ava a genius.

  “That’s amazing,” I yell from the foyer, car keys in hand. I push memories of my own high school graduation out of my head, how Mom showed up just for my name to be called and left before I was able to hug her goodbye and how Dad made an excuse that day about being sick, or maybe he was sick, I don’t know.

  “Amazing,” I yell again, hoping Ava will hear me, but she’s shut the back sliding glass door to talk to Mom.

  “Ghost girl,” I tell the empty room. “I am a ghost girl.”

  I turn to leave right as the doorbell rings. When I open the door, Max is there on our porch with this zeroed-in stare, this razor gaze that sears through everything to make me feel so exposed even though I’m in the world’s most engulfing peacoat.

  “Hey,” he says. “How you been farin’?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Busy.”

  “So that’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”

  “I haven’t been— Look, I’m sorry, right now’s not a good time. Can you come back later?”

  “I’m actually not here for you, I’m here ’cause Ava texted and said she wanted to pop some bubbly to celebrate her GED.”

  “Ah.”

  I’ll admit, it stings a little.

  “Max!” Ava sings, dancing into the room.

  They hug. I put my hands in my pocket.

  “Everyone want prosecco?” yells my dad. “I just found an old bottle I can put in the freezer.”

  “Do we have any kombucha?” Ava yells back.

  “That’s a weird thing to drink out of champagne glasses,” Dad says.

  “You’re not going somewhere, are you?” Ava asks me.

  “Yeah, I am, sorry,” I say. “I’ll celebrate with you later. Take you out to dinner or something. Congratulations! I’m so proud of you!”

  “But where are you going?” Ava asks, crestfallen.

  “I have a date,” I say.

  My gaze is directed at her, but I’m watching Max, specifically the grimace on his face as I say that last syllable. I don’t know why I said that. Two birds, one stone, I guess.

  “Whaaaaa?” Ava asks. “Seriously?”

  For a brief nanosecond I’m afraid I’ve hurt her just as much as Max. But then she grins and gives me a little push toward the door.

  “Yay for you! You’d better tell me every detail.”

  I toss a “Later” over my shoulder and don’t look back as I get into my car.

  Today is cloudless, bitter blue, and cold. I crank the heat. It’s not until I’m hitting the freeway that I let the quick interaction with Max there ring in my ears. It’s like I just had my first fight with him or something, which is absurd, because we’re not together and we didn’t fight. We kissed once. I didn’t return his calls after. Anyway, clearly, he’s my sister’s friend. I can’t hurt her. I won’t.

  I let out the world’s biggest sigh. I turn up, down, up the radio.

  “I have to do this,” I tell the rearview.

  As I finally get off the freeway in Satterfield two hours later, my mind tired from the thinking and self-convincing, my eyes squinty and shrunken from forgetting sunglasses and staring into the sun over the highway, I can’t stop the fire of questions in my head any longer. A pandemonium of hypotheticals has gone off, and I’m what-ifing at a rate faster than the speed of sound. What if he doesn’t live there anymore? What if it’s not even his house and Ava had it wrong? What am I going to say to him? What am I doing?

  I just want answers. I want answers so badly. I want to see his face, learn why Ava won’t let the world know about him. Maybe find out something about him that can take him down. Know my enemy.

  I pass the long nothing-road dotted with windmills, a bus stop, a church with a marquee that says I LOVED YOU AT YOUR DARKEST, do a double-take.

  It all looks so different in the daytime.

  Tract housing. Bench. Plastic playground. I could drive this unfamiliar route in my sleep.

  I park in front of his house. There’s no one on the street. Trees cast shade on the sidewalks. Next door, a kid’s bicycle left carelessly on a lawn. An airplane flies by, and it scares me that I’m so small they can’t see me, that at this moment, no one can.
<
br />   He could do anything to me.

  My arms are noodley. Am I really going to do this? The doubt screws into my belly, sickening, and I have to will my every action to keep the momentum going. Step out of the car. Close the car door. Harden my face. Stand for a moment on the sidewalk staring at the rock lawn, thinking maybe I should pocket one of the more jagged ones in case he’s dangerous. I lean down and pick one out. With enough force, I could slit his throat. I can’t move for a moment as I stand there, fondling the innocent rock that just became a weapon that easily—with just a thought. I cross the rock lawn, steps scraping. Could I be a killer? Would the world be better with him dead? Am I truly here right now? Are you real or are you not, Vera? Knock, knock. Vera, I can’t tell which you are anymore.

  The door opens. It’s a man.

  My stomach pitches.

  Everything behind him is not how I pictured it—a bird in a cage, some hung coats, a powerful stink of animal pee, a watercolor picture in a frame that says this, in block letters:

  THE BEST THING ABOUT MEMORIES IS MAKING THEM.

  I’m still thinking about killing him.

  But of course I don’t.

  I suspect right away that this man is not him. This man’s balding, white-haired, thinner than the forensic sketches. Then again, there are similarities. The blue-gray eyes. I don’t know whom I’m looking for. This could be the face of my worst enemy or the face of a nobody. Every stranger wears a mask.

  “Jonathan?” I ask.

  My voice sounds so much smaller than I intended it—a peep, really.

  “No—Pete,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say.

  There’s been some mistake. I’m sinking fast. I think about turning around and going home, but then the man speaks up in monotone.

  “I’m his brother. Jonathan passed away,” he says. “I’m staying here handling some things for a few weeks. Can I ask who you are?”

  The world melts into psychedelic slow motion for a second as those words, “passed away,” echo in my brain and conjure up a meaning and that meaning turns to sick, nervous, angry, disbelieving relief.

  “Uh . . . I’m sorry, he passed away?” I repeat.