Читать книгу Ava's Gift - Jason Mott - Страница 9

TWO

“THAT GIRL OF yours really started something, didn’t she, Sheriff?” John Mitchell put his hands akimbo and tightened his mouth into a querulous frown. He had been the sheriff of Stone Temple before Macon, and had not retired the cynicism acquired from a lifetime of upholding the law. He was a wiry man made of hard corners: sharp elbows and pointed shoulders, a long nose and deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that made him seem to scowl even when he was happy. He cast the type of bitter appearance that made children uneasy around him, even though he was a kind man who loved children.

Since passing the ornaments and instruments of sheriff on to Macon, he came by the station every Wednesday afternoon to check in on Macon and to get a general sense of what he’d left behind. Most days there was little to talk about other than missing farm animals—usually just animals that had walked off of their own accord—and where the best fishing or hunting spots were, depending on the weather and the time of year. But today John had come by and there was much more to talk about than fishing and runaway animals. “Looks like all hell’s done broke loose,” John said.

“Can’t argue with that,” Macon replied. The two men were standing in Macon’s office, peeking out through the window blinds. Outside there was a mob of reporters and cameras and people with signs. Macon sipped from a cup of coffee and watched and considered it all.

Macon was wrapping up work in the sheriff’s office of Stone Temple and doing the best he could to ignore the crowds of people surrounding the building, preparing to pick up his daughter from the hospital in Asheville. He didn’t like looking at the crowds outside the station, but looking away was a challenge, as well. He wanted to understand it all, and the road to understanding is always paved with hours spent doing something that it would be easier not to do. Still, all watching the crowds did for him was remind him that the world around him was getting out of control.

He’d been to the hospital every day since the incident and, each day, the process of getting there was more and more complicated—traffic, people, reporters. And once he was there, he was forced to sit and watch test after test after test run on his daughter. The doctors and nurses came like clockwork. They poked, they prodded. They took Ava’s blood. They took Macon’s blood. There were theories that whatever Ava had done might be rooted in her genetics. And with her mother deceased, Macon became the pincushion through which they hoped to explore their theories. They took bone marrow, DNA samples. And then, like old-world oracles, they came back for more blood, saying that the answers had to be hidden within.

Macon’s arm was still sore from a young nurse who didn’t quite seem to have yet perfected her craft. Time and again, she missed his vein. It was somewhere around the sixth error that he decided he’d had enough. “It’s time to stop this,” was all he said. And, from that point forward, he limited the doctors’ access to his daughter and he told them, in no uncertain terms, that he would be taking her home.

Today was the day he would bring her home. And the entire world seemed to be watching. He had always been a private man, and nothing that was happening in his life right now sat well with him. The earth was falling away beneath his feet.

“Never would have thought it,” John said.

“What’s that?”

“That all of this could fit into a town like ours.”

“I suppose nobody ever thinks something like this will fit,” Macon replied, taking another sip of his coffee. Finally he closed the blinds and returned to sitting at his desk. “But there it is,” he said, motioning at the window and the crowd beyond it.

“I still can’t quite see why you wouldn’t want to stay in Asheville,” John said. He leaned back on his heels a bit and thought. “Then again,” he said, “I suppose that if I were you and Ava was well enough that she didn’t have to be there, I reckon I’d want to have the home field advantage, too. Up there in Asheville, it’s just a city of people you don’t know. At least here, you know who you can trust. And, if you really, really want to, there are enough mountains and backwoods paths that you could sneak away from all of the cameras, even if only for a little while.”

Macon’s office, much like the town of Stone Temple, was small and old. The sheriff’s office building had been rebuilt in the late sixties after having burned down—something to do with lightning. And from that rebuilding onward, little had changed—apart from wiring the place for internet a few years back.

“Any actual crimes going on?” John asked, returning from the window. “I expect not, but I like to ask.”

“Crimes? No,” Macon said. “Mostly it’s just people. Too damned many of them. And everybody’s got their own agenda. You been out there on the mountain road lately?”

“Not if I can help it,” John said. “I try to stay in town most these days.”

“You couldn’t get over the mountain now if you wanted to,” Macon said. “At least not without burning three or four hours. It’s a parking lot. Just full of people. People in cars, people in vans, people in buses, people on bicycles, people walking. I don’t know where they’re planning on staying. Folks have already started renting out their houses and their property to anybody with enough money, but even with all that, I don’t think Stone Temple is big enough to hold all of this. It’s like watching floodwaters rise. Except I feel like we didn’t get the part where it started at our ankles and crept up slowly. All of this—” he made a motion with his hand to indicate the mass of people outside his window “—all of this makes me feel like the waters are already up to our necks.”

John nodded to show that he understood and agreed. He walked to the opened door of Macon’s office and looked out at the rest of the station. “Got a few new faces out there,” he said.

“State police loaned us a few bodies, just to help keep a handle on things,” Macon replied. He leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin. “A lot of people in town now with a lot of different opinions. Some folks think it’s all just some kind of hoax. And I can’t say I’d believe too much differently if it was me. All they saw was some video on the web. And there isn’t much in the world these days easier to disbelieve than what you see. So the skeptics have come and so have the people who think Ava’s the Second Coming. Put those two together, and you’ve got a recipe for shenanigans. At least somebody had the good sense to decide that maybe we could use a little help.”

“On whose dime?” John asked.

“Not sure if they’re getting paid overtime or what,” Macon said. “I think most of it is coming from the state—damned sure ain’t coming from us. But...”

“But what?” John asked.

“Honestly,” Macon said, “I think some of them might be volunteering for all this.”

John grunted disapprovingly. He closed the door to Macon’s office. “Can’t say I’m surprised by that. Keep an eye on them.”

“On who? The volunteers?”

“Yep,” John said. “Nobody volunteers for any damned thing. Not in this lifetime. They got mouths to feed, just like you do. If they’re here, and if they’re working, they’re getting paid. Likely as not they’re working for those reporters out there.” He motioned toward the window through which he and Macon had been looking. There was disgust in his gesture. “Chances are they’re getting paid for information. Little tidbits they can sell to the tabloids or whatever. They show up here, work, listen, watch and then when their shift is over they head out there and debrief.” John sighed. “Oldest trick in the book,” he said.

Macon thought for a moment. “Suppose I knew that, but I hadn’t really paid any attention to it.”

“Got any of them volunteering to work close to your house?”

“A couple,” Macon said.

“Yeah,” John replied. “Those are the ones getting paid the most.”

“Think I should be worried?”

John waved his hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t. Yeah, they’re out to make a buck off you, but I don’t think a single person out there would do it at the expense of your family. They’ll keep you safe, but they’ll make a little gravy if they can. I’d just be careful who I talked to,” he said.

Macon watched John as he spoke. The old sheriff shifted in his seat and licked his lips as he glanced around the office. “Are we going to get down to business anytime soon?” Macon asked. “I know that, as Southern folks, we’ve made taking the long road in conversation into an art form, but my world is too crazy right now to spend much more time on whatever it is you’re trying to bring up, John. I gotta make the drive up to Asheville and, like I said, with the road the way it is, it’s going to take hours.”

John squinted and leaned in toward Macon. “How did she do it?” he asked. “How did she heal that boy, really?”

“I don’t know,” Macon said. “Just like I told the reporters, the doctors, all those biologists they brought in, the twenty different preachers that have called me, the bloggers who keep emailing me. My story hasn’t changed, John. I don’t know anything about what’s going on here.”

“Bullshit,” John said gruffly. “We both know that you can bury a dead body in the distance between what a person knows and what a person pretends not to know. And I have a hard time getting my mind around the notion that you didn’t have any kind of inkling about any of this.” He shook his head. “No, I think you knew and you wanted to keep her...it...this thing that she’s able to do, you wanted to keep it under the radar.”

Macon sighed. “Everybody on this planet seems to think that, even if it’s not true.”

“You were wrong to keep it secret,” John said. “My wife,” he began. His fingers picked at a nonexistent piece of lint on his pants. “I loved my wife,” John said. “She was a good woman, a kind woman. Better than this world deserved, if you ask me. She was in that hospital a week before the end. Doctors did everything they could to save her. At least, that’s what I thought.” When he finally looked up from his fidgeting hand and into Macon’s eyes, there was a dark mixture of blame and bitterness in his eyes.

“I’m not going to have this conversation with you, John,” Macon said.

“It’s just that you could have helped,” John replied, and this time he was no longer the hard-nosed sheriff; he was simply a man who had lost his wife two years ago and now, very suddenly, believed it could have happened another way.

“John...” Macon said.

John snorted. “Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t know how she did it. You didn’t know anything about her being able to heal people, right?” Before Macon could answer, John continued. “Whatever story you stick to, you’re going to have to answer that question a hell of a lot more. You might not believe it, but those reporters out there paid me five hundred dollars just for walking in here,” he said. “I told them I wouldn’t have anything to tell them when I came out, and that’s still true. But I’m not the only person in this world who, now that they know what you’ve been hiding, will ask questions about what right you have to keep something like this to yourself.”

“They’re already asking those questions, John,” Macon replied. “As for them paying you to come in here, well, do what you feel you need to do. I know how much your pension is, and it’s not enough. Everyone’s got to make a living.”

John nodded emphatically. “They do,” he said. “Each and every one of us, from the day we’re born to the day we die, we’ve got to live. And we’ve got to make a living. Times been tough lately.”

Macon leaned back in his chair. “What else is there, John?” he asked. There was less patience in Macon’s voice now. He respected the old man, thought of him as a good friend, but he saw in John’s eyes that a shade of resentment still remained there. He was still thinking of his wife, Mabel, still imagining what might have been, still imagining what he believed Ava could have done.

John stared at him across the table briefly. The old sheriff’s expression shifted from surprise to acceptance to anger to something akin to embarrassment. John took a deep breath. When he let it go, the words that followed slid out of him like an apology. “There’s this preacher coming to town.”

“We got bushels of them already,” Macon replied. “Could sell preachers by the pound if we wanted right now. Preachers and reporters, whole churches trying to set up camp out there. You name it, we got it.”

“No,” John said. “This one is different. Bigger. If I can talk you into sitting with him for a while...” His voice trailed off.

“Who is he?”

“Reverend Isaiah Brown. You’ve probably seen him on TV.”

“Can’t say I’ve heard of him. But I don’t really keep up with reverends and I haven’t really watched TV since they canceled Seinfeld.”

“I’m not the type to ask for favors,” John said, not pausing for the joke. “And I damned sure don’t beg anyone for anything—”

Macon held up a hand to stop him. “I’m not going to make you say the words,” he said. “I’ll think about it. How much will he give you for that?”

At last, the fidgeting and nervousness stopped. “Don’t know,” he said. “But I figure that’s got to be worth something.”

“Good,” Macon said.

John stood. “I’ll let him know,” he said. Then: “Just tell me, Macon. Promise me. Promise me you didn’t know. That she couldn’t have helped my wife. If you say it one more time, I’ll believe it, and I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

The hardness and intimidation was stripped away from him. He was a man trapped between the solace that he had done everything in his power to save his wife’s life, and the possibility that, even though he didn’t know it at the time, he could have done more. Every brick of self-forgiveness that he had placed around his heart since his wife’s death was loosened, and all it would take was a word from Macon for it come to crashing down, leaving John to hate not only Macon but, most of all, himself.

“I promise,” Macon said. There was exasperation and confusion in his voice. He had known John for nearly all of his life, and yet here the man stood, ready to test the bounds of their friendship, ready to lay the blame for the death of his wife at Macon’s feet, all because of what Ava had done. But even through his frustration, Macon wondered if he would have behaved any differently. “This is all just as new to me as it is to everyone else, John,” Macon said. “If there was anything that I could have done to help your wife, anything at all, I would have done it. People have a duty to help one another, a responsibility. That’s one thing we’ve always agreed on.”

“All right,” John said finally. He made an awkward motion with his hand, something between a wave goodbye and a gesture of dismissiveness. “I believe you,” he said. “But there’s going to be people who won’t. Your daughter has started something. Something big. People in this world are looking for something to believe in, and they’re going to ask for help. When they do, if you say no—regardless of the reasons—they’re not going to like it.”

He turned and opened the door and finally left, leaving Macon to think about the future of things.

* * *

“Good news, kiddo. You’re getting paroled today.” Macon stood in the doorway of Ava’s hospital room with a small bouquet of flowers in one hand and a gym bag in the other. Floating above the flowers was a pair of balloons. One read Get Well Soon. The other It’s a Girl.

“See what I did there?” Macon asked with a grin, pointing up at the balloons.

“Carmen’s idea?” Ava asked. She sat up in the bed. Her father had never been the type to give flowers.

“Why wouldn’t they be my idea?” he asked Ava as he entered the room.

“Where’s Carmen?”

Macon placed the flowers on the windowsill. Outside the hospital the sun was high and bright. There were still reporters and people waving signs and banners in front of the hospital. “She’s at home,” he said. “She wanted to come, but it was just simpler if she stayed. Leaving the house is a little like heading out into a hurricane. People everywhere. Holding up signs. Shouting. Cheering. You name it. She and the baby don’t need to be a part of all that if it can be helped.”

“She just didn’t come,” Ava replied.

“It’s more complicated than that and you know it,” Macon said, dropping the gym bag on the foot of the bed. “I brought you some clothes to go home in. Go ahead and get dressed. We’re not in a rush, but I’d rather get this circus started.” He sat on the windowsill next to the flowers and folded his arms. “How are you feeling?”

“Fair to middling,” she said.

“Haven’t heard that in a while,” Macon replied. “Your mom used to say it.”

“I know,” Ava said. “She would have come to pick me up, no matter how many people were outside the house.” She sat up on the side of the bed and placed her feet on the floor. The cold ran up from the soles of her feet and tracked all the way up her spine. She still had trouble keeping warm since what had happened at the air show. She told the doctors about it, but they all assured her that it would be okay. They were always assuring her of the “okayness” of things, which did nothing more than convey to her that things were very far removed from okay. They saw her as a child, someone to keep the truth of things from, even if they did not know what the truth of things was. So they went on and on about how much they understood what had happened, and the more they said they understood, the more frightened Ava became. Though she was only thirteen, she knew that the bigger the lie, the more terrible the truth.

“How bad is this going to be?” she asked Macon as she took her clothes from the gym bag.

“We’ll get through it,” he said gently. “Go get dressed.”

Ava took her clothes and went into the bathroom to change. When she came out Macon was standing in front of the television—his neck craned upward at an awkward angle to watch. On the screen there was an image of the front of the hospital. The banner across the bottom of the screen read Miracle Child to Be Released. He switched it off.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked. Ava’s hair was a frizzy black mass atop her head. She had always had exceptionally thick hair—dark as molasses—and she was just enough of a tomboy that she gave it the least amount of attention that she felt she could manage. “Bring me a comb and come sit down,” Macon said, standing beside the bed.

Ava did as she was told. In the years between Heather’s death and the time when Carmen came into his life, Macon had become a very well-rounded single father. While he had never considered himself the type of man who believed in “women’s roles” or “men’s roles,” he had always been willing to concede that, simply from having split the duties of parenthood along the typical gender lines, he had a lot to learn raising a daughter.

And of all the things he had learned on the path of fatherhood, of all the moments he and his daughter shared, it was the simple act of combing her hair that was the most soothing to them both. For Macon, it was the stillness of it. She was thirteen now, and soon she would reach the age when a daughter drifts away from her father in lieu of other men of the world. He knew that these moments, when nothing was said between them and he could treat her like less of a woman and more a child, would become fewer and fewer as time marched forward.

“How sick am I?” Ava asked. Her voice was assertive—not like that of a thirteen-year-old girl, but like that of a woman deserving answers.

Macon was almost finished with her hair. He had combed it and smoothed it and fixed it into a very neat ponytail. He took pride in how well he had learned to manage his daughter’s hair. “I don’t know, Ava,” he said. “And that’s the truth. The fact is, nobody really knows what the hell happened. Nobody knows how Wash got better. Nobody knows how you made him better.” He sat on the foot of the bed, as if a great weight were being loaded upon his shoulders, word by word. “Wash seems okay, but they’re doing all kinds of tests to be sure—not quite as many as you’ve been through or as many as they’ve still got up their sleeve for you, but they’re definitely putting him through his paces. They kept him here for observation for a couple of days after everything happened, but then Brenda made a fuss and let her take him home. Brenda says he’s feeling fine. But I think there’s still something weird going on with him.” He laughed stiffly. “As if all of this doesn’t qualify as weird enough.” She rested her head against his shoulder.

“As for you, Miracle Child, you’re just a whirlwind of questions,” Macon continued. “Hell, the only reason they’re letting you go home is because I’ve had enough of you being trapped in here. And as much as I hate to admit it, I’m learning how to maneuver through all of this attention. You’d be surprised how much clout you get when you can threaten to hold a press conference if people don’t let you take your daughter home.”

“Do they want me to stay?” Ava asked.

“Some do,” Macon replied, “but not because they’re afraid for your life, just because they want to poke and prod you. And I’ve got nothing against tests, but they just want to do things they’ve already done. They all agree that you’re out of danger and, for me, that’s enough.” He took her face in his hand and kissed her forehead. “I won’t let them have you permanently,” he said.

“What’s wrong with me?” Ava asked.

“They’re saying there’s something going on with your blood cells. There’s some type of anemia, which is the reason you’re so cold all the time. Or maybe it’s the iron deficiency. At least, that’s what they think. Nobody is really willing to say with certainty what’s going on. If you don’t like what one doctor is telling you, just wait five minutes.” He cleared his throat. “But the one thing they can all seem to agree on is that you’re on the mend, and that’s enough for me to get you the hell out of this place. I’ve spent too much time in hospitals over the years. Both of my parents died in this very hospital. But I’ll get you out of here.”

There was a knock at the door and, before Macon or Ava could answer, the door was flung open and a pair of men entered in a rush. They were both dressed in scrubs like doctors, but something was wrong. They were too young to be doctors and, even more than that, they were wild-eyed. Macon and Ava leaped up from the bed.

“You’re her!” one of the men said. He had brown hair and a wide, bumpy nose. “We just need help,” the man said quickly. “Our dad, he’s sick. He had a stroke a few weeks ago and he’s not getting any better.”

The second man was shorter, with long blond hair and a sweaty upper lip. He only looked at Ava as the first man spoke. There was both fear and need in his eyes.

“He can’t move his right side,” the first man added. He huffed as he spoke, his words running together. It was obvious that they had used the doctors’ outfits to get past security. Macon pulled Ava behind him. He placed his hand on his hip—out of habit as sheriff. He had expected to find his pistol there, but he’d left it locked in the glove compartment of the squad car when he arrived in the hospital. He took another step back, keeping Ava behind him and opening the distance between her and the men.

Ava peered over his shoulder, frightened. Even with everything Wash and her father had told her about how things had changed since the incident, she hadn’t truly believed them. Perhaps she had not wanted to understand. There is always comfort in pretending that change has not happened in life, even when we know full well that nothing will ever again be the way it was.

From outside came the sound of footfalls running though the hallway toward the room. The second man looked back over his shoulder. “Shit,” the man said. He tugged his brother’s arm, as if to prompt the man to run. Then he stopped, realizing that they would not get far and, more importantly, that they had come to plead their case. So he stepped past his brother and toward Macon and Ava. “We just want our dad to get better,” the man said. His voice was full of sadness and insistence. He pointed at Ava. “She can do for our dad what she did for that boy,” he said. “That’s all we wa—”

His words were cut off as a pair of policemen came racing into the room. They tackled the two men to the floor. The man with the bumpy nose hit hard against the linoleum. Blood trickled from his mouth. But never, not even when another police officer stuck a knee in his back as he was handcuffed, never did he take his eyes off Ava. Never did he stop asking her to help his father.

* * *

Coming out of the hospital was as terrifying as Ava had expected it to be. It was a blur of yelling and lights and cameras and people calling her name. The policemen formed a wall between her and the crowd, leaving enough room for her and Macon to make it to their car. Parked in front and behind the car were state policemen, their lights flashing.

The sea of faces called her name again and again, and she could not help but look at them. Each time she turned to see who was calling her name, a wall of light flashed before her eyes. She could not count how many reporters there were, how many cameras, how many people holding up signs that read Ava’s Real and It’s a Miracle. Her eyes landed on a woman waving a banner that read Help My Child, Please. She had frizzled blond hair and heavy lines around her eyes and she looked worn down by the world around her. She did not chant or cheer like the others. She only looked at Ava pleadingly.

Then they were inside the car and the wall of policemen surrounded them.

“Not so bad,” Macon said. He’d driven his squad car. It was one of two the small town of Stone Temple owned. When he switched on the lights atop the car, the police cars in front and behind did the same. And then the car in front started off and Macon followed as they slowly made their way out of the hospital parking lot, past the crowds, through the streets of Asheville toward the highway.

“I don’t know what to do with all this,” Ava said as the crowds disappeared behind them.

“Do the best you can,” Macon said. “Just don’t get lost in it.”

Just as Wash had promised, home was not home anymore. The town of Stone Temple had always been a town that the world did not care to bother itself knowing. It was named after the Masonic temple that once stood in its center. But it was well over eighty years ago that the temple burned to the ground, along with a good portion of the town itself. The population, on average, was counted somewhere around fifteen hundred, and for the most part, it was the kind of place that people didn’t even pass through on their way to better locations—not since the building of the bypass almost twenty years ago. But there were still businesses that made life possible. And there were still people being born, living and dying here.

Stone Temple was an odd beauty. The town lived in a cradle of old trees and older mountains. The main road in and out of town rested on the shoulders of the mountain. In places, it promised to cast a driver off, to send them tumbling down the slopes that were covered in oak and pine and birch or, in some sections, covered in nothing but the unforgiving and constant rock.

But Stone Temple was peaceful, quiet. It was a place that slept.

All that was changed now.

It took hours to drive the length of the winding mountain road. Even before they’d entered the city, Ava could see how different it all was. In the fields along the outskirts, Ava could make out tents and vans, RVs and cars, all spaced in a field that had been harvested and sat bare and waiting for the next planting season.

“What do they all want?” Ava asked her father.

Macon grimaced, trying to keep his eyes on the road ahead. The state police had done a decent job of clearing the path into Stone Temple, but they could not remove everyone from the small road. People stood on foot—sometimes on the narrow edge of the road, other times in the oncoming lane, even though doing so meant they would have little place to go if someone came along the road out of Stone Temple.

“Turns out,” Macon finally said when he felt that he could split his attention enough to reply to his daughter, “all of that stuff people used to talk about, all that stuff about wanting to keep the world out, about wanting to keep Stone Temple a secret. Well, it went right out the door when folks started opening up their checkbooks.” He glanced at one of the fields brimming with people as they passed. “Gotta make a living, though, I suppose.”

The closer they got to town, the busier things became. The road leading into Stone Temple was two lanes, climbing and falling through the mountains, full of blind curves and steep drop-offs. It was generally a quiet road, but now it was inundated with vehicles, the traffic thicker than Ava had ever seen it. The police escort slowed to a crawl as they came up behind the wall of cars. Those passing in the opposite direction stared at Ava like rubberneckers watching a horrific accident.

When they finally arrived to Stone Temple proper, there were people gathered in the narrow streets. They had been waiting for Ava to arrive and were filled with a fervor that was typically reserved for presidents and celebrities—though neither a president nor a celebrity had ever come to Stone Temple.

Ava didn’t recognize any of the people standing along the streets, cheering and yelling and holding up their signs. And she couldn’t exactly say why she felt the need to look for familiar faces among the mass of people. Perhaps she simply hoped that if she saw someone she knew, it would help to lower the scope of everything that was happening, everything she did not understand.

“They won’t be at the house, will they?” Ava asked her father. He was concentrating on the road. Thus far the people around them were not encroaching on the car, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was only a matter of time before someone jumped out into the road—maybe even onto the car itself—the way they did on television.

“No, no,” he said. He answered quickly and confidently, as though he had been expecting the question. “They’ve got everything cleared off once we get through the town,” he continued. “I tried to tell these guys that it would have been better to come up from the other side. You know, swing up along Blacksmith Road, through the forest. But it rained pretty hard the other day, so they didn’t want to risk it.” He motioned to a man standing along the street with a sign held above his head that read Help Me, Too.

Ava and Macon stared at the man as they passed.

“Just take it as it is, Ava,” Macon said. “It’ll get better. Things will be strange for a little while, but they’ll calm down. You, this whole thing, it’s just the flavor of the month, you know? People get excited, but eventually the excitement cools and people go back to living the lives they know. These things don’t last.”

“Everything lasts forever,” Ava said quietly as though she were making the statement to herself rather than to her father. “Older people always think that things like this can’t last. But that’s not the way it is anymore. Things can last forever and ever now because of the internet. Everything is saved somewhere. Everything is permanent. Nothing dies anymore.”

“That’s...insightful,” Macon said. He’d wanted to use another adjective, but he had become distracted. They were almost out of town now, almost to the point where the small buildings and few streets that comprised the town would fall away and give rise to the fields and trees surrounding the town. Not long after that, they would take the narrow, winding road up the mountain to their home.

“Wash’ll be at the house when we get home,” Macon said with more than a little playful accusation in his tone.

“Who said I was thinking about Wash?”

“You two have been Bonnie and Clyde since the day you met,” Macon said. “I have no doubt that you’ve been wondering why he wasn’t there at the hospital when I came to pick you up. I know I’d be upset if I were a young girl and my boyfriend wasn’t there to greet me when I came out of the hospital.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Ava said with a flash of embarrassment.

“Do you prefer paramour, then? Is that the language all of the cool kids are using these days? Keeping it a little retro, you know?” He stretched across the front seat and elbowed her playfully. “I mean, you know, I’m old and everything so I can’t really be expected to keep up with all this stuff. You little whippersnappers are so dabgum...” He paused, and then he laughed. “Hell,” he said finally. “I can’t really think of the word I’m looking for to finish that joke.”

“Do you know why?” Ava asked, smiling a little.

“Why?” Macon replied.

“Because you’re old,” she jabbed, and they both smiled.

When they were properly outside the city, the crowds that had been in the streets were gone and there was only the countryside and the mountains and the trees and the sky above transitioning from the bright blue of afternoon into the softer hues of evening, promising a languid sunset.

* * *

“Ava!” Wash called as she stepped out of the car. He, his grandmother, Brenda, and Carmen were standing in the doorway of the house, the light from inside washing over their shoulders. He waved at her as if he had not seen her in months. He seemed to be holding back the urge to run over and hug her.

“Hey, Wash,” she said softly, resisting her own urge to rush to him. Being home, seeing Wash, it was like opening the windows of a house in the wake of a spring rain.

But it was Carmen, Ava’s stepmother, who came out of the doorway and walked over and hugged her first. She was pregnant, very pregnant, and so her walk was a slow, awkward waddle. Carmen was of average height, with sharp, bright features. She smiled often, in spite of the tension between her and Ava that sometimes filled the house and made it seem as though the walls were not strong enough to hold the entirety of their family. She had been born to Cuban parents living in Florida and had grown up bouncing from state to state as her father sought work. Eventually her father settled in the Midwest and opened a garage and, when Carmen was out of high school, she went to college in North Carolina and, after college, decided to stay. She was working as a teacher in Asheville when she met Macon—a dark-skinned widower sheriff with an unrelenting optimism and a smile that made promises she could not ignore.

The two of them became a part of each other’s life quickly, despite Ava’s resentment over the fact that Carmen was not her mother. Now she and Macon were married and all of them were trying to make the best of things.

“It’s so good to have you home,” Carmen said, holding Ava tightly. The swell of her belly was pressed between them. No sooner than Carmen’s arms were around her, Ava broke the hug. “We’ve got such a great night planned,” Carmen said. She had grown accustomed to Ava’s resentment. “Brenda brought pie, and you know she never cooks anything unless you hold a gun to her head.”

“I’m not cooking again unless somebody’s dead,” Brenda said, walking over. She was tall and willowy and with a crown of red hair. She was a strong woman who, in spite of her thin frame, exuded a regal and authoritative air. Macon sometimes called her the “Vengeful Peacock,” though he was smart enough never to call her that while she was within earshot. “How are you feeling, child?” Brenda said, stepping in to hug Ava just as Carmen pulled away. She smelled of cinnamon.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Because it’s what people do when they don’t know what else to say,” Brenda said matter-of-factly.

“She’s doing fine,” Macon said, walking up beside them. “And she’s going to be even better with each and every day,” he added.

She hugged Ava again and said, “Well, whatever the hell it is, we’ll sort it out. Don’t worry any more than you have to.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ava said, peeking around the woman.

“I suppose you want to say hello to Wash,” she said as she released Ava and stepped aside.

Ava and Wash met each other just beneath the eaves of the porch. He was still pale, Ava thought, but he seemed to be doing well enough.

“Hey,” the boy said softly.

“You’re not going to show me your stomach again, are you? Because you really don’t have anything worth showing,” Ava said. “You know that giant marshmallow guy at the end of the Ghostbusters movie? That’s totally what you reminded me of.”

“Shut up,” Wash said, grinning.

“I’ve had nightmares about it,” Ava continued.

“Shut up!” he said, and finally he stepped forward and hugged her. He smelled like pines and grass and the river.

“Okay, okay,” Macon said, walking over. “Break it up. We’ve got a dinner to eat. And I’m starving.”

Dinner was a blur of sweet and fried foods and conversations about the hospital, about what was going on in the town, about what the internet was saying about the air show, how far the videos had spread.

The subject no one discussed, the subject they all talked around, was what exactly had happened that day. What exactly did Ava do, and how? And why couldn’t she remember it? Would it truly fix itself? And what of Wash? Was he really healed? Like some rare breed of sword swallowers, they swallowed their curiosity that night.

After dinner, Wash and Ava sat alone on the front porch, looking up at the stars and listening to Macon, Carmen and Brenda in the kitchen telling stories about how Stone Temple used to be—conversations sparked by the news reports of how the town had been taken over by people in the recent days.

“Does it hurt?” Wash asked.

“Does what hurt?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Anything, I guess. You don’t really look like yourself,” Wash said.

“For a person who reads as much as you do, you’d think you’d be a little better at describing things, Wash.”

“Whatever,” Wash said.

A small cricket made its way up onto the porch. It sat on the worn oak wood and looked at the two children. It did not sing for them.

“You know what I mean.”

She did know what he meant, of course, even if she did not want to admit to it. She noticed it immediately in the days after she woke up in the hospital. It was on the day when she was well enough to get out of bed on her own and make it to the bathroom. Macon was there with her and tried to help her, but she had inherited stubbornness from her mother. She refused him and, very slowly, made her way to the bathroom as he watched her every step, ready to leap up to help her. “I’m fine,” she told him when she finally reached the bathroom.

She closed the door and stood before the sink. She was so tired from those few steps that she’d almost forgotten her reason for coming into the bathroom to begin with. She leaned in against the edge of the sink, huffing. When she finally caught her breath she lifted her head and saw a different version of herself in the mirror.

The girl in the mirror had Ava’s bones and skin, but the bones were too sharp, the skin pulled too tightly about the face. Her cheekbones, which were naturally sharp—another inheritance from her mother—looked like shards of stone reaching out from the side of a cliff. The color had drained from her usually dark skin, and it was dry and flaky, as though it might suddenly crack and bleed at any moment, worse than any winter windburn she’d ever known. It was mottled and spotted in places, though the appearance of it was so odd that she wondered if she might be imagining it.

This was the worst of it, she had thought that day.

Now she was out of the hospital and a part of her had hoped that the version of herself that she saw that day was gone. But now Wash, being of the honest nature that he was, had confirmed for her what she had known the entire time: nothing was healed, not really.

A cricket on the porch seemed to look up at them. Out in the night, among the darkness and grass and trees and breadth of the world, other crickets sang a soft melody. It was always a mystery, how creatures so tiny were able to build such a large presence for themselves in the world. The sound of the insects rose and filled Wash’s and Ava’s ears and drowned out the conversation they were not having—the one they both knew they should have, the one about what really happened that day, beneath the rubble and debris of the fallen grain silo.

“It must be sick,” Wash said, looking down at the silent insect. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t just come up here this close to us like this.” He leaned forward, but the insect did not retreat, as it should have. “Yeah,” Wash said, “definitely sick. Or hurt. Did you know that you can always tell the males apart from the females because the males are the only ones that chirp?”

“You’re rambling, Wash,” Ava said. A chill swept over her and she folded her arms across her chest to keep warm.

“Sorry,” Wash said. He reached down and gently picked up the cricket. It was a delicate black marble in his hand. It did not try to escape. It only positioned itself awkwardly in his hand. “Its leg is broken,” Wash said. He showed it to Ava.

The silence that came and filled the space between them then was one of demand, one of curiosity, one that sought answers to a question so confounding that, between the two of them, they could not think of another way to answer it.

“Have you always been able to do it?” Wash asked.

Ava opened her palm.

Wash placed the wounded cricket inside.

“Does it matter?” Ava asked. “Does it make me different?”

“If you thought you had to keep it secret, even from me,” Wash replied, “I guess that would make you different than I thought you were. That’s all.”

“I just wanted you to be better,” Ava said.

For a moment, Ava only stared at the insect. It shined like a pebble, glossy and iridescent in the dim lighting from the porch. She did not know exactly what to do with the creature. She looked at Wash, as though he might have the answer, but the boy looked back at her blankly with his brown eyes and his mop of brown hair.

Ava closed her palm. The cricket wiggled about briefly, trying to maneuver away from her fingers. She was slow in her movements, being sure to keep a wide pocket in the pit of her hand so that the insect was not crushed.

“What now?” she asked.

Wash shrugged his shoulders.

Ava nodded. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the thing she held in her hand. From the wall of darkness in her mind, the insect began to emerge. It was shiny and small and full of angles. She thought about its broken leg and how she wanted it to be better.

Then the cricket she saw inside her mind—which was large and the center of her focus—receded into darkness and, in its place, there came what looked like a Ferris wheel lit up at night. Ava smelled cotton candy and caramel apples. She was gripped by the sensation of being very small and being carried on someone’s shoulders. The person that carried her smelled like her father—sweat and grease and earthiness. She soon understood that this was memory in which she now lingered. Something from the recesses of her mind having to do with a Fall Festival they had attended as a family before her mother’s death.

In the time since the death of her mother, Ava had forgotten nearly all of the moments she shared with the woman. She could not say exactly how or when it began—this specific type of forgetting. But neither could she deny its reality. For Ava, there were only two versions of her mother: one was the woman in photographs. In the early months after Heather’s death, when Macon was most at odds with accepting what had happened, the man took to collecting and archiving any photograph that contained his deceased wife. He kept them all in a box at the foot of his bed for that first year, and would spend late hours of lonely nights sifting through them, studying the woman’s face, trying to understand why she had done it, why she had taken herself away from a husband and daughter that loved her so. He would cry some nights, and Ava would hear him. So she would get out of bed and come to his room and hug him and sit with him as he went through the photos. Some nights Macon would narrate the photographs, laying out all of the details of how and why a certain photo was snapped. If Heather was smiling in the photo, Macon went through great effort to explain to Ava the conditions that caused the smile. He recounted jokes, told stories of sunny afternoons and days at the beach. And Ava sat with him, listened, and pretended she could remember the moments her father described for her.

The smiling woman in the photographs was one version of her mother. It was the easiest to see, the easiest to believe. But that was not who Ava remembered. The only memory of her mother that lingered, intact and undiminished, in Ava’s mind was the sight of her swinging from the rafters of the barn.

But now, on the porch with Wash, with the broken insect in her hand, she could remember something more: she and her parents together at the Fall Festival, happy.

And then her eyes were open and she was on the porch again and there was something rising up inside her throat. She turned her head away from the porch and heaved until she vomited and, even in the dim light of the night, they could both see the blood mingled with the bile.

“Oh, God,” Wash said. He stood and turned to go into the house, his eyes wide.

“No!” Ava managed. “I’m okay. Don’t tell. Please.”

“What?”

Ava spat the last of the bile from her mouth. Her head ached and her bones felt hollow once again.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital, Wash,” Ava said. She sat up, huffing, and looked Wash in the eyes. “Just keep this between us. I’ll be fine.” She smiled a fast, apologetic smile. “You’ve never seen a person vomit before? It’s no reason to call the ambulance.”

Wash sat again. He pulled his knees to his chest and folded his arms across them. “Okay,” he said, and there was guilt in his words.

“I’ll be fine,” Ava said. “Really.”

It was only later that the children remembered the cricket. When the vomiting began, Ava had opened her hand and the cricket had escaped. Neither of them, amid the darkness and the worry, saw the small black marble leaping away quietly into the night. Neither of them heard its song, vibrant and full of life.