The Wonder of All Things (11 page)

“Sometimes I can go for a long time and not dream about her—even though I think about her every day. Do you?”

“Do I think about her every day? No, Ava. I think about her. But I’ll admit that it isn’t every day. It was at first, but not now.”

“Is that going to happen to me, too? Will I stop thinking about her? Will I forget her?”

“Never.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you loved her. Because you still love her. And you don’t forget people you love. That’s just how it works. So, no, you won’t ever forget her.” In the distance of the forest, they heard the sound of a twig breaking. “But you have to let her go.”

“And what if I can’t?”

“You have to.”

“But if I can’t, will I kill myself like she did? Is that why she killed herself? Was there something she couldn’t let go of?”

“Truthfully, Ava,” Macon began, “I don’t know. Maybe. I never really thought of your mother as a sad woman, but then, in the end, maybe that’s when I found out I didn’t really understand her.” He cleared his throat. “That’s something I think about a lot.”

Ava was silent. In spite of their talking, there was a deer approaching through the dense forest. The sun had reached the halfway point in the trees and the deer came tentatively through the underbrush. Ava raised her bow and notched the arrow.

The deer came closer still. It tested the air with its nose but Ava and Macon were downwind and so it did not find them when it searched. It was a male deer, full and old. Its antlers stretched wide and dangerous, like the branches of a great tree reaching up from it. Then, not far behind, came the doe and her fawn. They walked through the forest without hesitation, the buck having searched for predators in the dim light and heavy wind of the morning. But it was the same wind that was leading them into Ava’s arrow. The wind was heavy enough that it rustled the trees in such a way that Ava could not be heard when she shifted slightly in her position in order to better get the buck in her sights.

She watched them walk closer.

“How are you doing with everything else?” Macon asked softly.

Ava kept her eyes on the deer.

“The world has gotten so big so quickly,” Macon said. “I can hardly keep up with it. So I can only imagine what it must be like for you.” He wanted to stop talking, but he could not. There was a question he wanted to ask. “People are going to want you to do it again. That damned Eldrich keeps calling, saying that he wants to do more tests. He keeps talking about ‘controlled conditions.’ He says maybe it’ll help them understand why you’re not feeling right. Like maybe if you do it while they’re watching, while they’re monitoring everything, then maybe they can learn what’s actually happening.” Everything inside of Macon was conflicted. “Do you think you could do it again, Ava? Just once? Maybe then they’ll leave us alone.”

“What does everyone want?” Ava asked.

“It’s a little different for each one, I think,” Macon replied. He thought for a moment. “What do
you
want, Ava?”

“I want to know if I could have saved Mom,” Ava said. She said it in a voice so small it could have been birdsong. Then she loosed her arrow. She fired wide, missing the deer. She exhaled and watched the family of animals bound into the bracken, trembling with life for another day.

* * *

For Carmen, the morning came on the heels of another night of sleeplessness and pain. She had spent most of the hours in the bed taking shallow breaths and trying not to wake Macon, trying to convince herself that everything would be okay. Her doctor told her that everything was fine and that the baby was developing just fine and that, in the end, everything would be fine.
Fine
was one of Dr. Arnold’s favorite words. He even hinted that much of what was bothering Carmen, much of her pain, might be rooted in her mind rather than her body. And she had, eventually, been willing to admit that perhaps that was true.

Macon told her not to think about it. He gave her daily reassurances that everything was going to be okay, that she was doing everything correctly and that she had done everything correctly the last time. He tried his best to take away from her the guilt of losing her child. And, sometimes, it worked. There were days when she could believe that she had not caused the death of her first child. She would find her steps lighter than they had been the day before, and she would not be so irritated by the way people drove or by the rude things they said. And on those days, she could spend the day seeing other children in the world and she could be genuinely happy for them and for their parents. She could look upon them and smile and think to herself that the world was not such an unbearable place.

But then those days would pass—as they always did—and she would once again rise in the morning and think to herself the name of the child who did not live to see a single sunrise on this earth: Jeremy.

He’d been born early in the evening and spent the late hours of the night in an incubator while Carmen faded in and out of consciousness, always asking about him every time she woke. Again and again, the nurses told her that everything was okay and they smiled at her and squeezed her hand gently and told her not to worry. And then one time she was greeted by the sight of her mother crying and she knew then that her child was dead.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. But instead she only closed her eyes and stopped clinging to the waking world and the medicine in her veins took her into a deep, dark sleep.

When she awoke it was to the sound of soft crying as her mother sat in the far corner of the room watching her through puffy eyes and with trembling lips. “He went before sunup,” was the first thing Carmen’s mother said.

Then she went back to dabbing the corners of her eyes gently with handkerchief and watching her daughter. Carmen wept, as well, but it was a strange type of weeping. She felt numb and empty, as if she were outside her body seeing herself mourning the loss of her child. She did not know how long the weeping went on. The next thing she remembered was her husband coming into the room and standing next to her bedside. He looked down at her with a face made of stone and he squeezed her hand. “It’s okay,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” she replied.

“We’ll get through this,” he said.

“No, we won’t,” she replied.

And that was the truth. It all came apart in less than a year. One day he came home from work and stood in the center of the kitchen while she sat in the living room, watching him, and he looked over at her and said, “I’m going to my mother’s.” He looked down at his feet like a child. “I feel like I should say more,” he added.

“You don’t have to,” said Carmen.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“It’s just...it’s just too much to carry around. It’s too much to hold on to all the time. I just don’t have it in me.”

“So you’re going to leave it here with me?”

“No,” he said. “But maybe, if I leave, there’ll be less of it.”

“There won’t,” she said.

And that was the end of that.

The next several years were composed of drifting from one city to the next. She was a teacher and managed a year in a school before the faces of the children she taught would come to her dreams and then she would have to move again. And then she found a town called Stone Temple with something that could barely call itself a school and a sheriff named Macon and his daughter, Ava. And, for a little while, the hurt that she had been feeling was lessened and she could smile and wonder.

But now she was pregnant again and her body was always in pain, and even though the doctors told her she was fine, she knew better. There was a child within her that could be lost at any moment. It had happened before, after all.

The autumn came on quickly and without warning. The town of Stone Temple awoke one Thursday morning to find the trees ablaze with gold and red leaves and the temperature hovering above freezing. Ava saw it as a splendid thing. She’d never much cared for the summertime. There was a quietness that came with the autumn and the winter that could not be found in any other time of the year, so when the temperatures fell and the leaves changed and the migratory birds took to the air, she went to school each day with a smile upon her face and a spring in her step.

The autumn also brought with it the county fair. She was only six and she had never been to the fair, but she’d heard enough about it that she knew it would be a magical and breathtaking event. And when her father told her that the entire family would attend the fair that weekend, it was all the girl could do to sleep at night. She tossed and turned in her bed, and when she closed her eyes there were lights from Ferris wheels shining and the sound of men in elaborate hats standing atop boxes yelling for her to “Take a chance! Test your luck! Win it all!” And she saw strange and mysterious animals in her mind. She saw a lion with a snake for a tail and she saw a monkey that wore a suit and sat at a table sipping tea like a person. And then there was the scent of foods—sweet and salty and chocolaty. It was like a song given substance and placed upon her tongue.

When the Friday evening of the fair finally came, the girl could not sit still. From the time she came home from school, she raced around the house, doing chores that were not even assigned to her. She did not ask how long it would be before they left because she knew that would do nothing but frustrate her parents. So she simply cleaned and swept and made her bed and picked up stray items lying around the house and tried to find their proper place until, finally, Macon said, in a playful voice, “Well, I suppose I can’t deny you forever, can I?”

The drive to the fair was one of excited babbling. She asked her mother about fairs that she had been to when she was young and, in return, Ava was regaled with stories of bearded women and men with crocodile scales for skin and contortionists that could fold themselves into suitcases. “This world can be amazing sometimes,” her mother said. But, as she spoke, there was a hollowness in her words. It happened to Ava’s mother sometimes—a type of sadness that her daughter could hear in the folds of a laugh or see in the edges of the woman’s smile.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Ava asked as they rode.

“Of course I am,” her mother replied.

Not long after sunset Ava could make out the glow of the fair just over the mountains. Her stomach fluttered and she sat forward in her seat with her mouth agape. “There it is!” she shouted, the excitement of things pushing from her mind the uncertainty that had been there.

“Yes, it is,” Heather said with a smile.

Ava could hear the music—a tinny, high-pitched sound of revelry—and she rolled down the windows to better let the sound in. A wall of cold autumn air filled the car and raised chill bumps on her flesh and she expected her mother or father to tell her to roll the window up, but they never did. There was a genuine excitement among all of them.

When they arrived, Ava raced from the car, shouting and calling for everyone to come after her. Her heart beat between her ears at the sight of the lights and the rides and the men spitting fire—just as she imagined them—and the men standing above the crowd wearing strangely ornate hats, shouting that there was a wonderful show to be seen. “Step right this way!” they called, and Ava could not be stopped from following.

She rode every ride. She ate until her stomach could hold no more. She played every game of chance and, even when she did not win, she came away smiling.

The hours came and went. When the night was late Heather took her daughter’s hand and said simply, “That’s enough.”

“Do we have to go?” Ava protested, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes.

Heather reached down and took from Ava a large bag of cotton candy and passed it to Macon, who took the bag and sampled the candy and smiled.

“Can we come back?” Ava asked. And then she felt her body being lifted from the ground and suddenly she was resting on her father’s shoulder. She could smell that Macon was wearing cologne, another indication of how special the night had been.

“We’ll see,” Macon said.

“We’re not coming back,” Ava said.

“We didn’t say that,” Heather replied.

“You didn’t have to,” Ava said. She was half-asleep now, lulled by the gentle up-and-down rocking as her father carried her across the parking lot toward the waiting car. Through her drowsiness, through her fatigue and the burgeoning sadness inside her, Ava looked back once more at the fair.

Lights and rides and fire jugglers and contortionists and bearded women and giraffes and animals she could not name. She saw her mother, tired and walking slowly, but smiling. She saw the back of her father’s shoulder. She felt the texture of his hair against her face, the strength of the man beneath her, as solid as the earth.

Before the darkness of sleep took her, Ava caught one more glimpse of her mother. Walking behind her husband and daughter, Heather turned for a moment, like Lot’s wife, for one final glimpse. And when she had taken it in she started back after Macon and Ava, but her face was hard and dim. Her brow—normally smooth—was furrowed. Everything that had been there before—the joy, the excitement, the bright sense of adventure that her mother had worn all evening—was gone, consumed as quickly as a room in a house in the depths of a moonless night, when the last flickering candle is extinguished.

“Mom?” Ava called.

Her mother’s smile came back, as if it had never left. “Yes, Ava?”

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Ava said drowsily. She was still in her father’s arms, her head resting on his shoulder.

“What isn’t?” Heather replied.

“When things come to an end. Sometimes, they’re just supposed to. You don’t have to be sad.” Ava closed her eyes and, in the way it does, sleep took quickly and completely.

She did not see the way her mother suddenly began to cry. She did not hear how, when Macon asked what was wrong, Heather’s only reply was, “I smile, but I’m never sure if I mean it.”

FIVE

“I WISH WASH
were here,” Ava said.

“Try saying that three times fast,” Macon said. He leaned forward and kissed her brow.

The two of them sat at the kitchen table. It took two days for Macon, Ava and Carmen to all agree to Eldrich’s proposal. Their decision came with the stipulation that they did it here, at home, and not in Asheville. Macon was tired of seeing his daughter in hospitals.

There were electrodes placed all over her body that monitored everything from her blood pressure to her heart rate, and atop her head was a rubbery helmet laden with wires and more electrodes. The man hooking up the device told her it was designed to monitor her brain waves, her thought patterns, “the how and why of everything,” he said proudly.

“I’m just going to be in the next room,” Macon said to Ava. “If there’s anything you need, if there’s anything about this that you don’t like, all you have to do is say the word. Okay?”

Ava smiled faintly.

Macon left the room and did not look back over his shoulder. He passed the team of doctors and technicians and videographers who were all waiting for him to leave. They glanced at him as he passed, the way one looks at a squatter who has been too long clinging to a property that was never his to begin with. He passed Carmen and Dr. Eldrich in the living room and did not speak. Carmen had been grilling Eldrich about the test, about Ava’s safety, about what Eldrich would do if something went wrong.

Macon left the house and walked into the front yard. It was a chilly day—another early blow of the hard winter that was promising to come—and the sun was high. Around the yard there were cars and vans and trucks and an ambulance sent down from Asheville just in case things should happen to take a turn for the worse. At the sight of the van a knot formed in Macon’s stomach. He remembered the sight of Ava and Wash at the air show. He remembered the blood on her hands, the fear in her eyes, the sight of her falling unconscious.

He had thought she was dead in that moment. He didn’t know what he would do if he lost her, and suddenly he felt himself start to panic. He wanted to throw out all of the doctors and technicians and cameramen—the crowds of people who were the cause of the fear he now felt, who represented the rest of the world that was waiting and watching, each and every day, to know more about Ava. To know her secrets, her truths, to put her on display.

He was losing his child to the world.

He stood in the center of the yard looking at the house. He took in the sight of its worn and withered clapboard. The faded paint. The holes chewed through its eaves by woodpeckers and wood bees and perhaps even mice. For the first time in a great many years, he was able to see everything that his house was, pure and unfiltered by the familiarity of seeing a thing day in and day out.

He saw the house as it was and, consequently, he saw the life of his family. And the sight of it all made his stomach tighten. If he were driving along the highway and happened to come across a house like this, a house like the one in which he was trying to raise a family, he would think it was abandoned. He would cast judgments about the people who lived within it. He would wonder how they had allowed their lives to fall so far. He would wonder how they lived that way, how they did not see the desperate state they existed in. Few things breed contempt like a life viewed in passing.

Still Macon’s legs would not carry him forward, to kick out the doctors, the cameras, to return their lives to what they had always been. “Please,” he whispered to himself. “Let this be the right decision.” He stood and waited, as if there might come an answer from someone else, as if there would be a sign that would vouchsafe his decision, reassure him that, after all, he was doing the correct thing and, in the end, his family would endure unharmed.

He waited and waited and waited.

* * *

Ava sat up straight in her chair as the group of doctors entered the room. They formed a half circle around the other side of the table at which she sat.

“Do you understand what will happen now?” Eldrich asked. His thick comb-over was out of sorts, but there was excitement in his face.

“I think so,” Ava said.

“We’ll bring in the animal,” Eldrich began. “There will be cameras to document all of this, obviously. We’ll hand the animal over to you and, well, you’ll do whatever it is that you do, or did, or allegedly did.” He chuckled gently to himself, as though he had made a joke.

“And then what?” Ava asked.

“Well,” the dark-haired man replied, “then we’ll see what we’ll see, won’t we?”

The people behind the cameras pressed buttons and the red lights came on, one by one. There were three cameras placed around their living room: one in front, and one on each side of Ava, angled just a little behind her, as well. She assumed it was so that they could tell if she was doing something behind her back. It was very much like they were attempting to catch a magician in the act, she thought.

“We’re ready,” Dr. Eldrich said. The front door of the house opened and a young woman in a lab coat came in with a small dog in her arms. The dog was furry and it had a face that seemed specifically bred for viral internet videos.

“It’s okay,” the woman said, speaking to the animal, stroking it gently.

“What’s the matter with him?” Ava asked softly. The animal eyed her skeptically.

“For the sake of the experiment,” the woman said, “I think it’s best that I give you as little information as possible about exactly what the condition of this animal is.” Then she turned and faced the cameras. She stated her name and the date. She referred to what was about to happen as “Experiment Number One.”

As the animal trembled gently in her lap, Ava did not need the woman to tell her what was wrong with it. Its right front leg was broken. The animal kept the leg pulled close to its body and tried not to lie down in her lap, even though it seemed very tired and in need of sleep. Ava gently stroked the animal, which licked her face and trembled just a little bit less.

“Do you need anything else before we get started?” the woman asked, turning from the cameras back to Ava.

Ava thought for a moment, still looking down at the small dog with the broken leg. “I don’t suppose so,” she said.

The woman nodded and left the room without any reaction to being interrupted. She seemed eager to leave, eager to get things under way. And then Ava was alone. There was only the sound of the refrigerator running in the other room. The sound of the small dog huffing gently in her lap. It shifted its position every few seconds, almost like a cat, as it tried to find a way of sitting that reduced the pain in its broken leg. Now and again it whined softly and Ava would stroke it and shush it like a child.

The moments came and filled the room, one by one.

Somewhere in the house someone cleared their throat. Ava figured it was one of the doctors. She had almost forgotten that they were there, waiting for her like ghosts. She imagined them pressed against the walls, listening, watching through computer monitors—their breaths held, their mouths wet with anticipation, all of them hoping for something they could not quite name.

“Okay,” she said softly.

She wondered about herself as much as everyone else did, she realized now.

Gently, she took the dog’s paw between her hands. The animal flinched, but did not draw away. “This won’t hurt,” Ava said. “At least, I don’t think it will.” She smiled. The dog lowered its snout and licked the back of her hand.

Ava closed her eyes and squeezed gently on the animal’s leg. She breathed in and out slowly and, in her mind, the dog appeared. It was just as scruffy and rough-looking as the real thing. She saw the animal’s leg and she focused on the thought of the animal’s leg not being injured. She built a type of dream in her mind. She saw the animal uninjured, tail wagging, able to bounce around playfully. She thought more and more of the animal’s leg until it was the only thing she could see in the dream in her mind. She wanted the dog to be healthy, to be happy and to not be hurt.

Then the dog was gone and, in its place, just as it had been before, there came another memory of her mother.

* * *

Waking was like pulling herself out of quicksand. Ava’s eyes opened slowly. They were heavy, heavier than she had ever remembered them being. She saw only a dimness. She lifted her arm—which felt soft and slow to respond—and she rubbed her eyes, trying to remove what must have been gauze or cloth draped across her eyes. Try as she might, she could only see shades of unfocused light and blurry shapes.

“I can’t see,” Ava said. Her voice cracked. Her heart was like a small bird, trying to escape the cage of her chest.

Someone squeezed her hand. “Stay calm,” a voice said.

“Dad?”

“Yes,” Macon answered. And then Ava felt the weight of his body press down on the bed beside her. “I’m here, kiddo. You’re in the hospital. In Asheville. How do you feel?”

“I can’t see,” Ava said again. Her heart had not stopped racing. She blinked over and over again. She reached up and rubbed her eyes with her hands—as if that might change the state of her blindness—until Macon had to take her hands away from her face. He shushed her.

“I know you’re scared,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.” Ava could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

“I’m here, too,” Carmen said. And then Ava felt Carmen gently ease herself down onto the opposite side of the bed. Carmen clasped Ava’s hand and squeezed it. “We’re both here,” Carmen said.

“You can’t see anything at all?” Macon asked.

“Is it still just darkness?” Carmen said.

“I can’t see,” Ava repeated. Her breaths were fast and shallow, as though she had run too far too quickly, as though there were not enough air in the room to sustain her. “Dad, why can’t I see? What’s going on? I don’t understand. I can’t see anything!”

Then there was a gentle kiss applied to her forehead. A rough, heavy palm stroked her brow. All Ava could make out were shadows and light. “Deep breaths,” Macon whispered. “Just focus on the sound of my voice if you need to. Take deep breaths. It’s going to be okay.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know,” Macon replied, and his voice wavered. “But I promise it’s going to be okay.”

“Just relax,” Carmen said.

“Why can’t I see? Why can’t I see?”

She rattled off the sentence like an incantation. And her father gave back an oath of his own. “I promise this will get better,” he said, again and again, as if he could speak between the moments of her fear, as if he could balance out what she was feeling. “I promise, I promise, I promise.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Carmen said again. She squeezed Ava’s hand more tightly. “What do you see, Ava?”

“What?” Ava eventually replied, choking back tears. She could tell by Carmen’s tone that it was not the first time she had asked the question. But it was the first time Ava heard it.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing! I don’t see anything,” she said. “Just light. Just bright light.” She was still crying, still angry that the woman holding her hand at this moment was not her mother, and never would be. “I can’t see anything,” Ava said.

There was only blurry brightness before Ava’s eyes. And then the light fluctuated, as did the darkness, like something passing back and forth before a flashlight.

“Did you see that?” Carmen asked. “Did you see a change in the light just then?”

“I didn’t see anything!” Ava yelled. “Just shadows! I can’t see anything!” She snatched her hand away from Carmen. Ava’s tears stopped, replaced by anger and bitterness.

Then there was the sound of Carmen laughing. It was a high, proud laugh. And then Macon was laughing, as well, and the fear that had been in his voice was less than it had been.

“What?” Ava said. “What’s so funny?”

“You’re doing better,” Carmen said. She kissed Ava’s hand. “You’re doing better! You couldn’t see any changes in light before. The doctors said that, if you got better, that’s how it would start—with changes in light. You’re getting better.” Her voice was bubbling with a joy that, in spite of the many grudges Ava held against Carmen, the child was comforted by.

“I don’t understand,” Ava said.

“It’s okay,” Macon said softly. He sat up on the bed, still holding Ava’s hand. “What’s the last thing you remember, kiddo?”

Ava thought for a moment. The racing of her heart was beginning to slow. “I remember the dog,” she said.

“Okay,” Macon said. “Anything else?”

“He’s fine, by the way,” Carmen added. “The dog. You really did heal his leg. You really did it!”

“You’ve been in and out of consciousness for the past few days,” Macon said. “This is the third time you’ve woken up. The doctors said you might not remember. It was like watching someone in a fever dream—speaking and responding to questions, but you know they’re too sick to really understand.” He sighed. “Scared the hell out of us, kid.”

“You woke up screaming the past two times,” Carmen said. Her tone was almost cheerful, as if delivering a death letter in a gift envelope. “You woke up screaming that you couldn’t see anything and calling for help.” Ava could hear the smile on Carmen’s face. “You said it was nothing but whiteness.”

“But now, there are shadows, too,” Macon added, a hint of cheerfulness in his voice, as well. “Which means you’re on the mend.”

“The doctors said that maybe that would happen,” Carmen added. “They said that you might get better, that maybe your body had had some type of overload, or something—they’re not really sure what’s going on—and that maybe you’d get better all on your own with enough time.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” Ava said. She focused on her vision. There was still darkness, but the light she could see was like having bandages over her eyes. There were shapes that she could almost see, and the more she focused on them, the more they seemed to become more than simply a binary of light and dark, but a composite of angle and gradations.

“You were only conscious for a few moments. But we knew you’d be okay.”

“Wash came by while you were sleeping,” Carmen said. “He sat and read to you for a while. He seemed pretty sure that you’d wake up if he read to you.”