The Book That Matters Most (28 page)

Sitting at the kitchen table, Hank Bingham had given Ava a piece of paper and the stub of a pencil. “Draw exactly what happened,” he'd told her. Ava had wanted to let him know that she wasn't a very good artist. She was good at other things—math and reading and geography. She could name the fifty states in alphabetical order and all of the capitals, even the hard ones like Tallahassee, Florida, and Albany, New York. Lily was the artist. She could fold slips of paper into origami cranes and boats. She could take an autumn leaf or a pansy and press it between two pieces of wax paper and magically preserve it.

“Lily can draw the picture,” Ava had said finally, the paper still blank, the pencil clenched in her fist.

Hank Bingham's eyes met hers.

“No, sweetie,” he said. “She can't.”

“I wasn't there,” Ava's father said again. “I was at work.”

“I know,” she said, prying his fingers from their grip on her arm.

She took his hand—dry as parchment paper, bent from arthritis, cold as death—in hers. Ahead of them, the family room was all bright lights and orange plastic furniture. No families there, just patients staring at nothing. One stood hunched over a jigsaw puzzle of kittens playing with a ball of yarn, trying to fit a piece into an empty spot, any empty spot.

“I told your mother last night,” Ava's father said. “I told her that Beatrice wanted me to go straight to the hospital instead of going home.”

“Uh huh,” Ava said.

“I told her that the ambulance didn't even bother to look like it was in a hurry,” he said, his eyes blurred from tears.

Ava felt, suddenly, exhausted. She lowered herself into one of the orange chairs and closed her eyes.

“I told your mother and she said, ‘I know, Teddy. Why do you think I had to leave?'”

Ava nodded but kept her eyes shut. The room smelled like boxed mac and cheese and alcohol and old people.

“She said, ‘Didn't Penny Frost give you my note?'”

“Penny Frost?” Ava said, opening her eyes.

Her father got that confused look on his face, the one that broke Ava's heart.

“What do you know about Penny Frost?” he asked.

“Mom gave Penny Frost a note?” Ava asked him, even though she knew they had entered the place where he was lost to her.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded.

He waved his hand in the air as if he could make Ava disappear.

“You don't know anything,” he muttered.

He was right, of course, Ava thought. She saw that big tree, abundant with green leaves. She saw that blue sky and a flash of purple and pink. She heard her own small voice calling, “Too high, Lily!”

“Dad,” Ava said.

But he just stared off into the distance, at something she could not see.

A
va was in her bedroom, the air conditioner blasting so high that she'd put on a sweater, when she heard someone knocking, persistently, at the front door. On her lap she had a blank piece of copy paper and a box of colored pencils. Could she draw a picture of that day now, after all these years? She took out a green pencil, ignoring whoever was at the door.

She drew each leaf carefully, in the color called Grass Green, and then switched to Dark Green.

The knocking had stopped, but now Ava thought she heard footsteps on the stairs. She paused, Dark Green in hand, and listened.

The bedroom door opened and Jim walked in, looking pissed off.

“You still have a key?” Ava said, startled.

“It's like Alaska in here,” Jim said.

He walked over to the air conditioner, bent to peer at the knobs.

“You got an air conditioner,” he said.

“I like it cold,” Ava said.

“I didn't even know you liked pink,” he said, running his fingers across her pretty sheets.

“You can't just walk in here, you know.”

“You're drawing? A tree?” Jim asked her.

Ava turned the paper over so he couldn't see it.

“I got a call,” he said. “A troubling call.”

He wasn't looking at her. He just kept running his hand up and down the sheet.

“Okay,” she said.

“From the police. In Paris.”

Despite the air conditioner on low now, Ava felt chilled. She pulled her sweater closer around her.

“Oh God,” she said.

She asked him, “Is she dead?” Even though she knew that if that were true he wouldn't have bothered with the air conditioner.

Finally Jim looked up at her.

“She overdosed on heroin and was taken to a hospital,” he said. “It wasn't pneumonia.”

“Heroin?” Her throat had gone so dry, Ava couldn't seem to swallow.

“Thankfully someone called for an ambulance instead of leaving her. They treated her at the hospital and gave her a talking-to and released her.”

“You mean she's wandering around Paris? On drugs?” Ava was trying very hard not to fall apart.

“I don't know, Ava.”

“Heroin. Jesus.”

“Maybe it was just that once,” Jim said.

They both knew that wasn't likely. But Ava nodded anyway, and said, “Maybe.” Maggie had emailed her! She was supposed to be okay!

“They have her picture,” Jim said. “And the police are going to look out for her in the areas where there's drug activity.”

Ava thought of when she lived in that Manhattan railroad
flat in Alphabet City in the eighties. Bathtub in the kitchen and the smell of roach spray. On the corner, above the bodega, was a shooting gallery, and all day and night she would see people going in and out. Men in business suits and scrawny teenagers and strung-out junkies and housewives and girls just like Maggie, from good families and good schools. Was that where Maggie was? In a place like that?

“Don't cry,” Jim said, and that's when she realized she had started to cry.

He reached over and wrapped her in his arms. Ava pressed her face into his chest, felt the soft cotton of his t-shirt, a red one she didn't recognize with foreign words written across it. She inhaled his smell of minty soap and environmentally safe detergent and just Jim.

“We'll find her and we'll bring her home,” he said.

She wanted to remind him that there was no more
we
, but she didn't. Instead, she just rested her weary self against him.

Ava

“You haven't found Rosalind Arden, have you?” Cate asked Ava.

They were in Cate's backyard, setting up for the Labor Day weekend barbecue that Cate and Gray always held. Ava uncovered the bowls of potato salad and kale salad and pasta salad, took the plastic wrap off a platter of deviled eggs, and ignored Cate's question.

“She's supposed to come in November,” Cate said. “That's two months away.”

Ava watched her stick bottles of beer and wine into the ice in a big silver trough. Beyond her, Gray stood at the grill shoving
newspapers into a chimney. He refused to use a gas grill.
Changes the taste
, he always said.

“Is she dead?” Cate was asking. “Is that it? And you're afraid to tell the group?”

Ava took one of the red plastic forks sitting in a red basket of utensils and paper napkins decorated with red and black ants, and speared a corkscrew of pasta. The salad had sun-dried tomatoes and black olives and feta cheese.

“You're right,” Ava said, plucking out an olive, “I can't find her. It's like she vanished. The publishing house doesn't even exist anymore.”

“Which one was it?”

“White Swan,” Ava said.

“They were in Boston,” Cate said. “On Beacon Street. A small house with very few titles. Mostly New England writers. Poetry chapbooks. Accounts of the '39 hurricane. That sort of thing.”

Ava looked at her, surprised.

Cate laughed. “I'm a librarian. I know these things.”

“So they did exist,” Ava said.

“I knew an editor there. Poppy Montgomery. She was ancient.”

“The coals are white!” Gray called to Cate.

“Why doesn't he just use a gas grill like everyone else?” Ava said.

“He thinks it—”

“I know,” Ava said.

First came the sound of voices nearing, and then a small gaggle of people appeared at the top of the driveway. Everyone clutched a bottle of wine, like an offering. Right behind them another head appeared.

“You invited Jim?” Ava said in disbelief. “And the yarn bomber?”

“Gray must have,” Cate said. “I didn't.”

But Ava saw immediately that Jim wasn't with Delia. He was walking down the driveway purposefully. Alone.

He looked sheepish when he reached Ava and Cate. But Cate immediately put on her good hostess voice, and welcomed him more enthusiastically than Ava liked.

“Ava,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Ava said. Her mouth had gone suddenly dry. She hadn't talked to him since he gave her the news about Maggie a few days ago. Ava had made a timeline: the hospital, the email to Will, Maggie's email to her. How could Maggie have sounded so normal, so like herself?

“Let me put you to work,” Cate said, guiding Jim away.

He glanced over his shoulder at Ava, sending her a look she didn't understand. It was very much like the kind of looks he would send her years ago when they had to part after a long night together in her small East Village apartment. Or, later, when one or the other had to be away for a night or a few nights and that absence felt enormous and impossible. Or when the children were babies and Jim had to leave for work, hating to miss even one minute of their babyhood. But surely he intended something different. Those looks had stopped even before he met—remet, Ava reminded herself—Delia Lindstrom.

Still, that glance over his shoulder was enough to send Ava up the driveway herself, and across the street to the refuge of her own house.

U
nexpectedly, gray clouds moved across the sky, heavy with the promise of rain. With them, a cool breeze arrived, and Ava found herself shivering in her thin shift in her backyard,
The Unbearable
Lightness of Being
in her lap. The book, with its explorations of light and heavy, art versus kitsch, and the various entanglements of love and marriage and adultery, had so absorbed her that Ava had almost blocked out the sounds from Cate and Gray's party floating in the air.

She uncapped her orange highlighter and underlined a sentence in the book:
A return after long wanderings
. That was what Franz's wife ordered for his tombstone after his death.
A return after long wanderings
. The words made her think of Maggie, wandering the streets of Paris. And Will alone in Uganda, searching.

“There you are!” Jim's voice interrupted her.

Ava rubbed her arms to warm herself, but didn't respond.

He walked across their small backyard, sitting in the chair beside her, his elbows on his knees as he leaned toward her, smiling.

“You left,” he said.

“I didn't feel like a party. Maggie,” she added, and he nodded.

Jim cocked his head in the direction of Cate's house. “They've entered the dancing portion,” he said.

Bruce Springsteen was belting out “Rosalita” and people were singing along. This was part of the Labor Day party at Cate and Gray's, and Ava could picture them, all the middle-aged couples stomping and twirling.

“You have goosebumps,” Jim said.

He ran his index finger up her arm. Ava pulled her arm away from him, frowning.

“I need to read this,” she said, holding up the book.

“Milan Kundera,” he said. “The promise of socialism with a human face.”

When she didn't respond, he said, “You should put on a sweater.” He glanced up at the clouds. “A cold front is moving in.”

“Time to go inside,” she said, but he stopped her.

“Do you think,” he said softly, “there's a chance we could be happy too?”

“You know,” Ava said, “a year ago I would have said no. But I do think we can each be happy.”

Jim was looked her, confused.

“I mean,” she continued, “I've come to realize how very different we are.”

“I thought opposites attract,” he said ruefully.

Now Ava was confused. “What are you saying, Jim?”

“I meant, do you think
we
could be happy? Together. Again.”

“What about Delia?”

Jim said, “This isn't about Delia. It's about you and me. I miss you, Ava. Sometimes I walk past the house and I pause and remember us being there, all of us. Our family. You.”

Ava studied her husband's face. She had imagined this moment so often in those first months after he left. Surely, she used to think, he will come to his senses. Surely he will come back.

“Will you think about it?” Jim said.

Ava took his hand in hers. How familiar it still felt, soft and long-fingered.

“I don't have to,” Ava said. “I don't want us to get back together.”

Jim nodded slowly. For a very long time, he held her hand. Then he lifted it to his lips and kissed it gently before he stood.

As Ava watched him walk away, the line came into her mind again.

A return after long wanderings
.

But he wasn't returning, she told herself as the familiar broad shoulders and shaggy hair disappeared around the corner of the house.

B
y the time the book club met, the heat of summer had lifted. Already Ava spotted red leaves among the greenery as she drove to work the morning of the meeting. It was the first day of classes, and she found it appropriate that the weather had turned autumnal. Ava thought of her children and their long-ago first days of school. How neat Maggie's braids were, how white and clean Will's sneakers. Soon enough sweaters were misplaced, tights ripped, zippers broke. But for that first day everything looked shiny and perfect. Now, Jim had hired a private investigator in Paris to try and find their daughter, who still blithely emailed her brief messages, signing off with #paree or #crepeheaven!!!