The Wonder of All Things (22 page)

“Goodness,” Delores said. “I’ll get my husband.”

“I don’t think they came for your husband,” Brenda said.

“Of course they did,” Delores replied. “What else could they have come here for?” She walked past Brenda and opened the door. “Come in,” she said, waving her hands. “Come in and we’ll get you taken care of.” Her hands flapped in front of her, motioning for people to come inside. “I’ll get my husband,” she said. “We’ll get you all taken care of until we can find some more help here.”

“Is Ava in there?” someone asked.

“What?” Delores asked. Her hands stopped moving.

“I told you,” Brenda said, backing away from the door. “Shut the door,” she said.

“I’ll do no such thing,” Delores said. Then she turned back to the crowd. “Well, yes, Ava is in here. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. You folks need medical attention. I’m a nurse and my husband is a doctor. What’s that girl got to do with anything?”

“Shut the door,” Brenda repeated. She backed to the stairs, blocking them and, at the same time, listening upstairs for Ava and Wash, but not hearing them.

“It’s okay,” Delores said, her voice thin.

There was still the sound of the fire burning in the center of town. There was the glow of the fire and the glimmer of the lights from the fire trucks. There was the sound of people yelling, giving orders. Perhaps one of those voices was Macon’s. Then a woman standing in the crowd before Dr. Arnold’s house stepped forward, holding a child in her arms. “Please,” a woman said, holding her child. “You’ve got to do something.” Her child was young, no more than four or five, and his shirt was covered in blood. There was a large gash on the child’s head and the blood was running down his face and onto his clothes in spite of the way his mother held a cloth against the wound. “You’ve got to do something,” the woman said.

“Oh, Lord,” Delores said. “Come inside, quick!”

“Not you,” the woman said. “Not the doctor. The girl. Ava.”

“Ava can’t help you,” Brenda said, stepping forward into the doorway. “But there’s a nurse and a doctor here who’ll do everything they can, every single thing possible. Now get in here.”

“Yes,” Delores agreed. “Your boy needs help.”

“I want Ava to help him,” the woman said. “I want to know that he’s healed. I want to know that he’ll be okay. She’s the only one who can do that.”

“She can’t help everyone,” Brenda said. She looked over the crowd as she said it, hoping that they would somehow understand, but knowing full well that they would not.

“Just help my child,” the woman said.

“We’ll get your son to a hospital as soon as we can,” Delores said. “My husband will do everything he can.”

“I don’t want a hospital,” the woman yelled. “I want her help!”

“She can’t help you,” Brenda said.

“Who are you to decide?” a man said. He pressed forward and stood beside the woman with the injured child. “Who are you to say? What gives you the right?”

“Settle down,” Brenda said.

“We deserve help,” someone yelled. “She needs to help us.”

“This will all be sorted out properly,” Reverend Brown said, his voice booming. He raced up the front yard, his voice booming ahead of him as he spoke. The crowd parted to let him through. His coming impressed upon the crowd that they should behave as best they could, a sense that there was a judgment that might be passed upon them. But the lull it created did not last.

The arguing began quickly. The man standing in the front of the crowd bolted forward, past Brenda and Delores, and into the house. “Where is she?” he yelled. “Where is she?”

“Get the hell out of here,” Brenda yelled. The man dashed from room to room, calling Ava’s name. “There’s help here if you need it,” Brenda said, “but the girl will stay out of it.” She stood at the bottom of the stairs, planted and firm as an oak.

After he was done checking the rest of the house, the man looked at her thoughtfully, his mind adding things up. “She’s upstairs,” the man said, as if both creating and confirming the theory at the same time.

“And to hell with you if you think you’re getting past me,” Brenda said. She made her hands into fists at her side.

“You’ve got to stop this,” Delores said. She spoke with her hands flapping around her. Her nerves had always been weak, and the way things were turning was doing nothing to help that. “My husband and I can help everyone,” she said. “Or, if we can’t, we’ll make sure you’re okay until we can get you over to the hospital.”

Still Brenda and the man locked eyes on each other. He walked over to the old woman. Brenda was tall, but the man was taller. He looked down at her with a hard, angry face. “Move,” he growled.

“You’ll have to kill me,” Brenda said. “And even God Almighty ain’t figured out how to do that one yet.”

The moment stretched out. The man stood firmly and stared down at the old, red-haired matriarch. And like the mountains themselves, Brenda waited, and did not move until, finally, the man turned and walked out of the house.

Brenda sat on the bottom stair as the people entered the house and Delores and Dr. Arnold began hustling to take care of them. She would protect the children at any cost.

But it was not until sometime later, when she finally had a moment to check on them, that she would find them missing.

Ava and Wash were already half a mile way—escaped through the upstairs window, dipping between the houses, disappearing into the night, into the loneliness of the mountains.

They woke in the short hours before dawn and her mother had breakfast ready even though the day was still far off. Ava’s eyes burned with drowsiness but her mother had made cocoa and the house was thick with the smell of pancakes and the television in the living room was turned on to a low murmur that was warm and welcoming.

“How long until sunrise?” Ava asked.

“About an hour,” her mother said. “But we’re going to have to make it on up the mountain soon. So don’t dawdle with breakfast.”

They ate quickly and left the house into the cool darkness with the smell of maple syrup and coffee clinging to the collars of their jackets. The crickets trilled and the wind was still and it seemed that they could make out the sound of the dew falling through the leaves of the trees—a gentle tapping, like a small question being asked again and again by the earth.

They made their way in silence up the mountain. Heather carried a small flashlight and swung the beam of it back and forth on the path even though her legs knew the way well enough. Ava held her hand as they walked and the morning dew wet her shoes and dampened the bottom of her pants. She liked the smell of the grass and the loamy stench of the earth they left behind them as they trekked up the mountain.

When they had crested the mountain, Ava’s mother turned eastward and led the child into a small clearing with a stone outcropping that looked out over the entire mountain range—a shaggy band of blue-black beneath the moonless night sky.

“Come sit,” Heather said. She settled upon a large slab of stone and folded her legs and stared off to the east. Then she reached into the pockets of her large jacket and waited.

“How much longer?” Ava asked, settling onto the stone beside her mother. The rock was cold and slightly wet beneath her. It was a detail that she knew would stay with her.

“Not long,” Heather said. “Look.” And then she pointed off to the east and, with a quickness that Ava could not have imagined, the sky was already casting off its darkness, the stars receding gently.

“Look through this,” Heather said, handing Ava a dark piece of square glass from her jacket pocket.

“Why do I need this?”

“Because you’ll go blind otherwise. That’s how the sun works, kiddo.”

And then there was fire in the east. A bright torch from behind the trees that grew into a well of light that swelled and swelled—perfectly circular—and when Ava looked, her mother was holding the smoked glass in front of her, staring into the sun, and Ava did the same.

“The sun gets smaller when I look through the glass. What happened?” Ava asked.

“That’s what the sun really looks like from this far away.”

Ava took the glass away from her eyes and the sun was a huge glowing ball of fire that sent pinpricks of pain into the backs of her eyes. And then, with the glass, it was smaller than a dime again.

“Magic,” Ava said softly.

The two of them sat and watched the sun clear the horizon and then they saw when the moon rose up and conquered a third of the sun, and Ava was torn between watching the eclipse through the smoked glass that would protect her eyes and staring headlong into the brightness. She felt that there was something being lost in the transition between the glass and the naked eye.

“Is that really the moon?” Ava asked.

“It’s the moon,” Heather replied.

“Is it going to block out the sun?”

“Not completely. Today it’s only a partial eclipse. There won’t be another full eclipse for a few more years.”

“And that’s when the moon completely blocks out the sun?”

“That’s right.”

Ava continued to watch the sun and moon dance with each other through the smoky glass. Already the moon was receding, the dark spot of ink slowly marching out of view. Ava pictured the sun and moon and the earth in her mind. She had trouble giving them scope and distance. They were simply three large orbs—one yellow, one blue and one white. In her mind, the sun changed size, going from large and blindingly bright, to the small yellow dot she saw through the smoky glass.

It was a universe difficult to contain in her mind, but she did her best.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Heather said finally. And when Ava looked she saw that the moon had completely passed from the sun. It had returned to being simply a small, perfect dot of yellow in front of her.

Ava stopped looking through the glass and suddenly she could feel the warmth of the sun pouring over her. The world looked different from anything she had ever remembered seeing. The bushy green rug of trees and brush and rocks and earth stretched out before her. Suddenly the world felt small and large at the same time. It seemed to breathe.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Heather said.

It was only two days later—when the echo of this time together still reverberated in her daughter’s mind—that Heather would hang herself.

NINE

THEY COULD JUST
make out the radio tower blinking in the distance above the trees and above the mountain. Ava pointed and told Wash that was where they had to go. “Why?” Wash asked, huffing from the effort. He had not yet thought of how they would achieve this escape.

“Trust me,” she said, and then she pulled him forward.

When they first got out of town and into the woods she gave him one of her sweaters to wear so that he had some layers of his own. It smelled of her, and he liked wearing it beneath his jacket more than he cared to admit. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get some of your clothes,” Ava said. “I didn’t really plan this.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Wash said.

Ava trudged onward and, as if pulled by gravity, Wash followed. They treaded through darkness and underbrush, moving as fast as either of them could manage. Sweat beaded up on Ava’s brow. Her head lolled. She stumbled now and then.

“Maybe we should stop,” Wash said. He could not ignore the way her clothes hung loosely from her body. They swallowed her up, even with the layers she wore. She seemed to be disappearing, even as she stood in front of him.

“We can’t stop,” Ava huffed. But she had already come to a standstill. Her body swayed in the cold wind racing up the mountain. She closed her eyes and held her breath and Wash watched her, not knowing what to do or what to say to bring back the Ava he used to know.

“We’ve got to stop,” Wash said. He found a fallen log that would hold them. “Come sit.” He tucked his hands into his pockets and waited. After a moment Ava walked slowly toward Wash and sat on the tree beside him. “What’s going on, Ava? I mean, what’s really happening?”

“I wonder what happened in town,” Ava said. She looked in the direction of home, but the mountain blocked her view. She rubbed her temples to push away the headache that was growing steadily inside her. “You think Dad and Carmen are okay?” she asked.

“I’m sure your dad’s fine,” Wash answered. “I’m not sure we should have left Carmen, though.”

“I know,” Ava replied. She prepared to add to the statement, but she chose to swallow the words instead.

“I wonder if they’re taking her to the hospital.” Wash stood and, as Ava had done, looked in the direction of Stone Temple. He knew there was no way to see the town from where they were. There was too much distance between them—too much stone and earth, too many decisions they probably shouldn’t have made. But regardless of whether or not he thought they should have run away, there was never any question as to whether or not he should have followed Ava. They were caught in the gravity of each other, just as they always had been.

If he had stayed, she would have stayed. But since she left, he left.

“We should go,” Ava said. She stood slowly. Her body swayed and she stumbled a little, but finally she caught her balance. After a few deep breaths, she gathered herself. “I’m okay,” she said preemptively, looking at Wash. He was worried enough about her that it would not take much for him to turn back, and that was not part of her plan.

“They’ll catch up to us eventually,” Wash said. “You know they’re not going to just let us run off like this.”

“I know,” Ava said. She tucked her hands into her pockets and shrugged away the cold. Her teeth had begun chattering and she tightened her jaw to stop them.

“Then what are we doing?” Wash asked.

“Just trust me, Wash,” she replied.

“When haven’t I?”

And off they went.

The two of them high-stepped over the underbrush and rocks and fallen branches and mysterious things that reach out from the darkness of a nighttime mountain and hinder progress. Wash had always been a little clumsy, and not being able to see much of where he was going now did not help things. He tripped over rocks, stumbled at dips in the path and generally had a tough time of things. His legs quickly grew tired and his ankles were sore from being rolled. There were a dozen things he wished he and Ava had done differently. They should have brought flashlights. They should have brought food. They should have brought more clothes. They should have chosen another path.

The fact that Ava was taking them north was of particular concern to Wash. The mountains around Stone Temple were formed so that, of all the cardinal directions a person could choose, north was the most difficult. The mountain rose and fell with both swiftness and suddenness. There were jagged patches where a bad stumble meant landing on the point of a rock. And there were places where the rocks were smooth and flat and, as the night brought dew, it was easy to slide and tumble down a long, unforgiving slope.

And to worsen matters there was no moon to see by. Over time Wash’s and Ava’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, but it was only the fact that they had traveled upon this land before that they made any headway and were not yet injured.

All of the worry about the mountain, all of the thoughts of the town, all of the stress over what they were doing, all of it swirled around in Wash’s mind. He needed a distraction to keep himself from taking Ava by the hand and screaming for her to go back to town. Whatever it was she was leading them to, he wanted to let her have it. There are times in a life when one person follows another, regardless of where it leads. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid.

“I wish I’d brought my copy of
Moby Dick,
” he said. He decided not to call attention to the fact that it was night and the sky was moonless and, even if he had brought his book, he would have no way of seeing the words. “We need something to talk about,” he added.

“I want to go back to that house,” Ava said. She was ahead of him on the trail and marching slowly, but in the stillness of the night, her voice carried. It was full of fatigue.

Wash was surprised by the topic. He didn’t want to think about houses because that meant thinking about being indoors and warm and not alone in the middle of the woods. He tried to think of a joke, any joke at all, to lighten the mood, to further distract them. But nothing came to mind. “What house?” he asked.

“The one behind Dr. Arnold’s. The big one with the tall fencing.”

“The one where you’re going to try to hide from everybody?” He meant it as a joke, but his tone missed the mark.

“Yeah,” Ava said heavily. Then: “Maybe I wouldn’t keep everyone out, though. Maybe, if you didn’t bring in that damned book—and you know which one I’m talking about—maybe I’d let you in. Just you and me. Nobody else.”

“You’d get tired of me,” Wash said.

“That wouldn’t happen,” Ava said.

“Plus I’d still bring the book. So you’d have to deal with that.”

“Jerk.”

“Whatever,” Wash said. “Besides, how do you know that you wouldn’t get tired of me?”

“Because it’s going to be you and me in the end, Wash.” Ava was still huffing, but the conversation was making her forget just how tired she actually was.

“Like Beowulf and Wiglaf?”

“Like Lucy and Ricky.”

“Okay,” Wash said, smiling. “I think I could get behind that.”

For a very long time after that the two of them were silent. They simply walked. And when Ava’s breathing became labored again they stopped and looked at the path ahead.

The two of them stood there in the darkness with only the sound of the wind and of their own breathing and of their beating hearts to be heard. They would, now and again, prepare to speak, to say something that would take away the silence that had settled between them. But there was never anything that either of them felt needed saying and so they only stood within the gravity of each other. There was foreboding and splendor in those moments, adventure and fear. As if each of these moments were the last. Every moment was a breath that would not return.

Wash remembered moments in movies like this. Times when the guy and girl were alone just before they were destined to part ways. Sometimes they seemed completely oblivious to the fact that, for them, this was their final quiet moment of happiness. The fact that, from this point on, all things would get worse. Become more difficult. Completely fall apart in their hands.

But Wash knew what this moment was. And he wondered if Ava suspected.

It was then that Ava took Wash’s face in her hands and kissed him. It was a clumsy kiss at first, the way first kisses often are. But the longer she held him the better it felt. Everything that was not Ava...faded away. It was a kiss that made him feel whole and alone all at once.

The possibilities of what life could be like for them swam through his mind as he became heady and slow from the feeling of Ava’s lips pressed against his. He saw them living a life together, just as he saw the two of them dying in some horrible tragedy. He wondered where she was leading him, since she knew that they would not escape her father, the reverend and the town that would come looking for them.

“We’ve got to go,” Wash said, pulling his lips away from Ava. When he finally opened his eyes and looked at her, there was something that, in the moonlight, looked like blood coming from her lip.

“Okay,” Ava said, wiping her nose. She sniffled.

“Is that blood?” Wash asked.

“Let’s go,” Ava said.

Wash took her hand and pulled her close. He wiped her nose with the sleeve of his jacket. “I don’t have any tissues,” he said apologetically.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Ava said, half smiling.

“It’s going to be okay,” Wash said.

“I know,” Ava replied.

* * *

“Ava’s gone,” Brenda said through the phone.

Macon could barely hear her over what was going on in the town around him. There was still a fire burning and people were crying and, where there wasn’t crying, there was yelling and shouting—people barking orders, calling for help or yelling the name of someone they were not yet able to find. In the middle of it all was Brenda’s voice, buzzing through cell phone static, telling him that his daughter was gone. “What are you talking about, Brenda?”

“Run off somewhere,” she said. She spoke matter-of-factly, the way she always did. “She and Wash both. There were people here—must have been hurt from the explosion. They came here to Doc Arnold’s wanting Ava to help them—demanding it is a better version. I got into yelling at them and whatnot. Anyhow, when it was all over, I went to find the kids and they were gone. Slipped out the back of the house in all of the commotion, I suppose.”

“Jesus, Brenda!” Macon said. He turned around, looking in all directions, as if he might suddenly see them. “Where did they go? How did you let them leave? How long ago was it?” He rattled off the questions without giving her enough time to answer, even if she had the answers. “Where are you?” he added. “Are you out looking for them? Let me know where you are and I’ll come meet you.”

“I’m still at Doc Arnold’s,” she said.

“What the hell are you still doing there?” Macon barked.

“Doing what I can to help your wife,” Brenda said flatly.

The words were like a bell being rung inside Macon. He froze and let the sudden fear he felt wash over him. “Brenda,” he said slowly. “What’s wrong?”

“The baby’s coming early,” Brenda said. “Doc Arnold says we need to get her Asheville, to the hospital. We’re leaving soon. Don’t know what the road out of town is going to be like with all of those people, but a couple of the policemen are driving us. Maybe that’ll get us out of here faster.”

“Put Carmen on the phone,” Macon said.

There was the muffled sound of the phone being exchanged.

“Macon?” Carmen said. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke. She cleared her throat and, when she spoke next, she had better masked the fear she felt. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how Ava and Wash got away.”

“Let me worry about that,” Macon replied. “How are you feeling?” He walked over to a small bench that he happened to be standing by. He sat. In this moment, all of the commotion—the yelling, the people running by around him in a blur—all of it went away. There was only Carmen.

“I’m not good,” Carmen said, almost crying. She made an awkward, clucking sound as she choked back the tears welling up inside of her. “You find Ava,” she said. “I’ll...we’ll be okay. I can do this.”

“I’m coming over there,” Macon said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Carmen replied. “You’ve got to find Ava and Wash. You know that. You can’t let them be out there on their own like that. There’s no telling what will happen if someone else finds them first.” She cleared her throat again. “Everything’s so crazy,” she added. “And, besides, we’ll be on the way to the hospital before you get here. The baby’s coming. It’s too soon and everything hurts, but the baby’s coming.” Then she added, “I’m scared, Macon.”

“I know,” Macon said. He looked off in the direction of Dr. Arnold’s. He could not see the house, but he knew where it was—just a few streets over, tall and old, waiting for him to come running. But what about Ava and Wash? “I’m scared, too,” he said.

Carmen gasped in pain and there came the sound of several people talking at once in the background. “Carmen?” Macon called. “Carmen?”

“Hello?” a voice called through the phone. “Macon? That you?” It was Brenda.

“Brenda, what’s happening?”

“We’re going,” Brenda said. Macon could hear her moving as she spoke. “We’re going to the hospital. I’ll stay with her. I’ll take care of her.”

“Thank you,” Macon said. There was a powerlessness in him at that moment. It was the way he felt when he could not reach Ava and Wash to help them at the air show. It was the way he felt when she fell unconscious after healing the boy. It was the way he felt when the world came calling, taking over their small corner of life, pressuring him to make one questionable decision after another—all for the sake of trying to prevent what he felt was impossible to prevent: the moment when Ava would be taken away from him. Either by doctors or churches or simply by all of the people who wanted her to do something for them, to be something for them.

And, even more than all of that, he felt powerless the way he had on the day when he came home and found his wife hanging from the rafters of the barn, and his daughter on her knees, sobbing, becoming broken in a way that could never be healed.