The Wonder of All Things (5 page)

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.