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First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Faith Gardner
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
Ebook ISBN 9780451478320
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Micaela, my sister,
And Ramona, who might as well be.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
MY SISTER, AVA, disappeared on Halloween.
We were dressed in angel costumes. Homemade halos hovered over our heads, cheeks glitter-smeared with Mom’s makeup, limbs draped in dripping cake-white chiffon. It was a rare decision we could agree on.
We were six.
Ava and I were fraternal twins. We weren’t the same. And I was apt to point that out when she was still here—the little and not-so-little ways in which we were different. Ava was blond, I was auburn. Ava had dusty-blue eyes, I had hazel. Ava was loud, and I was quiet. Ava adored cartoons, I devoured books. Ava had boyfriends all through kindergarten, I had only kissed pillows by the time she disappeared.
But later I would just remember how we were the same. Our matching mood rings, our pigtails, our dolls, our room with the line duct-taped on the carpet to designate sides, our noses, the seashell-shaped vanilla perfume bottle we shared, the way we cut up Mom’s old magazines and made strange faces out of models’ lips and eyes and bangs. Our hair, wisps and waves that burst in clouds around our faces.
Ava’s disappearance was the crack in the Rivers family. I wish I could explain to you how we were before, but I can’t, because the before is so filmy and shadowed by the after. I can only tell you our family’s happiness was wonderfully unremarkable; our love was unfamiliar with the clutching claws of regret; there were no maybe-ghosts rattling our windowpanes or perhaps-angels at our dinner tables. I had a good childhood. Hot Junes and ice cream truck chases and dancing in the sprinklers. Loud Christmas mornings and Saturday pancake feasts and tickle fights.
It ended too early.
2
EVERYBODY BLAMES THEMSELVES for what happened. The blame is a loop that never really goes away. My parents blame themselves for hosting a party that night and telling our older brother, Elliott, a not-so-responsible twelve-year-old, to take us trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Elliott blames himself for putting us on his bike—me on his lap, Ava on the handlebars—and riding us over to his friend’s house on the other side of Ashby Avenue. I vaguely remember that ride, the way the air picked our hair up and reached with cold fingers down my neck. That badass feeling, so honored my brother would take us with him to go to hang out at his friend’s house, passing gaggles of goblins and bunnies along the street, the sky blue-black as the deep sea except for a few unspectacular stars. When he parked his bike on his friend’s lawn, Elliott told us to go up the block for more candy. Loud music was coming from inside the apartment building. It was a party. Teenagers—back then, they might as well have been gods—smoked cigarettes out front. I wanted to stay with my brother, but whining only pissed him off.
“Get out of here,” he told us. “This isn’t for kids. Just go trick-or-treat down the block and come back in a while and we’ll head home.”
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I remember I felt uneasy, being in the dark alone with my sister in a neighborhood that wa
sn’t ours. Even though the party seemed so mysterious, the teens so untouchably cool without their costumes, we did as he said. The angels walked into the night together, down the sidewalk, knocking on doors for puny candies. But it wasn’t fun anymore. It was getting cold. My costume seemed childish in this light. I wanted to go home.
This is where I blame myself.
After looping the block once we went back to the party, but Elliott wasn’t there, just a few teens out front drinking sodas and snickering at our costumes. I whispered to Ava that we should head home. It wasn’t that far. We had come straight down California Street. We could walk straight back in the other direction, and eventually we had to cross Ashby and hit our street.
Ava was the ambitious one. She wasn’t ready to leave yet. She liked the unfamiliar houses and yards, while I just wanted to be back on our block where everything made sense. She ran ahead of me. She wanted to play hide-and-seek. But my legs hurt and I was tired. I parked my butt on someone’s lawn and shoved candy in my mouth while she skipped down the street, taunting me to come with her.
“Count to a hundred!” she shouted as she ran up the sidewalk, glancing back over her shoulder. “Bet you can’t find me!”
I didn’t count. She was always trying to force me into playing games I didn’t want to play. Soon all I heard were cars roaring like ocean waves. I waited for her to return. I sat there eating candy and shivering until eventually I walked home alone, halo in hand, calling her name like a question into the air, crying, swinging my stupid pillowcase full of candy.
After that, the night becomes a blur.
Hazy memories of a house full of costumed, half-drunk adults freaking out over news that a kid was missing. Bride of Frankenstein leading a search party. A pirate calling the police. Cops everywhere, the nonstop spinning red-blue-white lights coming in through the window and crawling along the ceiling as I lay in bed, alone for the first time.
Her last words forever haunt me. She was right. I never found her. Nobody did.
3
AVA’S DISAPPEARANCE WAS almost twelve years ago—the divider between then and now like a duct-tape line on the carpet designating HERE and THERE.
There are still no answers. There are “leads,” “theories,” and “tips.” Investigators, TV specials, websites, memorials, anniversaries. There are the names of serial killers in the area during that decade who abducted little girls within miles of Berkeley. There are the steep crags of backyard creeks, there are runaway rumors, there are psychic visions of violet VW buses and mass graves. Police reports. Missing persons. Billboards, bus benches, flashing pictures at baseball games, enough fliers to swallow the town in neon pink. But there is still no trace of Ava—as if she walked straight into death’s tunnel that Halloween and left not a speck of angel-glitter or a golden thread of hair behind.
4
HOPE TAKES SUCH a twisted shape when someone is gone without explanation.
Years ago a hiker and her dog discovered the remains of a child off a trail at Diablo, a mountain about twenty miles inland. Shallow grave, heaped in dead pine needles, tiny skeleton curled in the fetal position in the dirt. A “friend” posted the news article to my mom’s Facebook wall—also an odd thing that begins occurring when someone disappears into thin air, everyone’s an armchair sleuth—and my mom lived on the news for weeks as the investigation into the remains ensued. She called our PI every day for updates first thing in the morning. She started remodeling the downstairs bathroom with sponge paints and wallpaper trim dotted with seahorses. She bought window boxes with preplanted pansies. She scrubbed out the fridge till it sparkled. But then the forensic lab results came in and it turned out to be a small eight-year-old boy. Mom hung up the phone when the news was delivered, and her eyes shone and she yelled at Mexico and Canada, her pugs, for barfing on the runner. Mom’s chipper attitude and household projects fell to the wayside. The downstairs bathroom has only one sponge-painted wall and a few stenciled seahorses, and the bucket of periwinkle paint still sits behind the toilet. Mom disappeared again into a string of Pilates appointments and charity work, her face hardened back into that determined, unreachable expression. More than once I saw her go into her SUV in the driveway just to sit in the driver’s seat, dabbing at her eyes, screaming a muffled scream.
She had been so excited at the prospect of an answer, a funeral, a burial, a door closing, a goodbye.
Dad’s the worst, though. www.FindAvaRivers.com and the corresponding social media pages are his full-time job. One that doesn’t pay as well as when he was the head of marketing at a media firm. Every day there’s a new tip, a new shiny lie to follow. A girl with no memories showed up at a hospital in Wichita. A woman strung out on drugs was spotted at a campsite in Oregon. The basement—Dad’s home—is stacked with books covering the sex-trafficking trade. Memoirs of girls locked in bunkers for years, with highlighted pages and fluorescent Post-its. When those ladies were discovered padlocked in that Midwestern man’s house a few years back, Dad actually pumped his fist in the air at the news, like yay, like hooray. “Can you imagine? Ten years,” he said, his eyes aglow.
He lives on that hope, that jacked-up hope that Ava’s not dead, she’s only been a slave for over a decade.
Jesus Oprah-watching Christ, my family.
I don’t mean to sound bitter. I don’t ever express my feelings about this stuff to my parents—they’ve had enough heartbreak for several eternities. Regarding Ava and her fate, I almost prefer Elliott’s naked hopelessness. Because whatever happened to her, it ain’t rainbows and unicorns, that’s for sure.
Everyone’s got their hunch, their theory, in the Rivers family. Everyone’s got their false leg of hope to lean on. What about me, Vera Rose, her not-so-identical twin? What do I believe? I prefer the sci-fi angle. Alien abduction. A rip in this dimension. Time travel. I prefer to joke about it if I can, because the truth is, we don’t know what happened to Ava May Rivers, and I’m afraid we never will.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to scan every horizon for a certain cloud of dirty-blond hair. I used to think, lying in bed, that every car I heard purring to park on the street was someone coming to bring me back my sister. I trusted my parents when they said she would come home. Then I grew; I started looking into their eyes when they said it instead of listening to their words. I let myself wonder, what if she doesn’t come home? I thought of her dead somewhere, and though it disturbed me, it seemed all too possible. After time, that thought became inevitable, then a sick relief.
And the wheel, it turned.
And the wheel keeps on turning.
5
EVERY YEAR MID-JULY I dread my birthday because it’s her birthday, too.
We have this tradition that involves gathering, with many balloons, in a park near where Ava disappeared. Sheet cake and a picnic bench and a shady oak tree. We brought enough balloons today that I contemplate tying them to Mexico and Canada and watching the fat pugs float away into the blue yonder. Hahaha, when pugs fly, I think to myself. But I don’t crack a smile. The mood is somber, multicolored Sharpies whispering against card paper, brows knit and brains hard at work. We fill out mini note cards to attach to the balloons. Notes that say things like:
“We miss you, Ladybird. Love, Dad.”
“Not a day goes by, Ava. Mom.”
I draw a cartoon of a stick figure in a hot dog suit, waving.
We release the balloons into the air one by one and watch them drift upward, as if depleting the world’s helium resources and releasing latex doomed to choke birds somewhere is going to get the message to Ava somehow.
It’s still better than the “remembrance ceremony” the year I reached double digits, though.
That year we had thirty or so people here at the park to memorialize Ava. My mom had this beautiful idea to release butterflies into the great beyond, one per person. She ordered these monarch butterflies, and they came in
fancy white boxes. We brought them to the park and distributed them to everyone, one by one, and said some secular prayer-type message of hope for Ava, and everyone opened the boxes so the butterflies would flutter their collective wings and rise heavenward. Only there was a problem. Something must have gone wrong in the shipping or the butterfly storage process, and everyone opened their boxes and . . . the butterflies were dead.
Talk about a downer of an already big old downer of a situation.
But wait, I’m not done.
An hour later, when everyone was putting on their coats and grabbing their purses and saying their final sorries and goodbyes, the boxes began moving, and all the butterflies suddenly awoke at the same time and flew up, up, and away. It was sort of magical. Plenty of tears were shed. Still . . . since that first year, my parents have gone with balloons instead of butterflies.
The crowd thins on an annual basis. It used to be extended relatives, kids and teachers from our elementary school, neighbors. On the important anniversaries—one, five, ten—there were news crews. But now it’s just family, minus Elliott. Which is basically family these days.
I know it shouldn’t be about me, it shouldn’t, but even with dozens of balloons it’s not exactly the most uplifting way to spend my eighteenth. We sing the happy birthday song to my question mark of a sister, and I wonder when anyone is going to mention the fact it’s also a certain someone’s birthday as well, ahem, ahem. I comfort myself by checking my phone and noting the somebodies I barely know who took the time to post on my wall today. Madeline, my ex, texted happy bday with three red hearts. I keep opening up that damn message and staring at it as if it’s going to make some difference in my life. Like all the other texts she’s sent, I ignore it. After the balloons are on their mission to Mars and Mom has neatly packed away the note cards and Sharpies, Dad heaves a sigh that’s like a window shutting and turns to me, petting my hair.
“What do you want to do for your birthday, Ladybug?” Dad asks, as if my birthday isn’t today and we aren’t already doing something.