Ava's Gift

It was difficult to measure the space of time between when Matt Cooper’s plane began falling and when it finally crashed into the earth. Some would later say it was all too fast to understand. Others that they had never known horror could last so long.

Then the waiting ended.

Matt Cooper was dead and there was a fire burning and the grain silo upon which the announcers had been seated lay broken, with the fragments of Matt Cooper’s airplane scattered around it like dropped leaves. Everything was panic.

But for whatever reason that such things sometimes come to pass, fortune was kind. Debris from the plane washed over the crowd like sea foam. It left them bloodied and, in some cases, with broken bones, but Death stayed its hand. As people took stock of one another—still trying to douse the fire, still sifting through the rubble of the grain silo—the only death anyone could count was that of Matt Cooper, who died instantly when his plane hit the silo. Even the announcers, perched atop it like a bird, had somehow come out alive. The more time that came and went, the more people waited for bodies to be found—for the number of the living in this world to be lessened. But it was a day of miracles.

So it was with nervousness that the boy and girl were found buried in a pocket of concrete and steel beneath the grain silo. It was built with an infrastructure of steel piping that, when felled by the plane, created small pockets. Macon Campbell, the town sheriff—a dark-skinned, overworked man who had made it through the lion’s share of his thirties with only a handful of things he wished he’d done differently—could just make out the pair of children held within the rubble. For a moment they were only shapes in dim lighting. Then he understood that one of them was his daughter, Ava. The other, her best friend, a boy named Wash.

The fear that came over him was like swallowed lightning.

“Ava!” he called out. “Ava! Wash! Can you hear me?”

His daughter responded by moving her hand. Her body was bent at an awkward angle—fetal, pulled in on itself like a ribbon—and she was half buried by debris. But she was alive. “Thank God,” Macon said. “It’s going to be okay. I’m going to get you out.”

She looked up at him with fear and tears in her eyes. Her lip quivered and she looked around, as if trying to understand how all of this had happened, as if the world had broken some promise she had always believed in. There was concrete and steel around her—sharp and waiting to come crashing down.

“Can you move?” Macon asked.

She answered by moving. First her hand—slowly, tentatively. Then, little by little, the other parts of her body. There was concrete atop her legs but, after some maneuvering, she freed herself.

“Don’t move too much,” Macon said. He spoke through a small, narrow breach in the rubble. He could fit his arm and part of his shoulder through it, but that was all. It would take help and time to move the rubble and safely get to the children. He called to the crowd behind him for help. “There are children here,” he shouted.

It was after she had gotten her legs free that Ava saw the boy, Wash. He was unconscious and buried up to his chest in rubble. “Wash?” she said. He did not answer and she could not tell if he was breathing. “Wash?” she called again. His face was streaked with dust and there was a small bruise on his brow. By nature, the boy was pale—something that Ava teased him about as often as she could manage—but, just now, there was something different in his pallor. He looked blanched, like a photograph left too long in the sun. It was then that she saw the steel rod jutting out of his side, and the blood seeping from the wound. “Wash!” Ava yelled, and she started crawling toward him.

“Ava, don’t move,” Macon yelled. Again he tried to fit through the small gap in the rubble. Again only his arm and shoulder fit. “Ava, be still,” he said. “This thing isn’t stable.”

She did not stop. She only kept her eyes on Wash, and continued crawling toward him. When she reached the boy she whispered his name. When he did not reply she put her hands on his face and hoped to feel something that might indicate that he was alive. Then she leaned close to his face, just above his open mouth, and tried to feel his breath. But it was difficult to tell what she was feeling. She was bruised and scratched from the fallen silo. She was frightened. Every nerve of her body seemed to be speaking to her at once. It drowned out any breathing she might have felt slide from Wash’s lips.

“Is he alive?” Macon called.

“I don’t know,” Ava replied. “He’s hurt.” She placed her hand on his neck and hoped for a pulse, but her hands were shaking and the only heartbeat she could feel was the frightened thundering of her own.

“How is he hurt?” Macon asked. Finally help was arriving—firemen and volunteers. But they were only in the beginning stages of solving the riddle of how to stabilize the debris and get to the children.

Ava heard her father barking orders. She heard people shouting replies. There was talk of two-by-fours, steel rods, floor jacks, cranes. It soon became simply a choir of garbled voices. For Ava, there was only the wound in Wash’s side, the sight of his blood spilling into the dust.

“I’ve got to do something,” Ava said. She gripped him beneath his shoulders.

“No,” Macon yelled. “Don’t move him. Don’t touch him.”

But it was too late. She tugged at his shoulders and, as soon as she did, the debris that was covering him shifted in one great, awful lurch. The steel rod that was protruding into his side came free. His blood flowed faster.

Macon called out for more help.

Ava cried. She said, over and over again in a terrified voice, “I’m sorry...I’m sorry...” Her hands leaped nervously in front of her. She did not know where to put them. She was torn between her desire to help the boy and the truth that what she had just done made things worse.

“Ava!” Macon called. Eventually, his daughter heard him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t think about it,” Macon replied. “Just put your hands over the wound. Put your hands over it to help slow the bleeding. Just hold on.” For a third time, even though he knew it was pointless, he tried to maneuver his way through the small opening in the rubble. For a third time he failed. “Just put your hands on his side and press down, baby,” he said.

Slowly, Ava pressed her hands over Wash’s side. She felt the pulse of his blood as it spilled over her hands. She closed her eyes and cried. She hoped. She prayed. She called out to a god that, being only thirteen, she did not know that she understood or even believed in. But, just now, at this moment, she would believe in anything or anyone. She would give anything for her best friend to live, to be healed.

And then there was something akin to cold in her hands. A numbness in her palms and a feeling of needles racing up the length of her arms. The sound of her father calling for her faded away. The sound of everything receded and the darkness of her closed eyes was darker than any she had ever experienced before.

In the darkness, she saw him. Wash. He stood in the center of the darkness, the pale hue of his skin almost glowing. He was bruised and there was a cut on his brow. His clothes were covered with dirt from the fallen grain silo. The right side of his shirt was torn and there was blood pouring from the wound. But the boy did not seem to notice any of this. He only looked at Ava with a face that betrayed nothing.

“It’s okay,” Wash said. But, somehow, his words were in the voice of Ava’s mother—dead for five years now. “It’s going to be okay.” He smiled—the small freckles dotting his face looked like cinnamon sprinkled over cloth. When he laughed, he laughed in the voice of Ava’s mother.

Then Ava’s eyes were open. Her father was still shouting her name. Her body was still bruised and sore. She still kneeled beside Wash with her hands covering his side—her fingers sticky with blood. She heard ambulances. She heard yelling. She heard people crying—crying out of fear, crying at the loss of Matt Cooper, crying because they could not understand how the day had turned so harsh so quickly.

Then she heard the sound of Wash’s voice.

“Ava?” Wash said, opening his eyes. “Ava? What did you do?” He reached across his stomach and placed his left hand atop hers.

“No, Wash!” she said quickly. “I have to keep my hands over it! You’re bleeding! I’ve got to stop the bleeding!” But there was no strength in her. She felt light-headed and could not resist as Wash took her hands away.

Beneath where her hands had been—where, once, there was a steel rod protruding into the boy, puncturing organs and promising that even the lives of children were not guaranteed in this world—there was only the boy’s skin, perfect and unharmed.

“What did you do?” Wash asked again, looking up at her.

Then, for Ava, the world began to slide, as if the hinges that kept the earth level were broken. The sight of Wash became a glimmering dimness. Then the dimness faded, replaced by an empty, unbounded darkness.

* * *

The news of her healing the boy spread like wildfire. Someone had been there with the camera of their cell phone running. The video was uploaded and shared and transmitted around the world. It leaped from screens to eyes to lips to ears, fanned by the flame of imagination of a planet that had been too long harboring a secret hope for some type of confirmation of the miraculous.

For the next few days in the hospital, Ava’s father sat by her side and held her hand. He would talk to her, though she was not always aware enough to recognize him. She existed in a haze, but she could tell by her father’s face that she was not well. He seemed worried and afraid and reluctant, but he also wore a look of purpose. It was the way he had looked at her when, once, she and Wash were playing in the forest behind the house and she fell upon a shard of wood that stabbed nearly an inch and a half into her thigh.

Macon had brought her into the house and sat her at the kitchen table, looking at the wound and the splint of wood protruding from it like a crude arrow. He had the same expression he wore at her bedside now, an expression that told her there was a hard task to be done before the healing could begin.

Around the room Ava could see other people standing, waiting. Most of them were doctors, but there were others, too. People with cameras and microphones. Everyone in the room, including Macon, wore security badges. Each time someone opened the door to enter the room, the sound of shouting and the flashing of camera lights poured in from the hallway. Ava could see a trio of policemen standing outside.

“Ava?” Macon called out. She did not realize it, but she had drifted off to sleep again. Her body felt far away and floating, like a balloon resting on the surface of a lake, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. “Ava, can you hear me?” Macon said. “I’m going to ask you a couple of questions for these nice people, okay? You just look at me and pretend it’s just the two of us. I promise it’ll be quick.”

A man that had been standing nearby with a video camera stepped forward and made an adjustment to a microphone that was sitting on the edge of Ava’s bed between her and her father. He checked something on his equipment and gave Macon a nod of affirmation. Another man snapped photographs. He moved around the bed, alternating between squatting and standing, sometimes photographing Ava, sometimes Macon and, in turn, the two of them together.

Macon squeezed Ava’s hand again to get her attention. “Has this ever happened before?” he asked. The photographer’s camera shutter clicked. Then Macon asked another question, and Ava was not certain whether or not she had answered the first. Time was not linear for her. It bubbled up like air through water. She was never sure of her depth in it. “How long have you been able to do this?” Macon asked. “When was the first time?”

Again there was a foggy, confusing passage of time and then everyone in the room was suddenly talking at once, shouting questions at Macon, yelling for better answers. “You had to have known,” Ava heard someone shout. The accusation was followed by several flashes from the photographer’s camera, capturing the expression on Macon’s face for posterity.

Macon withstood it as best he could, Ava could see. He was wearing the only suit he owned—charcoal-gray with a light blue shirt. The suit was frayed in places and there was a stain on the back of it from the time he’d attended a funeral and, on the way back, caught a ride with a friend who owned a pickup truck with greasy seats. But in spite of all that, Ava always loved the sight of her father in that suit.

“That’s enough for now,” Macon said to everyone. His voice was deep and booming. It was the voice of a man who was not only a father, but also the sheriff. “She’s barely conscious and I won’t keep harassing my daughter just because you want answers. You and everyone else will just have to wait.”

“Ask her more,” one of the doctors said. His name was Eldrich—Ava often heard her father yelling the man’s name as they argued—and he was a thin, short man with a poor comb-over. His face was red with frustration. “We haven’t learned anything yet,” he barked. “Nothing about how all of this started, about how long she’s been able to do it, about how she does it. And you, Sheriff, you’ve known about this all along. We have to do more tests.” There was resentment in his voice. “Why did you think you could keep something like this, something like her, from the rest of the world? What made you think you had that right?”