Ava's Gift

“It’s going to be okay,” Wash said softly. In the hallway there was the sound of footsteps approaching.

Ava closed her eyes.

“Before they get here,” Wash said, “I just want to say thank you. Thank you for...well...for whatever happened. For whatever you did.”

“I want to go home,” Ava said. Drowsiness and fatigue was a tide rising inside of her. “When I go home everything will be okay,” she said. In her mind there was the image of her father’s small gray house in Stone Temple. The paint was faded and the wood was worn and broken in places, but home is always a thing of beauty to a child. “I don’t want any of this,” Ava said softly. “I just want to go home.”

“Everything’s different now,” Wash said. “Home isn’t quite home anymore.”

Interlude I (#ulink_e5813ee3-e13b-5f0e-a4e6-00c268f39b2e)

By the time the girl is five years old her mother has found the rhythm of things. The two of them have established a pattern where Ava is never far from her mother’s heels and her mother is always smiling when her daughter comes to be with her. Oftentimes, in the warm hours of the afternoon, when the work is done for the day and her husband is still away at the station, it is possible for them both to believe that they are the only ones left in this world. At these times they will disappear into the mountains for the sake of disappearing.

Heather walks out in front, checking the ground for snakes and pitfalls like a concerned parent, and Ava, for her part, does the job of running up ahead and causing her mother to worry just enough. As Heather walks she thinks about how their lives might change in the years to come. She foresees the day when her daughter will not need her. The day when her child will not be a child but will become a woman who runs ahead into the world and, perhaps, does not look back. What will become of her then?

“Come on, Mom!” Ava calls.

“I’m coming,” Heather replies.

The sun is high and the wind is still and the earth is buzzing with the sound of life. The birds sing. The insects hum.

“Mom?” Ava calls. She has flitted around a bend in the trail, and there is something different in her voice now, as she stands in this place where her mother cannot see her. A knot of fear rises in Heather’s throat.

“What is it?”

“Mom!” Ava screams.

Heather rushes through the brush. It is inescapable, the fear she feels now, the fear she did not know was possible. But she has always been afraid; she simply lacked a location to affix to it. Now she has that: she has a child.

By the time Heather rounds the corner she can hear her daughter crying. It is a wet, choking sound, a soft shudder like the sound of ice breaking. “What is it?” Heather asks, just as she sees that her daughter is unharmed. Sprawled in the thick green grass is a deer. It is a female, its pelt the color of the late evening. There is an arrow rising out of its chest. The animal wheezes, slowly.

“Mom...” Ava says. Her face is streaked with tears. “Mom,” the child repeats. The word is a mantra. Heather looks around, hoping to find the hunter, hoping that things might be brought to a quick and less painful end for the animal. But there is no one. “Is it going to die?” Ava asks.

“It’s not your fault,” Heather replies, though she does not quite know why.

Ava weeps. She tries to understand. “How long is it going to take? What happens after? Is anyone going to bury it?” On and on, she gives voice to the questions that dance in her head.

Her mother does not have the answers. And so the two of them sit in silence, sharing this moment of time, this small plot of a large cruel world, with an animal in its last breaths of life. The deer watches them without fear and it does not flinch, does not withdraw when the child reaches out a trembling hand and places it on the animal’s neck. The deer’s hide is smooth.

Heather kisses the top of Ava’s head. They are both crying now.

The animal’s breathing slows. Without asking, Ava reaches up and grasps the arrow that has pierced the animal’s lung. She pulls it and, after a moment of resistance, it comes free. The deer trembles. It releases a sound like the bleating of sheep. Ava tosses the arrow away.

“Ava,” Heather says, “it’s too late.”

Heather can see in the child’s face that all she wants is for the creature to be better. All she wants is for the blood to stop. All she wants is for death to turn away, just this once. Ava places her hands over the wound. The deer’s blood flows in pulses, like a heartbeat. Ava closes her eyes and wants for nothing other than for the deer to be better.

What comes next is a trembling of her hands, like the spark of electricity placed beneath her palms. Then the deer is up, on its feet. It is still bleeding, but it is able to walk, ever so slowly.

Heather takes Ava in her arms and scuttles backward in the grass. Ava is limp. “Ava!” Heather calls. “Ava!”

Heather watches as the deer walks slowly away—still wheezing, the blood still flowing from its pierced lung, though not as vigorously as it had been. Step after step, the animal disappears into the forest, leaving a trail of blood.

“Ava?” Heather continues, again and again. “Please wake up,” she pleads. The minutes grow into one another like vines until, at last, Ava stirs.

“It’s okay,” Ava says in a voice so low that her mother can barely understand.

Heather weeps with joy at the sound of her daughter’s voice.

“The deer,” Ava whispers. “It’s okay? I wished for it to be okay.”

Heather looks at the trail of blood leading into the forest, but she does not understand anything of what has happened.

TWO (#ulink_3d1bb9f0-ae05-5ccf-9142-f5968c813147)

“THAT GIRL OF yours really started something, didn’t she, Sheriff?” John Mitchell put his hands akimbo and tightened his mouth into a querulous frown. He had been the sheriff of Stone Temple before Macon, and had not retired the cynicism acquired from a lifetime of upholding the law. He was a wiry man made of hard corners: sharp elbows and pointed shoulders, a long nose and deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that made him seem to scowl even when he was happy. He cast the type of bitter appearance that made children uneasy around him, even though he was a kind man who loved children.

Since passing the ornaments and instruments of sheriff on to Macon, he came by the station every Wednesday afternoon to check in on Macon and to get a general sense of what he’d left behind. Most days there was little to talk about other than missing farm animals—usually just animals that had walked off of their own accord—and where the best fishing or hunting spots were, depending on the weather and the time of year. But today John had come by and there was much more to talk about than fishing and runaway animals. “Looks like all hell’s done broke loose,” John said.

“Can’t argue with that,” Macon replied. The two men were standing in Macon’s office, peeking out through the window blinds. Outside there was a mob of reporters and cameras and people with signs. Macon sipped from a cup of coffee and watched and considered it all.

Macon was wrapping up work in the sheriff’s office of Stone Temple and doing the best he could to ignore the crowds of people surrounding the building, preparing to pick up his daughter from the hospital in Asheville. He didn’t like looking at the crowds outside the station, but looking away was a challenge, as well. He wanted to understand it all, and the road to understanding is always paved with hours spent doing something that it would be easier not to do. Still, all watching the crowds did for him was remind him that the world around him was getting out of control.

He’d been to the hospital every day since the incident and, each day, the process of getting there was more and more complicated—traffic, people, reporters. And once he was there, he was forced to sit and watch test after test after test run on his daughter. The doctors and nurses came like clockwork. They poked, they prodded. They took Ava’s blood. They took Macon’s blood. There were theories that whatever Ava had done might be rooted in her genetics. And with her mother deceased, Macon became the pincushion through which they hoped to explore their theories. They took bone marrow, DNA samples. And then, like old-world oracles, they came back for more blood, saying that the answers had to be hidden within.

Macon’s arm was still sore from a young nurse who didn’t quite seem to have yet perfected her craft. Time and again, she missed his vein. It was somewhere around the sixth error that he decided he’d had enough. “It’s time to stop this,” was all he said. And, from that point forward, he limited the doctors’ access to his daughter and he told them, in no uncertain terms, that he would be taking her home.

Today was the day he would bring her home. And the entire world seemed to be watching. He had always been a private man, and nothing that was happening in his life right now sat well with him. The earth was falling away beneath his feet.

“Never would have thought it,” John said.

“What’s that?”

“That all of this could fit into a town like ours.”

“I suppose nobody ever thinks something like this will fit,” Macon replied, taking another sip of his coffee. Finally he closed the blinds and returned to sitting at his desk. “But there it is,” he said, motioning at the window and the crowd beyond it.

“I still can’t quite see why you wouldn’t want to stay in Asheville,” John said. He leaned back on his heels a bit and thought. “Then again,” he said, “I suppose that if I were you and Ava was well enough that she didn’t have to be there, I reckon I’d want to have the home field advantage, too. Up there in Asheville, it’s just a city of people you don’t know. At least here, you know who you can trust. And, if you really, really want to, there are enough mountains and backwoods paths that you could sneak away from all of the cameras, even if only for a little while.”

Macon’s office, much like the town of Stone Temple, was small and old. The sheriff’s office building had been rebuilt in the late sixties after having burned down—something to do with lightning. And from that rebuilding onward, little had changed—apart from wiring the place for internet a few years back.

“Any actual crimes going on?” John asked, returning from the window. “I expect not, but I like to ask.”

“Crimes? No,” Macon said. “Mostly it’s just people. Too damned many of them. And everybody’s got their own agenda. You been out there on the mountain road lately?”

“Not if I can help it,” John said. “I try to stay in town most these days.”

“You couldn’t get over the mountain now if you wanted to,” Macon said. “At least not without burning three or four hours. It’s a parking lot. Just full of people. People in cars, people in vans, people in buses, people on bicycles, people walking. I don’t know where they’re planning on staying. Folks have already started renting out their houses and their property to anybody with enough money, but even with all that, I don’t think Stone Temple is big enough to hold all of this. It’s like watching floodwaters rise. Except I feel like we didn’t get the part where it started at our ankles and crept up slowly. All of this—” he made a motion with his hand to indicate the mass of people outside his window “—all of this makes me feel like the waters are already up to our necks.”