Twenty-Seven
Five Years Ago
Even years later, Ava couldn’t recall the details of the rest of her senior year. She woke, she dressed, she ate some of the time, she grew thin and wan – thinner than normal – and she went to school. Her report cards were stellar. Her teachers were glowing. And somehow, Mason Stephens’ parents were convinced, through her own parents’ street savvy, that it was in everyone’s best interest if the police were not involved and if the incident at Hamilton House was allowed to fade into rumor, Mason and Ava kept apart, never crossing paths. The drugs weren’t mentioned again; Ava didn’t know if the boys found who’d sold them to Mason, and she didn’t care.
Ghost didn’t disguise the fact that he thought Ava’s miscarriage was a blessing.
Ava wanted to kill herself.
She wasn’t her anymore; she was this ruined husk of a human being. She didn’t know how to live in a world without Mercy. It felt like learning how to walk again after a tragic accident. She didn’t smile, didn’t laugh, didn’t care, about anything. Life was a pattern of routine behaviors.
In April, when her acceptance letter from the University of Georgia arrived, she didn’t throw it in the trash like she’d always thought she would. Knoxville was tarnished now; it didn’t glitter for her anymore. And one night, over glasses of white wine, Ava watched Maggie come to tears, begging her to go off to school, because it might be the only thing that brought her back to life.
Carter got a full ride football scholarship to Texas A&M. Leah applied to a local technical school. And Ava made plans to move to Georgia, to the college town of Athens, where Ghost procured her an off-campus apartment that was all her own.
He bought her a gun. And Maggie cried the evening they left for home, and left her behind.
**
She’d been at school three weeks when Maggie’s usual phone call took on a shivery edge. They talked about class and Aidan’s typical stupidity back home as Ava picked through a microwavable lasagna at her tiny apartment table. All alone. No roommates. Just her and her books and her mother’s voice.
Maggie said, her words becoming tiptoe careful, “I got a phone call today.”
Ava knew, before she swallowed her burned hunk of noodles, exactly who’d called. “Really?” she asked, tone casual, as her heart accelerated.
“Ava,” Maggie said. “I gave him your address.”
She studied the tomato sauce glob sliding down her fork. “Okay.”
She skipped her last class of the afternoon the next day, and was in her Cracker Jack box apartment when a heavy knock moved through the door, stirring the dust motes in the air, pounding against the rhythm of her heart.
The sound crippled her. For one regrettable minute, she grabbed the back of her chair and steadied herself, breathing in, breathing out. The months of separation dissolved, and the doom returned, full force, the dread up the back of her neck and in the pit of her belly. And with it, the most acute love, the desire bold as lightning. She hated herself for being affected.
And then his voice floated through the door. “Ava.” Just the sound of her name gave her an impression of both his hands braced on the door, black forelock of hair falling across his brow as he let the wood hold his weight, too exhausted from fighting the distance between them. “It’s me, baby.”
Defiance sparked inside her, just a tiny ember, a speck of red off a dying coal. But it gave her the strength to stand and walk to the door. She laid her palm against the center panel, imagining she could feel Mercy’s warmth through the wood. “Which you?” she called back. “The Mercy who left? Or the Mercy who knows he should have stayed?” It wasn’t much, but it felt like a victory to her.
There was a pause, then: “Open the door.” Not aggravated, just curious, a little taken aback.
Ava constructed a killer comeback in her mind, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was: “You left me.” Because that’s what it all boiled down to. All the years, all the blood, all the silken threads strung up between them, the abandoned sanity and the lost baby, and he’d left. Just left.
He said, “Yeah,” voice muffled through the door.
Ava turned and put her back to it, gave in to the weakness in her legs and sank slowly down to the floor, until she sat leaning back against the door, her fingers threaded through the fibers of the rug beneath her. Her throat tightened, and she said, “You’d think, after all the books I’ve read, and all the shit I’ve seen growing up in my family – you think I’d understand this. But I don’t. I can’t, Mercy. How does a person just leave? How can there have ever been anything there that was real if you could walk away?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? It wasn’t real.”
The door bounced hard against her spine as he thumped it with something, his foot, his fist. “Don’t say that.” An order, one he didn’t expect to be ignored.
Ava tilted her head back and felt the tears pool at the outer corners of her eyes. “I thought I knew you,” she said, voice choked. “And it never mattered who you were or what you’d done, because I knew you, and I understood you. I was wrong, and maybe that’s what hurts the worst. I never knew you; not at all.”
“Ava.” This time it was definitely a kick, down low, right at the small of her back. “Open the goddamn door.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll kick it to fucking pieces.” She heard him take a deep breath. “And then you’ll have to go with me to Home Depot and get another, ‘cause I can’t let you sleep in an apartment with no door.”
The tears started down her cheeks, thin cool trickles against her burning skin. “I’m trying to be all Jo Dee Messina and stand my ground here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, and that’s stupid.”
She closed her eyes; she felt sick and miserable, desperate inside. “Please just go away. I hate fighting with you.”
Silence on the other side of the door. He wasn’t moving.
“Mercy, go!”
A beat passed, and he said, “Is that what you really want?”
“Yes,” she lied. But when she heard his footsteps begin to retreat across the landing, she stumbled to her feet, threw the locks, and yanked the door open. “Wait, Merc–”
He caught her around the waist as he charged into the room, lifting her up and kicking the door shut behind him. He kissed her while she was still gasping in surprise, and his hands clutched at her with an unchecked strength she could feel leave instant bruises.
Ava didn’t care. Her mouth opened under his and her hands dove inside his cut and the smell of wind in his hair crowded all thought from her mind.
They ended up on the floor, on the rug in front of her sofa, in a tangle of frenzied hands and half-torn-off clothes. It was over too soon, so Mercy pinned her hands up over her head, stretched over her like a big cat, and took her again, more slowly, no less fervently.
After, he slumped down onto the rug and pulled her against his side. He was still in his t-shirt and jeans, the fly just undone, and she was in nothing but her bra, with the straps tugged down.
Ava rested her head against his shoulder and tried to catch her breath, still stirred by the echoes of spasms, too limp to move.
The shadows grew long across the floor. The air cooled her skin until she was covered in gooseflesh, shivering and sliding her hands up beneath his shirt, seeking warmth.
It wasn’t the way it had been before. That automatic sense of safety, of shelter and peace; it was gone, decimated by the months apart, shattered by that moment she’d awakened in his apartment and found him gone. It wasn’t just the two of them anymore; the baby, and his leaving – they were in the room too, whispering and rustling in the corners, like the settling of bird wings. The unfailing man who’d helped to raise her had taken the most simple and precious thing she could offer him – her love – and he’d shoved it away.
The longer they lay on the floor, the more the moment began to hurt. The more Ava saw of the cruelty in his coming here today, the way he’d come for her body, like it was his to hold or reject. Like she didn’t even have a say in anything.
She was crying by the time she sat up and turned away from him, pressing her hands over her face, drawing her knees up to her chest.
Mercy’s large, rough hand settled in the middle of her back, a warm brand against her skin, some silent communication she didn’t know how to read.
“I don’t know you anymore,” she said again, voice broken and shivery, “and that’s the worst part.”
She listened to him get to his feet, straighten his clothes. He kissed her, one lingering stroke of his lips against the top of her head, and he left. Again.
The next morning, as she pressed a cool washcloth to the dark circles under her eyes, she cut him out of her heart for good.
At least, she thought she did.