“The thing is,” I continued, “I asked God to spare my father. From that avalanche. And he did.”
Ava studied my face harder than she ever had before. “You mean,” she said finally, “you got the news of the avalanche and began to pray? And then the next thing you heard he was saved?” I could tell that she was thinking hard, carefully choosing her words. “Because, you know, by the time you heard about the avalanche he had been saved. We just didn’t know that. The news didn’t have reports of survivors yet, only news that there had been an avalanche. So you were praying but really, he was all right.”
I wanted to explain better, about the voice and everything, but I couldn’t. Ava’s words had taken hold of something inside of me and squeezed it hard. She had said “we didn’t know.” But my father hadn’t even known Ava yet. My family was the “we” then and Ava Pomme was not part of our family. All of that came after. After the avalanche, after he got back home. Then the arguments began and the word divorce floated around our house like a bad spirit. But now, I wasn’t sure.
“Madeline?” Ava was saying. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said softly, trying to put everything in the right order. If my father already knew Ava, maybe even knew her back when I had danced in The Nutcracker, then I had saved him only to have him leave all of us and go to Ava Pomme. The Ouija board’s warning came back to me: Beware M. Antoinetta had told me it was a sin to consult Ouija boards, tarot cards, or phone-in psychics. I didn’t want to sin, but that Ouija board had sent me a warning. Maybe it was a warning about Ava Pomme.
“Now if you had prayed before the avalanche and then he lived, that would be different,” Ava was saying, “but why would you do that?”
“But that’s just it!” I blurted, forgetting for a moment what I was considering. “I didn’t know about the avalanche. I got a message or something. A premonition, maybe, that Daddy was in trouble. And I ran to the church and I prayed and I prayed and when I got back, he was saved.”
Ava stood, walked over to the sink, and emptied her coffee into it. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” she said.
“Ava?” I said, taking a step closer to my stepmother. Funny, I hardly ever thought of Ava as that: stepmother. The word conjured toothless witches, people with bad intentions.
Ava sighed, bored with this conversation, or with me. It wouldn’t be the first time. She often got impatient, like when I told a joke too many times or didn’t understand something and asked for an explanation. For a mother, she sure didn’t have any patience. With a sharp pang, I remembered how long my real mother spent teaching me to tie my shoes, to write my name. M is for mountain, she had taught me, and it looks like a mountain.
I was thinking all these mixed-up things and staring at Ava Pomme. Something flickered in her eyes, then went out. Just a brief shadow, but I saw it. Right then, I realized that if I was right, if I had figured this out, then so had my mother, probably a long time ago, back when it all first happened. And for two whole years my mother had let me hate her rather than telling me the truth and letting me hate my father. My mother had faith in us, and faith protected us from the truth. Somehow we would come back to her eventually.
The largeness of my mother’s love made me breathless. I thought of that list she had made. The first thing she’d been grateful for was us: The kids, of course. Ava Pomme would never put me on a list of things to be grateful for, I was certain.
“Ava?” I said again.
“Hmmm?” Ava said, distracted, and trying once again to make a pot of coffee. I got the clear impression that a good cup of coffee was a lot more important than I was.
“When exactly did you know about the avalanche?” I asked.
“Why, it was all over the news,” Ava said. “I think the whole country held their collective breath, waiting to hear if there were survivors.” She busied herself with the coffeepot. “Like when that little girl fell in the well. You probably don’t remember that. Some little girl fell in a well in Texas and it took days to rescue her and everyone was waiting to hear if she was alive or whatever.”
Ava glanced up at me.
“That was a close one,” she said.
Carmela from downstairs smelled good, like the fresh rosemary that my mother cooked with. She had strange bumps on her face, smooth hills of flesh scattered everywhere, and one large brown spot on her cheek. Her face was like a village: The bumps were all the little houses, the brown spot an irregular-shaped lake, and the deep lines on her cheeks the roads and tributaries that led to other, more exotic and mysterious places. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that face and explore it.