The nights were quiet unless you knew where to look. In the country (the real country, not the tourist-rural) there was precious little to lure a grown person off the couch in the middle of the night. Ava loved being up when the world was asleep. Pinewood lacked detail, like the time before Ava got her glasses and the objects and the people she saw were misted, blurred, all their pocked skin and yellowed teeth fixed in her poor eyesight. Ava’s glasses had made the landscape much too ugly. The night improved Pinewood, and it was no longer gray and beaten down but sleeping with striking silhouettes. “Go to bed. You’re not missing nothing!” her mother had told her a thousand times. But the voices that carried through the walls, the flatulent sound of shuffled cards, barked laughter from adults, from the center of town, from the cities way off in the distance, called to her. Always had.
Television no longer went off anymore, and the test pattern that used to signal to decent people that it was time for bed had gone the way of the dinosaurs. These days televisions from the neighbors’ houses flickered all night long courtesy of the satellites like Derby-worthy fascinators stationed on their roofs. Ava liked to be outside in that relative silence when the air was warm enough for only a long-sleeved shirt or light sweater. The sounds of dogs barking in some distant yard the only voice she heard. Some of the girls she’d known in high school and college smoked to have something to do with their hands when they found themselves alone, anything was better than looking cheesy and vulnerable Some nights, when she was young, Ava would sneak out and just drive through her ghost town, hers the only car on the streets. Back then, she’d park in front of Cynthia’s, a boutique that catered to middle-aged white women, and imagine the women who exited the building the way they’d adjust their sunglasses and purses in casual clothes that the initiated knew to be expensive; held their shiny lavender Cynthia’s shopping bags, with ownership on their faces. Ava and her family had gone to the five-and-ten store with the rows of discount socks and familiar woodworked crafts, its wild, wild west saloon doors that separated the customers from the employees, the squeak and give of the soft wood floor. Simmy’s Homestyle was still right there, the sole survivor from all those years ago. The sign was a prominent one on their mostly signless landscape, though even Simmy’s was dark by nine, earlier if the town was dead. If her mother ever knew that Ava wandered Pinewood in her car, she hadn’t let on. But there was no real danger that Ava could see. She rarely got out to explore. And only once when she walked Main Street, did she see another person, a thrill that almost gave her a heart attack when she happened upon him humming to himself on the courthouse steps.
Ava did not drive in town in the middle of the night anymore. Those days were long in the past, but Ava found herself up anyway on the deck at Jay’s house, waiting for something she knew was coming. She hadn’t slept at all. It had been a long time since she’d had a true all-nighter. Ava half hoped she would interrupt Jay’s quiet snoring with her restlessness and he would wake up so she would have company. She’d hoped that he might reach for her during some blurry haze of a dream. Jay had not moved.
SO MANY YEARS AGO, she and Jay had ridden to the spot where Devon was killed. “This is it,” he’d said and tried to sound matter-of-fact and not scared out of his mind.
“It feels like a horror movie out here,” Ava had said but she was immediately embarrassed. What they were seeing was worse than any horror movie. Dust swirled in the light, like in a dream, the light a living thing pushing back the dark, a losing battle anyone could predict.
“I don’t want to be here,” Ava had said.
“Let’s just go. Come on, Ava.”
Ava opened her car door and stepped out onto the dark road.
JJ followed her on the road, picked up a package that held a grocery store bouquet, dyed improbable colors, from the side of the road. “What’s this?”
“Put those back,” Ava’d said.
“Flowers,” he said as he looked them over, like he’d just realized what they were.
Joy, the strange little girl Ava had found slumped in front of Devon’s bed one day, clunky military looking shoes, a parrot green and blue dress bunched up around her thighs, picking crud from under her fingernails. “I’m waiting for Devon’s nap to be over,” she’d said, like that explained everything. She must have left the flowers.
“Put them back,” Ava said.
JJ placed the bouquet back where he found it. “Are you ready to go?”
“What a terrible place, JJ. It’s worse than I thought.”
JJ did not speak but took Ava’s hand and led her back to the car.
“Not yet,” Ava said as they watched the dust swirl in the headlights. Moths were coming already into the white beam. “We might feel him here. Do you think that’s possible?” she’d whispered.
JJ had been afraid of that very idea. “No, Ava. That’s the last thing that will happen.”
“What are you doing, Ava?” Jay said. “How long have you been up?” Ava hadn’t turned to see Jay approaching. “Come back to bed.”
“I’m okay.”
Jay stopped just behind her. The deck was a large one and looked like it went on forever, since the night was too dark to see where it truly ended. A body could get confused easily in the dark and take one too many steps thinking there was a solid surface underfoot.
“You want me to go back inside?”
“No, no, you can stay,” she said.
Jay moved beside her but not close enough to touch her. He stretched his legs in front of him, but couldn’t see his feet at the end of his body.
“You should put on a shirt. It’s chilly out here.”
“It’s not cold. I’m okay,” Jay said. The air actually felt punishing and good on his skin.
“I don’t feel the baby anymore, Jay.”
“It’s too early, right? Too small? Even I know it’s too soon, Ava.”
“I just feel like me.”
“You’re tired. There’s a lot going on.”
“I feel like me. I was almost there. Close to seven weeks.”
Jay put his arm around Ava, but she did not lean into him. He patted her shoulder, held her for an uncomfortable time as she sat still as a rock. He finally let his hand drop behind her back.
“Don’t worry. That’s not good for you or the baby. You don’t know anything yet,” Jay said.
Ava said nothing. She couldn’t imagine what she could say that Jay might understand.
Jay listened with Ava to the wind skittering through the maple leaves. He imagined their red stems like the stems of jarred cherries holding on tightly to the branches. There were so many things that deserved to be really seen.
“Do you ever feel your mother, Jay?”
Jay shrugged. Talk about his mother made him nervous. He had tried to ignore his mother for years as she sat quietly in the corner of his mind. He clicked her away like an image from the Viewfinder toy he’d had long ago. He would not think about her on purpose. But she persisted and skittered along the edges of his brain, popped up when he least suspected she would. Though she was smaller than she’d been, she did not disappear. “I’m still here,” his mother said to him every once in a while. “No, I don’t really feel her anymore,” Jay said.