IN THE COMING DAYS when Ava considered what had happened to the three of them, she wondered why she left with Henry down the mountain. There were moments she thought that the feeling of total loss like she had felt at the end of her pregnancies would ultimately consume her. As much as she tried tamp it down, a part of her looked forward to the day the feeling would eat her alive. The more pain the better. They say same knows same and the fact of Henry’s desperation drew her to him. Other times she recognized that she was likely looking for an opening in the fabric of the world she had carelessly slipped into with Jay. Henry had given her an easy escape. Mostly she knew that the scared shitless keep moving. To dwell is to die. Where do you stay Ava? Is there somewhere, anywhere, that you live?
There was no easy explanation. Maybe the same reason Ava stood with Henry in the driveway a couple days later when he carried his two duffle bags to the trunk of his car. The same reason she threw her hand up in a wave that looked like a blessing as he pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road. She’d told him she wished he’d find what he wanted and she meant it. For a few moments as she watched him leave, she felt like a sucker, a fool. Women forgave the shitasses in their lives anything, took it all on themselves, let them slide with any sad mess they brought to their unsuspecting doors.
But soon and in clearer moments she knew she had made her own choice not to lose him or at least not to lose all of her memories of him. She wanted the past where they lived and struggled and loved each other. A past that couldn’t and shouldn’t be erased. The possibility of the past, if it is a good one, or even if it has good moments, is that it can be alive, if you let it. All of it alive, not just the terror, but the beauty too. And the young encompassing and smothering love she’d felt for her lovely man—all that alive too. Otherwise all those years, her years, her life had not meant a thing.
39
In the backyard Ava and Devon run through the grass, they are children again. The game is tag or run or follow me all at the same time. Don never got around to putting up lattice on the back of the small trailer, so every ball they own has rolled under there in the dark. The children do not retrieve them from the place where anything could lie in wait. But they do not consider dark places today. Devon’s feet are bare the way he likes, and when he runs they touch his behind; he is elastic. Ava follows him, mirrors him the best she can. Don has brought the large boom box outside, and the plastic click of his rummaging through homemade cassette tapes softly punctuates the day. He is looking for the right song to thread through the air, set the tone, be the music they feel smoking through their brains, the particulars of the day probably lost, but the feeling, the feeling, snatched back when the song plays.
Sylvia sits on the unstained deck watching, but in this dream she has gotten up and is making her way down the rickety deck steps. Her clothes are large and unflattering, a long-sleeve shirt over a long dress, even here in the heat of summer. She grabs onto the deck railing, and slowly makes her way down the stairs, balancing her bulk, the redistribution of her weight making her waddle. She is winded from the descent. Ava turns as her mother approaches. She is dreaming she knows for sure because she sees her mother, not just glances at her in her periphery but she feels her mother’s struggle to reach them to play with them the nonsense game in the grass. Sylvia’s face is twisted into embarrassment. How had Ava ever missed that struggle? In the way of dreams she cannot talk to her mother, cannot signal to her or touch her. But she can watch. Again and again and again her mother gets up from the lawn chair, holds on to the railing, takes the steps slowly, with the care of a large woman, always on her way to stand with her children in the sunshine.
40
“Where are they?” Henry asked and took the seat to Ava’s side at the back of the dance studio. He had texted her to say he would be late, but the class had barely started. Ava pointed to the children.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.” Ava moved her pocketbook from the chair for Henry to sit. A few other parents, cell phones in hand, stood or sat along the back wall. Ava put her hand over Henry’s and looked at his face. He’d lost weight. It had been a hard year and he looked older maybe. Or probably he looked like he was supposed to. Not seeing him every day had made his face strange, unlike itself. Ava was most likely seeing Henry as the rest of the world had always seen him.
After a couple months of searching Henry had found a steady job (still mostly part-time, but that could change) at East Carolina University, helping admissions call and then put together and send out materials to prospective students. From Goldsboro Henry was a couple of hours from the white bubbles popping on the shore like living things. He couldn’t smell the clean but slightly metallic fish smell of the sand, but he liked the change. What was most surprising to him was that he didn’t miss the hilly landscape of the North Carolina piedmont, a place he thought was imprinted on his brain as home. On the drive there, almost to his nephew’s house where he would be staying, turtles had dotted the road washed up by a heavy rain. Henry tried to drive but he couldn’t stand the idea of popping them under his tires and stopped his car to watch them plod their way past. Henry didn’t like turtles especially, but it made him hopeful to think that nature still interested him, moved him enough to make him stand still and look. Just maybe he wasn’t as unreachable as he feared. He still lived with his nephew’s family, and he felt like a pet, the unloved cocker spaniel, that tried not to beg at the table. But he could see the end of that. In a month or two he’d get a room of his own and really start over.
Zeke was still young enough to be excited to hear his voice and to hear his father’s stories about the beach, his poverty that sounded like adventures to a child, the sights Henry would share with him when the time came. Zeke didn’t know yet that his father fouled everything he touched. It could be he didn’t have to know. Either way, Henry had to make sure his son loved him, so if he found out the truth, the real truth, he would consider his father with kindness and forgiveness and not pain. Henry had met Zeke three times at a McDonald’s half the distance from Pinewood. Carrie drove their son to his father for them to eat and play together, but she would not stay. She smiled at Henry when she saw him and she even talked cordially to him in front of Zeke, but no part of her wanted any part of Henry Bailey. She would do better, and if she couldn’t do better, she’d do without. Henry decided he would do better too. Just in time for his fortieth birthday.