Ava's Gift. Jason Mott

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СКАЧАТЬ hue of his skin almost glowing. He was bruised and there was a cut on his brow. His clothes were covered with dirt from the fallen grain silo. The right side of his shirt was torn and there was blood pouring from the wound. But the boy did not seem to notice any of this. He only looked at Ava with a face that betrayed nothing.

      “It’s okay,” Wash said. But, somehow, his words were in the voice of Ava’s mother—dead for five years now. “It’s going to be okay.” He smiled—the small freckles dotting his face looked like cinnamon sprinkled over cloth. When he laughed, he laughed in the voice of Ava’s mother.

      Then Ava’s eyes were open. Her father was still shouting her name. Her body was still bruised and sore. She still kneeled beside Wash with her hands covering his side—her fingers sticky with blood. She heard ambulances. She heard yelling. She heard people crying—crying out of fear, crying at the loss of Matt Cooper, crying because they could not understand how the day had turned so harsh so quickly.

      Then she heard the sound of Wash’s voice.

      “Ava?” Wash said, opening his eyes. “Ava? What did you do?” He reached across his stomach and placed his left hand atop hers.

      “No, Wash!” she said quickly. “I have to keep my hands over it! You’re bleeding! I’ve got to stop the bleeding!” But there was no strength in her. She felt light-headed and could not resist as Wash took her hands away.

      Beneath where her hands had been—where, once, there was a steel rod protruding into the boy, puncturing organs and promising that even the lives of children were not guaranteed in this world—there was only the boy’s skin, perfect and unharmed.

      “What did you do?” Wash asked again, looking up at her.

      Then, for Ava, the world began to slide, as if the hinges that kept the earth level were broken. The sight of Wash became a glimmering dimness. Then the dimness faded, replaced by an empty, unbounded darkness.

      * * *

      The news of her healing the boy spread like wildfire. Someone had been there with the camera of their cell phone running. The video was uploaded and shared and transmitted around the world. It leaped from screens to eyes to lips to ears, fanned by the flame of imagination of a planet that had been too long harboring a secret hope for some type of confirmation of the miraculous.

      For the next few days in the hospital, Ava’s father sat by her side and held her hand. He would talk to her, though she was not always aware enough to recognize him. She existed in a haze, but she could tell by her father’s face that she was not well. He seemed worried and afraid and reluctant, but he also wore a look of purpose. It was the way he had looked at her when, once, she and Wash were playing in the forest behind the house and she fell upon a shard of wood that stabbed nearly an inch and a half into her thigh.

      Macon had brought her into the house and sat her at the kitchen table, looking at the wound and the splint of wood protruding from it like a crude arrow. He had the same expression he wore at her bedside now, an expression that told her there was a hard task to be done before the healing could begin.

      Around the room Ava could see other people standing, waiting. Most of them were doctors, but there were others, too. People with cameras and microphones. Everyone in the room, including Macon, wore security badges. Each time someone opened the door to enter the room, the sound of shouting and the flashing of camera lights poured in from the hallway. Ava could see a trio of policemen standing outside.

      “Ava?” Macon called out. She did not realize it, but she had drifted off to sleep again. Her body felt far away and floating, like a balloon resting on the surface of a lake, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. “Ava, can you hear me?” Macon said. “I’m going to ask you a couple of questions for these nice people, okay? You just look at me and pretend it’s just the two of us. I promise it’ll be quick.”

      A man that had been standing nearby with a video camera stepped forward and made an adjustment to a microphone that was sitting on the edge of Ava’s bed between her and her father. He checked something on his equipment and gave Macon a nod of affirmation. Another man snapped photographs. He moved around the bed, alternating between squatting and standing, sometimes photographing Ava, sometimes Macon and, in turn, the two of them together.

      Macon squeezed Ava’s hand again to get her attention. “Has this ever happened before?” he asked. The photographer’s camera shutter clicked. Then Macon asked another question, and Ava was not certain whether or not she had answered the first. Time was not linear for her. It bubbled up like air through water. She was never sure of her depth in it. “How long have you been able to do this?” Macon asked. “When was the first time?”

      Again there was a foggy, confusing passage of time and then everyone in the room was suddenly talking at once, shouting questions at Macon, yelling for better answers. “You had to have known,” Ava heard someone shout. The accusation was followed by several flashes from the photographer’s camera, capturing the expression on Macon’s face for posterity.

      Macon withstood it as best he could, Ava could see. He was wearing the only suit he owned—charcoal-gray with a light blue shirt. The suit was frayed in places and there was a stain on the back of it from the time he’d attended a funeral and, on the way back, caught a ride with a friend who owned a pickup truck with greasy seats. But in spite of all that, Ava always loved the sight of her father in that suit.

      “That’s enough for now,” Macon said to everyone. His voice was deep and booming. It was the voice of a man who was not only a father, but also the sheriff. “She’s barely conscious and I won’t keep harassing my daughter just because you want answers. You and everyone else will just have to wait.”

      “Ask her more,” one of the doctors said. His name was Eldrich—Ava often heard her father yelling the man’s name as they argued—and he was a thin, short man with a poor comb-over. His face was red with frustration. “We haven’t learned anything yet,” he barked. “Nothing about how all of this started, about how long she’s been able to do it, about how she does it. And you, Sheriff, you’ve known about this all along. We have to do more tests.” There was resentment in his voice. “Why did you think you could keep something like this, something like her, from the rest of the world? What made you think you had that right?”

      Again the photographer snapped his photos. Again the man behind the video camera adjusted the audio on his microphone, recording it all, readying himself for the time when he would cut and edit and, finally, transmit it to the rest of the world. It was important that everyone see that here, in this small North Carolina town, there was a sheriff who had kept from the world a daughter who could do the impossible.

      There was more yelling and arguing to follow, but Ava was not awake for it. Everything began to feel distant again. Darkness returned. Time jumped forward.

      When she next opened her eyes she saw only the off-white tiles of the hospital ceiling. The smell of antiseptic was like a cloth draped across her face. She was cold, very cold. Somewhere, someone was talking. She began to panic and tried to sit up in the bed, but she felt a pain in her head that radiated outward in waves so sharp they halted her breath. She could not have screamed if she wanted.

      And then the pain was lessened, like lightning arcing in the night, leaving only the shudder of thunder behind. Still, somewhere, someone was talking. The voice was low, garbled, like a song played underwater. She wondered if this was how deafness began. The sound of the voice stretched out, held a single, long note, then rose and fell slowly. It wasn’t someone talking; it was a voice singing. Ava caught words and the tone and timbre of the voice behind them. And then, as if a switch were thrown, she knew the voice СКАЧАТЬ