Chapter 16
Ava
I wasn’t sure what to do to prepare for a date. There weren’t very many dates shown on Schitt’s Creek, and everybody dressed the same. The Rose family was all fancy all the time. The rest of the town was what Flo called Wal-Mart chic, whatever that meant.
I hadn’t worked today. I’d spent another long hour with Vinnie and my camera.
Vinnie had been patient in teaching me what I used to know. So far, I had learned about f-stops and apertures and the rule of thirds.
Vinnie said I had an eye for it, and as soon as I understood the settings, I’d be okay again. I wasn’t sure.
Since I had a couple of hours before Tucker would come, I wandered the neighborhood with the camera, taking pictures of trees and cars and squirrels when I could spot them. Maybe after I did these by myself, Vinnie could tell me if I still had the eye.
Everyone I passed seemed to know me and smiled and waved. One woman walking a dog called out. “How was the wedding?”
I didn’t know what to say. I went with, “It was an eventful day.”
I spotted a bright red bird and followed it for a while, hoping to catch it against the sky. I took picture after picture of the bird in a tree, on a wire, on a bush. But every time he flew somewhere, the picture was blurry. I would have to ask Vinnie why.
Eventually, I turned around.
A woman stood in front of the house next door, watering several buckets of flowers by her mailbox. “Hello, Ava,” she called. “Taking some pictures?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Got some of a red bird.” Maybe I could fake this.
“I was telling Ted we sure hadn’t seen much of you and Tucker since the wedding! I told him, I bet they’re busy being newlyweds!”
Oh. I wondered if I should correct her. But I said, “We are!”
I hurried past. When I turned up the path to the blue house, Tucker was already sitting on the steps. He looked forlorn, staring at his phone, his legs sprawled out in khaki pants ironed with a sharp crease. His shirt had buttons and a collar. Normally, he wore jeans and T-shirts.
Right. The date.
When he spotted me coming up the sidewalk, his face switched to relief. I guessed he thought I was lost or something had happened. “Talking to Isadora?” he asked.
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah. She’s lovely. She has a husband named Ted.”
“They think we got married. All the neighbors do.”
He nodded. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”
“Is it time already?” I asked him.
“Yeah. You don’t have your phone?”
“I didn’t have any pockets.” I walked behind him to pop the front door open.
“You don’t lock it?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Should I?”
His jaw tightened, and I could tell he wanted to say more, but he didn’t.
I guessed maybe I should lock the door. Everyone I met seemed so nice, but maybe there were people nearby who stole things, like the teenagers on Schitt’s Creek who’d shoplifted in Rose Apothecary. Alexis had called them kleptos.
I couldn’t have anyone stealing my book. I needed it.
Tucker followed me inside. “Have you watched any videos since last time?”
“I said no more videos. Besides, I’ve been working.”
Tucker nodded. “Do you have any questions for me?”
Would our date be the same as all the hours we spent going over my old life? I set the camera on the table everyone called a coffee table, which was weird because nobody ever drank coffee there.
But I did have a question for him. “I don’t understand the paper flowers.” I sat as far from him as possible on the sofa and opened a box I had found.
In it were tons of random things. A coaster from Big Harry’s. A pin from Shelfmart that had my name on it. But also, lots and lots of faded colored paper cut in the shape of flowers.
I hadn’t read the entire book yet. Focusing on words and figuring out their meaning gave me a headache if I did it for too long. I’d seen references to the paper flowers there and hints that they held all my secrets.
But I couldn’t figure out why these old cutouts were important, or where the secrets were.
I pulled out a handful and set them on the table.
Tucker picked one up. “Do you recognize the flower shapes anymore?”
“I think this is a tulip.” I pointed to a pink one with points along the top.
“It is.” He flattened the one he held in his hand. “This is a rose.”
“That’s not what the roses on our bushes look like.”
He laughed lightly. “Roses look a lot of ways. The tight buds are different from the fully open blooms.”
“That’s true.” I picked up a yellow flower with a long front section. “I have no idea what this is.”
This made his smile go away. “That’s a daffodil.” He swallowed in a way that made his throat bulge for a moment. “We, uh, wow. Okay.”
My chest squeezed. I’d said something wrong. “We don’t have to talk about it,” I said, reaching to gather up the flowers.
He stopped me with a hand resting lightly on mine.
My skin buzzed. I looked at him, wondering what was happening. It was like I was holding the electric toothbrush in my bathroom.
Tucker pulled back. Had he felt it, too? “When we first met at the children’s hospital, I told you about my mom. She died with my dad and brother when I was twelve.”
“What?” Now it was hard for me to swallow. I pressed my hand to my neck. “Your whole family?”
“Yes, that’s why you’ve never met them. They’re not here anymore. We had a car accident, and during that accident, they died, and I got a head injury that caused me to have seizures, like you do.”
I moved my hand from my throat to my chest. My heart was thumping so hard, I could feel it in my ears. “I didn’t know that.”
“We have a lot of ground to cover.”
What? “You mean in the yard?”
“No, no. Sorry. It’s an expression. I mean there are a lot of things we haven’t talked about yet.”
This was almost as hard as reading. Understanding random phrases was still difficult. I could see no connection between covering up some ground and talking about his family.
I pointed at the table. “We were talking about the paper flowers.”
“Right, right. So, in the hospital, I told you my mother’s favorite flowers were daffodils.
We painted pictures of them in art therapy, and it kind of became our thing.
I brought you a potted daffodil at the duplex where you lived.
You started making paper versions for your flower wall. These used to hang in your bedroom.”
“But how did they keep my secrets?”
“You were very clever.” He picked up the daffodil and turned it over. “See, you would write very small on the backside so it looked like you were making a design on the leaves. But there are words.”
I took the daffodil from him and peered at the letters. It read, “Tonight you will tell Tucker you love him.”
I set it down abruptly. “I get it.” I picked up the pink tulip. On the back of the leaves it said, “Mom stole your journal.”
The book said that, too. “Where is Mom now?” I asked everyone this. I wanted to compare Tucker’s answer to Dad’s and Harry’s.
“She still lives out near Wimberley in the house she moved you to back when you were about to turn eighteen. She was trying to get you away from me. She knew if your memory reset, you would forget who I was and not try to leave.”
Everyone had mentioned Wimberley, but no one had told me this much. “Did it work?”
“It did.” He flipped through the book to pages of densely typed words I hadn’t read yet.
“The whole story is here. She told you that you were fifteen years old, not eighteen, and kept you away from anyone who might tell you the truth. But then you turned sixteen, according to her. You wanted to get a job since you were old enough, but she wouldn’t let you, and you got suspicious and found your birth certificate. ”
I gripped the edge of the sofa cushion. Mom was indeed bad. “What did I do then?”
“You ran away and got to a librarian who helped you go to a shelter here in Austin.”
“I’ve read notes about the shelter. Men are bad, everyone said.”
He nodded. “Yes, there are terrible situations that lead women to go to shelters.”
“I saw your sticky note.” Tucker had placed one on the page about the shelter. It said, “Some men are bad. Others are good.”
“Do you want to read more of the paper flowers?” he asked. “I think you wrote most of them in your usual handwriting at one point.” He pointed at the book. “Can I look?”
“Okay.”
He flipped through it until he found a page that said, “Paper flowers” at the top. Sure enough, one of the flowers was glued in, with an arrow pointing to the letters on the back. It explained the markings.
I guessed I should have gone back to reading it. But it was so much easier just to ask Tucker.
“Will Mom come for me again?”
“Your dad got a restraining order against her back then. I’m not sure whether it has expired. He may have called it off. You tried to have a relationship with her for a while.”
“What’s a restraining order?”
“It’s something you can have the police use to keep people away from you. It’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to prove they are a danger. Your dad had to hire a lawyer in your case to get it through. But it’s one way of protecting yourself.”
Protecting yourself. Flo at the diner had told me I should always do that. “What are the other ways?”
He sat back against the cushions. “You can learn self-defense. There are classes where you learn how to fight back, to hit and kick people, or to escape if someone grabs you.”
I shifted forward, my mind a whirl, picturing myself kicking and hitting someone to get away. “Where can I do that?”
“I can look up a class for you and sign you up. There’s bound to be some close enough to walk, or…” He trailed off.
My body tensed. Or what? I waited for him to keep going.
“I could drive you to a class. I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
He took a quick, short breath, as if he were surprised by my answer. “I’ll find one. I guess I need to know your work schedule at the diner.”
“Big Harry will let me work whenever I want.” He’d said so.
“Okay. Good.”
I flipped through more of the pages. “It’s still hard to read. I get headaches.”
“Yes, that happened before, too.”
I kept turning pages. It was maddening, Tucker knowing more about me than I did. “Listening is easier.”
“That’s why we made the videos.”
Was he right about everything?
“Okay, fine. Let’s watch some videos. Then I guess we can start the date.”
He grinned at that. “Let me go get the laptop.”