Chapter Twenty #4
Ava blinked. She had begun to recognize the woman beside her. She was a friend or an enemy, or both; she was a person who had hurt her, but she was here for her now. “You’re Lauren,” Ava said.
“Like it or not.” Lauren nodded. “It’s me.”
The window was so covered with ivy no one had bothered to lock it or nail it shut.
There would later be a hearing and the custodial staff would be blamed, and after that the windows would be checked more carefully.
But for now, Lauren was able to open this window; she sliced through the meshing with her jackknife before beginning to hack at the vines.
“You first,” Lauren told Ava. “If you please.”
“I’ll fall. I know I will. They took something away. I have no power.”
“We’re only two stories up. We don’t have to fly, we can jump.” Lauren tugged Ava closer to the window. “You’ll be fine,” she assured her. “Just look where you’re going.”
It was true that Ava could see more clearly now.
The tranquilizer was wearing off, and she realized that she was in a hospital and had been in a medicated trance.
She’d been dreaming about apple trees; they couldn’t take that away from her.
She used to fly off the roof of the house in Genesis, in the spring when the landscape was a shimmering green.
Now everything outside was yellow and gold.
She slipped out the window and held on to the vines.
Her heart was beating so fast she imagined that it wouldn’t be possible to keep it inside her chest much longer.
It would burst if she didn’t do something.
If she didn’t make the leap, her heart would fly away without her, so she simply let go.
As it happened, there was an apple tree outside the window.
The spirit of her father had disappeared into the falling dark, departing the way ghosts often do when it’s not necessary to see them anymore.
Ava closed her eyes, forcing herself back into a waking sleep so she might see him again, but she couldn’t.
She was awake and he was gone. The cellist who was in a car on an icy road, that’s who he’d been once upon a time.
The cello was in the backseat, along with a baby.
There were no car seats, so the baby was in a laundry basket, covered with a blanket decorated with sheep.
And then it happened. The unexpected. The thing that had changed her life.
She saw it all now that her mind had cleared.
How her parents had struggled to grab her, how the river water had rushed in, how her mother had floated, even though she’d done her best to go under to save her husband.
Witches always rise, and mortal men can drown easily, falling deeper and deeper into the muddy tide, and despite his wife’s struggle to go after him, she rose to the surface every time she tried to dive after him, her child in her arms.
The rescuers found him too late, and the woman who’d saved Ava wept on the bank of the Charles River.
Ava remembered all of it now. She could already talk and was so advanced she could read a few letters but she forgot all of that, and afterward she was mute for a year and read only when no one else was around.
Now she remembered the cold water, the cold air, the cold heart inside her beating once more.
They had to take her mother away in the ambulance by force because she wouldn’t leave her husband’s waterlogged body alone on the grass.
She tried to fight them off, but they took her anyway, and when she ran off from the hospital, likely fearing an examination that would show what her bloodline was, the grandparents were called to come for Ava.
She was in the police station when they arrived.
She asked for her daddy and her mama, and when she was told they were gone, she stopped talking.
She didn’t say another word. They brought her warm, dry clothes.
They brushed her hair. They told her a story about a girl being rescued from an underground world where every day lasted for seven years and all the women were witches.
She would be fine, they told her, but she knew it was a lie.
Not long after, at the courthouse on Third Street in Cambridge, Christopher Abbot’s parents were granted custody.
By the time her mother recovered from the loss of her husband, the judge thought a woman who let someone else care for her child wasn’t worthy of claiming her.
She became someone searching for the little girl she wasn’t fit to raise, who would be safer in the woods of Maine.
She had been convinced of that, but she couldn’t stop looking for her child.
Sometimes Ava’s mother would take the bus to Maine and walk through the orchards.
Late at night she would stand outside the window that was double-locked and rest her hand on the windowpane, and the ice would melt and her daughter would hear something that sounded like brambles rapping against the glass.
She didn’t fly to the orchard, she took the bus, then walked from town, so she looked like any ordinary woman in mourning.
But she wasn’t ordinary in the least, and she was still someone’s mother.
The girl on the other side of the window was Ava Bridewell Abbot, the love of her life, and she left black apples in the hope that her little girl wouldn’t forget who she was.
Ava remembered it all now as she stood on the window ledge of the hospital. She stumbled and might have fallen if Lauren hadn’t grabbed her hand.
“You’ll be safe,” Lauren vowed.