Chapter 41
Ava
I didn’t sleep well at my mother’s house. I kept hearing noises in the night. Rustling. Drawers opening and closing.
But when I tiptoed to the door and peered out, all was dark and quiet.
Mother was still fully dressed, putting papers in a box.
When she saw me, she said, “Can’t sleep?” She held out another mug of tea. It shook, the surface trembling.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Right as rain,” she said. “It’s almost dawn. Why don’t you go water your roses by the porch? They’ve missed you.”
“Okay.” I sipped the tea and followed her down the hall.
“The hose is at the corner of the house!” she called, heading toward the back door.
Why was she pushing me out the front?
The sun was just peeking over the hills. When I saw the flowers, a breath of happiness unfurled in my belly. I set my mug on the porch and hurried to the water hose to tend to them.
The parched earth soaked up the moisture. My hands reached for the dead blooms, expertly plucking them off. My body knew the flowers. My heart opened.
Mother came out on the porch again. “Let’s go for a drive.” Her hands shook.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, my darling. I thought you might like to see the places you used to love.”
“But it’s so early.”
Her expression shifted for only a moment, but my throat tightened. Something was wrong.
“We can pick up some breakfast. There’s a pastry shop you loved a lot.”
I took a step back. “I’d like to stay here a bit longer, if that’s okay.”
Her smile looked painted on. “We really must go.”
“Why?”
“It’s—” Her voice faltered. “It’s not safe for you.”
My heart thundered. “It’s the men?”
She nodded. “They’re coming for you. You can’t trust them.”
I hurried onto the porch. “Do they know I’m here?”
“I don’t know. We can’t risk it. My car is out back. I already packed some things. See? I will keep you safe.”
We crossed through the house and Mother led me out the back door to a rusting car. The back seat was loaded with suitcases and boxes. She had been packing in the night.
“Hop in, darling. Let’s make a trip of it.”
I glanced back at the house. Something flashed in my mind—the squish of soggy cool grass. But it must have been from some other time. Today the grass was dry and crunched when I walked. Fear crept through me. The back door was bad. Everything was bad.
I stumbled away from the car. “No. Something’s wrong.”
Mother grabbed my arm and led me to the passenger door. “Get in before it’s too late!”
I had no idea what to do. My heart beat so hard that it hurt. But what scared me? The men coming for me? This place?
I opened the door and sat on the cracked seat.
“There you go, darling. We’ll have a lovely time. We’ll get reacquainted and all will be well.”
She started the car, which chugged and groaned for a moment, but eventually fired up.
Mother let out a long sigh. “Everything will be as it was.”
She drove across the dry earth, bumping and lurching as we rounded the house.
But when we arrived at the driveway, a sleek, shiny car blocked our way. Mother slammed to a stop in the dirt.
“No!” she called. “No!”
I opened my door, panicked. “Should I run?”
She turned to me, tears on her face. “No, my darling. There is no need to run.”
But my fear blasted through me, hot and terrible. I lurched from my seat and stood by the open door, the wind blowing dust into my hair.
Tucker was in the other car. I swiveled to sprint away.
He jumped out. “Stop!”
I hesitated. What was happening here? Mother turned off the engine and sat with her back straight, tears dripping onto her pale green dress.
Another man emerged from the car. Something about him calmed my breathing. I knew him.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Marcus Roberts,” Mother said. “Your father.”
Tucker approached. “Please, Ava, stay right there. Your dad’s here.”
“Come with us, Ava,” the other man said. “Get in our car.”
I shook my head and backed away. I almost fell on the rough terrain, broken clods of dirt and spurts of weeds tangling my feet.
“Let’s go in the house,” Mother said, sighing. “It’s long been due for us to talk like civilized people.”
“Yeah right! You were about to steal her away again,” Tucker shouted.
My father held out his hand. “She’s right. We’ll talk. Let’s sort this out to avoid future problems. Ava’s medicine isn’t settled yet. We need to all be on the same page until her condition stabilizes.”
“Restraining orders are the page you like,” Mother said.
Restraining orders?
I retreated to the porch, away from the door, watching them all walk up. Tucker was stiff and angry. Father clenched his fists, but walked calmly. Mother seemed to slump in on herself, tugging her skirt when it snagged on a cactus.
When they were all on the porch, I moved to the farthest corner. Mother opened the door. “Come, Ava. We didn’t make it.”
What did that mean?
“You knew better,” Father said. “You would have been violating the order.”
Mother’s laugh echoed on the weathered slats as she entered the house. “How? By being happy to see her when she showed up at my door?”
They all followed her inside, but I hesitated. Should I run away from all of them? They seemed so angry, so upset. I wanted to get away from the heat of their misery.
Tucker waited by the door. “Please come in, Ava. We all want to help you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I didn’t believe him, but what could I do? I needed to know what was going on. I scooted past him into the room.
Father stood firm by the door to the kitchen, arms crossed.
“I’ve gathered enough evidence to bury you.
Prescriptions you stopped filling. And this place.
” He gestured at the house. “I sent more money than this. You should have been able to live better. And the way Ava described your shopping trips. What happened to the money? I bet a financial audit could figure it out.”
Mother sat on a chair and arranged her dusty green skirt. “You don’t know anything. Nothing at all.”
Tucker settled on the sofa. I shifted to the opposite wall, as far from all of them as I could get.
Mother pulled a worn shoebox from the shelf beside her. “These are all Ava’s prescription bottles.” She passed them to Father. “You’ll see everything is in order.”
“Then why wasn’t the last one refilled?” he asked.
“It quit working,” she said. “Unfortunately, the meds the doctor gave her next had terrible side effects. Nightmares. Dizzy spells.”
Father sorted through the box. “So, what? You decided not to give her anything else?”
Mother smoothed her skirt over her knees.
“I took a chance on an alternative route of medicine. It’s been working for quite a lot of epilepsy cases.
” She glanced over at me. “I did my research. Unfortunately, the regimen is illegal here in Texas, so I had to allocate most of the money I got each month to procuring it.”
Dad set down the box. “And what was that?”
Mother folded her hands together. “Marijuana.”
“You had her smoke joints?” Tucker asked.
She shook her head. “This was medical grade. There are several compassionate growers who refine it. But it’s expensive.
I had one who was providing it for free for a while, and Ava bloomed with it.
Just remarkable. Took to her studies so quickly.
” She turned to me. “You were so lovely and kind. We got along so well.”
“Sure, if she was high all the time,” Tucker said.
“I had every reason to believe I was seeing a miracle. Reports of it were even making the news. Kids with fifty seizures a day, cured. But the man giving it to me was arrested, and I had to find another source as fast as I could, before I ran out.” Her hands knotted together, thumbs flicking against each other.
“I was terribly afraid of getting caught. I could go to jail. I didn’t want Ava to know anyone, meet anyone, talk about it accidentally. She was so guileless, so sweet.”
“Is that why you didn’t want her to go anywhere?” Father asked.
She nodded. “She took it twice a day. No one could know.”
I glanced over at Father. He’d relaxed into a chair, his mouth a deep frown. “And you were going to hold her here—indefinitely? Lie to her about her age?”
Mother’s eyes cast to the floor. “I just wanted to buy myself some time. Her seizures weren’t that common. I needed to know if we were stopping them. If she thought she was sixteen, I had two years, plenty of time to know if they were truly gone.”
Tucker leaned forward on the sofa. “You kept her prisoner,” he said. “She had no friends. No contact with the outside world. You had me arrested.”
Mother nodded. “I did. She was so impressionable. She’d tried to run away before, with a group of no-good hooligans. Keeping her safe during those tumultuous years was hard enough without outside influences.” She met my eyes. “You seduced her.”
Tucker frowned. “It wasn’t like that.”
Dad set the shoebox on the floor. “We are working on drugs for Ava. She has plenty of people who love her. You, however, have a history of stealing her from everyone. That is no way for her to live.”
I was beginning to understand the situation. “She forced me into her car.”
Mother gasped. “I’m the one who has kept you safe all your life!”
I shook my head. “It sounds like prison.”
“Your condition is your prison!” she shot back. “I gave up my whole life to help you with it. Your father walked away!”
Father stood his ground. “Ava and I have worked through that.”
We had?
Tucker turned to me. “Ava, you read your old notebook from when you were lost and scared. If you let us show you all the things we planned to help you get your life back, I think you’ll understand.”
I flattened my back against the wall. This was too intense. To ease the pressure, I pushed my fingers against my temples.
“What will help you, Ava?” Father asked. “We will do this any way you like.”
I gulped in air, trying to think. My head felt empty, like the sky. I had so little to hold onto. I sorted through my memories, settling on that hug in the diner. “Can Big Harry be with me?” I asked.
“Of course,” Tucker said. “I’m glad you believed in him. He’s the best.”
Mother clasped her hands in her lap. “Do I get to see Ava at all?”
“That remains to be seen,” Marcus said. “Clearly you can’t be trusted.”
“Maybe if I had a role in her life, no one would need to worry about anything,” she said.
“You have to earn it,” Father shot back. “Just like I did.”
I moved to the window, the white heat of the morning bleaching the landscape. The purity of it was easier to look at than the expressions of all the people behind me. “Mother, do you have a phone?”
“Yes.”
“Give Father your number. You can ask him when you want to know something about me.”
“And that’s it, after all these years?” Her voice wobbled.
“That’s about the best I can do.” I headed for the door. “I’d like to go back to my apartment. I’d like Big Harry to come over, if he’s willing.” I turned to Tucker. “And I’ll watch the videos now.”
His shoulders dropped in relief. “You’ll go with us?”
I nodded. “I’ll go with you.”
When I was outside, the open sky in front of me, wind blowing dust across my skin, I felt calm again.
The others were taking their time inside the house, so I plucked one of the biggest blooms from the rose bushes.
Something told me this bright red flower wasn’t going to last much longer, and it would like to go with me.
Maybe I would come here every once in a while, with Tucker or Father or Big Harry, and care for the spindly bushes, help them grow strong. Something from this part of my life should be salvaged.