He and Ashton had a good laugh about it. They reminisced about living in a place where it never rained, where, with a million others, they used to sit in traffic on the Freeway or the 405 and curse their life, thinking they had it so tough, the sun always shining, them having to drive everywhere to drink with friends, tell jokes to their girls, buy books at Book Soup.
And now Julian walked with his head down and no umbrella as he battled the rain, waiting fifteen minutes for the train, the Circle Line so slow. He had a different life now, a life in which every day by Notting Hill Gate, an eight-year-old girl offered to sell him a red rose and said, for your sweetheart, sir? To make her happy?
And every day Julian bought one.
His floor was strewn with three hundred dead roses.
* * *
Ava would wave him on. “Go,” she’d say. “Go out for a walk. Go look for your golden awning. I have much to do. I’m seeding a vegetable garden in the back so next summer you can have your own tomatoes.”
“Next summer?” They stared at each other, saying nothing. What was there to say? “I don’t like tomatoes.”
“Who asked you.”
In the evenings, she stayed up with him. Late at night, Julian would sometimes become talkative, tell Ava things she could bear to hear. Mostly he told her stories of mothers and daughters. He told her about Aurora and Lady Mary in Clerkenwell, about Agatha and Miri in the rookery, about Aubrey and Mirabelle in Kent. He didn’t tell her about Mallory in the brothel. The mother Anna was dead, the girl murdering men, burning in flames, blackening her soul. Nothing about that story could be told.
And he didn’t talk to her about Shae and Agnes because it wasn’t a story yet.
It wasn’t still life yet, like a bowl of fruit.
Ava wanted to know what each girl looked like, what she sounded like. She wanted to know if she danced, sang, if she told jokes. She asked Julian to reproduce her daughter’s best moments on the stage. She bought the plays and highlighted Mia’s spoken portions and asked Julian to recite them for her, but recite them standing up, just as her daughter would have.
Ava never asked about her death. “I don’t know how you can do it,” she whispered to him one night. “How you can do it over and over.”
“That’s not why I go,” Julian said. “I go to watch her live.”
He kept missing something, Ava said. That’s why he kept failing, he wasn’t seeing an important detail, wasn’t paying attention to some essential part of Mia’s existence.
“If only you could point me to what that might be,” Julian said.
“She was such a good girl,” Ava said. “She and her dad had the best time running our place on Coney Island, Sideshows by the Seashore. That child was a born carnival clown; she tap-danced, sang, did stand-up, a juggling act; she never left his side.” Ava smiled in remembrance. “She used to do this thing at the end of every show: after the curtain fell and she would thank people for coming, she’d fling out her arms, take the deepest bow, and say Make it real, make it last, make it beautiful.” Ava wiped her face. “We had the happiest life, the three of us,” she said. “Until Jack had a heart attack and died. But for twelve years before that, we were in paradise.”
Death did that, thought Julian. It ruined fucking everything.
* * *
Ava spent hours Skyping on the computer with her friends back in Brooklyn. It allowed her to be close to Julian if he needed something, yet still be plugged into her other life. Julian usually put on his headphones so he wouldn’t hear the details of her private conversations, but one afternoon when he didn’t, he heard something garbled in her speech that didn’t sound right. He put down his book and walked out into the hall. Disjointed words were spilling out of Ava’s mouth. The cadence was normal, but nothing in their content made sense. He heard someone’s voice crying, help her, help her! Ava, what’s wrong with you?
Julian ran inside the bedroom. Ava was sitting with her back to him, tilted to one side. She had stopped speaking almost completely except for one word she kept repeating over and over. “Once,” she kept saying. “Once once once once once once once.”