Chapter 10: Everything That Came After
Six months later, on a Saturday in October, Ava sat at our kitchen table and ate scrambled eggs with the cheese mixed in.
She had been coming every other weekend since June.
The first visit had been careful and slightly formal, everyone on their best behavior, Ava watching Dave with the evaluating look of a child who had been told something good and was waiting to see if it was true.
By the third visit she had claimed the left side of the sofa as hers and left a drawing on the refrigerator without asking permission.
The drawing was still there.
Dave was at the stove making toast.
Ava was telling him at length about a disagreement she'd had with a boy in her class who believed that the moon was made of rock, which she considered a boring theory.
"What do you think it's made of?" Dave asked.
"Something better," Ava said firmly.
"Like what?"
She considered.
"Compressed cloud.
With a hard bit in the middle."
"That's a much better theory."
"I know."
I poured juice and set it in front of her.
She said thank you without looking up from her toast, which meant she was comfortable, which meant everything.
Lauren was doing well.
The treatment had gone smoothly.
She had lost some weight and some hair and had gained, by her own account, a very strong opinion about which anti-nausea medications worked and which ones didn't.
She was back at work part-time.
She had called me twice during the worst weeks — not Dave, me — and I had talked her through both nights, and neither of us had mentioned that it was strange, because it wasn't strange anymore.
Cynthia had called Lauren in September.
I didn't know exactly what was said.
Lauren told me it had been awkward and short and that Cynthia had asked if she could send Ava something for her birthday.
Lauren had said yes.
A card had arrived with a gift card inside and a note that was, by Lauren's description, stiff but genuine.
Ava had used the gift card to buy a book about weather systems and had been delighted.
It wasn't warmth.
But it was a door left open.
Dave and I were still in counseling.
Dr.
Osei had the measured patience of someone who had seen worse and believed in better, and she had a way of asking questions that made it impossible to answer them dishonestly.
We had said things to each other in that room that we had never said anywhere else.
Some of them had been hard to hear.
All of them had been necessary.
We were not the same as before.
I had stopped expecting us to be.
What we were now was something I didn't have a clean word for — more careful, more deliberate, more honest than we had been in years.
The ease was different.
But there was something underneath it that felt more solid than ease.
Something that had been tested and had not, quite, broken.
After breakfast, Ava asked if we could go to the park.
Dave looked at me.
"Get your coat," I said.
She ran for the hallway.
Dave stood at the sink rinsing plates.
I came to stand beside him.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
Not for anything specific.
For all of it.
I picked up a dish towel.
"Don't thank me," I said.
"Just keep showing up."
He nodded.
Outside, Ava was already at the front door in her coat and her orange Easter basket — she still brought it, every visit, a portable piece of the day everything changed — calling back to us that we were being very slow.
Dave dried his hands.
I hung up the towel.
We went.
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Some people come into your life not to complete it, but to make you honest about what was missing.
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