Intaglio: Dragons All The Way Down (16 page)

Cole blinked,
taken by surprise.

“Why?”

“Well, the thing
is,” the officer continued, hands playing with the edges of the folder in front
of her.  “There are extenuating circumstances with Miss Brooks.” 

At her words,
Cole’s temper dropped, guilt replacing it.

“Our fight,” he
said quietly.

She shook her
head.

“No... not
that.”  She was watching him now, appraising.  There was a long pause in her
words.  “Did I do the right thing by calling you, Cole?” she asked, voice
brusque.

He blew a gust
of air from his lungs, leaning forward, dropping his elbows against his knees.

“I honestly
don’t know,” he said, frustration sharpening his words.  “Because I’ve got no
idea what’s even going on!”

She didn’t say
anything for a few seconds, fingers drumming on the desk as if deciding
something.

“I remembered
you from the last...
incident
,” she said.  “I had your character witness
report – that’s how I got your number.”  She eyed him suspiciously.  “It said
you were close friends.”

Cole sighed,
running a hand over his face.

“We are
friends.  More than friends.  I just have no idea what’s been going on with Ava
the last couple weeks.  She’s been away a lot... distant.”

Lieutenant
Alvarez shrugged.

“Makes sense.”

She watched him,
then reached into the folder and pulled out a sheet of paper.  She slid the
upside-down scanned document across the desk.  Cole could read the header
:
‘Ocean View Detox and Rehabilitation Centre.’
 He stared down at it.  Things
weren’t making sense.

“What is...?” 
Cole stopped, not sure what he wanted to ask.  “Who?”

Ava’s words were
suddenly in his mind: 
‘I’ve been dealing with a family emergency…’

The officer
nodded at the document, her face softening.

“Ava’s mother
came in for treatment of a meth addiction about a month ago.  I understand she
and Ava had been estranged for many years.  That’s in her file, too.  As part
of her treatment she’d requested, and been granted, contact with her daughter. 
They’d been talking for a few weeks when the incident happened.”

“Incident?”

“According to
Ocean View, Shay Brooks left the facility, unescorted, Wednesday the
fifteenth.  She OD’ed two days later, though her remains weren’t located until
the following Sunday.”

“That was the
first weekend Ava cancelled…” Cole muttered under his breath.

“Once everyone
knew what had happened, her daughter, Ava, was notified and an autopsy
performed.  Last week, Ocean View contacted Ava regarding Shay's remains. 
There was a small, private memorial this weekend,” she added
.  ‘The day she
left, and we fought,’
Cole’s mind noted in horror.  “One of the items we
found in Ava’s backpack was an urn of her mother’s ashes…”

: : : : : : : :
: :

Ava lay on the
hard mattress in the cell, staring at the cinder block wall a few inches away. 
The lines of mortar swirled and danced before her, leaving her brain feeling
unhinged, a boat without a keel.  She closed her eyes, forcing herself to
breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, quelling the wave of
nausea. 

The cell stank,
partly from when she’d been sick an hour ago.  The toilet in the corner had
come in pretty handy.  In fact, the police had taken her blood alcohol levels
twice, concerned that she might’ve had alcohol poisoning.  She didn’t.  It was
just a good old bender.

Ava coughed,
wincing as the noise stabbed into her brain.  Her stomach was empty now, though
she wished she had a glass or mug.  Cupping water in her fingers at the small
sink attached to the wall made it hard to get enough to counteract the alcohol,
especially as she could hardly stand.  Now that she was no longer vomiting, she
didn’t even have the strength to get up and try to drink again.  It was easier
to stay here and wait it out.  She wanted to curl up into a ball and go to
sleep forever.

‘
She’s dead,’
 
her mind chanted
.  ‘Gone...’
 

It still didn’t
feel real.

Ava felt wrung
out, tired beyond exhaustion, as if she was only a shell and nothing else.  The
reaction she was having was shock (she knew that in some part of her logical
mind,) but that didn’t change it. 

‘It’s finally
over,’
her mind assured her. 

That thought
left her close to tears, though she couldn’t tell at this point if they were
anger at her mother for fucking up rehab, or simple grief that the tentative peace
they’d forged in the last weeks had been torn away.  She wondered if there was
even a difference any more.  She took a breath, waiting through hot tears,
swallowed again and again, closing her eyes and remembering the message that
had changed everything.

“Ms.  Brooks,
this is Terrence Colby from the Ocean View Rehabilitation Centre.  We have a
patient here by the name of Shay Brook: your mother.  As part of her ongoing
treatment, she’s requested a meeting with you...” 

There’d been a
phone number from the facility and details on how to contact the counsellors. 
There’d been nothing from Shay at all.  No “I love you” or “I’m sorry” or
anything like that.  Just a statement of fact: her mother was in treatment for
meth addiction and she wanted to see her daughter.

The choice had
been Ava’s alone.

A sob heaved
from the interior of her chest, fighting its way out like a trapped animal. 
She gasped for air, feeling the ache settling once more. 
‘Over now.  All
over...’
the voice repeated soothingly.  Ava could distantly hear the
guards on shift changing, people talking in the hall.  It was late, near
midnight for sure.   Time lately had had no meaning. 

She hadn’t
called Ocean View back for days.  She’d spent a full week thinking about it, in
fact.  Distracted.  There had been at least fifty times she’d almost told Cole,
twice that many times she’d picked up the phone to dial her father, then
changed her mind.  She’d had her reasons, though the logic in them now eluded
her.  For Cole, it’d had to do with his own progress with his own father; he’d
been trying so hard to get past his own issues that she felt guilty burdening
him with her own.  That, and the shame.  Her mother had never featured in
regular conversations with Cole, and Ava liked it that way.

She hadn’t
wanted to share that dark part of herself with him.

The reasons for
not telling Oliver had been far more complicated.  He’d known the whole story. 
He’d been the one to come back from his tour to fight for (and win) sole
custody during the divorce, to change his whole life to be at home with her. 
Ava curled tighter, pain mixing with homesickness. 
‘Should’ve called Dad,’
her
mind hissed.
‘He would have understood.’
  But that was the thing.  She
didn’t know for certain that he would, because even Ava had difficulty
explaining why she’d wanted to see her mother again.  She just knew that she
had. 

She’d driven the
hour up the coast to meet with her mother for the first time in over a decade
in early March.  The meeting had…
changed things.

Ava rolled onto
her back, throwing her arm over her eyes as she did
.  ‘Why the hell do they
leave the fucking lights on all the time?’
her mind snapped irritably.  Her
head would hurt less in the dark, and that’s where she wanted to be, to have a
few minutes of peace now that the turbulent push-pull of fear and need, guilt
and love, was over.  She’d been icy cold walking the trails of the
river-bottom, numbed at her mother’s unexpected death. 
Inexplicably
relieved
. She winced at that thought.

Ava had gone to
the train yards for one last night of painting, her mother’s ashes in the
backpack with the spray cans.  It had seemed like a fitting memorial, since
Shay had been the source of so many of Ava's early, angry pieces, but she
hadn’t gotten far. 

A jogger had
seen her stumbling along the road to the river bottom (and then up to the train
yards beyond).  She’d apparently looked distraught enough that he’d called the
police, and two officers had met Ava along the trail and brought her in for
questioning.  She’d known they couldn’t charge her with anything except public
drunkenness, but she was angry that they’d stopped her.  They’d offered Ava her
one phone call, but she’d declined.  She intended to sleep this off first, then
call Chim tomorrow; she refused to think of Cole.  It was too painful to
consider him.

It still was.

Ava heard the
metal door opening at the end of the line of cells.  It scraped inside of her
skull like rocks along the bottom of a hull, her eyes squeezing shut in pain. 
In a flash, Ava was back in the detox centre, looking in the doorway of her
meeting room...

She sat in a
chair next to Terry, an open book in her lap.  Shay’s body, always lean, was
skeletal from years of hard living.  Her arms had withered down, like the
cordwood you find on the beach.  It was the drugs, Ava knew, eating her body
from the inside out.  The difference between her own mother and Nina Thomas was
thrown into shocking contrast as she stared at her.  Ava knew – the way her
father sometimes did – that, clean of drugs or not, her mother didn’t have long
to live.

She hadn’t
realized how close the vision was to coming true.

Her mother
glanced up, placing the novel she’d been reading into the large pile of books
on the side table, sitting taller.  While her body had whittled away to
nothing, her face was much the same.  It was younger than Ava expected, now
that the flesh had been worn away. Her eyes seemed preternaturally large.  She
had the same fair blonde colouring as Ava, though her eyes were brown.  Her
cheekbones were high and wide.  She might even have been pretty in her day. 
Her stature was probably no more than Ava’s height, her body almost childlike
as she sat in the chair, an oversized hoodie and worn blue jeans swallowing her
small frame. 

The sight of her
mother shocked her.  In her memory, Shay had always been so much larger.

Ava waited at
the door, hesitant to step into the room.  Terry was the first to move.

“Ms. Brooks,” he
said gently, “I’m Mr. Colby – please call me Terry.  I’m so glad that you made
it.”  He stepped forward, shaking her hand. “Come in, come in.”

Ava waited,
unwilling to step into the room, to put herself near her.  Her whole body was
pulsing with the primal need to run.

 “I didn’t think
you’d come,” her mother said.  As much as everything else had changed, Shay’s
voice was exactly the same.

“Neither did
I...”

Cole followed
the guard and Lieutenant Alvarez to the holding cell.  All was quiet except for
the sound of someone coughing wetly.  As they made it to the end of the row,
Cole's body flooded with déjà vu.  This was so much like the last time he’d
picked Ava up from the police station... except that she hadn’t called him tonight.

She lay in the
bunk with one arm flung over her face, body perfectly still.  He knew as soon
as he saw her that she wasn’t sleeping; there was a tautness to her posture
that made him long to step inside the cell and touch her.  The guard moved forward,
putting the keys into the lock, and Ava dropped her arm at the sound, squinting
to see who was there.

Her face flared
with colour as she saw Cole.  Without conscious intent, he smiled, impossibly
happy she was okay.  Since Lieutenant Alvarez had told him about Ava’s mother,
he’d had time to come to terms with the fact that he’d been wrong to accuse
her.  Chim had been right; Ava wouldn’t do that... and though he was frustrated
that she hadn’t told him about her mother, he was appalled that he’d assumed
the worst about Ava without asking first.  He needed to rebuild some bridges
here.  (He and Marta had talked about this skill at length.) 

Cole intended to
start tonight.

“Thought you
might need to be busted out of here,” he said, stepping up to the bars.  “You
know I’m your guy for that.”

He couldn’t keep
the grin off his face, and Ava glanced at him nervously, walking to the cell
door.  He could tell she was tense and wary as she wrapped her arms around
herself.  Her gaze flicked to Lieutenant Alvarez.

“I’ll need you
to fill in some paperwork, Ava,” the officer explained, “but you’re free to
go.  We’ve dropped the charge, given a very...” she smirked, looking at Cole,
“...glowing character witness report you had on file, and based on your mother’s
recent death.  I talked to Mr. Colby from Ocean View, too.  He explained what
happened last week.”  Her voice grew softer.  “I’m sorry to hear about your
loss.”

“Thank you,” Ava
answered, her eyes on the lieutenant first, then Cole.  With a screech, the
door finally swung open and she stepped out.

Cole pulled her
into a tight hug the moment she was out with them.  Her body was motionless as
he pressed his face to her hair.  She smelled of beer and smoke and day-old
sweat, but Cole didn’t care.  His hands rubbed up and down her back as he
breathed her in.  He could feel her hands hovering lightly on his back, like
the wings of a bird, uncertain if it should settle down to stay.