No more laughter.
“Mama didn’t abandon us,” Ava said. Except she had, and Ava knew it. All three sisters knew it.
“Did you make Emily disappear?” Natasha persisted.
Ava stared at her lap.
“And Ava, even if you did cause any of this, which you didn’t, what if there is no way to make things better?”
“I’m not a baby,” Ava said under her breath. She could sense her sisters glancing at each other over her head.
“Sorry, what?” Natasha said.
“I’m not cute or adorable or someone who just . . . floats through life.”
“You’re muttering. I can’t understand you.”
“Too bad, so sad,” Ava said, barely moving her lips.
Natasha placed her hand on Ava’s shoulder. Ava’s chest rose and fell.
“Ava, it’s going to be okay,” Natasha said.
“How can you say that when you just said there’s no way to fix things?” Ava cried. “My Wishing Day is in two days.” She gripped her journal and shook it. “That’s why I brought this, so we could come up with ideas, and I could write them down. Ideas for what to wish for!”
“Listen to me,” Natasha said firmly. “Whatever you wish for will be the right thing.”
“You just said it won’t be! You said I can’t make anything better, so why should I even try?”
Natasha sighed heavily. “Just . . . do what feels right at the time. Trust yourself. I do.”
“Natasha!” Ava wailed.
Natasha gave Ava a hug. She even kissed the top of her head. Then she pushed herself up, ducked through the willow’s branches, and was gone.
Darya rose next, finger-combing her hair and announcing that she had plans with her friend Tally.
“Wait, what?” Ava said. “You can’t leave, too!”
“Natasha’s right,” Darya said. “It’s not your job to take on all the world’s problems.”
“It is my job to take on our family’s problems. Our whole family’s problems.” Ava lowered her voice, even though Natasha was out of hearing range. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Darya hovered on one foot, then the other.
“The picture Tally drew,” Ava said. “I kept waiting for you to tell Natasha. When you didn’t, I figured . . . I don’t know. That for whatever reason, you weren’t ready to.”
“Excellent deduction,” Darya said.
“But Tally’s your best friend, just like Emily was Mama’s best friend!”
“Don’t bring Tally into this,” Darya warned.
“Tally already is in this! And Tally’s mother—”
“Has been in and out of mental hospitals Tally’s whole life,” Darya interrupted. “She’s not ‘eccentric’ like Great-Grandma Elnora. She’s got schizophrenia. She can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.”
“‘She can’t tell what’s real and what’s not,’” Ava repeated. She half laughed. “Do you even hear yourself? Can any of us tell what’s real and what’s not?”
Darya glanced past Ava at some indeterminate location.
“Oh, come on,” Ava said. “It’s got to be the hugest coincidence in the world that Tally was placed here, in Willow Hill, with her new foster parents. Unless, that is, it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Drop it, Ava.”
“But you found the picture. You figured out who it was a picture of.”
“And I decided to leave it alone!” snapped Darya. “You’re clinging to the past just as much as Mama, Ava. But guess what? Tally wants to move forward—and so do I.”
Darya spun on her heel and pushed through the willow’s fronds, leaving Ava alone and bewildered. She wanted to move forward, too. She did. Just, she wanted that for everybody, with no one left behind.
Beneath the willow tree, Ava uncapped her pen. She opened her journal and considered the blank page before her. A honeybee buzzed in a meandering path in front of her, and Ava considered it instead.
Hi, little bee, she thought. What about you? Do you have any brilliant ideas to pass along?
The bee stopped midflight, rotating to face her and hovering in a single spot, looking for all the world as if it was returning her gaze. Just before Ava was convinced that something truly odd was going on—something magical, even—the bee zipped off.
Ava couldn’t help but laugh, and laughing was good. It created room between her ribs.
A moment later, the bee hummed past her again, coming from the opposite direction. Well, hello again, little bee, Ava said silently. Did you forget something?
She smiled at the thought of the honeybee returning to its hive for a bee-sized cell phone or wallet. Or . . . what? A good luck charm for collecting pollen? A kiss from its honeybee honeybun? Maybe even honeybees made mistakes the first time around.
She caught her breath, a preposterous idea buzzing into her mind. She examined it from multiple angles, then gripped her pen and bent over her notebook, scribbling down her thoughts before she could convince herself not to.
The facts:
* When Mama was thirteen, she made a bad wish. She made her best friend disappear.
* Her best friend’s name was Emily.
* Emily was also Papa’s little sister.
* Mama went mad with guilt, and eventually, she decided she couldn’t take it anymore. So she left.
* Now she’s back, but I think she feels so guilty about everything that she’s stuck in the past. I think she does want to move forward, but can’t. I don’t think she’ll be able to until somebody rights the long-ago wrong that led to this mess.
* In other words, somebody has to do a do-over—and that somebody is me. That someone can only be me.
Ava drew her notebook to her chest and hugged it close. What needed to be done was impossible, but Ava didn’t let herself dwell on that.
Impossible situations called for impossible solutions.
That’s what wishes were for.
I wish I could find a way to heal.
—NATHANIEL BLOK, AGE THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWO
Ava
“Angela, won’t you have some more corn bread?” Aunt Vera asked, and Ava quietly ripped her napkin into shreds beneath the table.
“Absolutely,” Angela said, accepting the bread bowl. “It’s delicious.”
It was delicious, but tonight the corn bread stuck in Ava’s throat. Family dinners were supposed to be for family. When Ava had returned home that evening, however, she’d seen Angela’s cheerful blue pickup truck parked behind Papa’s
