Authors: Jason Mott

The Wonder of All Things (26 page)

BOOK: The Wonder of All Things

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“We’re going to get you help, Ava,” Wash said. His voice was low and far away, like the calling of a bird in the deep of the night. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his in reply. She could not tell how long he had been speaking to her. “You did it,” he said, his voice heavy with sadness. “You healed the baby.”

“Good,” Ava said, slowly waking. Before her eyes she still saw only darkness, but at least the pain was gone. Replacing it there was simply a numbness, a type of drifting off that her body seemed to be doing, getting farther and farther away from the girl. She wished she could have seen Wash’s face.

“Don’t go drifting off,” Wash said, and Ava could hear the tears in his voice just as clearly as if she had been able to see them on his face.

Somewhere far away Macon was yelling, calling for help. Screaming for people to rush from whatever they were doing. But then the sound of his voice drifted away into the darkness, the way her body was doing. She could not feel her feet or her legs. And her arms were little more than imaginings—like constructs of dust and air.

But she could not let go of Wash’s voice.

“Talk to me, Wash,” Ava said.

“Talk about what?” he replied.

“Read to me,” she said. She could feel a weight on her chest, rising up and down slowly. She could count by the rhythm of it. Up, down...up, down... The weight continued. But it was slowing, ever so slightly, as time marched forward. “Where’s your copy of
Moby Dick?
”

She heard Wash laugh. Or perhaps it was a sob hidden within a laugh.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “The truth is I hate that book. I always have.” His voice was confessional and apologetic—as if he had held the words within himself for too long. “Honestly, I don’t understand it. It’s a mess. But I always wanted you to think I was smart and it’s a book that smart people like.”

Ava laughed, and she hoped that it did not sound mocking. It was not meant to. Again, she wished that she could see Wash’s face. “I know,” she said.

“Then why didn’t you say anything?” He laughed now, and it was genuine. “Why’d you suffer through it?”

“Because I can’t think of a single time when I didn’t want to hear the sound of your voice,” Ava replied. The up-and-down sensation she felt in her chest was still fading. She understood now that the feeling was that of her lungs, slowing. “Just talk to me, Wash,” Ava said. “Sing something to me. I just want to hear your voice a little more.”

“All the songs I know are about people dying,” Wash said. He spoke slowly, as if each word were an anvil falling upon his heart. Then, after a moment, Ava heard the boy clear his throat. The song he sang then was one that she had never heard before. It was a ballad, soft and somber. It spoke of a man and a woman, of love, of loss, of the moment between the loving and the losing, of the starlight that shined down upon her body as she lay by a slow-moving river and he held her and wished that things could be different than they had been.

He sang beautifully. His voice was rich and deep. It did not falter the way it always had. He did not stagger, he did not pause. She could see the story of his song. She could see the words themselves in the darkness of her mind. They shined like a sea of fireflies.

The song broke off halfway through. She could hear him crying. “Don’t cry, Wash,” Ava said.

“I’m not crying,” he sobbed. She heard his sniffle. “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

“You are, too,” Ava replied softly.

The boy paused. He put together the pieces of their time together that night, and the terrible truth of it washed over him. Then, after a moment, he said, “It was up on the mountain, wasn’t it? You did something when you kissed me.” His voice found its footing. “That’s when you started getting sick. You healed me when you kissed me, didn’t you? And that’s why you got sick, isn’t it?” He swallowed. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, sorrow clouding his words.

“How does the song end?” Ava asked.

“What?”

“Your song,” she said slowly. “How does it end?”

“It ends the way all those songs end,” Wash said after a moment.

To Ava, his voice became heavy and old, as though all of the years of his future life had come to settle inside of him all at once. As if he would never again be a child from this point forward.

“But it doesn’t have to end that way,” Wash said. Then, without pausing, he cleared the sadness from his throat and, after a moment, resumed the song that he had been singing for Ava. There was still death and sorrow in the tale, but it began to turn. It became a song of love, a ballad of renewal, a story that, at the end of which, just when the two lovers were farthest apart, they found each other, and lived.

They both lived.

Then the faraway feeling in Ava’s legs and arms, the numbness, disappeared. The darkness created by her blindness became deeper and she felt as if she were moving through it at an impossible speed, flying, free and liberated. There was no fear in this moment, in this letting go that was happening, because behind it all—soft and warm and almost calling to her—was the sound of Wash’s voice. It was everything: that sound, that cadence, that piece of the boy that she would never let go of, not even in death. And his voice pulled her toward it. It became a beacon, a mixture of light and sound at the end of a tunnel walled in by darkness. She raced toward it, toward the light, toward the voice of the boy she loved.

It was October, the time of the Fall Festival. Stone Temple’s final celebration before the snow and the hard, cold nights—that long, lethargic continuity of winter—would come and settle upon the town and its inhabitants. Each year the townspeople assembled at the sweeping, open field that sat in the bowl of the mountains. They set up bleachers and sheltered them around the old grain silo that was no longer used and vendors came and there was popcorn and cotton candy and funnel cakes and pies and exotic decorations, the likes of which the children of small towns are seldom to find in their portion of this world.

Each year everyone in the town attended, and when Ava was six years old her mother and father bundled her up for the cold wind that would come sweeping down off the northern mountains once the sun set and the lights of the festival began to glow and they took her to the festival, hoping that she would finally be old enough that the memory of it would stay with her.

She spent most of the evening in a dream of amazement. The sights and sounds and the smell of sweet, candied fruit that her parents rarely allowed her was intoxicating. She rode the Ferris wheel for the first time just before sunset and craned her neck to look up into the sky as a man in a small airplane performed stunts in the fading light. He rose and fell through the sky as it slid from blue to gold to purple and the blackness of night encroached. And then the announcer in the grain silo made a remark about the pending darkness. The man in the airplane landed in the far end of the field and the crowd cheered. Ava asked her father how it was that planes were able to fly and he smiled at her and said, simply, “All things are possible in this world.”

It was after the Ferris wheel—when the night was fully stretched across the earth—that Ava met the boy. She was standing in line for cotton candy with her parents when she saw him in front of her looking back at her with an expression of great curiosity. He was small for his age and very pale, with brown hair and a sharp nose and he sucked his thumb.

Around the two of them there was the buzz of people talking and vendors shouting for patrons to test their luck and calls for people to buy tickets to the haunted house at the far end of the festival and on and on. It was an ocean of sound that could become so loud at times it made Ava’s ears hurt. But in spite of all this, she heard very clearly when the boy in front of her took his thumb out of his mouth and waved at her and said in a polite voice, “Hi. I’m Wash.”

“I’m Ava,” she said.

And then he stepped forward and took her hand in that gentle way that children do and said, “Do you want to come over to my house and play?”

Ava nodded happily.

Ava’s parents and the boy’s parents looked down at the children and they laughed. And the laughter was light and full of joy and free of worry. “Instant friends,” Wash’s father said, and the adults laughed again.

The children stood and looked at each other and they could not help but smile at the exuberance of their parents. They shared the cotton candy they had both been waiting in line for and, for the rest of the night, they would not be parted from each other. They walked among the lights and glitter of the evening, talking and holding hands, and creating the future that they would share together.

Ava held Wash’s hand for as long as she could that night. In her heart, she made the childish promise to never let him go.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from THE RETURNED by Jason Mott

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO
Michelle Brower and Erika Imranyi, the best agent and the best editor I could have ever asked for. And let me give a particularly huge verbal hug to Erika for everything she’s done for me as an editor. Too many good deeds to recount, but they are all remembered and appreciated.

A huge round of high fives to the usual rogue’s gallery of friends and family who continue to love, support and encourage me. There are too many to list here, but I pray that you all know how much I love you and how grateful I am to have you in my life.

Lastly, I would like to especially thank my readers and fans. I’ve discovered many wonderful, warm and loving people in the past year, and I cannot thank you enough for the kindness you have all shown me.

“
The Returned
transforms a brilliant premise into an extraordinary and beautifully realized novel. My spine is still shivering from the memory of this haunting story. Wow.”
—Douglas Preston, #1
New York Times
bestselling author

If you loved
The Wonder of All Things
by
New York Times
bestselling author Jason Mott, be sure to read his spellbinding emotional debut,
The Returned.
Available now wherever ebooks are sold.

“Exceptional.”
—Publishers Weekly,
starred review

“Breathtaking.”
—Kirkus Reviews,
starred review

“Eloquent.”
—Booklist,
starred review

“This is a masterly first novel for Mott.”
—Library Journal,
starred review

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