Shotgun

by Julie Johnson

Ava frantically texts her mom as they climb higher up the mountain and further from cell phone service.

I can’t believe you’re making me do this

He’s your father

He was your husband

That’s not fair

What’s not fair? That his betrayal of you matters but not his betrayal of us?

Service is becoming too spotty for this conversation to continue. No matter. Another few texts will not result in resolution. This has been a circular conversation between Ava and her mother since Ava’s father, Mike, was released from prison. Neither of them internalizes the other side of the exchange, both wearing the blinders of their own pain.

When their father’s imprisonment began, Ava was ten. Her brother, Charlie, was seven. Seventy months seemed an interminable length of time to their young minds. They immersed themselves in surviving the shame and stigma surrounding their circumstances. They didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to contemplate reconciliation, but their avoidance of this eventual future did not prevent its arrival.

Their mom, Tina, filed for divorce during the investigation that led to Mike’s incarceration. Charlie and Ava’s obligatory Christmas and Father’s Day prison visits were supervised by their paternal grandmother, who still defends her son’s innocence despite his admission of guilt. Each visit was followed by a fortnight of turmoil, but like waking from a nightmare, the trauma always faded in intensity with the passage of time.

For six years, their father’s absence and its aftermath were an immovable presence in their lives, an aching vacancy. Somehow his return has left them feeling more fractured rather than more whole. Like a shattered mirror, glued together, unable to offer a reflection without also betraying the scars.

Ava and Charlie’s visits with their father have been more frequent in the months since his release, but they have been quick visits, supervised by grandma. Her blathering about the injustice against him is as palatable as a sandpaper souffle, but they are willing to swallow it, because grandma’s incessant talking saves them from being alone with their father.

When Ava learned her father would be allowed to take her and Charlie for a weekend, without grandma, she pulled out all the stops to plead her way out of it. Halfway up the mountain, she knows she has failed. If she can’t have her way, she can at least have the last word. Dots flicker on her screen. Her mom is typing. Service dips out and nothing comes through. Good, she thinks. Let her mom worry about getting ghosted all weekend.

Ava throws her phone onto the car seat and rests her head on the cold glass of the window. Instead of fighting for the front seat, as siblings typically do, both she and Charlie are in the backseat. They feel safer in back, together, than up front with a stranger. Ava closes her eyes and nausea strangles her. Maybe brought on by being cut off from her mom. Maybe from looking at her phone while winding up a mountain road. Maybe the gravity of this trip is solidifying in her mind. Whatever the cause, she needs to vomit.

“I need to pull over.”

“Are you okay?” her father asks, navigating to the side of the road.

When the car comes to a stop, Ava jumps out and splatters glittering white snow with vomit. She vomits with such violence that her eyeglasses fly from her face. Her dad exits the car. Before he reaches Ava, his foot lands with a crunch on her glasses. He picks them up, mutters an expletive under his breath, and looks apologetically at Ava.

“I can patch them up for the weekend. We’ll get new ones as soon as we get back into town.”

Ava snatches the glasses from his hand.

“Whatever. I don’t recognize my life. It’s fine if I can’t see it either.”

Ava does not confess that the glasses do not house prescription lenses, only clear glass. She started wearing them to prevent people recognizing her entering and exiting the prison. No one she knew was ever once near the prison, but shame can make a person feel they are under constant surveillance. She also started wearing glasses to alienate her father. She could no longer recognize him. It seemed fair he should no longer recognize her. It only worked in her mind, but everyone allowed her this small comfort, the same way audiences suspend disbelief for Clark Kent and Superman.

“I’m sorry, Aves.”

“Ava,” she corrects.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

They get back on the road, and ride in silence until Charlie chimes in.

“Did you know parental incarceration impacts 1 in 14 children in the United States. It is more common than childhood asthma.”

Like Ava, Charlie has created hiding places from his pain. He finds comfort in studying crime and incarceration. Coping is widely varied and rarely logical. Some statistics are hopeful, others bleak. They all make him feel less alone. Ava is perpetually torn between letting him share and begging him to shut up. She squeezes Charlie’s hand and nods in a way she hopes will validate him while conveying that this is not the time or place. It works. They resume their silence.

When they arrive at their destination, fresh snow blankets acres of the heavily wooded mountainside that is home to their family cabin. On paper, the cabin belongs to Mike’s parents. During their marriage, Mike and Tina used it so often that it primarily became their place.

As they step through the door frame, a hint of nostalgia penetrates Ava and Charlie’s armor. A smell they could not have recalled ten minutes ago hits them with a familiarity that transports them in time. It floods their other senses. The house is recently cleaned, the only indication that anyone has been there in the past six years. It is otherwise preserved as they left it. Memories surround them like a hug and crush them like a vice.

They seek out their old rooms. Ava unpacks slowly, avoiding the reality of the weekend. When she hears Charlie hosting prison trivia with their father in the next room, she knows she needs to intervene.

“Did you know over half the people in prison have children?”

Mike squirms but does not dodge the question.

“I believe it, buddy. My friends and I talked about our kids all the time.”

Ava enters the room, curious about her dad’s prison friends. She does not cop to her curiosity.

“Charlie, wanna check out the game room? Maybe play air hockey?”

“I’ll play,” her dad offers. “You were getting good last time we played. I bet you could beat me.”

“Charlie?” Ava repeats, hoping her dad will feel not only uninvited, but invisible.

“Okay, why don’t I run out to get groceries while you two play,” Mike says.

“Whatever.”

“Any requests?”

They shake their heads. If their mom had been asking, Charlie and Ava would have bombarded her with requests, thick with the entitlement that comes when children feel so safe with a parent that they take them entirely for granted. They could ask their father for anything. His guilt would propel him to oblige but lack of familiarity restricts them from asking.

When Mike slips out the door, they breathe a sigh of relief. They can take their masks off. They head to the basement and play a few games of air hockey followed by a few games of pool.

“Dad’s been gone a long time. Do you think he’s okay?” Charlie asks.

“He’ll be back soon,” Ava answers with more confidence than she feels.

The shopping center on the mountain, nothing more than a small market, gas station, and pizza joint, is only a few miles away.

“Maybe he isn’t coming back because we weren’t talking to him?”

“Stop. He’s coming back. I don’t know why he didn’t go to the store before heading up the mountain. Dumbass.”

Ava tries to act annoyed and aloof, but she has joined Charlie in pacing and looking out the window. When Mike finally returns, they are filled with relief, then dread. Thank God he is home married to its unlikely partner Oh God, he’s home. They feel silly for thinking he would drive up the mountain, just to drive back down and leave them behind. The idea is absurd, but it had once seemed beyond imagination that he could commit a crime and destroy their lives. They have learned not to discount the impossible.

Mike hurries inside, grocery bags lining both arms, a pizza box in one hand.

“Sorry that took so long. It’s coming down out there. I had to put snow chains on the tires. I tried to call but you know how spotty service is up here.”

“Whatever. We were fine,” Ava answers.

They sit around the table, wordlessly eating pizza that has gone cold and soda that has grown warm in transit. After dinner, their dad asks.

“How about a movie night?”

“Sure,” Charlie answers.

“Okay,” Ava agrees.

Movie nights at the cabin used to be a highlight. They have an old VCR and a shelf full of movies their parents liked during their own childhoods. Movies that usually hadn’t aged well by the standards of social change. Movies that often contained nudity or swearing their parents had forgotten about. Movie nights once led to lots of laughter and cross generational banter.

Their dad starts a fire in the fireplace and makes popcorn. Minus mom, the scene looks and smells as it once had. Scents have no respect for the passage of time. They remain the same and torture their beneficiaries with reminders that everything has changed.

“Charlie, why don’t you choose?” Mike suggests.

Charlie sifts through the options and lands on Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie they once viewed as a quirky comedy about Robin Williams disguised as a nanny. His children do not recognize him in disguise, but it is the only way he can be near them, so he gets up every day and commits to his new identity just to be part of their lives. The parallels to their situation infuse the movie with meaning it never had before. Ava sits, flexing every muscle in her body against the discomfort, until she can no longer stand being in the room.

“I’m going to bed.”

She ruffles Charlie’s hair on her way out and nods in Mike’s direction without making eye contact. She feels guilty for leaving Charlie alone with their dad. She contemplates going back until she hears them laughing comfortably and decides he is fine. She doesn’t know Charlie is forcing laughter to convince his dad everything is okay. To convince himself. To convince Ava. She covers her head with her pillow and cries until sleep arrives.

When Ava wakes, she hears a fire crackling in the fireplace and smells bacon cooking. It summons her almost against her will. She splashes water on her face, hopes her puffy eyes will pass for fatigue, and heads to the kitchen. She almost turns around when she notices Charlie isn’t up yet.

“Good morning,” her dad says, briefly glancing from the pancakes he is flipping, long enough for her to note that puffy eyes seem to be contagious this morning.

“Hey.”

She walks to the pyramid of bacon her dad has plated, snags a piece, and asks, “What time are we going tubing?”

“Bad news. The roads are closed. I don’t think we’ll be able to get out today.”

Not trusting his assessment of the weather, Ava walks to the window for a second opinion. They are indeed snowed in. Ava has rehearsed for the horror of this weekend a million ways. She thought of every misfortune that could befall them, except for this one. Tubing was the only part of this trip she allowed herself to look forward to. Tubing would consume an entire day. An entire day of minimal conversation and maximum avoidance of reality.

“Great, now we are stuck here like priso...”

She stops herself short.

“It’s okay, Aves....sorry...Ava; you can say prisoners. This is a little better than prison. I will let you use the bathroom with the door closed.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I know. I just...I don’t know.”

The day limps off the starting block and crawls through the weighted hands of time for several hours. At one point, Ava starts counting seconds in her head to assure herself that time is passing at all.

Charlie and Mike are talking semi-regularly. They make lunch together while joking about their ineptitude in the kitchen. Ava, both jealous and annoyed at their chumminess, would rather accept a kiss from Judas than eat what they prepare. She settles for a bagel and Taki’s instead.

After lunch, Ava alternates between playing games on her phone and pretending to read, tuning in and out of their conversation, peppered with prison factoids.

“Did you know recidivism rates are high among white collar criminals? Many reoffend, because their sentences are lenient,” Charlie says.

“I will not reoffend. I promise.”

“If you had committed robbery your sentence would have been twice as long.”

“He did commit robbery,” Ava interjects.

“Robbery is a violent crime. Fraud and extortion are non-violent crimes,” Charlie says.

“They are cowardly crimes. At least violent criminals confront their victims face to face.”

No one speaks so Ava continues.

“You don’t have to be violent to massacre someone’s life? You are thirteen. You should be playing video games not researching recidivism rates. You shouldn’t even know the words recidivism rates.”

“Ava, can I say something, or do you just need to be heard right now?” her dad ventures.

“You can say something.”

“I made excuses for my crime, convinced myself it was victimless, because I couldn’t see the victims. Then my family became victims. I said I did it to give you a better life, but I did it because I could. I can’t go back and undo it, but I am trying to go forward and earn the right to be part of your life again.”

“What if we don’t want you to?”

“That will be the longest sentence in the darkest prison.”

“How many times did you rehearse that line?”

“Ava, stop,” Charlie pleads.

“It’s okay, Charlie. She’s allowed to be mad. I have thought of what I would say to you a million times. Clearly, I haven’t found the right script yet.”

“You’re not a good person.”

“I know.”

Because he concedes rather than defends, Ava feels cruel. She meant to inflict harm. Hitting her target is not as satisfying as she’d hoped.

“Do you want to play air hockey?” she asks.

“I would love to.”

The three of them spend hours playing air hockey. Ava gets close to beating her dad several times. He could try to win her affection by letting her win. She respects that he does not. The honest route is harder.

When they are ready for a change of pace, Mike pulls a cribbage board from his luggage and teaches them the game. They play until the skies have cleared, until the sun is painting a pink and orange sunset over the snow, until dusk fades from lavender to dark purple. Mike did not play cribbage before he went away. Now it is as natural to him as breathing, a reminder of where he’s been and how long he was gone.

Charlie and Mike make dinner. Charlie’s quips about prison have lightened from a downpour to a drizzle. Ava does not help cook, but she saddles up to the bar that separates the kitchen from the living room and tiptoes in and out of their conversation.

After dinner, Mike asks, “Anyone up for another movie night?”

“Sure, but I get to choose,” Ava answers.

She searches for something void of triggers. No divorce. No arrests. No family drama. She lands on Goonies. It feels like a safe choice, but nothing is safe. When something is heavy on a person’s mind, it becomes hyper visible in the world around them. By the closing scene, she is near tears when the Goonies’ silly treasure hunting adventure helps them save their home, against all odds.

After the movie, Ava and Charlie head to bed. The quiet hum of the TV from the living room, where Mike is still awake, brings Ava the warmth that comes to a child when they know someone is outside their door, standing watch against the night. The day has not been a movie montage where everything changes in the span of a song, but it has been okay. As she is drifting off, she hears her dad’s footsteps. Her door creaks open. She lifts her head but wishes she had feigned sleep.

“Hey, you left your throw blanket on the couch. I thought you might want it in case it gets cold.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

He walks to her bedside and lays the blanket gently over her. He rests his hand lightly on her shoulder almost too quickly to notice, before turning to leave.

“Goodnight, Ava.”

“Night.”

A lump forms in her throat and tears slide down her cheeks onto the pillow. Not the wracked sobs from the night before. Quieter tears that carry a million shades of heartbreak. She remembers the years when her father was her favorite person, but she doesn’t know how to stop hating him. Allowing him to make restitution feels like allowing the villain to play the hero.

When the morning breaks, it is time to head home. Ava started counting down to the end of this weekend before it began, so she is surprised to feel disappointment when she sees the roads are cleared. She assures herself this pinch of sadness is some odd variety of Stockholm Syndrome.

But she knows it is more than that.

After breakfast, while Mike and Charlie are packing the car, Ava hurries back to her room, takes the broken glasses from her backpack, and pushes them to the back of her nightstand drawer. It is time to try to see the world without them again. Sunlight is glinting off the snow as Ava closes the door to the cabin and makes her way to the car. Charlie is ahead of her.

She calls out, “Shotgun!”

She needs to sit up front. She can’t risk getting carsick again. That is what she tells herself. But she knows it is more than that.