The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [130]
A man with a roaring leaf blower came along the path. A swirl of leaves eddied around her feet.
“Mama!” It was Ava, in her white T-shirt that said La La La I Can’t Hear You. Ava looked like an angel, standing there in the sunlight, with the drops of the fountain in an arc around her. Ava never called her Mama anymore, and Caroline cherished the sound of it. Ava darted over and sat down on the bench beside her mother.
“Mama, you know what?”
Caroline took Ava’s hand.
For a few seconds Ava allowed her hand to be held, but quickly, hating to be confined, she pulled her hand out of her mother’s grasp.
In spite of herself, Caroline felt hurt.
“I’ve been thinking. Elvis had Asperger’s. The way they described him as a child, always staying to himself, not having friends, not making eye contact. He was a total klutz. He dry washed his hands all the time, and walked sort of hunched over when he was a kid. And he was so good at music. Never had any lessons. A musical savant.”
“Well,” said Caroline. “That’s a possibility.”
“I just feel like …” Ava looked away. “I’m embarrassed to say.” For Ava to be embarrassed to say something was highly unusual.
“I’m listening.”
“Okay.” Ava took a deep breath and let it out. “I feel like Elvis can help me, with my life, with my, you know. My Asperger’s. Maybe he can heal me. Cure me.”
Was this the reason all these people came to the Meditation Gardens? Did they all feel the need to be healed? Like going to Lourdes? “You don’t need to be cured of anything,” Caroline told Ava. “You’re fine just the way you are.”
“Then why do you keep trying to fix me?” Ava said.
“I’m just trying to make things easier for you. Help you.”
“Huh,” Ava said. “Well stop helping me all the time.”
Caroline felt the familiar sting of being unappreciated, misunderstood, and hating herself for being so petty. Parents were never appreciated. She knew that. But knowing it and not caring about it were two different things. “All right, I’ll stop helping you. Elvis can help you.”
“Fine.” Ava got up and wandered down the path toward a split rail fence that overlooked a rolling pasture and in the distance a barn.
Although she knew better, Caroline stood up and followed her. Groups of visitors, wearing their headsets, were strolling along the paths between the house and Vernon Presley’s office, the racquetball court, and the Meditation Gardens.
She joined Ava at the fence, and both of them leaned against the rails and gazed at the horses grazing a few yards away—six horses, paired head to rump, swishing their tails in each other’s faces, the way horses do. One of them was a palomino.
“I wonder if Elvis rode any of those horses,” Ava said.
Caroline slipped her arm around Ava’s waist. “Elvis’s horses are long gone,” she said.
Ava scrunched up her beautiful, angelic face and began to weep.
These sorts of public meltdowns rarely happened anymore, but they did happen, and you could never predict or control them. You just endured them.
“Those poor horses never knew what happened, when he died,” Ava sobbed. “They waited and waited for him to come see them and feed them and ride them, but they never saw him again. They didn’t understand.”
“They had each other,” Caroline said, stroking Ava’s hair. “See? Look at them out there, taking care of each other.” Tears ran out of Caroline’s eyes, too. Whenever Ava cried, Caroline cried.
“Why’d he have to die? Why’d he take all those drugs? Why?”
Caroline was aware that other people were standing off a ways, staring at them, including the British man with the toupee. She had to think of something to say to calm her daughter down.
“Maybe he knew things would never get better for him,” Caroline said. “Maybe he just gave up. But that’s not going to happen to you. Or me.”
“I know that!”
At last Ava allowed Caroline to hug