Ava is born at 12:00 a.m. sharp on the first day of spring, with purple crocus buds pushing through the patchy snow outside. It is a home birth, and she spends her first day on earth squalling and sleeping, nursing and acclimating to her new existence. She has a mother and a father who gaze at her with deep love, a five-year-old brother who is at first fascinated by her but quickly grows bored, and a nine-year-old sister who watches her intently from a slight distance as though she suspects this baby might be up to something unsavory.
###
At 12:00 a.m. sharp on the first day of spring, Ava is one day old. Her mother wakes to nurse her and easily falls back to sleep afterward, tired as she is from childbirth. Her father rocks her gently. Her brother holds a small toy truck up to her face for her to see before their father says, “Gentle, gentle.” Her sister peers from the doorway, suspicious.
###
On the first day of spring, Ava is two days old, then three, then four. Each day the same—her family their same ages, the crocuses, the snow—and Ava aging at the regular rate of one day per day, only all these days take place on the same repeating day. This day is the only home she has ever known, the only home she will ever know.
###
Ava turns one year old at 12:00 a.m. on the first day of spring. Aunts and uncles and grandparents come to celebrate her, and she is posed for countless photos with them, with her parents, with her five-year-old brother and her nine-year-old sister. Her sister quickly retreats from the frame and watches the proceedings, concerned, from behind a slice of birthday cake, the sharp sweetness of buttercream roses lingering in her mouth.
###
By the time Ava is two and a half, she wants to do what her five-year-old brother is doing. She toddles after him in the yard, where he crouches, digging trenches in the patchy snow for his plastic army men, posing them beside the emerging purple tips of the crocus buds. Her sister reads a book in the cozy warmth of the living room, discomforted as she looks out the window at her two siblings. What is Ava doing here? What is she doing?
###
Ava is five, the same age as her brother. She goes to kindergarten with him. At first, she likes it, but she quickly grows bored. “The teacher says the same things every day,” she complains to her parents. Eventually, they decide to home-school her for more personal attention.
“How come she doesn’t have to go to school?” Ava’s sister asks their parents.
“Do you want to be home-schooled, too?” asks their father.
But Ava’s sister admits that no, she doesn’t. School belongs to her, and she doesn’t want to give it up. At school, she doesn’t have the odd feeling that something is off, wrong. At school, she can simply be herself.
###
One day while Ava is nine, she says to her sister, “We’re exactly the same age today. Nine years, eight months, and twenty-six days.”
“No, we aren’t,” says her sister, who shuts herself in her bedroom and skips dinner. Later, though, she asks her mother, “Why are Ava and I the same age when I was born so much earlier than her?”
“Don’t be silly,” replies their mother, her tone cheerful but her mouth tight. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you today. Go on and get ready for bed. Tomorrow is a new day.”
Ava’s sister lies in bed in the darkness, unable to get that last sentence out of her head.
###
Ava is thirteen, and she doesn’t have much time or patience for her five-year-old brother or her nine-year-old sister, with whom she mostly just argues anyway. Ava doesn’t really have friends, but she is good at quickly ingratiating herself with neighbor kids or anyone else who happens to be around. “A natural charmer,” her father calls her. For this reason, Ava’s sister doesn’t like having friends over. She knows that they will gravitate toward special, charming Ava. It doesn’t seem fair. Ava isn’t the one who earned those friends. It’s better to go to their houses, to feel the relief at being out of her own.
###
At 18, Ava is done with her high-school-level studies, but she doesn’t leave home. “Why not?” asks her sister, whose friends’ older siblings all go away to college, move out, get jobs.
“It’s not for me,” replies Ava. “It’s better for me to stay here and help out around the house.” So she does. She helps with laundry and housework. She cooks dinner and makes lunches for her younger siblings to bring to school. She would help with yardwork, except that there is little to do outside on the borderline of winter and spring. Through her curious twenties and existential thirties and introspective forties, she helps her thirty-something parents and her nine-year-old sister and five-year-old brother with the things they need for daily life. Her sister hears her use the term “daily life” once and never forgets it, the strange way it hurts her ear.
###
Ava grows slower in her sixties and even more so in her seventies, arthritis and cataracts making their presence known. In her eighties, the end draws near as it does for all of us in our own time. Ava spends each day in her bed, eventually with home hospice staff coming to monitor and care for her. All the while, the patchy snow sits in the yard, the crocus buds rising up through it. As endless as time can feel at the age of nine, Ava’s sister senses she is running out of it, so for the first time ever, she approaches Ava. Standing by her bedside, her sister asks, “Why are you so much older than me? Or our parents, even?” She doesn’t know if Ava will answer. Her lucidity is no longer a guarantee.
But eventually, Ava says, “I don’t know.” After a few slow, shallow breaths, she adds, “I love you,” and Ava’s sister cries about this later, for she feels she has done nothing to deserve such love.
###
On the first day of spring at 12:00 a.m., Ava dies at the age of 86. She is mourned by her parents, her five-year-old brother, her nine-year-old sister, and numerous extended family members.
###
Eventually, the crocuses bloom.
###
Ava’s sister waits for the weather to get warm, and when it does, she rides her bike around the neighborhood with her friends and reads in the shade of the big weeping willow at the corner of the backyard. The lilacs bloom, then the lilies. The school year ends. The ice cream truck begins its daily rounds. There are sleepovers, swimming pools, s’mores. Then falling leaves, falling temperatures, falling snow. There are so many seasons, she thinks to herself. And as they pass, she notices something happening in her family. Her mother is quieter than she used to be. Her father spends more time in his garage workshop by himself. Her brother grows hungrier for attention, more volatile. And she observes.
###
Once, when Ava’s sister is 12, she works up the nerve to ask her mother, “Do you miss Ava?”
Her mother freezes in the middle of chopping a pepper, her face turned away. Eventually, she turns back and asks, “Who?”
“My sister,” says Ava’s sister.
“Aren’t you a little old for imaginary friends?” asks her mother flatly before turning back to her dinner preparations.
Ava’s sister is taken aback. She isn’t imagining it. And later, as she replays this encounter in her head time and time again, she realizes that if her mother truly didn’t know who Ava was, then why would she seem so upset at being asked? Why would she try so hard to shut the conversation down?
###
Ava’s sister grows up, and still, no one talks about that strange first day of spring when she was nine. But Ava’s sister never forgets. It comes and goes from her immediate thoughts but is always there, somewhere, an anchor to her past. The engine, she comes to believe, that drives her family to be the way it is. She becomes a writer and writes stories about time loops, secret sisters. When her work is published, her mother says, “I don’t know where you get that imagination of yours.”
###
Ava’s sister gets married, and divorced, and remarried. Ava’s brother goes through rehab, and rehab again, then marries a nice single mother and becomes a pretty good stepdad. Ava’s father latches on to the new granddaughter he has inherited, but Ava’s mother maintains a slight remove. Ava’s father lives to 78 before cancer takes him, and Ava’s mother lives alone in their old house until she dies in her sleep at 91. Ava’s sister, now 66, goes over to pack up the house. She works in the basement while her brother clears out the upstairs.
They meet for a break in the kitchen. She takes a long drink of water and asks him, “Do you remember Ava?”
“Ava,” he says thoughtfully.
“You were five when she was… around.”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I was pretty young.” He looks down. “My memory is a little spotty anyway,” he says. “You know. The drugs.”
She hugs him. “It’s okay,” she says. But she is the only one who remembers Ava now. All of her older relatives are gone, and if her brother doesn’t remember, that only leaves her. She recalls a day, a strange day from her childhood that shifts in her memory, the images constantly resolving and unresolving in her mind. A girl, a woman. Ava. She remembers the feeling of Ava. It is a feeling primal yet unsettling, familiar yet impossible to pin down. Was it a dream? No, she insists to herself. Ava was real.
Back in the basement, Ava’s sister comes across a box marked “March 20.” Her skin prickles with goosebumps. That’s the day. But the box is empty. Yet, there is a box, and that must mean something.
###
Ava’s sister lives to 101. So many seasons, so many years. So many very different days in the enormous patchwork quilt that is her long life. At the end, she lies in a bed, attended by hospice workers. “Just like Ava,” she tells one of them.
“Who’s Ava?” asks the nurse, not unkindly.
“My sister.” This time, there is no one here to contradict her. Her story belongs to her, as does the slice of time she has occupied in this world, more than a century yet still so slim in the great scheme of things. Her awareness grows sporadic, hazy. Figures float around her, tending to her physical form, but one stands by the end of her bed, extending a hand. Ava. She is a girl, a woman, everything all at once. It’s been so long and no time at all. Ava’s sister reaches her hand out. “I love you, too,” she says.
