Winter Solstice (Winter #4)(17)

Be present, she tells herself. She will think about Grayson Coker and Norah Vale later.





AVA


She stands at the entrance of the Museum of Natural History at five minutes to eleven, waiting for Potter and PJ to emerge from the subway. Potter called the night before, saying that PJ had fallen asleep in the taxi. “I think his overreaction was due to exhaustion,” Potter said. “It’s harder to fly east than fly west.”

“Is it?” Ava said.

“Jet lag is a real thing!” Potter said defensively.

Potter’s plan today was to let PJ sleep in, then take him for a big breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant, and then they would fulfill PJ’s fervent wish to ride the subway. PJ’s enthusiasm to ride the subway has been fueled in part by Potter’s ex-wife, Trish, who said that under no circumstances was PJ to ride the subway.

Ava takes a deep breath of crisp October air. They will spend the afternoon at the museum, capping off their visit with the Hayden Planetarium, and then they will go for a late lunch. There’s a great banh mi shop down the street, or if PJ is amenable, they can sit outside at Cafe Luxembourg, where Ava and Potter can split a bottle of Sancerre and PJ can eat frites out of a paper cone.

And then tonight… what will they do tonight? An IMAX movie? A trip to the top of the Empire State Building? The ghost tour of Greenwich Village? The possibilities are endless.

Ava loves New York!


Ava’s reverie is disrupted by the sight of Potter’s head. They are so connected that Ava sometimes feels his presence before she actually sees him. A few seconds later PJ appears. Potter has PJ by one hand, but in PJ’s other hand is a device that has captured his attention. At least he’s not resisting, shrieking, or throwing a tantrum.

Ava waves to Potter, and he waves back and cuts a diagonal across the street, pulling PJ along.

“Hey there,” Potter says. His demeanor is unruffled. Ava decides to proceed as though last night never happened.

“Hey there yourself,” Ava says. She refrains from kissing Potter in front of PJ, although it’s difficult. Tread lightly, she thinks. They can act as though they’re friends who have randomly met up on the street. “Hey there, PJ. I’m Ava.”

PJ doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look up. He’s absorbed in his game. He’s playing it on an iPhone 7, which is a nicer phone than either Ava or Potter has. Where did he get it? Does it belong to Trish? Certainly it’s not his—he’s only seven years old.

“Put the phone down, buddy, and say hello to Ava,” Potter says.

PJ doesn’t respond. His fingers are skating across the screen.

“What game are you playing?” Ava asks.

PJ doesn’t answer.

“Minecraft,” Potter says.

Ah, Minecraft. Ava has long listened to the people she knows with children complain about Minecraft. Apparently, it’s the bane of every parent’s existence. Even Ava’s sister-in-law Jennifer complains about it. But now Ava wishes she had been paying closer attention about what Minecraft is exactly. If she knew the details, she might be able to bond with PJ over the mines or the crafts.

“Shall we go in?” Ava asks. She leads the way through the entrance and waits while Potter gets tickets for the three of them, then they glide into the museum.

Ava hasn’t set foot in this museum since she was a child herself, but all the memories come rushing back. She recalls school field trips—brown bag lunches, the buddy system, worksheets to fill out in each wing—as well as the rainy weekends after Ava’s parents split. Ava and Patrick and Kevin used to spend the week with Margaret in the brownstone on East Eighty-Eighth Street, and the weekends with Kelley in his sleek, new high-rise down in the financial district. Kelley was a lost soul in those days. Ava wasn’t old enough to understand it then, though it’s clear to her now. Kelley’s brother, Avery, was dying of AIDS down in Greenwich Village, and so Kelley was adamant about spending his weekends with the kids uptown. Patrick and Kevin were teenagers, so they had friends and sports to use as excuses to escape the sad, desperate weekends with Kelley. But Ava was stuck. In clement weather she and Kelley went to Central Park, where they watched the roller skaters or threw stones in the Lake. When it was cold or raining, they came here.

There were things about this museum that Ava loved: the big elephant, the squid and the whale, the gemstones. She has bad memories of the dinosaurs and even worse memories of the Hall of Indigenous Peoples. She was sick to her stomach one Sunday and threw up in her father’s hands in front of the diorama of the Maoris.

“Where shall we start?” Ava asks. She has the map in her hand and is filled with optimism. The offerings in this day and age are almost overwhelming. There’s the Butterfly Conservatory, an exhibition on the Arctic, an exhibit on bats, an exhibit on the city of Petra, and one on the jewelry of Native Americans. There’s the planetarium, which they’ll save for last. There are the fossil halls, the dinosaurs, the mammals, the gems and minerals—they’ll have to stroll through there for old times’ sake—the Hall of Human Origins, and… the Discovery Room! Ava forgot about the Discovery Room, but she can vividly recall whiling away the hours there while Kelley read the Week in Review section of the Times on a bench. He didn’t realize that quality time meant he should get down on his hands and knees and marvel with Ava over the drawer filled with cowrie and turret shells.