Everything Leads to You (15 page)

“That sounds great!” she says. And then, I swear, I see her blush.

She gathers her purse and hands me back my script and slips out of the apartment. I wander onto the patio and listen to her car door shut, the engine start, the sound of her driving away, and then I go back inside where Charlotte is working on her laptop and probably will be for hours more, and even though our dishes are scattered across the counter and I have merchants to beg and plans to review, I change into my pajamas. Ignore Char’s surprise. Wash my face and brush my teeth and climb into bed, thinking the entire time of Ava’s voice speaking those lines, of her hair falling over her shoulders and her eyes wide and hopeful. The way her entrance into our lives was as breathtaking as any great film’s heroine’s. The way she looks at me sometimes, which I think is different from the way she looks at other people.

I am almost sure that it is different.

“Good night,” I call to Charlotte, and ignore her when she calls back, “
Seriously?
” I rest my face on a pillow. Close my eyes. Because all I want is eight hours to dream about Ava Garden Wilder.

~

Then, the next afternoon, standing in a garment-district textiles store, as I’m deciding between blue and green fabric for the curtains in Juniper’s apartment, my phone rings and it’s her.

“I know we’re scheduled to hang out tomorrow,” she says. “But I’m wondering if you’ll do me a favor today.”

“Sure,” I say. “When?”

“Well, now, actually. It’ll take a few hours. Are you busy?”

“I’m just finishing up,” I lie. I am nowhere close to finished, but I’m the kind of busy that feels eternal, the kind where you can’t say
I’ll be done in a few hours
because the truth is you will never, ever, be done.

“Should I meet you somewhere?” I ask.

“I can pick you up in Venice.”

“Okay. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you so much. I’ll explain everything on our way.”

“On our way?”

“To Leona Valley,” she says. Then, as though she’s afraid I’ll change my mind if she stays on the phone, she says good-bye and hangs up.

I choose blue. An underwater, electric blue.

“Nice choice,” the manager says, and I thank her again for giving me a hefty discount in exchange for a thank-you in the credits.

“
Yes & Yes,
” she says, “right?”

I nod. “You’ll hear about it. It’s going to be a beautiful movie.”

Back outside, I consider what to do about Charlotte. I know she’s busy with a family thing today, but it would be a major omission not to mention that I’m heading into the desert with Ava. So I take out my phone, and I let her know.
Hmmmm,
she writes back. Followed by
!!!
And, finally,
Remember: slow.

Chapter Eleven

When I pull into Toby’s driveway, I find Ava perched on the hood of her car, reading a thick paperback. She hops off when she sees me and says, through my open window, “It might be a better idea to take your car if that’s okay.”

She’s smiling but I can tell she’s nervous. Worry darts behind her eyes.

I don’t even turn the car off. I just say sure and she lets herself in. She looks a little different today, a thin line of shimmering gold eyeliner making her eyes even greener. Pink faintly smudged on her lips. She catches me looking.

“I have a tendency to put on makeup when I feel nervous,” she tells me. “And then I don’t like the way it looks so I end up taking most of it off.”

“Why are you nervous?” I ask her, thinking of the blush on her face when she left us last night. It returns now, and she twists a strand of red hair around a finger before answering me.

“A few reasons, I guess,” she says. “Going back to Leona is one of them. Taking you there with me is one of them. Jamal ended up working a double shift so he couldn’t come with me.”

“I’m happy to help.”

“Do you know how to get there?”

“I assume the 405 to start,” I say.

I’ve hunted for furniture in almost every city in Southern California, so I know the urban sprawl well. The sad cities that call themselves part of LA even though they feel so distant from it; the rough, flat, gritty neighborhoods; the sterile suburbs with perfectly mown lawns; the wealthy, mysterious, unattainable hills. I never got as far as the desert, but when you need to get out of LA, the 405 is what takes you away.

She nods yes. I pull out of the driveway and onto the road.

I assume that she’ll explain why we’re going, what we’re going to do once we get there. I’m trying to be patient and let her get to it eventually, but instead she tells me about Marilyn Monroe.

“This book was in the donation box at the shelter, and I immediately thought of you. I mean, does it get any more tragic?”

She flips through the paperback, which I now see is the kind of biography that would make my dad cringe—the kind packed with conspiracy theories and so-called explosive revelations.

“There’s this part where it talks about her imagining that Clark Gable was her father because her mom showed her a picture of a man who looked like him and told her he was her dad, even though her dad was supposed to be another guy.”

“So depressing,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says.

We’re on the freeway now, and it’s one of the rare afternoons when traffic is light and we can actually go the speed limit, so I’m barreling toward the desert, about to perform some unknown favor.

“So,” I say. “Leona Valley.”

She nods. “You want to know what we’re doing,” she says.

“I mean, I’m a little curious . . .” I shrug like it’s no big deal.

“I need to get my birth certificate.”

“From your house?”

“Thursday afternoons are a good time. Tracey has a knitting circle, and Jonah goes to guitar lessons. Not that it would be that bad if Jonah came home. I want to see him, but, I don’t know . . .”

“I get it,” I say. “Like, you miss him, but maybe you’re not ready to see him yet.”

She nods.

“So where do I come in?”

She grins at me. “Lookout girl,” she says. “Getaway driver.”

“Wow. When you said favor I thought you’d want me to, like, run lines with you or help you paint your bedroom or something.”

She laughs, but I feel immediately insensitive for joking about paint when she doesn’t even
have
her own bedroom. And though she doesn’t seem to mind, it only gets worse when she tells me why she needs it.

“So, you know how Clyde mentioned the guy at the bank in his letter?”

“Right,” I say. “The money.”

Even though the money has always been part of all of this, it hasn’t ever quite been real to me. Not in the way the feeling that took over me in Clyde’s study was real. That was something I could believe in, but the money seemed more abstract. I guess it’s easy to ignore the promise of fortune if the money isn’t intended for you, and if you have no use for it because you live in a nice house on a safe, tree-lined street in the best city in the world, and your parents have a college fund all tucked away and probably other money, too, for weddings and things you haven’t even thought about yet because you’ve never had to worry about anything financial.

“I called the bank and he was still there,” she said. “Everyone else is dead, but not Terrence.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

She nods. “I went there yesterday afternoon and met with him in a private office. I showed him the letter and my driver’s license, and he told me that there was an account with Caroline and me on it, but since my name is different now from what it was when Clyde knew about me, I have to show him my birth certificate.”

“How much is in there?” I ask, and then rush to say, “I don’t mean dollar amount
.
Just a ballpark. Like enough for a vacation somewhere, or enough to change your life?”

“He can’t tell me yet,” she says. “But I asked him if it would be enough for me to afford to rent my own apartment for a few months until I get a job that pays well and his face got all twisted, like he was trying not to smile, and he said yes.”

“A definitive yes,” I say.

She nods.

“So that’s great. That’s awesome.”

“I need to get out of the shelter,” she says. “I really like Venice, actually. I think I might find a place there. Here’s our exit.”

I turn off the freeway, already imagining Ava and me in her new Venice apartment, decorating all the rooms, spending all this time with each other.

We drive past a couple of restaurants, some dirt lots and tractors, and Ava has me turn left onto a residential street. We pass a nineties-era house, brown and beige.

“Okay, make a U-turn,” she says.

“Did we go the wrong way?”

“I just wanted to make sure no one was home. It’s that one we just passed.”

I pull up in front of her house. The shutters in the front windows are closed; junk mail sticks out of the box by the door. A few small pots of pink flowers line the path to the door, surrounded by a bright green lawn.

I turn off the car.

“Okay,” Ava says. “Tracey drives a white station wagon. She has long hair that she will probably be wearing in a braid. If you see her coming, call me.”

“Got it.”

“I can go out the back door when she goes inside and then come back around to you.”

“That sounds good.”

“But she shouldn’t come home for another two hours. She has her knitting circle until eight and she usually stays longer, talking.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t know for sure. Things change all the time, I guess, and I’ve been gone for a while.”

She’s staring at the front door, not moving.

“It’s good we have a plan, then,” I say. “We probably won’t need it, but if she comes, I’ll call you the second she rounds the corner.”

She bites at a nail.

“I’m ready,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Good luck.”

A silent minute passes, and then she gets out of the car.

I watch her try to unlock the front door but she’s having trouble. She keeps looking at her keys and trying again. Then she leaves the front door, grabs the nearest pot of pink flowers, and walks to the side of the house. I can’t see her anymore, but I hear a crash and a shattering, and that’s when I get nervous. Because being a getaway driver for a girl who just wants to avoid her mother is one thing; it takes on another meaning when actual breaking and entering is involved.

I wonder if I should start the car, just in case we have to move fast. I pull Ava’s name up on my phone so I can call her immediately, trying not to look away from the street as I do it.

I don’t know from which direction Tracey would come.

It’s difficult to keep watch in two opposite directions at one time, but I do my best.

A slam comes from the house.

It’s Ava, walking out the front door. She cuts across the lawn, empty-handed.

“I need help,” she says at the window. “I can’t find anything.”

And I thought my heart rate was already dangerously high.

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to look with me. There’s so much shit everywhere. I can’t go through it all.”

“What about watching for Tracey?”

“She won’t come. I was being paranoid. She’s had the knitting circle every Thursday for years. For half my life. Come on!” She starts back toward the door and I swear, this girl must be magical because this is not the sort of thing I do.

And yet, moments later, I am standing inside Tracey’s house.

“Let’s look here first,” Ava says, and crosses the carpet to the area of the living room with a dining room table and an armoire. I follow her more slowly because I’m standing in the house where Ava lived until a year ago and it would be impossible for me not to at least glance at what’s inside. Not much light filters in through the slats of the shutters, but even after Ava flips on the chandelier that hangs low over the table, the room is hardly lit. Wood-paneled walls surround us, adorned with careful paintings of landscapes and animals. I step closer and Ava verifies my hunch.

“Paint by numbers. Tracey loves the kind of art that comes with instructions.”

The table is covered with an impeccably ironed yellow tablecloth. A ceramic vase sits in the middle, full of paper flowers.

“These are actually really pretty,” I say, touching a red paper petal.

“Thanks,” she says, looking down at them. “I made those. They were supposed to be a peace offering, I guess, but she never put them out when I lived here.”

“Maybe she put them out because she misses you.”

She turns away.

“I don’t think so.”

She kneels on the carpet at the base of a giant armoire and gets to business, pulling the drawers until they all jut out, overflowing with papers that flutter and envelopes that crash to the floor.

“Look at all of this,” she says. “Junk mail. Like, five
years
’ worth of junk mail.
Shit
.” She buries her face in her hands.

“What happened at the door?” I ask. “Did you bring the wrong keys?”

“No,” Ava says. “I guess she changed the locks.”

“Okay.” I imagine Charlotte standing with us, taking over. “We need to be strategic about this,” I say.

Ava looks up at me and nods.

“Where are all of the places we should look? Show me.”

“Well, this is the first one.”

I say, “Let’s forget about this. We can come back later if we don’t find it, but I don’t think it would be in with the junk mail.”

“There’s more than junk—”

“Did you have this before you moved here?”

“No, she got it a few years ago.”

“So your birth certificate is older. She would have brought it with her when you guys moved here. It wouldn’t make sense to find a new place for it so many years later.”

Ava stands up.

“Her room,” she says, and leads me down the hallway into a room covered in rose wallpaper with a matching country-style bedroom set. If I had more time I would take pictures of it and use it as inspiration for part of George’s house. We head straight to the closet, though, where Tracey’s clothing dangles from wire hangers above a sea of boxes and below a shelf stacked high with even more boxes.