Everything Leads to You (28 page)

“No,” I say. “It’s just that we’ve learned so much about her already.”

Her eyes flick up to mine, and I feel something shift between us. Her face is so close all I’d have to do is put my hand on her hair and there would be no going back.

“Don’t you want to kiss me?” she says.

Her eyes are boring into mine, inviting but also angry, and I let go of her arm and take a step back.

“I do,” I say. “I do.” But as she puts her hand on my waist to draw me closer, I say, “But not right now.”

She flinches.

“Oh,” she says, spinning around, gathering her stuff. “I’m sorry. Do I not fit neatly enough into your perfect life? How
stupid
,” she says. “I was so stupid. When your dad took me into his office to show me all his Clyde Jones stuff it was probably just to amuse himself. And everything your mom said that night was out of pity. And you and Charlotte—you were just solving a mystery. You got your answers and now that’s it. It’s over.”

“Ava,” I say. “Stop.”

She’s trying to stuff everything into her bag but there’s just too much of it. She’s trembling and cursing and throwing a book that won’t fit hard against the floor. And then she’s giving up and sinking to her knees, and I want to step closer to her but I don’t know if I should.

But I want to.

And it’s in the precise moment I take a step toward her that Charlotte opens the door. She sees Ava crouched on the floor and freezes in the doorway.

“What’s going on?”

Ava says, “I was just leaving.”

Charlotte looks at me but I don’t say anything because I can’t speak.

Ava gathers into her arms what she hasn’t been able to put away.

I cross the room to pick up the book she threw. It landed open and the pages are bent. When I hand it to her, she doesn’t look at me.

I find my voice enough to say, “I don’t think you should drive right now.” It comes out small and meek. I barely recognize it.

“I’m okay,” she says. The anger is gone but she sounds so tired.

“I can drive you,” I say.

“No thanks.”

“I want to.”

She shakes her head and walks toward the door.

“
I’ll
drive you,” Charlotte says, still in the doorway with her purse over her shoulder. This is one of the reasons I love her. She doesn’t ask any other questions, and even as she takes a few of Ava’s books under one arm and puts her other arm around Ava’s shoulders, I know she’s doing this for me.

“We can take your car,” she says to Ava. “Em, come get me in a little bit, okay?”

~

I pace the floor. I go into the bathroom and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror for a minute. I force myself to just stay still and look.

And then I drive to Ava’s place and park on the street. A moment later, Charlotte’s climbing into the passenger seat.

“Is she okay?”

She shrugs.

“Is Jamal there?”

“I called him. He’s on his way.”

“Let’s just wait here,” I say. “Until we see him.”

So we wait for a long time, without speaking, until a bus pulls up and he steps out, hurrying to her front door.

On the short drive back I tell her what happened.

“All I want is to go home and sleep but I have so much to do,” I say.

I park in Toby’s spot but I’m too wrecked to do anything else.

Charlotte reaches for the keys, turns the engine off. She gets out and walks around to my side, opens my door.

“Come on,” she says. “I have to reply to some e-mails and then I’ll help you work on something. You wanted to fill those jars for the kitchen, right? We can do that together.”

I force myself out of the car and back into the apartment, where Charlotte tells me how great the table looks and the hanging contraption, too.

“Morgan’s actually coming through for you,” she says, which is the nicest thing she’s said about her in over a year.

I nod.

Then she adds, “I wonder what she wants.”

As Charlotte plugs in her laptop and heads to the bathroom, I pull flour and beans and dried cherries out of Toby’s cupboards and find a flat of mason jars we bought. I’m taking the hinges and doors off the kitchen cabinets and lining the shelves with jars to provide color and light.

I know I should be rinsing out the jars but I just can’t bring myself to do anything. I keep thinking of Ava saying
Don’t you want to kiss me?
I’ve been wanting a moment like that, wishing for it, but I never imagined there would be anger behind it. Never thought she’d wield my life at me like some kind of weapon.

And I didn’t think I’d say anything that would hurt her as much as I hurt her tonight.

Charlotte comes out of the bathroom, sees me standing here not doing the simple things I’m supposed to do. She leans against the counter next to me.

“I barely know her,” I say. “But still.”

“Come here,” she says, and gives me a hug. I hang out for a second, rest my chin on her shoulder.

When I’ve had enough I say, “Okay, I’ll wash the jars out,” and she lets me go.

Chapter Twenty-one

Almost a week passes and I don’t hear anything from Ava. As she spends her days in rehearsals, I immerse myself in the messy lives of the make-believe. Juniper and her plants and her longing. George and his coral-colored melancholy. I buy things and borrow things and mend them. I work with Charlotte and Morgan and then lose Morgan to
The Agency
and Charlotte to Rebecca, who needs her more and more for all the urgent, last-minute tasks.

Then, on Saturday night at our last official tech meeting before filming begins, Charlotte calls Ava to schedule a rehearsal. I cross the room away from her so that I don’t have to listen to them talking, busy myself with sorting the day’s receipts and checking tasks off my novel-length to-do list. Aside from a couple finishing touches, Juniper’s apartment is complete, which is a good thing because we start filming the day after tomorrow. I’ve been working on our changes to George’s set now, which is much more difficult than Juniper’s because I could work at Toby’s apartment whenever I wanted to, but I need to do most of the preparation for Frank and Edie’s house without inhabiting it.

I’m checking off “frame photographs” when Charlotte taps me on the shoulder, hands me the phone, and walks away.

“Hello?” I ask.

“I want to apologize,” Ava says.

Is it possible to get over a voice like this? Someday, I’d like to be able to hear her speak a sentence on the phone without it making me want to hang up, get in my car, and drive as many miles as it takes to kiss her.

“You don’t have to,” I manage.

“Please accept my apology,” she says, impossibly raspy and sweet. “You were right to think I was acting crazy. And you did nothing to deserve any of the things I said that night.”

“All right,” I say. “It’s accepted.”

“I also want to tell you that I haven’t been at my best.”

I nod, but she can’t see me.

“You met me during a difficult time,” she says.

“I think I’m partially responsible for that.”

“Maybe,” she says. “But you’re also responsible for making it better.”

I don’t ask her what she means by that, because I’m afraid she’ll talk about the money, or that she knows a little more about her mother, or that she’s only an announcement away from instant celebrity if she ever chooses to reveal that she’s a descendant of an actor well known for having no descendants. In other words, I’m afraid that it would have everything to do with what I wanted for her, and nothing at all to do with me.

“I’ll see you soon,” she says. “I can’t believe we shoot on Monday.”

“Yeah” I say. “Everyone’s really excited about you.”

“I hope it’s still okay with you. That I’m in it.”

“Of course.”

Here is what I want to say:
It doesn’t matter that you’re in the movie; I would be thinking about you all the time anyway.
I want to say,
It all leads to you. Not just the letter and the obituary, the articles and your birth date. But also this particular time in my life. The heartbreak and the art and all of the longing
. I want to say,
Every time I add a detail to the apartment I imagine you in it.

Instead, I say, “You’ll make a really great Juniper.”

And she says, “So I’ll see you Monday then?”

And I say, “Yes. I’ll see you then.”

And then I drag Charlotte out of house, saying, “We have so much to do, we have to go.”

Once we’re in her car she asks, “What was that about?”

I say, “You have to tell Toby.”

“What?”

“You have to tell him how you feel about him. You have to tell him right now.”

“But he’s in England.”

“I don’t care.”

Every breath I take feels jagged. Anything could make me cry.

“I reread Clyde’s letter when I was at Ava’s house. Remember how we thought he said nothing? It isn’t true. I got that wrong, too. He says so much in that letter. It’s all about the danger in leaving things unsaid. It’s about failure. How could he have sat there with Caroline and not told her all the things that he wanted to? We all get so afraid. We need to be brave.”

I knew that heartbreak was terrible, but never knew that I could feel this way over a girl I haven’t even kissed.

“I don’t know what I should have done,” I say. “Maybe that day at her house, after I knew for sure how I felt about her, I should have just told her.”

I lean forward and rest my head against the glove compartment. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I can’t help it.

“What’s the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?” I say. “What if the moment escapes you in the split second when your focus was elsewhere?”

I reach for her purse and find her phone nestled in a little pocket.

“God,” I say, “you’re so
organized
.”

She’s wide-eyed and staring at me. I hand her the phone.

“Just call him,” I say, and then I get out of the car and let her do it alone.

A minute later she knocks on the window and I go back inside.

“I left him a message.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no pressure, but for the record I’ve had a crush on him since sixth grade. And that now I’m no longer in high school maybe we could hang out sometime.”

I laugh and swat away the tears that have traitorously been dripping down my face.

“Emi,” she says. “I’m sorry. I think I gave you bad advice.”

I can’t even respond. I’ve never known Charlotte to be wrong, but I do think she might have been wrong about this.

“It seemed too fast for you, after everything with Morgan. And it seemed like Ava really needed friends,” Charlotte says. “But you can still be her friend, even if you’re more than that. And you were right. She
is
great. She’s fun and interesting and smart and nice. And beautiful. And talented. I was watching her rehearsal footage the other night. She’s
really
talented.”

“And she’s a good baker,” I say, these fucking tears still streaming down my face. “And I really think she liked me.”

“So go after her,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be over yet.”

“It’s already so complicated now,” I say. “And on the phone it was like she was trying to resolve everything so we could move on, work on the movie together. So things wouldn’t be too awkward. There were all these things I wanted to say but didn’t.”

“So call her back and say them.”

“No,” I say. “It would be too much.”

“Then just call her back and say something. Something that opens things up between you. You can move slowly, but you should move.”

She opens her car door.

“Okay?”

I nod and she shuts it.

I dial Ava’s number.

“Hey,” she says, and she sounds surprised but glad to hear from me.

“Hey. There was something else that I wanted to say.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean, there are a lot of things. So hopefully we’ll have time, you know, to talk when the filming is over and we’re all back to normal.”

“I hope so,” she says.

“But for now, I wanted to say this: I want to know who you are. I mean, apart from all of this we’ve been dealing with. Without the mystery and the Chateau Marmont. I thought that everyone would want that kind of huge, romantic story if it became available to them. But it wasn’t a story, it was your life. And when I got to your apartment the day we found Lenny, and I saw you and how you lived, that’s when I really understood that even without all the clues we’d pieced together and the new identity we’d made for you, you would have already been someone I’d want to know. It’s like the couch! The best things aren’t perfectly constructed. They aren’t illusions. They aren’t larger than life. They
are
life. Part of me knew that all along, but I got it wrong anyway. What I’m trying to say is that I just want to know
you
. You don’t have to be at your best. We can’t all be at our best all the time. But,” I say again, “I just want to know you.”

I can hear her breathing on the other end, reminding me that she is there, that she’s been listening. I hope that I’ve just rambled in a way that’s romantic and not a way that sounds insane. It would break my heart if she didn’t think I made sense, so I don’t give her time to react.

“I have to go now,” I tell her, and then I hang up.

I take a moment to breathe, and then I knock on the windshield but Charlotte doesn’t turn around.

I knock again, harder, and she raises a hand to tell me one minute and I see that her other hand is pressing her phone to her ear. And when she turns around a minute later and hangs up, she’s smiling.

“Was it him?” I ask her.

She nods.

“What did he say?”

“He said he’d been waiting all through high school for me to graduate.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No,” she says, and then she’s leaning against the car door in a hysterical fit of laughter comparable only to that at Clyde Jones’s estate sale.

“Wow,” I say. “You and Toby. Fantastic.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she says between breaths. “You’re the one who made me do it.”