Everything Leads to You (6 page)

“Hey, at least you have a new direction,” Dad says.

“Easy for you to say. You like this research stuff.”

“True,” he says.

I take out my phone and text Charlotte.

Braves beat Dodgers in 96. Back 2 library. 2 p.m.?

Chapter Four

After seven weeks, fifty-two garage sales, and sixteen estates, the impossible happens: I find the sofa.

It’s upstairs in a Pasadena house, my fourth and farthest stop of the morning, in a dressing room adjoining the master bedroom.

I push through the hoards of people to get to the woman who is clearly in charge and tell her I’ll take it.

“The one in the dressing room?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Hm,” she scrunches up her face. “That one’s on hold.”

I laugh because the universe must be playing a trick on me. But she doesn’t crack a smile, so I get serious.

“Nothing said it was on hold,” I say.

“I know but one of my clients expressed interest at the preview.”

“Expressed interest? That’s hardly putting something on hold. Did she pay a deposit?”

“No.”

“Then I should be able to buy it. I can pay you right now.”

“Why don’t you check back this afternoon?”

“I’ll pay you double,” I say.

“Fine,” she says. “But I need it out of here immediately. I don’t want it here when she comes later. This way I can blame it on someone else. You have a truck?”

I scoff like that’s a ridiculous question. It’s a scoff that says
Of course
.

While her assistants lug the sofa downstairs, I madly call all the buyers whose numbers are programmed into my phone. But all I get is voice mail after voice mail and I start to panic. The assistants ask me where the truck is and I tell them someone’s pulling it around. “You can just set it down here,” I say, and they set it on the dried-up grass of the front yard, bordering the sidewalk.

I sit on the cushions and try the next number. This way, if the woman comes, I’ll just refuse to get up. I’ll be ready to channel Clyde Jones.
If you want the sofa, you’ll have to get past me first.

But soon I am out of numbers. I guess no one wants to work on a Saturday, but besides the studio buyers, I only know one person with a truck. I can hear Charlotte telling me that she would rather rent a truck than have me call Morgan for help, and she would be right to say it, but I can’t take any chances with this sofa. It’s everything I hoped it would be, only better: vivid green and soft, with these gold embroidered leaves, so delicate I didn’t notice them when I first saw it from across the room. In the first music-room scene, when the daughter is practicing, it will seem pretty but plain. Later, though, once she’s lying on it under the boy’s weight, and there are close-ups of their hands or feet or faces, people will see the thread and the leaves. I can picture the girl’s hair spilling over the side, blending with the gold, like she’s tangled up in a forest. There’s something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They’re all about the moment when the girl is no longer who she once was, and with this in mind, I surrender all doubts and shreds of dignity and call Morgan.

She answers on the third ring.

“I found a sofa,” I tell her. “It’s perfect. Please tell me you can help me get it to set.”

“Where are you?”

“Pasadena,” I say.

“
Pasadena?
”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. But the couch is amazing. The couch is one of a kind, the best couch in history, the—”

“Okay, I’m at brunch with some people. I’m paying the bill. Text me the address.”

I hang up and text her, and then I lie down on the sofa and look up at the clear sky. Time passes and people pass, carrying the remnants of a dead woman’s life. I allow myself to imagine Morgan telling me she wants me back. I try to limit this particular daydream to two or three times per day, or else it becomes difficult to pay attention to the people and things around me. I’ve been lucky to have sofa hunting and Caroline Maddox as distractions, but now I have the sofa and I’m starting to agree with Charlotte that Ava might be a lost cause, and where will that leave me? The answer is simple: It will leave me in too many moments exactly like this, lying down somewhere, my mind occupied by the sound of Morgan saying
I want you back
(which is not a difficult sentence to imagine because it’s already happened five times in real life), placing her hands around my waist and pulling me toward her, kissing me in that passionate way that says
I never thought I’d be able to kiss you again and now that I have you I’ll never let you go.

I’m absorbed by these thoughts when Morgan’s face appears above me. Next to hers is a woman’s I don’t recognize.

I sit up. “Isn’t it even more amazing than you could imagine?”

“It’s really cool,” Morgan says. “It’ll look great in close-ups.”

Even though she’s saying the right things, I almost wish she wasn’t. Another person might see this sitting in the sun on a Saturday morning in Los Angeles and think it’s just a sofa, a castoff from an estate sale, no more or less special than any other sofa. Morgan understands, though, that it is, in fact, more special.

“This is my friend Rebecca.”

“Hi, Rebecca.” I channel Charlotte, stand, extend my hand like a professional, trying not to wonder if Rebecca is in some way affiliated with vastness.

“Morgan’s been telling me about you,” Rebecca says.

“Oh.”

“Good things,” she says.

“Great.”

I’m too confused to say anything else. Is Morgan telling her about me because she’s her new girlfriend? Is she telling her how great I am out of pity?

“I’m sure you guys have things to do,” I say, grabbing one of the sofa’s gorgeous arms. I feel really young and really foolish and desperate. I wish I had a limitless supply of friends with trucks. I wish I didn’t need her. I wish I had called Charlotte instead so she could have facilitated a truck rental. That is Charlotte’s job, after all: facilitation. Why didn’t I let her do her job?

The three of us carry the sofa to the bed of Morgan’s blue truck and lift with all our strength. It slides in.

“I’ll follow you guys,” I say, and turn and get into my car before they can say anything else to me.

~

All the way to the lot, I try to think about life’s vast possibilities. Not as a means of self-torture, because I’m not that type of girl. But as a means of trying to get over Morgan. Life
is
vast. Many things
are
possible. Morgan was right about that. So even if she is dating Rebecca now, maybe the world isn’t necessarily over for me. There are still Ava Maddoxes to find and sets to create and girls to kiss and colleges to attend. It’s possible that someday I will hear a Patsy Cline song and the heartbreak will barely register. It will be some distant, buried feeling. I won’t remember how much it once hurt.

By the time we get to the lot I am resolving to make it on and off set without crying. I park closer to the entrance than I usually get to because hardly anyone is here, and I ignore Morgan’s and Rebecca’s residual laughter as they climb out of the truck. I take down the tailgate and start pulling out the sofa, which is unbelievably smooth and plush. And when we set it down in the music room, this room I’ve created, it becomes official: This is the perfect room, the perfect sofa, the perfect set for heartbreak.

Morgan stands back and looks, but Rebecca walks all around it, paying attention to the sheet music and picture frames and the posters and trophies and rugs.

“You did this yourself?” She touches the top of the music stand.

I nod.

“The sofa really does suit the room. It feels authentic. How did you find it?”

“I looked for a long time,” I say. “I went to fifty-two garage sales and sixteen estates.”

“I’m sure you saw a lot of nice sofas, then.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But I knew what I wanted.”

Rebecca turns to Morgan and smiles a smile that says something. It isn’t a language I’m privy to, but it doesn’t seem like pity, so I don’t let it get to me.

“I’m going to call Theo,” she tells Morgan. “Really nice to meet you,” she says to me. She looks me in the eye. She shakes my hand again. I notice that she’s older than Morgan by at least a few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

She goes outside and I ask, “Who’s Theo?”

“Her boyfriend,” Morgan says. “Why?”

“No reason,” I say, looking into her face for the first time today. She looks back at me. I can tell that she likes what she’s seeing.

“Want to see what I’ve been working on?” she asks, gesturing to the far side of the set, where she’s been building the little brother’s room.

I pull out my phone; it’s one thirty.

“Wish I could,” I say, “but I have to meet Charlotte at the library.”

She laughs like she knows I’m playing hard to get, and I have to admit that it feels good to turn her down.

~

At 4:46, with Charlotte at the machine next to me scouring the
Los Angeles Times
, I find Caroline Maddox’s obituary in the
Long Beach Press-Telegram
.

Her name appears next to a small, grainy photograph.

“Char,” I say, and there must be something in the way I say it that tells her I’ve found it, because she sighs and says, “Finally.”

She scoots her chair closer to me. We read together.

Caroline Rose Maddox passed away on October 7, 1996. Born in Beverly Hills in 1974, she had a lifelong dream of being an actress. She had small parts in dozens of films, including
The Restlessness
, directed by Scott Bennings, in which she played a waitress in the climactic scene. In addition to acting, Caroline was a gifted gardener and a compassionate, loyal friend. She is survived by her four-month-old daughter, her best friend, Tracey Wilder, and the hundreds of people whose lives she made brighter by her presence in them.

“This is really sad,” I say.

“The acting stuff?”

“All of it. That she died, I guess. And the acting.”

“We all die,” Charlotte says.

“Well, yeah.”

“Sorry. It’s just that the acting part seems the worst. I mean, she was an extra. Her character didn’t even have a name but it was her greatest accomplishment.”

“Hopefully, she was proud of it,” I say. “We should find the movie.
The Restlessness
? I haven’t even heard of it.”

Charlotte gets out her laptop and transcribes the obituary, word for word.

“Ava’s name isn’t even in it,” I say. I read it again. “Who do you think wrote it?”

Charlotte bites her lip. “I’d assume Tracey Wilder,” she says. “She’s the only person mentioned by name.”

“Hey,” I say. “We should search for Ava Wilder. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? If I had a kid and I died, you’d adopt her, right?”

“I think your parents or Toby would probably—”

“But if I didn’t have parents or a brother. If Clyde Jones was my dad but you didn’t even know it. If, for all you knew, I had no one but you. You’d adopt her, right?”

“Of course,” she says, starting a search for Ava Wilder.

Three in the entire US. One in Leona Valley, a town that borders the desert.

We stare at the screen.

“Search for Tracey,” I say.

Charlotte’s hands fly across the keyboard.

Twenty-one Tracey Wilders in the US. Charlotte starts to scroll down the list and I see it before she does.

“Oh my God,” I say, and Charlotte gasps when she sees it: Tracey Wilder, Leona Valley, California. Next to her name is a phone number.

“Let’s call her.”

“Tracey or Ava?” Charlotte asks.

“Ava,” I say. “Definitely. Clyde wanted the letter to go to Caroline, but he said she could give the money to Ava. Tracey has nothing to do with it.”

We gather all of our stuff and Charlotte returns the microfilm to Joel-the-cute-librarian and we walk fast toward the exit.

“You call,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says, “but let’s get in the car so it’ll be quiet.”

Down in the garage we can’t get service, so I have to drive up to the street; and even though Charlotte’s ability to have a successful phone conversation in no way requires my full attention, I pull into a loading zone because I’m too nervous to drive.

She dials the number and I lean in close enough to hear a boy’s voice say hello.

“Hi,” she says. “My name is Charlotte. Is Ava home, by any chance?”

There is a pause, and then the kid says, “No, she isn’t.”

“Would you mind taking a message?”

“Ava’s, um. . . I mean, I can? But I don’t know when she’d get it.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says.

“She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Is there another way to reach her? Another number?”

“I don’t really know where she is,” he says.

Charlotte bites her lip.

He says, “I can take your number, and if I talk to her I’ll give it to her, but I don’t know when she’ll get it.”

“Okay,” Charlotte says, and she leaves him her number.

“I’ll give it to her. If she calls, I mean.”

“Okay,” Charlotte says again. I can tell she doesn’t want to hang up and I don’t want her to either.

“Bye,” the kid says.

She doesn’t say anything, but soon there’s a click.

And now it’s just Charlotte and me, illegally parked in downtown Los Angeles, all of the answers lost in the vastness.

Chapter Five

On Monday, I go straight to the room Morgan’s been working on. I can play hard to get only for so long. Really, I am easy to get. And I keep thinking of how she drove all the way to Pasadena to pick up the sofa, and how she’s been saying nice things to Rebecca-who-has-a-boyfriend about me, and how she wants to show me this space she’s been working on, because she cares about her work and knows that I also care because we are aligned in this way among many others.

Her back is to me when I walk into the room. She’s putting up wallpaper, sponging the corners of a panel to smooth it out.