Everything Leads to You (8 page)

“Okay,” she says.

“Good. I’m broke, too, but there’s some stuff we can cook at the apartment.”

~

Back at Toby’s, we cook dinner. Either the emotional strain from the day has caught up to us, or we’ve allowed ourselves to become so hungry that all we can think of is food, because our conversational skills are reduced to this:

“Should I add garlic to this?”

“Did you wash the lettuce?”

“How old do you think this cheese is?”

“Is there too much garlic in this?”

Finally, Charlotte lifts the plates and I follow her outside to the patio, to the warm night air and the
ranchera
music from next door.

Toby’s neighbors are having a loud conversation in Spanish, shouting and laughing, and I wish I could follow but I took French in high school.

“What are they talking about?” I finally ask.

“Hairstyles,” Charlotte says.

“What about them?”

“Whether someone’s hairstyle is out of fashion or not.”

“Is it?”

“The loud guy thinks so. The woman with the softer voice thinks it’s timeless.”

The loud guy says something especially loudly and they all laugh.

I smile. They sound so happy.

“What did he say?”

“I didn’t understand it.”

“Oh.”

“Why aren’t you eating?”

A moment ago I was ravenous but now I can’t imagine taking a bite. The heartache comes in waves and this particular one is the enveloping kind.

“I’ll save it for later,” I say.

“The girl or the couch?” Charlotte asks.

“Honestly?” I say. “The girl.”

Charlotte shakes her head and eats her pasta while I move mine around on my plate. She doesn’t say anything but it’s fine with me because I wouldn’t be able to even fake interest in anything Charlotte might want to talk about. I keep wondering who Morgan is going on a date with, and what this girl has that I don’t. Her own apartment? The legal right to drink?

“That girl is so—”

“Just stop,” I say. “It’s not what I need right now. I don’t care how terrible she is. I don’t care that you hate her.”

“Okay,” Char says, her voice soft. “We’ll leave how I feel about Morgan out of it.”

“Thank you.”

“But I do have something to say.”

I force a bite into my mouth. Force myself to chew.

“It’s over,” Charlotte says.

I stare at her. I swallow.

“Um,” I say.

“It’s time for you to accept it. She was your first love. That’s a huge deal. And I know how much she’s meant to you, and that it isn’t easy to accept that it’s over. But it is. It’s over.”

Tears rush in without warning.

“Okay, I take it back,” I say. “I’d rather just hear about how much you hate her.”

“Em,” she says. “You did a really good job of loving her. You put up with all her bullshit. You were a really good girlfriend. And now it’s time for you to find someone who will love you back.”

She scoots closer to me and grabs my hand. She waits for me to look at her.

“I’m sorry I made you cry,” she says. “But you really need to hear this.”

I nod.

“It’s over,” she says, once more. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I whisper, but I don’t really know what I’m agreeing to.

Charlotte stacks my plate on top of hers and moves them out of the way, but neither of us gets up. I could sit here in silence all night, which I’ll admit is rare for me. I don’t want to think about the fact that Morgan never loved me, even though I know that Charlotte is right. And I don’t want to think about the decisions I’ll inevitably have to make tomorrow. I’m caught between self-preservation and self-righteousness, between apologizing to Ginger and quitting. Neither option feels good. So I just want to listen to the sounds of the neighbors’ conversations and their lively music, all of these words I don’t understand.

~

Charlotte’s phone rings so she goes inside to answer it, and an especially good song comes on. I wish I knew what it was so I could find it again.

I hear Charlotte say hello.

And then I hear her say “Ava.”

I turn around and she’s wide-eyed, pointing to the phone pressed to her ear.

“Thanks for calling,” she says. “I know you don’t know me—”

She looks confused. “La Cienega Bakery?” she asks. “No, I don’t know anything about that.”

“Speakerphone!” I mouth to her and she nods and switches over.

A raspy voice says, “Oh, okay. I applied for a job there a while ago, so I thought . . . It doesn’t matter. So
who
are you?”

“I’m Charlotte. My friend Emi is here, too.”

“Hi,” I say.

“This might sound strange, but we have something that was meant to belong to Caroline Maddox.”

Ava is quiet on the other end, and I look down at the phone and see that it’s trembling in Charlotte’s hand.

“Caroline?” Ava finally repeats, her voice breaking on the question.

I say, “We got this letter for her, so we tried to find her but then found out that she died, so we’ve been just kind of connecting some dots, and eventually we found you—”

“You have a
letter
for
Caroline
?” Ava asks.

Charlotte says, “It’s kind of a long story. It would be better to talk in person, if that works for you.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Now?” Charlotte asks. “We’re just hanging out at our apartment.”

“In Venice,” I add.

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says. “Okay.”

I give her the address, and then we hang up.

I stare at Charlotte. She stares at me.

I scan the living room. Clyde Jones stuff is everywhere. Toby’s desktop computer screen is full of search windows for Caroline and Tracey and Ava, as is Charlotte’s laptop, resting open on the coffee table.

“Shit,” I say, and we begin closing screens and putting away Clyde Jones DVDs because neither of us wants to look like we’ve been collecting all the information there is to have about the girl who is about to walk through our door and possibly hang out for a while.

And somewhere in the frenzy of sweeping evidence and cleaning up our dinner dishes, the gravity of the moment captures me. I feel a camera panning across the room as if I’m watching us from a distance. A counter covered in garlic peels and cutting boards and bread crumbs. The door to the patio ajar. Two girls in a colorful, lived-in living room. They don’t know what’s coming, but one of them—the one with the faraway expression and the dark hair, the one whose eyes betray that she hasn’t been sleeping well—she has felt on the verge of something.

And when they hear a knock at the door, it’s this girl who crosses the room to answer it. She turns the knob, and here it is—like Clyde appearing on the horizon or emerging from the tall grass—a redhead in the doorway of a Venice courtyard apartment. A curious gaze, a tentative step inside. The curve of her mouth when she smiles, the raspy timbre of her voice when she says hello.

Chapter Six

As soon as I open the door I wish we’d had just a few more minutes, because Ava is standing in the doorway looking movie-star pretty, looking
Clyde Jones
pretty, and I am facing her in a shirt with a red tomato-sauce smear on the chest, my hair in a messy ponytail, realizing that in spite of all our planning I have no idea how to deliver the news we summoned her to hear.

“Hey. Come in,” I say, but I’m fighting the urge to tell her never mind.

Charlotte and I have involved ourselves in other people’s lives in a way that suddenly makes me uncomfortable. Like there was a
NO TRESPASSING
sign in front of a family’s driveway, and not only have we trespassed, but we’ve gone through their garage, opened all of their private boxes, rifled through their photo albums and diaries to discover dozens of secrets that were never meant to be revealed.

Ava is here, though, in the middle of Toby’s cozy living room, thanks to luck and fate and our will to find her. Charlotte is offering her the last of our Ethiopian iced tea and she is saying yes. She’s slipping a worn brown leather purse from over her shoulder and apologizing.

“What for?” Charlotte asks.

“I must have been difficult to get ahold of,” she says. “You must have tried hard.”

“It took us a while,” I say, pouring the tea into a little blue glass.

“Yeah,” she says. “Well, it’s been a strange year.”

She tries to say it casually, like her year has been just averagely strange, which doesn’t really fit with the kid on the phone who had no idea where she was or if she would ever be calling home again.

I hand her the glass. Her fingertips graze mine in the transfer.

She takes a sip of tea and looks at us, expectant. She wants answers, obviously, the reasons that we tracked her down, the information that we have. But all I can do is take her in because it’s uncanny, her resemblance to Clyde. Even more than the red hair and the green eyes, her features are like his: the slant of her cheekbones and her delicate nose, the slight crookedness of her smile as she looks quizzically at us. These are the features that, in spite of Clyde’s bravado, made him always a little bit vulnerable, made us always worry for him and hope that he would survive the shootouts and get the girl.

Ava pushes a strand of hair behind her ear and I notice that she’s even dressed a little bit like Clyde. Everything she has on looks vintage: brown leather boots and high-waisted denim shorts, a leather belt with a dulled brass buckle.

“This is really good,” Ava finally says, breaking our silence. “I’ve never had tea that tastes like this.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Charlotte replies, and I wonder if she’s been thinking the same things that I have. Between her gift for social interactions and my tendency to over-share, we don’t usually suffer through awkward silences like this. I try to pull myself together.

I say, “It’s Ethiopian, from this restaurant around the corner.” And then I launch into an explanation of Toby’s charm and this apartment and the request he’s made of us, and as I do, I can feel myself getting farther and farther from the reason we have her here with us right now. “He said we have to do something epic,” I say. “So if you have any ideas feel free to share them.”

I know that I’m going on about nothing of any importance to her but I can’t stop talking. Clyde Jones’s granddaughter is sitting in our kitchen and trying to downplay some kind of distress, something that’s kept her away from home for a long time.

I can still feel where her fingers brushed mine.

And we have a letter that is going to change her life.

“How did you connect Caroline to me?” she asks once I’ve stopped rambling.

“The library,” Charlotte says.

“The library?”

“I know, right? It was Charlotte’s idea.”

Charlotte says, “We found Caroline’s obituary in the newspaper, and it had Tracey Wilder’s name in it. Emi guessed that Tracey Wilder might be your mom? Your adoptive mom? That’s what we’ve been thinking.”

“Caroline and Tracey were best friends. Tracey adopted me when Caroline died. I was just a baby, though.”

Ava lifts her hands to her mouth and bites a short, unpolished nail. I notice the small freckles that dot her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She catches me staring at her and my eyes dart away. So stupid. I should have just smiled.

“So what is it that you have?” she asks. “For Caroline?”

I glance at Charlotte, hoping she’ll know how to take it from here. I’m not good at this at all. I’m so much better with imaginary people and their imaginary lives.

Charlotte says, “I really don’t know the best way to tell you this, so I’ll just show you what we found.”

She walks into the living room and takes the letter off the coffee table. I can’t even look at Ava, I’m so nervous. Charlotte gives her the envelope and Ava takes out the letter. I go sit on the sofa to wait. I would leave the apartment and walk around the block a few times if I could.

Ava is quiet for a long time, standing in the kitchen. I hear the pages rustling. She must read it several times. Charlotte comes to sit next to me but we don’t say anything.

Finally, I hear Ava walking over to us. She sits on Toby’s orange chair.

“Am I reading this right?”

Charlotte and I nod.

“Is this Clyde . . . ?”

“Jones,” I say. “Yes.”

“Clyde Jones was my grandfather?”

We nod again.

“I know that’s what it looks like but I just keep reading it over and over. There could be another explanation.”

“Yes,” Charlotte says. “There could be.”

“But everything leads to you,” I say. “All the names and the dates of everything.”

“Who’s Lenny?”

“We don’t know.”

Ava studies the letter again. “So Caroline’s mom died a long time ago, but her dad was alive all this time. I guess I always assumed that both of them had died, or else my mom would have told me about them.”

“Maybe Tracey never knew about Clyde,” I say.

“It’s possible,” she says. “How did you find this letter?”

We tell her all about ourselves and our jobs in the movies.

“Wait,” she says. “You design sets for real movies? How
old
are you?”

“We’re eighteen,” I say.

“I don’t design sets,” Charlotte says. “I make phone calls and run errands. Emi is the genius.”

I roll my eyes even though I really love compliments.

“But even if you’re a genius,” Ava says, “isn’t that a really big job? People go to school for that, right?”

“I don’t technically design them,” I say. “My name probably won’t even be in the credits. My brother got me this unpaid internship a couple years ago and I’ve just sort of worked my way up from there. I’m still an intern and I barely make minimum wage, but my boss let me submit a proposal for this sixteen-year-old’s room and she really loved it, and now they’re just sort of into me for some reason, so I have a next job lined up, too.”

I decide to leave out the unfortunate events of this afternoon. Even I know this night should be about Ava and not about me, and I’m hesitant to mention that her grandfather (admittedly without his knowledge) took part in the destruction of my room and, indirectly, may lead to the early demise of my career, too, if Ginger decides to blacklist me for talking to her the way that I did.