Everything Leads to You

We find the house, small and blue, with succulents growing in the front yard. We park and unbuckle our seat belts but neither of us makes any move to get out of the car. I lean back. The windshield reflects the tree above us: branches and leaves and the road through the glass.

“If she’s our age,” Char says, “let’s just ask if her mother’s name was Caroline. If she says yes, then she knows more of the story than we do, and we can just tell her we have something that belongs to her, give her the envelope, and let her know that she can call us if she has any questions.”

“Then just leave?” I ask.

She nods. “And if she says no, that Caroline was not her mother’s name, then we should just thank her and go.”

“But what if she says no because she doesn’t know about Caroline, or because she doesn’t know who we are or why we’re asking? What if we think we have the wrong Ava when really she’s the right one?”

Charlotte bites her lip again.

Finally, she says, “I don’t know. We’ll just have to see what happens today and go from there.”

She opens her car door and then I open mine, and I follow her up the walk to the door. Charlotte knocks and we both wait until we hear a kid’s voice from the other side, asking who is it.

“Charlotte and Emi,” Charlotte says. She looks at me for help, but what else are we supposed to say?

“We’re looking for Ava?” I try, but it comes out a question.

The door cracks open and a little girl peers through before pushing it open wider. She has long dark hair in pigtails and a quizzical expression.

“Here I am,” she says.

“You’re Ava?” Charlotte asks.

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“Eight.”

“Ten years too young,” Charlotte murmurs.

“Sorry,” I say. “Looks like we have the wrong Ava.”

The little Ava shrugs.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Bye.”

The door shuts.

“Okay,” Charlotte says, as we turn and head down the steps, back to the car waiting in the shade. “We have to go to the library.”

“The library?”

“There are things we just can’t find online, no matter how much money we waste.”

“But really? You think we can find answers in the library?” I’m skeptical, but Charlotte has great faith in the collection and preservation of things, and if she wants to go to the library I will go with her.

~

It turns out that 1995 is ancient history. So ancient, in fact, that we have to slide brown sheets of film displaying newspaper obituaries into a primitive machine, and then drop in quarters to make the screen light up. With the help of a cute, tattooed librarian named Joel who makes her blush as he leans over her to tinker with the machine, Charlotte starts with October 1 in the Los Angeles Times. Joel sets me up on a machine next to Charlotte and gives me the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which, I’m quick to point out, is obviously the inferior paper.

“It’s not even a paper anymore,” I say once Joel is back behind the information desk. “I’m clearly the sidekick in this mystery. I’ll selflessly devote myself to the Herald-Examiner while you find the answer in the Times and get all the glory.”

Charlotte smiles and changes slides.

I’ve only gotten through October 5 by the time my first quarter runs out and the screen goes dark.

“I thought libraries were supposed to provide information free of charge,” I whisper.

Charlotte ignores me. I search and search forever. There should really be a more efficient way of doing this.

“Why do we have to search by date? We should be able to search by name.”

“Newspapers don’t work that way,” Charlotte says, and I can tell she’s getting tired of me.

An hour later, she’s made it through October, and she sighs, defeated.

“My mom wants me home tonight,” she says. “She’s been complaining about me staying at Toby’s all the time before leaving for college.”

“That’s understandable,” I say. My parents haven’t been too worried about it, but I’m staying in LA for college, living at home to save money, while Charlotte’s really leaving. “I’ll see if my dad can help us out.”

Charlotte appears skeptical. “I feel like we’re hitting a wall,” she says. “I don’t know if we’re going to find her.”

“You feel that way because you just read through hundreds of obituaries. It’s depressing. But we’ll find her,” I say. “We just need to approach this from a new angle.”

Charlotte’s mom picks her up, but I keep searching, loading film and popping quarters into the machine. I make it through September and then I am finished with nothing to show for my patience and Charlotte’s faith in antiquity. I still have my studio work to do, so I wander over to Joel and ask him for today’s paper, which, thankfully, is in its normal paper form. I take a seat at a long, shiny table and start the weekly task of mapping out my Saturday morning garage-and estate-sale schedule.