Everything Leads to You

“Yeah, she seems really calm about it,” Charlotte says.

We choose A Long Time Till Tomorrow because it’s quintessential Clyde. Lowlands is my favorite but Ava can get to that one later, after she has at least a basic knowledge of his career so she can appreciate the ways in which it departs from his usual role. I can hear bits of her conversation. Toby’s place is small, and she isn’t trying to be secretive.

“I’ll drive us,” she’s saying. “Yes, really. Okay, see you in the kitchen at one fifteen.”

She’s obviously talking to someone she knows well, but she isn’t saying anything about what she just discovered. If it were me, I would be calling everyone. I would be ecstatic, but all she seems to be is curious.

She walks back in and sits down.

“Sorry,” she says. “I had to call my friend Jamal. I’m driving us to work later.”

“Where do you work?” I ask.

“Home Depot,” she says.

“Really?”

“Is that weird?” she asks.

“I just can’t picture you in one of those uniforms, or, like, helping people cut the right-size pieces of Masonite.”

“We work the early-morning stock shift. We don’t help customers. It’s an okay job and Jamal’s my best friend, so that helps.”

I nod, and Charlotte asks, “Have you known each other for a long time?”

“Almost a year. But we were best friends after barely a week of knowing each other. Things like that happen fast when you don’t have anybody else.”

I’m struck by the simple truth in that statement, but agreeing with her would be dishonest. I can’t even pretend to know what being so alone would feel like. And she doesn’t look like she’s waiting for a response anyway. She’s made herself comfortable in the chair, watching the screen, waiting for the film to begin.

“All right,” I say, back to business. “We’re starting with A Long Time Till Tomorrow. This is Clyde in his first lead role. 1953. Lee Dodson is the director. This is the movie that made Clyde Jones, Clyde Jones, if you know what I mean.”

She nods.

“Ready?” I say.

“Ready.”

I press play and the twangy music starts. Charlotte sits on the white rug, Ava on the orange chair, me on the sofa. The first couple scenes play. Charlotte laughs at the stilted dialogue and I examine the sets, which are spare and rustic.

And then, twelve minutes into the movie, Ava starts sobbing.

~

She cries for a while, knees pulled up to her chest, these sobs that sound like she will never stop.

Charlotte and I keep offering her blankets and mugs of mint tea but she keeps telling us she’ll be okay.

“Should we call your mom?” I ask Charlotte, because her mother is a therapist and speaks in a soft and coaxing voice that I will never be able to successfully imitate.

“If she doesn’t stop, yeah,” she says.

But, eventually, Ava does stop.

“This is so embarrassing,” she says, forcing a laugh. “How stupid.”

“No,” I say. “Not at all.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Charlotte asks her.

“I don’t even know where I would start,” she says, and I can tell Charlotte’s ready to let it go but I’m not. It’s not just that I’m nosy—which, admittedly, I am—it’s that I believe in this kind of thing. If you find a letter in a famous man’s house, and that letter ends up belonging to his daughter who died before she got a chance to get it, and you spend days chasing false leads in search of the granddaughter, and when you do find her, she isn’t where she’s supposed to be so you resign yourself to an answerless future, but then (suddenly, amazingly) the answer appears in your living room, sobbing on a bright orange chair, you don’t just let it go.

So I tell Ava, “We have time. Start anywhere,” and she finally accepts the mug of mint tea and begins.

“I ran away about a year ago,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“A few reasons. But my mom—Tracey—was the main one. She made it impossible for me to stay.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell us about it.

“You can go ahead,” Charlotte says. “So you’re away from home.”

She nods. “At first I was living in my car, but then eventually I found a shelter downtown.”

Charlotte asks, “Is that where you live now?”

Ava nods.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“No, it’s fine. The counselors are okay. It’s just this big house with a lot of teenagers living there, and we have chores and they help us find jobs. It’s where I met Jamal. It’s fine. It’s just that I’ve been spending all this time trying to adjust to living without a family, and now you guys show me this letter, and suddenly I’m watching my grandfather in a movie. And I never really thought about my grand-parents at all—I just knew they were dead—and I don’t know anything at all about who Caroline was or what her life was like.”

She takes a sip of tea, stares down into her mug.

“I know so little about where I come from,” she says.