Everything Leads to You

“Tracey hasn’t told you?” I ask.

“I used to ask her a lot of questions but I gave up. She’s really into self-improvement. Like reinventing herself? That sort of thing. She says there isn’t any use dwelling on the past, so it’s as if all of it—Caroline, my life as a little kid—disappeared.”

“That’s intense,” I say.

She still looks on the verge of tears but she laughs anyway.

“Intense is a good word to describe my mother. Everything I know about Caroline I had to figure out by myself, but I couldn’t ever find much.” She forces a smile. “I guess I should have gone to the library.”

“I typed up Caroline’s obituary,” Charlotte says. “Do you want to read it?”

Ava says yes, so Charlotte gets up to find the computer. I study the TV screen, where Clyde is frozen in profile against a bleak landscape, and say, “You look like him.”

“I kept thinking that when we were watching. My mom and my brother, they look so much alike. I’ve never looked like anyone.”

“Your brother?” I ask. “Is that who answered the phone when we called?”

She nods. “He’s Tracey’s son. She was married for a few years to this guy from her church. It didn’t last.”

Charlotte places her laptop on the coffee table, and Ava slips down onto the rug to read about Caroline.

“She was in movies?” she says when she’s finished.

“It sounds like she was mostly an extra,” I say. “But yes.”

“I had no idea.” Her eyes well up again but I can see her blinking, fighting it. After a little while she says, “Maybe that’s why Tracey never wanted me to act.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” I say.

Together, Charlotte and I tell Ava everything we’ve learned about Clyde and Caroline. Every question we’ve asked, every answer we’ve gotten. She loves hearing about little Ava, and laughs over my impressions of Frank and Edie, but her face gets serious when we get to what they said about “the drugs and the men and that baby,” and it all feels different now, that “that baby” is the girl sitting here with us, learning all of these secrets from her past for the first time.

And then, in the middle of everything, when it seems that soon we’ll resume our movie and continue the night, Ava says, “The clock.”

She points at Toby’s sunburst.

“Is that time right?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Then I have to go.”

I look at Charlotte, hoping she’ll have a plan for what we’ll do next, why we’ll need to see one another again, but Ava is already halfway across the living room.

Her eyes are still pink, her face soft from crying, but when she pauses in the doorway to say good-bye, she looks like Clyde Jones—the cocky, crooked smile, the charming glimmer in her eye.

“Thanks,” she says, “for finding me. Not everyone would have done all that.” And then she disappears into the night.





Chapter Seven



The next morning, I knock on the ajar door of Ginger’s office.

She looks up from her desk, not terribly thrilled to see me.

“I’ve come to apologize,” I tell her, and she nods and waves me in.

I have a speech prepared—Charlotte and I rehearsed over coffee this morning—and I recite it. It involves a little bit of groveling, a little bit of flattery, some self-deprecation, and a fair amount of regret. It ends with a concession: “Though it isn’t what I had envisioned for the room, it is a beautiful piece of furniture for such an important scene, and I’m sure that it will have mass appeal without sacrificing style.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.”

“I do,” I say. “I also have a couple of changes I would like to make to the rest of the set in order to make this new direction cohesive.”

“I’m listening,” she says.

“First of all, I don’t think the poster works anymore. Now that it’s a more polished room, I think we should go for more professional-looking wall art. I was thinking of this framed Miles Davis poster.” I show her an image on my phone.

“Yes, I approve. What else?”

“The music stand,” I say, trying not to sound bitter. “I know we both love it, but—”

“The music stand stays. Emi, I know you feel like I changed your entire concept for the room but I didn’t. We can strike a balance between stylized and naturalistic here. You can pull that off. Take the afternoon to make the changes you want, and I’ll go down to look at the end of the day.”