Everything Leads to You

“Our treat,” Charlotte adds.

When the waiter leaves, Ava says, “I’ll at least get the tip.”

Char and I try to shrug it off.

“No. I insist,” she says.

“So you had something you wanted to show us?” Charlotte asks.

I hadn’t even remembered that part of why we were here, but now, as Ava nods and reaches into her purse, I’m dying to know what it is.

“It’s just a photograph,” she says. “I realized after I texted that I should have told you that. You might have thought it was something really big, but . . .”

I reach out my hand and she places the photo in my palm. Charlotte leans closer to me to look.

“It’s my mother,” Ava says.

“Caroline,” I say.

Looking at the photograph, Caroline becomes real in a way she wasn’t when she was just a name on a letter found in a dead man’s mansion. She’s wearing her hair similarly to the way Ava is now, one wisp of it falling over her face. Her style is perfect, effortless nineties grunge: ripped-up jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a camisole, its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her arm is a blur of motion, as if she’s about to push the strands of hair out of her face. She’s outside in the sun on what looks like a street in Long Beach. She is fair and red haired and green eyed, caught in an everyday moment, casual and happy.

“She’s gorgeous,” Charlotte says, and it’s true.

“It’s amazing how much you guys resemble one another,” I say. “You and Caroline and Clyde. Those are some strong genes.”

I stop there. I don’t ask the thing I want to, which is how it feels to see such a strong biological connection when none of them really knew one another. I wonder what Ava feels when she looks at this photograph, whether there is any recognition, anything nestled in a faraway memory that registers this woman as more than someone who shares Ava’s features. If the declaration It’s my mother is only factual, or if, somehow, she can still feel it.

“I’ve been wondering,” Ava says. “When you met the old people at the apartment . . .” She reaches out for the photograph and I hand it back to her. She studies it and then takes a breath. “Did they happen to tell you how she died?”

“No,” I say. “They didn’t.”

Charlotte adds, “Just that they found her in the apartment.”

Ava nods. She puts the photograph back into an envelope, places the envelope inside a book, and then zips the book up into her purse.

“I went through this phase when I was five,” she says. “That’s when I remember Tracey really changing, pulling away from me. I felt like my life was suddenly all wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about how Caroline might have died.”

The waiter arrives with another guy behind him, placing fries and deviled eggs and bruschetta onto the table. He asks if we need anything else and we say no and I hope that Ava will continue when he leaves.

Charlotte and I don’t say anything, and Ava resumes her story.

“For some reason, I always pictured her in a lavender dress, even though I’ve only seen this one photo of her. Sometimes I imagined pill bottles near her. Sometimes a bullet wound. Sometimes there was no kind of evidence, and it was like she just curled up on the carpet and went to sleep.”

She takes her napkin and spreads it out onto her lap. She looks out the window.

“I always imagined it with carpet,” she says. “I guess I wanted it to be softer for her.”

“I still think it’s strange that Tracey wouldn’t tell you things,” I say. “It seems so wrong to make you guess.”

“We got in so many fights over it. For a while I thought it might be because she felt like she was my mother, and maybe I was hurting her feelings by bringing up Caroline.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Charlotte says.

“No. I mean, maybe it was when I was really little. She used to say this thing all the time: ‘Don’t do this to us.’ She’d say it to motel clerks or landlords when they tried to kick us out, or to her bosses when they told her she couldn’t bring me with her to work anymore.”

Charlotte frowns. “What a terrible thing to have to say.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t feel terrible. I guess I just focused on the ‘us’ part. It was never scary when I was little, even when we had to spend the night in the car or something, because we were always together. Even when she had boyfriends, she took me on all their dates. If the guys weren’t nice to me we just left.”