Everything Leads to You

A silent minute passes, and then she gets out of the car.

I watch her try to unlock the front door but she’s having trouble. She keeps looking at her keys and trying again. Then she leaves the front door, grabs the nearest pot of pink flowers, and walks to the side of the house. I can’t see her anymore, but I hear a crash and a shattering, and that’s when I get nervous. Because being a getaway driver for a girl who just wants to avoid her mother is one thing; it takes on another meaning when actual breaking and entering is involved.

I wonder if I should start the car, just in case we have to move fast. I pull Ava’s name up on my phone so I can call her immediately, trying not to look away from the street as I do it.

I don’t know from which direction Tracey would come.

It’s difficult to keep watch in two opposite directions at one time, but I do my best.

A slam comes from the house.

It’s Ava, walking out the front door. She cuts across the lawn, empty-handed.

“I need help,” she says at the window. “I can’t find anything.”

And I thought my heart rate was already dangerously high.

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to look with me. There’s so much shit everywhere. I can’t go through it all.”

“What about watching for Tracey?”

“She won’t come. I was being paranoid. She’s had the knitting circle every Thursday for years. For half my life. Come on!” She starts back toward the door and I swear, this girl must be magical because this is not the sort of thing I do.

And yet, moments later, I am standing inside Tracey’s house.

“Let’s look here first,” Ava says, and crosses the carpet to the area of the living room with a dining room table and an armoire. I follow her more slowly because I’m standing in the house where Ava lived until a year ago and it would be impossible for me not to at least glance at what’s inside. Not much light filters in through the slats of the shutters, but even after Ava flips on the chandelier that hangs low over the table, the room is hardly lit. Wood-paneled walls surround us, adorned with careful paintings of landscapes and animals. I step closer and Ava verifies my hunch.

“Paint by numbers. Tracey loves the kind of art that comes with instructions.”

The table is covered with an impeccably ironed yellow tablecloth. A ceramic vase sits in the middle, full of paper flowers.

“These are actually really pretty,” I say, touching a red paper petal.

“Thanks,” she says, looking down at them. “I made those. They were supposed to be a peace offering, I guess, but she never put them out when I lived here.”

“Maybe she put them out because she misses you.”

She turns away.

“I don’t think so.”

She kneels on the carpet at the base of a giant armoire and gets to business, pulling the drawers until they all jut out, overflowing with papers that flutter and envelopes that crash to the floor.

“Look at all of this,” she says. “Junk mail. Like, five years’ worth of junk mail. Shit.” She buries her face in her hands.

“What happened at the door?” I ask. “Did you bring the wrong keys?”

“No,” Ava says. “I guess she changed the locks.”

“Okay.” I imagine Charlotte standing with us, taking over. “We need to be strategic about this,” I say.

Ava looks up at me and nods.

“Where are all of the places we should look? Show me.”

“Well, this is the first one.”

I say, “Let’s forget about this. We can come back later if we don’t find it, but I don’t think it would be in with the junk mail.”

“There’s more than junk—”

“Did you have this before you moved here?”

“No, she got it a few years ago.”

“So your birth certificate is older. She would have brought it with her when you guys moved here. It wouldn’t make sense to find a new place for it so many years later.”

Ava stands up.

“Her room,” she says, and leads me down the hallway into a room covered in rose wallpaper with a matching country-style bedroom set. If I had more time I would take pictures of it and use it as inspiration for part of George’s house. We head straight to the closet, though, where Tracey’s clothing dangles from wire hangers above a sea of boxes and below a shelf stacked high with even more boxes.

“Looks like Tracey hates throwing stuff away,” I say.

Ava nods.

“I wish these were labeled,” I say.

“That would be nice.” She laughs, and even though it’s a tense laugh, it feels good to hear it. It makes me hopeful.

We grab boxes and start going through them. I’m trying to be neat about it: removing the things one by one until nothing is left, putting the pile back in, closing the box back up. Ava, however, is dumping the contents on the floor and scattering them all over, leaving everything everywhere, reaching for another box. She’s moving faster than I am, but I don’t think speed is the point.