Everything Leads to You

She wants to cause damage. She wants her mother to come back from her knitting group to a smashed-in window and a house torn apart.

I don’t know enough about the history of Ava and Tracey to decide exactly how I feel about this, but the way I feel doesn’t seem important at the moment. Nor does keeping a few boxes in order when the rest of them are getting smashed under Ava’s boots as she stands to pull more down.

So I stop trying to be careful.

“I’ll hand them to you,” I say, and she nods. I take down box after box and she pours everything out: old mittens and scarves and novels and CDs and videotapes. So many papers and photographs and envelopes. It could take weeks to go through everything.

When all the boxes are out of the closet, we sit on our knees on the rose-colored carpet, surrounded by rose-patterned wallpaper, and sift through all of Tracey’s private possessions. We toss the clothes and books and trinkets onto Tracey’s impeccably made bed until all that remains are papers and folders full of more papers and letters with different addresses.

Ava grabs a couple boxes and says, “Just put it all in here. You’re right, it has to be with this old stuff.”

I say, “Everything?”

“We don’t have time to go through it all.”

“The letters, too?”

“Yes,” she says.

She’s picking up handfuls of papers and dropping them in her box. I watch her tear through a few stacks, discarding some papers and dropping others in the boxes, until she opens a green folder and freezes. She doesn’t look at me, but I can tell: She’s found it.

I can’t see the paper, but she isn’t trying to hide it from me either. She takes two sheets from the folder and sets them on the bed: Tracey’s and Jonah’s birth certificates. Then she crosses the room and puts the folder into her purse.

I expect the discovery to end our business here, but Ava comes back and continues to fill boxes with Tracey’s photographs and letters.

I stare at the piles on the carpet. When I finally look up at Ava, she’s crying silently, still working fast. She can feel me watching her, I guess, because after a couple of minutes she says, “I don’t know anything about my own life.”

Pushing away how wrong this feels, I help her pack everything she wants to take.

After we’re finished we run our first boxes outside and drop them by the car, then return for our final two boxes.

On our way out of the house, I say, “Don’t you want to get any of your old stuff? Like, from your room?”

I know that if I left home in a hurry, there would be dozens of things I would miss. I want to see where she lived and slept and did her homework. I still can’t place her in this house.

“I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

She doesn’t answer me. She just shakes her head.

Even though it’s dangerously close to eight o’clock, we go out the front door. I’m behind her and I move to close it but she says, “Leave it open,” so I do.

A few people are out on the street. A man two doors down is watering his lawn but we don’t look at him and he doesn’t seem to notice us.

I do the unlocking as fast as I can and we throw the boxes into the backseat. I feel like Thelma and Louise without the husband and the boyfriend. Like Bonnie and Clyde without the guns and the murder. It’s a hot night and it’s still bright outside and as I turn on the car Ava rolls down her window and we pull away as if we’ve done nothing unusual.

~

“Charlotte is going to freak out when I tell her about this,” I say.

Now that it’s over, I’m shaking. Ava sees my hands.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m fine. That was just crazy. I can’t believe we did that.”

I’m stopped at a stop sign a few blocks away from Tracey’s house and since no one else is on the road around us, I allow myself to just sit for a few breaths, until they come easily again. And, soon, they do.

The heat lingers but the light is fading fast. And even though I’ve just trashed a woman’s house, allowed her front door to be left wide open, aided in the theft of her possessions, I feel like I’ve fulfilled a responsibility. I chose to pursue Clyde’s letter. I could have listened to Charlotte and handed it off to the estate sale manager, but I didn’t. Maybe I knew from the beginning that it was going to complicate my life somehow.

And here Ava is, right next to me, thanking me with every glance she shoots in my direction.

It’s simple: She makes the uncertainty worth it.

I take my foot off the brake and head in the direction of the hills.

“Turn right here,” Ava tells me, softly. “There’s one more place I want to go.”

I let her direct me, wind up a hill, park under a tree near a cherry orchard. When we get out of the car, Ava hops over the fence. I stand on the other side, facing her.

“It’s cherry season,” she says. “Have you ever eaten cherries right off the tree?”