Everything Leads to You

If Ava Garden Wilder were the star of her own film, the scene during which she watches her dead mother in a minor movie role would look something like this: Ava sits in a small, dim room alone. She sits close to the screen, and when her mother appears, she turns up the volume to better hear her voice. When the scene is over, she rewinds the tape and then her mother reappears. She touches the screen and it’s a poor substitute for the woman she wishes she knew. She hits rewind, then play. Rewind, then play. Everything is cast blue by the TV screen; her face is tear soaked.

But this is not a movie, this is life, and I hear Ava say, “Actually it’s fine with me if you both want to watch with us.”

“What movie is it?” Dad asks.

“It’s called The Restlessness.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Scott Bennings. I haven’t seen it since it came out in—what?—’92? ’93?”

“Do you know everything?” Jamal asks.

“Don’t encourage him,” I say.

Charlotte asks, “Are you sure, Ava?”

I explain to my parents that Caroline Maddox, Ava’s biological mother, has a small part in the movie.

“A waitress,” Ava says. “In an important scene. I don’t want to watch it alone. It’s fine if it’s emotional for me, right? It doesn’t need to be a private thing.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom says. “Feel completely at home. You just let it out if it hurts. Gary and I are honored—honored—that you will include us in this moment.”

Dad is nodding in concerned agreement, but I see something else flash behind his eyes.

“Let me guess what you’re thinking, Dad. You’re thinking: I’m about to see Clyde Jones’s daughter in a movie, and not a single one of my colleagues or a single film critic knows that she’s Clyde’s daughter, or even that Clyde Jones had any children.”

Dad furrows his brow.

“Of course not,” he says. “I’m thinking about Ava and how important this must be to her.”

“You can be thinking about both,” Ava says, smiling. “It’s okay.”

I have an urge to send Charlotte a secret text from across the room about how wonderful Ava is, but I don’t. My willpower has suddenly become stronger than I knew it ever could be.

“Okay,” Dad admits. “It’s both.”

We all carry our plates down my wide family-photo-lined hallway and into the den, which is basically a shrine to my parents’ eclectic interests. Where else can you find a framed flyer for a 1963 protest against the savage police beating of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer hanging directly next to a framed poster of Beverly Hills, 90210, signed by the entire cast of the 1993 season?

One of the few areas where my parents’ professional passions overlap, though, is music, most significantly the rise of West Coast gangsta rap. They can talk for hours about it, analyzing the evolution of music videos, from the low-budget Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre collaboration of Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, which celebrates Long Beach and Compton over a backdrop of humble house parties, to the opulent candlelight, champagne-filled set of 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted, released only three years later.

I turn on the VCR, Ava hands me the video, and soon the screen (which hangs on the wall flanked by giant original photographs of N.W.A and Tupac on the left and my parents many framed diplomas on the right), is playing the opening credits of The Restlessness.

Blue light and snow over Chicago. A jazzy song.

The story is pretty simple to follow. It’s all kind of a nod to the noir genre, with a mysterious loner protagonist trying to solve a murder mystery before the police do. The plot is fairly predictable but the tension in the den is high anyway, because we don’t know when Caroline Maddox will appear. All we know is that she’s a waitress in the pivotal scene, so we assume that she won’t be on-screen until the movie is at the very least half over.

Even though the wait is inevitable, no one eats much past five minutes in, and Ava doesn’t eat at all. No one moves or says anything, and as is the case with many of my ideas, I start to worry that coming over here was a bad one.

Ava and Jamal are sitting on a love seat, my parents and Charlotte on the couch. I’m alone in a chair where I can see them all through my peripheral vision, and everyone is stiff and nervous. So many things could go wrong. Maybe Caroline Maddox doesn’t even speak. Maybe we only see her from the neck down, a hand and arm refilling a coffee cup in the foreground while our moody detective broods at the counter. Or, even worse, what if we do see her and she’s a terrible actress? What if Ava is embarrassed and we all rush in to say Caroline wasn’t that bad but she can tell that we’re lying?

An hour and five minutes in, I begin to feel ill. I have to remind myself to breathe. I have no idea what’s going on in this movie, only that, at some point, the scene will change to the inside of a restaurant and I will implode.

And then, here it is:

The camera pans to the outside of a steakhouse, and suddenly we are in it. The detective sits in a booth alone, awaiting a blond woman who may or may not be his daughter.

“Can I get you a drink?” a woman’s voice asks, and the camera reveals Caroline Maddox.