Everything Leads to You

“Okay,” I say. “But we can watch while we wait.”


“As long as you don’t mind . . .” He picks up the remote and clicks the game back on.

“Can I ask you something else?” Ava says when a commercial comes on.

Frank nods.

“Where was she when you found her? What did she look like?”

“What did she look like?” Frank asks. “Well, sweetheart, I’m sorry to say, but she looked dead. I don’t know how else to describe her.”

“Was she in the living room?”

I brace myself for the answer, remembering what she told us at the Marmont, that she imagined carpet.

“No,” he says. His eyes are watery. “She was on the bathroom floor with a needle in her arm. There was nothing pretty about it. I’m sorry.”

A moment later the door opens and Edie steps inside dressed in a red suit and flat black shoes, her hair curly and stiff and much closer to brown than to purple.

“What?” she says, squinting to see us all. “We have company? Oh, it’s Emi and Charlotte. You came back to see us! And who did you bring with you this time?”

“Sweetheart,” Frank says. “This is the baby. Caroline’s baby.”

Edie blinks. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh, dear, really? Come. Let me see you.”

Ava crosses the room to stand with Edie in a patch of sun.

Edie touches her hand to her heart, and then reaches out and takes Ava’s hand between her own.

“You poor thing,” she says.

Ava tries to smile but it doesn’t last.

“Frank was telling us about the day you found her,” Charlotte says.

“It was a terrible day,” Edie nods. “But look at you now. So pretty.”

“A terrible day,” Frank echoes.

“Yes,” Edie says, her gaze never leaving Ava’s face. “But look. You grew up anyway.”





Chapter Sixteen



My phone rings at 2:23 a.m., a Los Angeles number I don’t recognize. I pick up, heart in my throat, unprepared for the terrible news that might come.

“Hey, it’s Jamal.”

My mind was swarming with police officers telling me something happened to my parents, hospital receptionists saying, Come immediately.

He says, “Sorry to call so late. It’s just Ava—is she with you?”

“No,” I say. “She isn’t at the shelter?”

He hesitates.

“She got kicked out tonight,” he says.

“Why?”

“She was upset and . . . I don’t know, I don’t think I should get into it.”

“Should we try to find her?”

Charlotte’s up now, standing in the doorway.

“What’s going on?” she asks. I tell her what Jamal told me, and then I offer to pick him up.

“Oh, man,” he says. “Things around here are tense right now.”

Charlotte cocks her head at me, waiting for an answer.

I shrug, but then Jamal says, “Whatever, fuck it, come get me.” He gives me the address. “Don’t come to the door,” he adds. “Just pull up and I’ll run down to you.”

Five minutes later Charlotte and I have traded our pajama shorts for jeans, grabbed my car keys and our purses and are pulling out of Toby’s driveway headed for downtown Los Angeles. The streets are deserted in Venice and the freeway traffic is nonexistent. Once we’ve exited, the skyscrapers tower around us, a lit window here and there, glowing like a partially inhabited ghost town.

We follow the directions on my phone and soon we’re on a part-commercial, part-residential block and something runs into the road and I slam on my breaks to discover that something is Jamal, now jogging around to the back and letting himself in.

“Really?” I ask. “You thought it would be a good idea to run in front of my car as I was driving?”

“You were going a little faster than I expected. I thought you saw me.”

We sit in silence for a minute as I try to get my heart rate back to normal. Eventually, Jamal says, “If you could pull away soon that’d be great. I’m not supposed to be doing this right now.”

I drive around the corner.

“So where should we look?” I ask.

“Honestly?” Jamal says. “I have no idea. All I could think of was your place.”

Charlotte says, “It might help if you tell us what happened.”

“I don’t know. I feel weird about this. She really likes you guys and I don’t want to change the way you think about her. She’s a great girl.”

“We know she’s great,” I say.

Charlotte smirks at me. “We’ve actually had a similar discussion,” she says, “about her greatness.”

“All right.” He takes a breath. “So, it’s like this. I don’t know what you guys did today, but when she came home she was a mess.”

“A mess how?” I ask.

“Throwing shit around her room, saying things I didn’t understand. What happened?”

“We had to go to the apartment where Caroline used to live,” I tell him. “It was for the movie, but Ava wanted to come and ask questions so we let her.”

Charlotte says, “She wanted to know about her mom’s death.”

“And they told her?”

“Yeah,” I say.