Everything Leads to You

And soon we are parked in a twenty-dollar-an-hour parking garage, riding a silver elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of a sleek office building, stepping out into a lobby with a pristine white carpet.

“How often do you think they have to replace this?” I whisper, but Ava isn’t looking down. She heads straight to the guy at the desk and tells him that Lenny’s expecting us. Then a door opens and a tall man with thinning brown hair and a white linen shirt appears. He looks at both of us but soon his gaze shifts to Ava only. A faint smile flickers and vanishes across his angular face, and then he ushers us in. We follow him down a hallway and into a corner office with a view of Los Angeles I’ve never seen before, so different from Ava’s view from only three stories up. From up here, it would be easy to forget that life exists below you.

Lenny sits in his office chair and I leave the seat across from him for Ava while I take the sofa behind her, a little out of the way but still close enough to hear everything he says.

“This is my friend Emi,” Ava says. “She drove me.” Which isn’t true, but I nod and say hi, because I understand that kind of lie the way I understood from the moment she said she’d go straight over that I would be with her. Some things are just impossible to do alone.

“Emi,” he says. “Hello.”

He gives me a weak wave and I lift my hand in response, aware that these are the first words exchanged among us.

Finally, Ava says, “I have some questions.”

“Yes, of course you do,” Lenny says.

This isn’t the response I would have expected. The child of a dead woman he used to know suddenly appears in his office almost two decades later, and he knows that she has questions?

But he lifts his hands over his head in a motion of surrender, and sweat beads on his cleanly shaven face, and each time he looks at Ava he averts his eyes as though she were too much to behold.

And then he launches into the past as though he’s known this moment would someday come and has preserved the story in some easily accessed recess of his brain. And here is his moment. And here we are. So he tells us everything.

It turns out that Lenny and Caroline went way back, grew up down the block from each other.

“What do you know about her parents?” he asks.

“I know that her mom is dead. I know Clyde Jones was her dad.”

“How did you find out?”

“From Emi,” she says.

“My friend and I found a letter hidden in a Patsy Cline record,” I tell him. “We bought it at his estate sale.”

“Wild. I really think that besides Caroline’s mother and Caroline—well, and Clyde, of course—that I was the only person alive who knew that for a long time. Mrs. Maddox—Valerie—was a terribly bitter woman. I’ve never met such a bitter woman, and believe me, I’ve met a lot of women.”

I laugh and say, “Okay,” but Ava doesn’t appear amused by him. She’s the way she was the first time in the Marmont, when she asked me if we knew how Caroline died: focused and intent, bracing herself for the answers she’s been searching for almost her whole life. And here, finally, is someone who can talk about her whole life. The only person who can and is willing to, already mentioning Clyde and Caroline as though they were just people, not clues in a mystery, not elusive characters in a cinematic life.

“Valerie’s house was always dark and she walked around in her robe all day, and poor Caroline, she only wanted to be happy. She ate dinner at my house most nights, but then Mrs. Maddox would get angry and keep her inside for a week. After a while Caroline could come back, but she always had to do her time at home in that horrible, dark, dusty house, with her mother pacing around smoking cigarettes and thinking about the man who betrayed her. For years she never even told Caroline that Clyde was her father. Caroline found out eventually when a letter came when her mom wasn’t home. Apparently Clyde tried to send money and letters for years, and Valerie had them sent back. I found that out later, a couple months after Valerie died. Caroline and I were in our twenties and we met Clyde at a restaurant.”

I don’t think of myself as an entirely trusting person, but everything Lenny’s saying fits what we already know, and there’s something about the way he’s telling us this that makes me believe him.

“Caroline was pregnant with you,” he says.