Everything Leads to You

First Ava, then Frank, then Edie, and now Lenny. I don’t know when so many strangers will ever cry in front of me in such quick succession and with such feeling again. I try not to look away because it’s clear: He’s giving us this moment. I don’t even know what he’s about to say but I already know that remorse is part of it.

“And then one day she wasn’t answering my calls. I had been over the night before. Over with a lot of other people. I left before the party was done and I wanted to call her before going back the next morning because I didn’t want to find her with somebody else. I was faithful to her but only for my own sake, so I could pretend we really had something. Caroline was the most honest woman I’ve ever known. Once she told me that she could love me but she couldn’t be true to me. I said, Where’s the commitment in that? And she said, That’s the point: There is none. And that was the last thing we ever said about it. But I never wanted to catch her with another man, so I liked to give her warning when I was headed her way. I had been calling and calling and she didn’t answer, so finally I went. I tried the door but it was locked so I used the key she’d given me and I let myself in. She wasn’t in the living room and I knew that something terrible had happened because the record player was spinning and spinning but no sound was coming because the record was over, and the baby was crying. You were crying. And not the strong kind of Pick me up or Feed me crying, but a weaker, desperate kind. I made my way down the hallway and I found her in the bathroom. I forced myself to touch her even though I knew right away that she was gone.

“Let me tell you: In that moment it was like my whole childhood was undone. All those dinners we had together that my mom made us. All the games we played. All the growing up we did. All the sex we had. All the conversations that felt important. They were obliterated. They were fucking gone. I was alone in the world and the world was an ugly, brutal place. I made it to the phone and I dialed nine-one-one and when the operator answered I told her that a baby and her mother needed help and I gave her the address and then I left the phone off the hook and I got the fuck out.”

He stops talking and the room is painfully silent. That kind of loss he’s describing? Just one look at Ava’s face shows that she’s felt it, too.

I want to confess. I thought that her story was comprised of scenes. I thought the tragedy could be glamorous and her grief could be undone by a sunnier future. I thought we could pinpoint dramatic events on a time line and call it a life.

But I was wrong. There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes. And none are skipped over and they all lead to the next. There was the minute that Caroline set Ava down and the minutes it took her to shoot up. There was the minute that Caroline died and all of the minutes before Lenny discovered them. The minute he left Ava there, still crying, and the minutes before the ambulance came. And all of the minutes that followed that, wherever she went next, whoever held her, so many gaps in memory that must have been filled by something important. I want to apologize for not realizing sooner that what I felt in Clyde’s study was not the beginning of a mystery or a project. She was never something waiting to be solved. All she is—all she’s ever been—is a person trying to live a life.

~

“Later on, I tried to keep in touch with you,” Lenny says. “You probably won’t believe me. I could have tried harder, I’m sure. I bought you a trampoline when you were a kid,” he says. “Do you remember that?”

“That was you?”

His face brightens, a flash of happiness in the midst of his sweating, teary nervousness.

“But,” Ava says, “the guy who bought me the trampoline was with Tracey.”

“Tracey,” he says. “Right. That was a strange time in my life.”

“You had a relationship with her, too?”

He nods, a little sheepishly.

“Tracey always had a thing for me,” he says. “I don’t want to flatter myself, but she did. She was a kid with us, too. Caroline knew her even longer than she knew me. After I found Caroline, I dropped out of reality for a while. I left town. I didn’t think I’d be a suspect or anything, but I was sure I’d be questioned. I had all these nightmares about lie detector tests. I was afraid of being humiliated. I was just . . . I was wrecked. And your mother,” he says, leaning closer to Ava, “she was the love of my life. If you ever repeat that to my wife I’ll deny it. But she was. God, was she a special woman. She could have been a great actress. She could have been a great mother if she weren’t so incredibly fucked up.”

He leans back in his chair and swivels toward the window. For a few moments, we all take in his breathtaking view of Los Angeles.

“She was crazy about you,” he says. “There’s no way she did it on purpose.”