Everything Leads to You

But he says it like he’s trying to convince himself, and it becomes clear that this is yet another thing we won’t ever know. If Caroline intentionally took more drugs than her body could endure. Why Clyde couldn’t be a better father. What Ava’s life would have been if Tracey had not become her mother.

“But back to Tracey,” Lenny says. “I had a few wandering years. I traveled all over the world. I was getting clean, finding myself. I tried to be a Buddhist but couldn’t make all the sacrifices. I could only go so far. Then I returned to LA ready to pick up where I left off in my career. Luckily I still had some friends in the business and they gave me work. I had been thinking about you a lot. Wondering how you were. I abandoned you. I knew the ambulance would come and they would take you away but that isn’t absolution. I know that. Now that I have kids of my own, I can hardly believe the coward I was then. But as I was saying. I got back to town and I looked Tracey up. She wasn’t easy to get ahold of, but eventually I found her, and she had me come over to this god-awful motel where you were living, and we spent a long time commiserating. She’s the only one, besides you now, who knew what I’d done. I confessed it to her that night but she had already suspected it was me who called the police. We ended up sleeping together. You’re old enough to know that. I woke up to you staring at me, standing at the foot of the bed. You’d been asleep already when I got there the night before. You look so much like Caroline. You did even then. I thought, I’m going to see how far this can go with Tracey. We had Caroline in common. We had you in common. You and I had fun for a while. Tracey and I, not so much. Eventually we both knew that we weren’t right for each other. She was still living a pretty rough life, and I had changed. I asked her if I could still spend time with you and she said yes, but keeping up with her wasn’t easy.”

“We moved around a lot,” Ava says.

“‘A lot’ doesn’t even come close. Seems like Tracey had a new boyfriend every couple weeks. At one point, when I started getting really nervous, I asked her if she’d let you stay with me for a little while, just while she got back on her feet, but she said no.”

“Why?” I ask. I can’t help myself.

He looks at me, then back to Ava. “You made her feel safe,” he says. “That’s what she told me. She said that she would never go too far as long as you were with her. She told me that you saved her life in more ways than she could explain.”

Ava shakes her head. I can see her fighting off tears.

“That isn’t how she feels now.”

“Well, no. That was before all of her transformations. I suppose AA or some self-help guru or Jesus saves her life now.”

Ava looks surprised at the bitterness in his voice.

“Yeah,” she says. “Exactly. Why did that happen?”

He leans forward, buries his head in his hands. Finally, he sits back again.

“I don’t know all the details. We’d been out of touch for about a year, and she called me and asked if I could meet her for lunch. You were in school, I guess. She was wearing a lot of makeup because someone had beaten her up. It was pretty ugly, I remember, even with her attempts to hide it. She wanted money. She needed to pay to get her car fixed and then she was going to take you and go to stay with her parents for a while in Arcadia. I gave her the money, and she left for her parents’ a few days later.”

“I remember staying there. They had a yard and a lot of books.”

“Right. You guys stayed there for a couple of months. She was in rehab and she thought it might work for her that time. She was trying really hard and I felt better, knowing that you were with her folks. Then, she met a guy who said he could help her and she moved way the fuck out there. To Leona Valley.”

“She’s still there.”

“Really,” he says. “I guess I already knew that. I just didn’t want it to be true. I got married seven years ago. Our first year of marriage, my wife got all excited. She wanted to send out holiday cards. We got our picture taken wearing Santa hats and posed with the dog. Amazing, isn’t it?—the things we’ll do for love. She asked me for a list of addresses, and I thought about you guys. I gave her your name and address and she sent it out. I didn’t know if you’d remember me, but I’d hoped that you would. But then the letter came back in the mail. Someone had written ‘return to sender’ and I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t Tracey’s writing, that it was the writing of a stranger, but I think I knew. Secretly, it was what I expected.”

He looks at his watch.

“Damn,” he says. “I pushed back a meeting in order to see you, but I can’t push it back any longer.”

Ava stands up and I stand up, too.

“So, look,” he says, walking us back down the hallway toward the lobby. “I know that to you I’m just some distant memory. Maybe less than that. But will you keep in touch with me? Just now and then. Give me your address, my wife will send you a holiday card.”

“She’s going to be in your business soon,” I tell him.

“That right?”

“I have a part in a film,” she says. “A small film.”