Everything Leads to You

“Yeah, but look, there are all these variations.”


She picks up a book and flips through it, drops it back on the stack and finds another one, muttering things to herself about how she knows that it’s somewhere in one of them I wonder whether this is what she was like at the shelter after she left Frank and Edie’s, what I should do to try to calm her down.

“Here!” she says. “Okay, look. When a drug overdose is the cause of death, sometimes it says ‘unintentional drug poisoning’ and sometimes ‘accidental drug poisoning,’ but Caroline’s doesn’t have those words. It’s ambiguous. It could have been accidental. But maybe it wasn’t.”

“Okay,” I say.

“So what do you think it means?” she asks. “What should I do next? Should I call Lenny again? Maybe he could give me a list of the people who they used to hang out with, people who could have been there that night. Then I could try to find them and figure out who was there last.”

“What would you want to ask them?”

“There’s so much we don’t know,” she says. “I mean, maybe it was accidental, or maybe she meant to do it, but what if someone gave her too much on purpose? I should call Lenny, right?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You don’t know if I should call him, or you don’t know what I should do next?”

I take a moment. I could keep playing along, say, Yeah, call Lenny, pretend I want to know what secrets she’ll uncover next. She’s so eager her hands are shaking and I want to tell her what she wants to hear.

But I just can’t.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to find,” I finally say. “I don’t know where you hope to be after you have all the answers.”

Pain registers on her beautiful face.

I reach a hand out to touch her arm, right above her elbow.

“You think I’m acting crazy,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It’s just that we’ve learned so much about her already.”

Her eyes flick up to mine, and I feel something shift between us. Her face is so close all I’d have to do is put my hand on her hair and there would be no going back.

“Don’t you want to kiss me?” she says.

Her eyes are boring into mine, inviting but also angry, and I let go of her arm and take a step back.

“I do,” I say. “I do.” But as she puts her hand on my waist to draw me closer, I say, “But not right now.”

She flinches.

“Oh,” she says, spinning around, gathering her stuff. “I’m sorry. Do I not fit neatly enough into your perfect life? How stupid,” she says. “I was so stupid. When your dad took me into his office to show me all his Clyde Jones stuff it was probably just to amuse himself. And everything your mom said that night was out of pity. And you and Charlotte—you were just solving a mystery. You got your answers and now that’s it. It’s over.”

“Ava,” I say. “Stop.”

She’s trying to stuff everything into her bag but there’s just too much of it. She’s trembling and cursing and throwing a book that won’t fit hard against the floor. And then she’s giving up and sinking to her knees, and I want to step closer to her but I don’t know if I should.

But I want to.

And it’s in the precise moment I take a step toward her that Charlotte opens the door. She sees Ava crouched on the floor and freezes in the doorway.

“What’s going on?”

Ava says, “I was just leaving.”

Charlotte looks at me but I don’t say anything because I can’t speak.

Ava gathers into her arms what she hasn’t been able to put away.

I cross the room to pick up the book she threw. It landed open and the pages are bent. When I hand it to her, she doesn’t look at me.

I find my voice enough to say, “I don’t think you should drive right now.” It comes out small and meek. I barely recognize it.

“I’m okay,” she says. The anger is gone but she sounds so tired.

“I can drive you,” I say.

“No thanks.”

“I want to.”

She shakes her head and walks toward the door.

“I’ll drive you,” Charlotte says, still in the doorway with her purse over her shoulder. This is one of the reasons I love her. She doesn’t ask any other questions, and even as she takes a few of Ava’s books under one arm and puts her other arm around Ava’s shoulders, I know she’s doing this for me.

“We can take your car,” she says to Ava. “Em, come get me in a little bit, okay?”

~

I pace the floor. I go into the bathroom and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror for a minute. I force myself to just stay still and look.

And then I drive to Ava’s place and park on the street. A moment later, Charlotte’s climbing into the passenger seat.

“Is she okay?”

She shrugs.

“Is Jamal there?”

“I called him. He’s on his way.”

“Let’s just wait here,” I say. “Until we see him.”

So we wait for a long time, without speaking, until a bus pulls up and he steps out, hurrying to her front door.