Everything Leads to You(14)

“Charlotte and Emi,” Charlotte says. She looks at me for help, but what else are we supposed to say?

“We’re looking for Ava?” I try, but it comes out a question.

The door cracks open and a little girl peers through before pushing it open wider. She has long dark hair in pigtails and a quizzical expression.

“Here I am,” she says.

“You’re Ava?” Charlotte asks.

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“Eight.”

“Ten years too young,” Charlotte murmurs.

“Sorry,” I say. “Looks like we have the wrong Ava.”

The little Ava shrugs.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Bye.”

The door shuts.

“Okay,” Charlotte says, as we turn and head down the steps, back to the car waiting in the shade. “We have to go to the library.”

“The library?”

“There are things we just can’t find online, no matter how much money we waste.”

“But really? You think we can find answers in the library?” I’m skeptical, but Charlotte has great faith in the collection and preservation of things, and if she wants to go to the library I will go with her.

~

It turns out that 1995 is ancient history. So ancient, in fact, that we have to slide brown sheets of film displaying newspaper obituaries into a primitive machine, and then drop in quarters to make the screen light up. With the help of a cute, tattooed librarian named Joel who makes her blush as he leans over her to tinker with the machine, Charlotte starts with October 1 in the Los Angeles Times. Joel sets me up on a machine next to Charlotte and gives me the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which, I’m quick to point out, is obviously the inferior paper.

“It’s not even a paper anymore,” I say once Joel is back behind the information desk. “I’m clearly the sidekick in this mystery. I’ll selflessly devote myself to the Herald-Examiner while you find the answer in the Times and get all the glory.”

Charlotte smiles and changes slides.

I’ve only gotten through October 5 by the time my first quarter runs out and the screen goes dark.

“I thought libraries were supposed to provide information free of charge,” I whisper.

Charlotte ignores me. I search and search forever. There should really be a more efficient way of doing this.

“Why do we have to search by date? We should be able to search by name.”

“Newspapers don’t work that way,” Charlotte says, and I can tell she’s getting tired of me.

An hour later, she’s made it through October, and she sighs, defeated.

“My mom wants me home tonight,” she says. “She’s been complaining about me staying at Toby’s all the time before leaving for college.”

“That’s understandable,” I say. My parents haven’t been too worried about it, but I’m staying in LA for college, living at home to save money, while Charlotte’s really leaving. “I’ll see if my dad can help us out.”

Charlotte appears skeptical. “I feel like we’re hitting a wall,” she says. “I don’t know if we’re going to find her.”

“You feel that way because you just read through hundreds of obituaries. It’s depressing. But we’ll find her,” I say. “We just need to approach this from a new angle.”

Charlotte’s mom picks her up, but I keep searching, loading film and popping quarters into the machine. I make it through September and then I am finished with nothing to show for my patience and Charlotte’s faith in antiquity. I still have my studio work to do, so I wander over to Joel and ask him for today’s paper, which, thankfully, is in its normal paper form. I take a seat at a long, shiny table and start the weekly task of mapping out my Saturday morning garage-and estate-sale schedule.

~

My parents have gotten delivery from Garlic Flower, so I kiss my mother’s cheek while she talks on the phone to a colleague, then grab a plate and a fork and heap rice and garlic chicken on my plate. My dad is watching a reality show about rich women. This is the kind of ridiculous thing you get to do for money if you are a professor of popular culture.

“Dad?” I say. “I need to vent. Mom’s on the phone.”

He turns the TV on mute. “Your mother has just finished reading a New Yorker article on emerging African American filmmakers and is now trying to coax them all into speaking to her graduate seminar,” Dad says. “So try me.”