Everything Leads to You(23)

Tears rush in without warning.

“Okay, I take it back,” I say. “I’d rather just hear about how much you hate her.”

“Em,” she says. “You did a really good job of loving her. You put up with all her bullshit. You were a really good girlfriend. And now it’s time for you to find someone who will love you back.”

She scoots closer to me and grabs my hand. She waits for me to look at her.

“I’m sorry I made you cry,” she says. “But you really need to hear this.”

I nod.

“It’s over,” she says, once more. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I whisper, but I don’t really know what I’m agreeing to.

Charlotte stacks my plate on top of hers and moves them out of the way, but neither of us gets up. I could sit here in silence all night, which I’ll admit is rare for me. I don’t want to think about the fact that Morgan never loved me, even though I know that Charlotte is right. And I don’t want to think about the decisions I’ll inevitably have to make tomorrow. I’m caught between self-preservation and self-righteousness, between apologizing to Ginger and quitting. Neither option feels good. So I just want to listen to the sounds of the neighbors’ conversations and their lively music, all of these words I don’t understand.

~

Charlotte’s phone rings so she goes inside to answer it, and an especially good song comes on. I wish I knew what it was so I could find it again.

I hear Charlotte say hello.

And then I hear her say “Ava.”

I turn around and she’s wide-eyed, pointing to the phone pressed to her ear.

“Thanks for calling,” she says. “I know you don’t know me—”

She looks confused. “La Cienega Bakery?” she asks. “No, I don’t know anything about that.”

“Speakerphone!” I mouth to her and she nods and switches over.

A raspy voice says, “Oh, okay. I applied for a job there a while ago, so I thought . . . It doesn’t matter. So who are you?”

“I’m Charlotte. My friend Emi is here, too.”

“Hi,” I say.

“This might sound strange, but we have something that was meant to belong to Caroline Maddox.”

Ava is quiet on the other end, and I look down at the phone and see that it’s trembling in Charlotte’s hand.

“Caroline?” Ava finally repeats, her voice breaking on the question.

I say, “We got this letter for her, so we tried to find her but then found out that she died, so we’ve been just kind of connecting some dots, and eventually we found you—”

“You have a letter for Caroline?” Ava asks.

Charlotte says, “It’s kind of a long story. It would be better to talk in person, if that works for you.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Now?” Charlotte asks. “We’re just hanging out at our apartment.”

“In Venice,” I add.

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Oh,” Charlotte says. “Okay.”

I give her the address, and then we hang up.

I stare at Charlotte. She stares at me.

I scan the living room. Clyde Jones stuff is everywhere. Toby’s desktop computer screen is full of search windows for Caroline and Tracey and Ava, as is Charlotte’s laptop, resting open on the coffee table.

“Shit,” I say, and we begin closing screens and putting away Clyde Jones DVDs because neither of us wants to look like we’ve been collecting all the information there is to have about the girl who is about to walk through our door and possibly hang out for a while.

And somewhere in the frenzy of sweeping evidence and cleaning up our dinner dishes, the gravity of the moment captures me. I feel a camera panning across the room as if I’m watching us from a distance. A counter covered in garlic peels and cutting boards and bread crumbs. The door to the patio ajar. Two girls in a colorful, lived-in living room. They don’t know what’s coming, but one of them—the one with the faraway expression and the dark hair, the one whose eyes betray that she hasn’t been sleeping well—she has felt on the verge of something.

And when they hear a knock at the door, it’s this girl who crosses the room to answer it. She turns the knob, and here it is—like Clyde appearing on the horizon or emerging from the tall grass—a redhead in the doorway of a Venice courtyard apartment. A curious gaze, a tentative step inside. The curve of her mouth when she smiles, the raspy timbre of her voice when she says hello.