Everything Leads to You(27)

“Should we call your mom?” I ask Charlotte, because her mother is a therapist and speaks in a soft and coaxing voice that I will never be able to successfully imitate.

“If she doesn’t stop, yeah,” she says.

But, eventually, Ava does stop.

“This is so embarrassing,” she says, forcing a laugh. “How stupid.”

“No,” I say. “Not at all.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Charlotte asks her.

“I don’t even know where I would start,” she says, and I can tell Charlotte’s ready to let it go but I’m not. It’s not just that I’m nosy—which, admittedly, I am—it’s that I believe in this kind of thing. If you find a letter in a famous man’s house, and that letter ends up belonging to his daughter who died before she got a chance to get it, and you spend days chasing false leads in search of the granddaughter, and when you do find her, she isn’t where she’s supposed to be so you resign yourself to an answerless future, but then (suddenly, amazingly) the answer appears in your living room, sobbing on a bright orange chair, you don’t just let it go.

So I tell Ava, “We have time. Start anywhere,” and she finally accepts the mug of mint tea and begins.

“I ran away about a year ago,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“A few reasons. But my mom—Tracey—was the main one. She made it impossible for me to stay.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell us about it.

“You can go ahead,” Charlotte says. “So you’re away from home.”

She nods. “At first I was living in my car, but then eventually I found a shelter downtown.”

Charlotte asks, “Is that where you live now?”

Ava nods.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“No, it’s fine. The counselors are okay. It’s just this big house with a lot of teenagers living there, and we have chores and they help us find jobs. It’s where I met Jamal. It’s fine. It’s just that I’ve been spending all this time trying to adjust to living without a family, and now you guys show me this letter, and suddenly I’m watching my grandfather in a movie. And I never really thought about my grand-parents at all—I just knew they were dead—and I don’t know anything at all about who Caroline was or what her life was like.”

She takes a sip of tea, stares down into her mug.

“I know so little about where I come from,” she says.

“Tracey hasn’t told you?” I ask.

“I used to ask her a lot of questions but I gave up. She’s really into self-improvement. Like reinventing herself? That sort of thing. She says there isn’t any use dwelling on the past, so it’s as if all of it—Caroline, my life as a little kid—disappeared.”

“That’s intense,” I say.

She still looks on the verge of tears but she laughs anyway.

“Intense is a good word to describe my mother. Everything I know about Caroline I had to figure out by myself, but I couldn’t ever find much.” She forces a smile. “I guess I should have gone to the library.”

“I typed up Caroline’s obituary,” Charlotte says. “Do you want to read it?”

Ava says yes, so Charlotte gets up to find the computer. I study the TV screen, where Clyde is frozen in profile against a bleak landscape, and say, “You look like him.”

“I kept thinking that when we were watching. My mom and my brother, they look so much alike. I’ve never looked like anyone.”

“Your brother?” I ask. “Is that who answered the phone when we called?”

She nods. “He’s Tracey’s son. She was married for a few years to this guy from her church. It didn’t last.”

Charlotte places her laptop on the coffee table, and Ava slips down onto the rug to read about Caroline.

“She was in movies?” she says when she’s finished.

“It sounds like she was mostly an extra,” I say. “But yes.”

“I had no idea.” Her eyes well up again but I can see her blinking, fighting it. After a little while she says, “Maybe that’s why Tracey never wanted me to act.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” I say.

Together, Charlotte and I tell Ava everything we’ve learned about Clyde and Caroline. Every question we’ve asked, every answer we’ve gotten. She loves hearing about little Ava, and laughs over my impressions of Frank and Edie, but her face gets serious when we get to what they said about “the drugs and the men and that baby,” and it all feels different now, that “that baby” is the girl sitting here with us, learning all of these secrets from her past for the first time.