Everything Leads to You(36)

“The Marmont is more than that,” I say. “It has a lot of history. Clyde Jones used to hang out here, so I thought it would be the perfect place to meet up with his granddaughter.”

“He did?”

“All the stars at that time did. And sure, lots of people come here just to be seen, but people do serious work here, too. Like Annie Leibovitz? She’s taken some of her most famous portraits here. People have written novels here. Sofia Coppola filmed an entire movie here. And there have been a lot of tragedies, too.”

Charlotte says, “Emi loves tragedy.”

“That’s because all the best stories are tragic.”

“Tragedies like what?” Ava asks.

“So many of them. Have you heard of John Belushi?”

She shakes her head no.

“He was a comedian, part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live. He died here in 1982. He was only thirty-three, and that night he was partying with all these other celebrities—Robin Williams and Robert De Niro and lots of other people—and then he OD’d. They found him in his room. Bungalow Three.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, so sad,” I say. “Are you hungry?”

She nods and I hand her a menu. Almost immediately, her brow furrows, and I know that it must be because everything costs way more than it should. You can’t even get a cup of soup for a decent price. So when the waiter comes I jump in and order a bunch of things.

“Does this sound okay?” I ask them. “I thought I’d order stuff to share.”

Ava nods but she looks worried.

“Our treat,” Charlotte adds.

When the waiter leaves, Ava says, “I’ll at least get the tip.”

Char and I try to shrug it off.

“No. I insist,” she says.

“So you had something you wanted to show us?” Charlotte asks.

I hadn’t even remembered that part of why we were here, but now, as Ava nods and reaches into her purse, I’m dying to know what it is.

“It’s just a photograph,” she says. “I realized after I texted that I should have told you that. You might have thought it was something really big, but . . .”

I reach out my hand and she places the photo in my palm. Charlotte leans closer to me to look.

“It’s my mother,” Ava says.

“Caroline,” I say.

Looking at the photograph, Caroline becomes real in a way she wasn’t when she was just a name on a letter found in a dead man’s mansion. She’s wearing her hair similarly to the way Ava is now, one wisp of it falling over her face. Her style is perfect, effortless nineties grunge: ripped-up jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a camisole, its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her arm is a blur of motion, as if she’s about to push the strands of hair out of her face. She’s outside in the sun on what looks like a street in Long Beach. She is fair and red haired and green eyed, caught in an everyday moment, casual and happy.

“She’s gorgeous,” Charlotte says, and it’s true.

“It’s amazing how much you guys resemble one another,” I say. “You and Caroline and Clyde. Those are some strong genes.”

I stop there. I don’t ask the thing I want to, which is how it feels to see such a strong biological connection when none of them really knew one another. I wonder what Ava feels when she looks at this photograph, whether there is any recognition, anything nestled in a faraway memory that registers this woman as more than someone who shares Ava’s features. If the declaration It’s my mother is only factual, or if, somehow, she can still feel it.

“I’ve been wondering,” Ava says. “When you met the old people at the apartment . . .” She reaches out for the photograph and I hand it back to her. She studies it and then takes a breath. “Did they happen to tell you how she died?”

“No,” I say. “They didn’t.”

Charlotte adds, “Just that they found her in the apartment.”

Ava nods. She puts the photograph back into an envelope, places the envelope inside a book, and then zips the book up into her purse.

“I went through this phase when I was five,” she says. “That’s when I remember Tracey really changing, pulling away from me. I felt like my life was suddenly all wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about how Caroline might have died.”

The waiter arrives with another guy behind him, placing fries and deviled eggs and bruschetta onto the table. He asks if we need anything else and we say no and I hope that Ava will continue when he leaves.