Everything Leads to You(37)

Charlotte and I don’t say anything, and Ava resumes her story.

“For some reason, I always pictured her in a lavender dress, even though I’ve only seen this one photo of her. Sometimes I imagined pill bottles near her. Sometimes a bullet wound. Sometimes there was no kind of evidence, and it was like she just curled up on the carpet and went to sleep.”

She takes her napkin and spreads it out onto her lap. She looks out the window.

“I always imagined it with carpet,” she says. “I guess I wanted it to be softer for her.”

“I still think it’s strange that Tracey wouldn’t tell you things,” I say. “It seems so wrong to make you guess.”

“We got in so many fights over it. For a while I thought it might be because she felt like she was my mother, and maybe I was hurting her feelings by bringing up Caroline.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Charlotte says.

“No. I mean, maybe it was when I was really little. She used to say this thing all the time: ‘Don’t do this to us.’ She’d say it to motel clerks or landlords when they tried to kick us out, or to her bosses when they told her she couldn’t bring me with her to work anymore.”

Charlotte frowns. “What a terrible thing to have to say.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t feel terrible. I guess I just focused on the ‘us’ part. It was never scary when I was little, even when we had to spend the night in the car or something, because we were always together. Even when she had boyfriends, she took me on all their dates. If the guys weren’t nice to me we just left.”

She reaches out and takes a french fry between her slender fingers. Before putting it in her mouth, she says, “One of them gave me one of those small trampolines. The kind where only one person jumps at a time? We kept it in the living room. Tracey could touch the ceiling when she jumped.”

She smiles, remembering this, and I can almost see it: A girl in her mid-twenties in a sparsely furnished apartment at night. The glow of a Goodwill lamp, of streetlights through a curtainless window. A four-year-old redhead, lying on the carpet, watching as the girl jumps again and again, amazed at the contact of hands against ceiling, filled with the wonder of someday growing big, the promise of someday growing up.

But the story takes a turn, of course. Ava tells us that it was around the time she started kindergarten. She could see the way Tracey looked at the other parents. They were a little older; they were so confident; they gathered in bright clusters on the playground at the end of the school day, their wedding rings glinting in the sun. They offered one another advice and commiserated and laughed with their heads thrown back and their mouths open, hoisting babies onto their hips, praising and consoling and disciplining one another’s kids as though they were their own.

“Suddenly Tracey started acting differently. She left me at home alone. She complained about dropping me off and picking me up from school and making dinner. I didn’t understand it at all then, but I think she was just realizing that this wasn’t a life that she had chosen for herself, you know? It’s not like she really wanted a kid when she was twenty. She never told me how it all happened, but my guess is that it was impulsive, that Caroline died—her best friend—and there I was, all that was left of her, and I’m sure that Tracey loved me and couldn’t imagine losing me, too. But that doesn’t mean that she really wanted to be a parent. Or that she was ready to be one.”

I find myself leaning forward across the table, too eager for this story, so I make myself sit back and drink my iced tea and swallow all my follow-up questions. I let Ava eat in peace for a minute as a minor celebrity walks past us to the patio and people try not to notice, as a hush falls and then, gradually, conversations resume around us.

The truth is I don’t know anyone who has led Ava’s kind of life. I divide my time between a world of relatively well-adjusted families and private school and the world of filmmaking, where the stories are often filled with all of this—young, troubled women, rejection and death and love—but they are so clearly constructed and controlled, the fate of everyone already determined.

“Charlotte isn’t totally right about me,” I say. “I love tragedy, but what I love the most is redemption.”

“I’m sorry. Did I miss something?” Charlotte asks with a smirk.

Ava cocks her head and studies me. I find myself not knowing what to say next, because what I’m thinking about is how movies are written in scenes, and how those scenes are shot out of order. You don’t start filming at the beginning and end at the end. It all has to do with locations and schedules. Sometimes, the last scenes are shot first, so you know that the couple reconciles, or the hero kills the aliens, or the addict gets clean. You already know that everything will turn out okay, so when it’s time for the earlier, harrowing scenes, you can get swept up in them safely. You can let them wreck you and allow the wrecking to feel good.