Everything Leads to You(47)

She nods.

“So that’s great. That’s awesome.”

“I need to get out of the shelter,” she says. “I really like Venice, actually. I think I might find a place there. Here’s our exit.”

I turn off the freeway, already imagining Ava and me in her new Venice apartment, decorating all the rooms, spending all this time with each other.

We drive past a couple of restaurants, some dirt lots and tractors, and Ava has me turn left onto a residential street. We pass a nineties-era house, brown and beige.

“Okay, make a U-turn,” she says.

“Did we go the wrong way?”

“I just wanted to make sure no one was home. It’s that one we just passed.”

I pull up in front of her house. The shutters in the front windows are closed; junk mail sticks out of the box by the door. A few small pots of pink flowers line the path to the door, surrounded by a bright green lawn.

I turn off the car.

“Okay,” Ava says. “Tracey drives a white station wagon. She has long hair that she will probably be wearing in a braid. If you see her coming, call me.”

“Got it.”

“I can go out the back door when she goes inside and then come back around to you.”

“That sounds good.”

“But she shouldn’t come home for another two hours. She has her knitting circle until eight and she usually stays longer, talking.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t know for sure. Things change all the time, I guess, and I’ve been gone for a while.”

She’s staring at the front door, not moving.

“It’s good we have a plan, then,” I say. “We probably won’t need it, but if she comes, I’ll call you the second she rounds the corner.”

She bites at a nail.

“I’m ready,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Good luck.”

A silent minute passes, and then she gets out of the car.

I watch her try to unlock the front door but she’s having trouble. She keeps looking at her keys and trying again. Then she leaves the front door, grabs the nearest pot of pink flowers, and walks to the side of the house. I can’t see her anymore, but I hear a crash and a shattering, and that’s when I get nervous. Because being a getaway driver for a girl who just wants to avoid her mother is one thing; it takes on another meaning when actual breaking and entering is involved.

I wonder if I should start the car, just in case we have to move fast. I pull Ava’s name up on my phone so I can call her immediately, trying not to look away from the street as I do it.

I don’t know from which direction Tracey would come.

It’s difficult to keep watch in two opposite directions at one time, but I do my best.

A slam comes from the house.

It’s Ava, walking out the front door. She cuts across the lawn, empty-handed.

“I need help,” she says at the window. “I can’t find anything.”

And I thought my heart rate was already dangerously high.

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to look with me. There’s so much shit everywhere. I can’t go through it all.”

“What about watching for Tracey?”

“She won’t come. I was being paranoid. She’s had the knitting circle every Thursday for years. For half my life. Come on!” She starts back toward the door and I swear, this girl must be magical because this is not the sort of thing I do.

And yet, moments later, I am standing inside Tracey’s house.

“Let’s look here first,” Ava says, and crosses the carpet to the area of the living room with a dining room table and an armoire. I follow her more slowly because I’m standing in the house where Ava lived until a year ago and it would be impossible for me not to at least glance at what’s inside. Not much light filters in through the slats of the shutters, but even after Ava flips on the chandelier that hangs low over the table, the room is hardly lit. Wood-paneled walls surround us, adorned with careful paintings of landscapes and animals. I step closer and Ava verifies my hunch.

“Paint by numbers. Tracey loves the kind of art that comes with instructions.”

The table is covered with an impeccably ironed yellow tablecloth. A ceramic vase sits in the middle, full of paper flowers.

“These are actually really pretty,” I say, touching a red paper petal.