Everything Leads to You(48)

“Thanks,” she says, looking down at them. “I made those. They were supposed to be a peace offering, I guess, but she never put them out when I lived here.”

“Maybe she put them out because she misses you.”

She turns away.

“I don’t think so.”

She kneels on the carpet at the base of a giant armoire and gets to business, pulling the drawers until they all jut out, overflowing with papers that flutter and envelopes that crash to the floor.

“Look at all of this,” she says. “Junk mail. Like, five years’ worth of junk mail. Shit.” She buries her face in her hands.

“What happened at the door?” I ask. “Did you bring the wrong keys?”

“No,” Ava says. “I guess she changed the locks.”

“Okay.” I imagine Charlotte standing with us, taking over. “We need to be strategic about this,” I say.

Ava looks up at me and nods.

“Where are all of the places we should look? Show me.”

“Well, this is the first one.”

I say, “Let’s forget about this. We can come back later if we don’t find it, but I don’t think it would be in with the junk mail.”

“There’s more than junk—”

“Did you have this before you moved here?”

“No, she got it a few years ago.”

“So your birth certificate is older. She would have brought it with her when you guys moved here. It wouldn’t make sense to find a new place for it so many years later.”

Ava stands up.

“Her room,” she says, and leads me down the hallway into a room covered in rose wallpaper with a matching country-style bedroom set. If I had more time I would take pictures of it and use it as inspiration for part of George’s house. We head straight to the closet, though, where Tracey’s clothing dangles from wire hangers above a sea of boxes and below a shelf stacked high with even more boxes.

“Looks like Tracey hates throwing stuff away,” I say.

Ava nods.

“I wish these were labeled,” I say.

“That would be nice.” She laughs, and even though it’s a tense laugh, it feels good to hear it. It makes me hopeful.

We grab boxes and start going through them. I’m trying to be neat about it: removing the things one by one until nothing is left, putting the pile back in, closing the box back up. Ava, however, is dumping the contents on the floor and scattering them all over, leaving everything everywhere, reaching for another box. She’s moving faster than I am, but I don’t think speed is the point.

She wants to cause damage. She wants her mother to come back from her knitting group to a smashed-in window and a house torn apart.

I don’t know enough about the history of Ava and Tracey to decide exactly how I feel about this, but the way I feel doesn’t seem important at the moment. Nor does keeping a few boxes in order when the rest of them are getting smashed under Ava’s boots as she stands to pull more down.

So I stop trying to be careful.

“I’ll hand them to you,” I say, and she nods. I take down box after box and she pours everything out: old mittens and scarves and novels and CDs and videotapes. So many papers and photographs and envelopes. It could take weeks to go through everything.

When all the boxes are out of the closet, we sit on our knees on the rose-colored carpet, surrounded by rose-patterned wallpaper, and sift through all of Tracey’s private possessions. We toss the clothes and books and trinkets onto Tracey’s impeccably made bed until all that remains are papers and folders full of more papers and letters with different addresses.

Ava grabs a couple boxes and says, “Just put it all in here. You’re right, it has to be with this old stuff.”

I say, “Everything?”

“We don’t have time to go through it all.”

“The letters, too?”

“Yes,” she says.

She’s picking up handfuls of papers and dropping them in her box. I watch her tear through a few stacks, discarding some papers and dropping others in the boxes, until she opens a green folder and freezes. She doesn’t look at me, but I can tell: She’s found it.

I can’t see the paper, but she isn’t trying to hide it from me either. She takes two sheets from the folder and sets them on the bed: Tracey’s and Jonah’s birth certificates. Then she crosses the room and puts the folder into her purse.