Everything Leads to You(49)

I expect the discovery to end our business here, but Ava comes back and continues to fill boxes with Tracey’s photographs and letters.

I stare at the piles on the carpet. When I finally look up at Ava, she’s crying silently, still working fast. She can feel me watching her, I guess, because after a couple of minutes she says, “I don’t know anything about my own life.”

Pushing away how wrong this feels, I help her pack everything she wants to take.

After we’re finished we run our first boxes outside and drop them by the car, then return for our final two boxes.

On our way out of the house, I say, “Don’t you want to get any of your old stuff? Like, from your room?”

I know that if I left home in a hurry, there would be dozens of things I would miss. I want to see where she lived and slept and did her homework. I still can’t place her in this house.

“I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

She doesn’t answer me. She just shakes her head.

Even though it’s dangerously close to eight o’clock, we go out the front door. I’m behind her and I move to close it but she says, “Leave it open,” so I do.

A few people are out on the street. A man two doors down is watering his lawn but we don’t look at him and he doesn’t seem to notice us.

I do the unlocking as fast as I can and we throw the boxes into the backseat. I feel like Thelma and Louise without the husband and the boyfriend. Like Bonnie and Clyde without the guns and the murder. It’s a hot night and it’s still bright outside and as I turn on the car Ava rolls down her window and we pull away as if we’ve done nothing unusual.

~

“Charlotte is going to freak out when I tell her about this,” I say.

Now that it’s over, I’m shaking. Ava sees my hands.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine. I’m fine. That was just crazy. I can’t believe we did that.”

I’m stopped at a stop sign a few blocks away from Tracey’s house and since no one else is on the road around us, I allow myself to just sit for a few breaths, until they come easily again. And, soon, they do.

The heat lingers but the light is fading fast. And even though I’ve just trashed a woman’s house, allowed her front door to be left wide open, aided in the theft of her possessions, I feel like I’ve fulfilled a responsibility. I chose to pursue Clyde’s letter. I could have listened to Charlotte and handed it off to the estate sale manager, but I didn’t. Maybe I knew from the beginning that it was going to complicate my life somehow.

And here Ava is, right next to me, thanking me with every glance she shoots in my direction.

It’s simple: She makes the uncertainty worth it.

I take my foot off the brake and head in the direction of the hills.

“Turn right here,” Ava tells me, softly. “There’s one more place I want to go.”

I let her direct me, wind up a hill, park under a tree near a cherry orchard. When we get out of the car, Ava hops over the fence. I stand on the other side, facing her.

“It’s cherry season,” she says. “Have you ever eaten cherries right off the tree?”

I shake my head. “The Santa Monica farmers market is the closest I get to nature.”

I feel myself grinning, and soon we are plucking cherries from branches until they fill our hands, walking to a stretch of grass as night begins to fall.

We eat in silence, looking up at the sky, lying close together but not quite touching.

“I want to explain,” she says.

“You don’t have to,” I tell her.

“But I want you to know that I’m not usually like that.”

“Oh, really? You don’t usually throw flower pots through windows?”

She smiles.

“No,” she says. “I don’t typically throw flower pots through windows. I don’t steal things or wreck people’s houses. And, I guess while I’m at it, I’ll say that I don’t usually cry in front of people either, especially on the night that I meet them.”

“That night was uncharted territory for all of us. We don’t usually track down mysterious girls and shock them with the secrets of their ancestry.”

“It had been a hard day.”

“Why?”

She sighs.

“I thought I ran away, but I didn’t.”