Everything Leads to You(82)

“He knew your name because he found me somehow. I got a call from him one night, just a couple weeks after you were born. He wanted to know about you, but mostly he wanted your name. I told him Ava Garden and he laughed. He said something like, ‘Caroline is more like me than she would like to believe,’ which I chose to interpret as a comment about family and rejection. That she would prefer to invent a last name than to carry one on. That all of them were rootless—Clyde and Valerie and Caroline and now Ava. Clyde was raised by relatives, you know. An aunt and uncle for a while, a grandmother, passed back and forth in this big family.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ava says. “He mentioned that he was an orphan in the letter, but I didn’t know the specifics.”

I did know it, though, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to mention it before.

“Yeah,” he says. “A lot of people theorize that that’s why he was so private. I was always touched by that, though. That he would just want your name.”

“It was for a bank account,” Ava says.

Lenny looks surprised, but then he shakes his head.

“Maybe he wanted to know for the account, but he also wanted to know just to know. Believe me. I could hear it in his voice. I never told Caroline about that call. She thought that meeting him had been a mistake and she was spinning out of control. The guy who got her pregnant was just a one-night stand, so she was on her own and she was scared.”

He looks stricken for a moment.

“I hope you weren’t hoping to find your father,” he says. “Caroline never knew his last name but she wouldn’t have tried to find him anyway.”

“Why not?” Ava asks.

“It just wasn’t like that. Caroline chose him for a good time one night, not to be a father to her child. And then we were sort of together by the time we met Clyde. I was never into the kind of life she led. Drugs didn’t sit that well with me. To be honest, they f*cked me up, and not in the intended way. But I would have done anything for Caroline and it was beginning to seem like the only way I could be with her was to live her kind of life. So I did, for a little while. And then one day . . .”

He turns his chair away from us, toward his majestic view, but he’s hunched forward the way people are when they’re about to pass out and someone tells them to put their head between their knees. After a while he turns back around to face us.

“Look,” he says. “Whoo! I just gotta say this. I’ve been carrying this thing around with me for years. For all your life. Holy shit. Okay.”

First Ava, then Frank, then Edie, and now Lenny. I don’t know when so many strangers will ever cry in front of me in such quick succession and with such feeling again. I try not to look away because it’s clear: He’s giving us this moment. I don’t even know what he’s about to say but I already know that remorse is part of it.

“And then one day she wasn’t answering my calls. I had been over the night before. Over with a lot of other people. I left before the party was done and I wanted to call her before going back the next morning because I didn’t want to find her with somebody else. I was faithful to her but only for my own sake, so I could pretend we really had something. Caroline was the most honest woman I’ve ever known. Once she told me that she could love me but she couldn’t be true to me. I said, Where’s the commitment in that? And she said, That’s the point: There is none. And that was the last thing we ever said about it. But I never wanted to catch her with another man, so I liked to give her warning when I was headed her way. I had been calling and calling and she didn’t answer, so finally I went. I tried the door but it was locked so I used the key she’d given me and I let myself in. She wasn’t in the living room and I knew that something terrible had happened because the record player was spinning and spinning but no sound was coming because the record was over, and the baby was crying. You were crying. And not the strong kind of Pick me up or Feed me crying, but a weaker, desperate kind. I made my way down the hallway and I found her in the bathroom. I forced myself to touch her even though I knew right away that she was gone.

“Let me tell you: In that moment it was like my whole childhood was undone. All those dinners we had together that my mom made us. All the games we played. All the growing up we did. All the sex we had. All the conversations that felt important. They were obliterated. They were f*cking gone. I was alone in the world and the world was an ugly, brutal place. I made it to the phone and I dialed nine-one-one and when the operator answered I told her that a baby and her mother needed help and I gave her the address and then I left the phone off the hook and I got the f*ck out.”