Everything Leads to You(83)

He stops talking and the room is painfully silent. That kind of loss he’s describing? Just one look at Ava’s face shows that she’s felt it, too.

I want to confess. I thought that her story was comprised of scenes. I thought the tragedy could be glamorous and her grief could be undone by a sunnier future. I thought we could pinpoint dramatic events on a time line and call it a life.

But I was wrong. There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes. And none are skipped over and they all lead to the next. There was the minute that Caroline set Ava down and the minutes it took her to shoot up. There was the minute that Caroline died and all of the minutes before Lenny discovered them. The minute he left Ava there, still crying, and the minutes before the ambulance came. And all of the minutes that followed that, wherever she went next, whoever held her, so many gaps in memory that must have been filled by something important. I want to apologize for not realizing sooner that what I felt in Clyde’s study was not the beginning of a mystery or a project. She was never something waiting to be solved. All she is—all she’s ever been—is a person trying to live a life.

~

“Later on, I tried to keep in touch with you,” Lenny says. “You probably won’t believe me. I could have tried harder, I’m sure. I bought you a trampoline when you were a kid,” he says. “Do you remember that?”

“That was you?”

His face brightens, a flash of happiness in the midst of his sweating, teary nervousness.

“But,” Ava says, “the guy who bought me the trampoline was with Tracey.”

“Tracey,” he says. “Right. That was a strange time in my life.”

“You had a relationship with her, too?”

He nods, a little sheepishly.

“Tracey always had a thing for me,” he says. “I don’t want to flatter myself, but she did. She was a kid with us, too. Caroline knew her even longer than she knew me. After I found Caroline, I dropped out of reality for a while. I left town. I didn’t think I’d be a suspect or anything, but I was sure I’d be questioned. I had all these nightmares about lie detector tests. I was afraid of being humiliated. I was just . . . I was wrecked. And your mother,” he says, leaning closer to Ava, “she was the love of my life. If you ever repeat that to my wife I’ll deny it. But she was. God, was she a special woman. She could have been a great actress. She could have been a great mother if she weren’t so incredibly f*cked up.”

He leans back in his chair and swivels toward the window. For a few moments, we all take in his breathtaking view of Los Angeles.

“She was crazy about you,” he says. “There’s no way she did it on purpose.”

But he says it like he’s trying to convince himself, and it becomes clear that this is yet another thing we won’t ever know. If Caroline intentionally took more drugs than her body could endure. Why Clyde couldn’t be a better father. What Ava’s life would have been if Tracey had not become her mother.

“But back to Tracey,” Lenny says. “I had a few wandering years. I traveled all over the world. I was getting clean, finding myself. I tried to be a Buddhist but couldn’t make all the sacrifices. I could only go so far. Then I returned to LA ready to pick up where I left off in my career. Luckily I still had some friends in the business and they gave me work. I had been thinking about you a lot. Wondering how you were. I abandoned you. I knew the ambulance would come and they would take you away but that isn’t absolution. I know that. Now that I have kids of my own, I can hardly believe the coward I was then. But as I was saying. I got back to town and I looked Tracey up. She wasn’t easy to get ahold of, but eventually I found her, and she had me come over to this god-awful motel where you were living, and we spent a long time commiserating. She’s the only one, besides you now, who knew what I’d done. I confessed it to her that night but she had already suspected it was me who called the police. We ended up sleeping together. You’re old enough to know that. I woke up to you staring at me, standing at the foot of the bed. You’d been asleep already when I got there the night before. You look so much like Caroline. You did even then. I thought, I’m going to see how far this can go with Tracey. We had Caroline in common. We had you in common. You and I had fun for a while. Tracey and I, not so much. Eventually we both knew that we weren’t right for each other. She was still living a pretty rough life, and I had changed. I asked her if I could still spend time with you and she said yes, but keeping up with her wasn’t easy.”