Everything Leads to You(93)

Tracey is shaking her head. Shaking, shaking.

“I think you’re afraid for me. Like, maybe you think I’m going to make the same mistakes you made. But I’m not. I’m doing really well. I just miss having a family.”

The door swings open again and Jonah walks out, tears streaking his face, and he walks over to Ava, close but not touching her. For a moment, he stands between Tracey and Ava as if he wants to be a bridge. Then he hugs Ava quickly but hard, and walks back into the house, shutting the door all the way this time.

“Mom,” Ava says when she can speak again, “you had a tough time when you were young. That’s okay. You did a lot of good, too. You took me in. You had Jonah. And look at us all. We’re fine. Things are fine.”

“You’re wrong,” Tracey tells her. “Things are not fine.” She lets out a sob and covers her face. “Maybe I’m being punished.”

“I try my best to be a good person,” Ava says. “I wish that could be enough for you.”

But Tracey turns and walks into her house, without even looking back, without saying good-bye.

Ava turns and steps numbly toward us. She walks past us all standing here and climbs into the front seat. When she starts the ignition, we get in, too. She drives down the block, turns the corner, and then Jamal breaks our silence.

“Look,” he says. “I don’t like talking shit about people’s families, but I have to get this off my chest. Your mom is seriously f*cked up. You know that? So you don’t believe in God in the same way that she does. So what? So you’re into girls. So f*cking what. She needs to wake up and figure out that she doesn’t get to decide every single thing about you. It’s her f*cking loss, man,” he says. “I’m sorry but I just had to say that. It’s her f*cking loss.”

Without warning, Ava pulls onto the side of the road. She pulls up the emergency brake and leans into Jamal, buries her face in his shoulder, her body quaking. She trembles and trembles and when she finally cries it doesn’t even sound like crying. Nothing like that night in our living room with Clyde Jones on the screen looking out at her. Not like a few minutes ago, on Tracey’s front lawn. Not even close to that. It’s this gasping that makes Charlotte and me lock hands, makes me have to struggle against crying myself. It isn’t my tragedy. It isn’t me who knows for certain in this moment that I’m alone in the world. She has us, I know, but for all people talk about friends as being the same as family, I know that, really, they aren’t. At least not when you’re eighteen. Not when sometimes you need your mother.

I don’t know what to do, but she brought us to be with her in this moment, so without overthinking the action, without wondering if it will be welcome, I reach through the seats and put my hand on her back as she cries. And then, right after me, Charlotte puts hers on her shoulder.

I know it’s only a gesture, but I hope that it’s something.

And after a little while, I say, “Let me drive us home. We can get delivery from Garlic Flower.”

Ava sniffles. “I don’t even have enough plates,” she says. “And your apartment is a film set.”

“We can go back to my parents’ house,” I say. “Let’s go there.”

She nods and opens her door and we switch places.

~

Charlotte calls the restaurant as I drive us out of the desert and back into the city, and we arrive at home just as Eric does.

“Perfect timing,” he says. I hand him money and he hands me a bag full of warm food, egg flower soup and mu shu and noodles. It makes me hopeful.

My parents aren’t home so I let us in and we carry everything to the den.

“Let’s watch TV shows,” Jamal says. “Some kind of series. Something cheesy.”

So we eat our takeout and watch Melrose Place, lose ourselves in the early nineties hideous fashion, the day-to-day trials of the newly adult characters as they swim and work and spy on the neighbors. Ava isn’t laughing, but she’s eating. All things considered, she seems okay.

I watch the screen but all I can think about is us. We were on the verge of being together, and then on the verge of being strangers again. But what are we now?

I guess I was hoping for a cinematic love story. Like Clyde on his horse galloping toward the girl through dust clouds and brambles. “Well, hello you.” His cocky smirk. The girl squinting into the sun after having waited for so long to be discovered.