“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.
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.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tracey told me all the time that she wished I would leave but I didn’t believe that she meant it. So when I finally did leave, I didn’t turn on my phone for almost a month, because I thought that if I did someone could track it. I moved my car all the time
because I was afraid the police would be looking for me, but I wouldn’t drive it long distances. Jamal and I took the bus to Home Depot every night. It took us an hour to get there and back.”
“Two hours on the bus every day?”
She nods. “It’s okay, though. That’s how we became such close friends. At first I thought we wouldn’t really hang out even though we worked together. He had this kind of hardness to him at first, and I didn’t think he’d be interested in getting to know me, this boring white girl from the desert. But we had a lot of time to get to know each other on those bus rides.”
I’m about to tell her that she is anything but boring, but she doesn’t give me the chance.
“Anyway, even after I moved into the shelter I was so afraid that Tracey would track me down and make me go home. I missed Jonah but I waited to call him until my eighteenth birthday, because then I’d be free.”
“Is that when he gave you our number?”
“Yeah. I called you guys right after.”
“It was your birthday?”
She nods. “When Jonah answered, he yelled at me. He was, like, ‘Why haven’t you called me? Why has your phone been off?’ I told him I had to keep it off because I was afraid they’d trace it. I asked him about the car, if Tracey filed anything, a missing person’s report, if they were looking for me. He was quiet for a long time. Then he told me no. He said she hadn’t done anything like that. So then I knew that I hadn’t run away, not really. She wanted me gone. She was through with me.”
“Ava, that’s terrible,” I say.
Then Ava sits up and points.
“The first person I ever loved lives in that house,” she says.
“Really?”
She bites a cherry off its stem and nods.
I sit up.
Below us, a ranch house stretches out in a long L, its windows bright in the dusk.
And before she says it, I feel it coming. Through the energy that is passing from her to me. From the tremor in her voice and the way I can still feel the place on my palm that her fingers touched when she handed me cherries. The way she’s been blushing and the way she looks right now, her brow furrowed, her eyes bright.
The person she loved is a girl.
“Her name is Lisa,” Ava says. “All summer we hung out at the aqueduct. Got drunk. Talked about running away.”
“What happened?”
“She was afraid people would find out about us,” she says, after a long pause. “So she confessed to her parents.”
“Confessed? This isn’t the fifties.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t Los Angeles, either. The reverend of her church blames gay people for everything. Like every storm and national tragedy is a manifestation of God’s wrath. That kind of thing.”
“That’s insane.”
“Tracey’s a congregant there, too.”
With that sentence, Ava’s life with Tracey snaps into focus. It’s like the final touches to a set, when random pieces of furniture and arranged objects suddenly become a room in a home where people could live.
“And Tracey found out about you guys, too?”
Ava nods.
“There was a lot of yelling. Things were broken.” She pauses. “I broke some things,” she says. “I packed some clothes and a few books and then I waited for the house to get quiet, and when it did I climbed out of the window and drove away.”
“And you didn’t go back?”
“Not until today,” she says. She turns to face me. “Not until with you.”
If this were a different moment, I would go with this feeling and kiss her. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, her mouth is so impossibly perfect and so impossibly close. But even I know enough not to kiss a girl while she’s telling me these things. It’s not that kind of intimacy she’s after, no matter how warm and close and inviting Ava is right now, no matter how much she makes me wonder how I could ever have been a mess over someone else.
So instead I ask her to tell me more about Lisa.
“The short version is this,” she says, “I fell in love with one of my best friends. I’m almost sure she fell in love with me. There were a few weeks that felt like magic, but I think I knew all along that it would end.”
She stares hard at the house.
“I used to spend the night over there a lot. With her.”
“Her parents didn’t know?”
“They thought I was sleeping on the air mattress.”
“Oh.”
“It lasted for about a month. I’ve never been so sleep deprived.”
I smile, but feel a tightness in my stomach, over what I’m not sure. Probably over a lot. Like the way I could say the same sentence and mean it about the few nights I was able to spend with Morgan by telling my parents I was somewhere else.
But also, maybe, the tightness is a little bit hopeful, a little bit over Ava and the possibility that the two of us could be sleep deprived together one day. It’s a thought that I push away, though, because I am beginning to understand Charlotte’s hesitation. She doesn’t want me to get hurt again, and let’s face it: I am just a small part of Ava’s potential rise to stardom. I’ve been around enough young actresses to know that an amateur production designer, an intern, really, would never hold her attention for long.
So I try to pull myself from fantasies of someday, back to this still-warm ground and cool night air and clear sky and bright stars and company of a girl who is telling me part of the story of her life.
“It was the strangest thing. One morning I woke up in Lisa’s bed and I had that feeling that came on all the time: that our time together was going to be over. Soon we would have to pull our clothes back on and go, one by one, into the bathroom. We wouldn’t sit too close at the breakfast table. We wouldn’t look at each other for too long at any moment, even when we were the only two people in the room, because at any time, without warning, someone could walk in and see that look and find us out. The light was coming through the curtains and it was too soon. I wasn’t ready to get out of bed with her yet. So I lifted the sheet to cover our heads and I said that I thought we should tell people. ‘Tell people what?’ Lisa asked. I should have known that was a bad sign. Tell people what. But I didn’t. I just said, ‘About us. We shouldn’t have to hide it.’ The sun was coming up fast; not even the blinds and the sheet could keep it out, and I could see Lisa’s eyelashes and the curve of her ear. I could see her lying awake and not answering me. Finally she moved away from me and reached for her pajama pants and the sheet fell away and we were there, in the sunny room, and everything was bright. She told her parents that night, but not in the way that I’d hoped. She told them that I had been coming on to her, that I had tricked her into all of it.”
“And they believed that?”
Ava sighs. “I made it easy for people to believe bad things about me,” she says. “It’s something the counselors at the shelter have helped me understand. I gave Tracey all these reasons to reject me so that I could stop feeling so powerless.”
I wait, but she doesn’t tell me anything more.
“Well, Lisa’s going to regret it,” I say. “When she hears about you. She’ll probably want you back.”
“I doubt it.”
“No,” I say. “You don’t understand. Your life can change as soon as you want it to. All you have to do is tell people who you are, and soon Lisa will be in line at the grocery store and she’ll see you on the cover of Vanity Fair. She’ll buy it and read the interview and find out along with the rest of the world. The interview will be all about Clyde and Caroline, and your upcoming movies and your lunch dates with famous people on the Chateau Marmont patio. Your portraits will be shot by Annie Leibovitz and you’ll be wearing Yves Saint Laurent or whatever. You’ll be so far removed from this place that Lisa will wonder if you even remember her.”
Ava doe
sn’t respond at first, but she’s really thinking about it. Her face is so serious in the moonlight, her eyes fixed on me, taking in every word.
“Maybe,” she says, but I can’t tell if she means it.
So I keep trying.
“Even if we leave Clyde and the movies out of it,” I say. “There’s still this thing that happens after you break up with someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a room with her again it’s as if you’re a different person. Maybe your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is louder. You’re wearing perfume she’s never smelled before and you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don’t even have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to say Look at who I am without you.”
She smiles.
“That scenario sounds a lot more realistic,” she says.
We leave a pile of cherry pits on the grass, hop the fence again, get back into my car. The space between us feels electric, each breath is something we’re sharing. Once we’re on the road, ahead of us is only the dark hills and the sky, and we drive in silence and I don’t even turn on the music until we’re back in Los Angeles, hundreds of taillights stretching endlessly before us, the clutter of roads and freeways that could take us anywhere.
Chapter Twelve
I guess the realization that Ginger was right about my sofa has shaken my confidence, because this morning I find myself in Theo’s backyard having requested a meeting to go over my progress. Recognizing Ginger’s concept made my vision for this film clearer. I don’t want stylized, I want naturalistic. Instead of drawing the audience’s attention to a few meaningful objects, I want everything to be meaningful.
“I want the places to really look lived in,” I say to Theo now.
“Yes.”
“I want, like, dishes in the sink and a sweater draped over a chair.”
“Love it.”
“And I’m trying to think of how to make it cohesive. Juniper’s apartment will look a lot different from George’s house but I need to make them feel like they are from the same world. Like, emotionally.”