We all sigh.
“That’s okay,” Ava says. “I already know her.”
Frank shuffles back to his chair. This time it’s me who helps him sit down.
“I could get used to this kind of treatment,” he says to us with a wink.
“Anytime,” I say. “But we should go, let you watch your game.”
“Don’t you want to wait for Edie? You can ask her about your movie.”
“Okay,” I say. “But we can watch while we wait.”
“As long as you don’t mind . . .” He picks up the remote and clicks the game back on.
“Can I ask you something else?” Ava says when a commercial comes on.
Frank nods.
“Where was she when you found her? What did she look like?”
“What did she look like?” Frank asks. “Well, sweetheart, I’m sorry to say, but she looked dead. I don’t know how else to describe her.”
“Was she in the living room?”
I brace myself for the answer, remembering what she told us at the Marmont, that she imagined carpet.
“No,” he says. His eyes are watery. “She was on the bathroom floor with a needle in her arm. There was nothing pretty about it. I’m sorry.”
A moment later the door opens and Edie steps inside dressed in a red suit and flat black shoes, her hair curly and stiff and much closer to brown than to purple.
“What?” she says, squinting to see us all. “We have company? Oh, it’s Emi and Charlotte. You came back to see us! And who did you bring with you this time?”
“Sweetheart,” Frank says. “This is the baby. Caroline’s baby.”
Edie blinks. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh, dear, really? Come. Let me see you.”
Ava crosses the room to stand with Edie in a patch of sun.
Edie touches her hand to her heart, and then reaches out and takes Ava’s hand between her own.
“You poor thing,” she says.
Ava tries to smile but it doesn’t last.
“Frank was telling us about the day you found her,” Charlotte says.
“It was a terrible day,” Edie nods. “But look at you now. So pretty.”
“A terrible day,” Frank echoes.
“Yes,” Edie says, her gaze never leaving Ava’s face. “But look. You grew up anyway.”
Chapter Sixteen
My phone rings at 2:23 a.m., a Los Angeles number I don’t recognize. I pick up, heart in my throat, unprepared for the terrible news that might come.
“Hey, it’s Jamal.”
My mind was swarming with police officers telling me something happened to my parents, hospital receptionists saying, Come immediately.
He says, “Sorry to call so late. It’s just Ava—is she with you?”
“No,” I say. “She isn’t at the shelter?”
He hesitates.
“She got kicked out tonight,” he says.
“Why?”
“She was upset and . . . I don’t know, I don’t think I should get into it.”
“Should we try to find her?”
Charlotte’s up now, standing in the doorway.
“What’s going on?” she asks. I tell her what Jamal told me, and then I offer to pick him up.
“Oh, man,” he says. “Things around here are tense right now.”
Charlotte cocks her head at me, waiting for an answer.
I shrug, but then Jamal says, “Whatever, fuck it, come get me.” He gives me the address. “Don’t come to the door,” he adds. “Just pull up and I’ll run down to you.”
Five minutes later Charlotte and I have traded our pajama shorts for jeans, grabbed my car keys and our purses and are pulling out of Toby’s driveway headed for downtown Los Angeles. The streets are deserted in Venice and the freeway traffic is nonexistent. Once we’ve exited, the skyscrapers tower around us, a lit window here and there, glowing like a partially inhabited ghost town.
We follow the directions on my phone and soon we’re on a part-commercial, part-residential block and something runs into the road and I slam on my breaks to discover that something is Jamal, now jogging around to the back and letting himself in.
“Really?” I ask. “You thought it would be a good idea to run in front of my car as I was driving?”
“You were going a little faster than I expected. I thought you saw me.”
We sit in silence for a minute as I try to get my heart rate back to normal. Eventually, Jamal says, “If you could pull away soon that’d be great. I’m not supposed to be doing this right now.”
I drive around the corner.
“So where should we look?” I ask.
“Honestly?” Jamal says. “I have no idea. All I could think of was your place.”
Charlotte says, “It might help if you tell us what happened.”
“I don’t know. I feel weird about this. She really likes you guys and I don’t want to change the way you think about her. She’s a great girl.”
“We know she’s great,” I say.
Charlotte smirks at me. “We’ve actually had a similar discussion,” she says, “about her greatness.”
“All right.” He takes a breath. “So, it’s like this. I don’t know what you guys did today, but when she came home she was a mess.”
“A mess how?” I ask.
“Throwing shit around her room, saying things I didn’t understand. What happened?”
“We had to go to the apartment where Caroline used to live,” I tell him. “It was for the movie, but Ava wanted to come and ask questions so we let her.”
Charlotte says, “She wanted to know about her mom’s death.”
“And they told her?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And then what?”
“She left and we stayed to talk about the film. The landlords are letting us use their house for a set but Edie—she’s the wife—she had five million questions for us.”
“Let me get this straight,” Jamal says. “You’re telling me that Ava sat there and found out how her mom died, and then you just let her drive away?”
Neither of us says anything.
“Like it was no big thing?” Jamal asks.
“Shit,” I say.
“I should have gone out there with her,” Char says.
“She seemed okay, though,” I say, but the truth is I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Edie was there and she wanted to know about the film and there’s so much that I need to do that I just let the conversation move in that direction. I just said, “Okay, talk to you soon,” when Ava said she had to go.
“Where should we start?” Charlotte asks. “Maybe back to Frank and Edie’s?”
“Yeah, that makes sense. She might want to go back to the apartment by herself.”
“All right,” Jamal says. “Let’s go.”
Back on the 405, I ask, “Why did they kick her out?”
“She was acting pretty wild. The counselors tried to talk to her but she slammed the door in their faces. I told them she just needed some time, but they’re used to some pretty serious shit, you know? They kept saying she could be a danger to herself. I was like, ‘Nah, you don’t know Ava. She’s not like that.’ I knew she just needed a little time, but they forced their way back in. She had a bottle of vodka on the table.”
I say, “They kicked her out for that?”
“There’s a zero-tolerance policy.”
We exit Ruby Avenue for the second time today.
“It seems irresponsible to kick someone out when she’s in distress like that,” Charlotte says. “I mean, I feel bad enough that we let her go this afternoon, but we didn’t know that she was upset.”
“They were going to let her spend the night,” Jamal says. “But she didn’t want to stay. She has issues around that stuff, yo
u know.”
When we get to Frank and Edie’s place, her car is nowhere in sight. We park and walk down their long driveway, but the only car there is the beige station wagon. We circle the block. No silver car.
“Where now?” I ask.
Jamal says, “I have no fucking clue, man.”
There’s worry in his voice and I can understand why. The streets are deserted. When we do catch sight of someone, he isn’t the kind of person we’d feel good running into in the middle of the night alone.
“Was she drinking before she left?” Charlotte asks.
Jamal’s quiet.
“It’s possible,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“I feel like shit,” I say. “Why didn’t we at least call her when we left?”
“Let’s just find her,” Charlotte says. “What about Clyde’s house?”
“Clyde’s?” Jamal says.
“If she’s thinking about her family, why wouldn’t she go there?”
“That makes perfect sense,” I say. “I don’t think she’s been there before, but it’s an easy address to find.”
I head back to the freeway in the direction of the Hollywood Hills, feeling the kind of hopeful that verges on certain. I can picture her there, sitting on his front steps looking out over the glittering lights of the city. We’ll get there and she’ll be grateful for our company. We’ll sneak around the property, look through all his windows, lie in the bottom of his empty pool like the kids in Rebel Without a Cause, but unlike James Dean and Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood, we’ll end the night feeling better.
I step on the gas and my car heaves itself up the winding hill, turns into the driveway.
The circular drive in front of his house is empty. She isn’t here.
I stop the car in front of his house.
“What now?” I ask, trying not to sound as defeated as I feel.
Jamal opens the door and looks around.
“Could she be parked somewhere else?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“I’ll take a quick lap. Just to be sure.”
Charlotte and I get out, too. We lean against the car and look at the house where all of this started until he comes back to us.
“Nothing,” he says.
We all climb in again.
“You’ve called her, right?”
“A million times. Straight to voice mail.”
“Maybe her phone’s battery’s dead,” Charlotte says.
“I feel terrible,” Jamal says.
“Me, too,” I say.
“We bought that bottle of vodka together. Weeks ago. We drank most of it together, too. I didn’t even get a chance to tell them it was part my fault she had it. She was just gone.”
“What about her house?” I ask. “What if she went back to see Tracey?”
“Yeah,” Charlotte says. “She had more questions. Maybe she thought Tracey would tell her.”
“I don’t know,” Jamal says. “She says she never wants to go back.”
We’re all quiet for a while, and I wonder if we’re about to give up for the night.
Then Jamal says, “But in a moment of weakness, who knows, right? Let’s go check it out.”
We barely talk on the ride to Leona Valley. I exit where I did before, but then take a wrong turn and have to backtrack a few blocks.
I turn on to her street, not expecting to see her car there, but there’s a silver sedan parked midway up the block, right across from her mother’s house.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Jamal says. “Yeah, that’s it.”
I park behind her car and open my door. I can’t imagine her here. It was more of a wish than an actual guess, so I walk up to make sure it’s really hers.
She’s inside, stretched across the backseat, bobby pins falling out of her hair, hoodie bundled up as a pillow. I know I should look away, but I can’t bring myself to do it. There is something kind of moving about seeing someone sleep—I’ve always felt that. But this. It feels bigger than that. Like I could understand so much of Ava if only I could be suspended here for a little while. Like I could look into her heart.
A few seconds later Jamal and Charlotte appear next to me.
“Should we wake her up?” I whisper.
“Nah,” Jamal says.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “She looks so lonely.”
“She knows where to find us when she wants to,” he says. “I just needed to know she was okay.”
I look at Charlotte and she nods, so I force myself to turn away from Ava and back toward my car. The sun begins to rise as we get on the freeway, and by the time we’re dropping Jamal off it almost looks like daylight.
“Call me if you hear from her?” I ask him.
“Yeah,” he says. “You, too, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Sorry if I was hard on you earlier.”
“We understand,” Charlotte says.
He nods, looks up at the shelter.
“Hey,” he says. “If it’s okay, let’s keep this little adventure to ourselves. It’s no big thing. She’d just be embarrassed if you knew what happened tonight. She’s really into you guys.”
“Us?” I say. “She’s Ava Garden Wilder.”
Jamal raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah, that’s her name,” he says.
I want to tell him that it’s more than just a name. It’s where she comes from, who she is, but before I can he says, “Later, y’all,” and jogs up the steps.
We drive most of the way back home in silence.
“What did he mean, ‘That’s her name’?”
“You know what he meant,” Charlotte says.
“No, actually. I don’t.”
“He’s saying she’s Ava Garden Wilder. Raised in Leona Valley, did drama in high school, ran away from home, works at Home Depot. He’s saying that she’s just a girl.”
“This is Hollywood,” I say. “You get to be anyone you want to be. Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe, Archibald Leach became Cary Grant. Spike Lee’s first name is actually Shelton. Ava has been Ava Garden Wilder forever. She just has to embrace it.”
When we get home it’s almost six already, so we collapse onto the bed and sleep for an hour and then we make coffee like zombies and get to work.
Part 3
THE APARTMENT
Chapter Seventeen
Juniper’s apartment is introduced like this:
INT. JUNIPER’s STUDIO APARTMENT—DAY.
A small bright space filled with PLANTS and BOOKS.
So I’ve used the plants and books as the starting point and chosen everything else based on them.
This morning Charlotte and I dug through piles of old art books at thrift stores up and down Sunset Boulevard. Stripped of their jackets, they are faded tan and pink and green cloth. I’m going to stack them in corners of the room, using them as makeshift side tables. We’re stripping the film history books and DVDs from Toby’s bookshelf, but I’ll keep his novels on the shelves as they are. Juniper would definitely read novels.
My dream is to create the impression of potted plants hanging from a beam in the ceiling, but Toby is not an indoor plants kind of guy, and I doubt his landlord would appreciate huge holes in the walls. I have no idea how this will work, but I’m browsing a West Hollywood nursery anyway, choosing the plants I want while Charlotte negotiates a loan from the owner. I’m relying on Morgan to create one of her perfect illusions.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Charlotte says, walking toward me from the office. “He’ll let us rent up to thirty plants for $15 a day, but we have to keep them really healthy, or else he’ll make us buy them. How does that sound?”
“Good.”
“Choose what
you want and put them on this cart, and then I’ll do all the paperwork with him and get directions for when to water them all while you go across the street to get pots.”
“This is why I need you,” I say.
“We still have three other tasks on our list for the day.”
I nod and select my thirty plants of various sizes and textures and shades of green. I choose one with yellow flowers to put in a prominent place, and then I let Charlotte deal with the business side while I start looking for pots. But I only find a few that are right, because Juniper would not have matching sets—she would have whatever she could find at the time.
I talk the woman at the register into giving me a deal and then I head back as Charlotte is loading the plants into the back of my car.
My phone rings. Ava.
“Hey,” she says. “Guess what? Everything went through. I have access to the bank account.”
“So cool,” I say, setting the pots in the backseat. “Are you rich?”
“Yeah. I think I am. I just bought myself a forty-dollar lunch.” She laughs. “And I got a manicure.”
“That’s awesome,” I say.
“So I need to find a place to live.”
I wait, but she doesn’t mention getting kicked out so I just say, “We have a couple more errands right now but you could come over after and we could start looking.”
“I have a better idea. I’m going to get a room at the Marmont. Meet me there when you’re done?”
“Looks like Ava came into a lot of money,” I tell Charlotte as she shuts the trunk. “She’s checking into the Marmont this afternoon.”
She widens her eyes.
“Long term?”
“I don’t think so. Just until she finds a place.”
“Still,” she says. “That’s expensive.”
“Seriously.”
“Did she say anything about last night?”
“No. I guess she doesn’t know we went to look for her.”
I call Jamal to let him know I heard from her.
“Yeah,” he says. “She left me a message when I was at work. Said she was getting a room at some fancy hotel. You gonna go check it out?”
“Yeah, a little later.”