The knuckles of one hand are white from grasping the phone, and then she reaches out to me and squeezes my shoulder with the other as she says, “Yes, her name was Caroline. Yes, I can come now.”
And I know that this is a major breakthrough. I know that all I should be thinking about is Lenny and what he’s about to tell us. But, instead, what I think about is how her hand squeezing my shoulder feels like a kiss.
She lets go.
Touch me again, I want to tell her. But I don’t.
Chapter Nineteen
“We found Lenny,” I tell Charlotte when she answers.
Ava is pulling her beat-up car out of her fancy garage and I’m sitting next to her in the passenger’s seat even though I’m due back at work in twenty minutes.
“Are you kidding?” she asks.
“No. And I know we’re supposed to be putting up the artwork but I’m sort of headed downtown right now.”
“We can do it tonight,” she says. “It’s fine. This is amazing. How did you do it?”
“I’ll tell you everything as soon as we’re done.”
“You’d better,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m missing this.”
“I know,” I say.
“It’s fine. I’ll do as much on my own as I can. I’ll tell Rebecca you got some great idea and ran off to make magic happen.”
“I love you,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “Call me as soon as it’s over.”
And soon we are parked in a twenty-dollar-an-hour parking garage, riding a silver elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of a sleek office building, stepping out into a lobby with a pristine white carpet.
“How often do you think they have to replace this?” I whisper, but Ava isn’t looking down. She heads straight to the guy at the desk and tells him that Lenny’s expecting us. Then a door opens and a tall man with thinning brown hair and a white linen shirt appears. He looks at both of us but soon his gaze shifts to Ava only. A faint smile flickers and vanishes across his angular face, and then he ushers us in. We follow him down a hallway and into a corner office with a view of Los Angeles I’ve never seen before, so different from Ava’s view from only three stories up. From up here, it would be easy to forget that life exists below you.
Lenny sits in his office chair and I leave the seat across from him for Ava while I take the sofa behind her, a little out of the way but still close enough to hear everything he says.
“This is my friend Emi,” Ava says. “She drove me.” Which isn’t true, but I nod and say hi, because I understand that kind of lie the way I understood from the moment she said she’d go straight over that I would be with her. Some things are just impossible to do alone.
“Emi,” he says. “Hello.”
He gives me a weak wave and I lift my hand in response, aware that these are the first words exchanged among us.
Finally, Ava says, “I have some questions.”
“Yes, of course you do,” Lenny says.
This isn’t the response I would have expected. The child of a dead woman he used to know suddenly appears in his office almost two decades later, and he knows that she has questions?
But he lifts his hands over his head in a motion of surrender, and sweat beads on his cleanly shaven face, and each time he looks at Ava he averts his eyes as though she were too much to behold.
And then he launches into the past as though he’s known this moment would someday come and has preserved the story in some easily accessed recess of his brain. And here is his moment. And here we are. So he tells us everything.
It turns out that Lenny and Caroline went way back, grew up down the block from each other.
“What do you know about her parents?” he asks.
“I know that her mom is dead. I know Clyde Jones was her dad.”
“How did you find out?”
“From Emi,” she says.
“My friend and I found a letter hidden in a Patsy Cline record,” I tell him. “We bought it at his estate sale.”
“Wild. I really think that besides Caroline’s mother and Caroline—well, and Clyde, of course—that I was the only person alive who knew that for a long time. Mrs. Maddox—Valerie—was a terribly bitter woman. I’ve never met such a bitter woman, and believe me, I’ve met a lot of women.”
I laugh and say, “Okay,” but Ava doesn’t appear amused by him. She’s the way she was the first time in the Marmont, when she asked me if we knew how Caroline died: focused and intent, bracing herself for the answers she’s been searching for almost her whole life. And here, finally, is someone who can talk about her whole life. The only person who can and is willing to, already mentioning Clyde and Caroline as though they were just people, not clues in a mystery, not elusive characters in a cinematic life.
“Valerie’s house was always dark and she walked around in her robe all day, and poor Caroline, she only wanted to be happy. She ate dinner at my house most nights, but then Mrs. Maddox would get angry and keep her inside for a week. After a while Caroline could come back, but she always had to do her time at home in that horrible, dark, dusty house, with her mother pacing around smoking cigarettes and thinking about the man who betrayed her. For years she never even told Caroline that Clyde was her father. Caroline found out eventually when a letter came when her mom wasn’t home. Apparently Clyde tried to send money and letters for years, and Valerie had them sent back. I found that out later, a couple months after Valerie died. Caroline and I were in our twenties and we met Clyde at a restaurant.”
I don’t think of myself as an entirely trusting person, but everything Lenny’s saying fits what we already know, and there’s something about the way he’s telling us this that makes me believe him.
“Caroline was pregnant with you,” he says.
“So that’s how he knew my name,” Ava says.
“No. She didn’t tell him. She was upset about seeing him. It was just too much for her. It’s hard to believe, but it was the first time they ever met. He explained it to us that day. He and Caroline’s mom had a fling—it only lasted a week or two—and he didn’t even know she was pregnant until a mutual friend told him. Until Caroline found that letter when she was about eleven, she didn’t have any idea who her dad might have been; and then when she did find out, her mom polluted her mind with these accusations: He was fame-obsessed. He would never admit that Caroline was his. The money he sent was to pay them to keep their mouths shut. I guess it was her word against Clyde’s, but the man I met that day didn’t seem like any of the things Valerie made him out to be. He seemed sad and lost and a little bit desperate. But Caroline didn’t know how to react to everything. She didn’t tell him what she was planning to name you. She hardly said anything.
“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 fucked 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 fucking 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 fuck out.”
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 fucked 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.”
“We mov
ed around a lot,” Ava says.
“‘A lot’ doesn’t even come close. Seems like Tracey had a new boyfriend every couple weeks. At one point, when I started getting really nervous, I asked her if she’d let you stay with me for a little while, just while she got back on her feet, but she said no.”
“Why?” I ask. I can’t help myself.
He looks at me, then back to Ava. “You made her feel safe,” he says. “That’s what she told me. She said that she would never go too far as long as you were with her. She told me that you saved her life in more ways than she could explain.”
Ava shakes her head. I can see her fighting off tears.
“That isn’t how she feels now.”
“Well, no. That was before all of her transformations. I suppose AA or some self-help guru or Jesus saves her life now.”
Ava looks surprised at the bitterness in his voice.
“Yeah,” she says. “Exactly. Why did that happen?”
He leans forward, buries his head in his hands. Finally, he sits back again.
“I don’t know all the details. We’d been out of touch for about a year, and she called me and asked if I could meet her for lunch. You were in school, I guess. She was wearing a lot of makeup because someone had beaten her up. It was pretty ugly, I remember, even with her attempts to hide it. She wanted money. She needed to pay to get her car fixed and then she was going to take you and go to stay with her parents for a while in Arcadia. I gave her the money, and she left for her parents’ a few days later.”
“I remember staying there. They had a yard and a lot of books.”
“Right. You guys stayed there for a couple of months. She was in rehab and she thought it might work for her that time. She was trying really hard and I felt better, knowing that you were with her folks. Then, she met a guy who said he could help her and she moved way the fuck out there. To Leona Valley.”
“She’s still there.”
“Really,” he says. “I guess I already knew that. I just didn’t want it to be true. I got married seven years ago. Our first year of marriage, my wife got all excited. She wanted to send out holiday cards. We got our picture taken wearing Santa hats and posed with the dog. Amazing, isn’t it?—the things we’ll do for love. She asked me for a list of addresses, and I thought about you guys. I gave her your name and address and she sent it out. I didn’t know if you’d remember me, but I’d hoped that you would. But then the letter came back in the mail. Someone had written ‘return to sender’ and I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t Tracey’s writing, that it was the writing of a stranger, but I think I knew. Secretly, it was what I expected.”