“Mom,” Ava says. “Please. We only have one life. This life.”
Tracey turns away, like she’s going to walk inside.
“Mom,” Ava says. “I never had sex with Malcolm. We weren’t even in the Sunday school room. We were outside. All we were doing was talking.”
Tracey won’t look at her, but Ava keeps talking anyway. And I remember what she told me when we were picking cherries, that she gave Tracey reasons to reject her.
“I never shoplifted from CVS. That makeup you found in my bathroom? Jessica gave it to me. And the night that you went looking for me in my room? I was just hanging out with friends at the movie theater. I wasn’t doing any of the things I told you I was doing.”
“Why did you torture me like that?” Tracey asks. “You were so cruel to me.”
“I was giving you reasons,” Ava says, “to not love me. I didn’t know it then but I understand now.”
I expect Tracey to give in at this, to assure Ava of her love, but she doesn’t say anything. She just watches Ava standing there, crying and trying to explain.
The door opens and a boy appears in the doorway.
“Jonah!” Ava says, and steps toward him but Tracey turns around and shrieks, “Get back inside!”
Jonah stands, paralyzed, looking from his mother to his sister, and for a moment I think he might defy her, go show Ava that he’s her family, but instead he retreats and the door closes slowly, but not all the way.
“I wasn’t coming on to Lisa,” Ava says. “What happened between us happened because of both of us.”
Tracey shakes her head.
“Like that’s going to make anything better,” she says.
Ava says, “You aren’t going to believe this but I found out that I had a grandfather, and he left me a lot of money. So I’m doing all right. You don’t have to worry about me.” She’s struggling not to cry and it’s so painful to watch her. “And I’m in this movie. I auditioned. A lot of other people wanted my part, but you know what? They wanted me.”
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 fucked 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 fucking what. She needs to wake up and figure out that she doesn’t get to decide every single thing about you. It’s her fucking loss, man,” he says. “I’m sorry but I just had to say that. It’s her fucking 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.
But our film would have been more modern noir than Western: Two girls in Los Angeles solving a mystery. A late, enigmatic star. A beautiful woman, drugs, and sex. We’d be swimming in the Marmont pool, driving down Sunset Boulevard, our hair wild in the wind from passing cars. A secret love affair, kissing in Ava’s trailer between shooting scenes, dodging paparazzi. All of it sounded amazing and so little of it was real.
But this is.
This is.
I thought I might get a cinematic love story, and I’ve gotten some of that.
But sitting here in my parents’ house, with Ava a couple feet away from me, eating chow fun and watching Melrose Place, I realize that all of the sets and the props and the performances, the scripts that take years to write; the perfect camera angles and painstaking lighting, the directors that call take after take until it turns out right, the projections on the huge theater screens—so much larger and louder than life—it’s all done in hopes of portraying what I’m feeling right now.
As much as I had wanted a love story out of a movie, I know now that movies can only hope to capture this kind of love.
~
Jamal leaves, heads back to the shelter to make curfew. Charlotte goes home to her mother.
“I know you’re tired,” I tell Ava. “And you can say no. But I have to go by the set one more time and I’d love it if you could come with me.”
She follows me to Toby’s place. We park next to each other and walk
through the courtyard and up to his door together. I knew from the beginning that I wanted Juniper’s apartment to seem lived in and I’ve tried to make it feel real. But even the stacks of books and the little basket by the door full of mail don’t do enough.
Ava turns to me, her eyes pink rimmed, too tired for even her usual smile.
“This doesn’t have to take long,” I say. “We don’t even have to talk. I was just thinking that maybe you could spend some time in here. Like, live here. Even a few minutes would help.”
She nods. Lets her purse drop to the floor.
I take a seat in a corner chair that Morgan upholstered in lime-green fabric and watch as Ava makes a slow lap through the space. In the kitchen, she takes a white enamel pitcher, borrowed from Theo and Rebecca’s, and fills it at the sink. One by one, she waters the plants, and when the pitcher is empty, she sets it on the edge of a bookshelf next to a hanging fern.
She scans the novels and collections of poetry and pulls one out. Twenty-one Love Poems by Adrienne Rich, snatched along with most of the other books from the shelves in my mother’s office. She kicks off her shoes, then sinks into the sofa and reads for twenty minutes. Then she places the book, spine open, on the coffee table. She makes a cup of tea, contemplating something as she stares into the ceramic mug. When she transfers the teabag into the sink, a couple drops land on the counter. She doesn’t wipe them up. She crosses the room and, as she drinks, she studies the portraits. She looks for the longest time at one in particular. I found it by myself at the Rose Bowl when I was scavenging for George’s house. It’s a charcoal drawing of a young man, and something about his expression reminded me of Clyde when he was very young. When she runs her finger along the edge of the frame, it leaves the portrait just a tiny bit crooked.
She takes her last sip of tea and sets her mug in the sink. Her leather purse waits in the entry.
“Bye,” she says to me, and walks barefoot out the door.
Chapter Twenty-two
We film today.
I wake up in my bed far before my alarm goes off. Everyone is meeting at Theo and Rebecca’s for coffee and a final review of the scenes we want to shoot, but I got permission from Theo to skip the meeting and head straight to the apartment. I want to do a final walk-through, make sure everything is in order.
Out in the kitchen, my mother is cooking in her suit.
“You need to have a good breakfast, honey. This is such an important day for you!”
She’s making her pancakes, the best pancakes in the world.
“I love you,” I tell her.
“And I you, my strong and talented daughter.”
When I was a kid, sometimes my mom had me do affirmations before school. She wanted me to grow up with a fierce belief in my own potential. So I stood and looked in the mirror and repeated the absurd things she said to me. But who knows? Maybe it did some good. I eat my breakfast and tell my parents a little about what happened with Ava and a lot about the movie.
“We’ve been missing you,” Dad says. “I’m glad we have you home again.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It feels good.”
They make me a little later than I had hoped to be, but I’m still the first one to arrive. I park and unlock the door and step inside, once again amazed by how different it looks from a week ago, and how, somehow, even with no budget and very little help or experience, I was able to make it look exactly as I hoped it would. Too soon, I hear another car pull up and stop. A door shut. Footsteps. All I wanted was a little time alone before everyone rushed in, but I guess everyone’s excited and nervous and ready to begin.
There’s a soft knock, followed by the door swinging open. It isn’t everyone. It’s Ava.
“Hey,” she says. “I wanted to catch you before we started.” She takes a breath. “Thanks again for coming with me yesterday.”
“Thank you for wanting me to.”
She nods, brushes a strand of hair off her face.
“How are you doing?” I ask her. “After everything?”
“Well, I didn’t sleep very much,” she says. “I was up all night thinking.”
“About Tracey?”
“Yes,” she says. “But also about you. That night when I came over, after I saw Caroline’s death certificate, you asked me what I hoped to get from everything. And that hurt, because it was obvious, wasn’t it?”
I shake my head.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I must be missing something because it isn’t obvious to me.”
“I was doing it for you,” she says. She smooths her hair behind her ear. She takes a breath. “I have so much more than I’ve ever had,” she says. “I know about where I come from. I have my own apartment and I have Jamal, who I know will be my friend forever. I have money. I have this movie, and all the possibilities that it could open up if I do well. But still. It’s hard to let go of what I was to you for a little while. I’ve never been anyone’s great mystery before. I doubt I ever will be again. It’s not even what I want for myself, but it felt amazing, to be that special for a little while. For you to think I was that special.”
“But you were more than that to me,” I say. “The mystery was just how we started.”
“I know that now. But I panicked. We saw Lenny and he explained all these things I’d always wondered about but all I could think was that I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t want it to be over for you.
“Look,” she says, and her words come faster, more urgently. “I don’t know how you feel. But I just want to say this, and maybe it will sound incredibly egotistical or absurd but I’m going to say it anyway.”
I can feel myself stop breathing.
She breathes deep. Says, “I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t want to stop thinking about you. And you’re this incredible person who does all of these amazing things. You have this job I didn’t even know existed and everyone talks about you like you’re a genius. You should have heard them this morning going on and on about this set, and it’s all so deserved. I mean, all I have to be is decent today, because this room all by itself is enough to break hearts. And you have this beautiful life with your parents and your cool older brother and Charlotte and all your movies and records and insane knowledge of the city. When I said those things about myself compared to you, when I talked about your perfect life, what I was trying to say was that I wanted to feel worthy of you. The problem was that I didn’t. But even though it’s only been a week since then, I’ve figured a lot out. It might sound crazy, but even though you’re this incredible, artistic genius of a girl, I do feel worthy of you.”
I shake my head because I can’t believe she’s saying these things.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course you are.”
Everything feels fuzzy. Like there’s humming all around me, and there is no way that she is saying these words to me but here she is, saying them, looking at me with those green eyes that I’ve been trying not to look too far into for all the weeks I’ve known her.
“But, wait,” I say. “What about if you get famous?”
She shakes her head and laughs.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When everyone knows about Clyde and—”
“I’m not going to tell people about Clyde. I got some answers, and I got the inheritance and for those things I’ll always be grateful. But I don’t want anything else out of it. I don’t want the world talking about him and my mother.”
“Okay, but this movie is going to be big. I know it will be. And then where will that leave me? Even without Clyde, you’ll be on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I’ll still be behind the scenes while the whole world falls in love with you.”
“So I’m in Vanity Fair,” she says. “Which I probably won’t be, but for the sake of this conversation, we can pretend that I am. This is what, a year from now?”
; I nod.
“Okay. A year from now. And the interviewer comes over and we’re there together. And her piece begins with something like, Ava Garden Wilder and her girlfriend, production designer Emi Price, sit drinking lemonade on her rooftop deck.”
I don’t even know what to say to that.
“It sounds good, doesn’t it?”
I nod. It sounds good.
“Last time I did this, I was in a terrible place, and I wasn’t very kind and I wasn’t ready to love anyone. You were right to say no and I’ll understand if you say no again but I hope that you won’t.”
She takes a step closer to me.
“Don’t you want to kiss me?” she asks.
She smiles just a little, a hopeful, sweet smile, but somewhere buried in it is that confidence that slays me.
I say yes and she says yes? and I nod and she touches my waist with one of her hands and I touch her face with mine, that spot where the sunlight landed on the day I really saw her.
We don’t kiss right away. Instead, there’s a moment when we just look at each other, the moment where, if this were a movie, the music would start. And surrounded by all of my careful details, everything still just a little more perfectly placed than it would be in life—the plants that cascade down the wall in their charming pots, the deep-sea curtains and the colorful jars, the fairy-tale sofa with its gold vines and plush cushions—and Ava’s movie-star face, her Clyde Jones nose and her freckles and her beautiful green eyes, this could be the scene in the movie that everyone aches for. The moment where the thing that you wish for becomes the thing that you get.
When we tip our faces to the side, we do it in the perfect movie way—no awkward repositionings, no pressed noses. I swear: I can hear the music swelling.
But then.
Our lips touch. The imaginary music goes quiet. The room is only a room and we are the miracles. Her mouth is warm and human and soft, her hand presses hard and insistent against my back, her breasts press against mine. My hand grazes the delicate line of her jaw; there’s the whisper of her hair against my fingers as we kiss harder.