I sit on the cushions and try the next number. This way, if the woman comes, I’ll just refuse to get up. I’ll be ready to channel Clyde Jones. If you want the sofa, you’ll have to get past me first.
But soon I am out of numbers. I guess no one wants to work on a Saturday, but besides the studio buyers, I only know one person with a truck. I can hear Charlotte telling me that she would rather rent a truck than have me call Morgan for help, and she would be right to say it, but I can’t take any chances with this sofa. It’s everything I hoped it would be, only better: vivid green and soft, with these gold embroidered leaves, so delicate I didn’t notice them when I first saw it from across the room. In the first music-room scene, when the daughter is practicing, it will seem pretty but plain. Later, though, once she’s lying on it under the boy’s weight, and there are close-ups of their hands or feet or faces, people will see the thread and the leaves. I can picture the girl’s hair spilling over the side, blending with the gold, like she’s tangled up in a forest. There’s something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They’re all about the moment when the girl is no longer who she once was, and with this in mind, I surrender all doubts and shreds of dignity and call Morgan.
She answers on the third ring.
“I found a sofa,” I tell her. “It’s perfect. Please tell me you can help me get it to set.”
“Where are you?”
“Pasadena,” I say.
“Pasadena?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. But the couch is amazing. The couch is one of a kind, the best couch in history, the—”
“Okay, I’m at brunch with some people. I’m paying the bill. Text me the address.”
I hang up and text her, and then I lie down on the sofa and look up at the clear sky. Time passes and people pass, carrying the remnants of a dead woman’s life. I allow myself to imagine Morgan telling me she wants me back. I try to limit this particular daydream to two or three times per day, or else it becomes difficult to pay attention to the people and things around me. I’ve been lucky to have sofa hunting and Caroline Maddox as distractions, but now I have the sofa and I’m starting to agree with Charlotte that Ava might be a lost cause, and where will that leave me? The answer is simple: It will leave me in too many moments exactly like this, lying down somewhere, my mind occupied by the sound of Morgan saying I want you back (which is not a difficult sentence to imagine because it’s already happened five times in real life), placing her hands around my waist and pulling me toward her, kissing me in that passionate way that says I never thought I’d be able to kiss you again and now that I have you I’ll never let you go.
I’m absorbed by these thoughts when Morgan’s face appears above me. Next to hers is a woman’s I don’t recognize.
I sit up. “Isn’t it even more amazing than you could imagine?”
“It’s really cool,” Morgan says. “It’ll look great in close-ups.”
Even though she’s saying the right things, I almost wish she wasn’t. Another person might see this sitting in the sun on a Saturday morning in Los Angeles and think it’s just a sofa, a castoff from an estate sale, no more or less special than any other sofa. Morgan understands, though, that it is, in fact, more special.
“This is my friend Rebecca.”
“Hi, Rebecca.” I channel Charlotte, stand, extend my hand like a professional, trying not to wonder if Rebecca is in some way affiliated with vastness.
“Morgan’s been telling me about you,” Rebecca says.
“Oh.”
“Good things,” she says.
“Great.”
I’m too confused to say anything else. Is Morgan telling her about me because she’s her new girlfriend? Is she telling her how great I am out of pity?
“I’m sure you guys have things to do,” I say, grabbing one of the sofa’s gorgeous arms. I feel really young and really foolish and desperate. I wish I had a limitless supply of friends with trucks. I wish I didn’t need her. I wish I had called Charlotte instead so she could have facilitated a truck rental. That is Charlotte’s job, after all: facilitation. Why didn’t I let her do her job?
The three of us carry the sofa to the bed of Morgan’s blue truck and lift with all our strength. It slides in.
“I’ll follow you guys,” I say, and turn and get into my car before they can say anything else to me.
~
All the way to the lot, I try to think about life’s vast possibilities. Not as a means of self-torture, because I’m not that type of girl. But as a means of trying to get over Morgan. Life is vast. Many things are possible. Morgan was right about that. So even if she is dating Rebecca now, maybe the world isn’t necessarily over for me. There are still Ava Maddoxes to find and sets to create and girls to kiss and colleges to attend. It’s possible that someday I will hear a Patsy Cline song and the heartbreak will barely register. It will be some distant, buried feeling. I won’t remember how much it once hurt.
By the time we get to the lot I am resolving to make it on and off set without crying. I park closer to the entrance than I usually get to because hardly anyone is here, and I ignore Morgan’s and Rebecca’s residual laughter as they climb out of the truck. I take down the tailgate and start pulling out the sofa, which is unbelievably smooth and plush. And when we set it down in the music room, this room I’ve created, it becomes official: This is the perfect room, the perfect sofa, the perfect set for heartbreak.
Morgan stands back and looks, but Rebecca walks all around it, paying attention to the sheet music and picture frames and the posters and trophies and rugs.
“You did this yourself?” She touches the top of the music stand.
I nod.
“The sofa really does suit the room. It feels authentic. How did you find it?”
“I looked for a long time,” I say. “I went to fifty-two garage sales and sixteen estates.”
“I’m sure you saw a lot of nice sofas, then.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I knew what I wanted.”
Rebecca turns to Morgan and smiles a smile that says something. It isn’t a language I’m privy to, but it doesn’t seem like pity, so I don’t let it get to me.
“I’m going to call Theo,” she tells Morgan. “Really nice to meet you,” she says to me. She looks me in the eye. She shakes my hand again. I notice that she’s older than Morgan by at least a few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
She goes outside and I ask, “Who’s Theo?”
“Her boyfriend,” Morgan says. “Why?”
“No reason,” I say, looking into her face for the first time today. She looks back at me. I can tell that she likes what she’s seeing.
“Want to see what I’ve been working on?” she asks, gesturing to the far side of the set, where she’s been building the little brother’s room.
I pull out my phone; it’s one thirty.
“Wish I could,” I say, “but I have to meet Charlotte at the library.”
She laughs like she knows I’m playing hard to get, and I have to admit that it feels good to turn her down.
~
At 4:46, with Charlotte at the machine next to me scouring the Los Angeles Times, I find Caroline Maddox’s obituary in the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Her name appears next to a small, grainy photograph.
“Char,” I say, and there must be something in the way I say it that tells her I’ve found it, because she sighs and says, “Finally.”
She scoots her chair closer to me. We read together.
Caroline Rose Maddox passed away on October 7, 1996. Born in Beverly Hills in 1974, she had a lifelong dream of being an actress. She had small parts in dozens of films, including The Restlessness, directed by Scott Bennings, in which she played a waitress i
n the climactic scene. In addition to acting, Caroline was a gifted gardener and a compassionate, loyal friend. She is survived by her four-month-old daughter, her best friend, Tracey Wilder, and the hundreds of people whose lives she made brighter by her presence in them.
“This is really sad,” I say.
“The acting stuff?”
“All of it. That she died, I guess. And the acting.”
“We all die,” Charlotte says.
“Well, yeah.”
“Sorry. It’s just that the acting part seems the worst. I mean, she was an extra. Her character didn’t even have a name but it was her greatest accomplishment.”
“Hopefully, she was proud of it,” I say. “We should find the movie. The Restlessness? I haven’t even heard of it.”
Charlotte gets out her laptop and transcribes the obituary, word for word.
“Ava’s name isn’t even in it,” I say. I read it again. “Who do you think wrote it?”
Charlotte bites her lip. “I’d assume Tracey Wilder,” she says. “She’s the only person mentioned by name.”
“Hey,” I say. “We should search for Ava Wilder. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? If I had a kid and I died, you’d adopt her, right?”
“I think your parents or Toby would probably—”
“But if I didn’t have parents or a brother. If Clyde Jones was my dad but you didn’t even know it. If, for all you knew, I had no one but you. You’d adopt her, right?”
“Of course,” she says, starting a search for Ava Wilder.
Three in the entire US. One in Leona Valley, a town that borders the desert.
We stare at the screen.
“Search for Tracey,” I say.
Charlotte’s hands fly across the keyboard.
Twenty-one Tracey Wilders in the US. Charlotte starts to scroll down the list and I see it before she does.
“Oh my God,” I say, and Charlotte gasps when she sees it: Tracey Wilder, Leona Valley, California. Next to her name is a phone number.
“Let’s call her.”
“Tracey or Ava?” Charlotte asks.
“Ava,” I say. “Definitely. Clyde wanted the letter to go to Caroline, but he said she could give the money to Ava. Tracey has nothing to do with it.”
We gather all of our stuff and Charlotte returns the microfilm to Joel-the-cute-librarian and we walk fast toward the exit.
“You call,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, “but let’s get in the car so it’ll be quiet.”
Down in the garage we can’t get service, so I have to drive up to the street; and even though Charlotte’s ability to have a successful phone conversation in no way requires my full attention, I pull into a loading zone because I’m too nervous to drive.
She dials the number and I lean in close enough to hear a boy’s voice say hello.
“Hi,” she says. “My name is Charlotte. Is Ava home, by any chance?”
There is a pause, and then the kid says, “No, she isn’t.”
“Would you mind taking a message?”
“Ava’s, um. . . I mean, I can? But I don’t know when she’d get it.”
“Oh,” Charlotte says.
“She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Is there another way to reach her? Another number?”
“I don’t really know where she is,” he says.
Charlotte bites her lip.
He says, “I can take your number, and if I talk to her I’ll give it to her, but I don’t know when she’ll get it.”
“Okay,” Charlotte says, and she leaves him her number.
“I’ll give it to her. If she calls, I mean.”
“Okay,” Charlotte says again. I can tell she doesn’t want to hang up and I don’t want her to either.
“Bye,” the kid says.
She doesn’t say anything, but soon there’s a click.
And now it’s just Charlotte and me, illegally parked in downtown Los Angeles, all of the answers lost in the vastness.
Chapter Five
On Monday, I go straight to the room Morgan’s been working on. I can play hard to get only for so long. Really, I am easy to get. And I keep thinking of how she drove all the way to Pasadena to pick up the sofa, and how she’s been saying nice things to Rebecca-who-has-a-boyfriend about me, and how she wants to show me this space she’s been working on, because she cares about her work and knows that I also care because we are aligned in this way among many others.
Her back is to me when I walk into the room. She’s putting up wallpaper, sponging the corners of a panel to smooth it out.
“This is gorgeous,” I say, because it is. The paper is the pattern of a night sky, panel after panel, with glowing stars forming constellations. It’s perfect for the little boy, who has an interest in science and whose room is shot primarily in night scenes.
She steps away and smiles at me. I allow myself to notice how good her arms look in her tank top, tan and strong but still unmistakably girl arms. And because the music room is finished and I knew that I wouldn’t be doing anything too hands-on today, I wore a skirt and a skimpy shirt to show off my girlishness, too.
“I’m mostly running errands today,” I tell her. “But I wanted to check it out. Since I couldn’t, you know, on Saturday.”
“That’s right,” she says. “You and Charlotte had a library party to attend.”
“We were actually doing something pretty interesting,” I say.
“I can imagine.” She turns back to her work and I watch her hands as they smooth down swirls and stars.
To the right is a bunk bed built out of light-colored wood.
“You built this?” I ask her, and she nods.
I climb the little ladder and sit on the top bunk. It would be so easy to forget that all around us people are working, moving planter boxes of trees to go on the opposite sides of windows, painting sets and assembling furniture, supervising and surveying and engaging in conversations. So easy, because here is a bunk bed and rumpled sheets, here is a model of a hot-air balloon floating from the ceiling, here is a white wall steadily becoming less white as Morgan applies panel after panel of deep blue wallpaper. It’s all a fantasy, so it’s easy, for a few minutes, to get lost in it.
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be on the top bunk,” I say, even though the idea has never occurred to me.
“And?”
“It’s great,” I say. “So cozy. You haven’t been up here?”
“Not since I finished building it.”
“Why don’t you join me?”
She smiles and shakes her head.
“Hey, what are you doing later?” I ask, trying to ignore Charlotte’s inevitable disapproval. I already had to explain myself about Saturday morning’s encounter.
“I have plans,” Morgan says.
“What kind of plans?”
“Mmm,” she says. “I don’t know if you want to hear about them.”
“Oh,” I say, and the glorious world of little boy’s bunk beds and hands smoothing stars and beautiful arms and short skirts disintegrates. I skip the ladder and hop down instead.
“Well, have fun.”
“Em,” she says. “I’m sorry if this is hard.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“No, really.” She sets down her sponge and leans against the bed, looking at me. “I really like you; I just can’t be tied down right now.”
“That’s such a cliché thing to say,” I tell her. “If I saw that in a script I would laugh.”
She shrugs. “It’s how I feel right now. When you’re ready to hang out as friends I would love that.”
My phone buzzes and I check the screen. It’s Charlotte texting, I thought your sofa was green?
“Charlotte’s here,” I say. “I
have to go.”
“Okay,” Morgan says. “Thanks for coming by. And my friend Rebecca might want to talk to you. I gave her your number. It’s about good things.”
“Sure,” I mutter, and head to the music room.
I see Charlotte as soon as I round the corner.
“Of course it’s green,” I say. “I’d call it, like, a cross between forest green and kelly green. What would you call it?”
“Um,” she says, “light gray?” And then she turns to look into the room and I turn with her.
My sofa is gone.
I spin away from her and out of the building until I’m in the bright sunshine of the lot with Charlotte behind me saying, “Emi, let’s just talk about this for a second. Let’s just take a moment to calm down.”
But all I can say is “Clyde fucking Jones,” because it’s his sofa in the place of my perfect one.
I storm through groups of smiling people and stern people and people talking on cell phones and carrying Starbucks cups and into Ginger’s building and past her secretary and into her office. She’s on the phone and holds up a finger for me to wait. So I stand there, in her perfectly decorated room, adorned with posters from all the famous movies she’s worked on, until she hangs up and says, “This must be about the music room.”
“What happened to my sofa? Did you see it? Wasn’t it perfect?”
She says, “It was a nice sofa. But we got so many amazing things that day, together, remember? You and me and Charlotte.”
“Of course I remember that day,” I say. “What does it have to do with my music room?”
She sighs as if she’s just so busy and I am so unreasonable.
“Emi, first, it isn’t your music room. You’ve done a really lovely job, but you are an intern and I am the production designer.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m aware of our respective positions.”
“Okay,” Charlotte says, sweeping into the office, having apparently been hovering right outside the door. “I think it would be a good idea for Emi and me to take the afternoon off if that would be all right with you, Ginger. She’s been working really hard and didn’t get much sleep last night and, you know, things with Morgan are still a little rocky, so—”