“What for?” Charlotte asks.
“I must have been difficult to get ahold of,” she says. “You must have tried hard.”
“It took us a while,” I say, pouring the tea into a little blue glass.
“Yeah,” she says. “Well, it’s been a strange year.”
She tries to say it casually, like her year has been just averagely strange, which doesn’t really fit with the kid on the phone who had no idea where she was or if she would ever be calling home again.
I hand her the glass. Her fingertips graze mine in the transfer.
She takes a sip of tea and looks at us, expectant. She wants answers, obviously, the reasons that we tracked her down, the information that we have. But all I can do is take her in because it’s uncanny, her resemblance to Clyde. Even more than the red hair and the green eyes, her features are like his: the slant of her cheekbones and her delicate nose, the slight crookedness of her smile as she looks quizzically at us. These are the features that, in spite of Clyde’s bravado, made him always a little bit vulnerable, made us always worry for him and hope that he would survive the shootouts and get the girl.
Ava pushes a strand of hair behind her ear and I notice that she’s even dressed a little bit like Clyde. Everything she has on looks vintage: brown leather boots and high-waisted denim shorts, a leather belt with a dulled brass buckle.
“This is really good,” Ava finally says, breaking our silence. “I’ve never had tea that tastes like this.”
“I’m glad you like it,” Charlotte replies, and I wonder if she’s been thinking the same things that I have. Between her gift for social interactions and my tendency to over-share, we don’t usually suffer through awkward silences like this. I try to pull myself together.
I say, “It’s Ethiopian, from this restaurant around the corner.” And then I launch into an explanation of Toby’s charm and this apartment and the request he’s made of us, and as I do, I can feel myself getting farther and farther from the reason we have her here with us right now. “He said we have to do something epic,” I say. “So if you have any ideas feel free to share them.”
I know that I’m going on about nothing of any importance to her but I can’t stop talking. Clyde Jones’s granddaughter is sitting in our kitchen and trying to downplay some kind of distress, something that’s kept her away from home for a long time.
I can still feel where her fingers brushed mine.
And we have a letter that is going to change her life.
“How did you connect Caroline to me?” she asks once I’ve stopped rambling.
“The library,” Charlotte says.
“The library?”
“I know, right? It was Charlotte’s idea.”
Charlotte says, “We found Caroline’s obituary in the newspaper, and it had Tracey Wilder’s name in it. Emi guessed that Tracey Wilder might be your mom? Your adoptive mom? That’s what we’ve been thinking.”
“Caroline and Tracey were best friends. Tracey adopted me when Caroline died. I was just a baby, though.”
Ava lifts her hands to her mouth and bites a short, unpolished nail. I notice the small freckles that dot her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She catches me staring at her and my eyes dart away. So stupid. I should have just smiled.
“So what is it that you have?” she asks. “For Caroline?”
I glance at Charlotte, hoping she’ll know how to take it from here. I’m not good at this at all. I’m so much better with imaginary people and their imaginary lives.
Charlotte says, “I really don’t know the best way to tell you this, so I’ll just show you what we found.”
She walks into the living room and takes the letter off the coffee table. I can’t even look at Ava, I’m so nervous. Charlotte gives her the envelope and Ava takes out the letter. I go sit on the sofa to wait. I would leave the apartment and walk around the block a few times if I could.
Ava is quiet for a long time, standing in the kitchen. I hear the pages rustling. She must read it several times. Charlotte comes to sit next to me but we don’t say anything.
Finally, I hear Ava walking over to us. She sits on Toby’s orange chair.
“Am I reading this right?”
Charlotte and I nod.
“Is this Clyde . . . ?”
“Jones,” I say. “Yes.”
“Clyde Jones was my grandfather?”
We nod again.
“I know that’s what it looks like but I just keep reading it over and over. There could be another explanation.”
“Yes,” Charlotte says. “There could be.”
“But everything leads to you,” I say. “All the names and the dates of everything.”
“Who’s Lenny?”
“We don’t know.”
Ava studies the letter again. “So Caroline’s mom died a long time ago, but her dad was alive all this time. I guess I always assumed that both of them had died, or else my mom would have told me about them.”
“Maybe Tracey never knew about Clyde,” I say.
“It’s possible,” she says. “How did you find this letter?”
We tell her all about ourselves and our jobs in the movies.
“Wait,” she says. “You design sets for real movies? How old are you?”
“We’re eighteen,” I say.
“I don’t design sets,” Charlotte says. “I make phone calls and run errands. Emi is the genius.”
I roll my eyes even though I really love compliments.
“But even if you’re a genius,” Ava says, “isn’t that a really big job? People go to school for that, right?”
“I don’t technically design them,” I say. “My name probably won’t even be in the credits. My brother got me this unpaid internship a couple years ago and I’ve just sort of worked my way up from there. I’m still an intern and I barely make minimum wage, but my boss let me submit a proposal for this sixteen-year-old’s room and she really loved it, and now they’re just sort of into me for some reason, so I have a next job lined up, too.”
I decide to leave out the unfortunate events of this afternoon. Even I know this night should be about Ava and not about me, and I’m hesitant to mention that her grandfather (admittedly without his knowledge) took part in the destruction of my room and, indirectly, may lead to the early demise of my career, too, if Ginger decides to blacklist me for talking to her the way that I did.
“That is such a cool job,” she says. “I used to take drama in high school, freshman and sophomore year. I loved to stay after rehearsals and watch people paint the sets. I mean, I know it’s not the same thing. These were just high school plays. The sets weren’t even that good, but it was just fun to watch everything come together. Sometimes the backdrops would be double sided. One side would look like a living room or something, and then they would turn it around and it would be a sidewalk scene?” She blushes. “I’m sure it doesn’t compare at all to what you guys do, but it just made me think of it . . .”
She trails off and I realize that she’s embarrassed, and Charlotte must notice it, too, because she rushes in and asks, “Did you act?”
Ava nods. “I started to get really into it, but Tracey made me quit.”
“Why?” I ask.
“She claimed that rehearsals kept me out too late and that my grades were slipping.” She shrugs. “I never tried that hard in school. Drama was the only thing I ever liked.”
“I guess it runs in your family,” I say.
Ava looks down at the letter, as though she’s forgotten about all of it for a moment.
“Do you realize how huge this is?” I say. “Clyde Jones’s life was pretty much a mystery. All people knew was that he was kind of a ladies’ man when he was younger, and that he then became a recluse, and that he never had a wife or children. And now, here you are, and it turns
out that even the little we thought we knew about him wasn’t true. You,” I say, pausing for effect, making sure that she’s really understanding this, “are the secret granddaughter of the most iconic actor in American film history.”
Ava shakes her head in wonder. Then she looks down and smiles. It makes me relieved and happy, like we aren’t invading anything with this information, aren’t trespassing at all. Like what we’ve done is more like picked a bunch of wildflowers and left them on a stranger’s doorstep, something wild and beautiful, ready to be discovered.
“I’ve never even seen a Clyde Jones movie,” she says.
“Are you joking?”
“I can picture him in his cowboy hats and everything, but no.”
I shake my head. “Insanity.”
“It’s not that insane, Emi,” Charlotte says. “Not everyone grows up in a household like yours.”
“Well, you came to the right place,” I say to Ava. “We have the complete collection. Do you have plans?”
The sunburst clock above Toby’s TV shows that it’s almost eleven. I see her glance at it.
“I have time,” she says. “I just have to make a quick phone call first.”
“Great! Char and I will choose one.”
She wanders back into the kitchen to find her phone.
“I’m glad she didn’t freak out,” I whisper as Charlotte and I position ourselves in front of Toby’s extensive DVD collection.
“Yeah, she seems really calm about it,” Charlotte says.
We choose A Long Time Till Tomorrow because it’s quintessential Clyde. Lowlands is my favorite but Ava can get to that one later, after she has at least a basic knowledge of his career so she can appreciate the ways in which it departs from his usual role. I can hear bits of her conversation. Toby’s place is small, and she isn’t trying to be secretive.
“I’ll drive us,” she’s saying. “Yes, really. Okay, see you in the kitchen at one fifteen.”
She’s obviously talking to someone she knows well, but she isn’t saying anything about what she just discovered. If it were me, I would be calling everyone. I would be ecstatic, but all she seems to be is curious.
She walks back in and sits down.
“Sorry,” she says. “I had to call my friend Jamal. I’m driving us to work later.”
“Where do you work?” I ask.
“Home Depot,” she says.
“Really?”
“Is that weird?” she asks.
“I just can’t picture you in one of those uniforms, or, like, helping people cut the right-size pieces of Masonite.”
“We work the early-morning stock shift. We don’t help customers. It’s an okay job and Jamal’s my best friend, so that helps.”
I nod, and Charlotte asks, “Have you known each other for a long time?”
“Almost a year. But we were best friends after barely a week of knowing each other. Things like that happen fast when you don’t have anybody else.”
I’m struck by the simple truth in that statement, but agreeing with her would be dishonest. I can’t even pretend to know what being so alone would feel like. And she doesn’t look like she’s waiting for a response anyway. She’s made herself comfortable in the chair, watching the screen, waiting for the film to begin.
“All right,” I say, back to business. “We’re starting with A Long Time Till Tomorrow. This is Clyde in his first lead role. 1953. Lee Dodson is the director. This is the movie that made Clyde Jones, Clyde Jones, if you know what I mean.”
She nods.
“Ready?” I say.
“Ready.”
I press play and the twangy music starts. Charlotte sits on the white rug, Ava on the orange chair, me on the sofa. The first couple scenes play. Charlotte laughs at the stilted dialogue and I examine the sets, which are spare and rustic.
And then, twelve minutes into the movie, Ava starts sobbing.
~
She cries for a while, knees pulled up to her chest, these sobs that sound like she will never stop.
Charlotte and I keep offering her blankets and mugs of mint tea but she keeps telling us she’ll be okay.
“Should we call your mom?” I ask Charlotte, because her mother is a therapist and speaks in a soft and coaxing voice that I will never be able to successfully imitate.
“If she doesn’t stop, yeah,” she says.
But, eventually, Ava does stop.
“This is so embarrassing,” she says, forcing a laugh. “How stupid.”
“No,” I say. “Not at all.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Charlotte asks her.
“I don’t even know where I would start,” she says, and I can tell Charlotte’s ready to let it go but I’m not. It’s not just that I’m nosy—which, admittedly, I am—it’s that I believe in this kind of thing. If you find a letter in a famous man’s house, and that letter ends up belonging to his daughter who died before she got a chance to get it, and you spend days chasing false leads in search of the granddaughter, and when you do find her, she isn’t where she’s supposed to be so you resign yourself to an answerless future, but then (suddenly, amazingly) the answer appears in your living room, sobbing on a bright orange chair, you don’t just let it go.
So I tell Ava, “We have time. Start anywhere,” and she finally accepts the mug of mint tea and begins.
“I ran away about a year ago,” she says.
“Why?” I ask.
“A few reasons. But my mom—Tracey—was the main one. She made it impossible for me to stay.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell us about it.
“You can go ahead,” Charlotte says. “So you’re away from home.”
She nods. “At first I was living in my car, but then eventually I found a shelter downtown.”
Charlotte asks, “Is that where you live now?”
Ava nods.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“No, it’s fine. The counselors are okay. It’s just this big house with a lot of teenagers living there, and we have chores and they help us find jobs. It’s where I met Jamal. It’s fine. It’s just that I’ve been spending all this time trying to adjust to living without a family, and now you guys show me this letter, and suddenly I’m watching my grandfather in a movie. And I never really thought about my grand-parents at all—I just knew they were dead—and I don’t know anything at all about who Caroline was or what her life was like.”
She takes a sip of tea, stares down into her mug.
“I know so little about where I come from,” she says.
“Tracey hasn’t told you?” I ask.
“I used to ask her a lot of questions but I gave up. She’s really into self-improvement. Like reinventing herself? That sort of thing. She says there isn’t any use dwelling on the past, so it’s as if all of it—Caroline, my life as a little kid—disappeared.”
“That’s intense,” I say.
She still looks on the verge of tears but she laughs anyway.
“Intense is a good word to describe my mother. Everything I know about Caroline I had to figure out by myself, but I couldn’t ever find much.” She forces a smile. “I guess I should have gone to the library.”
“I typed up Caroline’s obituary,” Charlotte says. “Do you want to read it?”
Ava says yes, so Charlotte gets up to find the computer. I study the TV screen, where Clyde is frozen in profile against a bleak landscape, and say, “You look like him.”
“I kept thinking that when we were watching. My mom and my brother, they look so much alike. I’ve never looked like anyone.”
“Your brother?” I ask. “Is that who answered the phone when we called?”
She nods. “He’s Tracey’s son. She was married for a few years to this guy from her church. It didn’t last.”
Charlotte places her laptop on the coffee table, and Ava slips down onto the rug to read about Caroline.
“She was in movies?” she says when she’s finished.
“It sounds like she was mostly an extra,” I say. “But yes.”
“I had no idea.” Her eyes well up again but I can see her blinking, fighting it. After a little while she says, “Maybe that’s why Tracey never wanted me to act.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” I say.
Together, Charlotte and I tell Ava everything we’ve learned about Clyde and Caroline. Every question we’ve asked, every answer we’ve gotten. She loves hearing about little Ava, and laughs over my impressions of Frank and Edie, but her face gets serious when we get to what they said about “the drugs and the men and that baby,” and it all feels different now, that “that baby” is the girl sitting here with us, learning all of these secrets from her past for the first time.
And then, in the middle of everything, when it seems that soon we’ll resume our movie and continue the night, Ava says, “The clock.”
She points at Toby’s sunburst.
“Is that time right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then I have to go.”
I look at Charlotte, hoping she’ll have a plan for what we’ll do next, why we’ll need to see one another again, but Ava is already halfway across the living room.
Her eyes are still pink, her face soft from crying, but when she pauses in the doorway to say good-bye, she looks like Clyde Jones—the cocky, crooked smile, the charming glimmer in her eye.
“Thanks,” she says, “for finding me. Not everyone would have done all that.” And then she disappears into the night.
Chapter Seven
The next morning, I knock on the ajar door of Ginger’s office.
She looks up from her desk, not terribly thrilled to see me.
“I’ve come to apologize,” I tell her, and she nods and waves me in.
I have a speech prepared—Charlotte and I rehearsed over coffee this morning—and I recite it. It involves a little bit of groveling, a little bit of flattery, some self-deprecation, and a fair amount of regret. It ends with a concession: “Though it isn’t what I had envisioned for the room, it is a beautiful piece of furniture for such an important scene, and I’m sure that it will have mass appeal without sacrificing style.”