Everything Leads to You (30 page)

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.

We love films because they make us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing.

But also.

They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken. Remember about death and suffering and the complexities of living. Remember what it is like to love someone. Remember how it is to be loved. Remember what you feel in this moment. Remember this. Remember this.

Outside, cars are approaching, their engines cutting off, one after the next. And there is the shutting of doors and so many familiar voices, and everyone sounds excited and anxious but happy. Soon they’re streaming in, and Ava and I are no longer alone, but the room is alive with beginning.

We step away from each other and Ava smiles, and her face is flushed and I feel this elated twist in my stomach when I realize that I will be able to kiss this face again when our day of work is over.

I will be able to hold her hand.

I will be able to talk to her whenever I want.

I will be able to want her without wondering if she wants me back.

Ava is swept away by Grant and Vicki, and I notice Charlotte watching me from across the room. She glances at Ava and then back to me and I nod yes. And living is beautiful. And she smiles because she knows.

The lights are already set up. Charlie’s camera is on its tripod, pointed to our opening frame. In the bedroom, Grant is applying Ava’s makeup while Vicki is standing back, assessing. I begin the last-minute steps to make the set perfect. I look into the monitor the way Morgan told me I should, and our first shot looks just as I had hoped. I prepare the first props: one of the ceramic plates with a piece of toast, a ceramic mug of peppermint tea. My toast comes out a little too brown, and when Ava sees it a few minutes later she smiles.

Her hair is straight, falling over her shoulders. Her eyes are lined with shimmery brown eyeliner and her lips are shining.

I will be able to make toast for her in the mornings.

I will do my best to get it right.

“Okay,” Theo says. “Ava, remember, we can take as long as we need to get this scene. And you don’t need to overthink it. It’s just Juniper, existing in her apartment. We’re getting to know her through her actions and her surroundings, so just, if you can, make yourself feel like you’re home.”

Ava nods. I watch her through the monitor. I wish I could tell Theo that the idea of home isn’t always simple. It isn’t the comforting direction he meant it to be. But, on the screen, I see Ava looking around at the set I’ve created for her. She moves from one place to another, lifting up the objects of an imaginary girl. And then she looks at me.

“Yeah,” she says. “I can feel that.”

“Okay, good.”

Ava takes a seat at the tiled table. She has a book of poetry. She has her toast and her tea.

“All right,” Theo says. “Are we ready?”

“Yes,” Michael says, holding the sound equipment.

“Yup,” Charlie says, from behind his camera.