by Nina LaCour
Sheriff: “I’m a man of the law but that don’t make me honest.”
The bad cowboy doesn’t say anything, but looks borderline maniacal as he points the gun at Clyde.
Then Clyde says, “Round these parts, lawlessness is a disease. I have a funny suspicion I know how to cure it.”
The camera moves down to his holster, and Toby shouts, “Look!” and presses pause. There’s the belt buckle: the horse, that hill, the moon.
Charlotte says, “That’s amazing!”
I say, “Toby. I am seriously worried about you. Of all the Clyde Jones movies and all the belt buckles, how did you know that this buckle was in this scene of this movie?”
But Toby is doing a dance around his living room, ignoring me, reveling in the glory of his new possession.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he chants.
After a while Toby calms down enough that we can watch the rest of the movie, which goes by quickly. Clyde kills all the bad guys. Gets the girl. The end.
“Okay,” Toby says. “I asked you both here for a reason. Come to the table.”
I’m trying to hold on to the good feeling of the last hour, but the truth is I’m getting sad again. Toby is about to leave for two months to scout around Europe for this film that starts shooting soon. It’s stupid of me—it’s only two months, and it’s a huge promotion for him—but Toby and I spend a lot of time together so it feels like a big deal. Plus he’s going to miss my graduation, which I shouldn’t care about because I’ve been over high school for a long time. But I do care just a little bit.
Toby opens the door to the patio off the kitchen and the night air floods in. He pours us some iced tea he gets from an Ethiopian place around the corner. The people there know him and sell it to him in a plastic pitcher that he takes back and gets refilled every couple days. They don’t do it for anyone else, only Toby.
When we’re seated at the round kitchen table, he says, “So, you know how I put up that ad to sublet my place? Well, I got all these responses. People were willing to spend mad cash to live here for two months.”
“Sure,” I say. Because it’s obvious. His place is small but super adorable. It’s this happy mix of Mom and Dad’s old worn-in furniture and castoffs from sets I’ve worked on and things we picked up from Beverly Hills yard sales, where rich people sell their expensive stuff for cheap. It’s just a few blocks from Abbot Kinney, and a few blocks more from the beach.
“Yeah,” he says. “So it was seeming like it was gonna work. But then I had a better idea.”
He takes a sip of his tea. Ice clinks. Charlotte leans forward in her chair. But me, I sit back. I know my brother, the master of good ideas, is waiting for the right moment to reveal his latest plan.
Finally, he says, “I’m letting you guys have it.”
“Whaaaat?” I say. Charlotte and I turn to each other, as if to confirm that we both just heard the same thing. We shake our heads in wonder. And then I can’t help it, I think of the third time Morgan broke up with me, when her reason was that I was younger (only three years!) and lived with my parents. Would it make a difference to her whether I lived here instead? Or is this time really about the vastness or whatever?
Charlotte says, “Are you serious?”
And Toby grins and says, “Completely. It’s my graduation present to both of you. But there’s a condition.”
“Of course,” I say, but he ignores me.
“I want you to do something with the place. Something epic. And I don’t mean throw a party. I mean, something great has to take place here while I’m gone.”
“Like what?” I ask. I’m a little worried, but excited, too. Toby’s the kind of person whose greatness makes other people want to rise to any occasion. Everything he does is somehow larger than life, which is how he worked his way from a summer job as one of the parking staff to a full-time job as the location manager’s assistant. And then, last month, at the age of twenty-two, he became the youngest location scout in the studio’s recent history.
“That’s all I’m gonna say on the subject,” he says. “The rest is up to you.”
We try asking more questions but when we do he just sits back and smiles. So the conversation shifts to The Agency, the film he’s scouting for. I get to design a room for it, too, which will be my biggest job yet. It’s a huge-budget movie with a young ensemble cast—Charlie Hayden and Emma Perez and Justin Stark—all the really big young actors. It’s a spy adventure, but the room I’m designing is for one of the girls when she’s still supposed to be in high school, before they all become spies and start traveling around the world. It’s probably going to be a stupid movie, but I’m thrilled about it anyway. A few weeks ago, Toby and I got to go to a party with the director and the whole cast and crew. I hung out with these stars whose faces are on posters all across the world. That’s just one example of the kinds of things I get to do because of Toby.
Too soon, a knock comes on Toby’s door—what is now for two months my door—and the film studio driver sweeps his suitcases into the trunk and then sweeps up my brother, too. Toby dangles the keys out the window, then looks out at me and says, “Epic.”
The car pulls away and we wave and then it turns a corner and is gone. And Charlotte and I are left on the curb outside the apartment.
I sit down on the still-warm concrete.
“Epic,” I say.
“We’ll think of something,” Charlotte says, sitting next to me.
We sit in silence for a while, listening to the neighbors. They talk and laugh, and soon some music starts. I’m trying to push away the heavy feeling that’s descending now, that has been so often lately, but I’m having trouble. A few months ago it seemed like high school was going to last forever, like our college planning was for a distant and indistinct future. I could hang out with Charlotte without feeling a good-bye looming, take for granted every spur-of-the-moment plan with my brother, sneak out at night to drive up to Laurel Canyon with Morgan and lie under blankets in the back of her truck without worrying that it would be the last time. But now the University of Michigan is taking my best friend from me in just over two months, and my brother is off to Europe tonight and who knows where else after that. Morgan is free to kiss any girl she wants. I expected graduation to feel like freedom, but instead I’m finding myself a little bit lost.
My phone buzzes. Why didn’t you come to work? I hide Morgan’s name on the screen and ignore Charlotte’s questioning look.
“Hey, we should listen to that record you got,” I say, and Charlotte says, “Nice way to avoid the question,” and I say, “Patsy Cline sounds like a perfect way to end the evening,” which is a total lie. I don’t know why Charlotte likes that kind of music.
But I fake enthusiasm as she takes the record out of its sleeve and places it on Toby’s record player and lowers the needle. We lie on Toby’s fluffy white rug (I got it from a pristine Beverly Hills yard sale for Toby’s twenty-first birthday, along with some etched cocktail glasses) and listen to Patsy sing her heart out. Each song lasts approximately one minute so we just listen as song after song plays. Truthfully? I actually like it. I mean, the heartbreak! Patsy knew what she was singing about, that’s for sure. It’s like she knows I have a phone in my pocket with texts from a girl who I wish more than anything really loved me. Patsy is telling me that she understands how hard it is not to text Morgan back. She might even be saying Dignity is overrated. You know what trumps dignity? Kissing.
And I might be sending silent promises to Patsy that go something like Next time Charlotte gets up to go to the bathroom I’ll just send a quick text. Just a short one.
“That was such a good song,” Charlotte says.
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
But I kind of missed it because Patsy and I were otherwise engaged and I swear that song only lasted six seconds.
“I wonder who wrote it,” sh
e says, standing and stretching and making her way to the album cover resting against a speaker.
This is probably my moment. She’ll look at the song list and get her answer and then she’ll head to the bathroom and I will write something really short like Let’s talk tomorrow or I still love you.
“Hank Cochran and Jimmy Key,” she says. “I love those lines ‘If still loving you means I’m weak, then I’m weak.’”
“Wow,” I say. It’s like Patsy is giving me permission to give in to how I feel. “Are the lyrics printed?” I ask, sitting up.
“Yeah, here.” Charlotte steps over and hands me the record sleeve, and as I take it something flutters out. I pick it up off the rug.
“An envelope.” I check to see if it’s sealed. It is. I turn it over and read the front. “‘In the event of my death, hand-deliver to Caroline Maddox of 726 Ruby Avenue, Apartment F. Long Beach, California.’”
“What?” Charlotte says.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Do you think Clyde wrote that?”
We study the handwriting for a long time. It’s that old-guy handwriting, cursive and kind of shaky, but neat. Considering that 1) Clyde lived alone, and 2) this record belonged to Clyde, and 3) Clyde was an old man who probably had old-man handwriting, we decide that the answer to my question is Definitively Yes.
The feeling I had in Clyde’s study comes back. The envelope in my hand is important. This moment is important. I don’t know why, but I know that it’s true.
“We should go there now,” I say.
“To Long Beach? We should probably let the estate sale manager know, don’t you think? Should we really be the ones to do this?”
I shake my head.
“I don’t want to give it to someone else,” I say. “This might sound crazy but remember when you asked me if I was doing okay earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“I just had this feeling that, I don’t know, that there was something important about me being there, in Clyde Jones’s house. Beyond the fact that it was just amazing luck.”
“Like fate?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know. Maybe fate. It felt like it.”
Charlotte studies my face.
“Let’s just try,” I say.
“Well, it’s after ten. It would be almost eleven by the time we got there,” Charlotte says. “We can’t go tonight.”
I know as well as Charlotte that we can’t just show up on someone’s doorstep at eleven with an envelope from a dead man.
“My physics final is at twelve thirty,” I say. “Yours?”
“Twelve thirty,” she says.
“I can’t go after because I have to get that music stand and then get to set. I guess we’ll have to go in the morning.”
Charlotte nods, and we get out our phones to see how long it will take us to get to Long Beach. Without traffic, it would take forty minutes, but there is always traffic, especially on a weekday morning, which means it could take well over an hour, and we need to leave time for Caroline Maddox to tell us her life story, and we have to make sure we get back before our finals start, which means we have to leave . . .
“Before seven?” I say.
“Yeah,” Charlotte says.
We are less than thrilled, but whatever. We are going to hand-deliver a letter from a late iconic actor to a mysterious woman named Caroline.
Chapter Two
We get on the road at 6:55, glasses full of Toby’s iced tea because it was either that or some homemade kombucha that neither of us was brave enough to try. Toby does yoga, eats lots of raw foods. It’s one of the areas in life where we diverge, which is probably good since we’re alike in almost every other way: a love for the movies, a love for girls, an energy level other people sometimes find difficult to tolerate for extended periods of time.
Charlotte and I spend a while in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405. I allow Charlotte twenty minutes of public radio, and then when I am thoroughly newsed-out I turn on The Knife, because I am a firm believer that important moments in life are best with a sound track, and this will undoubtedly be one of those moments.
“Who do you think she is?” I ask, switching into the right lane. Charlotte’s holding Clyde’s envelope, studying Caroline’s carefully written name.
“Maybe an ex-girlfriend?” she says. “She’ll probably be old.”
I try to think of other possibilities, but Clyde Jones is famous for being a bit of a recluse. He had some high-profile affairs when he was young, but that’s ancient history, and it’s common knowledge that he died without a single family member. With relatives out of the question, I can’t think of many good answers.
We exit the freeway onto Ruby Avenue.
“I’m getting nervous,” I say.
Charlotte nods.
“What if it’s traumatic for her? Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to do this before our finals. What if Caroline needs us or she passes out from shock or something?”
“I doubt that will happen,” Charlotte says.
Neither of us has been on Ruby Avenue, so we don’t know what to expect. But we do know that as we get closer to the address it becomes clear that whoever Caroline Maddox is, she doesn’t live the same kind of life Clyde did. Number 726 is one of those sad apartment buildings that look like motels, two stories with the doors lined up in rows. We park on the street and look at the apartment through the rolled-up window of my car.
“Maybe she’ll be someone he didn’t know that well. Like a waitress from a restaurant he went to a lot. Or maybe he had a daughter no one knew about. From an affair or something.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Charlotte says.
We get out of the car.
After climbing the black metal stairs to the second story and knocking on the door of apartment F, I whisper, “Is it okay for us to ask what’s inside? Like, to have her open it in front of us?”
Charlotte shakes her head no.
“Then how will we ever know? Will we follow up with her?”
“Shhh,” she says, and the door opens to a shirtless man, holding a baby on his hip.
“Hello,” Charlotte says, professional but friendly. “Is Caroline home by any chance?”
The guy looks from Charlotte to me, shifts his baby to the other hip. He has longish hair, a shell necklace. A surfer who ended up miles from the beach.
“Sorry,” he says. “No Caroline here.”
Charlotte looks at the address on the envelope. “This is 726, right?”
“Yeah. Apartment F. Just three of us, though. Little June, myself, my wife, Amy.”
“Do you mind my asking how long you’ve lived here?” Charlotte asks.
“About three years.”
“Do you know if a Caroline lived here before you?”
He shakes his head. “I think a dude named Raymond did. We get his mail sometimes.”
I turn to Charlotte. “Maybe she left a forwarding address with the landlord.”
She turns to the surfer. “Does the manager live in the building?”
He nods. “Hold on,” he says, disappears for a moment, and returns without the baby. He slides on flip-flops and joins us outside. “It’s hard to describe. I’ll lead you there.”
We follow him down the stairs.
“Awesome weather,” he says.
I say, “Well, yeah. It is LA.”
“True,” he says.
We walk along a path on the side of the building until we reach a detached cottage. He knocks on the door. We wait. Nothing.
“Hmm,” he says. “Frank and Edie. They’re old. Almost always home. Must be grocery day.”
He pulls a phone out of his pocket.
“I can give you their number,” he says, scrolling through names, and Charlotte enters it into her phone.
~
“We should really try to find her.”
“I know. But if we don’t.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Probably.”
I hand Charlotte my keys and she unlocks her side, gets in, leans over and unlocks mine. I start the car and look at the time.
“We could have slept an extra hour,” Charlotte says.
“Let’s call the managers now,” I say. “Maybe they were sleeping.”
But she calls and gets their machine. “Good morning,” she says. “My name is Charlotte Young. I’m trying to get in touch with a former tenant of yours. I’m hoping you might have some forwarding information. If you could call me back, I would appreciate it.”
She leaves her number and hangs up.
Sometimes she sounds so professional that I can’t believe the girl talking is also my best friend. At work, as long as I do my job well I don’t have to talk like an adult because I’m one of the creatives. But Charlotte helps with logistics and phone calls and scheduling and making sure people show up when they are supposed to.
“I hope they call back,” I say, noticing a brief ebb in the traffic and making a U-turn in the middle of the block.
“I’ll follow up if they don’t,” Charlotte says.
“But if we can’t reach them, and we can’t find Caroline, then we’ll open the letter,” I say. “Right?”
“Maybe,” she says. “But we’re really going to try to find Caroline.”
~
After my physics final and my Abbot Kinney stop, I drive to the studio, a little nauseous. Heartbreak is awful. Really awful. I wish I could listen to sad songs alone in my car until I felt over her. But I can’t even talk about it with Charlotte, and I have to finish designing the room I’m working on now, even though I know Morgan will be on set with her sleeves pushed up and her tight jeans on and her short hair all messy and perfect. I pull into the studio entrance and the guard waves me through, and I roll past Morgan’s vintage blue truck and into an open spot a few cars away, trying not to think of the first time I sat in the soft, upholstered passenger’s seat and all the times that followed that one.
