by Nina LaCour
He looks at his watch.
“Damn,” he says. “I pushed back a meeting in order to see you, but I can’t push it back any longer.”
Ava stands up and I stand up, too.
“So, look,” he says, walking us back down the hallway toward the lobby. “I know that to you I’m just some distant memory. Maybe less than that. But will you keep in touch with me? Just now and then. Give me your address, my wife will send you a holiday card.”
“She’s going to be in your business soon,” I tell him.
“That right?”
“I have a part in a film,” she says. “A small film.”
“Not that small,” I say.
“You take after your mother,” Lenny says. “In the best ways.”
“That’s how we found you,” I tell him. We’re all in the lobby now, and Lenny gives the “one minute” gesture to a group of eager young men. He turns back to me.
“From The Restlessness,” I say.
He cocks his head.
“I saw your name and we made a wild guess.”
“Caroline was the best part of that movie,” he says. “Don’t you think?”
We say, “Yes,” and he says, “Thank you,” and then he beams at Ava, regret still clouding his face, before turning away from us and ushering the men in. He shuts his door and then we are back in the silver elevator, plummeting down to the street.
Chapter Twenty
I have to make up for lost time. I talk to Toby in the morning, tell him all about Yes & Yes. He’s excited, but I can tell he’s also skeptical. I don’t tell him about the famous actors who’ll be in it. I don’t tell him that I’m using his apartment. But I do tell him about my design ideas, and about them he is not skeptical. He congratulates me. He wishes me luck. He shows me some photos of locations he’s found in London and they look opulent and larger than life, just as they should. Then we say good-bye, I shut my computer, and I start packing up all of his stuff.
Charlotte works on the DVDs and books; I take artwork off the walls, framed photographs and souvenirs from his travels and mementos from movies off his shelves. Charlotte takes pictures so we’ll know how to replace everything when we’re finished shooting. I move the sofa and roll up the shag rug, ready to replace it with the ones Rebecca found at the Rose Bowl. The orange chair stays, but I’ll be covering it with a Southwestern-style blanket to tone down the color.
Charlotte and I wrap up Toby’s dishes, which are too modern for Juniper. Instead, we’ll use Rebecca and Theo’s plates and bowls and mugs, handmade, from San Francisco. They’re way too expensive for Juniper, but this is the movies, after all, and the simple feeling of them is perfect.
“Hey,” Charlotte says. “Did Ava call you?”
She’s looking at her phone and I realize I don’t know where mine is, which only happens when I lose myself in this kind of project. I find it under a pile of pillows on the couch.
“Yeah,” I say. “Twice.”
“Me, too,” she says.
“Did she leave a message?”
“No.”
“Not for me, either.”
“We can call her later,” Charlotte says, and I set my phone back down and keep working.
A few minutes later there’s a knock at the door and Morgan walks in.
“You made it!” I say, and I can feel Charlotte’s disapproval over my enthusiasm, but I can’t help it. Morgan’s here to rig the hanging plants contraption; she’s here to affix wallpaper to removable panels. In other words: She’s here to make my dreams come true.
But only some of them.
“Did you doubt me?” She laughs.
“No,” I say.
“Though she had every reason to,” Charlotte says.
“Hey, Charlotte,” Morgan says, ignoring her comment.
Grudgingly, Charlotte says hey back.
I show Morgan my plans for the apartment and she’s the perfect person to help me because she’s done this sort of thing so many times. She knows, for example, how low the plants should hang in order for them to be in a lot of the shots.
“Once I worked on a set where I did all of this detail work on the wall near the ceiling,” she tells me. “First I put up this molding and then I painted it gold and blue. Really intricate. And then, when the movie came out, it wasn’t even in it. The camera never panned that high. One thing you need to do when a shot is being set up is stand with Charlie and look at the monitor. Be sure to tell him when you want something in the shot, when you think it’s important.”
“I’m allowed to do that?”
“Oh yeah,” Morgan says. “They’ll expect you to do it. And be prepared for him to ask you for changes, too. Like if he’s trying to get a certain shot but he needs it to be simpler, or something’s in the way.”
“I’m so glad you’re telling me this.”
“There’s more,” she says. “But first let’s talk about this hanging thing.”
I show her the pots I’ve collected, explain that I’m going to be borrowing some others from my parents’ house and from Theo and Rebecca’s jungle-like yard. Many of them will sit on the low wooden table in place of Toby’s TV, but I want a cluster of them to hang by a window to the right, not blocking the light, but catching it. I show her some red twine I found.
“I want this to be wrapped around the pots as if it’s hanging from a hook in the ceiling.”
“That’ll contrast well with the green.”
“And I want them to be at various heights, and a lot of them—a dozen at least. There’s that scene where she’s watering her plants and crying, remember? I want the plants to go on forever.”
“But no holes in the ceiling,” she says.
“Is that possible?”
“Anything is possible.”
She takes some measurements, sketches something out, and then tells me she’s going to pick up some supplies.
“We have a friend who might be able to get a discount,” I say. “Let me see if he’s working.”
I find my phone again and see that I have a text from Ava: Finding Caroline’s death certificate. Meet me downtown?
I text back: Can’t today. I’ll call you tonight.
Then I text Jamal to see if he’s at work and he is. Any chance you could share your discount? I write.
Gotta keep this job, he responds. But I am happy to provide you with unparalleled customer service.
So I tell him to expect Morgan; tell Morgan to ask for Jamal.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll pick up everything I need and come back. But first, come out to the truck. I have something you might want.”
Charlotte shoots me a glance from where she’s been wrapping dishes in old copies of the LA Weekly. She thinks this is a ruse to get me alone, but I ignore her and go outside anyway.
Morgan’s saying, “I thought about it after you described your ideas for Juniper’s apartment but didn’t want to bring it up in case it didn’t come through, but then this morning I got a call, and . . .”
And there is my sofa: green and gold and soft, sitting in the bed of Morgan’s truck.
“So can you use it? It’s no problem to take it back if you can’t.”
“Yes,” I say. “I can definitely use it.”
She lets down the gate and we carry the sofa into Toby’s house together, and then we set it down in the living room and I thank her as though it doesn’t mean much. Like it’s just some nice thing that anyone would do.
My phone buzzes with a new text: I have to wait two hours! Wish you were here with me.
Oh no! Wish I could be there, I write.
Morgan says, “I’ll be back in about an hour.”
“All right,” I say. “See you soon,” but I’m distracted, realizing I don’t know what Ava’s really looking for out there in whatever b
ureaucratic office she’s waiting in.
Tell me when you get it, I write back, even though I don’t know why she needs Caroline’s death certificate. Maybe she just wants more closure than Lenny was able to give her.
~
“Let’s hang the pots,” Morgan says hours later, after she’s been to Home Depot and back, after I’ve finished a dozen small tasks and she’s built the hanging contraption in the courtyard and installed it in the living room.
So we hang them, one after another, terra-cotta and porcelain and tin, orange and white and silver, full of all of these leafy green plants. She holds open the red string and I place the pots inside.
“Watching you work is incredible,” she says. “I can’t believe how good it’s looking in here.”
“I couldn’t do it without you.”
She shakes her head. “You’re much better at this than I am.”
“Not true,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, “I have the skills but you have the vision. If I had taken this job this would look like a normal apartment, but you’re making it look like its own world. If anyone ends up seeing this movie, you’re going to be celebrated for it.”
And I don’t say this flirtatiously; I say it straight. I look into her eyes and I thank her. Because no matter how flawed we were as a couple, as collaborators we’re perfect together.
But as good as it feels to be with her now, when Ava comes over later it will feel even better. I want her to see what I’ve made. I want to hear about her day. I want to see what’s between us now that the mystery is as over as it will ever be.
~
But when Ava walks through the doorway later, she doesn’t even look around.
“So they wouldn’t give me a copy of the death certificate but I got to see it,” she tells me. “Under cause of death it says ‘drug poisoning’ and I asked them what that means exactly but they didn’t know.”
She drops her bag and all of these papers and books on the table where we’re standing, and I try not to be disappointed that she doesn’t notice it, because as of two days ago it was a boring table I got for fifteen dollars at a garage sale and since then I’ve laid these gorgeous green and blue tiles on its surface.
“So I went to the library and did all this research.”
“The library,” I say, smiling, thinking it will remind her of the night we met, when Charlotte and I told her that the library was where we got the clues that led us to her.
“Yeah, and I found a list of reasons for death, and all of these books about causes of death, but they’re all medical books and law books so it’s, like, impossible to understand what any of them mean.”
“But doesn’t ‘drug poisoning’ just mean overdose?” I ask her. “That’s what Frank and Lenny both told us, right?”
“Yeah, but look, there are all these variations.”
She picks up a book and flips through it, drops it back on the stack and finds another one, muttering things to herself about how she knows that it’s somewhere in one of them I wonder whether this is what she was like at the shelter after she left Frank and Edie’s, what I should do to try to calm her down.
“Here!” she says. “Okay, look. When a drug overdose is the cause of death, sometimes it says ‘unintentional drug poisoning’ and sometimes ‘accidental drug poisoning,’ but Caroline’s doesn’t have those words. It’s ambiguous. It could have been accidental. But maybe it wasn’t.”
“Okay,” I say.
“So what do you think it means?” she asks. “What should I do next? Should I call Lenny again? Maybe he could give me a list of the people who they used to hang out with, people who could have been there that night. Then I could try to find them and figure out who was there last.”
“What would you want to ask them?”
“There’s so much we don’t know,” she says. “I mean, maybe it was accidental, or maybe she meant to do it, but what if someone gave her too much on purpose? I should call Lenny, right?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You don’t know if I should call him, or you don’t know what I should do next?”
I take a moment. I could keep playing along, say, Yeah, call Lenny, pretend I want to know what secrets she’ll uncover next. She’s so eager her hands are shaking and I want to tell her what she wants to hear.
But I just can’t.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to find,” I finally say. “I don’t know where you hope to be after you have all the answers.”
Pain registers on her beautiful face.
I reach a hand out to touch her arm, right above her elbow.
“You think I’m acting crazy,” she says.
“No,” I say. “It’s just that we’ve learned so much about her already.”
Her eyes flick up to mine, and I feel something shift between us. Her face is so close all I’d have to do is put my hand on her hair and there would be no going back.
“Don’t you want to kiss me?” she says.
Her eyes are boring into mine, inviting but also angry, and I let go of her arm and take a step back.
“I do,” I say. “I do.” But as she puts her hand on my waist to draw me closer, I say, “But not right now.”
She flinches.
“Oh,” she says, spinning around, gathering her stuff. “I’m sorry. Do I not fit neatly enough into your perfect life? How stupid,” she says. “I was so stupid. When your dad took me into his office to show me all his Clyde Jones stuff it was probably just to amuse himself. And everything your mom said that night was out of pity. And you and Charlotte—you were just solving a mystery. You got your answers and now that’s it. It’s over.”
“Ava,” I say. “Stop.”
She’s trying to stuff everything into her bag but there’s just too much of it. She’s trembling and cursing and throwing a book that won’t fit hard against the floor. And then she’s giving up and sinking to her knees, and I want to step closer to her but I don’t know if I should.
But I want to.
And it’s in the precise moment I take a step toward her that Charlotte opens the door. She sees Ava crouched on the floor and freezes in the doorway.
“What’s going on?”
Ava says, “I was just leaving.”
Charlotte looks at me but I don’t say anything because I can’t speak.
Ava gathers into her arms what she hasn’t been able to put away.
I cross the room to pick up the book she threw. It landed open and the pages are bent. When I hand it to her, she doesn’t look at me.
I find my voice enough to say, “I don’t think you should drive right now.” It comes out small and meek. I barely recognize it.
“I’m okay,” she says. The anger is gone but she sounds so tired.
“I can drive you,” I say.
“No thanks.”
“I want to.”
She shakes her head and walks toward the door.
“I’ll drive you,” Charlotte says, still in the doorway with her purse over her shoulder. This is one of the reasons I love her. She doesn’t ask any other questions, and even as she takes a few of Ava’s books under one arm and puts her other arm around Ava’s shoulders, I know she’s doing this for me.
“We can take your car,” she says to Ava. “Em, come get me in a little bit, okay?”
~
I pace the floor. I go into the bathroom and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror for a minute. I force myself to just stay still and look.
And then I drive to Ava’s place and park on the street. A moment later, Charlotte’s climbing into the passenger seat.
“Is she okay?”
She shrugs.
“Is Jamal there?”
“I called him. He’s on his way.”
“Let’s just wait
here,” I say. “Until we see him.”
So we wait for a long time, without speaking, until a bus pulls up and he steps out, hurrying to her front door.
On the short drive back I tell her what happened.
“All I want is to go home and sleep but I have so much to do,” I say.
I park in Toby’s spot but I’m too wrecked to do anything else.
Charlotte reaches for the keys, turns the engine off. She gets out and walks around to my side, opens my door.
“Come on,” she says. “I have to reply to some e-mails and then I’ll help you work on something. You wanted to fill those jars for the kitchen, right? We can do that together.”
I force myself out of the car and back into the apartment, where Charlotte tells me how great the table looks and the hanging contraption, too.
“Morgan’s actually coming through for you,” she says, which is the nicest thing she’s said about her in over a year.
I nod.
Then she adds, “I wonder what she wants.”
As Charlotte plugs in her laptop and heads to the bathroom, I pull flour and beans and dried cherries out of Toby’s cupboards and find a flat of mason jars we bought. I’m taking the hinges and doors off the kitchen cabinets and lining the shelves with jars to provide color and light.
I know I should be rinsing out the jars but I just can’t bring myself to do anything. I keep thinking of Ava saying Don’t you want to kiss me? I’ve been wanting a moment like that, wishing for it, but I never imagined there would be anger behind it. Never thought she’d wield my life at me like some kind of weapon.
