In Search of Us by Ava Dellaira

Author:Ava Dellaira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

The late-morning sun slowly burns through the fog that hangs over the city. It’s the marine layer, Sam tells Angie, that on summer mornings extends far inland from the beach. It gives the light a certain half-awake softness as they drive up from MacArthur Park, past Sunset Boulevard. A man in a shirt cut to his midriff crosses the street; a young woman jogs up the crowded sidewalk with a tiny bulldog; a boy with headphones dances under a stoplight, spinning a Jiffy Lube arrow; palm trees preside over it all.

“So this is Hollywood,” Sam says. “Not exactly the most glamorous.”

But for Angie, it is. She feels as if the LA whose streets they drive through contains both the city in present tense and the city of her invisible past, the city where her parents fell in love.

“I can’t believe I’ve never been out of New Mexico,” she says as Sam pulls onto the 101 North. “Before now.”

Sam looks over at her, and she senses him softening. She rolls down the window. Rihanna’s on the radio singing “Higher,” and Angie loves the crackling longing in her voice, feels it all the way through her body. They’re speeding into possibility, toward a man who could be her uncle. Uncle Justin. Angie tries the words out in her mind as she leans out the window, letting the air rush into her lungs.

She thinks of a camping trip she went on with her mom when she was little, the feeling of freedom in her body as they drove on the highway through the mountains, the windows open and the piney smell of air rushing down their throats as Angie stuck her head out and opened her mouth, singing along to the folk song from her kids’ tape: In my hear-art, in my hear-art, there’s a little song a-singing in my heart …

By the time Sam pulls off the freeway twenty minutes later, the fog is gone; sunlight gleams insistently along the wide boulevard with rows of palms and strip malls. The first Justin Bell on Angie’s list lives in Reseda. Angie stares out the window and makes a private game of counting the car washes (five) and nail salons (seven), a way of soothing her increasing nervousness as they near their destination. She’s been a counter ever since she was kid: the stars in the sky, the streetlights on the highway, the freckles on her mom’s pale face. When she was ten, she made it a project to count the leaves on the elm behind their new house. Lying on her back, she’d move from branch to branch, noting where she left off when her mom called her in for dinner. It calmed her, making her world into something to be kept track of. Now (the last time she checked) 7,505,201,954 people on the earth.

How many of them are caught in the strange feeling between hope and fear? How many are about to meet someone they’ve never met before, someone who could change

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