The Lola Quartet (14 page)

   "I can't tell you how much I envy you," Jack told him once, near the end, when they'd walked down the hill into town to get drunk. It was almost two a.m. Anna had been gone for three or four weeks. Jack and Liam were slumped in a booth in the back corner of a half-deserted Irish bar they'd discovered where the beer was cheap and no one cared what they put on the jukebox, and Jack had been happy earlier but now he was sinking into the morose kind of drunk that lends itself to regrettable statements.

   "Yeah, I can see why," Deval said. "I'm in love with an underage girl who lives in hiding in a different state with a fucking baby, school bores me half to death but my mother will kill me if I don't get a degree, and I've got a class in six hours. What's not to envy?"

   "You've got the music," Jack said. The idea of having the music or not having the music was something he'd never had an easy time explaining but Deval smiled, Deval seemed to understand, and Jack felt such gratitude at being understood in that moment that he let Deval choose the next three songs on the jukebox.

A
t  t h e  beginning of February, Jack left Lewins Hall en route to the practice rooms and a man he didn't recognize fell into step beside him.

   "Jack, right?"

   "Yes?"

   The man was in his twenties, blond, with pale eyes and a ring through his eyebrow. He was dressed in a way that seemed calculatedly forgettable— a gray sweatshirt, black shoes, jeans— but any chance of anonymity was ruined by his tattoo: an extravagantly detailed goldfish on the side of his neck, brilliant orange. Jack found it hard to look away. He hated needles. Tattoos made him queasy. His hand drifted to his own neck in sympathy.

   "You seen Anna around?"

   Jack stopped walking, so the man stopped walking too. "Anna . . . ?"

   "Anna Montgomery, Jack. Anna from Florida. The girl with the baby." He was standing a little too close. Jack could smell his aftershave. There was nothing friendly in the man's blue-eyed stare. "The girl who visited you last month," he said.

   "I heard she was in Utah."

   "Oh, she
was
," the man said brightly. "She
was
in Utah, Jack, but that was before she came here. Do you mind telling me where she is? I really need to talk to her about something important."

   "How do you know my name?"

   "Where's Anna?"

   "Look, I haven't seen her in almost a year. I knew her back in high school," Jack said.

   "Right," the man said. "Back in Florida. You're both from Sebastian, aren't you?"

   "Yes."

   "And your family still lives there, right?"

   Jack felt as if he'd brushed up against the edge of something cold, or as if a curtain had been pulled back for an instant and he'd glimpsed a flash of darkness and moving gears. He'd never been threatened before. He didn't know what to do. He stood blinking in the sunlight with the life of the campus continuing all around him, voices and laughter, the man's calm gaze, and his voice was unsteady when he could finally bring himself to speak. "What do you want?"

   "I want Anna Montgomery," the man said. "But if you don't know where she is, I could go ask your family. You've got a little sister still in high school in Florida, right?"

   "What? I . . ." There was no way to finish this sentence, so Jack didn't.

   "Bridget," he said. "That's your little sister's name, isn't it?"

   Jack was frozen.

   " Maybe I'll go down there and talk to her," the man said. "I mean, who knows, maybe she'd know where Anna is. You know how these high school girls all talk about each other."

   "I don't—"

   "I can't say I'll be in a great mood when I get down there," the man said. "Do you know, I was just there? Trying to track down Anna's dropout sister, for almost a week. And it's not like it's all that easy for me to leave town for long periods, in my line of work."

   Jack was afraid to ask what this line of work might be.

   "So I think by the time I find Bridget," the man said, "I'll probably already be angry. Just for having to go back to Florida again."

   "Anna went to Virginia." Jack heard his own voice and wanted to pull the words back through the air.

   " Where in Virginia?"

   "I don't know," Jack said, "she just said she was going to Virginia and that was it. I heard it was a small town but I don't know which one. That's all I know."

   "The problem is, Jack," the man said, "Virginia's such a big place. Last thing I want to do is drive back down to Florida but it'd almost be worth my time to go back down there, talk to your sister, see if maybe she knows more than you do. Who knows, Jack, maybe Anna and Bridget talk to each other sometimes."

   "They don't talk to each other. They don't know each other at all."

   "I'll ask Bridget myself. Thanks anyway, Jack, I'll be seeing you."

   "Carrollsburg," Jack said.

   "Carrollsburg?" The man was smiling. "Now we're getting somewhere, Jack. You have an address for me?"

   "I don't. I really don't. That's all I know."

   "You sure, now? You don't think maybe I should ask Bridget, just in case?"

   "I don't know more than that. Bridget doesn't know anything. She doesn't know anything."

   "Well, thank you very much, Jack," the man said pleasantly. "You just saved me another trip to Florida."

   He turned away. Jack's heart was pounding and he wanted to throw up on the grass. On his way to the building with the practice rooms it occurred to him that he should alert campus security, but when he looked back the man was nowhere to be seen, and what would he say anyway?
A few weeks ago my roommate and I snuck a girl into our room
and let her stay overnight in violation of the rules, and, oh yeah, she also had
a baby with her, and now some guy wants to know . . .
He needed to talk to Deval. He stepped through the doors into the cool shadows of Armstrong Hall and scanned the last few pages of the practice room sign-in book.
L. Deval, room 17.
He glanced over his shoulder, but through the glass doors behind him he saw only green grass and benignly milling students. The blond man was long gone.

   Deval didn't look up when Jack opened the door to 17. He was playing in a style that he'd begun to adopt recently. It was jazz, but glissando shivers of gypsy melodies kept coming through. The effect was uneven.

   "Deval," Jack said.

   "There's no piano in this one," Deval said, without looking up.

   "Please," Jack said. Deval stopped playing. "Some guy just asked me where Anna is."

   "What?" Deval set his guitar on the chair beside him, which left nowhere for Jack to sit, so he stood uncomfortably by the door like a kid in the principal's office.

   "He came up to me while I was walking, said he knew she'd been here. He knew she'd gone to Virginia—"

   "Did you tell him she'd gone to Virginia?"

   "Of course not," Jack said. "I told him to get lost." He was shivering. "He was menacing, Liam. He threatened my sister. He had this look about him, this—"

   "Yeah, some people aren't nice," Deval said. "Don't get hysterical. What exactly did he say?"

   "He said he knew she'd been here after she was in Utah. He asked me where she was. What did she do in Utah, Liam?"

   "She stole money from a meth dealer," Deval said. He was putting his guitar back in its case. "Listen, I'm going to go get her."

   "You're leaving now? In the middle of the semester?"

   "She doesn't drive. I'll call the dean's office from the road and tell them I've got a family emergency or something. Don't tell anything to anyone."

   Deval didn't go back to the residence hall. He left the practice room and walked quickly to his car, threw his guitar in the backseat and drove away.

J a c k  w a s 
thinking about a movie he'd seen once. He couldn't remember what it had been called, but it was set in the eighteenth century and there was a boat, and a sailor who'd been a disappointment to everyone had jumped overboard with a cannonball in his arms. When he closed his eyes Jack saw the sailor descending, pale in dark water with a cloud of bubbles rising silver around him, the weight of the cannonball carrying him down to some other place. "The truth is," the captain had said at the sailor's funeral, "we don't all turn into the men we had hoped to become." Or words to that effect. Jack wasn't sure he was remembering it exactly.

   "It's true," Jack said to his reflection in a darkened window, in reply to the captain of the movie ship. "It's just the way it is." He had taken too many pills. It was four a.m. and Deval had been gone for a week. With every passing day he became more certain that Deval and Anna and the baby were dead. He knew he should call the police, but every day and every hour made the call less possible. The first question would be
Why didn't you call sooner?
and with each passing hour the question would be more pointed, and then what would he say? The truth is, Officer, I'm not the man I wanted to be. The truth is, I gave up a girl at the slightest threat and now everyone's in trouble and I think both Deval and the girl are probably dead by now and the fault's entirely mine and I've been thinking it might be better for everyone if I take this cannonball in my arms and leap into the ocean.

   Jack waited a week, then two, but Deval didn't return. At the beginning of the third week a postcard arrived.

   The card was postmarked Detroit. The relief that all was well— Deval must have arrived in Virginia in time— was supplanted almost immediately by a colossal loneliness. It seemed impossible that Deval wasn't coming back. His belongings waited untouched in their room, his books, his sheet music, his clothes strewn around the bed. Jack kept expecting someone to come and collect them, but no one did.

   The pills weren't working the way they had before. Jack still floated but the blurred contours of the world made everything seem unreal in the manner of a bad dream. He spent a lot of time lying on his bed listening to music on headphones, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Coltrane and Parker, all the emissaries of a kingdom that was slipping away from him. There was no pleasure in playing the music himself. Sometime during the fifth or sixth week he stopped going to classes.

   After seven weeks he packed up his things in the middle of the day while everyone else was in class, loaded up his car and drove south.

J a c k  d r o v e 
to the Lemon Club nearly a year after his return from South Carolina. The bartender glared at him the way he always had when Jack was in high school, and Jack laughed out loud. It seemed inconceivable that high school had been less than two years ago. He'd just turned twenty and felt vastly old. The fact that he was still underage was a joke.

   He'd recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the
point
, he'd promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. "You don't want to drift through life all
addled
, Jack," his mother's voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he'd spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

   "You're sure you're good to go out?" his father had asked. Jack had been home for three weeks and tonight was the first time he'd been out by himself. His parents had taken him to dinner and a movie a few times but since he'd been back he'd mostly spent his evenings watching TV with them.
Law & Order
episodes with their soothingly formal two-act structures, a glass of warm milk delivered by his mother and then the same routine since childhood, washing his face and brushing his teeth and closing his eyes under a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets shining down from the ceiling of his childhood room. Bridget called sometimes. She was going to college in Colorado and had a cautious way of talking to him that he didn't like very much. By day he was working in a coffee shop in a mall, making lattes and cappuccinos behind a shining silver machine. A boring life on paper but he liked it, actually, the quiet of it, the peace. He played his saxophone in the backyard after work in the afternoons. He'd come home from music school and there it was in his room where he'd left it, a gleaming brass miracle leaning up against the bookcase. He hadn't played the piano in a year.

   A jazz pianist from Des Moines was headlining. He'd heard of her back when he was in music school and it seemed a good reason to go out so he'd dressed carefully and combed his hair. He chose a table at the front in the hope that if the music was beautiful it might sweep him up, but the pianist didn't appear when he thought she would. Instead a man came onstage with a guitar and started fiddling with amplifiers.

   "Excuse me," Jack said, to the fiftyish couple at the next table. He would've preferred not to bother them, but they seemed to have programs and he needed information. "Is there a warm-up act?"

   " There is," the woman said. She was black, and he found the brilliance of her blue eye shadow mesmerizing against the dark of her skin. All the girls he'd dated had worn such subdued makeup. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to paint blue shimmering powder on yourself, and he realized that she was holding out the program for him, so he took it quickly and said, "Thanks very much."

   "You're welcome." She was looking at him strangely. He had moments throughout the day when he thought everyone in the room was staring at him, and this was one of them. The program said the opening act was
Deval & Morelli/Guitar (with Joe Stevenson/Bass, Arnie
Jacobson/Percussion).
He must have smiled, because the woman said, "Well, that seemed to make you happy," and he said, "Yes, it does," although he of course couldn't be certain that this was the same Deval. He was in the habit of looking for Deval's name in the news every morning. No day passed without Jack wondering if the man with the goldfish tattoo had found them.