The Lola Quartet (2 page)

   "Want to meet for dinner?"

   "I'm supposed to meet with a park ranger later," he said. "How about tomorrow?"

   But their schedules were incompatible, and three days passed before he had a chance to see her. He spent his first day in Sebastian and the day after that interviewing conservationists and herpetologists, knocking on doors of the houses closest to the canals to ask residents about their encounters with giant snakes. He took photographs of blue-green water, of shy iguanas at the edges of backyards.

   There was an afternoon spent staggering through swamps under a wide-brimmed hat, listening to a park ranger named William Chandler talk about the new monsters that had been appearing since the early '90s. The creatures in the Florida swamps were terrifying and new, and the canals delivered the swamps to the suburbs. Experts speculated that some of the animals had been blown deep into the swamps by Hurricane Andrew— greenhouses that had held snakes had been found shattered and empty once the storm had passed— but most were abandoned pets. Small glittering lizards who'd seemed manageable enough when they were babies but then outgrew aquarium after aquarium until they'd become seven-foot-long two-hundred-pound Nile monitors with eerily intelligent eyes and extravagantly pebbled skin, perfectly capable of eating a small dog. Or Burmese pythons, purchased when small, abandoned when the owners got tired of having to feed them live rabbits. Capable of swallowing a leopard whole, William Chandler told him, and therefore capable of swallowing a human. All of these creatures multiplying in the brackish far reaches, the suburbs coming out to meet them. All Gavin could think of was the heat pressing down upon him, but he blinked hard against the spots swimming before his eyes and wrote down everything Chandler said. Insects hummed in the trees.

   By night the suburbs glimmered anonymously from his window, but even by daylight it was difficult to grasp the terrain. There had been considerable development in the decade since Gavin had lived here, and nothing was quite as he remembered. The present-day Sebastian was like a dream version of his hometown, much larger than it had been, filled with unexpected shopping malls and new condominium complexes, entire new neighborhoods where once there'd been trees or swamp. Once this had been the outer suburbs but now there were suburbs that sprawled out still further, linked up with exurbs by lacework patterns of freeways. The heart of the city was difficult to find. The suburbs circled wetlands, and there were monsters in the swamps. He wrote about the pythons and the Nile monitors, William Chandler and the frightened residents who lived alongside the canals, working deep into the night in the cool light of the hotel room.

   "How do you like being back in Sebastian?" his sister asked. Their schedules had finally coincided on his last night in Florida, and they'd met at a seafood restaurant near the hotel. Eilo was only thirty-two but her hair was mostly gray now, and she'd recently cut it very short against her skull. The haircut made her eyes look enormous. She was wearing a suit.

   "It's exactly the way I remember it," Gavin said.

   "A diplomatic response," Eilo said.

   "Except even more sprawling."

   "It never ends," she said. "You can drive from here to Miami without leaving the suburbs. How's Karen these days? She couldn't come with you?"

   "We broke up a month ago. She moved out."

   "You broke up? Even though she's pregnant?"

   "She's not pregnant anymore." Gavin remembered, sitting here, that he'd thought seriously about naming the baby after Eilo.

   "Gavin, I'm sorry."

   "Thanks. Me too." He didn't want to talk about it. "How's the real estate business?" They spoke on the phone every couple of months, but he hadn't seen her in so long that being in her presence was unexpectedly awkward.

   " Never better," she said.

   "In this economy?"

   "Well, I do deal exclusively in foreclosures." Eilo was looking at her plate. She hesitated a moment before she spoke again. "How's your health?"

   "Fine," he said. "A bit touch and go in the summertime, but I stay indoors and take taxis when it's hot. Is something bothering you?"

   "I don't know if I should tell you now," she said.

   "Tell me anyway."

   "Part of my job is inspecting homes. I inspected a property on Pau

line Street a few weeks ago, a place that had just been foreclosed on that week. The property owner's name was Gloria Jones. Older woman. She was taking care of a little girl."

   "Taking care of her?"

   "She referred to the girl as 'my ward.' I actually never saw the upstairs, so I don't know if the girl lived there or not. She was . . . listen, I know this sounds crazy, but the little girl looked exactly like me. It was like seeing myself as a kid."

   "So she was half-white, half-Japanese?" Gavin wasn't sure where she was going with the story and was already a little bored by it.

   "I was struck by her. I have to take pictures of the home for the real estate listing, and I made sure the kid was in one of the shots." She reached into her handbag and extracted a paperback. She'd placed the photograph in the middle for safekeeping.

   "Oh," Gavin said. "I see what you mean." For a disoriented moment he thought he was looking at a photograph of Eilo as a little girl. European and Asian genes in delicate combination, the same straight dark hair and thin lips, the same faint scattering of freckles on her nose. It took him a moment to realize that the eyes were different. His sister's eyes were brown, and this little Eilo's eyes were blue. But the similarity was uncanny. She stood at the edge of the shot, by the window of an almost empty dining room.

   "She's ten years old," Eilo said. Gavin was beginning to understand even before Eilo spoke again. "Gavin, I asked the kid her name when Gloria was out of the room. Her name's Chloe Montgomery."

   "Montgomery?"

   "That was when I knew," Eilo said.

   "She looks exactly like you. Where is she now?"

   "I have no idea. To be honest, the woman caught me taking the kid's

picture and started yelling at me, so I got out of there quickly. I drove by the house two days later, but they'd already moved out. I don't know where they went. I thought you should know."

   "Can I keep the picture?"

   "Yes. Of course." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know this can't be easy, especially given . . . I thought you should know."

   After dinner Gavin walked out to his car and drove past his hotel on purpose. He wanted to keep driving for a while, alone in the air conditioning. He turned off his cell phone. He was thinking about the girl, the other Eilo. Thinking about trying to find her, trying to imagine what he might say if he did. My name is Gavin Sasaki. You look exactly like my sister. I had a girlfriend named Anna who disappeared ten years ago and you have her last name. I know this sounds crazy but I think we have the same genes.

O
n her last morning in Virginia Anna sipped her coffee and stared up at the sky. It was a clear bright day, clouds passing over blue. She was tired in a way that made the world seem insubstantial. The sun was rising and the park held a dreamlike sheen. No leaves on the trees but the air was bright. She sat on a swing with her first coffee of the morning, scuffing her shoes in the sand. Only when she looked at her daughter did she feel awake.

Chloe lay on her back in the stroller staring up at the clouds.

A
n n a   a n d   Chloe were in the park when Liam Deval came to them. Anna looked up— a man approaching over the lawn, the sunrise behind him so she couldn't see his face— and because she couldn't see who it was she assumed the worst and thought she was finished, she clutched the chains of the swing so tightly that blood began to throb in the palms of her hands, she tried to steel herself but her last thoughts raced together and all she could think of was how sad it was that she'd had so little time with her daughter. She looked at Chloe, trying to memorize the soft flush of her skin and her wide unfocused eyes, her miniature hands clenching and unclenching above the blankets, the heartbreaking smallness of her fingernails, but then Liam called out her name over the grass. Anna let her breath out all at once and blinked away tears.

   "It's you," she said, "I'm so glad it's you," but she understood immediately that something was wrong. He held her for a moment and stroked her hair when she stood up from the swing, glanced over his shoulder before he looked at her again.

   "Anna, we have to leave again," he said. "I think he knows you're here."

T
he morning after the dinner with his sister Gavin woke early in his room in the Ramada Inn, troubled, and lay still in the bed for a few minutes before he remembered the photograph. He turned on the bedside light and went to the desk to retrieve it. The girl stared back at him, ten years old and the image of his sister, half-smiling in an unfurnished room.

   He showered and packed quickly, checked out of the hotel, and drove toward the airport for five minutes before he remembered that he still had one last interview. A woman in a planned community far out near the swamps, a friend of William Chandler's. He pulled into a parking lot to check the directions and had to read them three times. It took him twice as long to reach his destination as it should have. He kept forgetting street names, making wrong turns, looking for roads he was already driving on. Where had they been all these years, Anna and the girl? They were all he could think of. If the house where the girl had been staying had been foreclosed, what if she was in a homeless shelter? Or what if it was worse than that, what if she was on the street? The thought of his daughter sleeping under an overpass. He found the condominium complex— far from anywhere, almost beyond Sebastian city limits— and sat in his car for a full two minutes staring at the photograph before he went in.

   He sat drinking a glass of water in a large bright kitchen, taking notes and trying to concentrate on what the woman was saying. Her name was Ella Thompson and she wanted to tell him about her children.

   "When I was out with William Chandler the other day," he said, "he told me you saw a Burmese python in your backyard."

   "Oh, I
did
," she said. "Well, not in the backyard exactly, but there's this point where the yard sort of blends into the canal, and—" She was interrupted by the chime of a doorbell. It was her neighbor, a beautiful woman of about fifty with very high cheekbones and silver hair, here to see if she might borrow a stepladder, and yes, she would be delighted to speak with the reporter from New York for a few minutes. She talked about the beauty of Florida, the flowers and the palm trees and the endless summertime, blue pools.

   "And how long have you lived out here," Gavin asked, "by the swamps?"

   "A few years." The neighbor smiled. "It's funny. We thought we were coming closer to nature," she said, "but all along nature was creeping closer to us."

   Gavin said his good-byes and drove to the airport. He found himself staring at children in the terminal lounge. On the flight north out of Florida he tried not to think about anything except the story he was writing, William Chandler in hip waders standing up to his knees in the swamps at the far edge of the suburbs, a radio-tracking device beeping in his hand, "This means there's a python right at our feet, Gavin, right at our feet, you just can't see it because the water's so murky." The nervous residents of the outer suburbs, gazing out their back windows at canals. The conservationist who'd told him that the creatures in the swamps meant they were entering a time when every place would look the same as every other place, the same pythons, the same parrots, the same palm trees from Florida to Indonesia to Argentina, an ecological flattening of experience. He worked steadily until the island of Manhattan appeared below his window, and then he closed his laptop and tried not to think about the girl during the descent.