The Lola Quartet (32 page)

T
en years later in the city of Sebastian Gavin read the account of Paul's death and sat still for some time looking at nothing before he closed his laptop and continued on with his day. Later that evening he showered and shaved, put on his best shirt and drove to the address on the torn corner of newspaper. Driving was unpleasant and nerve-wracking with his bad arm, he didn't like having only one hand on the steering wheel, but he was tired of taxis. The address Deval had given him was another motel, even farther out than the Draker, a run-down place just within Sebastian city limits. It was late already, ten thirty p.m., and lights were on in no more than five or six motel-room windows. He parked his car and made his way toward the building.

   A girl was jumping rope by the stairs that led up to the second story. He couldn't see her face, a blur of long dark hair in the shadows, but something in her movement arrested him. He sat down on a step and waited until she stopped.

   "Hello," he said. The girl from the photograph stared back at him. Eilo's thin lips and straight dark hair, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Traces of Japan in the shape of her eyes although her eyes were the color of Anna's, bright blue. "Is your mom around?"

   "No," she said. There was something deerlike about her. She was winding the skipping rope around her hand, watching him, and her bearing suggested that she might bolt at any moment.

   "Where's your dad?"

   "I don't have a dad," the girl said. "He died before I was born."

   " Really," Gavin said. "Before you were born?" He wanted nothing more than to stay in this moment forever, sitting here on this step with his daughter before him. Trying to imagine all the years he'd missed, what she'd looked like at nine, at seven, at two.

   "My mom said it was a car accident."

   "A car accident," Gavin said. "I'm sorry to hear that."

   She shrugged. "It's okay," she said. "I didn't know him."

   "Where's your mom?"

   "She's at night school," the girl said.

   "What time does she get home?"

   "Late. Maybe eleven."

   The desolation of this small motel. The dirty stucco, the paint coming off the doors in patches and strips. She dropped the wound-up skipping rope at her feet, raised her arms and did a slow back handstand off the cement walkway onto the grass, walked on her hands for a few steps, and pivoted to face him once she was upright. He applauded.

   "I've been practicing," she said. He was watching her with tears in his eyes. A memory of Eilo doing backflips in a circle around the yard when they were little. A firefly sparked in the nearby air and she crouched down to look at it.

   "I'm not sure what your name is," he said.

   "Chloe." The firefly blinked out. She stood.

" Chloe Montgomery?"

"How did you know?"

"I know your mom," he said.

"But how did you know she was my mom?"

"You look like her."

"No, I don't," Chloe said.

"You have the same color eyes," he said.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Just a silly accident," he said. "It's getting better."

"How do you know her?"

"Your mom? We went to school together."

"How old were you?" Chloe asked.

   " Older than you," Gavin said. "I guess I was fifteen when I first met her. She was fourteen."

   "Were you her boyfriend?"

   "Yes."

   "Oh," she said. She was studying him closely.

   "Why are you here at the motel?"

   "I don't know," she said. A flicker of doubt crossed her face. "My mom said it was a vacation."

   "A vacation?"

   "She said sometimes people stay in motels for a while and that's what a vacation is."

   "Oh," Gavin said. "You know, she's right, actually. That's exactly what people do on vacation."

   "We keep going from motel to motel," Chloe said.

   "Chloe, I have to talk to your mom."

   "She gets home late," Chloe said. "I make my own dinner."

   "What do you make?"

   "Macaroni and cheese. 'Bye," she said abruptly, and went to the

door of a motel room halfway down the row. She fumbled in her pocket for a key, unlocked the door and closed it behind her, and a light flicked on behind the curtain. He stayed on the steps for a long time, waiting, listening to crickets and muffled television noises, watching cars pass on the street. Two cars pulled up to the motel in the interval, people coming home with bags of groceries. This was a motel, he realized, where people stayed for some time, a place for people who didn't have houses or apartments anymore.

   A third car pulled in, a small battered Toyota. The driver parked in front of the room that Chloe had disappeared into. It took him a moment to recognize Anna, hazy in the blue-white light. She had cut her hair short and dyed it. But she was wearing a sleeveless shirt that night and when she got out of the car he saw the bass-clef tattoo. She was less than thirty feet away.

   "Anna," he said. She started and took a step backward, came up hard against the door of the car. He raised his hands.

   "It's me," he said, "it's Gavin. Gavin Sasaki."

   "Gavin. Christ." He remembered her smoking when they were teenagers, and understood from her voice that she'd never stopped. "How did you find me?"

   " Deval gave me your address. I just wanted to talk to you. It's been years." He stood up slowly from the step. He didn't want to frighten her.

   She looked at him for a moment, walked around the car to retrieve a bag of groceries from the passenger seat. She unlocked the door to the motel room, fumbling with her keys. "Why don't you come in," she said.

A
n n a  h a d  a job as a file clerk, but she was studying to be a paralegal. She was twenty-six and looked older, pale when she turned on the dim light over the stove in the kitchenette. She was blond but he saw the dark roots of her natural hair. She lived with her daughter in a single motel room. Chloe was nowhere to be seen, but Anna raised a finger to her lips and pointed at a squared-off corner of folding screens, and Gavin understood this to be Chloe's room. There were two mismatched stools at the kitchenette counter, no table. The room had two beds; he could see the flattened-down space of carpet where Chloe's bed had been, before it had been pushed into the corner and hidden from view. Anna moved efficiently in the tiny kitchenette, putting groceries away. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge, popped both, and passed him one. He held the bottle briefly to his forehead.

   "You haven't changed," she said. " Still can't take the heat."

   "I never could."

   "So what are you doing back in Sebastian?" She had the same quick bright way of speaking. Here she stood before him and he realized that he was still looking for her, trying to find the Anna he'd known in her face, in her movements, still searching for clues.

   "It's a long, boring story."

   "You were a journalist, weren't you?"

   "I was," he said.

   "Daniel told me you got fired. He said you lied in all your stories."

   "Not all of them. The last few."

   "Why did you lie?" Anna asked.

   "I don't know, there was so much pressure at that place."

   "Come on," she said.

   "You come from nowhere, some suburb somewhere, there's such an expectation that you'll succeed, everyone back home talking about you—"

   "Why did you lie?"

   "I just came undone," Gavin said. "I wasn't expecting it."

   She had nothing to say to this. She pulled herself up to sit on the counter and sipped her beer and in that motion he saw a glimpse of her as a girl— but had he ever actually seen her sit on a counter? Perhaps at a house party? Or was it just that sitting on a counter was something he expected teenagers to do? She was wearing sandals. Her toenails were painted a sparkly blue. He glanced around in the awkward silence that followed and saw that she'd gone to some effort to make the motel room look like home. A child's drawings had been Scotch-taped to the walls. One in particular caught his eye: a house with a child and two women beside it and a sun with spiked rays overhead, Chloe's name written carefully in a corner in rounded letters with a heart after it. There were pictures of acrobats executing squiggly backflips, suspended in the air with red and blue birds flying overhead. A dish and a fork were drying on a dish towel beside the sink, and a faint aroma of macaroni and cheese lingered in the air.

   "You went to Utah," he said.

   "I did." She was sipping her beer, expressionless, and he tried to imagine what her memories might be like.

   "What was it like there?"

   "What was it like? It was lonely. It was uncomfortable. Nothing terrible happened to me. I just spent whole days alone in the house, pregnant, whole days waiting in this unfamiliar house while Daniel was at work, and the rest of the time I was working at a doughnut shop. It's so long ago now," she said. "I don't think about it."

   "You took some money," he said.

   "I did." She regarded him for a moment. "Have you ever made a decision in a moment of panic and then regretted it for the rest of your life?"

   "I've done regrettable things. Why did you come back here?"

   "Back to Sebastian? It'd been three years. I'd broken up with Liam.

I wanted to be near Sasha again. We figured if anyone were still looking for us, they'd have found us by then."

   "Anna," he said, "is that my daughter?"

   "No," she said. "She's my daughter. No one else raised her."

   "If I'd known she existed . . ."

   "Then what? You would have stayed in Florida?"

   "I don't know, Anna. I would have done something."

   She shrugged. "Well," she said, "you didn't." A hardness in her voice. He was looking at her and thinking, The robin' s-egg-blue headphones. The way you listened to music. The way your hair fell over your face while you did your homework. The way you stood before the wall in the park and showed me the word you'd spra
y-
painted over and over again, NO for New Order. The girl he'd searched for, he realized, no longer existed. He was shot through with unease.

   "I'm sorry," he said. "I came here to apologize. I think I knew you were pregnant. There were all those rumors, and you said you had to tell me something but you didn't, and then you disappeared. I didn't really make inquiries. I didn't really look for you. I just took off for New York and let you go."

   "I didn't tell you," she said. "I left town before you did."

   "But you know what? I should have known. You were always— you were good," he said. "You deserved better than what I did."

   She smiled. "Good? Is that how you remember me?"

   "Yes." In the long silence that followed he tried to think of a way of casually enquiring about the death behind the Starlight Diner, came up short and opted for bluntness. "Did you give Deval my address?" he asked.

   "He insisted. He said he had to apologize to you." Her voice had changed, her smile gone. "I told him he was out of his mind, going to see you in the state he was in. He wasn't thinking clearly."

"He told me your troubles are over."

"One of them," she said. "The most dangerous one."

"What happens now, Anna?"

   "Now?" She spoke quietly, contemplating the bottle in her hand. "Life continues. I get up and go to work every day. I'm going to move back in with my sister next week."

   "And you're . . . someone died last night," he said. "Aren't you troubled by that?"

   "Keep your voice down." Anna was peeling the label from her beer bottle, working sparkly blue fingernails under the corners. "I am," she said after a moment. "Of course I am. I know what I've done."

   "But you're—"

   "But I'm not wrecked by it," she said, "because there was nothing else I could do. Sasha's pretty torn up about it. Want to know something about Sasha? She's never gone anywhere or done anything, and it's made her naive. You know what people like Sasha assume? They assume every human life is equal."

   He felt a touch of vertigo that he couldn't blame on his arm. "You think some lives deserve to end."

   "He was a dealer who threatened my daughter." She was rolling the torn-off label into a tiny ball between her fingertips, a quick nervous motion. "I watched him beat a man almost to death once. Surely you don't wish he were still walking this earth."

   "I think it isn't for me to decide."

   Anna was cast in yellow by the stove-top light, a shine of sweat on her nose. " Think about it," she said. She wasn't nearly as calm as he'd thought, he realized. Her voice was strained now, tears in her eyes. "It was a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars plus interest. None of us had money, or families with money, or friends with money, or the kinds of credit ratings that lend themselves to loans. Daniel thought he had an inheritance, but it fell through at the last minute. What were we supposed to do?"

   "I don't know," he said. He was struck by a sudden mad thought that he was speaking with an impostor, but there was the bass-clef tattoo on her shoulder.

   "You see? We didn't know either. What would have been the right thing to do, Gavin, under the circumstances?"

   "I can't help but think . . ." He was short of breath. "I just think there's always another way."

   "We couldn't think of one," she said.

   "I just don't know how you move on from something like this," Gavin said.

   "You mean, you don't know how
you're
going to move on from this." She set her half-empty beer bottle next to the sink and jumped down off the counter, opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of ginger ale. She filled a glass with ice and they both listened to the cubes cracking as she poured the soda. She didn't offer him a glass. "Or are you implying that I've moved on from it? I haven't, of course I haven't. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. But if you're asking how to keep going, what you do is you remind yourself of the truth," she said, "which is that there wasn't a choice. That's the difference between me and Sasha. I understand that and she doesn't."