The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

  Fourteen

  Night had fallen by the time Daniel's airplane descended into Florida. He picked up his Jeep and drove the long straight road from Boca Raton to the city of Sebastian, a haze of insects in the air around every streetlight. Impossible not to dwell on the ragged decade that stood between today and the last time he'd gone to Utah, the marriages and divorces, his children, the guilt and the disappointments. He was calmer now that he was home. The blessed familiarity of these streets. Terrible to have to give the inheritance to Paul, but it seemed to him that paying off Anna's debt was honorable, and the idea of honor brought him peace. He drove home to the rented house where he'd been living in the long blank year since his second divorce, showered and drove to his mother's house. His grandmother had been ill for years now, a long slow fade into confusion and morphine, but the fact of her death was still somehow startling to him. His mother's eyes sparkled with tears.

  "I'm sorry I wasn't here," he said.

  . . .

  Da n i e l w e n t to the funeral two days later, watched as his grandmother's pitifully small coffin was lowered into the earth. Later in the week he came home from a long day of work and three messages blinked on his answering machine. One was from his mother, terse and businesslike—"Call me when you can"—and the other two were hang-ups, the second hang-up preceded by a sigh. He called his mother and listened to her in a state of increasing agitation.

  "Wait," he said finally, "I don't understand. How is this possible?"

  "As best we can figure out," his mother said, "she decided to invest in a real estate development. The money's gone."

  "How could it be gone?"

  "It just is," she said tightly. "She made a mistake."

  "But she told me . . ." Daniel was sitting in the shadows of his living room. He hadn't turned on the lights and the light from the street shone blue through the blinds. He felt he might be dreaming. "I just came back from Utah," he said.

  "Utah? Were you visiting my sister?"

  "I needed the money," he said. "I thought I had it, I thought the will was being settled this week, she told me—"

  "What did your grandmother tell you, Daniel?" Her voice was thin. Daniel flinched. She'd just lost her mother and now her son was whining about money.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "She lived a long, full life," his mother said. "If there's no money, Daniel, is it the end of the world? Don't we all have everything we need?"

  "You're right," he said. He closed his eyes. "She invested all of it?"

  " There wasn't much to start out with," his mother said. "She always talked about how frugal she'd been, all the careful investing she and my dad did, but once we took a look at the accounts, there just wasn't much there. Maybe she thought the real estate development would make her wealthy. Let me put it this way, sweetheart. After the bills for the nursing home and the hospital are settled, after we pay the accountant and the lawyer, I estimate we'll be left with about twelve hundred dollars. I'll split it with you if you want."

  Fifteen

  In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks— he couldn't find the kind he liked best, but close enough— and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn't in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don't exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna's name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room. He considered for a moment but could think of no other leads, and he was distracted by the distant sounds of Eilo hitting her heavy bag.

  Eilo had a heavy bag rigged up in a spare bedroom. She'd had it professionally mounted. The room was otherwise unfurnished. There was only the punching bag hanging still in a corner, Eilo's boxing gloves lined up on the gray carpet below. At five in the morning she was in the punching room and at six she was at her desk. Eilo disappeared occasionally during the day and during these absences Gavin heard the muted sounds of her gloved fists hitting the bag wherever he went in the house, a distant percussion. Afterward she was calmer, more focused, and she returned to work until at least seven or eight in the evening, long past the point when Gavin had stopped even pretending to upload new home listings to the website and was reading the news on his laptop instead. Eventually one of them would say something about pizza or Chinese takeout, and a while later they would be sitting in the living room watching TV and eating off the coffee table. It seemed to Gavin that she liked having him there. She never went out in the evenings.

  "At a certain point all your friends are couples," she said, when he asked about this. "You move through the world in pairs. They had to pick one of us."

  "So they picked the guy who left their friend?"

  "Apparently his girlfriend's lovely." She smiled as if she'd told a joke, and he realized how rarely he saw her smile. In all of his memories she was serious and efficient: Eilo sitting by his hospital bed after the time he'd walked home from his miserable senior prom and gotten heatstroke, Eilo putting a Band-Aid on his knee when he'd fallen off his skateboard at age seven, Eilo buying him a jacket at the mall when he was ten. What all these memories had in common was the absence of his parents, but he'd always known where they were: his father was at the office or on a business trip, his mother at home watching television. Neither of them had ever displayed the slightest interest in his or Eilo's activities. He'd never understood why they'd bothered to have children.

  "When did you last see Mom and Dad?" he asked, sitting with Eilo on the living room floor that night. Eilo didn't own a table.

  She finished her slice of pizza, considering the question.

  "I don't know," she said. " Maybe a couple years ago?"

  "I'm thinking about visiting them tomorrow."

  "Why would you want to do a thing like that?" Eilo stood swiftly and carried the empty pizza box to the kitchen.

  "I don't know," he said to her receding back. He did know. He was beginning an investigation and it had to start somewhere, but he didn't want to tell Eilo about it. He wanted something of his own. "It just seems like a kind thing to do."

  Th e i r p a r e n t s lived in a development called Palm Venice, no more than a half-hour away by car. The neighborhood had been imagined in the late '50s as Florida's answer to its namesake, a tropical paradise where you might travel by boat to your neighbor's house for a barbecue, but the canals that ran behind everyone's back lawns connected eventually with the swamps and therefore now harbored a glittery-eyed population of giant lizards and snakes. Residents saw pythons swimming in the canals sometimes, undulating ribbons with teeth. The lizards, the Nile monitors, watched the human world from the edges of backyards. A local woman swore she'd seen an anaconda but no one believed her. Still, Gavin thought as he was parking the car, there was no reason why not. As he walked up the concrete path to the front door he was remembering walking with William Chandler, murky water up around their knees and his legs soaked with sweat beneath the hip waders, a thermos of ice water in his backpack. The cool of the thermos against his spine the only thing preventing him from fainting in the heat. These are ideal conditions for an anaconda, Chandler had said, you can quote me on that.

  His parents had purchased their house after Gavin and Eilo had

  left home. He'd been here twice before, and he sometimes thought of it as a mausoleum. It was cool and almost silent, five thousand square feet of pale walls and white carpets. He hadn't seen his mother in some time. She was somewhat wider than he remembered when she opened the door.

  "Oh!" she said. "Gavin! Sweetheart. It's nice to see you again."

  "You too," he said. He wasn't sure what to do
next, so he hugged her. It was awkward. She exuded a complicated medley of scents: expensive face creams, perfumed lotions and cleansers and fabric softeners, a note of lemon in her hair. But mostly wine, a barely perceptible sweet staleness on her skin.

  "Are you just passing through on business?"

  "I'm not passing through. I'm living with Eilo."

  "You live with Eilo and Mike?"

  It wasn't his story to tell, but it seemed impossible not to now. "They've broken up. Eilo and Mike aren't together anymore."

  " Close the door," she said. "You're letting in the heat."

  They stood for a moment looking at one other. He tried, as he always had, to read the expression on her face. She had the warm but oddly blank half-smile she wore in most of his memories.

  "Well, come in!" she said, too loudly. "Come in! How long have you been back in Florida?"

  "A few weeks." He was following her into the kitchen.

  " Would you like a Coke?"

  "Just water, thanks. Or orange soda if you have it." But she wasn't listening, she was setting a Coca-Cola and a glass of ice before him, turning back to the fridge for a half-empty pitcher of sangria. He watched her in silence.

  "It's the most refreshing thing this time of year," she said. She was pouring herself a glass.

  "You drink that stuff all year."

  "Are we going to get nasty about drinking again? It's natural," she said. "It's fermented grapes and fruit pieces. Vitamin C. You need to loosen up a little. Well, cheers," she said.

  "Cheers." Gavin picked an ice cube out of his Coke, let it melt on his tongue while he watched her. "How have you been?" he asked, around the ice.

  "Oh, just fine," she said. "Just fine indeed. Enjoying life in the sunshine state."

  "But what've you been doing?" He knew what his mother did— she watched television, she shopped, she drank too much, she went for manicures and got her hair done and ate dinner either alone in front of the television or at expensive restaurants with her friends, she passed out on the sofa— and he wasn't sure why he was pressing the point, except that the house made him somehow claustrophobic despite its vastness and being with her always made him desperate for substance. Tell me something real, he wanted to scream at her sometimes, tell me anything at all, but as always she managed to deflect him.

  "Why would I be doing anything out of the ordinary?" she asked.

  "I don't know what the ordinary is," he said. "I haven't seen you in a while."

  "Two or three years," she said agreeably. "You came down for that one Christmas."

  "I think that was five years ago," Gavin said.

  "Five," she said. A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. " Really?"

  "Is Dad home?"

  "He's on a business trip."

  " Where did he go this time?"

  "New York," she said.

  This hit Gavin harder than he would have expected. How often in

  these past ten years had his father come to New York City without telling him? How many times had they passed within blocks of one another, how frequently had his plane passed over Gavin's apartment? When Gavin had stood by the window in the New York Star newsroom in the mornings, sipping his coffee and looking down at the teeming masses of humanity forty-three stories below, how many times had his father been among those dark specks on the sidewalk?

  "Excuse me a moment," Gavin said. He left her sipping sangria in the kitchen and set off down the hall in the direction of the closest bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face and contemplated climbing out the window. It wouldn't be difficult. He was on the first floor. The frosted-glass window was open just a crack and the outside world with its grass and leaves and flowers looked like freedom to him. On his way back he veered into the dining room. It had an underused emptiness that reminded him of unpopular museum halls and pristine Park Avenue lobbies. There were stiff-backed upholstered chairs that no one ever sat in, a glass table with space for fourteen.

  His mother's collection of glass and crystal figurines occupied most of an oak cabinet along one wall. He opened the cabinet door and let his eyes play over the cherubs and the tilt-headed cats until he found a glass dog of indeterminate breed with very large eyes and a tiny stick at its feet. He extracted it carefully and carried it back to her.

  "Mom," he said, "where did you get this one?"

  "Oh," she said, "you and Eilo gave me that for my birthday one year. It was the summer after you graduated high school, right before you went north."

  He looked at the dog in his hand, but there was no spark of recognition. He'd hoped the glass dog might jump-start his memory, but he couldn't remember buying it, and he certainly couldn't remember Sasha in a shopping mall with a bag full of baby clothes. His mother's birthday was in late August. He would have been days or at most a week or two from departure. She was pouring herself another glass of sangria. She looked up at him and they both knew what he was going to say. He delayed for a moment but his next line was inevitable. He knew his part in the script.

  "I thought you were going to cut down a bit," he said, as gently as possible. "That last time I saw you."

  "Christmas. That was the last time I saw you, wasn't it?" She sipped the sangria and then set it down on the countertop with exaggerated care. "Christmas is a very stressful time. You would be a better person if you were a little more compassionate, I think." She had never been a kind drunk.

  "I thought we'd agreed not to talk about that Christmas," Gavin said. He had come down with Karen against his strenuous objections. Karen had insisted, she thought it was strange that they'd lived together for two years and she'd never met his parents, she didn't seem to believe him when he told her what his parents were like. He'd tried to explain what ghosts they were, how uninterested they were in their children. But Karen's parents loved her, she had only ever had good holidays, she didn't understand. They'd come down to Florida and stayed at a hotel— an extravagance, Karen thought, because she couldn't imagine visiting family for Christmas and not staying with them, but Gavin had to draw the line somewhere— and Gavin's mother had lapsed into incoherence and finally passed out at the table near the end of Christmas dinner.

  "Well," Gavin's mother said, "you brought it up, darling, didn't you?"

  "I should go," Gavin said.

  "So soon," she said. She was looking past him at the screened glass doors to the flower garden. He turned, but no one was there. His reflection imposed over a chaos of leaves and flowers. "You won't stay for dinner?" She was trying, it seemed to him, but her heart wasn't in it, and when he thought about it neither was his.

  "It was nice to see you," he said. "Give Dad my regards."

  He left her there in the living room and let himself out into the sunlight. The glass dog was in his pocket. He drove past the turn for Eilo's house and continued on to the police station.

  "

  I d o n ' t u n d e r s t a n d , " the desk clerk at the 33rd Precinct said. "You're saying your kid's missing?"

  "I'm saying I have no idea where she is and I'm afraid she's in trouble," Gavin had been having some difficulty explaining the situation. "We've been over this twice. I don't know how to explain it differently."

  "I don't know either," the desk clerk said, "but please, help me out here. The kid's missing, but you said you've never met her before?"

  "She might be fine," he said. "I told you, she might be with her mother."

  "But you've never met the kid?"

  "Gavin?" The voice was familiar. A passing detective, an overweight man in an enormous gray suit, had stopped by the counter. He was entirely bald, his shaved head shiny under the fluorescent lights, and he was intensely familiar but it took Gavin a moment to place him. " Gavin Sasaki," the detective said.

  "Daniel?" The sight was disorienting. The Daniel Smith he remembered was a skinny kid with an Afro and wire-framed glasses, high-top sneakers in Day-Glo colors, t-shirts for bands no one had ever heard of and retro ties. It was impossible to rec
oncile him with this large slump-shouldered figure standing by the counter in the 33rd Precinct. "You're with the police?"

  "I am." Daniel glanced at the desk clerk, who gave him a meaningful look. "Come back to my office," he said, and Gavin followed him back into the depths of the police station, to a small gray room with no windows, a plastic chair on either side of a table that seemed to be bolted to the floor.

  "Your office?"

  "I don't have an office. I use the interrogation room when I want a little privacy." Daniel closed the door and settled into the chair across from him. "So I'm walking by the front desk," he said, "on my way out to get a sandwich, and I'm thinking to myself, Isn't that Gavin Sasaki? The trumpet player? So I come a bit closer, and I swear I hear something about a missing kid. We got a missing kid on our hands here, Gavin?"

  "No, it's not— look, she wasn't abducted, it's nothing like that. I just don't know where she is and I'm worried about her. Like I was saying to your colleague, I think she might be in trouble and I don't know how to find her. She could be with her mother."