The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

  All's well. Not coming back. Got rid of phone.—LD

  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.

  But then the other guitarist came up on the stage and it was Liam Deval, it was actually him. At first he just introduced himself and Arthur Morelli without really looking into the audience, started in on the set with his eyes on the guitar. Halfway through the third piece Deval looked up and saw Jack, and for a moment he faltered. Morelli gave him a questioning glance. Deval recovered quickly, slipped back into " Minor Swing." His year hadn't been wasted. In music school he'd been good but now he was remarkable, his talent hardened and sharpened, a knife. He played with a heavy swing and made Django Reinhardt's chord substitutions. For the first time in a while Jack felt perfectly at peace. The music was radiant.

  "Let me buy you a drink" was the first thing he said to Jack when the set was over. At the bar Jack ordered a ginger ale and sipped at it in silence while Deval settled up with the bartender.

  "Hey now," Deval said, "are you okay?"

  "I've been like this since I got out of rehab," Jack said. "I'm sorry. It's embarrassing. Nothing's wrong. I can't help it." He held a cocktail napkin to his eyes but the tears wouldn't stop coming.

  "Rehab," Deval said. "Christ, I'm sorry, and here I am offering to buy you drinks."

  "It's okay. It was only ever pills." Jack stared at the bar and with tremendous concentration forced his eyes to stop watering. "I'm fine."

  "Pills." Deval seemed at a loss. "I should have realized, I should have noticed . . ."

  "You left your things in the dorm room," Jack said.

  "I didn't want things anymore," Deval said. "It was easier just to leave them. It's hard to explain."

  "Why did you get rid of your phone?"

  "We were so paranoid. We didn't know what he'd do, we thought maybe there might be some way to trace our calls." Deval sounded embarrassed. "We thought there might be a private detective involved, the way he found you in South Carolina so easily."

  "Anna and the baby, are they . . . ?"

  "I think I got to Virginia just in time," Deval said.

  Seventeen

  Anna had thought that being on the run would be more exciting. The night she left Utah with the baby and the money she'd been terrified, but also she had gazed at her wide-eyed reflection in the bus-terminal bathroom and thought about how tragic she was, how pretty and how doomed and how alone in the world, thoughts that embarrassed her later when she remembered them. She'd run away before but this was something infinitely more dangerous. She had wept for hours on the bus, silently with her child in her arms, because she was perfectly adrift now and she was afraid, so afraid, knowing almost nothing of the man from whom she'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars or of what he might do when he discovered the theft. She put on her headphones and listened to electronica— an epiphany from childhood: when all lies in disarray there's still order in music— and this was how she missed Daniel's call. She listened to the voice mail a few hours later, shaking. Apologies, recriminations, a plea to go anywhere but Florida because Florida was where Paul thought she was going. She changed her ticket at the next stop and spent a long time waiting in a dusty waiting room for a bus that pulled up glinting in the sunlight, continued on to South Carolina, where she convinced Jack's roommate to hold the baby while she took her first shower in three days.

  "Did you name her after someone?" Liam Deval asked on the first night. It was three
in the morning. Anna was feeding the baby in the common area and Liam had come out to sit with her. Jack was asleep on the floor of the dorm room.

  "A friend," Anna said.

  The one true friend she'd ever had, when she thought about it. Chloe LaFleur, hair dyed bright pink and loops of steel through her ears and eyebrows and nostrils, Chloe who was trying to make herself as hard and spiked and dangerous-looking as possible, Chloe who skipped school with Anna and showed her how to use a can of spray paint and told her about punk music and death metal. They were inseparable in junior high until Anna transferred away. Anna told her about the Chemical Brothers and New Order, but they wanted different things out of music. Anna wanted steadiness and predictability, music with rules. Chloe wanted noise, Chloe wanted music she could listen to while she threw bottles against the underpass at the back of the park, Chloe wanted a soundtrack for destruction.

  But Chloe was the one Anna could call crying from a pay phone because she'd run away from home again— because someone had thrown all her things out the window in a drunken rage, because her sister was at her father's house and Anna was alone with wolves, because someone had given her another bruise she'd have to lie about at school on Monday, all the countless reasons for leaving that could come up in a given evening— and Chloe was the one who'd tell her to come over no matter what time it was, Chloe would meet her in the park, Chloe would go with her to the tattoo parlor when she was high and wild, when everything was moving too quickly and she was desperate to mark this moment on her skin.

  A month after Anna switched to the new school Chloe La Fleur moved to Indiana to live with her grandparents, and Anna didn't see her again. Still, she knew immediately what to name her baby when the nurse told her it was a girl. In the darkness of the residence hall at Holloway College she prepared a new bottle and leaned down to kiss her daughter's beautiful new skin.

  La t e r t h e r e was Virginia in all its calm and its peace, before Liam came to her in the park and spirited her away again.

  " Where are we going?" she asked, on the way out of town.

  "You're under no obligation," Liam said. Driving five miles over the speed limit, glancing every so often in his rearview mirror. They were passing through fields dusted with snow, black skeletons of winter trees. "I'll drive you anywhere. But I want to go to Detroit, and I'd love for you to come along."

  "What's in Detroit?"

  "A gypsy guitarist," he said. "Someone I've been wanting to study with for a while."

  Three or four blurred days of travel, then, but when they reached Detroit she found herself unprepared for the stasis of hiding. After a few cramped days in a motel they found a cheap one-bedroom apartment, and then the sensation of flight dissipated and days began to slide past without incident. She stared out the window at the winter snow, played with Chloe and sang to her, changed her diapers and prepared endless bottles, watched music videos, thought about enrolling in a GED program but didn't do anything about it, cleaned the apartment to techno music.

  The small peculiarities of living with someone. When Liam shaved he left a fine dusting of hair in the sink. When she woke in the night she found herself staring at him in the darkness. The lines of his shoulder, his neck, the stillness of his sleeping face. I am someone who sleeps next to someone else in a queen-sized bed every night. She wondered if this was what being married was like. She didn't recognize her life and felt vastly old.

  "Will your parents look for you?" he asked. He didn't think she was vastly old. He fretted about her age.

  "No," she said. Even if anyone reported her missing, she told him, she'd run away three times before so the Florida police would have listed her as a runaway.

  Liam found a job as a waiter. He hated it but was qualified for almost nothing else except teaching guitar lessons, which he said he couldn't stand the thought of. He came home exhausted and played his guitar alone in the living room, until at the beginning of their second week in Detroit he went from work to a housing project far from their apartment and returned home late in a state of elation. He lay on the bed, his clothes still smelling of the restaurant. Anna lay beside him with her head on his chest.

  "Tell me what it was like," she said. Chloe was sleeping in the crib by the bed. She didn't like leaving the apartment but she did like hearing about the outside world.

  "What part of it?"

  "All of it. You leave the restaurant, you take the bus to the housing project, you walk up to the door . . ."

  "I walk up to the door," he said, "the door of the tower, and I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing here? The place is desolate. A whole block of brick towers with small windows, leafless trees. There are all these dangerous-looking kids loitering out front in their huge puffy jackets. When I get close to the door they're staring at me and laughing, the girls sucking their teeth at me. So I have to go in then because if I turn around now I'm scared they'll jump me, maybe steal my guitar.

  "So I go into this terrible dark hallway, it smells like urine and there's garbage lying around, step into the elevator and then up to the seventh floor. It's better up there, not as dirty. There's music playing somewhere, television voices behind the doors and it seems less dangerous, just another place where people live their lives, and I'm feeling awfully judgmental all of a sudden for being afraid of the building. So I find the apartment, 7M, and a woman answers the door—"

  "How old is she?"

  " Maybe fifty? I'm bad with ages. She opens the door with the chain still on and asks me who I am through the crack, so I tell her who I am and that I have an appointment. And she says, 'Oh, Stanislaus is so looking forward to meeting you,' with a very faint Eastern European accent, like this isn't her first language but she's been here a long time. She opens the door and I'm face-to-face with this really elegant woman, her hair and makeup all done, nice clothes. I'm standing here in t-shirt and jeans, filthy from the restaurant, and it's embarrassing all of a sudden, like I should have dressed up to meet them.

  "And then Stanislaus comes in and he's a wreck, maybe sixty, he drags his leg and he winces like he's in pain, you can tell his nose got broken once or twice, but his wife brings him his guitar and he starts playing, Anna, and I can't tell you . . . he can do things I can't, and it made me think of Jack, actually, this thing he used to say—"

  Anna shifted in the bed. She was afraid she might have put Jack in danger. She didn't regret coming to Holloway College because if she hadn't gone there she wouldn't have met Liam, but the mention of Jack's name always filled her with guilt. Chloe whimpered in her sleep in the crib by the bed.

  "This thing he used to say," Liam said, "when we were in school together." He said this as if the time when he'd been in school with Jack were much more distant than three weeks ago, as if Liam's belongings weren't still scattered in the dorm room in South Carolina where Jack still slept every night. "We'd be listening to a musician, someone really good, and Jack would go, 'Damn, he has the music,' or 'She has the music'—"

  "He used to say that in high school too, but I don't think I really understood what he meant."

  "The way I think of it," Liam said, "it means the musician's a conduit. It means music's something that moves through him, like religion or electricity. I'm up there in a tower in the scariest neighborhood I've ever set foot in, all these kids waiting to rob me out front, and here's this man who comes into the room half-crippled, he's a bit gruff and he doesn't really have much to say to me, just asks for the money for the lesson up front and I'm wondering if coming to Detroit to study with him was a terrible idea, but then he sits down and starts playing and it's like nothing I've heard. This man, he's broken-down and poor and he lives in a hellhole, but he has the music."

  The idea of having the music— something you could hold inside yourself, a library of notes, a collection— made her happy. "Do you have the music?"

  "I'm so close," Liam said. "I think I'm getting closer."

  "To the music?"

  "To the music," he said. "I
can't really explain."

  Anna fell asleep beside him and when she woke two hours later— Chloe was whimpering— he was gone from the bed. She found him in the living room, playing softly and haltingly in a style she'd never heard before. He smiled when he saw her but didn't stop.

  Chloe liked the music. She flapped her arms and made excited small noises, she grinned toothlessly at Liam and kicked her feet, and after some time had passed Anna and Chloe fell asleep on the sofa. When they woke together Liam had gone to work. Anna redyed her hair and trimmed it while Chloe was napping. The sting of bleach on her head, the familiar ritual of turning herself blond, soft pieces falling around her ears. She sometimes didn't remember what she'd looked like in her old life. She sometimes didn't remember who she'd been. A distant version of herself had run away from home and gotten high in the park and skipped school to smoke cigarettes under an overpass, but there were days when these seemed like someone else's memories.

  S h e c o u l d have gone outside but she didn't. She thought of Paul constantly and her memories of him made her heart beat faster, a panicked blackness at the edges of her vision. Their neighborhood was half-empty, every third or fourth building boarded up. There were cracks in all the sidewalks, and no one ever threatened her but she didn't feel safe. She felt watched when she walked down the street with Chloe, all the windows of all the buildings filled with malevolent eyes. There was nowhere to go but the park down the street and that was a broken-down place, swings hanging lopsided and rust on the slide. There was one swing meant for a small child that still hung the way it was supposed to, but that swing made a ghastly shrieking sound when she pushed Chloe on it— rust on the chain— and Chloe didn't like the noise.