The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

  "Liam Deval? Why would you call him?"

  "Because he's my best friend," Anna said. Sasha had never understood this. She found it unnatural. All of her own relationships had ended in disaster and she couldn't conceive of being friends with any of her former boyfriends. "Because he said to call me if I was ever in trouble, and we talk all the time anyway. And because Gloria's his mother," Anna said. "It's his mother's house. He needs to know."

  "This woman, she was probably just who she said she was. You don't know—"

  "A real estate agent who takes pictures of kids? Asks them their names, identifies them?" A high edge of hysteria. She lit another cigarette.

  Sasha sighed and dropped her head into her hands. Every cell in her body was straining toward sleep.

  "What do you want to do?" she asked, again.

  "I don't know," Anna said. "I just want this to be over."

  "Are you going to work?"

  "I called in sick."

  "Where's Chloe?"

  "In her room. She's not going to school today. But maybe even that's not safe. I keep thinking, what if he knows where we live?"

  "Anna, I have to get some sleep. Let's talk about this later." Sasha stood and left her sister alone in the kitchen. Theirs was a very small house on a street of small houses. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. But the basement was finished and she had it to herself, which suited her. It was a large room with her own small bathroom and a cool cement floor, easy to darken completely against the daylight. She drew the blackout blinds, locked the door and undressed, turned on the air conditioner and lay still on the bed. The ceiling was creaking softly, Anna pacing overhead. She heard Chloe and Anna talking but couldn't make out the words. She fell asleep and dreamed of snow.

  Sa s h a w o k e at two in the afternoon. The movement upstairs had ceased. She opened the door to the stairway, blinking in the light from upstairs, and the silence of the house came over her. There was a note on the kitchen table. Liam arrived in town. We're staying with him in his motel for a while. I'll call you. Love, A.

  Her first thought was that now it would be easy to gamble, and the fact of that having been her first thought made her shiver. She went through the mechanical motions of coffee and breakfast, and even though she was almost always alone at this time of day— Anna at work, Chloe at her after-school program— their absence from the house was overwhelming. The light through the windows was too bright. She drank two cups of coffee, spent a long time in the shower, tidied the basement. She moved slowly, willing the time to pass, but when she was done with all of this she was still alone, there were still hours to get through before she could go to work. She called Anna, but Anna didn't answer her phone.

  Sasha did a load of laundry, sat in the basement watching the dryer spin. Four fifteen. She did the ironing, hung up two clean uniforms and went outside. She stood on the front steps for a few minutes, unsure what to do with herself. It was going to rain later but for now light still hung in the air outside. She found her deck of cards and sat in front of the television set while the afternoon faded outside the window, shuffling and reshuffling and playing solitaire until her cell phone rang at four forty.

  "Is tonight still good for you?" William Chandler asked. She'd forgotten that it was one of their regular coffee nights.

  "Tonight's fine," she said. The relief of being saved from solitude. "You'll come after the dinner rush?"

  "I'll be there," he said.

  The television couldn't mask the emptiness of the house all around her. When she'd disconnected the call she went from room to room turning on every light, but it wasn't enough, so she left early and spent a half-hour drinking coffee and reading the paper in a booth before her shift started.

  After the dinner rush she clocked out on break and returned to the same booth with her dinner. The rain had started. William Chandler shook his umbrella under the awning, a spray of silver droplets flying out through the air, and set it down in the foyer before he came to her.

  "

  Y o u s e e m distracted," William said.

  "I am." Sasha hadn't turned the lights off before she'd left because the thought of coming home to a black and empty house was unbearable, but now she was worried about the electric bill. She thought of the house with every window ablaze through the night, a beacon on the darkened street. Rain was streaking the diner windows, light slipping down the glass. She found herself wishing for a real storm, for a hurricane, a reason to get in the car and drive away from this life. She'd read that the evacuees of Hurricane Katrina had dispersed to every corner of the country, a New Orleans diaspora from Washington state to Boston to California. Couldn't she join them? There were moments when she wanted to leave everyone, even Anna and Chloe, strike out alone into a new state and a new way of living. After everything Anna had done for her.

  "Have you been gambling?"

  "No." She felt sick. "A little. Yes."

  "A little?"

  "I bought a couple of scratch-and-win tickets before work today."

  "Just two?"

  "Twelve," Sasha said. It had been so easy to slide back in. The tickets were so bright and as she'd carried them out to her car they'd seemed almost like real tickets, like slips of paper that might transport her to another place. The colors vibrating with possibility.

  "Well," he said. " First time in a while. You have them with you?"

  He knew her well. She'd kept them in her apron pocket. She laid them out on the table, iridescent rectangles with gray smudges where she'd scraped away the film to reveal the numbers. Across the room she was aware of Bianca watching her with concern. They'd been working together for years now and Bianca knew about the Gamblers Anonymous meetings, about the tickets, about Sasha's ruined credit rating and her fallen-down life. They'd talked about scratch-and-win tickets. Bianca had had a drinking problem when she was younger and said she understood.

  "You won twenty-one dollars," William said. "Congratulations. Was it worth it?"

  She'd seen it as a sign, but of course she couldn't tell him that. One hundred twenty-one thousand, twenty-one, the mirror of twelve, twelve tickets, if this wasn't a pattern then what was? But she knew where the rabbit hole led and so she looked away from the twelve rect angles on the table and said, " Could you please take these away from me?" and when she looked back they were gone.

  "What time do you get off work?"

  "Six a.m.," she said.

  "Seriously? That late?"

  "I work twelve-hour shifts a couple times a week."

  William was flipping through his notebook. It was a worn leather scrap of a thing that he carried everywhere. Sasha saw it as an affectation— who still carries a leather notebook?—and sometimes found it obscurely irritating.

  "Here," he said, "there's a meeting up on Lakeview Crescent at seven." He wrote an address on a notebook page, tore it off and gave it to her. "I won't be there. Seven a.m.'s when I get my kid up for school. You'll go, won't you?"

  "I will. Thank you."

  Sh e w a s tired at six a.m. but the suburbs were beautiful, the heat already rising and the sky streaked with pink, streetlights fading out as she drove. She was frightened but she had some hope. Daniel had come in after William had left and told her his plan. His grandmother was very close to death, he said, and he didn't like to think of death in these terms but the fact was that he was expecting an inheritance. He was going to go to Utah and negotiate with Paul. "People like him don't really want to draw attention to themselves," he'd said. "There's no reason why he wouldn't be willing to talk." She could have wept for happiness, but she'd settled for kissing him on the cheek. He was leaving for Utah the next morning.

  Lakeview Crescent was in a planned development, the houses set at angles around a man-made lake with palm trees all around it, small piers out into the water. The meeting was being held in a private home. She drove slowly with the scrap of paper William had given her in her hand, reading numbers on mailboxes, but even before she read the stre
et address of the meeting house she saw the cars out front.

  In the chilled air of the living room Sasha picked a chair facing the floor-to-ceiling windows. The lake was brilliant in the early light.

  "It's stocked with fish," a woman, Loreen, said. It was her house but she seemed anxious and out of place in it. She wore a white blouse and jeans and her hair was spiked up. The impression was of a punk rocker trying to impersonate a housewife. There was a white guitar leaning against a wall at the end of the room. The sleeve of her blouse slipped up as she passed Sasha a cup of coffee, and Sasha saw the edge of a tattoo — the letters "ocks" in gothic script, blurred and faded with time and sunlight. She wished she could ask to see the rest.

  There was the usual round of introductions. She found herself looking out at the water, mesmerized and caffeinated, bone-tired, thinking about swimming. She wasn't a strong swimmer but she'd always enjoyed it, the shock of a new element, the moment of plunging when the water closed over her and she was suspended. She felt a little feverish, as always happened when she was exhausted, sweat between her uniform and her skin, and she realized that everyone was looking at her and that she'd heard her name at least once.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I just got off the night shift." There were sympathetic smiles but most of the people here were day workers, well dressed and polished, going to an early-morning meeting because after this they were driving to their offices, and she saw that they didn't really understand. "My name's Sasha," she said. "I used to gamble. I lost everything of value."

  "What did you lose?" This from a man whose name she couldn't remember, thirtyish in a linen suit and expensive-looking glasses.

  "I spent a student-loan payment on Lotto tickets and poker games," Sasha said, "so I had to drop out of school after a semester. I was studying English literature and finance. I know it doesn't matter anymore, but my grades that first semester were really high. I stole some watches. I stole my dad's car." She'd told the story so many times that it sounded flat to her now. A recitation about loss and poker games and tickets. "I bought some scratch-and-win tickets today," she said. "I mean yesterday. Before work."

  "I did that too," Loreen said. "Just last week." The conversation shifted away from Sasha, toward scratch-and-win tickets and how they were everywhere now, every 7-Eleven and gas station and grocery store, and Sasha's attention drifted back to the lake. "It's all part of the sickness," someone said. Reflections of palm trees shimmered over the water.

  W i l l i a m c a l l e d her in the late afternoon, when he knew she'd be up. She was sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette.

  "Did you go to the meeting this morning?" he asked.

  "I did," she said. "It was a good idea. Thanks for making me go."

  "You sound tense."

  "I'm fine." What could she possibly tell him? William understood gambling. He understood what it felt like to slip away from yourself and to move beyond your own control, to turn into someone you never meant to become who did things you never wanted to do, but he didn't know that her sister had stolen over a hundred thousand dollars from a drug dealer. She'd been sitting on the front steps for an hour, because she couldn't bear to be alone inside.

  "I've known you for a while now," he said. "I don't believe you."

  "Just family problems. No gambling."

  "Okay," he said, and this was one of the things she liked best about him, the way he let things drop so easily. "Hope it all works out. You going to our regular meeting later?"

  "I think I'll go tomorrow."

  After the phone call she stayed on the steps for a while longer looking out at the twilight, restless and utterly alone. There were kids playing basketball in a driveway across the street. She waved when one of them looked at her, but he didn't wave back. There were hours to go before she had to leave for work but she didn't want to stay here anymore. She went back inside for her handbag and a clean uniform, draped the uniform carefully across the backseat of her car so it wouldn't get wrinkled, and left the neighborhood. She was as alone in the car as she'd been in the house, but at least the car didn't echo with anyone else's absence.

  Sa s h a p a r k e d at the end of a beach access road and walked down to the water. There were two new scratch-and-win tickets in her pocket from when she'd stopped to get gas. Two was a manageable number. Two wasn't the end of the world. She wouldn't dive into the ocean tonight but it was nice to think that she could. The lights of a yacht shone over the water but other than that there was nothing, only the sea and the sand and the bright stars and Sasha, the tickets stiff and sharp-edged in the pocket of her jeans.

  Twenty-Two

  The thing about private investigators, Gavin had read somewhere— Raymond Chandler? A dim memory of an essay with heavy underlining among his abandoned papers in New York, no doubt dragged out to the curb by his landlord and turning to mush in a landfill now— was that they wore trench coats. It sounds trivial but it isn't, because the profession exploded in the 1920s. These were men who'd been through trench warfare and emerged hard and half-broken into the glitter and commotion of the between-wars world; men out of time, out of place, hanging on by the threads of their uneven souls. The detectives were honorable but they'd seen too much to be good. The hardest among them had seen too much to be frightened. The mean streets were nothing compared to the trenches of Europe. Some of them had lost everything and all of them had lost something, and consequently most of them drank too much.

  He'd been shot but he felt more tired now than hard-bitten. At his desk in the rec room of Eilo's house he stared at the flicker of the computer screen and thought of the motel room, the man's voice in the shadows and the soft carpet under his face. His fedora had been lost at the Draker Motel. It was too hot here for a trench coat.

  "I brought you some lemonade," Eilo said. Ice cubes clinked softly as she set the glass on his desk. "It's cold."

  " Thank you," he said. He was unexpectedly moved. "That's exactly what I wanted." Wounded private detective Gavin Sasaki is reduced to tears by lemonade.

  "It's a hot day," she said. "There's a pitcher in the kitchen if you want more."

  He had been doing desk work for a few days now, typing up descriptions of properties and uploading photographs, updating the website as new properties came in or were sold. Quiet, undemanding work and he didn't mind it, he liked not having to go out into the heat. But he was aware at all times of a story unfolding just beyond the edges of his vision, some terrible drama involving Anna and his lost daughter and Liam Deval and a gun, a transaction whose details remained dangerous and vague.

  Th a t n i g h t Gavin took a taxi back to the diner and sat by the window again until Sasha came to him.

  "You're so pale," she said, when she gave him his coffee.

  "I haven't been out much since I hurt my arm." And then, experimentally, "have you spoken with Daniel?"

  She smiled. "He told me he has the money," she said. Her voice trembled a little, with fear or relief. "His inheritance came through. It's happening tomorrow night."

  "It'll be nice when it's over with."

  "It will be like it never happened," Sasha said, and he saw how desperately she wanted this. "We'll pay back the debt and he'll disappear. Are you ordering food?"

  "Two hard-poached eggs and multigrain toast," he said.

  She nodded and turned away from him. He watched her recede across the restaurant, wondering why, if this whole thing was simply a matter of paying off a debt, Liam Deval was in Florida with a gun.

  W h e n G a v i n went back to the diner the following night, Sasha was at a banquette with a girl. His breath caught, but she wasn't his daughter. She was older than the girl in the photograph. He realized as he crossed the room that he'd seen her before, leaning on the door frame of a house where everyone was sleeping, her eyes closed.

  "May I join you?" he asked. Sasha had watched his approach. She shrugged, so he sank into the booth across from them. The girl was sitting by the window with Sasha beside her
, and it seemed to Gavin that she was dressed oddly. The last time he'd seen her she'd been wearing cut-off shorts and a dirty t-shirt, but now she wore a cheap-looking white-and-pink dress with scratchy-looking lace and bows on the sleeves. She looked like a thirteen-year-old playing at being nine. Her hair was darker than he remembered.

  "Hello, Grace," he said.

  "You two know each other?"

  "I've seen her around."

  The girl only watched him. He couldn't read her expression. She was perfectly still.

  "She doesn't talk much," Sasha said.

  "Probably wise." The girl's silence made Gavin uneasy. "Only gets you in trouble." It occurred to him that she was probably always in trouble anyway. "You dyed your hair," he said. He realized that he had absolutely no idea how to speak to a thirteen-year-old, and he seemed to have said the wrong thing. Grace winced.