The Lola Quartet

One

Anna had fallen into a routine, or as much of a routine as a seventeen-year-old can reasonably fall into when she's transient and living in hiding with an infant. She was staying at her sister's friend's house in a small town in Virginia.

The baby always woke up crying at four thirty or five a.m. Anna got up and changed Chloe's diaper, prepared a bottle and bundled her into the stroller and then they left the basement where they were living, walked three blocks to the twenty-four-hour doughnut shop for coffee and across the wide empty street to the park. Anna sat on a swing with her first coffee of the morning and Chloe lay in the stroller staring up at the clouds. They listened to the birds in the trees at the edges of the park, the sounds of traffic in the distance. The climbing equipment cast a complicated silhouette against the pale morning sky.

There was a plastic shopping bag duct-taped to the underside of the stroller. It held a little under one hundred eighteen thousand dollars in cash.

.

Th a t m o r n i n g at a music school in South Carolina a pianist was sitting alone in a practice room. Jack had been playing the piano for four and a half hours and under normal circumstances his hands would have been aching by now, but he was high on painkillers and couldn't feel it. There was an east-facing window in the practice room and the morning light had long since entered. The piano was illuminated, sun caught in the varnish and gleaming in the keys, the whole room shining, he was dizzy, his skin itched and he hadn't slept all night. His roommate had gone to Virginia to rescue a girl whom Jack had imperiled and everything was coming apart around him, but so long as he kept playing he didn't have to think about any of this, so he closed his eyes against the shine and launched once more into Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Two

Ten years later, in February, the showerhead in Gavin's bathroom began to leak. The timing was inconvenient. His editor had assigned him to a story about Florida's exotic wildlife problem, and he was leaving New York the following morning. Gavin stood in the bathroom watching the steady dripping of hot water, at a loss. It seemed to him that this was the sort of thing Karen would have taken care of, before she'd moved out, and he realized at the same moment that he wasn't even sure where the landlord's phone number was. On a piece of paper somewhere, but pieces of paper had taken over his desk and spilled over onto the living room floor in the three weeks since Karen had left, a sort of avalanche. After a half-hour he came across a box of baby clothes that he'd forgotten to take to Goodwill and after that he didn't want to look anymore, so he retreated into the bedroom and resumed an earlier search for clean socks. He could call the landlord when he got back.

Wh a t G a v i n had wanted was to be an investigative reporter, a newspaperman, but nothing about his career was as he'd imagined it would be. When he'd graduated with his journalism degree he'd thought that this would be the moment when his life would finally begin. In idealistic daydreams he'd thought he might help change the world or at least improve it, and in shallower moments he'd just wanted to be a star reporter. He'd wanted to extend his hands and feel the weight of the Pulitzer with the crowd applauding before him, step up to the podium and clear his throat in the spotlight. He'd managed eventually to land a job as a reporter at one of the city's best papers, but coming to the New York Star was like stepping into a drama in which all the major roles were already taken, or perhaps the play had already closed. There were veteran journalists at the Star, men and a woman who'd brought down titans and gone into war zones and propelled the paper to a point only just beneath the Times in the New York City newspaper pantheon, people who didn't have to imagine what a Pulitzer felt like, but even the veterans seemed adrift in the changed world. The paper was sending out fewer and fewer correspondents on faraway stories. There were no more bureaus overseas or even in Washington. The paper was covering local news, relying on Reuters and freelancers for everything else. Too many of the stories seemed more like entertainment than news to him.

"You have to put in your time," his editor had told him, but Gavin feared more and more that his time had passed. On two or three occasions he'd managed to get invited along for drinks with a couple of the veterans, and their stories mostly concerned a time that seemed better and more glorious than now and ended with some variation on "those were the days." He'd come home from the bars leaden with disappointment.

"You know what your problem is?" his friend Silas said one night when they were drinking together at an Irish bar near the paper. "I just figured it out." Silas was a copy editor and had been at the paper longer than Gavin had. Their desks were side-by-side in the newsroom.

"Please," Gavin said, "tell me what my problem is."

"Look at you. Jesus. The fedora, the trench coat. You want to run around the city with a flashbulb camera and a press card in your hat band."

"How is that a problem?"

"Your problem is that you don't really want to work at a newspaper, per se. You want to work in 1925."

"I don't disagree," Gavin said. It had been clear for some time that he was in the wrong decade. All of his favorite movies were older than he was. His camera was a 1973 Yashica. He'd seen Chinatown a dozen times.

He suspected his editor was sending him on his first out-of-town assignment to make him feel better about not being senior enough to be sent into a war zone, or perhaps to make him feel better about having missed the days the veterans drank to. He knew she was doing him a favor, but the assignment itself seemed depressingly symptomatic: he was being sent to his hometown. He'd gone in a circle. He wanted to scream.

"Aren't you from there?" his editor asked, when she called him over to her desk.

"I am," he said. "But—" and he realized as he spoke that of course there was no way of evading the assignment, of course he couldn't tell her that the weather in his hometown had sent him to the hospital with heatstroke nearly every year until he'd left at eighteen, so he sat by her desk discussing the story for a few minutes and then went back to his computer to check the South Florida weather. The city of Sebastian was in the grip of a heat wave.

That night he lay awake listening to the dripping shower and wondered if it would be pathetic to call Karen about the landlord's phone number, decided against it and woke at an unspeakably early hour to board a southbound plane.

G a v i n h a d been back to Florida only once in the past five years. He flew into Boca Raton and when he stepped out of the airport the heat made him gasp. He drove a rental car down the freeway to the city of Sebastian and called his sister from his hotel room, which was mostly pink and smelled of synthetic cherries.

"I'm glad you're here," Eilo said. "You're sure you won't stay with me?"

"I don't want to impose. The paper pays for my hotel room."

"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.

Three

On 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.

An 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."

Four

The 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.

Th e f i r s t thing Gavin heard when he opened the door to his apartment was the leaking shower. It seemed to be getting worse, the drips more frequent, but he still didn't know where the landlord's phone number was and now he was too distracted to care. He left his suitcase in the apartment and took the subway to work. The newsroom seemed somehow changed in his absence. There were fewer people here than usual. A sense of dissipation hung in the air. It reminded him of the time when he'd come in late on a Christmas Eve to wrap up a piece and found the newsroom a shadow of itself, a ghost town. But the difference now, he realized with a lurching feeling in his stomach, was that a dozen desks had been cleared. Silas's papers and notebooks and the photograph of his wife had vanished, his computer monitor a dark window reflecting Gavin back at himself and behind him a ghostly version of the newsroom, all shadows and pale smudges of light.

"You missed all the fun," his editor said when he came to her.

"Where's Silas?"

"Sit down." There was a tiredness around her eyes that he hadn't seen before. He sat by her desk. "We were treated to a speech the day after you left," she said. "Declining ad revenue, ever fewer subscribers, the relentless expectation of free online content, et cetera. You've heard it before. It's a boring story."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why didn't I take the time to call you in Florida and explain that twelve of your colleagues had been laid off? Because believe it or not, kiddo, I've been a little busy in their absence." She told him the names and some of them were friends of his.

"Christ," he said. "Can you tell me anything else?"

"You're wondering about your job. I'm wondering about mine too." Julie sighed. "I don't know what to tell you," she said. "You're in a strange position. On the one hand, you're not that senior. On the other hand, that means you're relatively cheap. No offense."

"None taken. I've seen my pay stubs."

She took off her glasses and massaged her temples for a moment before she spoke again. "Listen," she said, "just between us, there's likely to be a second round of layoffs."

"Do you know who.?"

"No. But I know they're looking to make some cuts in the newsroom." She put her glasses back on and blinked at him. He liked her glasses. They were a stylish rectangular shape that he admired. "Gavin, your stories are always good," she said, "but if there was ever a time to make them better, this is it. There's going to be some scrutiny over the coming weeks."

"Whoever writes the best stories gets to stay employed? Are you serious, Julie?"

"Just write the best stories you can, Gavin, and try not to think about it too much. I'm giving you a heads-up because I don't want to lose you."

He settled back at his desk with his notes from Florida and tried to concentrate. He'd reached this morning's interview. Ella Thompson in her house by the canal, her neighbor. We thought we were coming closer to nature, but all along nature was creeping closer to us. He'd decided this was the quote that would close the story, but then he glanced again at the page and his breath caught in his throat. He'd written the neighbor's name as Chloe Montgomery.

Gavin swore softly. Whatever the neighbor's name had been, he was certain it wasn't Chloe. He was almost certain it had started with an L. Lara, Lana, Laurie, Louise? He tried to transport himself back to the scene: the kitchen island with the stools and the cup of coffee before him, Ella telling him about her children, the doorbell ringing and the neighbor walking into the room. "Gavin, this is L—!" Ella Thompson says brightly, but the name is a blank.

Gavin flipped through the pages of the notebook. He had been so distracted that morning, all his thoughts taken up by Anna and Chloe, that he'd seemingly neglected to write down the neighbor's telephone number. He called Ella Thompson, but her phone only rang endlessly, and he remembered her telling him that she was about to leave on vacation. He found contact information for the management office and spent some time arguing with a secretary and then her boss, but they refused to reveal names of residents.

He knew that if he went to Julie, she would tell him to cut the quote. The story worked without it but the quote was the grace note, the quote was sublime. It was evening now, lights gleaming softly on the empty desks. He wished Silas were here.

Gavin submitted the story, went home to eat takeout food and stare at his television. He didn't sleep well. In the morning he sat at his desk again, reading the paper, and the last few lines of the piece filled him with dread.

But for residents of the houses closest to the canals, the matter has become more pressing. "We thought we were coming closer to nature," said Lemuria Gardens resident Chloe Silas, "but all along nature was creeping closer to us."

Ei l o, " G a v i n said, "do you think I should be looking for the girl?" It had been only two weeks since he'd returned from Florida, but it seemed much longer. It was a particularly dark March in New York that year. The rain was unceasing. He hadn't been sleeping well. He had dreams where Anna was in some unspecified trouble and it was entirely his fault but he couldn't find her, and other dreams where he was losing his job. He had taken to staying in the newsroom for twelve hours at a time to escape the emptiness of the apartment and his own racing thoughts, but he couldn't concentrate on his work. Silas's desk remained empty. He hadn't realized how much he'd depended on Silas, his jokes and his freakish grasp of grammar, his company in the cafeteria at lunchtime. They went out drinking twice, but without the shared newsroom there wasn't much to talk about.

"I don't know, Gavin. I'm not sure what I'd do in your place," Eilo said.

"And you've never heard anything about what became of Anna?"

"Nothing," Eilo said. "No rumors, no sightings. I heard her sister Sasha had a gambling problem, but that was years ago already."

The clamor of the newsroom was all around him. Usually this was his favorite place in the world but today the sound jangled his nerves.

He f e l t that he was slipping, but it wasn't just him. The city of New York had gone dark so quickly, and at times Gavin was dazzled by the speed of the fall. Because it hadn't actually been that long since he'd been walking hand in hand with Karen down Columbus Avenue and they'd come upon a newsstand with a New York Magazine cover that read "The Second Gilded Age" in gold letters, and the headline had seemed perfect to him. This is the second gilded age, he'd tell himself, looking around at his fellow diners at expensive restaurants or studying photographs of $1.3 million one-bedroom apartments in the windows of real estate offices. The phrase fit the era. But within months the stock market had plummeted and banks were collapsing, everyone was losing their jobs and there were food shortages in the soup kitchens, and the second gilded age seemed distant.

J u l i e p u t him on the team covering the Jonathan Alkaitis story. The investment adviser had cheated unsuspecting investors of billions in an elaborate Ponzi scheme until his daughter had turned him in to the authorities. In that time of collapse and dissipation the stories all but wrote themselves— there were charities that had lost everything overnight, former senior executives who'd taken up employment at Starbucks, entire families living in motel rooms— but the Alkaitis story wasn't coming together. Everyone already knew the bare facts, the staggering sums lost and the collapse of charitable foundations, the ruined retirements, the litigations and blame. Gavin needed a quote, a good one, but none of Alkaitis's victims had anything to say that was worth printing or that hadn't already appeared in another paper. Proud old men in business suits averted their eyes and brushed past him on the sidewalk, which made Gavin feel despised and invisible. A twenty-one-year-old recently deprived of his trust fund gave a quote that made Gavin close his notebook and walk out of the room—"I can't believe I have to work for a living now. I mean, who the fuck works? It is so unfair" — and one or two people all but snarled as they turned away from him. Gavin talked his way into a series of offices and was escorted out of all of them. A woman laughed bitterly and said "Fuck you think my reaction to losing my retirement savings is? Go fuck yourself" before she hung up on him. One man who had lost everything, a retired businessman in his eighties, broke down and began to sob when Gavin called him. "It's okay," Gavin kept saying, "listen, it's going to be okay. " but the man kept crying. Gavin listened until he couldn't take it anymore and gently placed the receiver of his desk phone back on the cradle. He thought all evening about the man weeping into the dial tone and couldn't sleep that night.

On the morning of a particular deposition he stood for two hours under low gray skies outside the law office where several of Alkaitis's victims were being interviewed, lying in wait, but he kept seeing the same people who'd refused comment on all his other attempts. Until a man came through the doors whom he recognized from his research— Arnold Lander, former COO of a midtown consulting firm, an investor who'd lost a little under two million dollars— but who was the woman by his side? She looked about twenty, extravagantly blond with red lipstick, and he realized he'd seen her earlier. She'd been waiting on the sidewalk for a while too, before she'd gone inside to wait in the lobby. She hadn't been in the deposition hearing, then. It was beginning to rain, the first fat drops before the cloudburst, and she was holding a newspaper over her head. Her heels clicked sharply on the sidewalk.

"Excuse me, Mr. Lander," Gavin said, "may I have a moment?"

"No comment," Lander said, without looking at him. He was hailing a cab. He was a tall man, imposing in a dark coat.

"Mr. Lander, please, if I could just—"

"You want a comment?" The woman's voice was high-pitched. She sounded like a child. "It's a nightmare that we can't wake up from."

"Don't talk to him," Lander snapped. "What did I tell you about reporters?"

"Wait," Gavin said, "what's your name?" But the rain had turned to a cold downpour and they were gone, half-running toward a cab that had stopped on the corner. "Excuse me!" he shouted, "please, wait—" The door closed and the car pulled away into a river of taillights.

He looked up photographs of Arnold Lander later at his desk. Lander's image was everywhere— charity balls, a corporate website, various industry events— but who was the woman? She'd appeared to be a solid thirty years younger than Lander. She certainly wasn't the wife in the most recent charity ball photo, but that had been a year ago already. A daughter, secretary, mistress, fourth wife? He'd helped her into the cab, Gavin remembered, but perhaps an older man might do that for a secretary? Men of a particular era and class were taught to treat certain women like porcelain. Gavin knew it was the era he himself belonged to — fedoras! Mechanical cameras! Good table manners! — but this thought was a digression. What mattered was that the author of the perfect quote had walked away from him and he had no idea who she was.

"I need the Alkaitis story," Julie said. "You just about done?"

But for Alkaitis's victims, the disaster continues to unfold. Amy Torren and her husband lost their life savings. "I feel like I'm caught up in a bad dream," she said of Alkaitis's deception. "It's just a nightmare that we can't wake up from. I feel like there's maybe less good in the world than I thought there was. It's hard to take in, to be honest with you. I don't know how I'm going to aff ord my mother's medical expenses now."

"Hell of a quote," Julie said, when he saw her in the staff kitchen the next morning. He was helping himself to his third cup of coffee. He hadn't slept.

" Thank you," Gavin said. He returned to his desk with a strange feeling of floating. No one could prove that no investor had said those words to him but he still felt sick every time he thought about it. Amy Torren was the name of his eleventh grade English teacher.

As days passed without incident it seemed that both this and the

Floridian woman whose name wasn't Chloe had passed under the radar. But the point, Gavin realized, wasn't whether the woman who'd climbed into the cab with Lander was an investor, or even whether he'd gotten away with referring to her as such when he wrote dialogue for her and gave her a name. The point was that Gavin had opened a door, cracked it just slightly, and he could see through to the disgrace and shadows on the other side. If you tell a lie it's easier to tell another. An abyss yawns suddenly at your feet. At night he went home and stared into the flickering blue of the television and felt almost nothing.

Th e s e c o n d round of layoffs came without fanfare. The first time, Julie told him, when he'd been in Florida, there'd been an anguished speech in the middle of the newsroom by the executive editor, who'd stood on a chair to be better seen but hadn't been able to make eye contact with anyone. Two weeks later the second round was well under way before anyone realized what was happening. The executive editor's assistant called the victims one at a time and asked them to drop by the office, and eleven people didn't come to work the next day. The executive editor sent out a regretful memorandum that began with the words "As you may have noticed. " and included the phrases "online content" and "a changing media landscape." The word "rightsizing" was used. There was a regrettable possibility, the memo concluded, of future cuts.

Gavin read it twice, put on his fedora and went for a walk. He'd always thought of the newspaper as a ship sailing over a digital sea. Now that it was obvious the ship was sinking he didn't know what to do with himself, he couldn't imagine not being a newspaperman and in Karen's absence the newspaper was all he really had. Everyone he'd liked had been laid off now except Julie. He sometimes caught himself composing letters in his head. Dear Chloe, dear Anna, I wish I knew where you were. I have failed in my responsibilities. The thought of you keeps me up at night. It was raining in his apartment and he kept forgetting to shave in the mornings. The newsroom an ocean of empty desks. He sat in front of his computer, marooned.

"I've been meaning to ask you," Julie said. "I don't remember seeing an Amy Torren on the list of Alkaitis's victims."

"Oh, the investments were under her husband's name."

"Okay," she said, with an air of relief. "What's her husband's name?"

" Jacob Fischer," Gavin said. It was just the first name that came to him. Fischer was the man in his eighties who'd lost everything to Alkaitis and cried on the phone.

G a v i n ' s n e x t story was about cuts to funding for playground maintenance in the Bronx. He traveled far north on the subway to reach a desolate neighborhood where wind moaned around the corners of low brick buildings. It was cold and he spent an hour standing by a playground on a street that scared him, trying to get suspicious mothers to talk to him about broken swing sets. That was when the mothers showed up at all— more often it was gangs of half-feral eight-and nine-year-olds who hit the swing set with sticks and threw rocks at the slide, stared blankly at Gavin when he tried to talk to them and snickered as they walked off. They knew about lone men in playgrounds.

He stood at the edge of the playground, alone after forty-five minutes of trying to get people to talk to him, and tears came suddenly to his eyes. The slide was rusted. There were broken bottles in the grass. Was this the sort of place where his lost daughter might play, in whatever transitory postforeclosure hellhole she might have landed in?

Gavin took the train back to the newsroom, where he wrote the story and then stared for a long time at the blinking cursor on the screen. A memory of Karen, lying beside him on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. One of their last happy Sundays together, late in the third month of her four-month pregnancy. They'd told Eilo and Karen's parents but almost no one else. Sunlight angled through a window and caught in her hair. Had that only been two months ago? If it's a girl, we'll name her Rose, she said. If it's a boy, Thomas.

As local parent Rose Thomas put it, "It's really the children who are suff ering. The cuts in playground funding have been a nightmare for us."

Gavin read the quote over and over again. Seeing the words on the screen made them real, even though he hadn't sent them to anyone yet, even though this could still be undone. There had been two lapses now but turning back was still possible. There could still be an evening years or decades from now when he might look back at a strange period far earlier in his career, a few shadowy months before the Pulitzer but after his fiancée had left him when he'd started to slide but pulled himself back just in time, two stories with small lies in them and then no more after that.

But everyone knew there would be more layoffs at the newspaper and the story as written was a dud, filler, a flightless bird, all facts and budget numbers and no humanity. The Rose Thomas quote was exactly the sort of thing a concerned parent would say. When you came down to it, he thought, it was a question of names again, the same as that shadow across his Florida story had been. It was something he'd said, and he was almost certainly a father. Did it matter, did it actually matter that the words on the screen had been said by a parent named Gavin Sasaki, not a parent named Rose Thomas? He hadn't slept well since Florida. He was so tired tonight.

"Go home," Julie had said, two hours earlier. She usually stayed much later but tonight she said she had a headache. She'd walked past his desk with her coat over her arm, going home to cook dinner in a microwave and listen to classical music with her eyes closed. "We're probably about to get laid off anyway." This had put him into a tailspin. But now a curious calm had come over him, and nightmare seemed excessive. He closed his eyes for a moment and then retyped it: The cuts in playground funding have been awful. It was eleven p.m. and he was almost alone here, the few night production people quiet at their desks, a janitor emptying trash cans.

Rose Thomas walks the two blocks from her public housing unit to the neighborhood playground every morning. She moves slowly, her four-year-old daughter, Amy, at her side. Ms. Thomas would like to take her daughter to play somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go.

"I'll never understand why they thought they could cut funding," Ms. Thomas said on a recent morning, pushing her daughter on a swing. "Is having a safe place for my child to play really too much to ask?"

Gavin had taken a few photographs of the playground. Not for the story— the paper would send a freelance photographer with a camera made in the current century— but for himself. He had the film developed later that week and he spent some time at his desk looking at the images, the rusted swing sets, paint flaking from the monkey bars. If his daughter was in the care of a stranger in Florida, then what had become of her mother? He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Anna. He'd been playing a concert behind the school with his high school jazz quartet, he remembered. She'd thrown a paper airplane at him through the dark.

Five

The last time Gavin had spoken with Anna, a little over ten years before Karen left him and his shower in New York started dripping, they were sitting together on the back porch of her house in Sebastian and his shirt was soaked to his back with sweat. Gavin was eighteen, in his last month of high school. At the end of summer he was going to New York City to study journalism. Anna still had a year of high school left and the weight of the conversation they hadn't had yet— the what happens to us now that we'll be in different states? talk— was opening up longer and longer silences between them.

"Have you ever wanted to live somewhere colder?" Gavin asked, as a means of avoiding the conversation for at least a few more minutes or perhaps, he realized as he spoke, as a way of approaching it indirectly.

" Where would I go? I've never left Florida."

"I don't know," he said, "but I've been fantasizing about cold weather since I was five."

"I love Florida." Anna's voice was languid. "Permanent summer." She was watching the fireflies rise up from the grass.

"Don't you ever want seasons?"

"You're just too pale and heat-sensitive. Summers are easy for everyone else."

"I've heard that," Gavin said.

"Well," she said, "you'll be leaving soon."

Gavin took her hand. He heard voices at that moment somewhere in the house behind them, a shrill escalation and response. Anna's parents were fighting again.

"When I saw you the other day," he said, "you said there was something you needed to tell me."

He'd run into her in a school corridor. She'd seemed nervous and tense. But now she only shook her head, distracted. The tenor of the fight was growing louder and sharper. Anna and Gavin were silent for a moment, listening. Gavin watched the frantic fluttering of moths against the porch light.

"Listen," Anna said, "maybe you should go."

The screen door slammed and Anna's half-sister Sasha was outside. They shared the same volatile mother but had different fathers, and Gavin had always been under the impression that Sasha's father was better than Anna's. Sasha was usually at her father and stepmother's house across town. Tonight she nodded at Gavin and stepped away from them into the shadows of the yard. Her hands shook around the flame of her lighter. Sasha was a friend— they were in the jazz quartet together, Gavin on trumpet and Sasha on drums— but tonight she seemed foreign in the shadows by the porch, a tense stranger with bitten-down fingernails. She exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke.

"You should probably leave," Sasha said. "Don't go through the house."

"Will you be all right here?"

"We're always fine," Anna said. Gavin leaned in quickly to kiss her.

He walked around the side of the house, the fight still faintly audible through the exterior walls, down the driveway to the street. It was only ten blocks from Anna's house to his, but ten blocks was long for him in the heat. He stopped halfway to look up at the sky. He'd been reading about constellations recently, and had fallen particularly in love with the North Star. It always took him some time to find it in the haze of streetlight but there it was. True north, the direction of his second life, New York. He felt in those days that he was always on the edge of something, always waiting, his life about to begin. He was always impatient and always wanted to be somewhere else and as he walked away from Anna's house that night his desire to escape south Florida was almost a physical ache.

Later he heard sirens passing. Anna was absent from school the next day, and the day after that. They traded a few voice mails, but he could never seem to reach her. Her cell phone was always turned off when he called. He asked if he could come over but she said she wasn't feeling well. He saw her twice at school but only in passing, at a distance— getting into Sasha's car at the far end of the school parking lot, slipping quickly through the door to the girls' restroom at the other end of a long corridor. He loitered near the door for fifteen minutes but she didn't come out.

Th e l a s t official week of classes at the Sebastian High School for the Performing Arts passed, the drama production and end-of-year concerts and the art show. There were only exams now, running all week, the hallways deserted for long periods in the middle of the day. Gavin ran into Sasha on the day of his English and biology finals. She was smoking a cigarette on a bench by the parking lot.

"Hey," she said. She smiled fleetingly, but her voice was too flat.

There had been rumors about her in the past week. He'd heard she'd lost money in a poker game in some kid's basement, but the number shimmered and expanded with each retelling: she'd lost fifty dollars, no, a hundred. Five hundred, seven, maybe a grand.

"You waiting for someone?"

"I just had my math final," she said. "I've got a half-hour to kill before swim team."

"You okay?"

"Fine. I mean, you know, whatever."

He nodded, but was troubled by this. She was going to Florida State to study English literature and he'd never known her to be so inarticulate.

"I heard about the poker game," he said. He meant this to be sympathetic, but she winced and he immediately regretted mentioning it.

" Really? Where'd you hear about that?" She spoke without looking at him, smoking and gazing out across the faculty parking lot.

"I don't know," he said. "Around."

"That's one thing I won't miss about high school," she said. She exhaled a series of smoke rings. "The fucking small-mindedness of it all."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to stir up—"

"It's like, look, if I lose twenty-seven dollars at poker in some girl's basement, is that really actually the end of the world? Is that really worth spreading rumors about? I have a job. It's twenty-seven dollars. We usually play for pennies. Seriously, no one has anything better to talk about than that?"

"It's no big deal."

"Right, that's what I think." She drew savagely on her cigarette. "It's no big deal. There's another game next week and I'm going to win it back."

"Right," he said.

"I will miss swim team, though," she said. "That's the one thing about high school I didn't hate, that and the music."

"Have you seen Anna around?" A week had passed since he'd left Anna and Sasha in the haze of their backyard.

"I've seen her around school a couple times, but I haven't talked to her. I've been staying at my dad's place."

"I think she's avoiding me."

"The kid's a screwup," Sasha said. "I'm sorry, you know I love her, but."

Gavin didn't know this, but he said "Sure," and made a conciliatory gesture. Everything in his life seemed awkward and graceless except the school he was entering at the end of summer. In his mind Columbia University was taking on the dimensions of the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz, a hard spired brightness on the horizon. He was going to be a different person there, someone confident and urbane who never got laughed at for wearing a fedora.

"Sasha, is she okay? At home, I mean?"

"Why wouldn't she be?"

" Those bruises she gets. She'll say nothing's wrong, but come on."

"She's anemic," Sasha said. "She forgets to take her iron pills. She bruises if you look at her funny."

"I'm serious," he said.

"Look," Sasha said, "she got the short end of the stick where parents are concerned, no question." Sasha flicked her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. She drummed her fingers on the cigarette box for a moment and then lit another one. "But seriously, she can look after herself," she said. "She always has. Another year and she's out of the house."

Gavin didn't know what to say to this, so he looked down at the sidewalk and said nothing. The day was too hot and he felt the familiar weight in his limbs, the leaden exhaustion that would turn to dizziness and then heatstroke if he didn't get indoors quickly.

"I have to go," he said. "See you next week at the concert?"

"It'll be the best concert ever," Sasha said.

G a v i n d i d n ' t see Anna again until the night of the concert, when he looked up from playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" on his trumpet in time to watch the paper airplane sail toward him through the dusk.

They had attended a school devoted largely to music. None of the quartet aspired to be professional musicians except Jack, but the local public schools were atrocious and the High School for the Performing Arts was the magnet school closest to their houses. If you were in Jazz Orchestra it was possible to earn extra credits by forming your own ensemble under the supervision of the faculty, so four of them had established an outfit they'd called the Lola Quartet after a German film they'd all liked with Lola in the title. They'd been playing together for three years and had gradually become good enough to win awards at regional and state high school music competitions, but now it was almost over. Now they were graduating and going to college in different states and it was wrenching, actually, the thought of the quartet being finished. Gavin had been trying not to think about it.

For their farewell performance they'd set up behind the gym in the back of a pickup truck with two battery-powered lights rigged up on the cab, shining over their instruments and casting long shadows on the grass. Daniel on bass and Gavin on trumpet, Sasha on drums and Jack on his saxophone that evening. Jack was going to music school for jazz piano, but he was freakishly talented and could switch instruments as the song required. The two dozen or so kids slow dancing in the sun-scorched grass were mostly drunk members of the Swing Dance Club and their friends and dates, except that they'd been at this for a couple of hours by now and the music wasn't really swing or even particularly danceable anymore. Everyone was a little strung out from the heat, lapsing into slow motion.

The Lola Quartet was playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn't smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him. They hadn't spoken in two weeks.

Jack was taking a solo. Gavin picked up the airplane, unfolded the wings and read the two words written across the creased page: I'm sorry. And the night kept moving, the dancers swaying and the music unceasing, but it seemed to Gavin that something had shifted, an electrical charge passing through the air. When he looked up Anna had disappeared. He jumped down off the back of the truck and made his way through the dancers, his trumpet a long dim gleam in his hand, and Sasha called after him but he didn't look back.

This far out into the suburbs the scrub forest was everywhere, peninsulas of low bushy trees creeping in between subdivisions. He called Anna's name. He thought he saw her once, a flash of white that could have been her dress, but it was only moonlight. He couldn't hear the music anymore. Gavin kept walking until the brush opened into a bulldozed swath of dark earth, a future development of some sort. A 7-Eleven glowed bright on the far side. Beyond the convenience store the outer suburbs continued, glimmering toward the distant black of the swamps. He turned away from the lights and walked back into the trees, back to the high school where the music was over now, the dancers dispersing and Sasha packing up her drum kit, Taylor singing drunkenly in her boyfriend's arms.

"Where'd you go?" Sasha asked.

"I thought I saw Anna."

"She was just here a few minutes ago. After you ran into the trees."

" Where is she now?"

"I don't know, I didn't see where she went," Sasha said. "I was packing up the drum kit."

"Well, if you see her, will you tell her to call me?"

But Anna didn't call, and school was over. Gavin had taken his last exam. He called Anna six times and left messages but she didn't call back, and no one answered when he knocked on her door. He called Sasha, but Sasha was staying at her father's house and hadn't seen her sister since the day of the concert. She was distracted and tired, working two jobs to save up before college. In two of his six messages Gavin had asked Anna to come to the senior prom with him, so he went by himself in the hope that she might be there. He sat for a long time in the gymnasium under streamers hung from the ceiling, watching girls in bright dresses and boys stiff in rented tuxedos dance to music he didn't like. Anna was nowhere. Late in the evening Taylor slid into the chair beside him, hopelessly drunk with fake diamonds in her hair. Her dress was a cloud of pink.

"Hey," she said, "I heard Anna's pregnant."

"What?"

"Is it just a rumor?" Her smile was lopsided. She was sliding off her chair.

"It's just a rumor," Gavin said. " Where did you hear.?" But a knot of her friends had swirled around her, helping her up. She stood, giggling and unsteady, and they swept her away. He saw Jack in a corner, drinking too much from a sloppily concealed flask with a redheaded cellist from the eleventh grade, but Sasha and Daniel were both absent. He remembered that Sasha was working tonight. Out in the parking lot Gavin tried to call a taxi, but half the schools in Sebastian had prom that night and the dispatcher's phone rang unanswered. He looked back at the school, at the light and the music spilling out from the gymnasium and all the girls in long dresses who weren't Anna, and he wanted very much to get away from there so he set off on foot, five miles of heat that brought him to his knees just inside the front door of his house and sent him to the hospital for a night.

"You can't do this kind of thing," Gavin's doctor told him. Gavin had had the same doctor all his life. There was a degree of mutual exasperation. "I've been treating you for heat exhaustion since you were a kid."

"Surely you don't expect him to miss his own prom," Eilo said. She'd driven down from college to be with him and had so far been his only visitor.

"I expect him not to walk five miles in hot weather," the doctor said. "You'd think he'd have figured this out by now. Have your parents arrived yet?"

"They're stuck in traffic," Eilo said, because this was easier than explaining that their father was on a business trip and their mother was most likely at home drinking. She flashed the doctor her most winning smile and left the room to deal with the discharge paperwork.

F l o r i d a w a s caught in a tropical heat wave. The air conditioner in Gavin's bedroom rattled and hummed, and when he stood by the window he felt heat radiating through the glass. Three days passed before he was well enough to go outside again, and Anna still hadn't called. Two months slipped by without her. He was leaving for New York in a matter of weeks. The quartet was a memory. Jack was still around but Daniel had left town already without saying goodbye, which was puzzling. Gavin supposed they weren't best friends, exactly, but they'd spent an enormous amount of time together and he'd thought they were fairly close. He'd known Daniel since the first grade and didn't understand why he'd disappear without saying anything. Daniel had told Jack he was going to Utah. Jack thought he'd maybe gone there to work for his uncle's construction company like he'd done the past two summers. Sasha was working days in a clothing store and nights in an ice-cream parlor.

It was increasingly clear that Anna had left him, that I'm sorry meant I'm sorry but it's over or I'm sorry but I can't do this anymore. As the weeks passed the fact of her absence began to seem like something he could live with. He didn't hear from her again, and in the fall he went to school in New York City.

The journalism track at Columbia. His ideas about his future were vague. But he'd been obsessed with film noir and detective novels from the ninth grade onward and had decided long ago that he was going to be either a newspaperman or a private detective.

Te n y e a r s later in the newsroom of the New York Star Gavin handed in a piece about cuts to playground funding in the Bronx, went out into the cold air and took a northbound subway to his apartment. The sound from the leaking shower was like rain. He lay on the sofa to listen to it, just for a moment, and woke stiff and disoriented at six a.m. He showered and found a clean shirt, took the subway back to the newsroom. It was a blue-tinged morning, a cold wind in the streets. In the light of day it was obvious that he'd made an unforgivable mistake. He called Eilo from his desk.

"It's just such a strange situation," he said, meaning everything. "I never imagined this could happen."

"I'm sorry," Eilo said. "I thought about not showing you the photograph. Are you okay? You sound a bit. "

"I keep thinking, if the kid was staying with that woman whose house was getting foreclosed, what happened to Anna? And I keep thinking that I should have known," he said. "Her sister always said she was fine, but the way she vanished like that. The rumors at the prom."

"Well, if we're to be honest with ourselves, I guess we both always knew it was a possibility," Eilo said. "I keep thinking of that time we ran into Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall, how off she seemed that day."

"What?"

"You don't remember this?"

"No," he said. "What happened?"

"I can't believe you don't remember. We ran into Sasha in the mall, and she had a bag from Babies 'R' Us. You said, 'Who had a baby, Sasha?' and she seemed so jumpy, she just stammered something and walked away without really answering you. It was weird."

"Why were we in the mall together?"

"We were buying a gift for Mom for her birthday."

"I don't remember this." A passing reporter glanced at him, and Gavin realized he was speaking too loudly. He made an apologetic gesture and sank down further into his chair. "I don't remember," he said, quieter now. "What was it we got for Mom?"

"One of those horrible little glass figurines she likes," Eilo said. "I think it was a dog."

"I really don't remember," Gavin said. Eilo's memory was impeccable. He had no reason to doubt her. He wondered, as he hung up the phone, if he'd always known that Anna was pregnant and had managed to block this fact from his mind in order to leave without guilt for New York. This idea was somewhat more than he could live with, and he felt himself slipping deeper into fog.

Six

Some things Gavin remembered: Her enormous headphones. Anna in the evenings cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom with her homework all around her. She liked constant music but Gavin could study only when the room was quiet so she'd put on her headphones and retreat into sound. She liked electronica, mostly '80s stuff that didn't move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea. The headphones were a shiny robin' s-egg blue, surprisingly heavy when he tried them but the sound was perfect. Sasha had bought them for her, a Christmas present.

A small scar just above her right ankle from a bicycle accident when she was six.

Dark hair falling over her face, blue eyes, a habit of drawing little circles instead of dots over her i's when she did her homework.

Her extravagant charisma. Was charisma the word? He tried to analyze it sometimes. He knew there were obvious reasons why everyone liked her, why half the school was half in love— she was pretty, she was kind, she laughed at everyone's jokes and she knew how to listen— but also she was capable of drawing blood. The tension between her loveliness and her violence was captivating. Once a girl spit her gum at Anna's feet and Anna delivered a swift punch to the girl's jaw, tripped her, tore her clothes. Anna came back in after recess laughing with a bleeding lip. Gavin saw her pass by and trailed behind her, watching the way the crowds parted before her all the way to the girls' room. She was suspended twice in the tenth grade for fighting.

A tattoo of a bass clef on her left shoulder—

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin's high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She'd fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She'd been gone for three days but her parents hadn't reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker's idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said "Even when I'm stoned I have good taste in tattoos."

She showed him the graffiti she'd done in the park before she'd transferred to the magnet school. Pinkish tags faded by rain and sun light on the wall behind the bleachers. She went quiet looking at them. An earlier version of herself had spray-painted NO over and over again in big bubbly letters. She said it wasn't what it looked like. NO stood for New Order.

Her favorite joke—

— Knock knock.

— Who's there?

— Interrupting pirate.

— Interrupting pirate wh—

— ARRRRRRR!

The way she went still in the presence of music. You could talk to her while music was playing but she'd only be half-listening to you because she was also half-listening to the music. She didn't play an instrument— she said she didn't want to play at all if she couldn't play perfectly— but she wanted to work with music someday, work beside it somehow. She said maybe she'd be a DJ or a music producer or something.

She listened to the Lola Quartet and liked them but it was the wrong kind of music, not electronica, her heart wasn't really in it. Gavin didn't mind. She leaned back on the sofa in the basement where they used to practice, half-lost in the shadows at the edge of the room, staring up at the ceiling, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and when he raised his trumpet to his lips he often thought I am playing for you but he never told her this.

Seven

Gavin's last story was about a fire in Brooklyn. It was a horrible assignment, the worst he'd ever had to do. A nine-year-old girl had died and every time he thought of her he thought of Chloe. He went to the scene and stood across the street from the burned-out apartment. Three windows on the fourth floor were blackened holes in the brick, smoke stains rising toward the sky. Shattered glass glittered on the sidewalk below. He longed at that moment to be anywhere else.

"It's a nightmare we can't wake up from," neighbor Sarah Connelly said. "I keep thinking of her playing hopscotch on the street the way she used to in the summertime, and I just can't believe she's gone."

The day after the story came out Gavin was summoned into a conference room. Julie was there, along with the editor-in-chief and, unnervingly, the directors of the personnel and legal departments. All four stared at him as he sat down. Gavin sat on one side of the confer ence room table, and the four of them sat on the other. He wasn't sure where to look. For a long moment no one spoke, until Julie cleared her throat.

"Gavin, I spoke with Jacob Fischer this morning," Julie said.

Gavin opened his mouth, but didn't speak.

"The Alkaitis investor who lost his retirement," Julie said, apparently interpreting his silence as confusion. " Turns out he doesn't have a wife."

"You can't be serious," Gavin said. It was difficult to summon the appropriate tones of incredulity and lightness, but he managed. "The woman I quoted, Amy Torren, she said she was Fischer's—"

"Aren't you curious to know why I was speaking with him?"

"I—"

"I called him because the dead girl's mother called the paper last night," Julie said. She was looking at him as if she'd never seen him before. He noticed that she was very pale. "The mother of that girl who died in the fire in Brooklyn. Apparently the dead kid didn't play hopscotch."

"Well, look," Gavin said, "the neighbor said she used to play hopscotch all the time. Maybe she played hopscotch while the mother wasn't home."

"She was in a wheelchair," Julie said.

It was clear from the way she was looking at Gavin that everything was over, absolutely everything, so Gavin stood up from the table and left the room without saying anything else. He went back to his desk, picked up his bag and fedora and walked out of the newsroom without speaking to anyone. Outside the air was very bright, and he pulled his fedora low over his eyes. It was only one in the afternoon. He couldn't face his empty apartment yet, the leaking shower and the piles of paper on the floor, so he turned south and walked all the way down to Battery Park City, stood looking out at the Statue of Liberty for a while before he turned inland and wandered into the Financial District. He lingered in various bars and small parks all day. In the evening he made his way home through the darkening city, let himself into his apartment and sat for a while on his sofa staring at the opposite wall. The dripping from the shower made a constant, almost musical sound. He was drunk, drifting in and out of sleep. It seemed improbable that he was no longer a newspaperman. It seemed like something that might have happened to somebody else.

Eight

On the day Gavin lost his job in New York, Daniel was sitting alone in a meth dealer's living room in the outer suburbs of Salt Lake City. He hadn't played a musical instrument of any kind in ten years.

Daniel had lived in this house for a time just after high school, a few miserable long months after he'd driven up from Florida when he'd worked every day for his uncle's construction firm and fretted constantly about providing for a baby who had turned out not to be his and gone for long jogs in the deepening evenings with the neighbors casting suspicious glances at him. The jogs were meant to clear his head but they'd only made him uneasy. Moving through the streets toward or away from this house that he didn't particularly want to return to, wondering what he was going to do about the baby and the girl, feeling in those moments like the only black man in the entire washed-out state.

But the house had been subjected to a gut renovation, and the interior was unrecognizable to him now. The room where he sat was a white rectangle where two stiff gray sofas faced one another under track lighting, a wall of windows looking out over an aggressively landscaped backyard. From the tint of the sunlight he could tell that the glass was one-way, that if anyone were outside on the empty white gravel pathways they'd see only a mirror if they tried to look in. The falling-down wooden fence he remembered from all those years ago had been replaced by a high stone wall. He had the disoriented thought that he was perhaps in the wrong house altogether.

He'd come here to negotiate, but the negotiations hadn't even begun and already he was tired and shaken. Two hours earlier in the Salt Lake City airport the call had come through that his grandmother had died in Florida, and the sense of being in the wrong place was overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to return to the airport and fly home. He'd been shown in by an enormous unsmiling man who'd told him to take a seat, that Paul would be right with him, but Paul hadn't appeared and it had occurred to Daniel that he might be killed here. He wasn't stupid enough to carry his service weapon— the enormous unsmiling man had frisked him just inside the door— and he felt defenseless without it. Through the mirrored glass the sky held a greenish tint, sunlight weak on the carpet.

He had been waiting for an hour and twenty-two minutes now, and the silence of the house was absolute but he knew it wouldn't be possible to leave. Inside this house there were other people, he was certain of it, other people waiting as silently as he was or carrying out their business on the other side of soundproofed walls. He thought it likely that the man who'd frisked him was standing outside the door. It was possible that he was being observed. He looked around for a camera and didn't see one but that of course meant nothing. Daniel closed his eyes and thought of his children.

Nine

New York City was cold. It was early April, but in the world outside the apartment the rain was streaked with snow. When Gavin wasn't looking for jobs online or handing out résumés he was reading the papers— although not his paper— and everything was wrong: there were stories about people waiting hours to get into job fairs, increasing strains on the food-stamp program. There were suicides and lost fortunes, hungry children and people who had slipped down into new, previously unimagined dwellings: a van in the parking lot of a grocery store in Queens, a boat on the oil-bright surface of the Gowanus Canal, a relative's garage in Westchester County. He understood, reading these stories, how easy it was to sink.

Gavin had never been very good with money. He had several thousand dollars of credit-card debt that he'd been carrying around for a while, and it was growing at a rate that he wouldn't have thought possible. On the day he lost his job he'd already accidentally fallen a month behind on rent, a matter of forgetting to mail a check to the landlord— Karen had always taken care of this— and when his paychecks stopped coming he began paying credit cards off with other credit cards. His checking account balance was dwindling. He had no savings.

All of his friends had either been associated with the newspaper or he'd met them in journalism school. Gavin didn't try to contact them. He was aware that he was a disgrace to his profession. None of them called him, which was unsurprising but disappointing nonetheless. For the first time in his life he had too much time on his hands and he was afraid of it, the empty hours echoing all around him with nothing to think about but failure, so he went out of his way to establish a routine: he spent the day drinking coffee and searching for jobs online or sitting in the park and circling jobs he wanted to apply for in the classifieds, and then in the evening he boarded a southbound F train and traveled deep into Brooklyn to listen to music at Barbès, a narrow sliver of an establishment between a tanning salon and a sandwich shop.

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d' Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d' Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the finest music Gavin had ever heard.

At Barbès he was at his best, his calmest and least desperate. He'd been obsessed with jazz in high school and listening to it again was like coming home. He'd had a friend in high school with a touch of synesthesia who saw light when he heard music, and he liked to think of this when he listened. He could lose himself in the music for a while and he sometimes felt that he was a part of something that mattered, a witness to evenings that might be written about later on.

He was there for Deval & Morelli's last performance, for example. They were a guitar duo who played the nine o'clock set on Mondays. Their last performance was on a cool night in May toward the end of things, some time after Gavin had run out of cash and had started paying for everything with credit cards. He didn't know if Arthur Morelli and Liam Deval were famous in any widespread, conventional way— there were so many gradations of fame now, it was hard to tell anymore what kind of fame counted and who stood a chance of being remembered later— but he thought they were brilliant and on the nights when they played the room was packed. Gavin went every week and stood at the back so he could duck out easily before the tip bucket for the musicians was passed around. He felt bad about this, but he had no cash anymore.

Arthur Morelli was older, an unsmiling man in his late thirties or early forties who played with a heavy swing. In his solos he wheeled out into wild tangents, he pushed the music to the edge before he came back to rhythm. Liam Deval looked about Gavin's age, late twenties or early thirties, the star of the show: a perfect counterpoint to Morelli, all shimmering arpeggios and light sharp tones. Gavin had never seen anyone's hands move so quickly. His skill was astonishing. Jazz slipped into gypsy music and back again, a thrilling hybrid form. Gavin knew it wasn't new, what they were doing, but it was the first time he'd encountered it live. There was a bassist and occasionally a drummer, one solo each per set but otherwise strictly backup. Everyone was backup to Liam Deval, including Morelli. It was obvious that they were a duo in name only.

They played the nine o'clock set every Monday, until a particular night in June when it seemed to Gavin that there was tension between Deval and Morelli during the first set. They took a break, during which they murmured inaudibly but furiously in a back corner. They started the second set unevenly. Something was off— Morelli was glaring at his guitar and when he took a solo he went too far out and the beat was lost. Deval's glissandos were ungrounded. The guitars went subtly but maddeningly out of sync. The bass player closed his eyes and struggled to keep the rhythm. When the short set was over they packed up their instruments without looking at one another. Deval slung his guitar case over his back and walked out of the room without a word. Morelli looked up at him when he left, his expression unreadable. The bass player was glowering and wouldn't look at either of them. Morelli left a few minutes later, and after that the nine o'clock set on Mondays was a large beautiful woman with squared-off bangs and red lipstick who played exquisite melodies on a ukulele, a dreamlike wave of strings and horns and soft drumbeats rising up behind her.

J u l i e s e n t him an email. She wanted to know if there was anything he wanted to tell her. There was, there was, but he sat paralyzed for some time before he managed it. "Some of this you already know," he wrote, but he listed them all anyway: the woman in the Florida story whose name wasn't Chloe, the imaginary concerned parent in the Bronx playground with the child who also didn't exist, the woman who probably wasn't an Alkaitis investor climbing into a taxi in the rain, the day he stood across the street from a burned-out apartment and couldn't bear to speak with any of the neighbors or get any closer to the scene: it seemed a banal downfall when he read it on the screen. He said he was sorry and hit send. He waited days for a response but there was nothing.

.

Th e d r i p from the showerhead in Gavin's apartment had turned into a steady trickle and now it leaked a stream of hot water day and night. Gavin wasn't paying rent anymore, which made the situation awkward, because once you've stopped paying rent you can't really call the landlord to complain about repairs, and spending his own money on a plumber was out of the question. In a way he didn't mind it. The sound lulled him to sleep. The leaking water was scaldingly hot, which made the room fill permanently with steam. The bathroom grew strange and almost subtropical. Cool drips fell from the ceiling, water slid down the walls, the paint bubbled.

Gavin imagined the damage being done to the paint job was irreparable, but this struck him as a reasonable trade-off for the landlord's failure to do anything about the broken light in the stairwell. He stood barefoot in the bathroom some mornings, rain falling from the ceiling, and wondered what Karen would do in this situation. The obvious answer, of course, was that Karen would never have allowed this to happen in the first place. He was pretty sure the dark spot in the northeast corner of the ceiling was turning into a mushroom. His reflection in the fogged-up mirror stared back at him with a fixed, somewhat shell-shocked expression. He wondered how much more he could lose.

Ten

Some weeks earlier, in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Daniel had been waiting for an audience in a meth dealer's living room. He sat alone for two hours before the door finally opened.

"Daniel," Paul said. He'd changed very little since Daniel had seen him last, although Daniel had forgotten about his tattoo, a large bright goldfish on the side of his neck. It was obvious that if he was still dealing meth, he hadn't indulged in his product. His teeth when he smiled were even and white, and he had none of the hollow-eyed blankness Daniel saw in his drug arrests. His handshake was firm. "I'm surprised to see you again. What's it been, ten years?"

" About that. How's business?"

Paul shrugged. "Honestly?" he said, and for just a moment Daniel saw a flash of the man Paul had been when they'd first met, when they were working construction together during the summer before Daniel's last year of high school. They'd been friends once. "It's all cartels now," he said. "It's not like it was. I don't even work for myself no more."

"They pay you a salary?"

"Something like that."

"I see you renovated the house," Daniel said.

"A few years back. I like it like this. Clean, that's the word the decorator kept using. Clean lines." Paul sat on the hard gray sofa across from him. Except for the carpet, which was deep enough to silence every step, nothing in this room was soft. "Now," he said, "why don't you tell me what you're doing here?"

"Paul," Daniel said, "my grandmother died this morning in Florida."

"My condolences."

" Thank you. I don't like to think of her death in these terms, but the fact of it is, she told me a while back that I'd be getting some money."

"And this is, what, a business proposition?"

"Paul, I'd like to pay back Anna Montgomery's debt. The hundred and twenty-one thousand." His gaze kept drifting to Paul's hands. He had watched Paul beat a man almost to death once and he wished he could forget what it had sounded like, Paul's fists against the man's limp body. He wished he could forget that he hadn't intervened.

"Awfully generous of you, Daniel, settling someone else's debt."

"Well, I feel a certain responsibility. I brought her here."

Paul smiled. "Your conscience troubling you?"

"It always has," Daniel said.

"You've got the money with you?"

"I don't. I wanted to come here quickly and work something out, but it's likely the estate won't be settled for a few weeks."

"What do you mean, you wanted to come here quickly? Quickly after what?"

"I think we both know," Daniel said.

Paul was impassive.

"The photograph," Daniel said, "the photograph of Chloe," but even

as the words were leaving his mouth he understood that he had made a colossal mistake, because before Paul's face returned to impassiveness and he leaned forward to begin negotiating the repayment there was a brief light in his eyes, the faintest flicker of confusion, and Daniel saw that Paul had had no idea what Daniel was talking about.

"H a s s h e been in Florida all this time?" Paul asked, when their negotiations were nearly at an end. He had insisted upon a substantial amount of interest. Daniel tried to console himself with the thought that he was doing the right thing after all these years, but he was sick with remorse. He had thought that the photograph of Chloe meant Paul had found them, but it seemed obvious now that Paul had no longer been looking. It wasn't that Paul had found the woman who'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars from him, then— it was that Daniel had brought her whereabouts to Paul's attention.

"No," Daniel said.

"I went to a lot of trouble to find her, back then. I even hired a private detective, but it was just a dead end once I got to Virginia."

Daniel wasn't sure what to say to this, so he said nothing.

"You're a police officer," Paul said, switching tracks.

"A detective," Daniel said.

"What kind of detective?"

Daniel was silent for a moment, but he was too afraid of Paul to lie. " Major Crimes division," he said. "I'm in the Vice and Intelligence unit."

"Vice and Intelligence? What's that translate to in English?"

It occurred to Daniel that no one in the world knew where he was today. If he disappeared in Utah he might never be found. "Gaming," he said. "Prostitution, prescription fraud, narcotics."

"Narcotics." Paul seemed amused by this. "Well, you keep up the good work," he said. "America's children depend on you, man. Daniel, there's one last thing. Did you know my mother was in the insurance business?"

"No," Daniel said, "I don't believe you've ever mentioned it."

"Well, she was. My mom and I, we didn't see eye to eye on most things, but one thing she always used to say was, a person's got to have insurance. And you know, I think she was right about that."

"I'm not sure what you're getting at," Daniel said.

"When I come down to Florida," he said, "for the payment, I want the girl there when I'm counting the money. Just in case the count's off."

Daniel held his gaze.

"Come on," Paul said, "don't look at me that way. If you're in narcotics, you know how it works these days. You pay with money, or you pay with your family."

Eleven

Gavin made a list of things he didn't need anymore. Number one: electricity. He bought candles in a dollar store and set them up in old beer bottles, which he half-filled with water to counterbalance the weight, and thus he was serenely prepared when the lights blinked out. Number two: the home phone, but this was redundant, because his phone was the kind with a digital call display that plugs into the wall and therefore hadn't worked since the electricity ended. Number three: gas. This one was obvious. He wasn't cooking anymore, and anyway he hadn't opened the fridge since the day the light switches had stopped working. At first he'd thought about emptying it out and cleaning it, taking the dead food out to the curb, but lately he'd been thinking about taping it shut.

There was a night when Gavin stood in the apartment with candlelight flickering all around him and thought, Someday soon this will all be gone. He was listening to classical music on an old battery-operated radio that he'd pulled out of the closet, part of the emergency preparedness kit he'd assembled with Karen a few years back. The Brandenburg Concertos sounded staticky and far away and he had a disoriented feeling that nothing in the room was real. His papers, his clothes, his books, this detritus he'd accumulated all around him, these shadows in these darkened rooms. He could live without most of it, but not all, so he began carrying an overnight bag when he left the apartment. A spare set of toiletries purchased on a credit card— why not? — and a change of clothing, the only clothes he owned that he absolutely couldn't stand to give up: a pair of particularly excellent pin-striped pants, a crisp white shirt that he loved, his best corduroy jacket. The bag also held his camera— the 1973 Yashica with a perfect lens— and a couple pairs each of underwear and socks, his passport, an umbrella, a broken gold pocket watch he'd found at a stoop sale, his laptop, power adapters for the computer and the cell phone. He felt overburdened and weighted when he went out in the mornings.

There were several unopened envelopes from his landlord on his kitchen table. He hadn't paid the rent in some time. He knew that someday soon he'd come home and his belongings would be scattered on the street or closed away behind a lock for which he didn't have the key, and he had salvaged the best of them. He never left the apartment without his favorite fedora.

Gavin had always taken pictures, but now it was different. He took as many pictures as he always had— of angles of light, of interesting graffiti, of street corners— but he no longer bothered to get the film developed. That had always been the expensive part.

S o m e w h e r e a l o n g the way, perhaps in high school, Gavin had fallen into the habit of mentally framing himself in an imaginary photograph and murmuring the caption aloud, mostly to avoid taking his life too seriously. Noted journalist Gavin Sasaki stands in line at the supermarket. Or later, Former reporter Gavin Sasaki ducks out of Barbès before the arrival of the tip bucket. Or later still, Disgraced newspaperman Gavin Sasaki debates whether to put one sugar or two into his Venti latte and simultaneously ponders the ruins of his life. Gavin was spending all his time at a Starbucks near his apartment. His bank account was empty and he'd maxed out two credit cards, but there were one hundred and forty-one dollars left on a third. In the absence of any better ideas, he thought he might as well spend it all on sandwiches and coffee. In one last heroic effort he had fifty résumés printed at a Kinko's, and he walked the streets for two days distributing them at any place he thought he could possibly work, restaurants and coffee shops and bookstores, places that sold cell phones, clothing shops. When the résumés were gone he went back to sitting at Starbucks with his cell phone and his laptop plugged into the wall beside him, but none of the fifty businesses called him back. When the phone finally rang it was his sister.

"I tried to call you at home," Eilo said. "The message said your phone number's out of service."

"Yeah," he said, "it got cut off a few weeks ago."

"Gavin, what the hell's going on?"

"It's a long story, but my job's gone and I'm practically living at Starbucks."

"Jesus, Gavin. When I saw you four months ago you seemed fine."

"Four months ago I was fine," he said. This wasn't entirely true, when he thought about it, but at least four months ago he hadn't known that Chloe existed, and four months ago he hadn't been consumed by guilt. He was increasingly certain that he'd known Anna was pregnant.

"Did you read the paper this morning?"

" Which paper?"

"Your paper," she said.

"Why? Should I?"

"Well," she said, "maybe not, if you haven't seen it yet. I'm not going to ask why you did it—"

"Wait," he said, "there's a story about me?"

" — But Gavin, if you want to come home—"

"Home? Eilo, you know how I feel about Florida—"

"I'm saying if you need a job," Eilo said, "my business is ex panding."

"Real estate? But I have no experience—"

"What I'm saying is that if you want to cut your losses, Gavin, if you want to leave New York for a while, if it's all come unglued and you don't really have a reason to be there at all anymore and it happens that your phone's been cut off, I can offer you a place to stay and a job."

"In Florida," he said.

"Gavin," she said, "why don't you go buy a copy of the paper and then call me back when you've had a chance to think about it."

He went out and bought the paper. He was on the front page. It was a brief story, three short columns below the fold, but there was his face, the photo from his employee ID card, and the headline was "Star Journalist Committed Fraud." For a moment he was flattered that they'd called him a star journalist, then he realized they just meant he'd been a journalist for the Star. He read the first few lines, about a promising young reporter who'd invented characters and written dialogue for them for his stories, and let his gaze slide over the paragraphs that followed— there they all were, Amy Torren and the others, a congregation of ghosts— and then he came upon a sentence that stopped him cold: "This episode is deeply regretted by everyone here at the New York Star, and marks a low in the 82-year history of the paper."

He was almost in tears when he called Eilo back. "They plagiarized the New York Times's Jayson Blair apology," he said, before she could say anything.

"The what apology?"

Gavin was pacing back and forth by the newsstand. The sidewalk blurred and quivered before him. "That bit about marking a low in the history of the paper? Eilo, they lifted that from the Times."

"Gavin," she said, "what difference does it make?"

"Plagiarism matters," he said. "They teach you that on the first day of journalism school. Actually, you know what? Before journalism school. I think they covered that in maybe the ninth grade. It makes a difference, Eilo, believe me. I would never, I would never—"

"Gavin."

"I would never do it, Eilo. Yeah, I lied. I made up people who gave me quotes because real people are so goddamn disappointing, Eilo, real people have nothing good to say when something happens, you ask them for a reaction and they just stare at you like 'uh. ' and they can't string a sentence together, they're pitiful—"

"Gavin, I'm worried about you."

"Yeah, well." He meant for this to sound tough, but there was a lump in his throat. "It's all gone to hell," he said, and he forced a laugh but it sounded wrong. "I'm an unemployed guy with a bad reputation and no electricity."

"Gavin, I want to buy you a ticket to Florida," she said. "Will you come back down here for a while and stay with me?"

"Eilo," he said, "I can't let you—"

"You'd do the same for me," she said. "Go home and pack and I'll call you with your flight information, okay?"

G a v i n a r r i v e d home just as the locksmith was leaving. There was a notice of eviction on his apartment door and his first thought was that now Karen wouldn't be able to find him, but he'd been avoiding her since he'd lost his job and she hadn't called once. It occurred to him that she'd very likely seen the story in the Star by now. He stood looking at his apartment door for a moment, thought about tearing down the eviction notice, calling a different locksmith and pretending to be locked out, but he knew that locksmiths in Manhattan ran in the two-hundred-dollar range for lockouts and if he was going to lose his apartment anyway, why not today? He had the important things with him, the camera, the computer, his favorite hat.

Back out on the street he wandered aimlessly for a while. The city was pressing down upon him. He thought at that moment that he might've done anything to escape the gray of the city, his static life, and that thought— anything— made him stop in his tracks. It was the worst thought he'd had in a while, because what was left to lose? His hands were shaking. He sat on a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway until his cell phone rang.

"Eilo, I want to get out of the city today," he said. "Can we do that? I don't recognize myself."

"Well, I was going to ask if you wanted to come next week," she said, "but I suppose there's no reason why you couldn't fly down this afternoon. Does that give you enough time to pack your things?"

"I don't have things," he said, "so yes. Thank you."

"Hold on a moment." He heard the clatter of her typing and then she was quiet, reading a screen. "It looks like there's a flight departing LaGuardia in five hours," she said. "I'll book you a ticket."

She gave him the flight information and he wrote it on his hand, hailed a taxi and watched the city slip away from him. It was late spring but a cloud hung low over the streets and Manhattan had already turned into a ghost of itself, gray with tower lights shining high in the fog. At LaGuardia he paid for the taxi with a credit card. He bought an extra pair of socks and two cheap paperbacks in the terminal. He refused to look directly at the New York Star in the newsstand. He'd checked in hours early. He paced the length of the terminal and read both paperbacks cover to cover. It occurred to him in the airplane that he might never live in New York City again, and he was surprised to discover that the thought came as a relief. Night had fallen by the time the plane began the descent. The lights of Florida glimmered to the horizon, one suburb bleeding into another along the blackness of the Everglades.

Eilo met him at the baggage claim.

"Gavin, where's your luggage? Don't you have a suitcase?"

He shook his head. A crease of worry appeared on her forehead, but she was kind enough not to make further inquiries. The heat struck him when they stepped out of the terminal. The old dread came over him, childhood memories of dizziness and heatstroke, but in the cool of Eilo's air-conditioned car it was possible to forget all this for a moment. Eilo flicked between stations on the radio, her hand lit pale by the console lights. The interior of the car smelled faintly of lavender. The outskirts of Boca Raton bled into the outskirts of Sebastian and the streets became gradually familiar, except it seemed to him that Eilo was making all the wrong turns.

" Where are we going?"

"I've moved," Eilo said. He saw in the passing streetlight that she no longer wore a wedding ring.

"You and Mike.?"

"He met someone."

"I'm sorry. How long has it been?"

" Three months. We're not legally divorced yet." Eilo took an off-ramp that spiraled down into a dim wide street, made a sharp right turn and pulled up into the driveway of a low-slung brick house. The house looked large and Gavin supposed it was relatively nice, as houses went— he vastly preferred apartments— but when he got out of the car the air was filled with sound. After a moment he realized that the freeway was almost overhead, massive pylons rising up just beyond the backyard.

"Eilo," he said, "you're living under the freeway?"

"We're not under the freeway," she said. "It's behind the house. And you can't hear it from inside. The place is completely soundproofed." She punched a code into a console by the garage door and went back to the car, got in and drove into the garage, and Gavin found himself alone on a suburban driveway. He was thinking about how he'd frame the image if he were taking a photograph. The bright square of the garage door opening at the lower left corner of the frame, darkness all around it and above.

Twelve

After the negotiations were complete Daniel left Paul's house in the suburbs and drove his rental car back to the Salt Lake City airport. When he showed his boarding pass to the security agent he found that his hands were shaking. The visit with Paul had taken longer than anticipated; once he'd cleared security he had to half-run through the terminal, jostling people and apologizing, a gasping nightmare of bright lights and slow-moving people and distant elevator music. Daniel arrived at his gate at the last possible moment and as the plane rose out of Salt Lake City he stared down at Utah's sci-filandscape, abandoned planet. Unearthly forms of brown and white, high plateaus and long ridges with violet shadows lengthening alongside. He was having some difficulty catching his breath. Daniel was a large man and the run hadn't been easy.

He'd admired the landscape that morning when he'd flown in. He'd never seen this part of the country from the air before and he liked the austerity of it, the opposite of Florida's feverish greenery and lakes, but now on the return flight he was distracted by his calculations. The debts of his life were as follows: his rent, which was minimal, as his house was small and in a bad school district. His cellular telephone— Daniel considered landlines an extravagance— and his television. He watched only sports and the news, and had canceled the cable some time ago. Groceries and takeout food. He had pared all of these expenses down as far as possible, because on top of them he paid alimony and child support to two ex-wives and four children. He didn't take vacations and worked considerable overtime. There was no extra money and there never had been. He expected that the inheritance would cover the debt, but it had occurred to him that coming up with the extra money for the interest would likely require a second job.

Still, though, did it matter? The plane ascended into a cloud and Utah was lost beneath him. What was a second job in the face of a chance to erase a long-ago mistake, to make amends? He'd walked for ten years with terrible guilt and the thought of being free of this was exhilarating. Money is opportunity. He'd known this all his life. But he realized then why he was having such trouble catching his breath, well over a half-hour since his dash through the terminal: if you pay with money or you pay with your family, then what would happen to his children if he couldn't come up with the interest? His memories of Paul suggested that there were very few things that Paul was unwilling to do. He stared unseeing out the window into white.

Thirteen

The strangest thing about waking up in Eilo's house was the silence. In Gavin's apartment in New York he'd heard birdsong in the mornings from the tree outside his bedroom window, soft sounds of traffic from the streets. But now he woke in the mornings in a soundproofed house as closed as a space station, cool air humming through a vent in the wall. The carpets silenced his footsteps. He usually opened his bedroom window a crack to admit the outside world, just to be sure that it was there, and the noise of the freeway behind the house flooded in. The sound reminded him of the ocean.

In the mornings he showered, dressed, made himself breakfast in Eilo's vast kitchen, walked down the length of the house to the rec room that Eilo had turned into an office. She had bought four desks and a wall of filing cabinets in anticipation of future expansion, but the transition from rec room to office was incomplete. There was still a pool table in the center of the room, left behind by the house's previous owners, half-hidden under files and neat stacks of paperwork. Gavin and Eilo's desks were fifteen feet apart but she was miles away. By the time he reached the office she was usually on the telephone, and there was always a stack of folders waiting on his desk. Each one labeled with the address of a house slipping rapidly from its owner's hands.

E i l o c a m e into people's lives in the last few weeks before they left their foreclosed houses. Her business card identified her as an R.E.O. broker— she and Gavin had a halfhearted debate over whether she should change it to O.R.E.O., since R.E.O. somehow indicated "other real estate owned" and Gavin was troubled by the missing letter. Banks retained her to sell foreclosed properties. The first task of the R.E.O. broker, she told him, is to determine whether anyone's living at the property, and if so, Gavin, you offer them cash for keys. This means settling on a sum, a few thousand, for them to clean the place and leave. The goal is to sell the home as quickly as possible.

He shadowed Eilo for a week and observed the rituals of the transaction, and on the following Monday he went out on his own. Eilo and her husband had had three cars, for reasons that Gavin could never remember because the explanation was so tedious, and Eilo had somehow ended up with two of them. She gave him the keys to a little blue Kia that reminded him of a toy. Another task of the R.E.O. broker was to take photographs for the real estate listing. She gave him a digital camera and insisted he use it.

"It's the twenty-first century," she said, when she gave it to him. "In case you hadn't noticed."

"Yes," he said, "I'm painfully aware."

He drove out to Emory Street, where a couple had been slipping into financial perdition for some months. The property was far from Eilo's house, almost beyond the outer suburbs. The suburbs broke apart and subsided into disconnected gated communities strung along the wide road, each block a mile long, and then there were gaps between the walled villages with straggly trees and enormous signs advertising future developments, the occasional enormous church or synagogue, a sprawl of outlet stores. The outlets had been far out of town when Gavin was a kid, but now the city of Sebastian had come out to meet them.

The house on Emory Street was small and neat, the lawn an impeccable rectangle. He took a photograph of the house from the street— the camera had a maddening way of beeping when the picture was taken— and another of the freshly painted front steps with pots of roses on either side. He took unnecessary pictures of the neighborhood from his position on the front step until a woman answered the doorbell.

"I'm Gavin Sasaki from the real estate company," he said. "I believe you spoke with my colleague Eileen earlier in the day."

"Oh," she said. "Please, come in."

She was polite and embarrassed, a straightforward cash for keys transaction— they settled on two thousand dollars for her and her husband to clean and vacate the premises within thirty days— and he was gone in a half-hour with a camera full of photographs. There were two more stops to make but he suddenly couldn't stand it. He pulled off the freeway and drove into a mall parking lot, turned off the ignition and sat still for a moment. Missing New York and Barbès and Karen. With the air conditioning off the heat crept in quickly, so he got out of the car and crossed the white light of the parking lot to the mall.

There was something familiar about the place. He wandered through the Cinnabon-scented air, looking for anything that might trigger a memory, but he wasn't sure if he'd been here before or if it was just that all malls looked the same to him. He went down to the food court, bought a blueberry smoothie that tasted mostly of sugar, and found a secluded bench beside a pillar. His forehead was damp with sweat beneath his summer fedora. Halfway through the blue smoothie, his cell phone began to ring. Washed-up ex-journalist and reluctant digital photographer Gavin Sasaki contemplates the number on his cell-phone screen for just a moment before he answers.

"How did it go?" Eilo asked.

"Fine. I gave her two thousand dollars."

"Good. That's perfect. You could've gone higher."

"I know," he said. "I started at one."

"Good work. You're going on to the other two houses?"

"I just stopped at a mall for a minute."

"Take your time," she said. "It's a hundred and five degrees today."

The next two houses were easy, although the woman at the second house was crying a little. "We just didn't think it would come to this," she kept saying, and he wanted to tell her about his apartment in New York, the rain dripping silently from the bathroom ceiling and the gaping abyss of his credit-card debt, he wanted to commiserate about ruinous financial decisions and lost homes, but instead he just said "I'm sorry about all this," which was against Eilo's rules. She'd warned that apologies weakened his bargaining position.

He reached an agreement with the tearful woman, and the drive back to Eilo's house was long and still. The heat made everything unreal. Palm trees in the distance separated from the earth and floated upward. There was something dreamlike about the movement of cars on the expressway, false lakes shimmering on the pavement ahead. He liked the solitude of driving, all these cars traveling around him with one passenger each. He wondered where Karen was at that moment. Living her life in New York or in some other city, waking each morning and putting on clothes that were unfamiliar to him, perhaps even spending time with someone else by now, a life that he'd slipped out of. Unsettling to think of himself as someone else's memory. He found himself wondering how Anna remembered him.

As i d e f r o m the music, the robin' s-egg-blue headphones, the spray-painted NOs in the park in Sebastian, the scar and the tattoo and the way her hair fell across her face when she leaned over her homework, what he remembered about Anna was that he'd loved her. He couldn't remember her ever being unkind to him, from the day they met in a corridor outside one of the band rooms, Sasha's pretty little sister, until she threw a paper airplane at him through the still night air.

On long drives through the suburbs he found himself thinking of Anna constantly. He'd let her slip away so easily. He assumed it was too late to make anything right, for Anna or her daughter, but it had occurred to him that the least he could do was find them.

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 reconcile 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."

"With her mother? But you've got, what, joint custody? Visitation rights?"

"It's not that. I've never met the kid."

Daniel held up his hand. "Back up," he said. "You've never met your daughter?"

"Okay, look, let me start at the beginning."

"Please do."

"You remember my high school girlfriend, Anna? Used to hang out with us when we were in the quartet together?" A faint sense of absurdity: he couldn't shake the notion that he was being interrogated by a bass player. Difficult to think of Daniel as a cop. "She just dropped out and vanished at the end of the eleventh grade. I heard some rumor about how she'd gone to Georgia to live with an aunt. But then recently I found out that there's a kid in Sebastian, a ten-year-old girl with Anna's last name. She looks like me."

Daniel had gone still.

"And I just— I don't know if going to the police is the right way to do this." Gavin paused but Daniel only stared at him, a hard unreadable gaze, so he continued, foundering now, "As I was saying to your colleague, I have no idea how to go about finding her. She could be with her mother. I'm just afraid she's—"

"You went to New York," Daniel said. An unpleasant smile was pulling at his mouth. " Right after we graduated high school."

"Yeah, I did. I got into Columbia."

"My most recent ex-wife's from New York," Daniel said. "She introduced me to the New York Star a while back. I still read it online sometimes when I can't sleep. It's no Times, as I'm sure you were painfully aware for the duration of your career there, but it's actually not a bad publication, all in all. Bit of a fabulist, aren't you?"

"Daniel, I—"

"Look, Gavin, it's nice to see you again. But seeing as how you lost your last job because you invent people, I'm having a little trouble with this phantom-kid story."

"She exists," Gavin said. He had realized, too late, that Daniel didn't like him, but he couldn't think of a reason. It made no sense— hadn't they always been friendly? He was trying to recall if they'd had a falling-out all those years ago. He couldn't remember one. "Don't you remember when Anna left town? This was just after we graduated high school, right before I went to New York. I think she was pregnant with my kid."

"You lose your job, life's not going so good, you get a little confused. It's a stress response. Look, I see it pretty often. I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but the thing is, I don't have a whole lot of time for this kind of thing. You know how fucked up this place is now? Nothing like when we were kids. We grew up in paradise, Gavin, comparatively speaking."

"It never felt like paradise to me."

"That's just because you got heatstroke every ten minutes. Place was pretty nice for everyone else. Look, I got this case on my desk now, I shouldn't be telling you this—" he folded his hands together on the table—"a thirteen-year-old trades her baby brother for a bag of Oxycontin and then runs away from home. Unbelievable, right? And yes, we got the baby back, but this is what we're dealing with down here. So listen, great to see you, and I hope you've been keeping up the trumpet—" he was standing now—"but all I ask, Gavin, is that you not waste my time with your invisible people."

"Daniel, she's not some figment—"

"You know, there's something my dad used to say to me, Gavin. He said, 'You start telling lies, son, no one ever believes you after that. It's like diving into a lake, and your clothes are never dry again.' So you're telling me this story about a phantom kid, but the thing is, Gavin, your clothes are all wet." He opened the door to the room. Gavin was at a loss for words, a little shaky, still trying to reconcile this man with the scrawny kid who'd played bass beside him in high school, trying to understand. "You've already done a swan dive, as far as I'm concerned."

H e c r o s s e d out the question mark after Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall in his notebook, and set the stolen glass dog on the windowsill. It was the only adornment in the square white room. He liked the way the light struck it. Under The Lola Quartet he wrote the names of the members besides him— Daniel Smith (bass), Sasha Lyon (drums), Jack Baranovsky (piano/saxophone)—considered a moment, and went to the kitchen to search for a phone book.

There were ten Baranovskys in the city of Sebastian and none of them were Jack, but he remembered Jack's childhood address and found it in the directory, the third Baranovsky from the top. He called Jack's mother. Jack still lived in Sebastian, she told him. She gave him an address on Mortimer Street.

"Perhaps it'll be good for him to see you," she said.

It took him some time to find Jack's house. It was in one of the oldest parts of the suburbs, a run-down district near Sebastian's empty downtown core. The streets here were set in a grid, small houses crowded together behind unmown lawns. The end-of-afternoon light cast the street in a beautiful glow but the disintegration was obvious. There were rooftops with tarps over them, camping trailers parked in driveways with children sitting on their steps. Gavin slowed the car, counting off numbers.

The house at 1196 Mortimer was set back from the street on a weed-choked lot, the front lawn half— taken over by exuberant palm fronds. There were broken bottles in the weeds by the driveway. The cement steps and the walkway were cracked. He rang the doorbell and waited for what seemed like a long time. The neighborhood was quiet. He heard cicadas and crickets and frogs, distant voices, a car. The smell of a barbecue in someone's yard. There was a flutter of movement in a curtained window across the street.

The girl who opened the door was young, perhaps thirteen years old. There was something unkempt about her, neglected, glassy eyes and unbrushed hair. She needed a bath. She was very pretty, but she had the look of a girl for whom beauty had been a mixed blessing.

"Hello," he said. "Is Jack Baranovsky here?"

It seemed to take a moment for the question to travel through the air between them. When it reached her she blinked and nodded slowly.

"Can I come in? He's a friend of mine."

The delay was shorter this time. "Okay," she said. She stepped aside, and when he walked in he almost gagged. The smell of the house was mold, mostly, but also someone had spilled beer on a carpet. The air was still and hot.

"Do you know where Jack is?"

"There," she said. She made a vague motion toward the back of the house.

The room he found at the end of the hallway was a kitchen, but it also seemed to be serving as a living room and a library. An overstuffed sofa took up half the room, books stacked precariously on the grimy linoleum all around it. The countertop by the stove was a mess of takeout containers, flies moving lazily above them. But here at least was a little more air, a sliding glass door open to an overgrown backyard.

The man reading on the sofa looked up, and for a moment Gavin didn't recognize him. He was unshaven and his eyes were red. He badly needed a haircut. His clothes hung off him, and Gavin understood why his mother had sounded so sad on the phone.

"Jack."

"Hello," Jack said. He put his book down. There was no recognition in his eyes, but the sight of a man he didn't recognize in his kitchen didn't seem to trouble him.

" Gavin Sasaki. High school. The Lola Quartet."

"Oh, wow. Gavin." His face lit up like a child's. "Hey, sit down. I don't get that many visitors. It's so nice of you to come."

"Hey, of course." There was a shifting movement of cockroaches along the edges of the room. "I'm back in Florida for a while, thought I'd look you up. How've you been?"

"Oh, I'm good," Jack said. He was beaming. "I'm good, you know, just staying with a friend for a while."

"So you don't live here?"

Jack gestured through the sliding glass door, and for the first time Gavin noticed the tent out back. It was on a raised cement platform under an orange tree.

"Nah, it's my friend Laila's house. I'm just camping here for a while," Jack said. "I always really liked camping, you know?"

"I didn't know that. Jack, who's that girl who answered the door?"

"Oh, that's Grace," Jack said. "She's Laila's little sister or her stepsister or something. I think she's just here for the summer." He blinked very slowly. "How are you doing? You doing okay?"

"No," Gavin said. "Not really." The Jack he remembered, the Jack who'd leaned on the band-room door frame and flirted with every girl passing by in the hallway, seemed very far from here.

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that." Jack really did sound sorry. "Things get bad sometimes."

"Are all these books yours?"

"All of them," Jack said. Gavin knelt to examine the stacks. Mostly jazz history, a few musicians' memoirs, a lot of Whitney Balliett. American Singers, New York Jazz Notes, Django Reinhardt: A Life in Music.

"It's a good collection." Jack was beaming when Gavin looked up. "Do you still have that synesthesia thing you used to talk about in high school? You still see music?"

" Still the brightest thing in the room," Jack said.

"I always wished I could see it too." Gavin stood, but standing over Jack was a little awkward, so he sat on an arm of the sofa. "Jack, can I ask you something?"

"Sure, sure. Ask me about anything except college. I don't like talking about college very much."

"Do you remember that night when we played the concert behind the school?"

Jack blinked, concentrating. "Why? What concert?"

"I was just thinking about it the other day. It was the last performance we did. We played 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' twice and Taylor was singing."

" 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.' " Jack sounded doubtful. "I think I remember that one."

"We used to win competitions with that song," Gavin said. "But this concert, we were playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck. We drove it onto school grounds and parked behind the gym, used it as a stage."

"But how would we all fit in the bed of a pickup truck? Me, you, Sasha, Daniel, the double bass, the drum kit?"

Gavin was silent. He couldn't remember how they'd all fit. It seemed improbable in retrospect.

"I mean, the drums alone," Jack said. "Drum kits are kind of big."

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't in the back of a pickup truck," Gavin said, "maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it was definitely behind the school in the unbelievable heat. And then Anna came up to the edge of where the swing kids were dancing and threw a paper airplane, and—"

"A paper airplane?"

"My point is, Anna came to the concert that night," Gavin said. "You remember her? My high school girlfriend?"

"Sure. Short blond hair, real pretty."

"Well, she was pretty, but her hair was long and dark. That was the last time I saw her. Do you know what happened to her? Back then, or after high school?"

Jack shrugged and looked away. His smile was gone. He was fum bling in his pocket. "Hey," he said, "you don't mind, do you? I've got this back problem." He held up an unlabeled bottle of pills.

"Go ahead," Gavin said. Jack swallowed three without water. " Sorry about your back."

"Yeah, well. The pills help."

"I need to know," Gavin said. "I really need to know where she is. I know you and her were friendly, I mean, we were all friendly, I just thought maybe you'd kept in touch. I wondered if you ever saw her again after that concert."

Jack leaned back against the sofa cushions. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he spoke. "You should ask Daniel about all this, Gavin."

"Daniel as in Daniel Smith? The bass player who turned into an asshole cop?"

"He helps me out sometimes," Jack said. "You shouldn't call him that. He's nice." His eyes were drifting shut.

"Jack! Jack, wake up."

Jack's eyelids fluttered open.

"Sorry," he said. "Nodding off when there's company. Way to be a bad host, right?"

"It's okay," Gavin said. "When was the last time you saw Anna?"

"I dunno. While back." Jack's eyes were closing again. "Few years ago."

"How about Chloe?"

" Sweet kid," Jack murmured.

"Jack," Gavin said, but it was hopeless. Jack was snoring softly. Gavin stood and checked his clothing for cockroaches. Out in the darkened hallway the girl was standing where he'd left her. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning against the wall, her forehead pressed to the edge of the door frame. He remembered a fairy tale he'd read as a kid, or perhaps Eilo had read it to him— a story about a castle in the middle of a labyrinth of thorns, everyone sleeping for a century inside. There was something eerie about the drugged silence of the house, a spellbound stillness that made him want to run. Gavin held his cell phone near the girl's face and took her picture. She startled awake at the digital click of the shutter and stared at him, blinking. He closed the door, went back to his car and drove as quickly as possible away from there.

In his room at Eilo's house he sat on his mattress with the notebook on his lap. He wrote Has met Chloe and Pills under Jack's name.

Gavin put the notebook down and went to the window. The squalor of the house and the tent in the backyard weren't things he wanted to think about. He'd always liked Sasha and Daniel but Jack was the one he'd felt closest to. Gavin wore fedoras and read noir and watched Chinatown over and over again and Jack understood, Jack was in the wrong decade too, Jack was going to be a jazzman. There had been long stoned hours in Jack's basement after school, listening to jazz and talking about how things used to be, how things were going to be, talking about anywhere other than the stultifying present.

Gavin's room was at the back of the house, facing the freeway. On the far side of the yard pylons rose up with dark shadows beneath them, cars passing in a blur of light high above. How could he have let Jack slip away so completely? The traffic was no more than two hundred yards from him, but with the windows closed the room was silent. There were evenings when he didn't understand the world at all.

"Y o u ' r e c e r t a i n you don't know where they went?" he asked Eilo that night. " Chloe and that woman she was with?" They were eating Thai food out of takeout containers.

"I drove by the house two days after I took the photograph," Eilo said. "They were gone already."

"No forwarding address?"

" These people don't always leave forwarding addresses," Eilo said. "They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear."

"I've been thinking about trying to find them," Gavin said.

"Good luck," Eilo said. "I wouldn't know where to begin. Have you thought of hiring a private investigator?"

I want to be the private investigator. He couldn't bring himself to tell her this. "I'll look into it," he said.

In t h e morning Gavin returned to the police station.

"I'm surprised to see you again," Daniel said. He had kept Gavin waiting for an hour. His fingers tapped almost silently on the side of his coffee cup, a nervous flicker. "Aren't you hot? Wearing a fedora in this heat?"

"It's a summer fedora," Gavin said.

"And here some of us make do with baseball caps."

"I went to visit our multitalented piano and saxophone player yesterday," Gavin said. "You remember Jack? He speaks highly of you."

Daniel sighed and his face softened a little. "Sure," he said, "I try to keep an eye on him. He's been arrested a couple times."

"I asked him about Anna," Gavin said, "and he said to ask you."

"Me? Why would I know anything about your high school girlfriend?"

"Well, she hung out with us at school, with the quartet. We were all friends."

"I don't know that you were much of a friend to her. Was there some reason you wanted to see me, Gavin, or is this strictly a social call?"

"What do you mean by that comment? How was I not a friend to her?"

"I'm pretty busy," Daniel said. "You know, doing police work and stuff. I'm going to get back to work now."

"Okay, look, the main reason I came is, Jack's staying in this house on Mortimer Street—"

"Eleven ninety-six Mortimer," Daniel said. "I've been there. Lovely home, isn't it?"

"A girl answered the door when I knocked. No older than thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, stoned out of her mind. Jack said she was his roommate's sister or her stepsister or something, just staying there for a while. I came to see you because I thought maybe she was a runaway."

Daniel took a slow sip of coffee. "I'm getting the strangest sense of déjà vu," he said. "Have you talked to a shrink about these phantom girls you've been seeing?"

"I knew you wouldn't believe me. I took her picture." He passed Daniel his cell phone and Daniel studied the image for a moment. The phone looked very small in his hand. "Her name's Grace."

"Wait here," Daniel said. He pushed himself up on the edge of the table and left the room. Gavin waited alone in the interrogation room for twenty minutes, listening to the hum of central air conditioning and staring at the fine cracks in the paint on the opposite wall until Daniel returned.

"Thanks for the photo," Daniel said. He was awkward now, looking away. "The tip might be useful to us."

"A runaway's got to be worth a couple of questions, right?"

"Gavin—"

"Two minutes of your time."

"Fine," Daniel said. "A couple of questions."

"Do you know what happened to Anna after high school?"

"She left town after the eleventh grade and went to live with her aunt in Georgia. I thought everyone knew that."

"You know what's funny? She was my girlfriend for two years and we spent half our waking hours together, and she never so much as mentioned that aunt in Georgia."

"I've really got an awful lot of work to do," Daniel said. He opened the door.

"You said two questions."

"Thanks for stopping by, Gavin."

"My cell phone?"

"See, now there's your second question. It's at the front desk."

Gavin walked back out into the heat with his fedora in his hands.