The Lola Quartet

Sixteen

Jack was good but not good enough for Juilliard. He auditioned after high school and didn't get in, but what he found strange— and in retrospect this should have been a warning sign, he thought— was that he was almost relieved. In the September after high school he packed up his car and drove north to South Carolina. His roommate at Holloway College was good enough for Juilliard, but he saw New York City as an inevitability and wanted to stay in the South a little longer. Jack's roommate was from the suburbs of Miami. He was going to play every major city on the continent no matter where he studied, because he actually was that impressive. Jack liked him, though he was prone to grandeur in his drunker moments.

"My name is Liam Deval," he would say, raising a glass of beer or introducing himself to someone in a bar, or sometimes, when he didn't know anyone else was around, quietly to his reflection in the men' s-room mirror, "and I am going to be famous."

When he did this at bars everyone would laugh and buy him another drink because his delivery was hilarious. Everyone knew he wasn't really kidding, but it didn't matter because he was the best guitarist any of them had ever heard. "The only real difference between me and Django Reinhardt," he said once when very drunk, "is that Django did it first."

"Well, yes," Jack said. "Exactly."

Deval only laughed. Just as they both understood that Deval was going to be a star, they understood that Jack's days were numbered.

Jack had been on his way out almost from the moment of arrival. He couldn't have said how he knew this. He couldn't even have explained what exactly was wrong. He had been touched lightly by synesthesia; mostly it was a small matter of sounds being attached to colors— the impression of red left by car horns, for example, the dandelion-yellow sounds of his parents' doorbell— but music was brilliance, music was light moving through the air every time he heard it.

Playing with the quartet, switching back and forth between piano and saxophone, practicing for endless hours with Gavin and Sasha and Daniel, traveling to competitions— in short, all the things he loved— none of these things seemed to relate in any way to the sudden grind of Holloway College, the evenings when he played piano alone in a small white practice room and got lonelier and lonelier by the hour, the clinics, the harshness of teachers. Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular, and sometimes he wanted to pack up his car and drive back to Florida when he thought about the things they'd said to him.

The pills helped. He could float a little. In the weeks leading up to the winter break he started to take them more frequently. His skill was unlessened but nothing seemed quite real.

"You seem more relaxed these days," Deval said. They were in their room at the end of another day. Deval was on the edge of his bed, listening to music. Jack had been toiling in a theory workbook earlier, but now he was staring into space.

"It doesn't have to be stressful," Jack said.

"I envy you. I'm more stressed than I thought I would be." They'd been here a few months and Deval's bravado was becoming a little threadbare. Holloway College wasn't Juilliard, but it also wasn't easy.

"You're good," Jack said. "You don't need to. " he was thinking "take Vicodin" but said "worry" instead.

"We're all good," Deval said. "Otherwise we wouldn't be here."

Jack wasn't sure anymore if he was good or not. He'd been confident of his talent in high school, but lately he was certain of nothing. The winter break arrived and on the long drive back to Sebastian he toyed with the idea of not returning to Holloway after the break, of perhaps enrolling in community college in January and getting a degree in something practical. Business management? Economics? Accounting? He wasn't really sure what the practical degrees were. He'd never wanted to do anything but music and now he didn't even want to do that.

It was disorienting, being back in Sebastian. Now that he'd left and seen another place it looked less familiar somehow, as if the town were forgetting him. That was the year when the streetlights turned from amber to blue. The blue ones apparently used less electricity and would save the city some money, but they cast the suburbs in a cold and foreign light. On his third or fourth day back Daniel and Sasha came over and passed an hour or two in Jack's parents' basement, where they'd brought their instruments and practiced sometimes in the days of the jazz quartet. Gavin hadn't come home. He was in a communications program at Columbia, full scholarship. No one was surprised that he'd cracked the Ivy League— his grades had always been better than anyone else's— but they were surprised that he'd stayed in New York for Christmas. They sat together in the basement, Jack and Sasha and Daniel with Gavin ostentatiously absent, and it seemed to Jack that their missing instruments were like ghosts. He'd been thinking a lot about ghosts lately, after a movie he'd seen, and the thought of a translucent ghost saxophone sitting next to him was oddly appealing.

The silence was awkward. He thought of these people as his closest friends, but it seemed that without music there wasn't much to talk about. He was seized by a mad desire to confide in them— I miss everything about high school and I'm not the musician I thought I was, I don't know what I'm doing anymore, jazz has always been my life but now it's slipping away from me and my talent isn't going to be enough— but he couldn't imagine how to begin.

"Do you still play?" he asked Daniel, to fill the silence.

"Haven't touched the bass since that last concert," Daniel said. Jack smiled at this. The last concert, on the back of the truck behind the school, was one of his favorite memories. The heat and the music, a final perfect evening, dancers trampling the grass. He missed the quartet with an unexpected force. It had been a nice thing, all of them playing together.

"I wish Gavin were around," he said.

Daniel made a dismissive noise. "Convenient that he's not here."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what?" Daniel said. "I wouldn't come back here and show my face either. His girlfriend disappears, and he runs off to New York?"

"Disappears? I heard she moved to Georgia to live with her aunt." Jack looked at Sasha. "That's what you told me."

Daniel muttered something inaudible. Sasha shot him a look.

"Anyway," Sasha said, in a let' s-change-the-subject way.

Daniel didn't say anything. There was something altered about him. He seemed more pensive than he had been, his voice strained.

"Let's face it," Sasha said, "I don't think Gavin's parents would notice if he came home for Christmas or not."

"Are they really that bad?" Jack was interested. He'd heard rumors.

"I heard that when Gavin was in the hospital last spring with heat exhaustion, the night after the prom, his sister Eileen was the only one by his bedside. And she goes to school like three hours away. Eileen drove out as soon as she heard and their parents weren't even at the hospital."

"It could be worse," Daniel said. "People have families that are worse than that." Daniel was taking a year off before college. He said he'd mostly been in Salt Lake City since the end of high school, working construction with his uncle and staying with friends, but when pressed for details about his time in Utah he said he didn't want to talk about it.

"What's with you?" Jack asked.

"Nothing," Daniel said. "I just think maybe people shouldn't run off to New York when their girlfriends are. look, never mind. Whatever."

"But she wasn't even in Florida anymore. She'd left. She'd gone to live with her—"

"Can we drop it?" Daniel said.

Sasha looked away. They knew something, and Jack was excluded. He went out that night without them, drove alone through the wide streets until he reached the Lemon Club, a run-down jazz bar in a strip mall on the edge of town. The bartender— an older man with a permanent sneer who usually glared at Jack like he was daring him to order a drink, just daring him— barely glanced up when Jack entered.

Jack had gone to the club one or two nights a week in high school,

but he'd never come in alone before. He listened to a fairly decent trio from Denver and then— because neither Sasha nor Daniel had called him— went back again the next night with his little sister Bridget. It had dawned on him that he didn't know Bridget very well anymore, she'd somehow slipped away and eluded him, and he thought maybe music would help. It did. She was enraptured by the fifteen-year-old jazz violin prodigy they'd gone to hear and seemed happy to be out with him.

"Jack." He looked up and the Band teacher who'd supervised the Lola Quartet was standing by their table. Jack hadn't seen him come in.

"Hello, Mr. Winters," he said. He was unsure of the etiquette, postgraduation. Should he have called him Steven? Mr. Winters was talking about Holloway College, the excellence of the program in which Jack was enrolled, how he hoped Jack was taking full advantage of the opportunities before him. A note of wistfulness in his voice.

"I'm proud of you," Mr. Winters said, and Jack managed a smile. His midyear review hadn't gone well. His teachers had noted a spaciness, an inattentiveness in general, an overall lack of improvement. It hadn't occurred to him that flunking out of music school would mean disappointing Mr. Winters, but he saw now that of course it would. Jack called Sasha and Daniel the next night and left messages, but neither of them called back. He returned to Holloway a few days early.

Th e d r i v e from Sebastian to Holloway College took him a little more than ten hours. Jack drove slowly, in no particular rush, stopping every so often to stretch his legs. A part of him wanted to remain suspended between school and home forever. He hadn't played piano at all over the break, and the thought of the hours he needed to spend in the practice rooms made him tired.

The sense of limbo was increased by the landscape he traveled through. He pulled off the interstate into towns that all looked the same to him. He tried to find things to differentiate them, some kind of proof that he was passing through parts of three different states, but there was almost nothing. Only the names of the towns varied, and the towns were like envelopes with all the contents the same. The same gas stations, the same restaurants, the same chain stores with the same logos shining out into the deepening twilight. It was a relief to him at the end of the day to make the last exit off the interstate, to drive along the narrow roads that led up to the college, to turn the corner on the sweeping drive and see the white buildings and lights of Holloway rising up at the top of the hill. At least, he thought, this wasn't a place that could easily be mistaken for somewhere else.

He parked the car and walked up the long pathway to the hall where he lived. The security guard nodded at him when he flashed his identity card. He saw no one else. It was still only the day after Christmas, the building deserted, almost everyone home with their families.

There was a baby crying when Jack stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor. He stood still in the hall for a moment, listening. The presence of a baby in Lewins Hall seemed so impossible that he wondered fleetingly if he might be listening to a ghost: could a baby have died here? Maybe a hundred years ago? The idea of a baby ghost was interesting. The building seemed like the kind of place that would lend itself to hauntings. The crying subsided. Silence descended over the halls. The corridor was so quiet now that it was possible to entertain notions of being the last man on earth as he walked past closed doors, but when he opened the door to their room Deval was there, sitting on Jack's bed with a baby in his arms. He'd forgotten that Deval was staying at school through the holidays. The child, who had a wisp of dark hair and a face red from screaming, was drifting off into a fitful sleep.

"Congratulations?" Jack said.

" Thank you. It's a girl."

" Whose is it?"

"A friend of yours came by," Deval said. "She brought a baby."

"I don't think I have any friends with babies."

"Oh," Deval said, "I think you do. Unless she's some kind of con artist and she's just using us for our shower facilities."

Jack dropped his bag on the floor and sank into an armchair they'd rescued from a dumpster together a month or two earlier. "What's my friend's name?"

"Anna. She's in the shower."

"Anna?" The only Anna he knew was Gavin's lost girlfriend. He was having a hard time imagining the chain of events that would result in her appearing in his dorm room in South Carolina with a baby. "Anna Montgomery?"

"I think so," Deval said. "I can't remember her last name, but it was something like that." He was smiling at the sleeping baby. "I got the baby to stop crying," he said. "I think I should get a medal or something."

"She just came today?"

"An hour ago. You mind if she spends the night? I already told her it was okay."

"I don't mind," Jack said. The door opened just then. It was Anna, but an Anna greatly changed. She looked older, far more tired, and she'd cut off all her hair; it was dark with water but he could see that she'd dyed it blond.

"Jack," she said. She still sounded the same.

"Anna. What are you doing here?"

She smiled instead of answering him. "Is it okay if I stay the night?"

"It's fine with me," he said. Anna reached for the baby. Jack didn't

know much about babies, but it seemed to him that this one was very small. "How old is it?" he asked.

"She," Anna said softly. "Not 'it.' " She was gazing at the baby's closed eyes. "Her name's Chloe. She's three weeks old."

"That's young," Jack said. " Where are you going with it? I mean her. Sorry. I didn't know you had a baby."

"I'm on my way to Virginia," she said. "My sister has a friend there who I can stay with for a while."

"But I just saw your sister over the break," Jack said. "She didn't say anything about. weren't you with an aunt? I heard you'd gone to live with your aunt in Georgia." He'd also heard a crazy rumor that she'd had a baby and it had been stillborn, but he decided not to bring this up.

"I've been in Utah," Anna said.

"Utah? Why Utah?"

"Long story," Anna said, in a tone that made it clear she didn't want to tell it.

She slept that night in Jack's bed. Jack slept on the floor. The baby slept on the floor too, lying on her back on the seat cushion from the armchair. The baby kept waking up crying. Toward morning Jack drifted off to the sounds of Anna singing the baby to sleep, a lullaby about a night bus out of Salt Lake City, and when he woke he was alone and the room was filled with sunlight. It was almost noon. He showered and set off in search of breakfast. In the dining hall he sat alone with a sandwich in a sea of plastic chairs and then wandered the campus looking for someone to talk to, anyone, but the only people he saw were security guards and the maintenance crew and they all seemed busy. Later he ran into three other students whom he knew— two violinists and a singer, from places too far away or from families too poor to travel home for the winter break— and he sat with them for a while in the cafeteria. The singer, Bernadette, was talking about George Gershwin's "Summertime." She thought it was about death. Her argument seemed solid to him and the conversation was interesting but all his thoughts were of Anna. Sixteen or seventeen years old with her impossibly young infant, traveling by means unknown up the coast to Virginia. The dorm room was still empty when he returned there in the late afternoon. Could Deval have gone with her to Virginia? It was the only explanation he could think of.

De v a l w a s still gone when Jack woke in the morning. He ate alone in the cafeteria again and wandered the campus without finding anyone to talk to, but Bernadette called him in the late afternoon. "It's me," she said, as if they'd ever spoken on the phone before, and then added, "Bernadette."

"The Summertime girl," he said, and caught himself wondering how she'd obtained his number.

She giggled. "You must think I'm incredibly morbid," she said. "But listen, I'm having a party tonight."

"A party? Seriously? Is there anyone left on campus?"

"That's why I'm having it," she said. "We should all stick together. It's cold."

It was nice to think of not being alone for another long evening, so when night fell he put on a clean shirt and left the dorm. It was an unusually cold night, the coldest he'd ever seen. There was a light frost and the grass sparkled underfoot. Jack wasn't sure that he'd encountered frost outside a freezer before. He knew what it was but couldn't stop staring at it, stooped down once to touch it. The sparkling turned to cold water on his fingertips. Jack stood for a moment in the middle of the Commons, looking up at the stars. He'd meant to practice today but hadn't. It had been two weeks since he'd played the piano and nothing about the thought of sitting down at a keyboard was appealing to him. He closed his eyes for a moment. He had a feeling of slippage, of pieces coming apart around him. He opened his eyes quickly and he was still on the Commons, the air cold on his face. There was movement around one of the girls' dormitory buildings at the far end of campus, an impression of voices, he hurried on and in a few minutes he was safely among other people, fifteen or twenty students in the suite where Bernadette and her roommates lived. He hadn't thought there were this many people on campus.

"You came!" Bernadette said. She was flushed and lovely, already a little drunk, wearing a miniskirt that he couldn't help but notice was short even by miniskirt standards. "I'm so glad you're here."

"I'm glad I'm here too," he said. "What's this we're listening to?" She was pressing a plastic cup of beer into his hands.

"The Klezmatics," she said. "I don't love them, except this one song. Can you hear it? It's klezmer, but it's also jazz."

"I don't know that much about klezmer," he said. It was nice to be in a conversation with someone instead of alone in the dorm room, and he didn't want the moment to end. She had hair that caught the light, dark curls falling over her shoulders.

"Then stay a while and keep listening," Bernadette said. "Another drink?"

She floated away from him. He didn't know anyone else here but they all seemed to know each other. Jack stayed as long as possible in the warmth and the brightness, trying to find a conversation, until sometime near midnight he glanced across the room and Bernadette was kissing someone else, a cellist whose name he could never remember. He drifted outside and over the sparkling grass to Lewins Hall, drunk, the stars wheeling. He hoped Deval might be back from wherever he'd gone, but the room was dark and still. He slept with his bedside lamp on, a t-shirt thrown over it to blunt the light, and woke hungover to the smell of scorched fabric.

F o u r d a y s later Deval came into the room one morning while Jack was getting dressed, waved instead of saying hello, lay down on top of his bed, and closed his eyes.

" Where were you?"

"I drove her to Virginia," Deval said. "Then I hung around for a few days."

" Where in Virginia?"

"Somewhere in the middle. Place called Carrollsburg." He kicked off his shoes. "Have you ever seen her tattoo?" He gestured vaguely at his shoulder without sitting up.

"I could've taken her."

"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You were asleep."

"So you saw where she's living?"

"It's an okay place," Deval said. " Quiet little house in a small town. Nowhere anyone would look for her. She's got the whole basement to herself. I think it'll be okay."

"You know what's weird? The last time I saw her, she had all this long dark hair, and now it's short and blond. It's like she was in disguise."

"Yeah, about that." Deval sat up. "She's got a complicated life," he said. "She asked me to tell you— well, to ask you, I guess— look, she doesn't want you to tell anyone you saw her. Seriously, no one. It's really important, okay?"

"Okay."

"When I say important, I mean this is like the most important thing anyone's ever going to ask of you."

"Okay, I get it. I won't tell anyone."

"Thanks." Deval lay back down on his bed.

Dj a n g o R e i n h a r d t was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

"A match," Deval said. "Of all the things he could have used."

Deval's mother had given him a biography of Django Reinhardt as a high school graduation present, and he liked to read his favorite sections aloud in the dorm room at night. Jack appreciated the distraction.

Django Reinhardt was always good, but he was at his best with Stéphane Grappelli. They met as members of a fourteen-piece orchestra that played uninspired music for tea dances, Grappelli on violin and Reinhardt on guitar, until one day Grappelli broke a string. He played a few notes of a jazz melody, trying to get his violin in tune, and Reinhardt echoed him on guitar. A bass player and a rhythm guitarist jumped in, and this was the beginning of the Quintette du Hot Club de France. They played together with enormous success. Reinhardt hadn't spent much time in school as a child; Grappelli taught him how to read. Reinhardt went on a shaky American tour without him, dabbling in electric, traveling unsteadily with unfamiliar guitars, but only when he returned to Grappelli did he sound like himself again.

"Why are you telling me so much about Grappelli?" Jack asked. "I thought you wanted to be Reinhardt."

"Because this is what I keep wondering." Deval was sitting up on his bed, bright-eyed in the lamplight. The Quintette du Hot Club de France playing on his stereo, the underwater sound of old recordings. "I can play the guitar and maybe I'll be really good someday, Jack, but who will be there with me? Who will be my Grappelli?"

De c e m b e r s h i f t e d into a colorless January. Jack didn't want to be at music school, he knew he was taking too many pills, he knew the little baby with the wisp of dark hair was probably Gavin's and he couldn't imagine why he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it, but Deval had repeated three or four times that Jack should tell no one he'd seen Anna or the child. He hinted that Anna was in some kind of trouble. He made it sound as though lives were at stake, but still he managed to appear perfectly serene as he moved through his days. Skipping half his classes, spending hours in the practice rooms, reading about gypsy jazz and listening to scratchy recordings of the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the evenings. He was making long phone calls to Virginia at night.

"I can't tell you how much I envy you," Jack told him once, near the end, when they'd walked down the hill into town to get drunk. It was almost two a.m. Anna had been gone for three or four weeks. Jack and Liam were slumped in a booth in the back corner of a half-deserted Irish bar they'd discovered where the beer was cheap and no one cared what they put on the jukebox, and Jack had been happy earlier but now he was sinking into the morose kind of drunk that lends itself to regrettable statements.

"Yeah, I can see why," Deval said. "I'm in love with an underage girl who lives in hiding in a different state with a fucking baby, school bores me half to death but my mother will kill me if I don't get a degree, and I've got a class in six hours. What's not to envy?"

"You've got the music," Jack said. The idea of having the music or not having the music was something he'd never had an easy time explaining but Deval smiled, Deval seemed to understand, and Jack felt such gratitude at being understood in that moment that he let Deval choose the next three songs on the jukebox.

At t h e beginning of February, Jack left Lewins Hall en route to the practice rooms and a man he didn't recognize fell into step beside him.

"Jack, right?"

"Yes?"

The man was in his twenties, blond, with pale eyes and a ring through his eyebrow. He was dressed in a way that seemed calculatedly forgettable— a gray sweatshirt, black shoes, jeans— but any chance of anonymity was ruined by his tattoo: an extravagantly detailed goldfish on the side of his neck, brilliant orange. Jack found it hard to look away. He hated needles. Tattoos made him queasy. His hand drifted to his own neck in sympathy.

"You seen Anna around?"

Jack stopped walking, so the man stopped walking too. "Anna.?"

"Anna Montgomery, Jack. Anna from Florida. The girl with the baby." He was standing a little too close. Jack could smell his aftershave. There was nothing friendly in the man's blue-eyed stare. "The girl who visited you last month," he said.

"I heard she was in Utah."

"Oh, she was," the man said brightly. "She was in Utah, Jack, but that was before she came here. Do you mind telling me where she is? I really need to talk to her about something important."

"How do you know my name?"

"Where's Anna?"

"Look, I haven't seen her in almost a year. I knew her back in high school," Jack said.

"Right," the man said. "Back in Florida. You're both from Sebastian, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And your family still lives there, right?"

Jack felt as if he'd brushed up against the edge of something cold, or as if a curtain had been pulled back for an instant and he'd glimpsed a flash of darkness and moving gears. He'd never been threatened before. He didn't know what to do. He stood blinking in the sunlight with the life of the campus continuing all around him, voices and laughter, the man's calm gaze, and his voice was unsteady when he could finally bring himself to speak. "What do you want?"

"I want Anna Montgomery," the man said. "But if you don't know where she is, I could go ask your family. You've got a little sister still in high school in Florida, right?"

"What? I. " There was no way to finish this sentence, so Jack didn't.

"Bridget," he said. "That's your little sister's name, isn't it?"

Jack was frozen.

" Maybe I'll go down there and talk to her," the man said. "I mean, who knows, maybe she'd know where Anna is. You know how these high school girls all talk about each other."

"I don't—"

"I can't say I'll be in a great mood when I get down there," the man said. "Do you know, I was just there? Trying to track down Anna's dropout sister, for almost a week. And it's not like it's all that easy for me to leave town for long periods, in my line of work."

Jack was afraid to ask what this line of work might be.

"So I think by the time I find Bridget," the man said, "I'll probably already be angry. Just for having to go back to Florida again."

"Anna went to Virginia." Jack heard his own voice and wanted to pull the words back through the air.

" Where in Virginia?"

"I don't know," Jack said, "she just said she was going to Virginia and that was it. I heard it was a small town but I don't know which one. That's all I know."

"The problem is, Jack," the man said, "Virginia's such a big place. Last thing I want to do is drive back down to Florida but it'd almost be worth my time to go back down there, talk to your sister, see if maybe she knows more than you do. Who knows, Jack, maybe Anna and Bridget talk to each other sometimes."

"They don't talk to each other. They don't know each other at all."

"I'll ask Bridget myself. Thanks anyway, Jack, I'll be seeing you."

"Carrollsburg," Jack said.

"Carrollsburg?" The man was smiling. "Now we're getting somewhere, Jack. You have an address for me?"

"I don't. I really don't. That's all I know."

"You sure, now? You don't think maybe I should ask Bridget, just in case?"

"I don't know more than that. Bridget doesn't know anything. She doesn't know anything."

"Well, thank you very much, Jack," the man said pleasantly. "You just saved me another trip to Florida."

He turned away. Jack's heart was pounding and he wanted to throw up on the grass. On his way to the building with the practice rooms it occurred to him that he should alert campus security, but when he looked back the man was nowhere to be seen, and what would he say anyway? A few weeks ago my roommate and I snuck a girl into our room and let her stay overnight in violation of the rules, and, oh yeah, she also had a baby with her, and now some guy wants to know. He needed to talk to Deval. He stepped through the doors into the cool shadows of Armstrong Hall and scanned the last few pages of the practice room sign-in book. L. Deval, room 17. He glanced over his shoulder, but through the glass doors behind him he saw only green grass and benignly milling students. The blond man was long gone.

Deval didn't look up when Jack opened the door to 17. He was playing in a style that he'd begun to adopt recently. It was jazz, but glissando shivers of gypsy melodies kept coming through. The effect was uneven.

"Deval," Jack said.

"There's no piano in this one," Deval said, without looking up.

"Please," Jack said. Deval stopped playing. "Some guy just asked me where Anna is."

"What?" Deval set his guitar on the chair beside him, which left nowhere for Jack to sit, so he stood uncomfortably by the door like a kid in the principal's office.

"He came up to me while I was walking, said he knew she'd been here. He knew she'd gone to Virginia—"

"Did you tell him she'd gone to Virginia?"

"Of course not," Jack said. "I told him to get lost." He was shivering. "He was menacing, Liam. He threatened my sister. He had this look about him, this—"

"Yeah, some people aren't nice," Deval said. "Don't get hysterical. What exactly did he say?"

"He said he knew she'd been here after she was in Utah. He asked me where she was. What did she do in Utah, Liam?"

"She stole money from a meth dealer," Deval said. He was putting his guitar back in its case. "Listen, I'm going to go get her."

"You're leaving now? In the middle of the semester?"

"She doesn't drive. I'll call the dean's office from the road and tell them I've got a family emergency or something. Don't tell anything to anyone."

Deval didn't go back to the residence hall. He left the practice room and walked quickly to his car, threw his guitar in the backseat and drove away.

J a c k w a s thinking about a movie he'd seen once. He couldn't remember what it had been called, but it was set in the eighteenth century and there was a boat, and a sailor who'd been a disappointment to everyone had jumped overboard with a cannonball in his arms. When he closed his eyes Jack saw the sailor descending, pale in dark water with a cloud of bubbles rising silver around him, the weight of the cannonball carrying him down to some other place. "The truth is," the captain had said at the sailor's funeral, "we don't all turn into the men we had hoped to become." Or words to that effect. Jack wasn't sure he was remembering it exactly.

"It's true," Jack said to his reflection in a darkened window, in reply to the captain of the movie ship. "It's just the way it is." He had taken too many pills. It was four a.m. and Deval had been gone for a week. With every passing day he became more certain that Deval and Anna and the baby were dead. He knew he should call the police, but every day and every hour made the call less possible. The first question would be Why didn't you call sooner? and with each passing hour the question would be more pointed, and then what would he say? The truth is, Officer, I'm not the man I wanted to be. The truth is, I gave up a girl at the slightest threat and now everyone's in trouble and I think both Deval and the girl are probably dead by now and the fault's entirely mine and I've been thinking it might be better for everyone if I take this cannonball in my arms and leap into the ocean.

Jack waited a week, then two, but Deval didn't return. At the beginning of the third week a postcard arrived.

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

The card was postmarked Detroit. The relief that all was well— Deval must have arrived in Virginia in time— was supplanted almost immediately by a colossal loneliness. It seemed impossible that Deval wasn't coming back. His belongings waited untouched in their room, his books, his sheet music, his clothes strewn around the bed. Jack kept expecting someone to come and collect them, but no one did.

The pills weren't working the way they had before. Jack still floated but the blurred contours of the world made everything seem unreal in the manner of a bad dream. He spent a lot of time lying on his bed listening to music on headphones, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Coltrane and Parker, all the emissaries of a kingdom that was slipping away from him. There was no pleasure in playing the music himself. Sometime during the fifth or sixth week he stopped going to classes.

After seven weeks he packed up his things in the middle of the day while everyone else was in class, loaded up his car and drove south.

J a c k d r o v e to the Lemon Club nearly a year after his return from South Carolina. The bartender glared at him the way he always had when Jack was in high school, and Jack laughed out loud. It seemed inconceivable that high school had been less than two years ago. He'd just turned twenty and felt vastly old. The fact that he was still underage was a joke.

He'd recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he'd promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. "You don't want to drift through life all addled, Jack," his mother's voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he'd spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

"You're sure you're good to go out?" his father had asked. Jack had been home for three weeks and tonight was the first time he'd been out by himself. His parents had taken him to dinner and a movie a few times but since he'd been back he'd mostly spent his evenings watching TV with them. Law & Order episodes with their soothingly formal two-act structures, a glass of warm milk delivered by his mother and then the same routine since childhood, washing his face and brushing his teeth and closing his eyes under a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets shining down from the ceiling of his childhood room. Bridget called sometimes. She was going to college in Colorado and had a cautious way of talking to him that he didn't like very much. By day he was working in a coffee shop in a mall, making lattes and cappuccinos behind a shining silver machine. A boring life on paper but he liked it, actually, the quiet of it, the peace. He played his saxophone in the backyard after work in the afternoons. He'd come home from music school and there it was in his room where he'd left it, a gleaming brass miracle leaning up against the bookcase. He hadn't played the piano in a year.

A jazz pianist from Des Moines was headlining. He'd heard of her back when he was in music school and it seemed a good reason to go out so he'd dressed carefully and combed his hair. He chose a table at the front in the hope that if the music was beautiful it might sweep him up, but the pianist didn't appear when he thought she would. Instead a man came onstage with a guitar and started fiddling with amplifiers.

"Excuse me," Jack said, to the fiftyish couple at the next table. He would've preferred not to bother them, but they seemed to have programs and he needed information. "Is there a warm-up act?"

" There is," the woman said. She was black, and he found the brilliance of her blue eye shadow mesmerizing against the dark of her skin. All the girls he'd dated had worn such subdued makeup. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to paint blue shimmering powder on yourself, and he realized that she was holding out the program for him, so he took it quickly and said, "Thanks very much."

"You're welcome." She was looking at him strangely. He had moments throughout the day when he thought everyone in the room was staring at him, and this was one of them. The program said the opening act was Deval & Morelli/Guitar (with Joe Stevenson/Bass, Arnie Jacobson/Percussion). He must have smiled, because the woman said, "Well, that seemed to make you happy," and he said, "Yes, it does," although he of course couldn't be certain that this was the same Deval. He was in the habit of looking for Deval's name in the news every morning. No day passed without Jack wondering if the man with the goldfish tattoo had found them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why did you get rid of your phone?"

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

"Anna and the baby, are they.?"

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

Seventeen

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

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

"A friend," Anna said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's in Detroit?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What part of it?"

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

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

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

"How old is she?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To the music?"

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

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

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

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

When Liam came home at night he was tired and exhilarated. After his shift in the restaurant he would board a bus to the projects, where he rode an elevator to the seventh floor of a brick tower and spent two hours with Stanislaus. Later Anna sat on the floor of the living room and listened to him practice. She'd liked listening to the jazz quartet back in high school but this was different, this was something she didn't have words for. Chloe loved it too. When she was big enough to sit up, she sat on the carpet and stared at Liam while he played. There were moments of unbearable beauty when Anna closed her eyes in the living room while Liam played his guitar and everything rushed away from her until it was just the music, just Liam, just her daughter and the softness of the carpet where she lay on her back to listen to him, scents of cleaning products lingering in the air. The perfection of their lives together.

"I love your music," Anna said. He put down his guitar and kissed her. There were moments when everything was easy and bright.

Anna knew that Liam worried about her, the way she stayed indoors almost all the time. He pressed her sometimes to think about the future. "What are you going to do with your life?" he asked, near the beginning, when they'd just arrived in Detroit.

"I'm going to look after Chloe."

"What were you going to do before Chloe?"

"I wanted to be Brian Eno," she said.

"What?"

"I was going to be in the music industry in some way. I used to think I'd maybe be a producer or a DJ or something."

"You still can."

"I know," she said, "maybe I'll still do it." But the future was abstract and none of it mattered as much as Chloe did. The idea of leaving Chloe with a stranger was unthinkable. She was going to be a better parent than her parents had been. She was going to save Chloe from everything bad.

In t h e spring Liam asked if she'd mind moving to New York. He'd learned all he could from Stanislaus, he said. There was someone else, an old man in Queens who Stanislaus said was among the very best.

"My name is Liam Deval," he said quietly to himself in the mirror when he didn't know she could hear him, "and I am going to be famous." He said it sardonically now, as if he were only kidding, but his ambition was a winged and burning thing.

In early April they packed up the car, strapped the baby in the car seat, and drove southeast with cups of coffee in the cup holders and a map to New York City on the dashboard.

Br i g h t o n B e a c h was on the far edge of Brooklyn, close against the sea. Blue sky and white sand, the edge of the city, a boardwalk running along the beach. The advertisements and signs on the street were in Russian. The grocery store was filled with inscrutable labels. The trains rattled and cast fleeting shadows from the elevated tracks. She was aware at all times that Gavin was somewhere in this city. She felt such guilt when she thought of him. If it's spring, she thought, he's just finished his first year of college. There were moments when she imagined getting on the subway with Chloe, taking her on the endless train from Brighton Beach to Columbia University, waiting for Gavin by the university gates. But then what? The conversation was impossible to imagine— I gave birth to your child but I never told you I was pregnant because I decided instead to run away with someone else— and she didn't need child support. Could he possibly take Chloe away from her? She wasn't sure. It seemed possible. His family had more money than hers did. Did Chloe actually need a father? Anna certainly hadn't needed hers, and anyway Chloe had Deval.

They had a small apartment a few blocks from the ocean. Liam took a job as a waiter in Manhattan and came home demoralized. He had been told that the first week would be training, which meant he wouldn't be paid.

"Isn't that illegal?" Anna asked.

"Of course," he said. He had worked for thirteen hours. He was sitting at the table with his guitar, picking out chords while she made pancakes. An exhausted sheen to his face. "Now ask me if there's anything I can do about it."

"You could quit," she said. They'd had this conversation before.

"I need the job."

"You don't. We have money."

"Anna," he said. "I don't want to use the. " The cautious voice he used when they skirted around the edges of the theft. The money was divided between several plastic bags here and there in the apartment— behind the towels, under the bed, at the back of a closet— and she was aware of it constantly.

"You could be playing music all day," she said. "You could rent studio space."

"I'm not—"

"Let me do this for you, Liam. It's not like we can return it."

He laid his hand flat over the strings of his guitar, watching her.

"Did you like working today?"

"No," he said.

"Then don't go back tomorrow," she said.

The money went so quickly after that, but in an odd way it was a relief to watch it trickling away. It was like destroying the evidence of a crime.

Li a m s p e n t his days in a rented studio near their apartment. In the evenings he took a train to Queens to work with the man who Stanislaus had said might be the world's greatest living gypsy-guitar teacher, a secret legend. Liam paid him in money and cigars and in return the man showed him everything he could, subtleties of rhythm and technique. He had only one other student, a man named Arthur Morelli who made a decent living as a session musician and played gypsy jazz whenever he could.

Liam brought Arthur Morelli back to Brighton Beach one night a few months after their arrival in the city. The baby was sleeping and Anna was cooking when they came in. She always tried to have something ready for Liam when he arrived home around eleven.

"Sausages," Morelli said. "What a nice surprise."

He was older than Liam, and Anna saw him register her age as they smiled at one another and said hello.

" Would you like some eggs?" she asked.

"I would love some eggs." Morelli sat at the kitchen table and crossed his legs. "So this is what you come home to," he said to Liam. " Lucky man."

"The luckiest," Liam said. He kissed Anna. "Is Chloe sleeping?"

Anna nodded.

"Your daughter?" Morelli asked.

" Eight months old," Liam said, and Anna understood how little he'd told Morelli about his life.

"What's this music we're listening to?" Morelli asked.

"They're called Baltica," Anna said. "I think they're from Canada." The CD played on the stereo on top of the fridge, quietly so it wouldn't wake Chloe. Baltica's sound made her think of snow. A high clear beat with electronic strings in the background sometimes and gentle static, repetitive echoing lyrics if there were any lyrics at all, I always come to you, come to you, come to you in the background while she beat eggs in a bowl with a fork.

"Anna, any chance of a hot-lemon-and-honey?" Liam asked.

"What exotic concoction is that?" Morelli's voice had a languor that

she liked, as if he had all the time in the world. She realized how rarely she spoke with anyone besides Liam.

"Hot water," she said. She was filling the kettle. "You boil water and then squeeze a lemon into it and then you add some honey."

"It's an addiction," Liam said. "We're thinking about playing together, Anna. A guitar duo."

"Morelli and Deval," Morelli said.

" Deval and Morelli."

"With a bass, maybe," Morelli said. "Drums."

"It sounds like a nice idea," Anna said. "I used to spend a lot of time with a jazz quartet in high school."

"Did you play?"

"No," she said. "My friends and my sister did." Were they her friends? She'd slept with two of them and managed to betray both, put the third in danger by showing up at his dorm room, left the state without telling her sister. The pan blurred before her eyes. She blinked hard and flipped the omelet.

"It's the best idea ever," Liam said, "but I need to study a little more."

"By next spring," Morelli said. Liam had poured him a glass of wine, and he raised it. "To music."

"To next spring," Liam said, and the glasses clinked behind her.

She set their plates on the table and sat with them. This is part of my disguise. Not just dyed-blond hair but plates of eggs too. A part of her wanted to put her fork down and tell Morelli who she really was— Listen, I ran away three times before the tenth grade. Family Services in Florida has a file on me that's probably two inches thick. I stood before a wall with a can of pink spray paint and slept for three nights in the park. I have a tattoo but I was so out of my mind that night that I barely remember the needle. I stole a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars from a drug dealer in Utah. I am not someone who has always stood in front of stoves cooking eggs for her boyfriend— but of course she didn't.

Mo n t h s l a t e r at Puppets Jazz Bar in Brooklyn Anna closed her eyes while they were playing and abruptly found herself disoriented, lost in the sound and unsure of where she was. She opened her eyes in alarm and clutched the seat of her chair. The darkness of the club was like the darknesses of all the other clubs where she'd gone to listen to gypsy jazz since Liam and Morelli had started playing regular gigs together. Where was Gavin tonight? She thought she'd die of shame every time she thought of him. She knew he was somewhere in this sharp and endless city, she knew he could walk in at any moment— did he still love music? And then perhaps she'd tell Liam she had a headache and find a way to leave with her face turned away, perhaps Gavin wouldn't recognize her at once with the short blond hair and that would buy her a few minutes. She was afraid to look toward the door.

Liam found her smoking on the sidewalk after the set.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," she said. "Coming out here like this with Chloe at home. Paying a fortune for a babysitter when you play for me and Chloe almost every night."

"That's just practicing," he said. "It isn't a performance. There's no Morelli, no bass, no drums."

"I like it better," she said. "I like it better when it's just us."

"Well," he said, "you don't have to come to these places if you don't want to." He turned to go back inside and the motion reminded her of another day months earlier in a hospital in Utah, lying on her back in the maternity ward, the look in Daniel's eyes when he saw the baby for the first time and turned away from her. I am always disappointing the ones I love.

.

Li a m c a l l e d Anna from a van between Miami and Sebastian on the morning of Chloe's first birthday. He'd gone to Florida to visit his mother and play a few gigs with Morelli— the Lemon Club in Sebastian, two places in Miami, stops in Celebration and Sarasota. She'd almost gone with him but it still seemed too soon. The thought of traveling with Chloe again was exhausting and her nerves overcame her at the last moment. She imagined Paul lying in wait for her among the palm trees. In Liam's absence the city was vast and gray and empty, an unformed mass pressed up against the neighborhood. She stayed close to the sea.

"I wish you'd come with me," he said.

"It isn't safe."

"I think if Paul were still looking," Liam said, "he would have found us by now."

"You don't think he's looking anymore?"

"I don't," Liam said. "I don't think it's that much money for a guy like him. Anna, you'll never guess who I ran into down here. Jack came to my gig in Sebastian."

"Jack's back in Florida?"

"He dropped out of school," Liam said. "A few weeks after I picked you up in Virginia. He came to see me at the Lemon Club."

"How is he?"

"He seems a little shaky, actually. How's everything over there, love?"

"Fine, completely fine. We're heading out to the beach."

"Give her a happy-birthday kiss for me," he said. She did, while she was bundling Chloe into the stroller.

Anna took Chloe down to the boardwalk. They walked for a while alongside the sea. It was November but the day was unseasonably warm. Anna eased the stroller off the boards and pushed it with great difficulty toward the water, until they were halfway between the boardwalk and the waves. The sand rising over the wheels, impossible to go farther. She knelt to free Chloe from the buckles and straps.

"Want to walk on the sand?" she asked Chloe, who was staring mesmerized over her shoulder. Chloe pointed and cried out "Wucks!" which meant ducks, which was her go-to word for birds of any kind. There were seagulls on the beach today, congregating around a dropped sandwich. Anna pulled Chloe's hat down over her ears, maneuvered her chubby hands into her mittens. " Happy birthday," she said. "I am so glad you're here."

Chloe looked at her and for an instant Anna was certain she understood.

"I would do anything for you," Anna whispered, but the moment had passed and Chloe was squirming now, kicking to be let out of the stroller. Anna lifted her free. They walked on the sand together, Chloe shrieking and laughing at the movement of seagulls and Anna holding Chloe's hand.

Eighteen

Awoman called Gavin a vulture once. She'd signed a bad mortgage and she was coming undone. He sensed her derangement as he came into her house, a tension in the air as in the hour before an electrical storm. She was pinch-faced and furious, sweating in her kitchen in a dress with an enormous flower pattern that reminded him of the curtains in his first apartment. He'd been working for Eilo for some weeks now and had decided that the people who'd done this to themselves were the angriest. The ones who were losing their houses because they'd already lost their jobs were despairing. The ones who were losing their houses because they hadn't understood their mortgages wanted to kill him.

". Just a bloodsucking leech," the woman said, at the end of an extended tirade.

"A leech." Gavin was trying to keep his voice mild. "A moment ago you said I was a vulture."

"I'm going to be homeless," she said, "and you're making money off me."

He couldn't argue with this. The arguments Eilo had given him— You're performing a necessary service for a legitimate financial institution, if we don't do this someone else will, it was their responsibility to pay their mortgages and they didn't, etc. — seemed weak as he stood in this peach-and-blue kitchen on a cul-de-sac near his old high school. He looked down at the papers in his hands.

"Perhaps," he said, "you were given bad advice when you signed the loan."

"Perhaps," she said, "you should get the fuck out of my kitchen."

"The next person after me will be a sheriff's deputy," he said. "I'm authorized to offer you—"

"I don't want your cash-for-keys deal. I want the people who are doing this to me to go to prison for the rest of their unnatural lives." Her voice had risen. He saw movement in the doorway. A small child was staring at him. The child's eyes were very large and there seemed to be applesauce on his face.

"I see," he said.

"Including you," she said, although she was losing steam now. There were tears in her eyes. "People like you should probably just die in prison."

"No one did this to you," Gavin said. "You did this to yourself." She was sputtering at him when he left. He drove four blocks, pulled over on a side street and spent some time staring at nothing, at pale stucco houses and close-cut lawns, each house its own kingdom with souls passing through. There were moments when he thought there might be something hidden in his job, some as-yet-ungrasped larger meaning amid all these people, their fear and their sadness and their disappearing homes, but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.

.

A f e w weeks after his arrival Gavin moved to Sebastian's empty downtown core. It was unclear to him how these streets had become so vacant, why everyone had decided that their fortunes lay on the perimeter, in an ever-expanding sprawl of split-level houses with screened-in back decks and kidney-shaped swimming pools and azaleas and snakes.

"Snakes?" Eilo repeated, in the car on the way to his new apartment with all his worldly belongings in the backseat. She wanted to see his new place. She didn't understand why he was moving.

"Pythons," Gavin said. "They just really bother me, ever since I did that story for the Star."

"That makes no sense, Gavin. It's not like they're slithering all over the backyard."

Pythons weren't the reason. He wanted to be back on concrete, in the company of neon lights. He'd found a one-bedroom apartment above a Laundromat. It was small, but it would be his, and the rent was cheap. The neighborhood was a lost section of grid in between a handful of squat glass office complexes and a mall. His street was barely two blocks long and all but deserted, a parallel row of low run-down buildings that ended in the mall's parking lot, but he felt no menace. This street was only empty, not dangerous. There was an open-all-night Chinese restaurant across from his apartment.

They unloaded the car in the twilight. His worldly belongings didn't amount to much. Two boxes of new clothes, bedding that Eilo was giving him, the carry-on bag that he'd brought from New York.

"You could stay with me for longer, you know," Eilo said.

"I need my own place," he said. "I've been staying with you for weeks."

"You're making good money. You could rent a perfectly nice house somewhere."

"But I don't like houses," Gavin said. "I don't need that much space."

It wasn't just that. It was all the obvious things, of course— he thought he'd feel better about his life if he were living less obviously off the charity of his sister— but it was also that he needed a private base of operations from which to conduct his investigation. All his thoughts were of Anna and the little girl.

Th e m o r n i n g sunlight was brilliant in the new apartment. What was strange was that he felt less alone here than he had in New York. He thought it was perhaps because Karen had never occupied these rooms, therefore her absence didn't fill them. He purchased some cheap furniture, a bed and a mattress, a desk. He filled the second page of his notebook with questions. Why does Daniel Smith dislike me? Where are Chloe and Anna? What does Sasha know? Who were Anna's friends in high school?

It was almost like being a reporter again. He woke every morning thinking of his secret investigation, and it was the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep.

W h o h a d Anna been close to in high school? No one, it seemed, when he examined his memories. Almost everyone had liked her but she had had no close friends. Why hadn't he realized this at the time? He was trying to take notes on the people in her life one evening in the apartment, but his pen was stalled after her half-sister's name. Her friends had been a shifty, druggy crowd whom she'd mostly abandoned by the time he had known her, derelicts from her old school. He didn't know any of their names. She'd been nominally involved in the Drama program after she'd transferred to his school, but only to the extent that she was a stagehand in their productions and helped out with costumes and sets. If she'd had Drama friends, he didn't remember them. She'd been on the outskirts of the music scene, but only because she'd been dating him. She wasn't really interested in the kind of music that was being played at the school. She'd spent time with the quartet and with their occasional singer, Taylor.

He found himself reaching for the phone almost without meaning to. His fingertips still retained the memory of Karen's cell number, the pattern on the keypad.

"It's me," he said.

"It's you." Karen's voice was neutral. "How are you, Gavin?"

"I moved back to Florida," he said. "I lost my job."

"Yeah, I saw that story about you." Her voice softened then, as if she'd seen him wince. "I'm sorry. That's probably the last thing you want to talk about."

"It's okay," he said. "I don't even know why I did it." There was a moment of silence.

"You blew up your career," she said, "and you don't know why?"

"It was difficult after you left," he said. "You know it wasn't what I wanted." She was silent. "And then something happened, I found out I had a—" But children were a terrible topic—"I got some news," he said, floundering. "I was horribly distracted. I think I lost my mind a little bit."

She had nothing to say to this.

"But anyway," he said, "how have you been?"

"I'm okay." She was quiet for a moment. "Florida," she said. "I thought you hated hot weather."

"I didn't have anywhere else to go."

"You always said you'd move to Chicago," she said, "if you ever got tired of New York."

" Maybe I'll go there someday. I've been saving money. You remember that weekend we spent there?" The memory had ambushed him that morning in the shower. It had been spring and the trees were blooming. They'd bought pretzels from a street vendor and looked at the animals in Lincoln Park Zoo. They'd had a picnic and Karen had fallen asleep on the grass in Hyde Park.

"It was a nice weekend," she said. "Listen, Gavin, I have to get back to work. I'd love to talk longer, but. "

"You got a new job? Congratulations." She'd been an administrative assistant at Lehman Brothers until the day the firm collapsed.

"I'm a temporary night-shift proofreader," she said. "It barely qualifies as employment. Goodnight, Gavin."

" Good night," he said. He disconnected and held the phone in his hands for a moment. The apartment was silent except for the air conditioner, the soft hum of the fridge.

Gavin went downstairs to the quiet street. The Laundromat below his apartment was alight, dryers spinning, a woman folding laundry. He drove to the house where Anna and Sasha's mother had lived, but now the name on the mailbox was Sabharwal and there were small unfamiliar children playing in the front yard, throwing a Frisbee that shone white in the gathering darkness.

G a v i n l e t a few days slide past in the heat. The temperature was soaring and he found it difficult to be outside. It was almost a pleasure to lose himself in work. The foreclosures were endless. He had as many houses to inspect as he could handle. But he couldn't stop thinking about Anna or the child, an obsessive worry that tugged him out of sleep at night, so the investigation continued. He found Taylor after a half-hour of online stalking, called her and drove at her invitation to a gated community in a section of town that he thought might not have existed when he'd lived here before. He waited ten minutes in his car for his turn with the security guard, who was taking his time interrogating a contractor in a pickup truck.

Inside the gates of the subdivision the streets curved around a park, and Taylor's house was on one of the outer loops. It was pink with gardens all around it, a fountain out front. When he cut the engine the quiet was almost complete. He got out of the car and stood for a moment listening to the falling water. The windows of the house reflected the sky and dark palm fronds.

"I'm sorry I'm late," he said, when she opened the door. "The gates—" he made a vague gesture back toward the entrance, but she only smiled at him blankly. "I had to wait forever to get through," he said. "The security guard."

"I don't understand," she said, although not unkindly, so he started from the beginning again and said, " Sorry I'm late," which seemed to reset the conversation. In her immaculate blue-and-white kitchen she poured lemonade over ice and talked about her life. A year in a music program at a school he'd never heard of, a shift in priorities that led to a BA in finance and then to a job at a bank, a marriage—"Todd's at a conference in Miami, otherwise he'd be here" — unrealized dreams of traveling the world—"I always thought I'd see everything, but then I had kids, so, you know" — and the kids, yes, Amy and Jaden, twins, at their summer day camp this afternoon. Gavin had never gone to camp as a kid— his pediatrician had suggested that a boy who made repeated visits to the ER with heat exhaustion was perhaps not ideally suited to outdoor summer activities in Florida— and he found himself imagining what it might be like. Lakes and sunlight, bright water. It would be nice to get out of the suburbs, he thought. There was so much green here, such riotous growth, but nothing close to true wilderness. When was the last time he'd been away from a city, from a suburb, from clipped lawns and cement? He was thinking about the time he'd gone camping with Karen in upstate New York, the perfect quiet in the morning, a bird gliding over a lake, the smell of tent fabric in sunlight. He realized that Taylor was still talking. He had been looking at her and smiling and nodding as his thoughts wandered. She was still beautiful. The same blue eyes and cascading blond hair, the same smile. He found himself wondering idly if she might want to sleep with him. She was talking about her garden now, and had been for a while. His gaze drifted to the microwave clock. She'd been talking about herself for a little under an hour.

"Well," she said finally, "it's just so great to catch up with you. How's your life been?"

This was a competition, he realized. She'd presented him with a gorgeous life and now she wanted to hold his life up to the light and compare. He thought about the photograph of himself on the front page of the New York Star and briefly considered spinning something halfway plausible, I am a famous reporter taking some time off to write a book on Florida's exotic wildlife problem, but he didn't want to lie anymore and he knew he wasn't famous so much as disgraced.

"Well," he said, "I went to Columbia. I was a reporter at the New York Star. I met a girl and we were going to get married, but then she had a miscarriage in the second trimester and she didn't want to be with me anymore after that. I lost my job and moved back to Florida. I'm selling real estate with my sister."

"Oh," Taylor said. She was looking at him a little desperately, her half-smile slipping. She wanted lightness, he realized. She wanted to be saved by a self-deprecating one-liner that might keep things moving. She'd told him nothing very serious about herself. If her life had held the slightest trace of sorrow or any disappointments deeper than her postponed ambition to travel the world, she'd kept it out of the narrative. He was acutely aware of the soft hum of central air conditioning, the far-off drone of a lawnmower.

"But anyway," he said, "do you still keep up with anyone from high school?"

"Oh, I do." She smiled to thank him for the conversational rescue and then launched a twenty-minute monologue concerning people whom Gavin hadn't thought of in a decade, trips she'd taken with her high school girlfriends, gossip about people he barely remembered, the last reunion she'd been to. Kind of a sad affair actually, just fifty or so people standing around under streamers in the high school gymnasium—

"Was Anna Montgomery there?" Gavin asked. "You two were in the same grade, weren't you?"

"Anna? Your high school girlfriend? No. I mean yes, we were in the same year, but she wasn't there at the reunion. You know, I haven't seen her in so long," she said.

"Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

"Hoping to rekindle the flame?" Taylor widened her eyes as she said this, and Gavin understood for the first time that she was killingly bored.

"We were close," he said, "and I just wanted to find out what'd become of her. It's like she disappeared from the face of the earth."

"You should maybe ask Daniel about her," Taylor said.

" Really. Why Daniel?"

"It's probably nothing. But do you remember the Lola Quartet's last concert?"

"Behind the school," Gavin said. "We were playing on the back of your father's pickup truck."

"Yes," she said. "Exactly. I have such vivid memories of that concert, I guess because it was the last one. Do you know, I haven't sung 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' since that night? And it was one of my favorite songs. But anyway, that was the last time I saw her. We were playing that song and I remember you took off in the middle of it, just ran into the woods like you were going to be sick or something. We didn't know what the matter was but we were winding down anyway, that was our last song of the night. It was something like two o'clock in the morning, and I remember I saw Anna there. I noticed because she hadn't been there before, it was like she'd just stepped out of the woods, and I thought it was weird for her to come so late in the evening when everything was done, but I was talking to my boyfriend at the time— you remember Brian? That guy who did the penguin imitations?"

Gavin didn't remember Brian or his penguin imitations. He nodded anyway.

"I was talking to him, so I didn't talk to Anna when I saw her. But I remember I looked up a while later," she said, "and she was walking around the side of the school with Daniel, and he was carrying his instrument and she was carrying a duffel bag. I thought it was strange for them to be going off together. I mean she was your girlfriend, not his. But there'd been all this talk about her and I thought, you know, we're all friends anyway so it's probably nothing. But then I remembered it later because when school started up again in September she wasn't there, and it occurred to me that that had been the last time I'd seen her, disappearing with Daniel that night. I never saw her again."

"What kind of talk?" Gavin asked.

"What?"

"You said there'd been all this talk about her. What kind of talk had there been?"

Taylor looked away from him and stood up. "Oh, you know how high school was," she said. "We were all just bored suburban kids telling vicious rumors about each other."

Did he know how high school was? He knew he should, but his memories of those years were for the most part hazy. He remembered small details. The clean waxed-floor scent of the corridors, a band teacher named Mr. Winters raising his baton with pure joy in his eyes, the way sunlight angled through the windows of a particular classroom in the afternoons, Daniel and Sasha and Jack all around him with their instruments and Anna listening somewhere off to the side, long hours in the van driving to music competitions, the pine-scented-disinfectant smell of the locker rooms, a red pencil case with a zipper. "Like what?" he asked. "What were the rumors you remember?"

She was refilling their glasses.

"Just, you know, unkind things. "

"Come on, Taylor, I can take it. What were they saying about her?"

"They said— you know, it's stupid, just stupid rumors— they said she was. well, they said she was seeing people. They said it was a bit of a crowded field there right before she left school, toward the end." She returned the lemonade pitcher to the fridge. "I'm sorry. It's nasty. I know it's not true."

"How would you know that?"

"Well, it's just— I guess I should say I hope it's not true. I don't like that kind of thing. They said she was sleeping around, and then the story was that she'd gone to live with her aunt in Georgia, but there was this crazy rumor that she'd left school because she was pregnant and had a miscarriage, or sometimes the rumor was that she'd had a baby and was still living in Florida, just one or two towns over. You know, just rumors. Crazy stuff."

"What about Anna's sister?" Gavin asked. "You ever see Sasha around?"

"Never," Taylor said. "I don't know what happened to her."

He left her house soon after that—"We should do this again," they told one another without conviction— and drove out of the closed streets of the subdivision, past the security guard and out into the larger world. It was five o'clock. He drove to the police station and parked his car within view of the front door— the station shared parking with a mall and an auto-body shop, so he felt reasonably inconspicuous— and waited until Daniel appeared in the station doorway around six.

Daniel didn't move quickly. He was slow, distracted, jingling the change in his pockets and staring at the pavement. He looked up when Gavin said his name.

"You're so persistent," Daniel said. "I admire that about you."

"Daniel, I need to talk to you."

"I don't really have a lot to say to you, Gavin. I don't think we know each other very well." Daniel had resumed his slow progress across the parking lot. "High school was a very long time ago."

"Daniel—" He was almost dancing at Daniel's side, so agitated that he couldn't be still. "Daniel, every time I ask anyone about Anna, they tell me to talk to you."

" Really."

"Daniel, I know she had a baby. I think the baby was mine."

"That's none of my business," Daniel said, "and again, that was really quite a while ago, wasn't it?" He swatted at a drip of sweat on his forehead. "Why don't you drop it, Gavin?"

"Because I think she's my kid," Gavin said. "I want to find her and make sure she's okay."

"And make sure she's okay?" They'd reached Daniel's car, a gray Jeep with a dented fender and rust on the side. "If you'd been paying more attention ten years ago—"

"I want to do the right thing. I'm trying to do something good here."

Daniel looked at him for a moment.

"This is just a shot at redemption for you," he said. "You don't even know the kid. You fucked up your life in New York and you feel like a failure, so now you want to do something good."

"So the kid exists," Gavin said. " Thank you for confirming that."

"Now that we've established your superb interrogative skills, I'd appreciate it tremendously if you'd step away from my car."

"Can you please just tell me where Anna is? That's all I want to know."

"This isn't something you want to be involved in." Daniel was getting into the Jeep. "I don't want to see you again. Are we clear?"

Gavin stepped back, stung, and Daniel closed the Jeep door.

"I've known you since the first grade," Gavin said. "All I want is to talk to you for a minute."

"If you knew more, you'd thank me," Daniel said. "Can you just forget about this? All of it? I'm giving you a gift here."

He left Gavin standing alone in the heat of the parking lot. Gavin thought for a moment about whether he could forget about it, but found that he couldn't.

T h e n e x t afternoon at five o'clock Gavin was waiting in the parking lot outside the police station again, but this time he stayed in his car. He had bought pizza and orange soda, and the pizza had given the car a stale pepperoni smell that he knew was going to linger. He had to keep the engine running, because without the air conditioner the car heated quickly and he was afraid he'd black out if it got too hot. He'd run out of orange soda and was debating whether to make a run for another bottle when Daniel emerged from the police station. Daniel crossed the parking lot to his Jeep, and Gavin eased his car out of the lot behind him.

H e h a d two jobs after that. There was the job he did for Eilo, the eight or nine hours he spent at her service. Driving to visit and photograph houses, negotiating with the residents of foreclosed homes, writing up property descriptions at his desk. Eilo liked his work. He neither enjoyed nor particularly disliked the occupation. He wanted only to reach the evening, when the real work began. His secret investigation, the story he was tracking, the focused hours spent waiting for Daniel to appear in the doorway of the police station.

Gavin recognized himself in the evenings— a newspaperman, a private investigator, a man who chased stories and sought out clues— but he didn't recognize Daniel. It was almost inconceivable that this was the same Daniel he'd known all his life until he'd left for New York. He wouldn't have imagined that a person could change so completely, but then, he didn't recognize Jack either.

Daniel always came out of the police station with slumped shoulders, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. He had an air of perpetual distraction, lost to the world, which made it easy to trail him undetected. He seemed to work six days a week. On two of those days he went to the elementary school, where he picked up his four children. They swarmed all around him, a very small set of twins and two a little bigger. They showed him drawings they'd made and ribbons for accomplishments, papers with stars on them that caught the light from a distance, and in those moments Daniel was a changed man. He smiled, he touched their hair and said things that made them giggle, he inspected every ribbon and drawing. He drove them to his home— a house that looked from the outside to be too small for four children— in a new part of the suburbs that at first Gavin didn't know very well, a section that seemed to have radiated outward from the blank epicenter of a golf course.

Divorced, Gavin decided. Because on the other days Daniel took a different route and drove home alone, avoided the vicinity of the elementary school even though driving near the school would have been faster, parked his car in the driveway and walked to the front door without looking up from his feet. A light went on in one room on the ground floor. All the other windows stayed dark. Some time later dinner arrived, usually in a pizza delivery car. Gavin always parked down the street behind another vehicle, cut his engine and opened the window. He sat alone in his car, watching and waiting, sometimes falling asleep.

He was frightening himself.

T h e p r o b l e m was that Gavin wasn't really sure what he was looking for, or whether he'd recognize it if he saw it. Daniel's routine was absolute. It wasn't that Gavin was necessarily expecting Anna or the child to simply appear at Daniel's house, if Anna was even in Florida, if Anna was still alive, if the child hadn't vanished into the hell of a homeless shelter. He was looking for something more subtle, a sign of some kind, but he couldn't imagine what it would look like or if he might have missed it a dozen times already. He brought his beloved 1973 Yashica and took photographs of Daniel leaving the police station, photographs of Daniel's house and of the pizza-delivery guy, but he didn't know what he was documenting aside from Daniel's apparently unremarkable life. He was tired from the late nights, and frustrated. In the office with Eilo he drank cup after cup of coffee until his heart raced.

There was more work than they could handle, a new foreclosure or two every day. She was talking about hiring more people. She had a gardener working for her now, a quiet man named Carlos who mowed lawns and planted flowers in front of the houses they were trying to sell. Sometimes instead of going to the police station to follow Daniel home he stayed at Eilo's house and they ate dinner together picnic-style on the living room floor, the way they had when he'd first come down reeling from New York.

"What do you do with yourself in the evenings?" she asked.

"Not much," he said. "Read, watch TV, do crossword puzzles. Drive around." He'd considered telling her about the search for Anna and the little girl, but there was something he liked about having one part of his life that was only his. He'd lost so much in New York and had been left with so little.

On a Friday afternoon he drove back to Mortimer Street. It was one of those golden-light afternoons when the suburbs are at their most beautiful. The air dense with humidity and the heat like a diving bell, sound muffled within. Gavin rang the doorbell. No one came to the door. He stood for a while on the cracked front step before he remembered Jack's tent in the backyard.

He walked around the side of the house, pushing through overgrown bushes that he couldn't identify, dark waxy leaves and bright flowers. An airplane droned in the sky overhead. He stepped out into the yard, grass up to his knees.

Gavin heard his name, but it was a moment before he saw Jack. He was sitting alone under an orange tree in a white plastic lawn chair, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. There was a book open on his lap.

"You came back," Jack said.

"Of course I did." There were two other plastic chairs in the shade of the orange tree. He sat in the one closest to Jack. "Were you working today?"

Jack was wearing what looked like a uniform, a red polo shirt and black trousers. He was covered in dust. "My friend's got a company," he said. "I help rip carpets out."

"That sounds difficult."

"It's okay. It pays enough to get by." Jack didn't seem to want to talk about it.

"What are you reading?"

Jack passed him the book. Django Reinhardt: A Life. It was dog-eared and battered, small tears along the bottom of the dust jacket. Gavin opened the front cover and read the inscription: To my beloved son Liam on the occasion of his high school graduation with love and congratulations.—G.

"I wonder who Liam was," Gavin said. He'd found similar inscriptions in books he'd bought used.

"Liam? My roommate from college. You just missed him, actually." Jack took the book back from Gavin and set it on the grass by his lawn chair. "He used to do this thing," Jack said, "back in music school. It was pretty funny, he'd be drunk or whatever, and he'd say—" Jack raised his Gatorade bottle and dropped his voice—" 'My name is Liam Deval, and I am going to be famous.' "

"Wait," Gavin said, "Liam Deval? The guitarist? I used to listen to him play in New York."

"Yeah, he was up there for a long time. Always meant to visit him there." Jack's gaze was distant. Aside from his disastrous foray into South Carolina, Jack had never left the state of Florida.

"But he's here now?"

"Yeah, he's visiting Anna," Jack said.

"What?"

"I didn't— I'm sorry," Jack said, "I'm sorry, I always screw up." He was reaching into his pocket. Gavin looked away while he measured three pills into his hand.

"Did you just say Liam Deval's in Florida because of Anna?"

"I can't talk about it," Jack said. "I can't talk about Anna. I promised I wouldn't."

"Promised who?"

"Deval," Jack said. He looked like he wanted to cry. "Forget I said anything."

"It's okay," Gavin said. "It's okay. We won't talk about Anna."

Jack nodded. He was looking at his feet.

"But maybe you could tell me about Deval," Gavin said. "I really love his music."

"Yeah, he's good. Really good. I mean, I was sort of good. I maybe had something. But Deval, he had the music." Jack smiled. "He was trying to be Django Reinhardt. And you know what? He might be as good as Reinhardt was."

"Where's he staying? I'd love to meet him."

"I don't know," Jack said. "A hotel somewhere, I guess. Oh wait, wait, he told me." Jack rested his head on the back of the chair and stared into space. He was still for so long that Gavin glanced up to see what he was looking at. The leaves of the orange tree were brilliant green against the hazy sky. "The Decker," Jack said.

"The Decker?"

"It was something like that. The Dracker, or the Decker, or something."

"He say if he was coming back?" The heat was making Gavin's head swim. He wanted to lie down.

"No," Jack said, "but I hope he comes back. He said he was going to go visit Daniel."

"Of course he was."

"Did you just say something?"

"Nothing. Hey, is he playing anywhere while he's here?"

"Sure," Jack said. "He's got a gig at the Lemon Club."

T h e L e m o n Club had been open for thirty years and in high school Gavin had gone there a few times, trying to be sophisticated, trying to grasp hold of something that he might use to pull himself up toward adulthood, but he could never find it and as a teenager he'd felt uneasy there, pitifully young, out of his depth and unable to swim. The Lemon Club was a stop on the way to Miami and he'd seen a few big names there. The one he remembered best was a trumpet player, Bert Johnston. He'd brought Anna there in his last year of high school. They'd sat together at a round table just big enough for his Pepsi and her ginger ale— he wished he could order wine for both of them but didn't want to risk being laughed at by the bartender in front of her— and they listened to Bert Johnston's trumpet wail and sing. When Anna reached for his hand he didn't notice, only realized later that her hand was in his and he couldn't remember how it had ended up there. It was too warm in the club, the air conditioner laboring and spitting water over the door, and normally this would have bothered him but that night he was transfixed, that night things were becoming clearer. He was watching Bert Johnston and realizing that he wasn't going to be a musician. It wasn't an unpleasant revelation, just an understanding that his life was going to go in one direction and not another.

"I'll never be that good," he told Anna later, not upset, just stating

the fact, but she mistook his tone and tried to console him. The thought of the practice it would take to be a professional musician made him weary. He was reading a lot of noir and wearing a fedora, and he'd already developed backup plans. If he couldn't be a jazz musician he was going to be a newspaperman. If he couldn't be a newspaperman he was going to be a private detective.

The Lemon Club was already a little decrepit in his memories, but it had declined further since then and now the strip-mall parking lot was cracked and had a small palm tree growing out of the middle of it. Most of the other tenants were gone, sections of the mall boarded up. The only other tenants were an off-track betting parlor, an evangelical church and a pizza place with a torn awning.

In his memories the interior was glamorous, but all night places are cheaper-looking in daylight and with the curtains opened the light picked up the grit in the upholstery, the swimming galaxies of dust motes in the air.

"Help you?" the bartender asked, and Gavin realized he was the only customer. The bartender wasn't the sullen-looking old man Gavin remembered. He was young and blond and looked somehow like a lifeguard.

"I was hoping to see the listings for the next couple months," Gavin said. "I heard a jazz guitarist I like might be coming through town." He realized that it was stupid to say "jazz" in that sentence— it was after all a club devoted to this and no other kind of music— but the new bartender was more forgiving than the old bartender had been and didn't even smirk or tell him to get lost, just produced a photocopy of a calendar from behind the bar and scanned it for a moment before he passed it to Gavin.

"I think you maybe mean Deval?" he said. "Only guitarist I see here."

The calendar read Deval & Morelli, but Morelli's name had been crossed out.

"Can I keep this?" Gavin asked. The bartender nodded. Deval was scheduled to play in three nights. Gavin went to Jack's house every day after work and sat with him in the backyard under the orange tree, but Liam Deval didn't appear and Jack revealed nothing except his interest in jazz history and the extent of his pill addiction.

On Friday Gavin bought a dark red shirt with gray pinstripes, drove to the Lemon Club an hour before the set and established himself at a small table in the darkest corner, farthest from the stage. He wanted to be invisible. Only a few other people were here at this hour— a couple sitting at a table by the stage, a man at the end of the bar with a tattoo of a goldfish on his neck. Gavin ordered a pint of Guinness. He'd brought his notebook with him, as if he really were either a newspaperman or a detective. His new shirt had cufflinks and he caught himself fiddling with them as he waited.

The club filled slowly. A bass player made his way between the tables and began tuning his instrument. He was followed a few minutes later by a drummer, but there was no sign of Deval. A saxophonist had appeared— a saxophonist? With Deval, who so far as Gavin knew only ever played with Morelli, a bassist, sometimes a drummer? — and he was talking to the bass player while the drummer assembled his kit. At nine twenty the bartender came to the stage and tapped lightly on a microphone. There'd been a substitution, he said. Liam Deval had had to remain in New York at the last minute, a family emergency, but fortunately the great Chicago saxophonist Pedro Lang— who looked too young to be called the great anything, in Gavin's opinion— was in town a day early for his show tomorrow night and had graciously agreed to bless them with his presence two nights in a row and so without further ado, etc., and applause filled the room while Gavin finished his beer.

He thought about leaving but it was nice to be out in the evening for once, away from the quiet of his apartment with the television and the recorded music and his notes, not waiting in his car outside Daniel's house like a stalker. The saxophone player really was great, mesmerizing actually. Everyone who'd arrived to hear Deval stayed to watch him except for the man at the end of the bar whom Gavin had noticed when he came in, who settled up with the bartender and left just before the music began.

I n t h e morning Gavin sat at his desk in Eilo's rec room looking at yellow-pages listings of local motels with names similar to Decker or Dracker, run-down places by highways— Cable TV! Jacuzzi in Penthouse Suite! — and trying to ignore his headache. The saxophonist had been good and it was a pleasure to lose himself in music, to sit alone without having to talk to anyone. There was a span of time when he'd thought of nothing but the sound.

The Draker Motel had purchased a square ad with a minuscule photograph in the middle of it, so small that it could have been almost any motel anywhere. He looked it up on the Internet and was momentarily dazzled by the website's flashing red text— Cable TV!!! Convenient Location!!! — and a picture of a small white dog that he supposed must belong to the owner. Convenient to what? He looked it up on a map. It was, he supposed, convenient to the interstate.

He drove to a part of the suburbs that was close up against the edge of the wilderness, although it had occurred to Gavin that what he thought of as wilderness might just be a band of wildly lush greenery with another suburb approaching undetected from the other side, like two teams of miners tunneling toward one another under the earth. The streets out here were wide and industrial, self-storage facilities, a junkyard. The Draker Motel stood at the end of an almost-deserted cul-de-sac, two stories of stucco with a balcony running along the second floor.

Gavin stayed in his car for a moment looking out at the heat waves shimmering over the parking lot, put on his fedora and ventured out. The motel office was a small wood-paneled room with tiny palm trees running up and down the wallpaper, an air conditioner rattling in the window. The girl behind the counter looked no older than fifteen.

"You have a nice website," he said. "I liked the picture of the dog."

"Thanks," the girl said warily.

"I'm looking for a guest, a friend of mine. Do you have a Liam Deval staying here?"

"I'm not supposed to say the names of guests," she said.

He opened his wallet and laid three twenties on the counter. "If you're not allowed to say," he said, "maybe I could just take a quick glance at your computer?"

She glanced over her shoulder, slipped the money into her pocket.

"I might get in trouble," she said.

He laid another twenty on the counter. "But do you think anyone would notice? It'd only take me a minute."

She bit her lip.

" Maybe you were in the back," he said. "You didn't hear me come in."

She swiveled the computer monitor so he could see it and pushed the keyboard and mouse toward him, took the money and vanished behind a beaded curtain. He wasn't familiar with the software, but it didn't seem complicated. It was possible to bring up a list of guests' names with a few keystrokes. Liam Deval's name wasn't in the registry.

He went through the list again. There was a D. Reinhardt in room

18. Gavin left the tiny chilled office with its palm-tree-print curtains

and laboring air conditioner, followed the numbers down a line of closed doors. The heat was staggering. This side of the hotel was exposed to the full glare of sunlight, the stucco hot to the touch.

He knocked on the door of room 18 and the curtains in the window flickered, but too briefly and too slightly to make out a face.

"Who is it?" The voice came through the window, which he saw now was open just a crack.

"My name's Gavin Sasaki," he said to the curtains. "I'm looking for Liam Deval."

"I don't know you, Gavin," the man said. "Why are you here?"

The heat was making Gavin dizzy. "It's about Anna Montgomery," he said. "May I come in?"

"I have to make a phone call first," the man said. Was this Liam Deval's voice? He couldn't tell. Deval hadn't talked much at Barbès and everyone sounds different behind a microphone. " Could you wait out there for a moment?"

"Of course," Gavin said.

He had been waiting outside for no more than a few minutes when the old fear began to come over him. It was a hundred degrees, heat radiating from the cement and from the building's exterior wall. He was already sweating. Cars shimmered in the parking lot. The angle of the sun was such that the second-floor balcony cast no shade. He glanced at his watch, turned his back on the sun and closed his eyes. Thinking of ice cubes, of orange sherbet, of snow. When he opened his eyes again it seemed to him that a long time had passed so he called out toward the window, "Hello, could I possibly come in?" but there was no answer. He wondered if he was being watched, if Deval— if that voice was Deval, if his instinct that the D. Reinhardt in the hotel log and Deval were the same person was correct and the man in the room wasn't just some malevolent stranger— was still on the phone.

Gavin was too hot for his fedora, so he took it off. He leaned forward, let his forehead rest on the stucco between the window and the door. He was going to get sick from staying out in the sun like this but the least he could do was wait, wasn't it, with Anna and Chloe perhaps so close? The thought of being a father. It seemed possible that they might be in the motel room, mere feet from him on the other side of the wall. It seemed to him that he'd been waiting for a very long time. He wanted to look at his watch again, but it seemed like too much effort to raise his arm. His thoughts drifted. He could help them in some way, do the right thing. He had a job, he could contribute, maybe even go to Chloe's school plays. Maybe they'd all eat dinner together sometimes, a sort of provisional family. He'd wanted his own family for as long as he could remember. He was having some trouble staying upright. His fedora, he realized, had fallen from his hand.

"Please!" he called again, toward the window.

"You're going to have to wait," the voice said. A note of panic. "I can't reach anyone."

"Who are you calling? Daniel?"

"How do you know Daniel?"

"How do I know him? I don't know." Gavin was aware that he was mumbling. He couldn't think of how to explain how he knew Daniel; the whole mundane history of elementary school and high school, first grade field trips to museums and seventh grade parties in basements and the jazz quartet seemed like too much to explain all of a sudden. "It's been a long time." He was having trouble concentrating. "Listen," he said, louder now, "I'm not going to give up. I'll stay here all night. I'm going to keep chasing Anna and Chloe forever if I have to."

"Forever?" the man's voice was almost squeaky now. "Are there others with you?"

"What? No, I'm alone," Gavin said. "I'm alone." It wouldn't be so bad to take a short nap, would it, just to drift off for a moment or two? He felt too sick to open his eyes. How long had he been out here? He was seized by a sudden chill. What was strange was that the wall of the motel was softening. He was sinking into it.

There was a sound as if from a long way off, and he realized that the door had opened beside him. Gavin stood upright with tremendous difficulty. His legs were like water.

The man's voice was nervous. "Why did you come here?"

Gavin was so dizzy now that he could no longer see. A blinding wash of swimming dots over his vision, a haze.

"I'm here for Anna," he said. The open doorway was all cold air and black shadow, a sanctuary— he forced himself to move and lurched forward, trying to get inside before he blacked out.

"Hold it right there!" the man called out, from somewhere farther back in the room. "Don't come any closer! I don't know who you are!"

But Gavin knew only that he had to get inside, into the cool. He kept moving.

"Stop," the man cried, "oh God, please," but Gavin didn't. He heard a dull sound but didn't immediately understand what it had to do with the sudden pain singing out from his left arm, his rapidly numbing hand. He fell to his knees.

"I think I have heatstroke," he mumbled, to no one in particular. He fell forward then and closed his eyes, soft carpet. His shirt was wet and he was impossibly tired. It seemed like a good moment to sleep, and he drifted off into a confused dream about New York City, Sasha, the pleasant chaos of the Star newsroom, a trumpet.

Nineteen

The Lola Quartet's last concert: Anna threw the paper airplane and took a step backward, dry leaves breaking under her shoes. The quartet was playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck in the night heat with dancers all around them. Daniel was playing with his eyes closed. She watched the airplane rise through the air and descend, the way Gavin looked up a moment before it landed at his feet. The bass solo was ending. Gavin lifted his trumpet to his lips and he half-smiled at her around the mouthpiece before he blew the first note, but she couldn't bring herself to smile back. In a moment he would unfold the paper airplane and read the two-word message it carried, but at this instant he was playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön," the quartet's signature piece, the horns in perfect unison, and Taylor was singing again. Gavin let Jack's saxophone take over the brass line. He stooped to pick up the airplane, but Anna couldn't bear to watch him read it so she stepped behind a bush. A childish desire to hide, to disappear for a moment. When she was little she used to stay for hours under her bed.

She heard footsteps approaching. Gavin walked close by her where

she stood against the leaves, but he was coming from a haze of light into darkness and he was momentarily a little blind. She kept still, almost not breathing. Gavin called her name, but he didn't look back. He was moving quickly, his trumpet in his hand, and he receded into the trees and bushes until she couldn't see his white t-shirt anymore.

She waited a moment before she turned back toward the lights. The song was done, everyone tired and a little high, people dispersing and picking up water bottles and beer cans from the grass. Jack was standing by the truck, flirting with a twelfth grader whose name Anna didn't know. She saw Taylor looking at her, but Taylor's boyfriend whispered something in her ear just then and they both turned away from Anna. Sasha was packing up her drum kit and this was the hardest thing, not going to her at that moment, not telling her about her departure. Anna and Daniel had agreed that even Sasha couldn't know where they were going, not yet. She would call Sasha when they were settled in Utah. Daniel wrestled his bass into its enormous carrying case, lowered it down from the truck and jumped after it.

"I'm glad you're here," he said. Anna knew he hadn't seen the paper airplane— he played his solos with his eyes closed— but she still felt like a traitor. She wasn't sure in that moment what she'd hoped to accomplish with the airplane note. She couldn't tell Gavin she was leaving, she couldn't tell anyone, everything had all been decided in these past two weeks, long afternoons of cutting school and sitting in Daniel's basement talking about the plan, which was at first so wild that two weeks was how much time they'd needed to talk it into reality.

"Did you see where Gavin went?" he asked. "Did he see you?"

"No," she said. "He didn't see me." She looked back at the trees, where Gavin had disappeared. She wasn't sure how far back the woods went, if it might be possible to get lost in them.

Daniel glanced around. The others were drifting away in twos and threes, no one paying attention to them.

"Why don't you get your bag," he murmured.

Her duffel bag was waiting at the base of a tree. She felt piercingly lonely and in that moment she wanted nothing more than to see Gavin again. She stood for a second at the edge of the shadows, but Gavin didn't emerge and Daniel was waiting for her. They walked together away from the pickup truck where Jack and Sasha and Taylor and a half-dozen others still lingered, their voices fading into sounds of frogs and crickets. Anna and Daniel turned the corner around the side of the gym and she felt safer then, out of sight, fireflies rising silently from the grass all around her.

Daniel had parked his station wagon at the far end of the student parking lot. He struggled to fit the bass into the back while she sat in the passenger seat, staring out the side window at the pavement bright with moonlight, the lights of the school. A thought: I might never see this place again. This didn't make her as wistful as she'd thought it would. It stirred nothing in her except a vague unease. Daniel dropped into the driver's seat.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Yes." She was impatient with the question. What had she been doing these past two weeks, spending time with Daniel and avoiding Gavin, if not readying herself for this? The passing streets were dense with memory. It was unfathomable that before morning they'd be across state lines, like imagining driving off the edge of a map. She had never left Florida before.

"You'll get to come back someday," Daniel said, as if reading her thoughts. "Once this all blows over. This doesn't have to be forever."

Anna only nodded. She didn't feel like talking anymore. She

realized then why she'd sent the paper airplane sailing through the air to Gavin: it was too late for anything to change now, the plan was already in motion and it was the only plan she'd been able to come up with that she thought might save her and keep her child out of foster care, they were going to Utah and she risked everything if Gavin or anyone else knew, but she at least wanted him to know she was sorry. She wished now that she'd written more.

They drove all night. Daniel was nervous, talking to fill the silence. His aunt was a good person, he said. He'd been visiting Utah in the summertime all his life and he knew for a fact that his aunt didn't talk to his parents, who he thought would probably cry if they knew he'd fathered a child out of wedlock. He'd told his aunt about the situation and she'd said they could stay at her house, he said. The aunt just wanted to help, because that's what good people do in situations like this, they help, and if there were more people like that in the world—

"Daniel," she said, "it's okay. We're going to be okay."

"He's your boyfriend," he said after a moment. "I don't like to think of myself as the kind of guy who steals girls from their boyfriends."

"You didn't steal me," she said. She was tired. It was all too much, actually. She was feeling queasy again. The radio was off. They moved in silence up the interstate. Daniel was looking straight ahead, his face illuminated only occasionally by passing lights. He was wearing his hair in an Afro that year, and it turned briefly into a halo each time a set of headlights passed. "Daniel," she said, "I'm going to try to sleep for a bit."

"Okay." He sounded scared and uncertain, and it occurred to her as she was drifting off to sleep that both of them were very young. She was looking at Daniel's dark hands on the wheel and thinking, Please, oh please let the child be black.

.

W h e n A n n a thought about Utah she had an impression of desert and also an impression of ski slopes, and the two images didn't fit together in her mind. But in the car with Daniel she imagined a house, orderly and large, with a couple of rooms set aside for her and Daniel and the baby. Their own bathroom maybe. A suite! It was a long drive, two days broken up by roadside motels, and there were moments when she wished they could travel forever. A state of suspension, sitting still in the passenger seat while the landscape changed all around her. Daniel did all the driving, because Anna didn't know how to drive— her parents shared a single car that she'd been forbidden to go near— and Daniel didn't like anyone driving his car anyway, even though it was just an enormous old station wagon that his parents had given him when they'd upgraded. On the long drive out of South Florida Anna was free to close her eyes in the passenger seat and imagine being a different kind of person in a different kind of life.

At the end she woke from a long nap and the quality of light had changed. They were on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. The sunlight here had a hard high-altitude brilliance. The landscape had been distilled into the barest palette of colors— brown mountains tinged with green under a blue-white sky, the gray of the highway ahead, white light.

"Are we getting close?"

"We're almost there."

"Daniel," she said, "I don't know how to thank you. Most people wouldn't have done this."

"Look, Anna, there's something I should tell you."

"What?"

"My aunt doesn't have a lot of money," he said. "She and my uncle got divorced a few years back, he's the one with the construction firm I told you about, and it's the kind of situation. look, you'll be safe there, she's a trustworthy person. But it's not a really nice place or anything."

"Oh," Anna said. "It's okay. It doesn't have to be nice." She carefully replaced her vision of the large house, the suite, the deep white carpets with a modest but still cozy house, a spare room.

"I'm glad you don't mind," Daniel said. "I wish I could take you somewhere nicer."

"It's okay," she said.

They were passing through suburbs now. There were things here that were different— mountains rising up at the edge of the sky, an absence of palm trees, less-green lawns— but these suburbs weren't really different from the place where she'd spent her entire life, endless similar houses and cul-de-sacs. She was left with an unsettling sense that they hadn't gone anywhere, that this was only a variation on the place where they'd started. Daniel pulled into the driveway of a low single-story house with peeling white paint. A run-down street bleached by high sunlight, a neighborhood of brownish lawns and toys left out in yards.

"Well!" Daniel said, too brightly. "Here we are!" She stepped out of the car into the thin bright air. Daniel pulled their duffel bags from the backseat and came to stand beside her.

"It's nice," she said.

"Wait till you see the inside." He seemed nervous, trying to keep his voice light but she understood his strain. The same fear she'd felt every time she'd ever brought a friend home, Please oh please let everything be calm inside the house today. She took his arm as they approached the front door.

"It's okay," she said, while they stood waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. "Even if it isn't good, it's better than what I left, isn't it?"

"I don't know," he said. "I hope this was the right thing."

.

Da n i e l ' s a u n t was a thin nervous woman who worked as a hotel maid near the convention center. Delia was kind but tired, distracted by worry. Her hair was caught up in a hundred tiny braids with beads on the ends. She had a daughter in college and she'd taken in subletters to help with the tuition. Anna gathered that Daniel hadn't been aware of this fact. This meant that another family was living in the basement, and there was, it seemed, nowhere for Anna and Daniel to stay.

"I thought you could maybe take Tanya's old room," Delia said, but her daughter's bedroom was being used for storage, stacked high with boxes filled with things that Delia and Tanya were trying to sell on eBay. The people downstairs were playing loud music. Anna stood in the hall listening to Daniel and his aunt, and she felt the rhythm coming up through the walls. She was mesmerized by the movement of the beads at the ends of Delia's braids, the soft musical clicking every time she turned her head.

"Tanya's room looks kind of full, actually," Daniel said, in a tight voice that made Anna shiver. She was acutely sensitive to oncoming storms. She pressed the palms of her hands to the cool wall and felt the bass coming through in pulses. Thinking about the other times she'd run away, about how much less complicated running away was when it was only you and you were only going a few miles from home and no one else's family was involved.

"And she'll be home over the holidays," Delia said. " Maybe you could stay in the living room?"

But the living room was tiny and open to the kitchen, almost entirely taken up by an overstuffed sofa. It was clearly the room where Delia spent most of her time when she was home. There were magazines and half-completed crossword puzzles open on the coffee table, an ironing board set up with a neat stack of pressed clothing folded at the end of it, a gray cat sprawled asleep on the sofa. A TV blared commercials into the air.

"I wonder if you'd mind waiting in the car for a few minutes," Daniel said to Anna, and by this Anna understood that they were leaving again. She sat for a long time in the car with the seat reclined, staring at the mountains. She felt hollow and worn thin. It was obvious to her at that moment that their plans would end in catastrophe. The sunlight through the windshield was too bright.

"We're going to my friend's place," Daniel said when he came to her. He looked flushed and spent, as if he'd been shouting. She looked past him at the house. His aunt was standing in the open doorway, wiping tears from her face. "He doesn't live that far from here."

"What did you say to her?" Anna asked, but Daniel pretended not to hear. He pulled out of the driveway and when she looked back the front door was closed.

His friend lived in a sprawling ranch house on a cul-de-sac with the same reduced color palette as the larger suburbs: white houses, blue sky, green-brown lawns. This sheer white light.

"Why don't we just go to your uncle's place?"

"Because he lives in a small apartment and my friend's got an entire house to himself."

"What's your friend's name?" she asked, on the way up the driveway. Daniel was walking ahead of her with the bags.

"Paul," he said. "We worked together when I was here last summer."

P a u l w a s a wiry man in his early twenties, with blond hair and an earring and a tattoo on his neck, a splash of orange. He took them on a tour. The house seemed to have at least three bedrooms, closed doors along the upstairs hallway. Paul had friends who came to stay with him sometimes, he said. A roommate who was here every couple of weeks. He showed them the garage, where an expensive-looking silver car was parked next to a motorcycle.

"One rule," Paul said, when he showed them into the storage room beside the garage. He was sorry that this was the only room he could give them, he'd said. All the other rooms had other uses. "You can't ever go into the basement."

"I think he's a dealer," Daniel said later, when he and Anna were alone. He had lapsed into a deep silence. She was surprised to hear him speak.

"But when you knew him, last summer. "

"He was working construction," Daniel said. " Looks to me like there's been a career change."

The storage room wasn't large. There was a foldout sofa, a layer of dust on the linoleum floor, a bare lightbulb overhead. Daniel was embarrassed, it was obvious to Anna, and she wanted to say something to make it better but didn't know what she could possibly say. She sat on the sofa looking out the window at the backyard, the brownish grass and falling-down fence. Daniel seemed to be having some difficulty looking directly at her. In those last two weeks in Florida they hadn't talked much, she realized, about the actual circumstances in which they'd live after they ran away. He'd told her his aunt had room for them and she had imagined a mansion.

She wanted to leave but she had no more than eighty dollars to her name. She was here and there was nowhere else she could go.

Th e d a y s in the house were long and empty. People came and went, cars pulling in and out of the driveway. She heard voices upstairs and on the stairs to the basement. The day after their arrival Daniel went to work at his uncle's construction firm. A house was going up across town, Daniel told her, lying beside her at night. A huge sprawling McMansion of a place with pillars and a portrait of Joseph Smith carved into stone above the door. Daniel said it was creepy, actually. He'd been raised Catholic, but he wasn't about to litter any house of his with religious iconography. Anna tried to imagine what their house would be like, if they ever lived in a house that was theirs. The thought of living with Daniel indefinitely was somehow awkward. He was working overtime and went jogging in the evenings. She didn't see much of him.

Six voice mails came in from Gavin, like dispatches from a foreign country. Pleas for information, questions about her whereabouts, invitations to the prom. She listened and then deleted them. She sometimes cried at night.

Before the pregnancy began to show she got a job in a doughnut shop. It was down on a main street, a twenty-minute walk. She'd never had a job before but the work was easy and the manager liked her. It was a pleasure to escape from the silent house. She didn't mind it, although the smell of doughnuts made her nauseous some days. She served coffee and counted change through long afternoons while the question of paternity hung overhead like a cloud.

On t h e i r third or fourth week in the house she woke at three in the morning, thrown out of sleep by an unremembered sound. Daniel was standing by the storage-room window, staring out at the backyard through the smallest possible opening in the curtain. He looked stricken.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"You don't want to see this," he said, without taking his eyes away from the window, but he didn't object when she came to stand beside him. That was when she heard the sound again, a sharp cry from outside.

She was aware first of movement, a confused motion in the middle of the lawn just at the point where the light cast from the house met darkness, two figures moving on the edge of visibility. It took her a moment to decipher the scene.

There were two men in the backyard. For a moment it was almost a balanced fight, both men punching, but then one fell to his knees and seemed to retreat into himself, curled up on the grass in a ball, and the other— Paul, she realized— struck the fallen man again and again and again.

"He's going to kill him," Anna whispered.

"He won't," Daniel whispered back. His eyes were very wide. "The last thing a guy like him wants is to get in trouble with the law."

"We have to stop him," she hissed, but neither of them moved and the blows continued until Paul gave his victim a final vicious kick and turned toward them, stalking back to the house, sweat shining on his face and soaking through his shirt. Knuckles bleeding and eyes bright, his tattoo slick on the side of his neck. Daniel pulled her away from the window.

Anna woke late in the morning and wondered if it had perhaps been a dream. Daniel had left for work already. She looked through the gap in the curtains, half-expecting to see a body on the grass, but the yard was empty. When she went outside she saw the blood, spattered here and there, less than she was expecting for the violence she'd seen. There was a pine tree in the back corner of the yard by the fence, a wooden picnic table beneath it, and she liked to sit out there sometimes when the air in the house was too close. Today she walked past the blood and lay on her back on the table, numb, staring up at the patterns of pine needles and branches against the overcast sky. She closed her eyes and still saw the patterns on the inside of her eyelids.

"What are you thinking of?"

Anna hadn't heard Paul's approach over the dead grass. She started when she heard his voice and sat up on the table.

"Nothing," she said.

It was difficult not to look at his hands. He'd wrapped both knuckles in gauze and she remembered the impact of fists on ribs, the fallen man's cries.

"I've seen you out here before," he said.

She shrugged.

"So you just lie there on the table by the hour, thinking of nothing?"

"Yeah," she said, "that's sort of the point."

"Cigarette?"

"Yes please."

He hesitated a moment before he lit it for her. "You supposed to smoke when you're pregnant?"

"No." She inhaled slowly. "But I figure the occasional one can't hurt." He shrugged and sat down on the other end of the table. "I like your tattoo," she said. Perhaps this was adulthood, this feeling of danger, smoking a cigarette far from home with a man who'd beaten another man almost to death the night before.

" Thank you."

She hoped he might have a story to tell her, but he sat smoking in silence until she asked, "Why a goldfish?"

"My best friend drowned when we were kids," he said. "I got the tattoo of a fish to remind myself to fear water."

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I thought, I'll put it on my neck, where I'll never be able to forget it's there. Other tattoos, you put on a long-sleeved shirt and forget about them."

She wanted to ask for the rest of the story— Did your friend fall into a river, swim too far out into the ocean, hit his head in the bathtub? — but it seemed rude to pry, so she just smoked her cigarette and wished Daniel were there.

"So you're from here, then?" she asked, just to break the silence.

"I'm from Spanish Fork. You know where that is?"

"No."

"Gary Gilmore lived there for a while."

"I don't know who that is," she said.

He didn't seem to want to tell her. He blew a series of smoke rings into the cool air. "And you," he said, "I hear you're from Florida."

"Sebastian," she said.

"Where's that?"

"Near Boca. North of Miami."

"The whole state's north of Miami," he said. "Your parents know where you are?"

"I doubt they've noticed I left," Anna said.

"I have parents like that."

"It's a big club." She stubbed out her cigarette on the silvery wood. "You have a nice house," she said, but as soon as she said this it seemed like a stupid thing to have said. She had no idea if the house was Paul's or if he was just renting it, and it wasn't really all that nice.

He laughed and glanced at the house— gray stucco, pale in the dead brown lawn. "It's not a nice house," he said. "What it is is inconspicuous. I've come to value that more than niceness." He blew another series of smoke rings. She watched them dissolve into the air and thought of Sasha. "Don't take offense," he said, "but I look at a girl like you, pregnant, fifteen or sixteen or whatever, and I just have to wonder, what's the plan? What brings you to the Kingdom of Deseret?"

"I'm not sure what you mean." She didn't know what the Kingdom of Deseret was.

"Sure you do. You finish high school?"

"I've only got a year to go. I was thinking I'd get my GED."

"Yeah, and then what? You'll work at a McDonald's?"

"I always thought I'd do something with music. Maybe be a music producer or something."

"Come on. With a GED?"

"I don't know," she said. She found herself on the verge of tears and had to look away quickly. "I don't know what I'll do. I'll think of something."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. I see a girl like you, it's just something I wonder about. Who am I to talk, right? It's not like I ever went to college."

"What happened to your hands?" It was a bold question and for an instant she thought she'd made a horrible mistake, her stomach sank, he'd probably buried the man from last night behind the garden shed and now he'd kill her too and no one would ever know what had happened and Sasha would never see her again, Daniel would come home from work and she'd have disappeared into thin air, but he only smiled and looked at the bandages.

"I took care of a problem," he said. " Messy work."

"I should probably go," she said.

"You got somewhere to be?"

"I have to get to work soon."

" Where do you work?"

"The doughnut place down the street," she said.

"I'll give you a ride." He stood up from the table. She didn't want to

be in a car with him, but she didn't know how to politely refuse. He waited for her while she went into the house and changed into her uniform, the regulation t-shirt tight across her body. "How far along are you?" he asked, on the short drive down the hill.

"Four months."

"Boy or girl?"

"I don't know," she said. "I wanted it to be a surprise." In truth, she didn't care if it was a boy or a girl. All she cared about was the shade of the baby's skin. She caught herself looking at Daniel's skin at odd moments— his exposed back as he turned away from her to put on a clean t-shirt, his hand holding a spoon, the side of his face as he spoke on the phone to his parents— and whispering the same silent prayer over and over again: Please, please, please let the baby be black. She whispered the prayer to herself when she first felt the baby kick, when the first pain shuddered through her on a late afternoon in the doughnut shop four and a half months later, when she sat holding herself in the passenger seat of Paul's car as he sped toward the hospital with Daniel on his cell phone, while she lay on her back on the bed looking up at the lights with strangers shouting at her to push, please, please, please. But even before she had a good look at the baby she saw the way the nurse looked from the child to Daniel and then to Anna, the way Daniel's eyes filled with tears as he turned away from the bed. He left the room then and she was alone with the nurses, with the machines, with the baby who cried out and clung blindly to the soft blanket with hands that were very small and very pink.

Twenty

You still with me, Gavin?" Daniel asked softly. The air singing with electric blue stars.

T h e r e w a s something wrong with the ceiling. It was mostly white, but the texture of the tiles made constellations of gray that swarmed and changed shape the longer Gavin looked at them. His arm was a frozen, inert thing, pain seeping through the drugs. He was aware of sound: a nurse pulling the curtain around the bed, metal rings jangling; a beeping machine; soft footsteps.

The room was flickering. He kept falling in and out of sleep, if sleep was what this was. It felt lighter than unconsciousness. Intervals of twilight. Vertigo, a terrible shifting movement, the bed's a boat on rough water, I am going to drown.

"W a s I really shot?" Gavin murmured. "Was that really what happened to my arm?"

"He panicked," Daniel said. Daniel was an unsteady silhouette beside the bed, a blurred figure wavering. How long had he been there? "He thought you were someone else."

Gavin's ears were ringing. He closed his eyes again.

"I' m n o t someone else," Gavin said. He was confused and his voice was a mumble. He wasn't sure how long he'd been talking to Daniel, how long he'd been awake. His throat was dry. The texture of the ceiling above the hospital bed. Dizzy.

"He thought you were after Anna."

"I am after Anna. I've been looking for her." The drugs were a weight in his bloodstream, a fog behind his eyes. Antibiotics, the remnants of general anesthesia, whatever they were giving him for his arm. Was this how Jack felt through all the days of his life? He remembered being wheeled into surgery, flashes of sound and light.

"If you care about her," Daniel said, "I'd suggest you stay away from Deval." Was Gavin dreaming? He had the impression of swimming. Daniel's face wasn't entirely in focus.

"Or he'll shoot me again?" Gavin murmured. Talking nauseated him. He closed his eyes.

"Li s t e n, " D a n i e l said, "I'm here in my official capacity."

Gavin was awake again. Had he been awake the whole time? Nothing was certain. He'd been dreaming of a trumpet.

"I don't understand," he said.

"I'm a detective on the Sebastian police force, and I'm here interviewing the victim of a crime." Daniel was speaking very quietly. "This is what my report will say: you were visiting a friend in the mo tel, but you got the wrong room and the drug fiend on the other side of the door shot you and fled. Do you understand why I'm going to write that?"

"Not really," Gavin said. "I don't really understand any of it." He hazarded opening his eyes again. The ceiling was still moving so he looked down at the blanket and sheet instead, but the texture of the blanket had a way of telescoping in on itself. He wanted to put his hand over his eyes, to block the light and the queasy motion of everything around him, but his left arm seemed unmovable and the IV was in his right. "To protect Liam Deval?"

"Not Deval. Anna."

"Can you please just tell me what happened to her after high school? I know you know, and I'm so goddamned tired of asking." Gavin closed his eyes. "I am so dizzy," he said, to no one in particular.

"You lost a lot of blood," Daniel said. He was quiet for a few minutes, and Gavin had almost slipped back into sleep before he spoke again. "How did you know he was in the Draker Motel?"

"I used to be a reporter," Gavin said. "I can follow a story. Do I have to ask the question again?"

Daniel sighed. "Look, she was pregnant," he said. "Sixteen years old."

"Yes, I figured that part out already. She was pregnant and sixteen, and then what?"

"This isn't something I'm proud of. You do stupid things in high school. I made a mistake. But listen, she was pregnant, and she told me the kid was mine."

Gavin opened his eyes. Daniel's face was dim, hard to make out in the swarm of stars. "So what did you do?" he asked.

"I drove her to Utah. We were going to live with my aunt until we could get our own place."

"Why would she go with you? What did you offer her?"

"What do you think I offered her? A getaway car," Daniel said. "If you'd had a car and a place to take her, she'd have said the kid was yours."

"I didn't think she was. " He couldn't focus his thoughts. "I thought she was different than that."

"She was desperate. People are capable of anything when they're desperate. Look, I don't flatter myself. She wasn't in love with me. But you must have known what her family was like. I offered her a lifeline and she took it."

"She never wanted a lifeline," Gavin said. "I was always offering—"

"No, you were always threatening," Daniel said. "You were always threatening to call the authorities, every time she showed up at school with a bruise. That was your idea of helping her? Calling Family Services? They knew all about that household. She spent a year in foster care when she was a little kid. They were at that house all the time."

"She never told me that."

"They could easily have taken her child away from her. She was afraid of being separated from the baby."

"But she always said she didn't want any help." The whole thing was too much for him. The room was tilting, so he closed his eyes again. His throat was dry.

"If someone's drowning in front of you and they say they don't want to be saved, do you take them at their word or do you pull them out of the water? The way you stood by and did nothing."

"I didn't know—"

"You weren't paying attention."

"I need some water," Gavin whispered. "My throat. "

There was a plastic cup of water by the bed. Daniel lifted the cup and guided the straw to Gavin's lips. The water was warm.

"You took her to Utah," Gavin said. "What happened then?"

"The baby wasn't mine. We broke up. She left. She got in some trouble, ended up with Liam Deval."

"Why do I get the impression you're leaving out details?"

"Gavin, does it matter? This was all a decade ago."

"Everything matters, Daniel. Didn't you used to say that in high school?"

"I don't remember saying that."

"If you'll just tell me how to find Anna, I'll stay out of your way. I'll even forget who shot me. I don't know what you and Deval are doing, or why you're helping him. I actually don't even really care, so long as no one shoots me again and Anna and Chloe are safe."

Gavin heard footsteps in the corridor, Eilo's voice. He registered dimly that she'd been here earlier.

"Hello," she said from the doorway. Gavin smiled as best he could. Daniel turned to look at her, and Gavin saw that she didn't recognize him.

"I'll just be another minute, ma'am," Daniel said. He leaned over the bed. "Do I have your word?"

"Yes."

"Go to the Starlight Diner on Route 77," he said softly. "Her sister works the night shift. Maybe she'll tell you where to find her."

"I don't want to talk to Sasha. I want to talk to Anna."

"She switched motels last night. Sasha's the only one who knows where she is."

"Was she there when I was shot? In the room, with Deval?"

"No." Daniel was looking at the floor. "I'm sorry about what happened," he said. "All of it." He stood then and turned away from the bed.

.

On h i s first day home from the hospital Gavin lay on the sofa in Eilo's living room looking up at the underside of the freeway across the yard. The bullet had struck the bone between his elbow and his shoulder. His arm was fractured. He would have extravagant scars. A little higher and he would have been crippled. "There's not a surgeon alive who can repair a shattered shoulder socket," a doctor at the hospital had told him. "You're a lucky man." He knew he was lucky but every movement was painful. Eilo came in sometimes to see how he was. He heard the sounds of distant telephones from the office, the soft percussion of Eilo's fists against the heavy bag.

After two or three hours on the sofa he forced himself to sit up, and in the swampy shadows under the freeway he thought he saw something move. A quick inhuman movement, a lizard perhaps. He was thinking of Nile monitors, of anacondas, of the extremities of nature, William Chandler in the swamps. This place is slipping away from us, Chandler had said. These new animals. This sure as hell isn't the Florida I grew up in.

"I don't understand what happened," Eilo had said. Speaking cautiously, the way she almost always spoke to him now. The bullet had pushed him into a different world, one she didn't inhabit, and he could see her calculations every time she looked at him: if he had been shot he must be involved in something. If he was involved in something, perhaps it would follow him here. She had taken to double-checking that the doors were locked.

"It was a mistake," he'd told her. "Someone thought I was someone else and shot me by accident. I just got the wrong room."

"But why were you there?"

"I thought a friend from New York was staying at the motel. Did

you see the police report?" But he saw the doubt in her eyes and he knew she was thinking about the New York Star. Liar. Liar. "Tell me about my medical expenses," he said.

"Don't worry about that," she said. "I've made some money."

"Eilo, you can't. "

"I've always tried to take care of you." Eilo was quiet for a moment, sitting on the edge of the sofa. "Why were you at the motel?"

"I was looking for her."

"For Anna?"

"Anna and the little girl."

"Did you find them?"

"No," Gavin said.

"And it was a coincidence that you were shot?"

"It had nothing to do with anything. I just got the wrong room."

She left him alone then, and a few minutes later he heard the muted sounds of her fists hitting the heavy bag.

He w o k e on Eilo's sofa at two in the morning. The freeway was a blaze of light high over the lawn. He lay for a while in the half-light, got up with difficulty and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He hadn't shaved in a few days but he thought he didn't look too bad, except for the pallor and the dark circles under his eyes, and anyway the thought of shaving was exhausting. His car was at his apartment, he realized, and it occurred to him that he wouldn't want to drive it with one hand anyway. He called a taxi company and went outside to wait on the front lawn. At this hour the neighborhood was silent and the taxi almost silent too, the only car on the street when it came for him. The letters on the side door read Greenlight Taxi Co. The car was the color of a lime.

"Do you know the Starlight Diner?" Gavin asked. " Route 77?"

"Sure," the driver said. "Good pancakes there."

The Starlight Diner was some distance from Eilo's house, not far from Gavin's apartment. There are certain restaurants meant to be viewed at night and the Starlight was among them. A gleaming chrome-and-red-Naugahyde interior visible from the parking lot, a neon sign shining over a bank of flowers near the front door. It was close to three a.m. when the taxi dropped him off. He opened the door of the diner awkwardly— the sling made everything difficult— and glanced around, but he didn't see anyone who looked like Sasha. Daniel had said she worked the night shift, but perhaps there was more than one night shift, or more than one Starlight Diner on Route 77, or it was her night off.

"Anywhere you like," a waitress said. She was fiftyish, eyes bright with caffeine, bleached hair piled on top of her head and turquoise eye shadow.

He chose a booth by the window where he could see the street, ordered a coffee, and realized as he drank it that he wasn't going to sleep again that night. Gavin had brought a newspaper with him, but it was difficult to concentrate. The pain was a dull constant throb from his elbow to his shoulder but when he gave in and took a Vicodin he thought of Jack, so he'd been trying to get by on aspirin. It wasn't working very well. He looked out at the lights of passing cars and his thoughts wandered. He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Deval and Morelli play together at Barbès, the apparent falling-out at the end of the set, Deval stalking out of the room and Morelli glaring after him. Why had Deval come to Sebastian, if not to play his canceled gig at the Lemon Club? He felt that he was on the periphery of some great drama, trapped on the wrong side of the locked stage door while the action transpired just out of sight. He didn't understand the story. He was distracted by the pain. He'd been shot four days ago and it had occurred to him that it was a nice thing, actually, that he'd been halfway unconscious from heat exhaustion and sunstroke when it had happened. He was lucky, he thought, that he had no memory of facing a gun. But even so, he'd noticed that loud noises rattled him. The man slamming a car door in the parking lot, for instance. Gavin tensed but it was just another man, no one he knew, coming in for a doughnut and a cup of coffee to go.

"Gavin?"

He looked up with a start. Sasha was sliding into the booth across from him. It took him a moment to recognize her. He hadn't seen her since she was eighteen years old. "I thought that was you," she said. "I just came back from my break and saw you here." She'd brought two cups of coffee. " Cream or sugar?"

"Both. Thank you."

"You're welcome." She carried a faint aura of cigarette smoke. The preceding decade had been hard on her. She carried the kind of exhaustion that he'd seen only rarely in a woman so young, and mostly only in his time as a reporter. She had the look of women who've worried too much, smoked too many cigarettes, been too poor for too many years, and worked too hard for long hours. She was studying him. "Gavin," she said, "you don't look so good."

"I've had better weeks."

"Are you trying to grow a beard?"

"Not on purpose."

"Well, what brings you here?"

"You know," he said. "Anna."

"Don't tell me you're involved in this."

He nodded carefully. She sighed.

"I don't like it," she said. "Anything about it."

Gavin wasn't sure what to say, so he just watched her. A trick taught to him by an older reporter at the paper: Sometimes if you're silent they'll just keep talking.

"I just can't stand the way they're using the girl," she said.

"Perhaps it's the only way to do it," Gavin ventured, when it became clear that she was waiting for a response. The girl? Could she possibly mean his daughter?

"It's a terrible plan," she said, "and has been from the beginning. If it were up to me it wouldn't be this way. What happened to your arm?"

"Just a stupid accident," Gavin said.

"God, I'm sorry, I'm usually not this rude." Sasha glanced out at the parking lot. She seemed ill at ease. "I haven't seen you in ten years, and all I can talk about is the goddamned plan. This week aside, Gavin, how's your decade been?"

"Good and then bad. How was your decade?"

"Difficult," she said, "but there were a few good moments. Didn't you go to New York and become a reporter or something?"

"I did," Gavin said. "I became a reporter, and then I got fired, and now I'm working for my sister."

"Here in Sebastian?"

"Here in Sebastian."

"Why were you fired?"

"Fraud," he said.

She sipped her coffee, her eyes on his face. "I heard you were engaged."

"I was," Gavin said. "I'm not anymore." He hadn't thought of Karen in a while, but her presence once summoned hadn't dulled with time. Karen's smile, Karen moving through a room, Karen brushing a strand of hair from her forehead as she read the Sunday Times over coffee in their sunlit kitchen in Manhattan. He wondered where she was tonight.

"I'm sorry," Sasha said. "It sounds like you've lost some things."

Gavin didn't know what to say, so he nodded and said nothing. They sat together for a moment in silence. "I heard you went to Florida State," he said finally.

"I did. I was studying English lit." She seemed disinclined to explain how she'd gone from studying literature to working the graveyard shift in a roadside diner, and Gavin didn't know how to ask without being rude. "If you know the plan, you've spoken with Daniel since you've been back," she said. "Tell me something, has he seemed strange to you lately?"

"Strange in what way?"

"Like something's horribly wrong," she said. "I don't mean to be melodramatic."

"I don't know," Gavin said. "He seems to have changed considerably since high school."

"Do you know if the time's been set?"

It took Gavin a moment to understand that she was talking about the plan again, and he wished more than anything at that moment that he could shed the pretense and just ask her what she was talking about.

"I haven't heard anything about that."

"Well, Daniel or Liam will let us know, I suppose. All I know is it's going to be sometime between one and three in the morning." She was looking out at the parking lot again, her eyes moving over the few parked cars. It wasn't just that she was ill at ease, he realized. She was frightened.

"Right," he said.

"Well," she said, "I should get back to work. Are you sticking with coffee?"

"I'm not that hungry. Sasha, could you tell me about my daughter?"

"How long have you known about Chloe?"

"Not long," he said. "Why didn't Anna ever tell me?"

"I don't know. I think she was embarrassed about running off with someone else."

"Is there anything you could tell me about her?"

Sasha smiled. " About Chloe? You'd like her," she said. "She's a good kid. Polite, good grades at school. She wants to be an acrobat when she grows up. She likes to draw."

"What does she draw? If you don't mind me asking."

"Houses," Sasha said. "Flowers, people, trees, the usual kid things. Suns with smiley faces. Bicycles."

"And she's— is she okay?"

"She's fine. Well, I don't know, actually, she's staying in a motel with Anna. I assume she's fine. I haven't seen her in a while."

" Thank you," Gavin said. There was a tightness in his throat. " Could I possibly talk to Anna?"

"Not till this is over," she said. "You've no idea how nervous she is."

"Will you tell her that I asked about her?"

Sasha was standing now, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of her apron. "I will. I'll tell her."

"Wait," he said. "Can I borrow your pen?" She gave it to him and he wrote his address and cell number on a corner of the place mat, tore it off and gave it to her. "If you wouldn't mind," he said. "In case she wants to know where to find me."

"I'll give it to her," Sasha said. He watched her move away across the room.