The Lola Quartet

Twenty-One

Sasha was raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Narnia was behind the coats in a wardrobe. Alice fell down the rabbit hole. There was another story whose name she couldn't remember about a brother and sister picking up a golden pinecone in the woods and in that motion, that lifting of an enchanted object from the forest floor, a new world rotated silently into place around them.

"Once you step into the underworld it's hard to come out again," she said to William Chandler. This was a few months before Gavin appeared in the Starlight Diner with his arm in a sling. Sasha and William met in the diner a few times a month to drink coffee together before the start of her shift. William wasn't her official sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous, her official sponsor had left town a long time ago and Sasha wasn't sure what had become of her, but they had gravitated toward one another over years of meetings and he often seemed more like a sponsor than a friend.

"Don't be melodramatic," he said. "You were never that far in."

But she knew it wasn't really a question of how far in she'd gone. It

was true, she'd never sold herself to pay her gambling debts or been physically harmed. The meetings were full of lost marriages and personal bankruptcies and parents who had lost their children forever and women who'd turned to prostitution to finance their debts. She'd played poker a few times in high school, gathered with friends in someone's parents' basement on boring Friday nights. The game made them feel like adults, even if they were usually just playing for pennies. She'd begun playing regularly in her first semester of college, just to have something to think about other than English literature and finance.

It would have been impossible to imagine the slide that followed. By the end of the first semester she was playing almost every day. She'd lost a student-loan payment and had to leave school. She'd stolen money from two previous jobs. She'd taken her father's car and sold it in a parking lot and now he didn't talk to her anymore. She'd lived in terror of a particular loan shark. She'd skated across a dark surface, but the surface was all she'd needed to touch. Sasha could always find the door in the back of the wardrobe after that, she was always already halfway through—"I'd like ten lottery tickets," a man murmured near her in a dusty convenience store on Caroline Street, and there was that shadow angling over the day again. Traces of her old world were everywhere. She saw it in glances, in people sitting together in parked cars, in exchanges of envelopes outside closed businesses. She was aware of it all around her, as if all the off-track betting parlors and basement poker and scratch-and-win tickets were part of the same game, a never-ending continuous transaction of currency and numbers and cards that she could sense in the air but no longer touch. When she drove the streets of Sebastian she always knew where the casino was, where she was in relation to it. She was constantly aware of the casino's gravitational pull, dark star.

Sasha shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards in the evenings in front of a television set, almost without noticing anymore. She felt tainted but also she wanted to slip back in again, back to the beautiful casino poker room where she'd always been on the verge of winning everything, everything, the patterns of cards unfolding around her and the night so bright sometimes, evenings of ice cubes glinting in glasses and hard chips and money.

"You're getting better," Anna said. "When was the last time you lost any money?" She'd been living with Sasha for years now, ever since she'd broken up with the guitarist and come back down from New York with her daughter and enough money to pay off Sasha's gambling debt. Sasha had known that night that never again in her lifetime would anyone show up on her doorstep with eleven thousand dollars in cash. She'd known that this was her last chance and she'd fought every day since then to not gamble, but she could never bring herself to think of it as a disease. She'd had arguments with William about it.

"If I had pneumonia," she'd said, "I wouldn't be able to will myself to get better. There's no such thing as Pneumonia Anonymous. There's a difference between a disease and a character flaw."

"It's thinking like that that keeps treatment programs underfunded," he'd said, and changed the subject. He'd never felt he stood a chance before the poisonous allure of horse racing. Now, sitting in front of the television set shuffling a card deck over and over again, Sasha looked up from the cards and didn't know what to say. Anna was watching her from the doorway. Cards made Anna nervous.

"I don't know," Sasha said finally, because she had to say something. "I can't remember the last thing I lost."

"That's good," Anna said. She was a little bleary-eyed. She'd slept for an hour between work and night school and was on her way out again. Chloe was at the babysitter's house. "Are you hungry? There's a pizza in the freezer."

" Thank you," Sasha said. There were nights when it was easy, but she knew this wasn't going to be one of them. "I'm leaving for work soon."

T h e i r s h a k y mother married twice. Sasha and Anna had different fathers and different last names and different clothes, and one was luckier than the other. "Your mother dresses that kid like a whore," Sasha's father muttered once when Sasha was thirteen or so, picking her up from her mother's house where Anna waved good-bye on the driveway in high cut-off shorts and a too-small tank top, and Sasha felt bad about him saying this but she couldn't disagree. People didn't know they were sisters and it was the shame of her life that she sometimes didn't mind this and sometimes even let it slide. Anna wore clothes that Sasha wouldn't have left the house in. Anna often had bruises and did poorly in school. Anna was suspended twice for fighting, once for graffiti. Anna ran away for days at a time. Her friends were mostly drug addicts and dropouts until she changed schools and found the jazz quartet.

Sasha hadn't minded Anna hanging around on the outskirts of the quartet but she'd always secretly thought of Anna as a bit of a basket case, wayward child, lost girl. When things were bad at their mother's house, during Sasha's increasingly infrequent visits, she tried her best to protect Anna because she thought it was her duty. She'd told Anna to go upstairs and she'd faced their mother and Anna's father on her own, scared but also a little virtuous about it, and it was shocking that after all this Anna had been the one to save her. Sasha had owed ten thousand seven hundred dollars to a man named Lizard who was threatening to beat her and then Anna appeared one night on her doorstep with Chloe and eleven thousand dollars, all that remained by then of the hundred and twenty-one thousand from Utah after three years of rent and groceries and the production of Deval & Morelli's first album. Sasha had just got off the phone with Lizard when the doorbell rang. Anna stood on her doorstep holding the tired three-year-old's hand and asked why Sasha was crying, and by late afternoon the next day Sasha's gambling debts were erased. Anna tried to pretend it was nothing. "You'd have done the same for me," she said, and through all the days of her life Sasha hoped this was true.

Sa s h a h a d been working the graveyard shift at the Starlight Diner for four years now. At first just because she was new and had no say in her schedule and they needed someone for the night shift, later because she liked it. She felt too jangled there in daylight, overexposed in the clatter of plates and voices, always falling behind. She arrived every night in time for the dinner rush. It was the time of day she most hated, but she knew it was necessary. The diner served decent dinner entrees, and it was a popular destination. The tips from the dinner rush were what made the night shift financially viable, and beyond the rush lay the promise of long quiet hours.

The nights were serene. Usually just she and Bianca or sometimes Jocelyn, Luis and Freddy in the kitchen. Bianca was in her fifties, Jocelyn forty-three. They had both been working nights for years and had identical looks of permanent tiredness. They'd told Sasha they didn't want to work days, though, and Sasha understood. It was Sasha's first night job but she already knew she didn't want to work in daylight again either.

The best part about working at night was the silence. She stepped out of the diner for a cigarette sometimes in the quietest hour, between three and four in the morning, stood alone at the edge of the shadows out back listening. Not that the silence was ever complete— cicadas, frogs in the canal across the street, rustlings in the bushes, the occasional passing truck or car— but daylight was cacophonous by comparison. The diner was never crowded at night. The pace was calm, and calm was the state that Sasha most longed for. A few coked-out nutjobs or shadow-eyed meth addicts seized by sudden excitable cravings— a strawberry milkshake! Chocolate mud pie! — staring down their forty-eighth consecutive hour without sleep, but mostly just a steady stream of truckers and strippers and insomniacs, a few night staffers from St. Mary Star of the Sea Hospital a mile away. This is what a steady life looks like, she told herself sometimes, when she was driving home in the early morning, and took pleasure in the thought. It's just that it happens at night. She liked watching the progression of darkness into first light into morning.

Daniel came in sometimes. She'd take a quick break— no managers at night, that was the other nice thing, just Sasha and one of the sympathetic night-shift veterans, either Jocelyn or Bianca— and sit with him for a few minutes. He'd started coming here about a year ago. His grandmother was in and out of St. Mary Star of the Sea. He came for dinner after visiting hours. It was startling, how much he'd changed in the years since high school. She hardly recognized him the first time she saw him after all these years, almost didn't know where to look.

"What happened to you?" he asked, the second or third night he came in, and it could have been a cruel question but he spoke so gently, he was looking at her with such kindness and sympathy that there seemed no reason not to tell the truth— he was Daniel, they'd played music together in competitions in the days of band and orchestra and the Lola Quartet, she'd known him since the eighth grade even if years had gone by when they hadn't seen one another— so she poured herself a cup of coffee and told him about the lost student-loan money, the frantic bets and the almost nightly poker games, the enormous sums of money won and lost and lost further, the boyfriends who thought she was fun at first, a novelty, a girl who drank whiskey and loved poker, until they saw that it was pathological and finally left her when they realized she couldn't stop and that their watches were missing, the miserable long slide, but she stopped when she got to the part where Anna had reappeared in Florida because she remembered that Anna was where their stories intersected. She looked at the table, flustered.

"I have no right to ask," he said, "but how is your sister?"

"She's fine. She moved in with me a few years back. We live together, the three of us."

"You and Anna and the little girl."

"Chloe. She's a good kid."

"Interesting family."

"Family's always a provisional arrangement. But what about you?" she asked, suddenly emboldened. "What happened to you?"

"You know the first part of it already," he said. "I ran off with your little sister. I said something stupid that scared her, she stole money from our scumbag roommate and then took off with the baby. But you knew that part."

Sasha nodded. She knew that part. It was the part that always made her perversely jealous. She'd been spinning down into a tedious glazed-eyed oblivion of scratch cards and poker and Anna had been fleeing across the country with a baby and a gym bag full of money, Anna had been falling into the arms of jazz musicians and evading villains across the continental United States. Anna insisted that this life had mostly been a dull grinding shadow existence but there was a small part of Sasha that didn't entirely believe it. That life did sound horrible, but also — and she was shot through with guilt whenever she let herself think this— it sounded more exciting than Sasha's life had ever been.

"What's the part that comes next?" Sasha asked.

"Next? Then there were two marriages in five years," Daniel said. "Four children between the two of them. Two divorces, police academy, police work, a number of promotions, a thyroid condition, and a decade of crushing guilt. Nothing about my life is exceptional except my children. May I have another cup of coffee?"

"Of course," Sasha said. She crossed the room to the coffee station and refilled two cups. Bianca nodded at her from behind the cash register. They'd been working together for years and had an understanding: unlimited breaks when the restaurant was this slow. There were only two active tables just now, both Bianca's, both eating dessert.

Daniel stirred his coffee, tapped the spoon on the cup. "The girl's father," he said, without looking at her. "It's Gavin Sasaki, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Mr. New York," Daniel said with unexpected bitterness. "Does he know?"

"I've told Anna she should try to get child support, but she says she doesn't think Chloe needs more than one parent. I think she's embarrassed that she left him and ran off with you. I don't know," Sasha said, "he had to have known she was pregnant. There were so many crazy rumors flying around about Anna just before you two left for Utah, and then he ran into me buying baby clothes. I heard he's a newspaper reporter or something now."

"A newspaperman," Daniel said. "Some of us get the lives we want, don't we?"

He came in once or twice a week after that and they talked about Anna, about Daniel's kids, about Chloe, about nothing. It wasn't romantic. It was nice to just sit with someone for a half-hour or so. She felt that he understood her; he'd fallen too. She didn't really have friends besides him and William Chandler, and she was never entirely sure if William Chandler was her friend or her sponsor.

Th e y w e r e sitting together the night Anna called. Daniel's grandmother was in St. Mary Star of the Sea Hospital for the duration now, living out her final days on morphine, and he'd been coming here almost every night for the past week.

"Someone came to Gloria's house and took Chloe's picture," Anna said, without saying hello first. There was panic in her voice.

Anna was going to night school three nights a week to qualify as a paralegal, and on those days Chloe went from school to Gloria's house. Gloria was Liam Deval's mother, the closest thing Chloe had to a grandmother, and she'd moved from the suburbs of Miami to the suburbs of Sebastian a few years earlier. Gloria had visited Liam and Anna a few times when they'd lived together in New York and seemed to consider Anna and Chloe part of her extended family.

"Calm down." Sasha glanced across the table at Daniel, who was looking at her with mild concern. "It's probably nothing. Tell me what happened."

"I had night school," Anna said. She was crying. "So I didn't pick Chloe up until nine, and Gloria told me this woman had come by to appraise the house or something, but while she was there she took Chloe's picture."

"What did Chloe tell you?"

"She said the woman asked her how old she was, and her name."

"Jesus," Sasha said. "Who was this woman?"

"I don't know," Anna said. "She told Gloria she was a real estate agent, but she didn't give her a card before she left, and now Gloria can't remember what her name was. We don't know who she was. She said she was from a real estate company, then she said she was with the bank—"

"Well, we knew Gloria was getting foreclosed—"

"But what kind of a real estate agent takes pictures of someone else's child? Asks her questions? They've found us, Sasha, they've found us—"

"No one's found us," Sasha said. "There's no they." She was looking at Daniel now. "There's just a him. One person. Who probably hasn't left Utah." Daniel was expressionless. "Who probably has no idea where you are and probably stopped looking years ago. Everything will be fine. Listen, Daniel's here." Anna made an indecipherable noise. "Let me talk to him about this."

"What the hell can he do?" Anna asked. "All he's ever done is—"

"He's a cop," Sasha said. "Snap out of it. I'll call you back." She disconnected and watched the call fade from her cell-phone screen. "A stranger showed up and took a picture of Chloe," she said. Saying the words aloud made the story real, and she began to be afraid.

"It might be nothing," Daniel said, when she told him the story about the real estate agent. "A misunderstanding."

"But it might not be."

"It might not be," he agreed, and she thought she'd never seen anyone look so tired.

"Do we go to the police?"

"Of course you can't go to the police." Daniel spoke softly, looking into his coffee. "The only police you can tell is me, and that's only because I'm your friend." He stood up from the table and left some money next to his coffee cup. "Let me think about this. I'll be back in tomorrow or the next night."

She almost asked why they couldn't go to the police, but she under stood as she watched him leave. Anna was in trouble because she'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars. Anna was the criminal. Once you've slipped into the underworld, it's difficult to come back out. Shadows slanting over everything.

An n a w o r k e d full-time as a file clerk at a law firm. She never missed a day of work but when Sasha came home that morning she was still in her bathrobe, red-eyed at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in her hand. She'd been crying. Sasha wanted to go to bed but she sat across from Anna instead.

"You're usually home earlier," Anna said. Her voice was very small, and all of Sasha's old instincts— to protect Anna, to shield Anna from everything bad— flashed through her.

" There was an accident on Route 77."

"An accident. That's awful." Anna was smoking, which was startling— she had always been vehement that no one was allowed to smoke in the house, not with a kid living here— and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray as she spoke. "Was anyone hurt?"

"I think so," Sasha said. " There was an ambulance. You look tired."

"I've been up all night."

"Me too," Sasha said. "You have to stay calm."

"He has a picture of her, Sasha."

"You don't know that."

"Even if he doesn't," Anna said, "he's always out there. He'll always be out there. And I don't have the money anymore. Any of it."

Sasha looked away. There were moments even now when she wanted to drown. Walk out the door, drive to the casino, play poker until her chips were gone and then dive into the ocean and swim away from the shore.

"I'm sorry," Anna said quickly. "I didn't mean it like that. I was happy to help, you know I was. You were sick."

"This language of disease," Sasha said, but she was too tired to finish the thought.

"Sasha, I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I'm sorry too. What do you want to do?"

"I called Liam. He's coming down here."

"Liam Deval? Why would you call him?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you going to work?"

"I called in sick."

"Where's Chloe?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll be there," he said.

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

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

"

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

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

"Have you been gambling?"

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

"A little?"

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

"Just two?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What time do you get off work?"

"Six a.m.," she said.

"Seriously? That late?"

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

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

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

"I will. Thank you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You sound tense."

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

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

"Just family problems. No gambling."

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

"I think I'll go tomorrow."

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

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

Twenty-Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello, Grace," he said.

"You two know each other?"

"I've seen her around."

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

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

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

"She's being a good sport," Sasha said. "Aren't you, Grace?"

"A good sport?" A plan unfolding all around him while he only grasped at its hanging threads. "What do you mean?"

"You said you knew the plan," Sasha said. "You know exactly what I mean."

"They said if I sat here in this dress by the window," Grace said, in a voice so soft he could hardly hear her, "then I wouldn't face charges."

"Charges," he repeated helplessly. He was so close now but he still couldn't see it, he didn't quite grasp how her presence here fit into any sort of a larger scheme, the story just beyond his reach. "Who said that, Grace?"

"The detective," Grace said. "The detective and Anna."

"Grace," Sasha said, "would you listen to your music for a minute?"

Grace had a tiny plastic purse, suitable for a girl much younger. She zipped it open with difficulty— it was cheap, and the zipper stuck— and pulled out a scratched-up iPod, inserted the earbuds and looked away from them. He could hear the music very faintly but couldn't make out what it was.

"Sasha," Gavin whispered, "I don't know this part of the plan. Could you tell me what's going on here?"

"What do you mean, you don't know this part of the plan? This is the plan."

"She's not— you're not giving her to anyone, are you?"

"Of course not," Sasha whispered. "You know that. She's a decoy."

"So nothing will happen to her?"

"She'll sit here as planned, and at a certain point I'll walk her toward

the back door in full view of someone who will be waiting outside in the parking lot. That's all."

"Why her?"

"She's a runaway," Sasha said softly. "She's facing drug charges. She's at hand."

"So if she sits here as a decoy, the drug charges go away?"

"All she has to do is remain in full view through the windows while a payment gets handed off in the parking lot. It's not such a bad deal. How do you not know all of this? You said you knew the—"

"What happens to her afterward?"

"Afterward? I'll drive her home."

"The home she ran away from."

"It's an imperfect world. Would you rather have Chloe sitting here?"

Gavin was silent.

"Me neither," she said, " Grace made a deal. She knows what she's doing. Nothing will happen to her."

"Then why not have Chloe here?"

"There's always a risk."

"And you think this girl's disposable." Something was welling up inside him. He reached across the table and pulled the earbuds gently from Grace's head. He heard thin tinny voices. She was listening to rap.

"Grace," he said, "do your parents know you're here?"

Grace reached for the earbuds and turned her face to the window. Sasha was glaring at him.

"Gavin, what the hell was that?"

"She's so goddamn young," he said.

"We all were, at one point or another." Sasha sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim. It struck him, watching her, that he'd never realized how hard she was. "And we all survived our youths, didn't we? She fell into our laps. She's a little old for our purposes, but she looks young for thirteen and Chloe's almost eleven. It's plausible." Sasha glanced at her watch. "Are you really supposed to be here for this?"

"No," Gavin said, "I don't think I am." His arm was throbbing, a dull sick pain. The floor lurched alarmingly when he stood, the diner lights too bright. "Will you. could you possibly tell me where to find Anna?"

"I don't know where she is," Sasha said. "She just said she was going to another motel."

"If she— if you speak with her," he said, "will you tell her I'd like to talk?"

"I will," Sasha said.

" Thank you." He crossed the room and opened the door with his good hand, walked out of the air conditioning into the heat and the darkness of the parking lot. Long after dark but he still felt heat radiating from the pavement.

A taxi was pulling into the parking lot. Gavin stepped between two cars and watched Liam Deval get out. Deval paid the driver, but he didn't enter the diner. He was walking toward the back of the building, where shadows hung black and the parking lot faded into bushes and weeds, and Gavin didn't want to see any more. When he looked up Grace was still listening to music in the window, her hair falling over her face. Sasha was staring into her coffee cup.

The diner wasn't far from his apartment, two miles, maybe three. Gavin slipped between the parked cars and walked quickly away from there, turned away from Route 77 onto a side street. The beauty of the suburbs at night, streetlight shining through palm trees, the flicker of sprinklers on lawns, strange shadows. The pleasure of being alone outside after all these days of interiors. He was wandering through a new housing development when he realized he was lost. He didn't recognize the name of the street he was on. Half of the new houses seemed vacant. At the far end of the development they weren't even finished yet, skeletal beams against the sky. Raw dirt driveways with tall weeds, an abandoned bulldozer silhouetted black. Does a house still count as a ruin if it's abandoned before it's done? Asphalt soft beneath his shoes. He was aware of his footsteps on the silent street.

He crossed an expanse of weeds to the next cul-de-sac, an older neighborhood where the houses had people in them, out onto a wider commercial strip. A 7-Eleven was shining like a beacon ahead. He went in and bought a map. His thoughts were scattered. He didn't think he'd wandered that far from Route 77, but it took Gavin and the 7-Eleven counter guy a solid five minutes to find themselves on the map. All the streets looped and circled back on themselves and crashed up against grids, the grids broke into a spaghetti chaos of freeways and came back together on the other side and then disintegrated into loops again, and also the 7-Eleven guy was stoned.

Gavin found the intersection closest to his apartment after a while, but the loops and circles of the outer suburbs made for a confounding route and the 7-Eleven guy was distracted by the way all the streets converged, man. Gavin thanked him and set off in what he thought was the correct direction, but it wasn't easy to tell and all his thoughts were of Anna, Chloe, the girl in the diner. He kept realizing that he'd been walking without thinking, taking random turns. He wandered in and out of three cul-de-sacs. All the houses looked the same to him. Dogs barked occasionally. A shadow in the middle of the street turned into the silhouette of an animal he couldn't identify, then ran off into the bushes. An iguana, he decided a few blocks later, and he wished the street had been bright enough to see its skin.

Gavin lost track of where he was on the map, so he resolved to set his course by the stars. It was a clear night and in theory he was trying to get home again, but it seemed to him later that he'd really just wanted to keep walking and stay alone with his thoughts, away from the diner where at this moment a glassy-eyed runaway in a frilly dress was playing the part of his daughter and a plan that had a gun in it was moving into action. He was trying to understand and something was pulling at him, a memory of a story covered years ago by the New York Star, something about a lost child. Gavin found the North Star and kept it over his left shoulder, or tried to, but the streets wouldn't cooperate.

Af t e r s o m e time Gavin came upon a wider road— a semitrailer roared past in the darkness— and ahead were the bright signs of chain restaurants, a shopping mall that he recognized. The mall had faux-Greek pillars around the entrance, a banner reading summer midnite madness!!!

sagging over the glass doors.

Gavin walked blinking into the mall's winter chill and found a bench under a plastic-and-fabric palm tree. It was a mall filled with elevators and mezzanines. He found himself gazing blankly up at the levels of other people, these stragglers under the spell of a late-night summer sale, sales clerks smiling fixedly from store entrances. What was the Star story? It had been published years ago but there was something in it that he thought might somehow pull everything together, if only he could remember the details. There had been a lost boy in the Bronx, a transaction. He hadn't worked on the story but he remembered his editor and another reporter talking about it, and what was startling was that after all these months, here under the halogen lights of this distant southern land, in this unrecognizable life, he still had his editor's cell-phone number programmed into his phone. He scrolled through the names, all these ghosts from his vanished life, let her name slide past on the screen three times before he summoned the courage to press the button that sent the call through the satellites to New York.

"I almost didn't pick up," Julie said. He imagined her in the night quiet of the Star newsroom, her stocking feet on her desk and her hand on her forehead, the far-off look she always had when she talked on the telephone.

"Hello, Julie," he said. He hadn't seen her since an afternoon months earlier, a different lifetime actually, when he'd risen from a conference-room table with her and the editor-in-chief and the directors of the personnel and legal departments staring at him and walked out of the Star building for the last time.

"You know where I work now?" Her tone was studiedly casual. "A website, Gavin. There isn't even paper involved anymore."

"You lost your job?"

"Most of us did."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I can't tell you how sorry I am." He could think of nothing else to say. He closed his eyes against the mall's cool light and pressed the palm of his hand against the plastic bench.

"I'm not even going to ask why you lied in your stories, Gavin. Nothing you could possibly say would make it better."

"I wasn't myself," he said. "I came a little undone."

"Just like that," Julie said, but she sounded deflated, the fight fading from her voice. It was, after all, one thirty in the morning. She sighed audibly and he reformatted his image of her into another, imagined office. What kind of space would a website occupy? He pictured a loft, an open workspace, her feet up on a different desk, the ceiling so high that shadows gathered up above her.

"Julie, I have to ask you something. It's about a story."

"You know, I've often wished over the past few months that you'd

come to me to ask about stories," she said. "But it seems a little late now, doesn't it?"

"You have no reason to believe me," he said, "but it's important. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't."

She was silent, but she didn't hang up.

"Do you remember two years ago, maybe two and a half, the paper covered a story about an abandoned boy in the Bronx? You worked on the story. I think there'd been a shootout or something, and the kid had somehow been part of it. There was some kind of drug connection."

"Theo," she said, after a moment. "Theo Cordell. He was seven."

"Will you tell me about it? I was thinking about it just now."

"You called me at, what, one thirty-five in the morning," Julie said, "to ask about a story I worked on two years ago?"

"I knew you'd be up."

"You knew I'd be up. Fine," she said, "why not? Let's tell each other stories. A seven-year-old boy was found wandering in the Bronx after a shootout. Turned out the boy's father was one of the men who'd been shot. He'd taken the kid along to some meeting, I can't remember all the details but it was a drop-off of some kind, at the other party's request."

"But why would the other person request that? Wouldn't a kid just get in the way?"

"The deal was, if either the product or the count was off, I can't remember which it was, the other party would take the kid."

"Was it off? The product, or the count?"

"One or the other," Julie said. "I can't remember now. The kid escaped in the confusion."

"So the kid came along to the transaction," Gavin said, "as, what, a kind of insurance policy?"

"Exactly," Julie said. "That's exactly it." She was animated now, the exhaustion fallen from her voice. She had a passion for people, for drama, for news. It seemed to him that she'd perhaps forgotten whom she was speaking to, or perhaps they'd managed to slip back through some invisible doorway into a time when he hadn't yet given her cause to despise him. "The detective told me it's not that uncommon. The theory is that people who'll risk their own lives won't risk their kids."

"Except Theo's father did."

"Well," she said, "you can't choose your parents."

"What happened to him?"

"To Theo? He went into foster care. I don't know what happened to him after that."

" Thank you for talking to me," he said. He wanted the call to end before she remembered who he was and became angry again, and also he was feeling ill.

" Good-night, Gavin."

He disconnected. His head was pounding and his arm was throbbing, an ache that he was afraid might stay with him forever. It was nearly two in the morning. He'd left Sasha and the girl at the diner two hours ago and whatever had happened there was almost certainly over by now. It was too late to do anything but he thought he finally understood.

How does this play out? A man from Utah arrives in a parking lot. Through the window he sees a girl in a white-and-pink dress. She's thirteen but she's small for her age, she could be ten, she could be Chloe, especially in that getup with her hair falling over her face, especially from a slight distance. Someone speaks to him and the arrangements are made. He sees through the diner window that the girl is being led toward the back door, his insurance. Someone's giving him money tonight. He's confident that the amount will be correct because the girl will be standing there when he counts it. And then?

The pain from his arm was overwhelming. Gavin left the mall and in the parking lot he realized that he was closer to Jack's house than he was to his apartment, so he set off walking in the direction of Mortimer Street.

Twenty-Three

Jack had been playing the saxophone on and off for a long time before he became aware of movement at the edge of the yard. Gavin was coming through the bushes at the side of the house.

"Don't stop," Gavin said. So Jack continued, eased back into another long loop of melody. George Gershwin's "Summertime." Music for a place where it was almost always summer. He knew an arrangement that kept the song looping around and around and he improvised inside it, leaving the melody and wandering away and then coming back to the tune again, and the living is easy, long and slow and meandering, soft and low under the orange tree. Jack always imagined a singer's voice when he played this song, a woman soothing a child to sleep on a porch in the southern lands that lay north of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, a summer afternoon with the air heavy around them, a breeze through tall grass. He stopped all at once because the daydream and backyard had converged and he was momentarily disoriented, caught between the two. There was a soft wind moving through the grass around him, and the lawn hadn't been mowed in so long that the grass rippled. Gavin was watching him with that look he always had since he'd come back from New York. Anxious, something desperate about the eyes.

"That was beautiful," Gavin said.

"Thanks." The instrument felt inert in Jack's hands now that the music had left it. He tried to lean the saxophone against his lawn chair but it toppled over and fell into the grass, an empty shell. He decided to leave it there for the moment. There was a high silent whine in his bloodstream, sweat on his forehead, he needed another pill. Gavin sank into the chair beside him and closed his eyes.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Bar fight," Gavin said. "You should see the other guy."

It seemed to Jack that there'd been a time when Gavin would have just answered the question. "I miss everything sometimes," he said. He meant high school and the Lola Quartet, his life before South Carolina, but he realized as he spoke and as the flicker of confusion crossed Gavin's face that he didn't want to have to explain all this, so he spoke again quickly. "You like that song?"

"I always liked that song," Gavin said. " There was a guy who'd play 'Summertime' on his saxophone on the street near Columbus Circle, Broadway and 61st, maybe 62nd Street. I used to stand there and listen to him sometimes on my way home from work."

"I knew a girl who thought it was about death," Jack said.

"Death? When I hear that song I always sort of picture a woman rocking a child to sleep. I always thought it was peaceful."

"That bit in the middle," Jack said. "The lyric about rising up singing into the sky."

"I thought that part was about leaving home."

Jack reached into his pocket. The shivering in his blood was getting

worse. "This girl, Bernadette, she knew her stuff," he said. "She studied a lot." He swallowed a pill, quickly. He didn't think Gavin noticed. "She said that part was about dying."

Gavin was silent, looking at nothing or maybe at his distant spired city where men played saxophones on Broadway.

"You can hear it in some of the versions," Jack said. "Not all of them. You ever heard the Nina Simone cover?"

"I'm not sure." Gavin sounded distracted.

"Some versions are pretty bright and harmless, lots of brass. Ella Fitzgerald's recording was like that. But I hear Nina Simone's version and I think the girl was right. The drummer makes a sound like static and then the first note's a growl, the bass line's ominous and it kind of drags, and the melody's on piano but the piano's muted. It sounds fragile. You can hardly even hear the melody at the beginning. Half the song, it's just the piano drowning in the bass line, trying to break through. The singing doesn't start till halfway through, and then when it gets to that part about rising up singing, it's like—" Like a thunderstorm, like disintegration, like a soul rising up, but Jack felt stupid saying these things aloud. "I don't know, you can just hear it in that version."

"Jack," Gavin said, "do you know what's happening tonight?"

"I don't know." Jack wasn't sure what Gavin meant but earlier in the evening he'd been inside and he'd heard a car door slam. Through the living room window he'd watched Grace walk down the driveway to the waiting car. She'd been wearing a dress that reminded him of his little sister's china dolls, and this detail was so strange that he couldn't stop thinking about it, but stranger still was the identity of the driver waiting for her by the car. "What time is it?"

"Two o'clock," Gavin said. " Maybe a little later. I keep thinking, if I'd just known, if I'd known she was pregnant. But then I think, maybe I did know, maybe I just didn't do anything about it. "

Jack had taken a Vicodin but it wasn't enough, his skin was crawling, so he swallowed another. Why hadn't he called Gavin, all those years ago, when Anna arrived at Holloway College with a baby? He took another pill and sat still for a while before he spoke again, waiting for the substances in his bloodstream to light up. "I think she should have told you," he said. Gavin was looking at him now, a ghost in the dark. A light blinked on in the house and cast complicated blue-yellow shadows over the grass. "But you didn't hear that from me."

"What happened to that girl who was staying here?"

"Grace," Jack said. "I don't know what's happening to Grace. She left earlier in a funny dress." He remembered his saxophone and lifted it from the grass.

"Who did she leave with?"

"Anna," Jack said. "She left with Anna."

"Do you know where Anna is?"

"No."

"I want to talk to her," Gavin said, but Jack thought he was talking mostly to himself.

"Why would you want to talk to Anna? When has Anna ever done anything good?" Jack wasn't sure if he'd spoken aloud. He was floating. The saxophone was warm and clammy in his hands and it caught the light from the house, an ethereal shine down the curve of the bell. He liked looking at lights when he was in this state. All the edges were shimmering. "I'm going to play again," he said.

"Wait," Gavin said.

"What for?"

"Jack, listen, it's none of my business, but it seems like maybe you're taking a lot of pills."

"The thing with this arrangement of 'Summertime,' " Jack said, "is you can just keep it going. There's the first section that everyone knows, and then—"

"What are you on, Jack? Is it Vicodin? Oxycontin?"

"I'm going to play again," Jack said. Playing, he had realized, was something that would preclude talking. He wanted to fall back into music and rest for a while. He started playing "Summertime" at half-speed, almost a dirge, slow light all around him, and when he looked up some time later Gavin was gone. He drifted alone in his lawn chair on the grass.

Twenty-Four

When Gavin reached his apartment he took two Vicodin and flushed the rest down the toilet. He sat for a long

time in front of the television. Remembering nothing of the programs he was watching, bone-tired, anesthetized by the flickering blue light. When he allowed his thoughts to wander he imagined an alternative version of events: he arrives in Florida on assignment from the New York Star, spends a few days interviewing people about the exotic-wildlife problem, following William Chandler around swamps, writing up his notes in a Ramada Inn in the evenings. Until finally he meets Eilo for dinner in a seafood restaurant, and this is where the fantasy begins: they have a pleasant dinner and he drives back to the hotel afterward, and the difference between this scene and what actually happened is that when Gloria Jones's house goes into foreclosure the bank calls a different broker, not Eilo, so Eilo never goes to Gloria Jones's house and never has a photograph to give him.

.

G a v i n d i d n ' t realize he'd fallen asleep until he heard the doorbell. He started awake and the television was showing a nature special, seagulls wheeling through the air above a rocky shore. He stood up, his heart beating too quickly, and the doorbell rang again. It was four in the morning.

At the bottom of the stairs was his front door, and on the other side of this a dusty foyer where his mail was delivered. The door between the foyer and the street was steel with a dusty spyhole that he'd never looked through. The glass was so greasy that he saw only a vague shadow, a man standing outside with his arms folded over his chest. He couldn't tell who it was. Gavin got down on one knee and called through the letter slot. "Who are you?"

"Liam," the man said. "It's Liam."

Gavin only knew one Liam. There was no reason to let him in except his own desperate curiosity, and the shock of Liam Deval being there at all; here after all these weeks was his story, waiting on the other side of another door. Gavin unlocked the door and opened it a crack.

Liam Deval was shivering in the streetlight. "Can I come in?"

Gavin stood back, and Deval slipped past him into the foyer and up the stairs. In the light of the apartment Deval looked malarial, glittery-eyed and shivering with streaks of sweat down his face. His hair wet against his forehead, sweat coming through his shirt.

"I came to apologize," Deval said. "I'm sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am." He was looking at Gavin's arm in the sling. Gavin nodded but said nothing. He wasn't sure what a person was supposed to say in these circumstances, what the etiquette was for forgiving or failing to forgive the man who'd sent a bullet into your arm. His bandages itched.

"I never would have done it if I'd known who you were," Deval said. "Why did you let me in?"

"That's a good question. Curiosity, I guess."

"Is it okay if I just stay here for a few minutes?"

"Are you armed?"

"I threw it away," Deval said. "Can I use your bathroom?"

"It's there on the left." Deval stood before the bathroom sink and began methodically scrubbing his hands with soap and hot water. Steam rose and clouded the mirror. Gavin left him there and went into the living room. He turned off the TV and straightened the pile of newspapers, moved his cameras from the coffee table to the lower shelf of the television stand. "Can I offer you anything?" he asked, when Deval emerged from the bathroom. Deval's eyes looked unnaturally bright.

"Do you have any alcohol?"

"Alcohol, no, I've just got juice and orange soda. Or I could make some coffee if you'd like."

"You have any lemons?"

"Lemons?"

Deval nodded.

"Actually, I think I might."

" Would you mind boiling some water," Deval said with curious intensity, "and then squeezing some lemon juice into it? I know it's a strange request."

In the kitchenette Gavin filled the kettle, put it on the stove and began searching one-handed in the fridge. A slightly desiccated lemon was hiding behind a ketchup bottle. "I used to go to Barbès to hear you play," he said, to break the silence. He sensed Deval watching his every move.

Deval's eyes seemed to focus. "Barbès," he said. "Barbès. Really?"

"Before I knew you were involved in. in any of this," Gavin said, trying to keep the frustration at the fact that he still didn't know ex actly what this was out of his voice, all he had to go on was his own wild conjecture, his guesses, his suspicions and his paltry trail of clues. "Whatever you're involved in. I used to go every Monday night. Feels like a different lifetime."

"Barbès," Deval said. "I was just thinking of that place a little earlier."

Gavin heard a noise he couldn't immediately identify, and he realized that Deval's teeth were chattering. Gavin turned off the air conditioner, opened the other window in the living room as far as it would go. Soft sounds of traffic drifted up from the street. The heat at this time of night wasn't terrible.

"I used to stand at the back," Gavin said. He walked past Deval into the bedroom and pulled a blanket from the unmade bed. Deval was staring at him through the doorway, as if Gavin's words were all that kept him from floating off. "I was there listening to you every week for a while, you and Arthur Morelli. I loved your sound."

"I loved it too," Deval said.

"Why did you stop playing together?"

"We had a falling-out." Deval reached for the blanket and pulled it close around him. "It's hard to play with someone for a long time. It's like a marriage. Sometimes it lasts forever, sometimes you get sick of each other, sometimes the other party gets tired of playing the rhythm part."

The kettle was whistling. Gavin found a clean mug and filled it, but the lemon was hard and almost dry. He squeezed as hard he could with his good hand. He could only get a few drops out of it, but Deval didn't complain when he raised the hot water to his lips.

" Thank you," Deval said. The drink seemed to calm him. He sipped, gazing around at the unremarkable room, and his shivering subsided.

"Did something happen to you?"

"I took care of something," Deval said. "I solved a problem." His hands were shaking again. Gavin sat on the other end of the sofa, unsure where to look, trying not to stare.

"Listen," Gavin said. Deval's expression was inscrutable. "The whole time I've been back in Florida, I've been trying to find out what happened to a girl named Anna Montgomery. Do you know her?"

Deval didn't speak for a moment. "Do I know her," he said. He made a sound very much like a laugh. "Yeah, I know Anna."

"When did you meet her?"

Deval glanced at Gavin's bandaged arm. "I guess the least I could do is tell you a story," he said. "I met her at a music school in South Carolina. She'd stolen some money and she was on the run with her baby, which was as crazy as it sounds, and she knew my roommate. She just appeared out of nowhere in the dorm one night. She'd had to leave Utah quickly. She didn't really have a plan."

"Why didn't she go to her sister?"

"Because Daniel told her not to. He told the guy she'd stolen money from that she'd never go anywhere but back to Florida, then he called her and begged her to go anywhere else." Deval lifted the mug with some difficulty. His hands were unsteady. "She was thinking of people she knew outside Florida, people who were kind, and she wasn't really close to anyone outside your jazz quartet. She thought of Jack."

"Jack's kind."

"He is. Inept, but kind. It wasn't such a bad choice."

"So she arrives in South Carolina with a baby. Then what?"

"I drove her to Virginia," Deval said. "I know it's crazy, but I was already half in love with her that first night and I liked her kid, and I thought, you know, why not? She couldn't stay in the dorm. There was something about her. I wanted out of the music school anyway, I was young and stupid and thought I was too good to be there. I wanted an adventure, and if you're in a position to help someone, shouldn't you? She had a tattoo of a bass clef on her shoulder and I took it as a sign. I had ideas about what I wanted my life to be. Living with a woman and a child, I liked that, there was something settled about the arrangement. We were together for three years."

"And what brings you to Sebastian?"

"Someone came to my mother's house and took a picture of the kid." Deval leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and slowly lowered his face into his hands.

"Your mother? Gloria Jones, that woman she was staying with a few months back?"

"Gloria. Yes."

"A picture. That's what started this whole thing?" He felt ill. The picture of Chloe was stuck to his fridge with a magnet.

"You can't imagine how terrified Anna was. She calls me sobbing in New York, tells me Paul's found her. It all just happened so quickly after that. I came down to Florida, plans were made. " He sat up, his eyes unfocused. "How far would you go for someone you love?"

"Is that a serious question?"

"Yes."

"I don't know," Gavin said. "Far." Who did he love? Eilo. Maybe Karen, he realized, even now. It seemed paltry, loving only two people in the entire teeming world, but he knew some people had far less.

"Exactly. You never know how far you'll go till you're faced with it."

"How far.?" But he didn't want to know.

"I owed her," Deval said. "I lived off her money for years. She

funded the first album I recorded with Morelli." He turned suddenly to Gavin. "I don't want to do the wrong thing anymore."

"I don't want to do the wrong thing anymore either," Gavin said, but he didn't think Deval heard him.

"Are you supposed to just go back to your life, after something like this?" Deval didn't seem to expect an answer. He'd looked away again. He was gazing into the air at the center of the room. "That sound," he said. "It was like he was choking."

"What?"

Deval shook his head and swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said. "I came here to apologize. I didn't know who you were when you came lurching into the room at the Draker. I didn't realize how sick you were, I thought you were coming at me, I just panicked and there was a gun in my hand." He was standing. He swiped his hand over his eyes and pulled the blanket from his shoulders, folded it into a neat square without looking at Gavin. "Thanks for letting me in," he said.

"There's one last thing. I have a small favor to ask of you."

"What kind of favor?"

"I just want to talk to Anna," Gavin said. "I just want to know that she's okay. Could you possibly tell me where to find her?"

Deval hesitated a moment, looking at the square of blanket in his hands. "Fine," he said. "I suppose I owe you that. You just want to talk to her?"

"That's all."

There was a pen on the coffee table from when Gavin had been doing the crossword puzzle. Deval wrote an address on the corner of a newspaper page. "She gets in late," he said. "Ten, eleven p.m."

" Thank you." Gavin shook Deval's hand and locked the door behind him, listened to Deval's footsteps receding on the stairs. He turned on all the lights. Sleep was out of the question. He felt watched. There was no sound except the distant hum of traffic through the open window. He closed the window, turned on the air conditioner for background noise and then the television set for company, lay down on the sofa with the blanket over him and tried to think of nothing but the screen.

Twenty-Five

Aday earlier, the day of the transaction, Sasha started swimming again. She'd rarely taken advantage of the recreation center pool before— it was ten dollars for a pass, and she never felt like swimming at convenient moments— but on the way home from the diner that morning she saw sun glinting off the vaulted recreation center roof ahead and she was struck by an unexpected wistfulness. She hadn't swum seriously since high school, and only occasionally afterward.

When she arrived home the thought of swimming hadn't yet left her. She knew she should be sleeping but the transaction was so close now and her thoughts were racing. She went through all her drawers and found her swimsuit under the t-shirts, threw it into a shopping bag with a towel and went back out. At the recreation center she paid the fee— the attendant glanced at her waitressing uniform but said nothing— and changed quickly in the damp of the locker room. It was seven thirty in the morning, the pool deserted but for two men swimming laps. Sasha dove in and the water closed over her. She swam two laps, which was all she could manage after so long without exercise, drove home with wet hair in the sunlight and fell into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

W h e n s h e woke in the late afternoon she lay still on the bed for a while, feeling curiously light. A faint scent of chlorine rose from her skin in the shower. Tonight was the transaction, tomorrow Anna and Chloe could come back and the house wouldn't seem like a tomb above her, tomorrow the debt would be paid. She drove to the diner and clocked in early, and a few hours passed in a haze of plates and bright lighting. Bianca touched her shoulder near midnight.

"Someone here to see you," she said. "A kid."

Sasha looked past her and saw the girl waiting by the hostess stand. The girl was looking down at her shoes, tugging at a too-tight sleeve of her frilly dress. Beyond the girl she saw Anna, just for a moment, watching her from the other side of the glass door to the parking lot. Anna turned away into the darkness.

"She's my cousin," Sasha said. A part of her wanted to run after Anna. She hadn't seen her in so long.

"Bit late for a kid that age to be out, isn't it?"

"Family problems," Sasha said. It pained her to lie to Bianca. "Bad divorce. I told her, you feel like you can't be at home, you come visit me here, no matter what time it is. Listen, I'm clocking out on break."

Sasha went to the girl and stood before her. The girl's eyes were flat, a greenish shade of blue. An unnerving blankness in her stare that made Sasha wonder if she was entirely well.

"Come sit with me a while," Sasha said.

.

Ho u r s l a t e r, afterward, when Gavin had come and left and everything had gone exactly as Daniel had said it would, when Grace had finished her milkshake and was dozing off in the booth, Sasha told Bianca she wasn't feeling well and clocked out. At three in the morning she was driving slowly down Mortimer Street with Grace in the passenger seat, reading street numbers.

"Here," Grace said.

"This is where you live?" Sasha stopped the car in front of 1196 Mortimer and she was certain that she'd been here before, perhaps years ago, but she couldn't fix an event in memory. Grace didn't answer. She closed the car door behind her and disappeared around the side of the house.

Sasha cut the engine and got out of the car. She waited for a light to come on in the house, but none did. A window on the first floor was broken; the other windows reflected streetlight but this one absorbed it, a blank rectangle of cardboard or wood. She stood on the street for a few minutes, looking at the darkened house and the shadowed chaos of plants all around it, pale explosions of blossoms in ink-black leaves. The front lawn hadn't been cut in some time. A faint scent of flowers in the still air. She was alone.

Sasha knew she should be exhausted but she wasn't. She drove to an open-all-night doughnut shop and drank coffee for a while, trying to read the paper but too jittery. She was waiting in her car in the recreation center parking lot when the doors opened at five a.m. At this hour fourteen out of fifteen lanes belonged to the swim team, a flock of teenagers and adults in black swimsuits who dove in one after another with hardly a splash and shot through the water with such speed and power that she felt her breath catch in her chest. She slipped as unobtrusively as possible into the unoccupied lane.

Something was troubling her, a memory from a few hours before. As far as she was aware the transaction had gone flawlessly and Anna's debt had been paid. She had been sitting in the diner with Grace when her cell phone had vibrated on the table. A text message from Daniel: Hi Sasha. This was her cue.

"Come with me," she said to Grace, who hesitated just a moment and then obeyed. She walked slowly with Grace down the length of the restaurant— all but deserted at this hour— and when they were almost at the back door she'd said "Grace, go in there for a few minutes, will you?" and Grace went as directed into the restroom. Sasha turned her back to the windows. But first she glanced outside— she didn't mean to — and saw a man's pale face looking up at her. He was standing at the very back of the parking lot. She looked away quickly and it seemed that he turned away at the same time, as if both were embarrassed to have met one another's eyes in the middle of all this, whatever this transaction was that they'd found themselves in. But what was strange— and all these hours later she lost her rhythm in the pool, turned over onto her back in the middle of her third lap to look up at the distant ceiling with her breath tight in her chest— was that just at the instant when she averted her gaze he seemed to fall away, as if a trapdoor had opened under his feet or his knees had failed him.

Sasha reached for the edge of the pool and hauled herself gasping up on the side. She sat with her feet in the water, the swim team flashing up and down the lanes before her. She'd walked to the back of the restaurant. She'd looked out the window. The man's pale face, a half-second of descent in her peripheral vision as she'd turned from him.

She left the pool and the clamor of the swim team, washed the chemicals from her hair and put her uniform back on. When she stepped out into the parking lot it was six a.m., bright morning. She drove home and prepared herself for bed, but sleep was elusive. At eleven a.m. she gave up and turned on the light. She wanted to go outside into the fresh air and sunlight, but she knew she could fall asleep again only if she kept the illusion of night.

Sasha had long ago fallen into the habit of reading when she couldn't sleep. Easy to forget sometimes that there were books back at the beginning of everything, that she'd gone to Florida State because she'd loved books and that even in the long fall into patterns and numbers she hadn't lost this. She turned on the lamp in the late-morning darkness of the basement and pulled a volume at random from the shelf above her bed. A translated-from-the-Russian novel that she'd read twice already, Delirious Things. She read for a while about the unreliability of memory, about snow and northern lights.

She had never left the state of Florida and had never thought seriously about leaving, but she liked to imagine living under the aurora borealis and she'd looked up pictures of it on the Internet. Sasha sometimes imagined stepping through the front door of the house into a parallel universe where the aurora borealis came south to the Florida skies, a shadowed empty neighborhood with colors shifting overhead. When her alarm clock rang she woke exhausted, the bedside lamp shining and the book fallen from her hands.

Twenty-Six

Gavin woke with a dull headache throbbing behind his eyes, a morning news anchor in a pink suit telling him about the weather. Lights burned uselessly in the unoccupied rooms. It seemed crazy now that he'd found this place haunted a few hours earlier. If it weren't for the blanket he'd slept under, the empty cup on the coffee table, he might not have believed that Deval had been there at all. He considered the cup for a moment, took it to the sink and scrubbed it over and over again with hot water and soap and paper towels, wondering about the tenacity of DNA. At eight a.m. he called Eilo and told her he wasn't feeling well.

The story didn't appear till later in the day, in the online edition of the local paper. A body had been found behind the Starlight Diner. The victim had been identified as Paul J. Harris of Salt Lake City, Utah, shot twice in the chest with no witnesses sometime between the hours of midnight and three a.m. A quote from a detective on the Sebastian police force: while the police were actively pursuing all leads, there were no suspects at this time. Gavin turned away from his computer and looked down from his window at the movement of cars on the street. Thinking of Liam Deval sitting on his sofa twelve hours earlier, his hands shaking around the mug of hot water and lemon juice.

Twenty-Seven

It was necessary to stop twice for scratch-and-win tickets on the way to work, but Sasha didn't buy many and she managed not to spend very much. She found when she pulled into the diner parking lot that night that she had been expecting the police tape. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel but she felt no surprise. There wasn't much to see. Bright yellow tape blocking the back half of the parking lot, two officers standing around talking in the end-of-day light, a police cruiser. She clocked into the clamor of the dinner rush. Some hours later when the restaurant was quiet she found herself standing next to Bianca, but it was a moment before she could bring herself to ask.

"No one told you yet? It's an awful thing," Bianca said. "You left what time last night? Around two thirty?" Sasha nodded. Around two thirty. "Well, early this morning," Bianca said, "maybe five a.m., Freddy goes out for a cigarette, I hear a yell. He comes running back in here, pale as a sheet, says there's someone lying in the parking lot out back, says it looks like he's been shot in the chest. Well, you know that detective comes in sometimes, friend of yours?"

"Daniel?"

"That's the one. He came in last night after you left, and he was lingering, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Told me he couldn't sleep. Anyway, he goes out back to see what Freddy's talking about, makes everyone stay inside so they don't contaminate the crime scene, next thing you know there's cops everywhere."

"Do they know who it was?"

"I heard a few of them talking. They said it was some criminal from Utah, some guy with a drug record."

"From Utah? Are you sure?"

"You look pale, sweetheart."

"I didn't sleep well." A new group was coming in, four men in hospital scrubs from St. Mary Star of the Sea Hospital, and Sasha crossed the room unsteadily to greet them. She gave them menus and a forced smile, took orders for drinks and moved on autopilot through the motions of her exhausting profession. There were moments that night when disaster seemed so certain that she found herself paralyzed, concentrating on breathing because breathing was all that was left, but sometimes she was above this kind of panic and floated through the hours in a state of suspended hope. The smooth surfaces of the tickets in her apron pocket every time she reached for change.

"You okay, doll?" Bianca was watching her.

"Fine," she said.

"You don't look it, hon." Bianca's voice would be Anna's voice in a few decades, the low rasp that follows a lifetime of cigarettes, and it reminded Sasha of her stepmother's voice, silent now, rest in peace, her father alone. Her hand hovered in the air for just a second and then she punched in the hamburger, the fries, the macaroni and cheese, the Diet Coke and 7-Up, and on the other side of the thin adjoining wall to the kitchen an efficient small machine spit out a receipt with the order and Freddy tacked it up on the counter, the machinery of the restaurant moving into motion and Sasha at the middle of it. She was if nothing else an excellent waitress.

"That's not nothing," Anna had said a few months ago, "and surely there's more than that." There was. This evening Sasha looked out over her tables of customers and tried to remember all the things that were transcendent. Swimming, clean passage up and down the lanes. Chloe, a delight, an elf in the school Christmas play, sitting cross-legged on the sofa reading magazines, doing backflips and cartwheels in the backyard, careening down the street on a secondhand bicycle. A bell from the kitchen: an order was ready. Sasha carried the tray of food out into the dining room.

At e l e v e n o'clock Sasha went outside to make a phone call. She usually went out back but that was impossible now that the space behind the diner was a crime scene, so she left through the front door and stood by the restaurant's neon sign, its bluish light flickering over the gardenia bushes. She counted thirty-eight flowers while she waited for Anna to pick up.

"Anna," Sasha said. She'd been so breathless since Bianca had told her, since she'd seen the police tape. "Am I calling too late?"

"You sound strange." Anna's voice was muffled and sleepy.

"Anna, they found a body behind the restaurant. They said—" and there were tears now, humiliating but at least Anna couldn't see her and she struggled to steady her voice—"Bianca, my coworker, she said a cop told her it was some drifter from Utah."

"From Utah?" Anna spoke a beat too late. She sounded fully awake now. " Really?"

"Anna," she said, but it wasn't possible to ask the question. "Anna. "

"What are you asking me?" An edge in Anna's voice that Sasha had heard only once before, a decade ago, when Anna had called her from Utah months after Sasha had seen her last, before Sasha had even realized she'd left town— I'm going to have a baby and I'm not sure if it's Gavin's or Daniel's, do you think I'm awful Sasha? I've run away and I couldn't tell Gavin and please don't tell him either, I'm so scared— and Sasha had done her best to soothe her over the staticky connection, Shh, of course you're not awful, everything's going to be fine, Anna, we'll work it out, and after she'd hung up she'd gone to buy baby clothes at the mall in a gesture of what? Acceptance? Love? Guilt, because her sister had been gone for three months and Sasha had been too caught up in the theatrics of her own life that summer to really notice. She reminded herself that they'd been living in different houses, each with their respective fathers, but still; it was shocking, actually, how easy it had been for Anna to leave town undetected, and Sasha always knew afterward that she should have been paying more attention.

"Are you still there?" Anna asked.

"I'm here."

"Then what are you asking me?"

Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I'm asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much. The tears hot on her face.

"That's a good question," she said. "I don't know, Anna. I don't know what I'm asking you." She disconnected and when she went back inside she put her phone in her handbag in the staff room, where she wouldn't be able to hear it ring. For just a moment she felt unreachable and protected, but of course everyone who knew her also knew where she worked.

.

Da n i e l w a s there at two in the morning, slump-shouldered and harrowed in the corner of a booth. Sasha poured two cups of coffee, milk and sugar for him, black for her. She set the coffee in front of him. He was changed, smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, a tightness around his mouth that she hadn't seen before.

"Hell of a thing," he said after a few minutes of silence, and it was so inadequate that she laughed out loud. She felt a little giddy. He gave her a look that she recognized from gambling. It was a look she'd seen across poker tables on the faces of men and women who'd been dealt poor hands and hadn't decided whether to bluff or not. Daniel was sizing her up, but he was also afraid. They had, she realized, something in common at that moment: neither of them knew what she was going to do.

"Sasha," he began, but stopped.

"Yes?"

"Sasha, I spoke with Anna earlier. She said you were a little. she said you seemed. " He had run out of words again. He looked at her helplessly for a moment and then turned his focus to pouring a third packet of sugar into his coffee and stirring it for longer than necessary.

"How's your investigation going, Daniel?"

"Investigation?" He looked up as if startled.

"The body behind the diner last night. The drifter from Utah."

"Well, it's not my investigation, but in my understanding there's no weapon, no suspect, and no motive."

"Not much of an investigation, then, is it?"

"Sasha," he said.

"Where's Liam?"

"Gone."

"Gone gone?"

"Jesus, Sasha, he just left town. People do that sometimes. He said he was leaving for Europe."

"Daniel," she said, "you told me not to worry about where the money came from."

"What?" That miserable fugitive look. It wasn't just exhaustion. He looked eaten alive.

"When you came back from Utah," she said. "All those weeks ago. You told me you'd talked to the dealer, arranged repayment of the money Anna took. I asked where the money was coming from, and you said you'd recently come into an inheritance. Do you remember telling me that?"

"I remember." He wouldn't meet her eyes. "A man like that has a lot of enemies," he said. " Would you believe me if I said I see this all the time?"

"Yes," she said. "People who think they're getting a payment and get shot instead, because there was never any money at all. Why did I believe you when you said there was money? I wanted so much to believe that this could actually be over, but—"

"Sasha, think about what you're saying."

"What am I supposed to say?"

" Think about how the things you say might affect other people," he said. " Think about your niece."

"I am thinking about my niece. My niece is the only reason I haven't gone to the police yet."

"Who would believe you if you did?"

"Daniel. "

"But suppose you did go to the police," Daniel said. "Suppose a troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling did go to my colleagues and tell an improbable story about a detective with an impeccable record, even if that story was somehow believed, I was thinking of something earlier. That girl who was here last night, Grace. Did you know she's a runaway whose mother's in prison?"

"So?" But she understood, and she felt a chill down her spine.

"So you could turn Chloe into Grace, just by saying the word. You could take a little girl who lives happily with a mother who loves her, and you could set her adrift." He was speaking very quietly, leaning close across the table. His voice was flat but his eyes were shining. " Grace has been arrested three times, Sasha. She's a runaway living with a stripper and a drug addict. I'd say there but for the grace of God goes Chloe, but it isn't really God who gets to decide this one, is it?"

"You know that isn't what I want."

"Then let this blow over," Daniel said. "Let this go."

"Is that what you've done, Daniel? Let this go?"

But Daniel paid and left without answering her.

Sa s h a w e n t home in the morning and took two sleeping pills that held her only just below the surface of sleep. After three hours she was awake again in the silence of the basement. A troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling. The sleeping pills had left her dizzy and drugged. She was aware of the weight of her skeleton, her sluggish heart. She lay still for two more hours before she gave up on sleep, turned on the bedside lamp and tried to read but her thoughts were scattered. She showered and dressed and went upstairs into the violent daylight, sat on the front step and called William. He answered through a burst of static. She knew this meant he was far out in the field, in the swamps beyond town where reception was spotty.

"Can you meet me?" she asked.

"How soon?"

"As soon as you can."

"I'm at work all day," he said. "I could be at the diner by six."

She wished she could go swimming but she was far too tired; she closed her eyes in the sunlight and thought for a moment she might fall asleep. Daydreams of swimming laps and weightlessness.

Hours later in the diner she sat across a table from William, who was still in his Parks Department uniform, and it was all she could do to stay awake.

"How was work?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I was hunting," he said. William was only supposed to track the Burmese pythons, he was supposed to log their whereabouts and report sightings, but he'd confessed to Sasha that he'd taken to killing them. He knew how dangerous they were. He thought of those kids who lived near the canals and his heart just constricted. He was afraid of opening the paper one morning and seeing that one of the snakes had swallowed a four-year-old. He followed them through swamps with the radio transmitter, a quick loop of wire around the fleshy throat. His boss was turning a blind eye.

"You seem agitated," he said.

"I've been thinking about leaving town." Sasha glanced out the window. The crime scene had been dismantled, the police tape gone from the parking lot.

"You in trouble?"

"I haven't been gambling. Just the tickets."

"That's not what I asked."

"I don't know," she said. "When you were gambling, or anytime else in your life, did you ever. " She tried to find the right word while William watched her. "Did you ever witness anything?"

"Sasha, what are you talking about?"

"I think I saw something," she said.

"Are you saying you witnessed a crime?"

"Two nights ago."

"Have you gone to the police?"

"I can't."

"Why can't you?"

"I just can't," she said. "William, I need your help."

"What can I do?" He had set his coffee cup down on the table.

"I have to leave town," she said. "I have to get out, and I only know one way to raise money."

"Don't be crazy," he said.

"Can't you see I have no choice? I saw something." But what had she seen? A man's face tilted up toward the window, something almost plaintive in his look, a possibly imagined instant of falling as she turned away. It didn't matter what she'd seen. She'd lifted her cell phone from the table and obeyed a text message that had perhaps helped send him on his way to the next world.

"If it saves me," she said, "then isn't it worth it?"

He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before.

"When you were gambling," she said, "it was only horses, wasn't it?"

"Only," he said.

"I'm sorry. I just mean that that was the only kind of gambling you ever did."

"That was the only kind that was a problem."

"William, I need you to come with me to a poker game."

"Sasha, please."

"I need you to come with me to a poker game, and pull me away from the table if I'm losing too much."

" Think about who you're asking. I can't."

"I can't ask anyone else, William. I'm sorry." She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes. "William," she said, "I have to leave town soon, and I'm going to go to the casino before work tomorrow whether you'll meet me there or not. But I hope you'll meet me, because I need your help."

"I can't help you," he said. "You're asking too much."

I n t h e casino it was always night. Sasha stood for a few minutes near the door, afraid to go further, adrift on the wild patterns of the carpet. She had slept for only three hours after the end of her shift and then woken in tears from a dream she couldn't remember, heart racing. She felt slightly delirious. It had been some years since she'd been here and she'd forgotten the sounds of this place, the chimes and bells of machines, the voices and laughter. The slot machines, row upon row of men and women staring at screens and pulling levers, cherries and pineapples and bananas lining up and falling away before them. Beyond the slot machines she stood for a moment by the roulette table, watching the game. An impassive woman in a white shirt and black trousers spun the wheel, a dial of smooth heavy wood that gleamed under the lights.

This was what had caught her once, and held her here: once you stepped beyond the slot machines— and even these held a certain glinting allure— the casino was beautiful. White-and-gold ceilings arcing high between mahogany pillars, complicated parquet floors and thick carpets. When everything else around her had been squalid, there had always been this. This place had always held beauty even when it was killing her and the beauty reached her even now, even knowing what she did about how much could be lost here.

Sasha walked under mahogany archways into the hush of the poker room, where games were playing out at a dozen tables, bought into a no-limit game and sat with her chips in a small tower before her. After all these years of effort, of Gamblers Anonymous meetings, she was disappointed by an inescapable sense of homecoming.

The blinds were laid and the cards dealt. For a moment Sasha didn't want to look at her hand. She hesitated for so long that the man sitting beside her— a pinch-faced small person in a cowboy hat— glanced curiously at her. But she did look, finally, and it wasn't terrible. A jack and a nine, both hearts. There was hope there, or she could still fold and not have lost very much. Sasha raised a small bet and put in twenty, the first chips sliding away from her over the felt. She half-wanted to snatch them back and leave immediately before she lost anything important, but she forced herself to sit still. The flop was a two, a five, a queen. Nothing enormously useful, but the fourth card— the turn— was a ten of hearts and she felt the old quickening. It would be difficult, she realized, to hold on to herself here. She was thinking of Delirious Things, of northern lights and snow. She would go to Alaska! A half-formed idea that became a plan between the turn and the river card. She had always loved Florida but if her life was changing into something unrecognizable then she wanted Florida's opposite, she wanted winter and cold landscapes under northern lights. She would be alone there, but she was alone now. The river was the eight of hearts. She had the best hand and won three hundred dollars.

Her next two hands were useless and she folded, and after this she lost track of time. There was the smooth wood at the edge of the table under her fingertips, a faint scent of orange oil, the clicking of chips. She glanced up and the person next to her was now a large woman with a clipped northern accent. Sasha hadn't noticed when the man with the cowboy hat had left, or she'd noticed him leave but had forgotten it. There were tells and bluffs all around her, patterns in the cards. The stacks of hard disks by her hands rose and fell and rose again.

Her table was the nearest to the bar. She looked up and across the game and saw William Chandler watching her from a barstool, a jacket over his Parks Department uniform. He was sipping an amber liquid caught between ice cubes.

"I hoped I wouldn't find you here," he said. She wasn't sure if she'd heard him or if she'd read his lips, but she was certain of what he'd said to her. There was something unreal about the room now, the lights too bright, sound muffled.

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry." She knew she'd spoken aloud, but no one at the table glanced at her. The man across from her wore reflective glasses and a baseball cap, most of his face hidden. She couldn't tell where he was looking, so she tried not to look at him.

Sasha had a good hand, a king and a jack of spades, and the flop held a ten of the same suit. She held her breath. The turn was the nine of spades, the river was the queen and she'd just won, she realized, an extraordinary sum of money. The chips moved across the table toward her. She assembled them into careful towers. She was up two thousand four hundred fifty dollars. In the next game she lost seven hundred of this but it came back to her quickly. She couldn't remember having asked for a glass of water but one had appeared beside her chips, and she realized dimly that it was William who had set it there. Impossible to tell, in this room without clocks or windows, how long she had been here now. It had to have been a while, all these hands and the cast at the table around her still changing, the large northern woman with the clipped accent replaced by a larger red-faced man. She tried to remember all the hands she'd been dealt, but couldn't. William was watching her from the bar. She nodded at him in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

In her new state, she decided, Alaska or someplace else with snow, she would clean the wood of her home with orange oil. She liked the scent of it. The cards in her hands now were a two and a six, unmatched suits, so she folded and let her gaze slide over the room. This room was the promise: if you win enough at these tables you might move forever through rooms like this one, places with solid shining mahogany and warm colors, potted palm trees, high ceilings. All the interiors of your life might be elegant after this, opulent and always clean. Her next hand contained a pair of aces that brought towers of chips sliding over the table toward her and it was some time after this, although she wasn't sure how long, when she heard William Chandler's voice behind her.

"Sasha," he said, "it's time to stop."

His voice broke the spell. She looked at the pile of chips before her and realized, waking from the dream, that she was up a little over six thousand dollars.

"Fold," she said. The game was almost over. She watched the showdown, the dealer's hands sliding the stacks of chips toward the man with the reflective glasses, who broke into an exuberant grin. Her legs were unsteady when she stood. William took her elbow. He helped her cash out her chips and in the gray twilight of the parking lot they stood together by his car. She felt dazed and emptied out.

" Thank you, William." Her voice was hoarse. "What time is it?"

" Eight o'clock," he said. "You working tonight?"

"I got someone to cover for me," she said. "I don't have to be at work till ten. I didn't know how much time I'd need."

"What now, then?"

"Let's go to the ocean."

"The ocean?"

"I'm leaving Florida soon," Sasha said. "I don't know when I'll see it again."

"Okay, then, the ocean. You have a spot in mind?"

"There's an access point at the end of Cordoba Boulevard."

"Fine," he said. "I'll follow you."

She started her car. These mechanical motions, automatic pilot. William's headlights in the rearview mirror. She usually felt more sharpness and purpose in a car than elsewhere but now she drifted through the twilight, palm trees approaching and falling away in the windshield, her headlights a thin glaze on the half-dark streets. Stay awake. Stay awake. She had to remind herself to blink but she felt sleep crowding close around her, a chaotic darkness at the periphery. It would be easy to slide. She wondered where Anna was, but that thought was pure agony and she shied quickly away from it. The six thousand seventy dollars from the casino were divided here and there on her body, some in the zipped inside pocket of her jacket, some in her handbag, some in her sports bra between her breasts. These tropical streets where she'd lived all her life. The long passage down Cordoba and the darkened sea at the end. She parked the car and walked out on the sand in the still salt air. There were three condominium towers by the beach here, but the units hadn't sold. Almost all of the windows were dark, one or two lights shining high above.

"I'm going somewhere where the air's lighter," she said to William, when she heard his footsteps on the sand beside her.

" Where you planning on going?"

"I'm going to Alaska," she said. "Or as close to Alaska as I can get before my car breaks down."

"When?" "Soon. Maybe tomorrow or the next day." "Then I might not see you again," William said.

At n i n e forty-five Sasha was at the diner, reflexively checking the booths and tables for Daniel or Gavin as she walked to the staff room. Neither was there.

"Sweetheart," Bianca said, "you look like hell."

"I had insomnia." Sasha moved past her and locked the staff bathroom door behind her. She looked worse than she would have guessed. Her eyes were bloodshot and glassy, her stare unblinking. Her lipstick was gone. There was a shine of sweat on her skin, smudges of mascara at the corners of her eyes. She washed her face, stripped out of her uniform and gave herself a cold sponge bath with paper towels. She tried not to look at herself in the mirror. She dressed and smoothed out the wrinkles with a damp paper towel as best she could, combed her hair and pinned it up behind her head, carefully reapplied her makeup. When she was done she thought she looked presentable, except for the eyes.

"You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if something were wrong," Bianca said.

"No," Sasha said, "I think I've been enough of a burden."

The dinner rush was nearly over, a few stray customers here and there in the booths. Her apron and her bra were full of money, hundred-dollar bills warm against her skin. She stood by the cash register, listening to the muffled clatter of Freddy and Luis washing up from the dinner rush in the kitchen. She picked up dirty dishes and dropped off dessert menus, carried a towering slice of New York cheesecake that seemed to float before her across the room. Sasha admired the gleam of lights in melting ice cream as she set a banana split on a table. Her exhaustion was taking on the force of gravity. She drank cup after cup of coffee and it helped but her heart was racing, spots in front of her eyes when she turned her head too quickly. She was trying not to look out the windows, because it was possible that beneath the surface of the reflections she might see the man's face looking up at her from outside like a corpse in deep water. The idea of swimming. She went to the restroom to splash cold water on her hands. All this money pressed close against her body but the idea of going out on her own was terrifying.

" Where are your parents?" Bianca asked. They were standing together by the cash register, a momentary lull. The question was unexpected. It took Sasha a moment to compose her thoughts.

"I don't know anymore," Sasha said. "Why?"

"It would've been my mother's birthday today," Bianca said. "I've been thinking about parents, I suppose."

"What was your mother like?"

"She was kind. She worked hard. She raised five kids. Liked soap operas and calla lilies. Yours?"

"My mother isn't any good. I haven't spoken to her since high school."

"What do you mean, she isn't any good?"

"She just never was."

"Where's your father?"

"He doesn't talk to me," Sasha said. "I stole his car and sold it for gambling money."

"But you're better now, aren't you?"

"I don't know," Sasha said. "I'm trying to be better."

It occurred to her around midnight that this might be her last night here. The idea of departure cast the diner in a vivid light, a picture coming into focus. She felt suddenly awake, the fog lifted. The brilliant red banquettes and the gleam of chrome under the lights, pebbled Formica tabletops and all the sounds she barely heard anymore, the clatter from the kitchen and the voices of other diners and the passage of cars on Route 77. She looked around, blinking, she caught Bianca's eye and smiled.

"I just want you to know," she said, "I've always enjoyed working with you."

"Well, thank you, sweetheart." Bianca didn't smile back. "You sound like you're saying your good-byes."

"I don't know," Sasha said. "Maybe."

She moved like a ghost through the caffeinated hours.

Twenty-Eight

A brief history of the money:

A h u n d r e d and twenty-one thousand dollars in a gym bag in a basement in Salt Lake City, destined to be taken to a sympathetic investment banker the following morning. Cameras in the basement caught the image clearly: Anna descends the stairs—"She looks kind of wild-eyed," Daniel said nervously, watching the footage with Paul in the hours after the theft was discovered, afraid for his life— and she unzips the bag at the bottom of the stairs, grabs it, and slips like a shadow back up to the first floor. The theft takes less than a minute. Careless to leave the money unsecured and Paul never did it again. He was still new in those days. He'd been in his profession less than a year.

A f e w hours earlier Anna had been lying on top of the sofa bed in the storage room at Paul's house, watching the movement of the fan on the ceiling above. A charitable organization at the hospital had given Anna an infant car seat, a package of diapers, a bottle and formula, some brochures. She threw out the brochure about adoption and read the others over and over again, trying to memorize everything. Paul's house wasn't home but she didn't know where else she could go, marooned as she was that night in the Kingdom of Deseret. She was alone in the storage room with her baby and she'd been putting Chloe to sleep in the car seat at night, because she was afraid of rolling over on her in the bed. Daniel was living in an upstairs room, not speaking to her. Sasha had wired her two hundred dollars. Anna took expensive taxis to the pharmacy for diapers and infant formula. She didn't know what she would do when the money ran out, if it would be possible to ask Daniel for more. Whenever she saw him in passing in the house he looked at her with such fury that words froze in her throat. She tried to avoid him.

How well did she know Daniel? Not well, when she considered the question, but who else did she have? There was Sasha far away in Florida, struggling. There was Gavin, but the thought of Gavin filled her with guilt and approaching him seemed unthinkable after what she'd done; she had ideas about honor and knew she'd transgressed. She wasn't sure what would become of her, or what Daniel would do. Every part of her ached with exhaustion. Days slipped into a week and then two and even music didn't soothe her. Chloe slept and woke, cried and made small noises, gurgled and kicked her feet. Anna had never imagined such an intensity of love.

On the night she took the money she was restless and ill at ease. When Chloe finally fell asleep Anna lay on her back on the sofa bed, fully dressed. Shadows passed over the ceiling from a branch blowing in front of the backyard light, and a cold wind came into the room. She stood to close the window, and this was when she heard them. Paul and Daniel were in the backyard, far back in the shadows by the picnic bench under the tree. A woman's voice, Paul's girlfriend, a too-thin woman with blond hair whom Anna had seen only in passing. The faint smell of cigarettes. She didn't hear what Paul said— she caught her name and the word responsibility, nothing else— but Daniel's reply carried clearly on the breeze.

"I could kill her," he said. "That's how angry I am."

She stepped away from the window. Chloe was still sleeping. All she could think of as she left the room and slipped down the stairs to the basement was Paul beating that man in the backyard a few months earlier, the blood on the grass the following morning. You're judged by the company you keep, a social worker had told her once, you are the company you keep, and wasn't Daniel Paul's friend?

The bag wasn't heavy. She had no idea how much money weighed, but she was half-blind with fear and the thought occurred to her that this couldn't be more than a few thousand dollars, five thousand perhaps, she would take it and use it to get away from here and pay Paul back later and perhaps someday he'd even understand. Back in the storage room she was fast and silent, throwing everything she could see into her duffel bag. Cigarette smoke still drifted in through the window; she heard them talking, too quietly to hear, and the miracle was that Chloe didn't wake when Anna lifted the car seat and slipped out the front door. She half-walked, half-ran down the hill to the doughnut store where she'd worked, called a taxi, and bought a doughnut and a cup of coffee while she waited for the car to arrive. It wasn't until much later, waiting for the bus that would take her out of Utah, hiding in the ladies' room until the last possible moment, locked in a handicapped stall with Chloe and the two bags, that she looked for the first time at the money in the bathroom's harsh light and understood exactly how much trouble she was in.

.

In t h e small hours of morning Anna held Chloe wrapped in a blanket in her arms and they fell together into a fitful sleep, Utah passing outside the window. Mostly darkness, every so often a town in the distance. In the house in the suburbs in Salt Lake City, the theft had just been discovered. In the master bedroom where he'd set up his command center Paul was watching the footage from the basement camera over and over again, and Daniel was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. Paul's girlfriend had been waiting, smoking and painting her nails in the kitchen, for a half-hour before she finally came in.

"I told you not to come in," Paul said, but he was distracted. The girl on the screen lifted the bag for the twelfth time.

"Tell me what's wrong," Paul's girlfriend said. "Why won't you just tell me?" But she was already moving toward the screen. She watched Anna slip quickly up the stairs.

"A hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars," Paul said, but this, after leaving the basement door unsecured, was his second mistake of the evening.

"Are you serious? That little girl?" She spoke with such derision that a decade later Daniel remembered her exact wording, the look on her face, even though he couldn't remember her name. "That little girl stole a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars from you? Oh my God, baby, that's hilarious. You gonna let that slide?"

Paul stared at the screen and even though Daniel was far from the underworld, he'd seen enough movies to understand. Paul couldn't let this slide because the girl was a witness. Daniel assumed that if word got out that it was possible to get away with stealing a hundred twenty-one thousand dollars, then Paul was finished.

"Of course not," Paul said. He turned to Daniel, as he had a half-dozen times in the past half-hour; but now everything was different, because now someone was watching them. "I could hold you responsible," he said. Daniel hoped this was for the benefit of the girl.

"I told you I had nothing to do with this. I haven't spoken a word to her since the baby was born."

" Where would she have gone?"

"I have no idea," Daniel said.

"I might be willing to believe you," Paul said, "but first you have to tell me who her friends are." The girl was chewing gum, looking from one to the other.

"She doesn't really have—"

"Who did she spend time with before she came here?" Paul asked.

Daniel spent the rest of his life laden with guilt, but at that moment telling him seemed the only way out of that house. He gave him the names of the rest of the Lola Quartet. "But look, the only place she would go is Florida," he said. This bit of misdirection seemed the last thing he could do for her. In an hour he would call her and speak into her voice mail, he would tell her how sorry he was and how stupid she'd been and beg her to go anywhere but Florida. In two hours she would stand at a counter in a small town in Colorado and change her bus ticket to South Carolina. "She's never in her life been anywhere else."

Twenty-Nine

Ten years later in the city of Sebastian Gavin read the account of Paul's death and sat still for some time looking at nothing before he closed his laptop and continued on with his day. Later that evening he showered and shaved, put on his best shirt and drove to the address on the torn corner of newspaper. Driving was unpleasant and nerve-wracking with his bad arm, he didn't like having only one hand on the steering wheel, but he was tired of taxis. The address Deval had given him was another motel, even farther out than the Draker, a run-down place just within Sebastian city limits. It was late already, ten thirty p.m., and lights were on in no more than five or six motel-room windows. He parked his car and made his way toward the building.

A girl was jumping rope by the stairs that led up to the second story. He couldn't see her face, a blur of long dark hair in the shadows, but something in her movement arrested him. He sat down on a step and waited until she stopped.

"Hello," he said. The girl from the photograph stared back at him. Eilo's thin lips and straight dark hair, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Traces of Japan in the shape of her eyes although her eyes were the color of Anna's, bright blue. "Is your mom around?"

"No," she said. There was something deerlike about her. She was winding the skipping rope around her hand, watching him, and her bearing suggested that she might bolt at any moment.

"Where's your dad?"

"I don't have a dad," the girl said. "He died before I was born."

" Really," Gavin said. "Before you were born?" He wanted nothing more than to stay in this moment forever, sitting here on this step with his daughter before him. Trying to imagine all the years he'd missed, what she'd looked like at nine, at seven, at two.

"My mom said it was a car accident."

"A car accident," Gavin said. "I'm sorry to hear that."

She shrugged. "It's okay," she said. "I didn't know him."

"Where's your mom?"

"She's at night school," the girl said.

"What time does she get home?"

"Late. Maybe eleven."

The desolation of this small motel. The dirty stucco, the paint coming off the doors in patches and strips. She dropped the wound-up skipping rope at her feet, raised her arms and did a slow back handstand off the cement walkway onto the grass, walked on her hands for a few steps, and pivoted to face him once she was upright. He applauded.

"I've been practicing," she said. He was watching her with tears in his eyes. A memory of Eilo doing backflips in a circle around the yard when they were little. A firefly sparked in the nearby air and she crouched down to look at it.

"I'm not sure what your name is," he said.

"Chloe." The firefly blinked out. She stood.

" Chloe Montgomery?"

"How did you know?"

"I know your mom," he said.

"But how did you know she was my mom?"

"You look like her."

"No, I don't," Chloe said.

"You have the same color eyes," he said.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Just a silly accident," he said. "It's getting better."

"How do you know her?"

"Your mom? We went to school together."

"How old were you?" Chloe asked.

" Older than you," Gavin said. "I guess I was fifteen when I first met her. She was fourteen."

"Were you her boyfriend?"

"Yes."

"Oh," she said. She was studying him closely.

"Why are you here at the motel?"

"I don't know," she said. A flicker of doubt crossed her face. "My mom said it was a vacation."

"A vacation?"

"She said sometimes people stay in motels for a while and that's what a vacation is."

"Oh," Gavin said. "You know, she's right, actually. That's exactly what people do on vacation."

"We keep going from motel to motel," Chloe said.

"Chloe, I have to talk to your mom."

"She gets home late," Chloe said. "I make my own dinner."

"What do you make?"

"Macaroni and cheese. 'Bye," she said abruptly, and went to the

door of a motel room halfway down the row. She fumbled in her pocket for a key, unlocked the door and closed it behind her, and a light flicked on behind the curtain. He stayed on the steps for a long time, waiting, listening to crickets and muffled television noises, watching cars pass on the street. Two cars pulled up to the motel in the interval, people coming home with bags of groceries. This was a motel, he realized, where people stayed for some time, a place for people who didn't have houses or apartments anymore.

A third car pulled in, a small battered Toyota. The driver parked in front of the room that Chloe had disappeared into. It took him a moment to recognize Anna, hazy in the blue-white light. She had cut her hair short and dyed it. But she was wearing a sleeveless shirt that night and when she got out of the car he saw the bass-clef tattoo. She was less than thirty feet away.

"Anna," he said. She started and took a step backward, came up hard against the door of the car. He raised his hands.

"It's me," he said, "it's Gavin. Gavin Sasaki."

"Gavin. Christ." He remembered her smoking when they were teenagers, and understood from her voice that she'd never stopped. "How did you find me?"

" Deval gave me your address. I just wanted to talk to you. It's been years." He stood up slowly from the step. He didn't want to frighten her.

She looked at him for a moment, walked around the car to retrieve a bag of groceries from the passenger seat. She unlocked the door to the motel room, fumbling with her keys. "Why don't you come in," she said.

An n a h a d a job as a file clerk, but she was studying to be a paralegal. She was twenty-six and looked older, pale when she turned on the dim light over the stove in the kitchenette. She was blond but he saw the dark roots of her natural hair. She lived with her daughter in a single motel room. Chloe was nowhere to be seen, but Anna raised a finger to her lips and pointed at a squared-off corner of folding screens, and Gavin understood this to be Chloe's room. There were two mismatched stools at the kitchenette counter, no table. The room had two beds; he could see the flattened-down space of carpet where Chloe's bed had been, before it had been pushed into the corner and hidden from view. Anna moved efficiently in the tiny kitchenette, putting groceries away. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge, popped both, and passed him one. He held the bottle briefly to his forehead.

"You haven't changed," she said. " Still can't take the heat."

"I never could."

"So what are you doing back in Sebastian?" She had the same quick bright way of speaking. Here she stood before him and he realized that he was still looking for her, trying to find the Anna he'd known in her face, in her movements, still searching for clues.

"It's a long, boring story."

"You were a journalist, weren't you?"

"I was," he said.

"Daniel told me you got fired. He said you lied in all your stories."

"Not all of them. The last few."

"Why did you lie?" Anna asked.

"I don't know, there was so much pressure at that place."

"Come on," she said.

"You come from nowhere, some suburb somewhere, there's such an expectation that you'll succeed, everyone back home talking about you—"

"Why did you lie?"

"I just came undone," Gavin said. "I wasn't expecting it."

She had nothing to say to this. She pulled herself up to sit on the counter and sipped her beer and in that motion he saw a glimpse of her as a girl— but had he ever actually seen her sit on a counter? Perhaps at a house party? Or was it just that sitting on a counter was something he expected teenagers to do? She was wearing sandals. Her toenails were painted a sparkly blue. He glanced around in the awkward silence that followed and saw that she'd gone to some effort to make the motel room look like home. A child's drawings had been Scotch-taped to the walls. One in particular caught his eye: a house with a child and two women beside it and a sun with spiked rays overhead, Chloe's name written carefully in a corner in rounded letters with a heart after it. There were pictures of acrobats executing squiggly backflips, suspended in the air with red and blue birds flying overhead. A dish and a fork were drying on a dish towel beside the sink, and a faint aroma of macaroni and cheese lingered in the air.

"You went to Utah," he said.

"I did." She was sipping her beer, expressionless, and he tried to imagine what her memories might be like.

"What was it like there?"

"What was it like? It was lonely. It was uncomfortable. Nothing terrible happened to me. I just spent whole days alone in the house, pregnant, whole days waiting in this unfamiliar house while Daniel was at work, and the rest of the time I was working at a doughnut shop. It's so long ago now," she said. "I don't think about it."

"You took some money," he said.

"I did." She regarded him for a moment. "Have you ever made a decision in a moment of panic and then regretted it for the rest of your life?"

"I've done regrettable things. Why did you come back here?"

"Back to Sebastian? It'd been three years. I'd broken up with Liam.

I wanted to be near Sasha again. We figured if anyone were still looking for us, they'd have found us by then."

"Anna," he said, "is that my daughter?"

"No," she said. "She's my daughter. No one else raised her."

"If I'd known she existed. "

"Then what? You would have stayed in Florida?"

"I don't know, Anna. I would have done something."

She shrugged. "Well," she said, "you didn't." A hardness in her voice. He was looking at her and thinking, The robin' s-egg-blue headphones. The way you listened to music. The way your hair fell over your face while you did your homework. The way you stood before the wall in the park and showed me the word you'd spray- painted over and over again, NO for New Order. The girl he'd searched for, he realized, no longer existed. He was shot through with unease.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I came here to apologize. I think I knew you were pregnant. There were all those rumors, and you said you had to tell me something but you didn't, and then you disappeared. I didn't really make inquiries. I didn't really look for you. I just took off for New York and let you go."

"I didn't tell you," she said. "I left town before you did."

"But you know what? I should have known. You were always— you were good," he said. "You deserved better than what I did."

She smiled. "Good? Is that how you remember me?"

"Yes." In the long silence that followed he tried to think of a way of casually enquiring about the death behind the Starlight Diner, came up short and opted for bluntness. "Did you give Deval my address?" he asked.

"He insisted. He said he had to apologize to you." Her voice had changed, her smile gone. "I told him he was out of his mind, going to see you in the state he was in. He wasn't thinking clearly."

"He told me your troubles are over."

"One of them," she said. "The most dangerous one."

"What happens now, Anna?"

"Now?" She spoke quietly, contemplating the bottle in her hand. "Life continues. I get up and go to work every day. I'm going to move back in with my sister next week."

"And you're. someone died last night," he said. "Aren't you troubled by that?"

"Keep your voice down." Anna was peeling the label from her beer bottle, working sparkly blue fingernails under the corners. "I am," she said after a moment. "Of course I am. I know what I've done."

"But you're—"

"But I'm not wrecked by it," she said, "because there was nothing else I could do. Sasha's pretty torn up about it. Want to know something about Sasha? She's never gone anywhere or done anything, and it's made her naive. You know what people like Sasha assume? They assume every human life is equal."

He felt a touch of vertigo that he couldn't blame on his arm. "You think some lives deserve to end."

"He was a dealer who threatened my daughter." She was rolling the torn-off label into a tiny ball between her fingertips, a quick nervous motion. "I watched him beat a man almost to death once. Surely you don't wish he were still walking this earth."

"I think it isn't for me to decide."

Anna was cast in yellow by the stove-top light, a shine of sweat on her nose. " Think about it," she said. She wasn't nearly as calm as he'd thought, he realized. Her voice was strained now, tears in her eyes. "It was a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars plus interest. None of us had money, or families with money, or friends with money, or the kinds of credit ratings that lend themselves to loans. Daniel thought he had an inheritance, but it fell through at the last minute. What were we supposed to do?"

"I don't know," he said. He was struck by a sudden mad thought that he was speaking with an impostor, but there was the bass-clef tattoo on her shoulder.

"You see? We didn't know either. What would have been the right thing to do, Gavin, under the circumstances?"

"I can't help but think. " He was short of breath. "I just think there's always another way."

"We couldn't think of one," she said.

"I just don't know how you move on from something like this," Gavin said.

"You mean, you don't know how you're going to move on from this." She set her half-empty beer bottle next to the sink and jumped down off the counter, opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of ginger ale. She filled a glass with ice and they both listened to the cubes cracking as she poured the soda. She didn't offer him a glass. "Or are you implying that I've moved on from it? I haven't, of course I haven't. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. But if you're asking how to keep going, what you do is you remind yourself of the truth," she said, "which is that there wasn't a choice. That's the difference between me and Sasha. I understand that and she doesn't."

"You could have turned him in. Cooperated with the police."

"You mean, help convict an alleged drug dealer for having had a hundred twenty-one thousand dollars stolen from him ten years ago in a distant state? Don't be stupid. I was the thief. The way I see it, the theft and the provenance of the money cancel each other out. How could anyone possibly prove that the money I found in his basement ten years ago came from dealing crystal?" Her eyes were shining. "You don't understand the position we were placed in," she said. "He found us, he forced our hands. He had someone take Chloe's picture at Liam's mother's house. Daniel went to talk to him about repayment, but then it turned out there was no money after all. None of us was even close. We could have done. this, we could've done what we did, or I could have disappeared again with Chloe, and Liam's mother would probably have been in danger. Sasha too, and Daniel's children. People like him, they come after your family and friends."

He looked away from her. His arm hurt.

"The photograph of Chloe. " he began, but couldn't finish. Not telling her, he realized, was the only kindness he could give her.

"I had to hide before," Anna said. She cleared her throat and continued in a steadier voice. " After I left Utah that time, when I was seventeen. I ran and hid for years, and I just couldn't do it again. You don't know what it's like. Always looking over your shoulder, looking out for strange cars, the way all the windows have eyes. This time there wouldn't have been any money, Gavin, this time we would've been in hiding forever, Chloe and I. New names, no friends, no more family, no money, and this time I'd be with a child who was old enough to understand and old enough to give us away, and the people we left behind would be in danger, like I said. There wasn't a choice."

Chloe stirred in her sleep and they were both silent for a moment, looking in her direction.

"I'm sorry," Gavin said. "I don't think you had to do what you think you had to do."

Anna said nothing. What were they capable of, Anna and Daniel and Liam? If you've gone all the way once, isn't it easier to do it again? He was chilled in the dim air of the motel room.

"It was your idea," he said, "wasn't it?"

"It wasn't anyone's idea." She sounded immeasurably weary. "We were talking about what to do, the three of us—"

"You, Daniel, Liam Deval?"

"Right. I can't remember anyone bringing it up, but the idea was there, in the room. We were talking and it was something we were skirting around. No one said it directly. It just. it slowly became something that had been decided on. If we hadn't done this," she said, and there were tears on her face now, "how much danger would we have been in? What might have happened to Chloe, to Sasha, to Daniel's kids? 'You pay with money or you pay with your family.' That's what he said to Daniel."

"But it was the wrong thing to do," Gavin said. "It's the worst thing anyone I know has ever done."

Anna had gone still. She was watching him intently. Could she throw something at him? Everything within her reach was suddenly a weapon; the toaster, the heavy glass in her hand, the hard bowl on the dish towel by the sink. Gavin backed away from her and opened the door. He was afraid to look away until he'd closed the door between them, and he glanced twice at the motel on the fast walk back to his car but the door remained shut, the curtain over the window unmoving.

Gavin drove to his apartment. He hadn't accumulated much. He made a neat stack of his clothes and bedding in the backseat of his car, working quickly. His socks and underwear went into a cardboard box behind the front passenger seat. He hid his laptop under a pillow on the backseat and packed a plastic bag with half a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, all the bottles of water from the fridge, an unripe banana and an orange. The kettle, which was of course easily replaceable but was his favorite of all the kettles he'd ever owned, a pleasing fire-engine red. His magnificent 1973 Yashica and the gold pocket watch he'd found at a stoop sale in New York, the glass dog stolen from his mother, the photograph of Chloe. When he was finished all that remained was the sofa that had been there when he moved in, a cheap bed and dresser and coffee table from Ikea. On the way out he dropped the apartment key through the mail slot.

H e d r o v e to the Starlight Diner and parked in the shadows by the back door. No trace remained of the crime scene. The diner was quiet at this hour, a midnight lull. When he came in Sasha was standing by the cash register with another waitress, the older blond woman with turquoise eye shadow whom he'd met once or twice before. Gavin waved at them and sat in a banquette where he could see the parking lot.

"Will you sit for a moment?" he asked, when Sasha came to his table. She did, sliding onto the padded bench across from him. She looked worse than she had the last time he'd seen her, paler, dark smudges under her eyes.

"You look tired," he said. He realized it was a tactless thing to say as the words left his mouth, but she didn't seem to take offense.

"I was up all day playing poker." Something tugged at him when she said this— a long-ago conversation he'd had with her outside the school, money lost in a high school poker game— but the memory was fleeting and vague.

"Where's Grace?"

"I don't know. I drove her home that night."

"Sasha, you told me once that you hated the plan."

She glanced at Bianca, but Bianca was across the room and couldn't hear them.

"I did," she said softly. "I do. Yes."

"Did you know what the plan was?"

"That's just it," she said. "I thought I did, but I think the plan was

actually something different." Her hands were clenched on the table. "Did you know what the plan was, Gavin?"

"I didn't know anything."

"I thought it was just money." There were tears in her eyes. "Anna and Daniel, I thought they were just paying back a debt. I didn't know."

"Sasha," he said, "we were friends back then, weren't we? In high school?"

"That was a nice time," she said. He hadn't expected her to turn nostalgic on him. Her eyes drifted toward the window, and he saw how tired she was. She was losing focus, not as sharp as she had been a week or two ago, not even as sharp as she'd been in high school. She closed her eyes for just a moment and touched her fingertips to her forehead. "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't been sleeping much. Do you ever miss the quartet?"

"We were good."

She smiled. "We were. You remember our last concert?"

"Behind the school. How could I forget? It was the only time I ever played in the back of a pickup truck."

"I think about it sometimes," she said. "Taylor singing, the fireflies, everyone dancing."

"Sasha," he said, "have you thought about going somewhere else?"

"I have." She was still gazing out the window. "I'm leaving soon," she said.

"When?"

"I don't know, I just want to get away from all this." She looked at him. "I can't go to the police," she said. "She's my sister. You don't know what she's done for me."

"I want to ask you a favor," Gavin said. "As a friend."

"What kind of favor?"

"Sasha," he said, "I want you to leave town tonight. Please. Don't tell anyone you're going."

"Tonight?"

"Will you do it?"

"Why.?"

"Because you're complicit," he said, "and because I don't know if you're safe here."

"But you're not going to say anything about this, are you? What would happen to Chloe?"

The thought of his daughter made his heart seize up.

"Just say you'll do it, Sasha, please."

"Okay," she said, "I'll leave town tonight." A brightness in her eyes that he hadn't anticipated. She was frightened, he realized, but also excited. How many times in your life do you get to flee town? How often do you get to lose everything and start all over again?

G a v i n h a d already researched the boundaries of police precincts in this part of Florida and now he pulled out of the parking lot and turned right on Route 77. He crossed the first boundary within a few minutes— Fellever Road— and kept driving. It wouldn't hurt, he thought, to cover some distance. He stopped for gas and a road map. The suburbs were shining, glass and stucco and lights along the freeway and palm trees silhouetted along the edge of the sky. He was traveling north. He had a few thousand dollars, the savings from his work with Eilo. He would stop and call Eilo to explain and then keep going, up out of this land of palm trees and alligators, somewhere far. He was thinking about Chicago. He didn't think his life would be easier there but he was certain it would be different.

Gavin crossed the Sebastian city limits. The city-limits sign was in

the middle of a long block between a shopping mall and an office park. He was entering the city of Cassidy, according to the signs, and now he'd crossed Alberly Street. This was yet another demarcation. He'd put at least six precincts between himself and Daniel. After some time had passed he saw a sign for a police station and pulled into the exit lane. The station was a massive square of cinder blocks in an ocean of parking lot.

Gavin parked the car and retrieved the photograph of Chloe from the glove box. Ten years old, standing by the window in an almost empty dining room. He put his hand on the car door, but he didn't open it.

He'd played the sequence of events over in his head so many times that it felt almost like a memory. I get out of my car and walk across the parking lot, I push open the glass doors of the police station and cross a threshold into a bright world of blue paint and fluorescent light panels humming, voices and the crackling of radios. I address myself to the police officer watching me from behind a high blue countertop, I say the words that change everything: I have information about a murder. I make statements, I name names. I do the technically correct thing, the right thing, the thing a law-abiding citizen does in the presence of a crime.

A knock on the driver' s-side window made Gavin jump. He'd been too lost in the dream to register the police cruiser pulling into the lot, and now a police officer was looking at him through the glass. Gavin rolled the window down and the cool air of the car escaped.

"Can I help you?" the officer asked. His tone was unexpectedly friendly.

"Just getting my bearings." Gavin was grateful now for the map, open on the passenger seat. He gestured weakly at it.

"You need directions?"

"I'm trying to get on the interstate," he said. It came out a whisper. He was having trouble finding his voice. He cleared his throat and repeated himself. The photograph of Chloe was still in his hand. "Just pulled in here to take a look at the map."

" Where you going?"

"Chicago."

"You want I-95." Gavin tried to listen while the police officer described a series of turns. "Anything else I can help you with this evening?"

Gavin set the photograph of Chloe on the seat beside him. " Thank you," he said. "There's nothing else."

He pulled out of the police-station parking lot and left the town of Cassidy, lights burning all along the interstate, northward flight. His lips moving with the words of a letter that he would transcribe some days later in Chicago, a letter that he would write but never send: I wanted to find you, dear Chloe, I wanted to help, but in the end the best I could do for you was to leave you in peace. I love you. I'll never know you. I'll always wonder who you are.

On either side of the highway the suburbs continued uninterrupted, a continuous centerless glimmering of lights, shadows of palm trees on parking lots, malls shining like beacons and he was nowhere, this could be any suburb on the edge of any city but it seemed to him that none of the cities had edges anymore, just a long slow reach across landscapes. At four a.m. he stopped for food and coffee at a diner very much like the Starlight, left a long message on his sister's cell phone, and drove on toward Chicago, toward the north star and morning.