The Lola Quartet (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "I see," he said.

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   "It's me," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   She had nothing to say to this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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