The Lola Quartet (24 page)

S
a 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.

T
h 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.

A
n 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.