The Lola Quartet (27 page)

   "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.

J
ack 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.

W
hen 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.