The Lola Quartet (28 page)

   "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.

A
day 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.

. . .

H
o 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.