The Lola Quartet Read online

  "I've been meaning to ask you," Julie said. "I don't remember seeing an Amy Torren on the list of Alkaitis's victims."

  "Oh, the investments were under her husband's name."

  "Okay," she said, with an air of relief. "What's her husband's name?"

  " Jacob Fischer," Gavin said. It was just the first name that came to him. Fischer was the man in his eighties who'd lost everything to Alkaitis and cried on the phone.

  G a v i n ' s n e x t story was about cuts to funding for playground maintenance in the Bronx. He traveled far north on the subway to reach a desolate neighborhood where wind moaned around the corners of low brick buildings. It was cold and he spent an hour standing by a playground on a street that scared him, trying to get suspicious mothers to talk to him about broken swing sets. That was when the mothers showed up at all— more often it was gangs of half-feral eight-and nine-year-olds who hit the swing set with sticks and threw rocks at the slide, stared blankly at Gavin when he tried to talk to them and snickered as they walked off. They knew about lone men in playgrounds.

  He stood at the edge of the playground, alone after forty-five minutes of trying to get people to talk to him, and tears came suddenly to his eyes. The slide was rusted. There were broken bottles in the grass. Was this the sort of place where his lost daughter might play, in whatever transitory postforeclosure hellhole she might have landed in?

  Gavin took the train back to the newsroom, where he wrote the story and then stared for a long time at the blinking cursor on the screen. A memory of Karen, lying beside him on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. One of their last happy Sundays together, late in the third month of her four-month pregnancy. They'd told Eilo and Karen's parents but almost no one else. Sunlight angled through a window and caught in her hair. Had that only been two months ago? If it's a girl, we'll name her Rose, she said. If it's a boy, Thomas.

  As local parent Rose Thomas put it, "It's really the children who are suff ering. The cuts in playground funding have been a nightmare for us."

  Gavin read the quote over and over again. Seeing the words on the screen made them real, even though he hadn't sent them to anyone yet, even though this could still be undone. There had been two lapses now but turning back was still possible. There could still be an evening years or decades from now when he might look back at a strange period far earlier in his career, a few shadowy months before the Pulitzer but after his fiancée had left him when he'd started to slide but pulled himself back just in time, two stories with small lies in them and then no more after that.

  But everyone knew there would be more layoffs at the newspaper and the story as written was a dud, filler, a flightless bird, all facts and budget numbers and no humanity. The Rose Thomas quote was exactly the sort of thing a concerned parent would say. When you came down to it, he thought, it was a question of names again, the same as that shadow across his Florida story had been. It was something he'd said, and he was almost certainly a father. Did it matter, did it actually matter that the words on the screen had been said by a parent named Gavin Sasaki, not a parent named Rose Thomas? He hadn't slept well since Florida. He was so tired tonight.

  "Go home," Julie had said, two hours earlier. She usually stayed much later but tonight she said she had a headache. She'd walked past his desk with her coat over her arm, going home to cook dinner in a microwave and listen to classical music with her eyes closed. "We're probably about to get laid off anyway." This had put him into a tailspin. But now a curious calm had come over him, and nightmare seemed excessive. He closed his eyes for a moment and then retyped it: The cuts in playground funding have been awful. It was eleven p.m. and he was almost alone here, the few night production people quiet at their desks, a janitor emptying trash cans.

  Rose Thomas walks the two blocks from her public housing unit to the neighborhood playground every morning. She moves slowly, her four-year-old daughter, Amy, at her side. Ms. Thomas would like to take her daughter to play somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go.

  "I'll never understand why they thought they could cut funding," Ms. Thomas said on a recent morning, pushing her daughter on a swing. "Is having a safe place for my child to play really too much to ask?"

  Gavin had taken a few photographs of the playground. Not for the story— the paper would send a freelance photographer with a camera made in the current century— but for himself. He had the film developed later that week and he spent some time at his desk looking at the images, the rusted swing sets, paint flaking from the monkey bars. If his daughter was in the care of a stranger in Florida, then what had become of her mother? He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Anna. He'd been playing a concert behind the school with his high school jazz quartet, he remembered. She'd thrown a paper airplane at him through the dark.

  Five

  The last time Gavin had spoken with Anna, a little over ten years before Karen left him and his shower in New York started dripping, they were sitting together on the back porch of her house in Sebastian and his shirt was soaked to his back with sweat. Gavin was eighteen, in his last month of high school. At the end of summer he was going to New York City to study journalism. Anna still had a year of high school left and the weight of the conversation they hadn't had yet— the what happens to us now that we'll be in different states? talk— was opening up longer and longer silences between them.

  "Have you ever wanted to live somewhere colder?" Gavin asked, as a means of avoiding the conversation for at least a few more minutes or perhaps, he realized as he spoke, as a way of approaching it indirectly.

  " Where would I go? I've never left Florida."

  "I don't know," he said, "but I've been fantasizing about cold weather since I was five."

  "I love Florida." Anna's voice was languid. "Permanent summer." She was watching the fireflies rise up from the grass.

  "Don't you ever want seasons?"

  "You're just too pale and heat-sensitive. Summers are easy for everyone else."

  "I've heard that," Gavin said.

  "Well," she said, "you'll be leaving soon."

  Gavin took her hand. He heard voices at that moment somewhere in the house behind them, a shrill escalation and response. Anna's parents were fighting again.

  "When I saw you the other day," he said, "you said there was something you needed to tell me."

  He'd run into her in a school corridor. She'd seemed nervous and tense. But now she only shook her head, distracted. The tenor of the fight was growing louder and sharper. Anna and Gavin were silent for a moment, listening. Gavin watched the frantic fluttering of moths against the porch light.

  "Listen," Anna said, "maybe you should go."

  The screen door slammed and Anna's half-sister Sasha was outside. They shared the same volatile mother but had different fathers, and Gavin had always been under the impression that Sasha's father was better than Anna's. Sasha was usually at her father and stepmother's house across town. Tonight she nodded at Gavin and stepped away from them into the shadows of the yard. Her hands shook around the flame of her lighter. Sasha was a friend— they were in the jazz quartet together, Gavin on trumpet and Sasha on drums— but tonight she seemed foreign in the shadows by the porch, a tense stranger with bitten-down fingernails. She exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  "You should probably leave," Sasha said. "Don't go through the house."

  "Will you be all right here?"

  "We're always fine," Anna said. Gavin leaned in quickly to kiss her.

  He walked around the side of the house, the fight still faintly audible through the exterior walls, down the driveway to the street. It was only ten blocks from Anna's house to his, but ten blocks was long for him in the heat. He stopped halfway to look up at the sky. He'd been reading about constellations recently, and had fallen particularly in love with the North Star. It always took him some time to find it in the haze of streetlight but there it was. True north, the direction of his second life, New York. He felt in those days that he was always on t
he edge of something, always waiting, his life about to begin. He was always impatient and always wanted to be somewhere else and as he walked away from Anna's house that night his desire to escape south Florida was almost a physical ache.

  Later he heard sirens passing. Anna was absent from school the next day, and the day after that. They traded a few voice mails, but he could never seem to reach her. Her cell phone was always turned off when he called. He asked if he could come over but she said she wasn't feeling well. He saw her twice at school but only in passing, at a distance— getting into Sasha's car at the far end of the school parking lot, slipping quickly through the door to the girls' restroom at the other end of a long corridor. He loitered near the door for fifteen minutes but she didn't come out.

  Th e l a s t official week of classes at the Sebastian High School for the Performing Arts passed, the drama production and end-of-year concerts and the art show. There were only exams now, running all week, the hallways deserted for long periods in the middle of the day. Gavin ran into Sasha on the day of his English and biology finals. She was smoking a cigarette on a bench by the parking lot.

  "Hey," she said. She smiled fleetingly, but her voice was too flat.

  There had been rumors about her in the past week. He'd heard she'd lost money in a poker game in some kid's basement, but the number shimmered and expanded with each retelling: she'd lost fifty dollars, no, a hundred. Five hundred, seven, maybe a grand.

  "You waiting for someone?"

  "I just had my math final," she said. "I've got a half-hour to kill before swim team."

  "You okay?"

  "Fine. I mean, you know, whatever."

  He nodded, but was troubled by this. She was going to Florida State to study English literature and he'd never known her to be so inarticulate.

  "I heard about the poker game," he said. He meant this to be sympathetic, but she winced and he immediately regretted mentioning it.

  " Really? Where'd you hear about that?" She spoke without looking at him, smoking and gazing out across the faculty parking lot.

  "I don't know," he said. "Around."

  "That's one thing I won't miss about high school," she said. She exhaled a series of smoke rings. "The fucking small-mindedness of it all."

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to stir up—"

  "It's like, look, if I lose twenty-seven dollars at poker in some girl's basement, is that really actually the end of the world? Is that really worth spreading rumors about? I have a job. It's twenty-seven dollars. We usually play for pennies. Seriously, no one has anything better to talk about than that?"

  "It's no big deal."

  "Right, that's what I think." She drew savagely on her cigarette. "It's no big deal. There's another game next week and I'm going to win it back."

  "Right," he said.

  "I will miss swim team, though," she said. "That's the one thing about high school I didn't hate, that and the music."

  "Have you seen Anna around?" A week had passed since he'd left Anna and Sasha in the haze of their backyard.

  "I've seen her around school a couple times, but I haven't talked to her. I've been staying at my dad's place."

  "I think she's avoiding me."

  "The kid's a screwup," Sasha said. "I'm sorry, you know I love her, but."

  Gavin didn't know this, but he said "Sure," and made a conciliatory gesture. Everything in his life seemed awkward and graceless except the school he was entering at the end of summer. In his mind Columbia University was taking on the dimensions of the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz, a hard spired brightness on the horizon. He was going to be a different person there, someone confident and urbane who never got laughed at for wearing a fedora.

  "Sasha, is she okay? At home, I mean?"

  "Why wouldn't she be?"

  " Those bruises she gets. She'll say nothing's wrong, but come on."

  "She's anemic," Sasha said. "She forgets to take her iron pills. She bruises if you look at her funny."

  "I'm serious," he said.

  "Look," Sasha said, "she got the short end of the stick where parents are concerned, no question." Sasha flicked her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk. She drummed her fingers on the cigarette box for a moment and then lit another one. "But seriously, she can look after herself," she said. "She always has. Another year and she's out of the house."

  Gavin didn't know what to say to this, so he looked down at the sidewalk and said nothing. The day was too hot and he felt the familiar weight in his limbs, the leaden exhaustion that would turn to dizziness and then heatstroke if he didn't get indoors quickly.

  "I have to go," he said. "See you next week at the concert?"

  "It'll be the best concert ever," Sasha said.

  G a v i n d i d n ' t see Anna again until the night of the concert, when he looked up from playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" on his trumpet in time to watch the paper airplane sail toward him through the dusk.

  They had attended a school devoted largely to music. None of the quartet aspired to be professional musicians except Jack, but the local public schools were atrocious and the High School for the Performing Arts was the magnet school closest to their houses. If you were in Jazz Orchestra it was possible to earn extra credits by forming your own ensemble under the supervision of the faculty, so four of them had established an outfit they'd called the Lola Quartet after a German film they'd all liked with Lola in the title. They'd been playing together for three years and had gradually become good enough to win awards at regional and state high school music competitions, but now it was almost over. Now they were graduating and going to college in different states and it was wrenching, actually, the thought of the quartet being finished. Gavin had been trying not to think about it.

  For their farewell performance they'd set up behind the gym in the back of a pickup truck with two battery-powered lights rigged up on the cab, shining over their instruments and casting long shadows on the grass. Daniel on bass and Gavin on trumpet, Sasha on drums and Jack on his saxophone that evening. Jack was going to music school for jazz piano, but he was freakishly talented and could switch instruments as the song required. The two dozen or so kids slow dancing in the sun-scorched grass were mostly drunk members of the Swing Dance Club and their friends and dates, except that they'd been at this for a couple of hours by now and the music wasn't really swing or even particularly danceable anymore. Everyone was a little strung out from the heat, lapsing into slow motion.

  The Lola Quartet was playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön" for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn't smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him. They hadn't spoken in two weeks.

  Jack was taking a solo. Gavin picked up the airplane, unfolded the wings and read the two words written across the creased page: I'm sorry. And the night kept moving, the dancers swaying and the music unceasing, but it seemed to Gavin that something had shifted, an electrical charge passing through the air. When he looked up Anna had disappeared. He jumped down off the back of the truck and made his way through the dancers, his trumpet a long dim gleam in his hand, and Sasha called after him but he didn't look back.

  This far out into the suburbs the scrub forest was everywhere, peninsulas of low bushy trees creeping in between subdivisions. He called Anna's name. He thought he saw her once, a flash of white that could have been her dress, but it was only moonlight. He couldn't hear the music anymore. Gavin kept walking until the brush opened into a bulldozed swath of dark earth, a future
development of some sort. A 7-Eleven glowed bright on the far side. Beyond the convenience store the outer suburbs continued, glimmering toward the distant black of the swamps. He turned away from the lights and walked back into the trees, back to the high school where the music was over now, the dancers dispersing and Sasha packing up her drum kit, Taylor singing drunkenly in her boyfriend's arms.