The Lola Quartet Read online

  "With her mother? But you've got, what, joint custody? Visitation rights?"

  "It's not that. I've never met the kid."

  Daniel held up his hand. "Back up," he said. "You've never met your daughter?"

  "Okay, look, let me start at the beginning."

  "Please do."

  "You remember my high school girlfriend, Anna? Used to hang out with us when we were in the quartet together?" A faint sense of absurdity: he couldn't shake the notion that he was being interrogated by a bass player. Difficult to think of Daniel as a cop. "She just dropped out and vanished at the end of the eleventh grade. I heard some rumor about how she'd gone to Georgia to live with an aunt. But then recently I found out that there's a kid in Sebastian, a ten-year-old girl with Anna's last name. She looks like me."

  Daniel had gone still.

  "And I just— I don't know if going to the police is the right way to do this." Gavin paused but Daniel only stared at him, a hard unreadable gaze, so he continued, foundering now, "As I was saying to your colleague, I have no idea how to go about finding her. She could be with her mother. I'm just afraid she's—"

  "You went to New York," Daniel said. An unpleasant smile was pulling at his mouth. " Right after we graduated high school."

  "Yeah, I did. I got into Columbia."

  "My most recent ex-wife's from New York," Daniel said. "She introduced me to the New York Star a while back. I still read it online sometimes when I can't sleep. It's no Times, as I'm sure you were painfully aware for the duration of your career there, but it's actually not a bad publication, all in all. Bit of a fabulist, aren't you?"

  "Daniel, I—"

  "Look, Gavin, it's nice to see you again. But seeing as how you lost your last job because you invent people, I'm having a little trouble with this phantom-kid story."

  "She exists," Gavin said. He had realized, too late, that Daniel didn't like him, but he couldn't think of a reason. It made no sense— hadn't they always been friendly? He was trying to recall if they'd had a falling-out all those years ago. He couldn't remember one. "Don't you remember when Anna left town? This was just after we graduated high school, right before I went to New York. I think she was pregnant with my kid."

  "You lose your job, life's not going so good, you get a little confused. It's a stress response. Look, I see it pretty often. I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but the thing is, I don't have a whole lot of time for this kind of thing. You know how fucked up this place is now? Nothing like when we were kids. We grew up in paradise, Gavin, comparatively speaking."

  "It never felt like paradise to me."

  "That's just because you got heatstroke every ten minutes. Place was pretty nice for everyone else. Look, I got this case on my desk now, I shouldn't be telling you this—" he folded his hands together on the table—"a thirteen-year-old trades her baby brother for a bag of Oxycontin and then runs away from home. Unbelievable, right? And yes, we got the baby back, but this is what we're dealing with down here. So listen, great to see you, and I hope you've been keeping up the trumpet—" he was standing now—"but all I ask, Gavin, is that you not waste my time with your invisible people."

  "Daniel, she's not some figment—"

  "You know, there's something my dad used to say to me, Gavin. He said, 'You start telling lies, son, no one ever believes you after that. It's like diving into a lake, and your clothes are never dry again.' So you're telling me this story about a phantom kid, but the thing is, Gavin, your clothes are all wet." He opened the door to the room. Gavin was at a loss for words, a little shaky, still trying to reconcile this man with the scrawny kid who'd played bass beside him in high school, trying to understand. "You've already done a swan dive, as far as I'm concerned."

  H e c r o s s e d out the question mark after Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall in his notebook, and set the stolen glass dog on the windowsill. It was the only adornment in the square white room. He liked the way the light struck it. Under The Lola Quartet he wrote the names of the members besides him— Daniel Smith (bass), Sasha Lyon (drums), Jack Baranovsky (piano/saxophone)—considered a moment, and went to the kitchen to search for a phone book.

  There were ten Baranovskys in the city of Sebastian and none of them were Jack, but he remembered Jack's childhood address and found it in the directory, the third Baranovsky from the top. He called Jack's mother. Jack still lived in Sebastian, she told him. She gave him an address on Mortimer Street.

  "Perhaps it'll be good for him to see you," she said.

  It took him some time to find Jack's house. It was in one of the oldest parts of the suburbs, a run-down district near Sebastian's empty downtown core. The streets here were set in a grid, small houses crowded together behind unmown lawns. The end-of-afternoon light cast the street in a beautiful glow but the disintegration was obvious. There were rooftops with tarps over them, camping trailers parked in driveways with children sitting on their steps. Gavin slowed the car, counting off numbers.

  The house at 1196 Mortimer was set back from the street on a weed-choked lot, the front lawn half– taken over by exuberant palm fronds. There were broken bottles in the weeds by the driveway. The cement steps and the walkway were cracked. He rang the doorbell and waited for what seemed like a long time. The neighborhood was quiet. He heard cicadas and crickets and frogs, distant voices, a car. The smell of a barbecue in someone's yard. There was a flutter of movement in a curtained window across the street.

  The girl who opened the door was young, perhaps thirteen years old. There was something unkempt about her, neglected, glassy eyes and unbrushed hair. She needed a bath. She was very pretty, but she had the look of a girl for whom beauty had been a mixed blessing.

  "Hello," he said. "Is Jack Baranovsky here?"

  It seemed to take a moment for the question to travel through the air between them. When it reached her she blinked and nodded slowly.

  "Can I come in? He's a friend of mine."

  The delay was shorter this time. "Okay," she said. She stepped aside, and when he walked in he almost gagged. The smell of the house was mold, mostly, but also someone had spilled beer on a carpet. The air was still and hot.

  "Do you know where Jack is?"

  "There," she said. She made a vague motion toward the back of the house.

  The room he found at the end of the hallway was a kitchen, but it also seemed to be serving as a living room and a library. An overstuffed sofa took up half the room, books stacked precariously on the grimy linoleum all around it. The countertop by the stove was a mess of takeout containers, flies moving lazily above them. But here at least was a little more air, a sliding glass door open to an overgrown backyard.

  The man reading on the sofa looked up, and for a moment Gavin didn't recognize him. He was unshaven and his eyes were red. He badly needed a haircut. His clothes hung off him, and Gavin understood why his mother had sounded so sad on the phone.

  "Jack."

  "Hello," Jack said. He put his book down. There was no recognition in his eyes, but the sight of a man he didn't recognize in his kitchen didn't seem to trouble him.

  " Gavin Sasaki. High school. The Lola Quartet."

  "Oh, wow. Gavin." His face lit up like a child's. "Hey, sit down. I don't get that many visitors. It's so nice of you to come."

  "Hey, of course." There was a shifting movement of cockroaches along the edges of the room. "I'm back in Florida for a while, thought I'd look you up. How've you been?"

  "Oh, I'm good," Jack said. He was beaming. "I'm good, you know, just staying with a friend for a while."

  "So you don't live here?"

  Jack gestured through the sliding glass door, and for the first time Gavin noticed the tent out back. It was on a raised cement platform under an orange tree.

  "Nah, it's my friend Laila's house. I'm just camping here for a while," Jack said. "I always really liked camping, you know?"

  "I didn't know that. Jack, who's that girl who answered the door?"

  "Oh, that's Grace,
" Jack said. "She's Laila's little sister or her stepsister or something. I think she's just here for the summer." He blinked very slowly. "How are you doing? You doing okay?"

  "No," Gavin said. "Not really." The Jack he remembered, the Jack who'd leaned on the band-room door frame and flirted with every girl passing by in the hallway, seemed very far from here.

  "Well, I'm sorry to hear that." Jack really did sound sorry. "Things get bad sometimes."

  "Are all these books yours?"

  "All of them," Jack said. Gavin knelt to examine the stacks. Mostly jazz history, a few musicians' memoirs, a lot of Whitney Balliett. American Singers, New York Jazz Notes, Django Reinhardt: A Life in Music.

  "It's a good collection." Jack was beaming when Gavin looked up. "Do you still have that synesthesia thing you used to talk about in high school? You still see music?"

  " Still the brightest thing in the room," Jack said.

  "I always wished I could see it too." Gavin stood, but standing over Jack was a little awkward, so he sat on an arm of the sofa. "Jack, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure, sure. Ask me about anything except college. I don't like talking about college very much."

  "Do you remember that night when we played the concert behind the school?"

  Jack blinked, concentrating. "Why? What concert?"

  "I was just thinking about it the other day. It was the last performance we did. We played 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' twice and Taylor was singing."

  " 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.' " Jack sounded doubtful. "I think I remember that one."

  "We used to win competitions with that song," Gavin said. "But this concert, we were playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck. We drove it onto school grounds and parked behind the gym, used it as a stage."

  "But how would we all fit in the bed of a pickup truck? Me, you, Sasha, Daniel, the double bass, the drum kit?"

  Gavin was silent. He couldn't remember how they'd all fit. It seemed improbable in retrospect.

  "I mean, the drums alone," Jack said. "Drum kits are kind of big."

  "Okay, so maybe it wasn't in the back of a pickup truck," Gavin said, "maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it was definitely behind the school in the unbelievable heat. And then Anna came up to the edge of where the swing kids were dancing and threw a paper airplane, and—"

  "A paper airplane?"

  "My point is, Anna came to the concert that night," Gavin said. "You remember her? My high school girlfriend?"

  "Sure. Short blond hair, real pretty."

  "Well, she was pretty, but her hair was long and dark. That was the last time I saw her. Do you know what happened to her? Back then, or after high school?"

  Jack shrugged and looked away. His smile was gone. He was fum bling in his pocket. "Hey," he said, "you don't mind, do you? I've got this back problem." He held up an unlabeled bottle of pills.

  "Go ahead," Gavin said. Jack swallowed three without water. " Sorry about your back."

  "Yeah, well. The pills help."

  "I need to know," Gavin said. "I really need to know where she is. I know you and her were friendly, I mean, we were all friendly, I just thought maybe you'd kept in touch. I wondered if you ever saw her again after that concert."

  Jack leaned back against the sofa cushions. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he spoke. "You should ask Daniel about all this, Gavin."

  "Daniel as in Daniel Smith? The bass player who turned into an asshole cop?"

  "He helps me out sometimes," Jack said. "You shouldn't call him that. He's nice." His eyes were drifting shut.

  "Jack! Jack, wake up."

  Jack's eyelids fluttered open.

  "Sorry," he said. "Nodding off when there's company. Way to be a bad host, right?"

  "It's okay," Gavin said. "When was the last time you saw Anna?"

  "I dunno. While back." Jack's eyes were closing again. "Few years ago."

  "How about Chloe?"

  " Sweet kid," Jack murmured.

  "Jack," Gavin said, but it was hopeless. Jack was snoring softly. Gavin stood and checked his clothing for cockroaches. Out in the darkened hallway the girl was standing where he'd left her. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning against the wall, her forehead pressed to the edge of the door frame. He remembered a fairy tale he'd read as a kid, or perhaps Eilo had read it to him— a story about a castle in the middle of a labyrinth of thorns, everyone sleeping for a century inside. There was something eerie about the drugged silence of the house, a spellbound stillness that made him want to run. Gavin held his cell phone near the girl's face and took her picture. She startled awake at the digital click of the shutter and stared at him, blinking. He closed the door, went back to his car and drove as quickly as possible away from there.

  In his room at Eilo's house he sat on his mattress with the notebook on his lap. He wrote Has met Chloe and Pills under Jack's name.

  Gavin put the notebook down and went to the window. The squalor of the house and the tent in the backyard weren't things he wanted to think about. He'd always liked Sasha and Daniel but Jack was the one he'd felt closest to. Gavin wore fedoras and read noir and watched Chinatown over and over again and Jack understood, Jack was in the wrong decade too, Jack was going to be a jazzman. There had been long stoned hours in Jack's basement after school, listening to jazz and talking about how things used to be, how things were going to be, talking about anywhere other than the stultifying present.

  Gavin's room was at the back of the house, facing the freeway. On the far side of the yard pylons rose up with dark shadows beneath them, cars passing in a blur of light high above. How could he have let Jack slip away so completely? The traffic was no more than two hundred yards from him, but with the windows closed the room was silent. There were evenings when he didn't understand the world at all.

  "Y o u ' r e c e r t a i n you don't know where they went?" he asked Eilo that night. " Chloe and that woman she was with?" They were eating Thai food out of takeout containers.

  "I drove by the house two days after I took the photograph," Eilo said. "They were gone already."

  "No forwarding address?"

  " These people don't always leave forwarding addresses," Eilo said. "They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear."

  "I've been thinking about trying to find them," Gavin said.

  "Good luck," Eilo said. "I wouldn't know where to begin. Have you thought of hiring a private investigator?"

  I want to be the private investigator. He couldn't bring himself to tell her this. "I'll look into it," he said.

  In t h e morning Gavin returned to the police station.

  "I'm surprised to see you again," Daniel said. He had kept Gavin waiting for an hour. His fingers tapped almost silently on the side of his coffee cup, a nervous flicker. "Aren't you hot? Wearing a fedora in this heat?"

  "It's a summer fedora," Gavin said.

  "And here some of us make do with baseball caps."

  "I went to visit our multitalented piano and saxophone player yesterday," Gavin said. "You remember Jack? He speaks highly of you."

  Daniel sighed and his face softened a little. "Sure," he said, "I try to keep an eye on him. He's been arrested a couple times."

  "I asked him about Anna," Gavin said, "and he said to ask you."

  "Me? Why would I know anything about your high school girlfriend?"

  "Well, she hung out with us at school, with the quartet. We were all friends."

  "I don't know that you were much of a friend to her. Was there some reason you wanted to see me, Gavin, or is this strictly a social call?"

  "What do you mean by that comment? How was I not a friend to her?"

  "I'm pretty busy," Daniel said. "You know, doing police work and stuff. I'm going to get back to work now."

  "Okay, look, the main reason I came is, Jack's staying in this house on Mortimer Street—"

  "Eleven ninety-six Mortimer," Daniel said. "I've been there. Lovely home, isn't it?
"

  "A girl answered the door when I knocked. No older than thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, stoned out of her mind. Jack said she was his roommate's sister or her stepsister or something, just staying there for a while. I came to see you because I thought maybe she was a runaway."

  Daniel took a slow sip of coffee. "I'm getting the strangest sense of déjà vu," he said. "Have you talked to a shrink about these phantom girls you've been seeing?"