The Lola Quartet Read online

  "I knew you wouldn't believe me. I took her picture." He passed Daniel his cell phone and Daniel studied the image for a moment. The phone looked very small in his hand. "Her name's Grace."

  "Wait here," Daniel said. He pushed himself up on the edge of the table and left the room. Gavin waited alone in the interrogation room for twenty minutes, listening to the hum of central air conditioning and staring at the fine cracks in the paint on the opposite wall until Daniel returned.

  "Thanks for the photo," Daniel said. He was awkward now, looking away. "The tip might be useful to us."

  "A runaway's got to be worth a couple of questions, right?"

  "Gavin—"

  "Two minutes of your time."

  "Fine," Daniel said. "A couple of questions."

  "Do you know what happened to Anna after high school?"

  "She left town after the eleventh grade and went to live with her aunt in Georgia. I thought everyone knew that."

  "You know what's funny? She was my girlfriend for two years and we spent half our waking hours together, and she never so much as mentioned that aunt in Georgia."

  "I've really got an awful lot of work to do," Daniel said. He opened the door.

  "You said two questions."

  "Thanks for stopping by, Gavin."

  "My cell phone?"

  "See, now there's your second question. It's at the front desk."

  Gavin walked back out into the heat with his fedora in his hands.

  Part Two

  Sixteen

  Jack was good but not good enough for Juilliard. He auditioned after high school and didn't get in, but what he found strange— and in retrospect this should have been a warning sign, he thought— was that he was almost relieved. In the September after high school he packed up his car and drove north to South Carolina. His roommate at Holloway College was good enough for Juilliard, but he saw New York City as an inevitability and wanted to stay in the South a little longer. Jack's roommate was from the suburbs of Miami. He was going to play every major city on the continent no matter where he studied, because he actually was that impressive. Jack liked him, though he was prone to grandeur in his drunker moments.

  "My name is Liam Deval," he would say, raising a glass of beer or introducing himself to someone in a bar, or sometimes, when he didn't know anyone else was around, quietly to his reflection in the men' s-room mirror, "and I am going to be famous."

  When he did this at bars everyone would laugh and buy him another drink because his delivery was hilarious. Everyone knew he wasn't really kidding, but it didn't matter because he was the best guitarist any of them had ever heard. "The only real difference between me and Django Reinhardt," he said once when very drunk, "is that Django did it first."

  "Well, yes," Jack said. "Exactly."

  Deval only laughed. Just as they both understood that Deval was going to be a star, they understood that Jack's days were numbered.

  Jack had been on his way out almost from the moment of arrival. He couldn't have said how he knew this. He couldn't even have explained what exactly was wrong. He had been touched lightly by synesthesia; mostly it was a small matter of sounds being attached to colors— the impression of red left by car horns, for example, the dandelion-yellow sounds of his parents' doorbell— but music was brilliance, music was light moving through the air every time he heard it.

  Playing with the quartet, switching back and forth between piano and saxophone, practicing for endless hours with Gavin and Sasha and Daniel, traveling to competitions— in short, all the things he loved— none of these things seemed to relate in any way to the sudden grind of Holloway College, the evenings when he played piano alone in a small white practice room and got lonelier and lonelier by the hour, the clinics, the harshness of teachers. Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular, and sometimes he wanted to pack up his car and drive back to Florida when he thought about the things they'd said to him.

  The pills helped. He could float a little. In the weeks leading up to the winter break he started to take them more frequently. His skill was unlessened but nothing seemed quite real.

  "You seem more relaxed these days," Deval said. They were in their room at the end of another day. Deval was on the edge of his bed, listening to music. Jack had been toiling in a theory workbook earlier, but now he was staring into space.

  "It doesn't have to be stressful," Jack said.

  "I envy you. I'm more stressed than I thought I would be." They'd been here a few months and Deval's bravado was becoming a little threadbare. Holloway College wasn't Juilliard, but it also wasn't easy.

  "You're good," Jack said. "You don't need to . . ." he was thinking "take Vicodin" but said "worry" instead.

  "We're all good," Deval said. "Otherwise we wouldn't be here."

  Jack wasn't sure anymore if he was good or not. He'd been confident of his talent in high school, but lately he was certain of nothing. The winter break arrived and on the long drive back to Sebastian he toyed with the idea of not returning to Holloway after the break, of perhaps enrolling in community college in January and getting a degree in something practical. Business management? Economics? Accounting? He wasn't really sure what the practical degrees were. He'd never wanted to do anything but music and now he didn't even want to do that.

  It was disorienting, being back in Sebastian. Now that he'd left and seen another place it looked less familiar somehow, as if the town were forgetting him. That was the year when the streetlights turned from amber to blue. The blue ones apparently used less electricity and would save the city some money, but they cast the suburbs in a cold and foreign light. On his third or fourth day back Daniel and Sasha came over and passed an hour or two in Jack's parents' basement, where they'd brought their instruments and practiced sometimes in the days of the jazz quartet. Gavin hadn't come home. He was in a communications program at Columbia, full scholarship. No one was surprised that he'd cracked the Ivy League— his grades had always been better than anyone else's— but they were surprised that he'd stayed in New York for Christmas. They sat together in the basement, Jack and Sasha and Daniel with Gavin ostentatiously absent, and it seemed to Jack that their missing instruments were like ghosts. He'd been thinking a lot about ghosts lately, after a movie he'd seen, and the thought of a translucent ghost saxophone sitting next to him was oddly appealing.

  The silence was awkward. He thought of these people as his closest friends, but it seemed that without music there wasn't much to talk about. He was seized by a mad desire to confide in them— I miss everything about high school and I'm not the musician I thought I was, I don't know what I'm doing anymore, jazz has always been my life but now it's slipping away from me and my talent isn't going to be enough— but he couldn't imagine how to begin.

  "Do you still play?" he asked Daniel, to fill the silence.

  "Haven't touched the bass since that last concert," Daniel said. Jack smiled at this. The last concert, on the back of the truck behind the school, was one of his favorite memories. The heat and the music, a final perfect evening, dancers trampling the grass. He missed the quartet with an unexpected force. It had been a nice thing, all of them playing together.

  "I wish Gavin were around," he said.

  Daniel made a dismissive noise. "Convenient that he's not here."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know what?" Daniel said. "I wouldn't come back here and show my face either. His girlfriend disappears, and he runs off to New York?"

  "Disappears? I heard she moved to Georgia to live with her aunt." Jack looked at Sasha. "That's what you told me."

  Daniel muttered something inaudible. Sasha shot him a look.

  "Anyway," Sasha said, in a let' s-change-the-subject way.

  Daniel didn't say anything. There was something
altered about him. He seemed more pensive than he had been, his voice strained.

  "Let's face it," Sasha said, "I don't think Gavin's parents would notice if he came home for Christmas or not."

  "Are they really that bad?" Jack was interested. He'd heard rumors.

  "I heard that when Gavin was in the hospital last spring with heat exhaustion, the night after the prom, his sister Eileen was the only one by his bedside. And she goes to school like three hours away. Eileen drove out as soon as she heard and their parents weren't even at the hospital."

  "It could be worse," Daniel said. "People have families that are worse than that." Daniel was taking a year off before college. He said he'd mostly been in Salt Lake City since the end of high school, working construction with his uncle and staying with friends, but when pressed for details about his time in Utah he said he didn't want to talk about it.

  "What's with you?" Jack asked.

  "Nothing," Daniel said. "I just think maybe people shouldn't run off to New York when their girlfriends are . . . look, never mind. Whatever."

  "But she wasn't even in Florida anymore. She'd left. She'd gone to live with her—"

  "Can we drop it?" Daniel said.

  Sasha looked away. They knew something, and Jack was excluded. He went out that night without them, drove alone through the wide streets until he reached the Lemon Club, a run-down jazz bar in a strip mall on the edge of town. The bartender— an older man with a permanent sneer who usually glared at Jack like he was daring him to order a drink, just daring him— barely glanced up when Jack entered.

  Jack had gone to the club one or two nights a week in high school,

  but he'd never come in alone before. He listened to a fairly decent trio from Denver and then— because neither Sasha nor Daniel had called him— went back again the next night with his little sister Bridget. It had dawned on him that he didn't know Bridget very well anymore, she'd somehow slipped away and eluded him, and he thought maybe music would help. It did. She was enraptured by the fifteen-year-old jazz violin prodigy they'd gone to hear and seemed happy to be out with him.

  "Jack." He looked up and the Band teacher who'd supervised the Lola Quartet was standing by their table. Jack hadn't seen him come in.

  "Hello, Mr. Winters," he said. He was unsure of the etiquette, postgraduation. Should he have called him Steven? Mr. Winters was talking about Holloway College, the excellence of the program in which Jack was enrolled, how he hoped Jack was taking full advantage of the opportunities before him. A note of wistfulness in his voice.

  "I'm proud of you," Mr. Winters said, and Jack managed a smile. His midyear review hadn't gone well. His teachers had noted a spaciness, an inattentiveness in general, an overall lack of improvement. It hadn't occurred to him that flunking out of music school would mean disappointing Mr. Winters, but he saw now that of course it would. Jack called Sasha and Daniel the next night and left messages, but neither of them called back. He returned to Holloway a few days early.

  Th e d r i v e from Sebastian to Holloway College took him a little more than ten hours. Jack drove slowly, in no particular rush, stopping every so often to stretch his legs. A part of him wanted to remain suspended between school and home forever. He hadn't played piano at all over the break, and the thought of the hours he needed to spend in the practice rooms made him tired.

  The sense of limbo was increased by the landscape he traveled through. He pulled off the interstate into towns that all looked the same to him. He tried to find things to differentiate them, some kind of proof that he was passing through parts of three different states, but there was almost nothing. Only the names of the towns varied, and the towns were like envelopes with all the contents the same. The same gas stations, the same restaurants, the same chain stores with the same logos shining out into the deepening twilight. It was a relief to him at the end of the day to make the last exit off the interstate, to drive along the narrow roads that led up to the college, to turn the corner on the sweeping drive and see the white buildings and lights of Holloway rising up at the top of the hill. At least, he thought, this wasn't a place that could easily be mistaken for somewhere else.

  He parked the car and walked up the long pathway to the hall where he lived. The security guard nodded at him when he flashed his identity card. He saw no one else. It was still only the day after Christmas, the building deserted, almost everyone home with their families.

  There was a baby crying when Jack stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor. He stood still in the hall for a moment, listening. The presence of a baby in Lewins Hall seemed so impossible that he wondered fleetingly if he might be listening to a ghost: could a baby have died here? Maybe a hundred years ago? The idea of a baby ghost was interesting. The building seemed like the kind of place that would lend itself to hauntings. The crying subsided. Silence descended over the halls. The corridor was so quiet now that it was possible to entertain notions of being the last man on earth as he walked past closed doors, but when he opened the door to their room Deval was there, sitting on Jack's bed with a baby in his arms. He'd forgotten that Deval was staying at school through the holidays. The child, who had a wisp of dark hair and a face red from screaming, was drifting off into a fitful sleep.

  "Congratulations?" Jack said.

  " Thank you. It's a girl."

  " Whose is it?"

  "A friend of yours came by," Deval said. "She brought a baby."

  "I don't think I have any friends with babies."

  "Oh," Deval said, "I think you do. Unless she's some kind of con artist and she's just using us for our shower facilities."

  Jack dropped his bag on the floor and sank into an armchair they'd rescued from a dumpster together a month or two earlier. "What's my friend's name?"

  "Anna. She's in the shower."

  "Anna?" The only Anna he knew was Gavin's lost girlfriend. He was having a hard time imagining the chain of events that would result in her appearing in his dorm room in South Carolina with a baby. "Anna Montgomery?"

  "I think so," Deval said. "I can't remember her last name, but it was something like that." He was smiling at the sleeping baby. "I got the baby to stop crying," he said. "I think I should get a medal or something."

  "She just came today?"

  "An hour ago. You mind if she spends the night? I already told her it was okay."

  "I don't mind," Jack said. The door opened just then. It was Anna, but an Anna greatly changed. She looked older, far more tired, and she'd cut off all her hair; it was dark with water but he could see that she'd dyed it blond.

  "Jack," she said. She still sounded the same.

  "Anna. What are you doing here?"

  She smiled instead of answering him. "Is it okay if I stay the night?"

  "It's fine with me," he said. Anna reached for the baby. Jack didn't

  know much about babies, but it seemed to him that this one was very small. "How old is it?" he asked.

  "She," Anna said softly. "Not 'it.' " She was gazing at the baby's closed eyes. "Her name's Chloe. She's three weeks old."

  "That's young," Jack said. " Where are you going with it? I mean her. Sorry. I didn't know you had a baby."

  "I'm on my way to Virginia," she said. "My sister has a friend there who I can stay with for a while."

  "But I just saw your sister over the break," Jack said. "She didn't say anything about . . . weren't you with an aunt? I heard you'd gone to live with your aunt in Georgia." He'd also heard a crazy rumor that she'd had a baby and it had been stillborn, but he decided not to bring this up.

  "I've been in Utah," Anna said.

  "Utah? Why Utah?"

  "Long story," Anna said, in a tone that made it clear she didn't want to tell it.

  She slept that night in Jack's bed. Jack slept on the floor. The baby slept on the floor too, lying on her back on the seat cushion from the armchair. The baby kept waking up crying. Toward morning Jack drifted off to the sounds of Anna singing the baby to sleep, a lullaby ab
out a night bus out of Salt Lake City, and when he woke he was alone and the room was filled with sunlight. It was almost noon. He showered and set off in search of breakfast. In the dining hall he sat alone with a sandwich in a sea of plastic chairs and then wandered the campus looking for someone to talk to, anyone, but the only people he saw were security guards and the maintenance crew and they all seemed busy. Later he ran into three other students whom he knew— two violinists and a singer, from places too far away or from families too poor to travel home for the winter break— and he sat with them for a while in the cafeteria. The singer, Bernadette, was talking about George Gershwin's "Summertime." She thought it was about death. Her argument seemed solid to him and the conversation was interesting but all his thoughts were of Anna. Sixteen or seventeen years old with her impossibly young infant, traveling by means unknown up the coast to Virginia. The dorm room was still empty when he returned there in the late afternoon. Could Deval have gone with her to Virginia? It was the only explanation he could think of.