Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

He looked at the dog in his hand, but there was no spark of recognition. He'd hoped the glass dog might jump-start his memory, but he couldn't remember buying it, and he certainly couldn't remember Sasha in a shopping mall with a bag full of baby clothes. His mother's birthday was in late August. He would have been days or at most a week or two from departure. She was pouring herself another glass of sangria. She looked up at him and they both knew what he was going to say. He delayed for a moment but his next line was inevitable. He knew his part in the script.

"I thought you were going to cut down a bit," he said, as gently as possible. "That last time I saw you."

"Christmas. That was the last time I saw you, wasn't it?" She sipped the sangria and then set it down on the countertop with exaggerated care. "Christmas is a very stressful time. You would be a better person if you were a little more compassionate, I think." She had never been a kind drunk.

"I thought we'd agreed not to talk about that Christmas," Gavin said. He had come down with Karen against his strenuous objections. Karen had insisted, she thought it was strange that they'd lived together for two years and she'd never met his parents, she didn't seem to believe him when he told her what his parents were like. He'd tried to explain what ghosts they were, how uninterested they were in their children. But Karen's parents loved her, she had only ever had good holidays, she didn't understand. They'd come down to Florida and stayed at a hotel— an extravagance, Karen thought, because she couldn't imagine visiting family for Christmas and not staying with them, but Gavin had to draw the line somewhere— and Gavin's mother had lapsed into incoherence and finally passed out at the table near the end of Christmas dinner.

"Well," Gavin's mother said, "you brought it up, darling, didn't you?"

"I should go," Gavin said.

"So soon," she said. She was looking past him at the screened glass doors to the flower garden. He turned, but no one was there. His reflection imposed over a chaos of leaves and flowers. "You won't stay for dinner?" She was trying, it seemed to him, but her heart wasn't in it, and when he thought about it neither was his.

"It was nice to see you," he said. "Give Dad my regards."

He left her there in the living room and let himself out into the sunlight. The glass dog was in his pocket. He drove past the turn for Eilo's house and continued on to the police station.

"

I d o n ' t u n d e r s t a n d, " the desk clerk at the 33rd Precinct said. "You're saying your kid's missing?"

"I'm saying I have no idea where she is and I'm afraid she's in trouble," Gavin had been having some difficulty explaining the situation. "We've been over this twice. I don't know how to explain it differently."

"I don't know either," the desk clerk said, "but please, help me out here. The kid's missing, but you said you've never met her before?"

"She might be fine," he said. "I told you, she might be with her mother."

"But you've never met the kid?"

"Gavin?" The voice was familiar. A passing detective, an overweight man in an enormous gray suit, had stopped by the counter. He was entirely bald, his shaved head shiny under the fluorescent lights, and he was intensely familiar but it took Gavin a moment to place him. " Gavin Sasaki," the detective said.

"Daniel?" The sight was disorienting. The Daniel Smith he remembered was a skinny kid with an Afro and wire-framed glasses, high-top sneakers in Day-Glo colors, t-shirts for bands no one had ever heard of and retro ties. It was impossible to reconcile him with this large slump-shouldered figure standing by the counter in the 33rd Precinct. "You're with the police?"

"I am." Daniel glanced at the desk clerk, who gave him a meaningful look. "Come back to my office," he said, and Gavin followed him back into the depths of the police station, to a small gray room with no windows, a plastic chair on either side of a table that seemed to be bolted to the floor.

"Your office?"

"I don't have an office. I use the interrogation room when I want a little privacy." Daniel closed the door and settled into the chair across from him. "So I'm walking by the front desk," he said, "on my way out to get a sandwich, and I'm thinking to myself, Isn't that Gavin Sasaki? The trumpet player? So I come a bit closer, and I swear I hear something about a missing kid. We got a missing kid on our hands here, Gavin?"

"No, it's not— look, she wasn't abducted, it's nothing like that. I just don't know where she is and I'm worried about her. Like I was saying to your colleague, I think she might be in trouble and I don't know how to find her. She could be with her mother."

"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 T imes , 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."