Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"I heard she was in Utah."

"Oh, she was ," the man said brightly. "She was in Utah, Jack, but that was before she came here. Do you mind telling me where she is? I really need to talk to her about something important."

"How do you know my name?"

"Where's Anna?"

"Look, I haven't seen her in almost a year. I knew her back in high school," Jack said.

"Right," the man said. "Back in Florida. You're both from Sebastian, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And your family still lives there, right?"

Jack felt as if he'd brushed up against the edge of something cold, or as if a curtain had been pulled back for an instant and he'd glimpsed a flash of darkness and moving gears. He'd never been threatened before. He didn't know what to do. He stood blinking in the sunlight with the life of the campus continuing all around him, voices and laughter, the man's calm gaze, and his voice was unsteady when he could finally bring himself to speak. "What do you want?"

"I want Anna Montgomery," the man said. "But if you don't know where she is, I could go ask your family. You've got a little sister still in high school in Florida, right?"

"What? I. " There was no way to finish this sentence, so Jack didn't.

"Bridget," he said. "That's your little sister's name, isn't it?"

Jack was frozen.

" Maybe I'll go down there and talk to her," the man said. "I mean, who knows, maybe she'd know where Anna is. You know how these high school girls all talk about each other."

"I don't—"

"I can't say I'll be in a great mood when I get down there," the man said. "Do you know, I was just there? Trying to track down Anna's dropout sister, for almost a week. And it's not like it's all that easy for me to leave town for long periods, in my line of work."

Jack was afraid to ask what this line of work might be.

"So I think by the time I find Bridget," the man said, "I'll probably already be angry. Just for having to go back to Florida again."

"Anna went to Virginia." Jack heard his own voice and wanted to pull the words back through the air.

" Where in Virginia?"

"I don't know," Jack said, "she just said she was going to Virginia and that was it. I heard it was a small town but I don't know which one. That's all I know."

"The problem is, Jack," the man said, "Virginia's such a big place. Last thing I want to do is drive back down to Florida but it'd almost be worth my time to go back down there, talk to your sister, see if maybe she knows more than you do. Who knows, Jack, maybe Anna and Bridget talk to each other sometimes."

"They don't talk to each other. They don't know each other at all."

"I'll ask Bridget myself. Thanks anyway, Jack, I'll be seeing you."

"Carrollsburg," Jack said.

"Carrollsburg?" The man was smiling. "Now we're getting somewhere, Jack. You have an address for me?"

"I don't. I really don't. That's all I know."

"You sure, now? You don't think maybe I should ask Bridget, just in case?"

"I don't know more than that. Bridget doesn't know anything. She doesn't know anything."

"Well, thank you very much, Jack," the man said pleasantly. "You just saved me another trip to Florida."

He turned away. Jack's heart was pounding and he wanted to throw up on the grass. On his way to the building with the practice rooms it occurred to him that he should alert campus security, but when he looked back the man was nowhere to be seen, and what would he say anyway? A few weeks ago my roommate and I snuck a girl into our room and let her stay overnight in violation of the rules, and, oh yeah, she also had a baby with her, and now some guy wants to know. He needed to talk to Deval. He stepped through the doors into the cool shadows of Armstrong Hall and scanned the last few pages of the practice room sign-in book. L. Deval, room 17. He glanced over his shoulder, but through the glass doors behind him he saw only green grass and benignly milling students. The blond man was long gone.

Deval didn't look up when Jack opened the door to 17. He was playing in a style that he'd begun to adopt recently. It was jazz, but glissando shivers of gypsy melodies kept coming through. The effect was uneven.

"Deval," Jack said.

"There's no piano in this one," Deval said, without looking up.

"Please," Jack said. Deval stopped playing. "Some guy just asked me where Anna is."

"What?" Deval set his guitar on the chair beside him, which left nowhere for Jack to sit, so he stood uncomfortably by the door like a kid in the principal's office.

"He came up to me while I was walking, said he knew she'd been here. He knew she'd gone to Virginia—"

"Did you tell him she'd gone to Virginia?"

"Of course not," Jack said. "I told him to get lost." He was shivering. "He was menacing, Liam. He threatened my sister. He had this look about him, this—"

"Yeah, some people aren't nice," Deval said. "Don't get hysterical. What exactly did he say?"

"He said he knew she'd been here after she was in Utah. He asked me where she was. What did she do in Utah, Liam?"

"She stole money from a meth dealer," Deval said. He was putting his guitar back in its case. "Listen, I'm going to go get her."

"You're leaving now? In the middle of the semester?"

"She doesn't drive. I'll call the dean's office from the road and tell them I've got a family emergency or something. Don't tell anything to anyone."

Deval didn't go back to the residence hall. He left the practice room and walked quickly to his car, threw his guitar in the backseat and drove away.

J a c k w a s thinking about a movie he'd seen once. He couldn't remember what it had been called, but it was set in the eighteenth century and there was a boat, and a sailor who'd been a disappointment to everyone had jumped overboard with a cannonball in his arms. When he closed his eyes Jack saw the sailor descending, pale in dark water with a cloud of bubbles rising silver around him, the weight of the cannonball carrying him down to some other place. "The truth is," the captain had said at the sailor's funeral, "we don't all turn into the men we had hoped to become." Or words to that effect. Jack wasn't sure he was remembering it exactly.

"It's true," Jack said to his reflection in a darkened window, in reply to the captain of the movie ship. "It's just the way it is." He had taken too many pills. It was four a.m. and Deval had been gone for a week. With every passing day he became more certain that Deval and Anna and the baby were dead. He knew he should call the police, but every day and every hour made the call less possible. The first question would be Why didn't you call sooner? and with each passing hour the question would be more pointed, and then what would he say? The truth is, Officer, I'm not the man I wanted to be. The truth is, I gave up a girl at the slightest threat and now everyone's in trouble and I think both Deval and the girl are probably dead by now and the fault's entirely mine and I've been thinking it might be better for everyone if I take this cannonball in my arms and leap into the ocean.

Jack waited a week, then two, but Deval didn't return. At the beginning of the third week a postcard arrived.

All's well. Not coming back. Got rid of phone. — LD

The card was postmarked Detroit. The relief that all was well— Deval must have arrived in Virginia in time— was supplanted almost immediately by a colossal loneliness. It seemed impossible that Deval wasn't coming back. His belongings waited untouched in their room, his books, his sheet music, his clothes strewn around the bed. Jack kept expecting someone to come and collect them, but no one did.

The pills weren't working the way they had before. Jack still floated but the blurred contours of the world made everything seem unreal in the manner of a bad dream. He spent a lot of time lying on his bed listening to music on headphones, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Coltrane and Parker, all the emissaries of a kingdom that was slipping away from him. There was no pleasure in playing the music himself. Sometime during the fifth or sixth week he stopped going to classes.