Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

After seven weeks he packed up his things in the middle of the day while everyone else was in class, loaded up his car and drove south.

J a c k d r o v e to the Lemon Club nearly a year after his return from South Carolina. The bartender glared at him the way he always had when Jack was in high school, and Jack laughed out loud. It seemed inconceivable that high school had been less than two years ago. He'd just turned twenty and felt vastly old. The fact that he was still underage was a joke.

He'd recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point , he'd promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. "You don't want to drift through life all addled , Jack," his mother's voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he'd spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.

"You're sure you're good to go out?" his father had asked. Jack had been home for three weeks and tonight was the first time he'd been out by himself. His parents had taken him to dinner and a movie a few times but since he'd been back he'd mostly spent his evenings watching TV with them. Law & Order episodes with their soothingly formal two-act structures, a glass of warm milk delivered by his mother and then the same routine since childhood, washing his face and brushing his teeth and closing his eyes under a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets shining down from the ceiling of his childhood room. Bridget called sometimes. She was going to college in Colorado and had a cautious way of talking to him that he didn't like very much. By day he was working in a coffee shop in a mall, making lattes and cappuccinos behind a shining silver machine. A boring life on paper but he liked it, actually, the quiet of it, the peace. He played his saxophone in the backyard after work in the afternoons. He'd come home from music school and there it was in his room where he'd left it, a gleaming brass miracle leaning up against the bookcase. He hadn't played the piano in a year.

A jazz pianist from Des Moines was headlining. He'd heard of her back when he was in music school and it seemed a good reason to go out so he'd dressed carefully and combed his hair. He chose a table at the front in the hope that if the music was beautiful it might sweep him up, but the pianist didn't appear when he thought she would. Instead a man came onstage with a guitar and started fiddling with amplifiers.

"Excuse me," Jack said, to the fiftyish couple at the next table. He would've preferred not to bother them, but they seemed to have programs and he needed information. "Is there a warm-up act?"

" There is," the woman said. She was black, and he found the brilliance of her blue eye shadow mesmerizing against the dark of her skin. All the girls he'd dated had worn such subdued makeup. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to paint blue shimmering powder on yourself, and he realized that she was holding out the program for him, so he took it quickly and said, "Thanks very much."

"You're welcome." She was looking at him strangely. He had moments throughout the day when he thought everyone in the room was staring at him, and this was one of them. The program said the opening act was Deval & Morelli/Guitar (with Joe Stevenson/Bass, Arnie Jacobson/Percussion). He must have smiled, because the woman said, "Well, that seemed to make you happy," and he said, "Yes, it does," although he of course couldn't be certain that this was the same Deval. He was in the habit of looking for Deval's name in the news every morning. No day passed without Jack wondering if the man with the goldfish tattoo had found them.

But then the other guitarist came up on the stage and it was Liam Deval, it was actually him. At first he just introduced himself and Arthur Morelli without really looking into the audience, started in on the set with his eyes on the guitar. Halfway through the third piece Deval looked up and saw Jack, and for a moment he faltered. Morelli gave him a questioning glance. Deval recovered quickly, slipped back into " Minor Swing." His year hadn't been wasted. In music school he'd been good but now he was remarkable, his talent hardened and sharpened, a knife. He played with a heavy swing and made Django Reinhardt's chord substitutions. For the first time in a while Jack felt perfectly at peace. The music was radiant.

"Let me buy you a drink" was the first thing he said to Jack when the set was over. At the bar Jack ordered a ginger ale and sipped at it in silence while Deval settled up with the bartender.

"Hey now," Deval said, "are you okay?"

"I've been like this since I got out of rehab," Jack said. "I'm sorry. It's embarrassing. Nothing's wrong. I can't help it." He held a cocktail napkin to his eyes but the tears wouldn't stop coming.

"Rehab," Deval said. "Christ, I'm sorry, and here I am offering to buy you drinks."

"It's okay. It was only ever pills." Jack stared at the bar and with tremendous concentration forced his eyes to stop watering. "I'm fine."

"Pills." Deval seemed at a loss. "I should have realized, I should have noticed. "

"You left your things in the dorm room," Jack said.

"I didn't want things anymore ," Deval said. "It was easier just to leave them. It's hard to explain."

"Why did you get rid of your phone?"

"We were so paranoid. We didn't know what he'd do, we thought maybe there might be some way to trace our calls." Deval sounded embarrassed. "We thought there might be a private detective involved, the way he found you in South Carolina so easily."

"Anna and the baby, are they.?"

"I think I got to Virginia just in time," Deval said.

Anna had thought that being on the run would be more exciting. The night she left Utah with the baby and the money she'd been terrified, but also she had gazed at her wide-eyed reflection in the bus-terminal bathroom and thought about how tragic she was, how pretty and how doomed and how alone in the world, thoughts that embarrassed her later when she remembered them. She'd run away before but this was something infinitely more dangerous. She had wept for hours on the bus, silently with her child in her arms, because she was perfectly adrift now and she was afraid, so afraid, knowing almost nothing of the man from whom she'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars or of what he might do when he discovered the theft. She put on her headphones and listened to electronica— an epiphany from childhood: when all lies in disarray there's still order in music— and this was how she missed Daniel's call. She listened to the voice mail a few hours later, shaking. Apologies, recriminations, a plea to go anywhere but Florida because Florida was where Paul thought she was going. She changed her ticket at the next stop and spent a long time waiting in a dusty waiting room for a bus that pulled up glinting in the sunlight, continued on to South Carolina, where she convinced Jack's roommate to hold the baby while she took her first shower in three days.

"Did you name her after someone?" Liam Deval asked on the first night. It was three in the morning. Anna was feeding the baby in the common area and Liam had come out to sit with her. Jack was asleep on the floor of the dorm room.