Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

The idea of having the music— something you could hold inside yourself, a library of notes, a collection— made her happy. "Do you have the music?"

"I'm so close," Liam said. "I think I'm getting closer."

"To the music?"

"To the music," he said. "I can't really explain."

Anna fell asleep beside him and when she woke two hours later— Chloe was whimpering— he was gone from the bed. She found him in the living room, playing softly and haltingly in a style she'd never heard before. He smiled when he saw her but didn't stop.

Chloe liked the music. She flapped her arms and made excited small noises, she grinned toothlessly at Liam and kicked her feet, and after some time had passed Anna and Chloe fell asleep on the sofa. When they woke together Liam had gone to work. Anna redyed her hair and trimmed it while Chloe was napping. The sting of bleach on her head, the familiar ritual of turning herself blond, soft pieces falling around her ears. She sometimes didn't remember what she'd looked like in her old life. She sometimes didn't remember who she'd been. A distant version of herself had run away from home and gotten high in the park and skipped school to smoke cigarettes under an overpass, but there were days when these seemed like someone else's memories.

S h e c o u l d have gone outside but she didn't. She thought of Paul constantly and her memories of him made her heart beat faster, a panicked blackness at the edges of her vision. Their neighborhood was half-empty, every third or fourth building boarded up. There were cracks in all the sidewalks, and no one ever threatened her but she didn't feel safe. She felt watched when she walked down the street with Chloe, all the windows of all the buildings filled with malevolent eyes. There was nowhere to go but the park down the street and that was a broken-down place, swings hanging lopsided and rust on the slide. There was one swing meant for a small child that still hung the way it was supposed to, but that swing made a ghastly shrieking sound when she pushed Chloe on it— rust on the chain— and Chloe didn't like the noise.

When Liam came home at night he was tired and exhilarated. After his shift in the restaurant he would board a bus to the projects, where he rode an elevator to the seventh floor of a brick tower and spent two hours with Stanislaus. Later Anna sat on the floor of the living room and listened to him practice. She'd liked listening to the jazz quartet back in high school but this was different, this was something she didn't have words for. Chloe loved it too. When she was big enough to sit up, she sat on the carpet and stared at Liam while he played. There were moments of unbearable beauty when Anna closed her eyes in the living room while Liam played his guitar and everything rushed away from her until it was just the music, just Liam, just her daughter and the softness of the carpet where she lay on her back to listen to him, scents of cleaning products lingering in the air. The perfection of their lives together.

"I love your music," Anna said. He put down his guitar and kissed her. There were moments when everything was easy and bright.

Anna knew that Liam worried about her, the way she stayed indoors almost all the time. He pressed her sometimes to think about the future. "What are you going to do with your life?" he asked, near the beginning, when they'd just arrived in Detroit.

"I'm going to look after Chloe."

"What were you going to do before Chloe?"

"I wanted to be Brian Eno," she said.

"What?"

"I was going to be in the music industry in some way. I used to think I'd maybe be a producer or a DJ or something."

"You still can."

"I know," she said, "maybe I'll still do it." But the future was abstract and none of it mattered as much as Chloe did. The idea of leaving Chloe with a stranger was unthinkable. She was going to be a better parent than her parents had been. She was going to save Chloe from everything bad.

In t h e spring Liam asked if she'd mind moving to New York. He'd learned all he could from Stanislaus, he said. There was someone else, an old man in Queens who Stanislaus said was among the very best.

"My name is Liam Deval," he said quietly to himself in the mirror when he didn't know she could hear him, "and I am going to be famous." He said it sardonically now, as if he were only kidding, but his ambition was a winged and burning thing.

In early April they packed up the car, strapped the baby in the car seat, and drove southeast with cups of coffee in the cup holders and a map to New York City on the dashboard.

Br i g h t o n B e a c h was on the far edge of Brooklyn, close against the sea. Blue sky and white sand, the edge of the city, a boardwalk running along the beach. The advertisements and signs on the street were in Russian. The grocery store was filled with inscrutable labels. The trains rattled and cast fleeting shadows from the elevated tracks. She was aware at all times that Gavin was somewhere in this city. She felt such guilt when she thought of him. If it's spring , she thought, he's just finished his first year of college . There were moments when she imagined getting on the subway with Chloe, taking her on the endless train from Brighton Beach to Columbia University, waiting for Gavin by the university gates. But then what? The conversation was impossible to imagine— I gave birth to your child but I never told you I was pregnant because I decided instead to run away with someone else — and she didn't need child support. Could he possibly take Chloe away from her? She wasn't sure. It seemed possible. His family had more money than hers did. Did Chloe actually need a father? Anna certainly hadn't needed hers, and anyway Chloe had Deval.

They had a small apartment a few blocks from the ocean. Liam took a job as a waiter in Manhattan and came home demoralized. He had been told that the first week would be training, which meant he wouldn't be paid.

"Isn't that illegal?" Anna asked.

"Of course," he said. He had worked for thirteen hours. He was sitting at the table with his guitar, picking out chords while she made pancakes. An exhausted sheen to his face. "Now ask me if there's anything I can do about it."

"You could quit," she said. They'd had this conversation before.

"I need the job."

"You don't. We have money."

"Anna," he said. "I don't want to use the. " The cautious voice he used when they skirted around the edges of the theft. The money was divided between several plastic bags here and there in the apartment— behind the towels, under the bed, at the back of a closet— and she was aware of it constantly.

"You could be playing music all day," she said. "You could rent studio space."

"I'm not—"

"Let me do this for you, Liam. It's not like we can return it."

He laid his hand flat over the strings of his guitar, watching her.

"Did you like working today?"

"No," he said.

"Then don't go back tomorrow," she said.

The money went so quickly after that, but in an odd way it was a relief to watch it trickling away. It was like destroying the evidence of a crime.

Li a m s p e n t his days in a rented studio near their apartment. In the evenings he took a train to Queens to work with the man who Stanislaus had said might be the world's greatest living gypsy-guitar teacher, a secret legend. Liam paid him in money and cigars and in return the man showed him everything he could, subtleties of rhythm and technique. He had only one other student, a man named Arthur Morelli who made a decent living as a session musician and played gypsy jazz whenever he could.

Liam brought Arthur Morelli back to Brighton Beach one night a few months after their arrival in the city. The baby was sleeping and Anna was cooking when they came in. She always tried to have something ready for Liam when he arrived home around eleven.