Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

Gavin went downstairs to the quiet street. The Laundromat below his apartment was alight, dryers spinning, a woman folding laundry. He drove to the house where Anna and Sasha's mother had lived, but now the name on the mailbox was Sabharwal and there were small unfamiliar children playing in the front yard, throwing a Frisbee that shone white in the gathering darkness.

G a v i n l e t a few days slide past in the heat. The temperature was soaring and he found it difficult to be outside. It was almost a pleasure to lose himself in work. The foreclosures were endless. He had as many houses to inspect as he could handle. But he couldn't stop thinking about Anna or the child, an obsessive worry that tugged him out of sleep at night, so the investigation continued. He found Taylor after a half-hour of online stalking, called her and drove at her invitation to a gated community in a section of town that he thought might not have existed when he'd lived here before. He waited ten minutes in his car for his turn with the security guard, who was taking his time interrogating a contractor in a pickup truck.

Inside the gates of the subdivision the streets curved around a park, and Taylor's house was on one of the outer loops. It was pink with gardens all around it, a fountain out front. When he cut the engine the quiet was almost complete. He got out of the car and stood for a moment listening to the falling water. The windows of the house reflected the sky and dark palm fronds.

"I'm sorry I'm late," he said, when she opened the door. "The gates—" he made a vague gesture back toward the entrance, but she only smiled at him blankly. "I had to wait forever to get through," he said. "The security guard."

"I don't understand," she said, although not unkindly, so he started from the beginning again and said, " Sorry I'm late," which seemed to reset the conversation. In her immaculate blue-and-white kitchen she poured lemonade over ice and talked about her life. A year in a music program at a school he'd never heard of, a shift in priorities that led to a BA in finance and then to a job at a bank, a marriage—"Todd's at a conference in Miami, otherwise he'd be here" — unrealized dreams of traveling the world—"I always thought I'd see everything, but then I had kids, so, you know" — and the kids, yes, Amy and Jaden, twins, at their summer day camp this afternoon. Gavin had never gone to camp as a kid— his pediatrician had suggested that a boy who made repeated visits to the ER with heat exhaustion was perhaps not ideally suited to outdoor summer activities in Florida— and he found himself imagining what it might be like. Lakes and sunlight, bright water. It would be nice to get out of the suburbs, he thought. There was so much green here, such riotous growth, but nothing close to true wilderness. When was the last time he'd been away from a city, from a suburb, from clipped lawns and cement? He was thinking about the time he'd gone camping with Karen in upstate New York, the perfect quiet in the morning, a bird gliding over a lake, the smell of tent fabric in sunlight. He realized that Taylor was still talking. He had been looking at her and smiling and nodding as his thoughts wandered. She was still beautiful. The same blue eyes and cascading blond hair, the same smile. He found himself wondering idly if she might want to sleep with him. She was talking about her garden now, and had been for a while. His gaze drifted to the microwave clock. She'd been talking about herself for a little under an hour.

"Well," she said finally, "it's just so great to catch up with you. How's your life been?"

This was a competition, he realized. She'd presented him with a gorgeous life and now she wanted to hold his life up to the light and compare. He thought about the photograph of himself on the front page of the New York Star and briefly considered spinning something halfway plausible, I am a famous reporter taking some time off to write a book on Florida's exotic wildlife problem, but he didn't want to lie anymore and he knew he wasn't famous so much as disgraced.

"Well," he said, "I went to Columbia. I was a reporter at the New York Star . I met a girl and we were going to get married, but then she had a miscarriage in the second trimester and she didn't want to be with me anymore after that. I lost my job and moved back to Florida. I'm selling real estate with my sister."

"Oh," Taylor said. She was looking at him a little desperately, her half-smile slipping. She wanted lightness, he realized. She wanted to be saved by a self-deprecating one-liner that might keep things moving. She'd told him nothing very serious about herself. If her life had held the slightest trace of sorrow or any disappointments deeper than her postponed ambition to travel the world, she'd kept it out of the narrative. He was acutely aware of the soft hum of central air conditioning, the far-off drone of a lawnmower.

"But anyway," he said, "do you still keep up with anyone from high school?"

"Oh, I do." She smiled to thank him for the conversational rescue and then launched a twenty-minute monologue concerning people whom Gavin hadn't thought of in a decade, trips she'd taken with her high school girlfriends, gossip about people he barely remembered, the last reunion she'd been to. Kind of a sad affair actually, just fifty or so people standing around under streamers in the high school gymnasium—

"Was Anna Montgomery there?" Gavin asked. "You two were in the same grade, weren't you?"

"Anna? Your high school girlfriend? No. I mean yes, we were in the same year, but she wasn't there at the reunion. You know, I haven't seen her in so long," she said.

"Do you remember the last time you saw her?"

"Hoping to rekindle the flame?" Taylor widened her eyes as she said this, and Gavin understood for the first time that she was killingly bored.

"We were close," he said, "and I just wanted to find out what'd become of her. It's like she disappeared from the face of the earth."

"You should maybe ask Daniel about her," Taylor said.

" Really. Why Daniel?"

"It's probably nothing. But do you remember the Lola Quartet's last concert?"

"Behind the school," Gavin said. "We were playing on the back of your father's pickup truck."

"Yes," she said. "Exactly. I have such vivid memories of that concert, I guess because it was the last one. Do you know, I haven't sung 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' since that night? And it was one of my favorite songs. But anyway, that was the last time I saw her. We were playing that song and I remember you took off in the middle of it, just ran into the woods like you were going to be sick or something. We didn't know what the matter was but we were winding down anyway, that was our last song of the night. It was something like two o'clock in the morning, and I remember I saw Anna there. I noticed because she hadn't been there before, it was like she'd just stepped out of the woods, and I thought it was weird for her to come so late in the evening when everything was done, but I was talking to my boyfriend at the time— you remember Brian? That guy who did the penguin imitations?"

Gavin didn't remember Brian or his penguin imitations. He nodded anyway.

"I was talking to him, so I didn't talk to Anna when I saw her. But I remember I looked up a while later," she said, "and she was walking around the side of the school with Daniel, and he was carrying his instrument and she was carrying a duffel bag. I thought it was strange for them to be going off together. I mean she was your girlfriend, not his. But there'd been all this talk about her and I thought, you know, we're all friends anyway so it's probably nothing. But then I remembered it later because when school started up again in September she wasn't there, and it occurred to me that that had been the last time I'd seen her, disappearing with Daniel that night. I never saw her again."