Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"Ready?" he asked.

"Yes." She was impatient with the question. What had she been doing these past two weeks, spending time with Daniel and avoiding Gavin, if not readying herself for this? The passing streets were dense with memory. It was unfathomable that before morning they'd be across state lines, like imagining driving off the edge of a map. She had never left Florida before.

"You'll get to come back someday," Daniel said, as if reading her thoughts. "Once this all blows over. This doesn't have to be forever."

Anna only nodded. She didn't feel like talking anymore. She

realized then why she'd sent the paper airplane sailing through the air to Gavin: it was too late for anything to change now, the plan was already in motion and it was the only plan she'd been able to come up with that she thought might save her and keep her child out of foster care, they were going to Utah and she risked everything if Gavin or anyone else knew, but she at least wanted him to know she was sorry. She wished now that she'd written more.

They drove all night. Daniel was nervous, talking to fill the silence. His aunt was a good person, he said. He'd been visiting Utah in the summertime all his life and he knew for a fact that his aunt didn't talk to his parents, who he thought would probably cry if they knew he'd fathered a child out of wedlock. He'd told his aunt about the situation and she'd said they could stay at her house, he said. The aunt just wanted to help, because that's what good people do in situations like this, they help, and if there were more people like that in the world—

"Daniel," she said, "it's okay. We're going to be okay."

"He's your boyfriend," he said after a moment. "I don't like to think of myself as the kind of guy who steals girls from their boyfriends."

"You didn't steal me," she said. She was tired. It was all too much, actually. She was feeling queasy again. The radio was off. They moved in silence up the interstate. Daniel was looking straight ahead, his face illuminated only occasionally by passing lights. He was wearing his hair in an Afro that year, and it turned briefly into a halo each time a set of headlights passed. "Daniel," she said, "I'm going to try to sleep for a bit."

"Okay." He sounded scared and uncertain, and it occurred to her as she was drifting off to sleep that both of them were very young. She was looking at Daniel's dark hands on the wheel and thinking, Please, oh please let the child be black.

.

W h e n A n n a thought about Utah she had an impression of desert and also an impression of ski slopes, and the two images didn't fit together in her mind. But in the car with Daniel she imagined a house, orderly and large, with a couple of rooms set aside for her and Daniel and the baby. Their own bathroom maybe. A suite! It was a long drive, two days broken up by roadside motels, and there were moments when she wished they could travel forever. A state of suspension, sitting still in the passenger seat while the landscape changed all around her. Daniel did all the driving, because Anna didn't know how to drive— her parents shared a single car that she'd been forbidden to go near— and Daniel didn't like anyone driving his car anyway, even though it was just an enormous old station wagon that his parents had given him when they'd upgraded. On the long drive out of South Florida Anna was free to close her eyes in the passenger seat and imagine being a different kind of person in a different kind of life.

At the end she woke from a long nap and the quality of light had changed. They were on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. The sunlight here had a hard high-altitude brilliance. The landscape had been distilled into the barest palette of colors— brown mountains tinged with green under a blue-white sky, the gray of the highway ahead, white light.

"Are we getting close?"

"We're almost there."

"Daniel," she said, "I don't know how to thank you. Most people wouldn't have done this."

"Look, Anna, there's something I should tell you."

"What?"

"My aunt doesn't have a lot of money," he said. "She and my uncle got divorced a few years back, he's the one with the construction firm I told you about, and it's the kind of situation. look, you'll be safe there, she's a trustworthy person. But it's not a really nice place or anything."

"Oh," Anna said. "It's okay. It doesn't have to be nice." She carefully replaced her vision of the large house, the suite, the deep white carpets with a modest but still cozy house, a spare room.

"I'm glad you don't mind," Daniel said. "I wish I could take you somewhere nicer."

"It's okay," she said.

They were passing through suburbs now. There were things here that were different— mountains rising up at the edge of the sky, an absence of palm trees, less-green lawns— but these suburbs weren't really different from the place where she'd spent her entire life, endless similar houses and cul-de-sacs. She was left with an unsettling sense that they hadn't gone anywhere, that this was only a variation on the place where they'd started. Daniel pulled into the driveway of a low single-story house with peeling white paint. A run-down street bleached by high sunlight, a neighborhood of brownish lawns and toys left out in yards.

"Well!" Daniel said, too brightly. "Here we are!" She stepped out of the car into the thin bright air. Daniel pulled their duffel bags from the backseat and came to stand beside her.

"It's nice," she said.

"Wait till you see the inside." He seemed nervous, trying to keep his voice light but she understood his strain. The same fear she'd felt every time she'd ever brought a friend home, Please oh please let everything be calm inside the house today. She took his arm as they approached the front door.

"It's okay," she said, while they stood waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. "Even if it isn't good, it's better than what I left, isn't it?"

"I don't know," he said. "I hope this was the right thing."

.

Da n i e l ' s a u n t was a thin nervous woman who worked as a hotel maid near the convention center. Delia was kind but tired, distracted by worry. Her hair was caught up in a hundred tiny braids with beads on the ends. She had a daughter in college and she'd taken in subletters to help with the tuition. Anna gathered that Daniel hadn't been aware of this fact. This meant that another family was living in the basement, and there was, it seemed, nowhere for Anna and Daniel to stay.

"I thought you could maybe take Tanya's old room," Delia said, but her daughter's bedroom was being used for storage, stacked high with boxes filled with things that Delia and Tanya were trying to sell on eBay. The people downstairs were playing loud music. Anna stood in the hall listening to Daniel and his aunt, and she felt the rhythm coming up through the walls. She was mesmerized by the movement of the beads at the ends of Delia's braids, the soft musical clicking every time she turned her head.

"Tanya's room looks kind of full, actually," Daniel said, in a tight voice that made Anna shiver. She was acutely sensitive to oncoming storms. She pressed the palms of her hands to the cool wall and felt the bass coming through in pulses. Thinking about the other times she'd run away, about how much less complicated running away was when it was only you and you were only going a few miles from home and no one else's family was involved.

"And she'll be home over the holidays," Delia said. " Maybe you could stay in the living room?"

But the living room was tiny and open to the kitchen, almost entirely taken up by an overstuffed sofa. It was clearly the room where Delia spent most of her time when she was home. There were magazines and half-completed crossword puzzles open on the coffee table, an ironing board set up with a neat stack of pressed clothing folded at the end of it, a gray cat sprawled asleep on the sofa. A TV blared commercials into the air.