Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"I wonder if you'd mind waiting in the car for a few minutes," Daniel said to Anna, and by this Anna understood that they were leaving again. She sat for a long time in the car with the seat reclined, staring at the mountains. She felt hollow and worn thin. It was obvious to her at that moment that their plans would end in catastrophe. The sunlight through the windshield was too bright.

"We're going to my friend's place," Daniel said when he came to her. He looked flushed and spent, as if he'd been shouting. She looked past him at the house. His aunt was standing in the open doorway, wiping tears from her face. "He doesn't live that far from here."

"What did you say to her?" Anna asked, but Daniel pretended not to hear. He pulled out of the driveway and when she looked back the front door was closed.

His friend lived in a sprawling ranch house on a cul-de-sac with the same reduced color palette as the larger suburbs: white houses, blue sky, green-brown lawns. This sheer white light.

"Why don't we just go to your uncle's place?"

"Because he lives in a small apartment and my friend's got an entire house to himself."

"What's your friend's name?" she asked, on the way up the driveway. Daniel was walking ahead of her with the bags.

"Paul," he said. "We worked together when I was here last summer."

P a u l w a s a wiry man in his early twenties, with blond hair and an earring and a tattoo on his neck, a splash of orange. He took them on a tour. The house seemed to have at least three bedrooms, closed doors along the upstairs hallway. Paul had friends who came to stay with him sometimes, he said. A roommate who was here every couple of weeks. He showed them the garage, where an expensive-looking silver car was parked next to a motorcycle.

"One rule," Paul said, when he showed them into the storage room beside the garage. He was sorry that this was the only room he could give them, he'd said. All the other rooms had other uses. "You can't ever go into the basement."

"I think he's a dealer," Daniel said later, when he and Anna were alone. He had lapsed into a deep silence. She was surprised to hear him speak.

"But when you knew him, last summer. "

"He was working construction," Daniel said. " Looks to me like there's been a career change."

The storage room wasn't large. There was a foldout sofa, a layer of dust on the linoleum floor, a bare lightbulb overhead. Daniel was embarrassed, it was obvious to Anna, and she wanted to say something to make it better but didn't know what she could possibly say. She sat on the sofa looking out the window at the backyard, the brownish grass and falling-down fence. Daniel seemed to be having some difficulty looking directly at her. In those last two weeks in Florida they hadn't talked much, she realized, about the actual circumstances in which they'd live after they ran away. He'd told her his aunt had room for them and she had imagined a mansion.

She wanted to leave but she had no more than eighty dollars to her name. She was here and there was nowhere else she could go.

Th e d a y s in the house were long and empty. People came and went, cars pulling in and out of the driveway. She heard voices upstairs and on the stairs to the basement. The day after their arrival Daniel went to work at his uncle's construction firm. A house was going up across town, Daniel told her, lying beside her at night. A huge sprawling McMansion of a place with pillars and a portrait of Joseph Smith carved into stone above the door. Daniel said it was creepy, actually. He'd been raised Catholic, but he wasn't about to litter any house of his with religious iconography. Anna tried to imagine what their house would be like, if they ever lived in a house that was theirs. The thought of living with Daniel indefinitely was somehow awkward. He was working overtime and went jogging in the evenings. She didn't see much of him.

Six voice mails came in from Gavin, like dispatches from a foreign country. Pleas for information, questions about her whereabouts, invitations to the prom. She listened and then deleted them. She sometimes cried at night.

Before the pregnancy began to show she got a job in a doughnut shop. It was down on a main street, a twenty-minute walk. She'd never had a job before but the work was easy and the manager liked her. It was a pleasure to escape from the silent house. She didn't mind it, although the smell of doughnuts made her nauseous some days. She served coffee and counted change through long afternoons while the question of paternity hung overhead like a cloud.

On t h e i r third or fourth week in the house she woke at three in the morning, thrown out of sleep by an unremembered sound. Daniel was standing by the storage-room window, staring out at the backyard through the smallest possible opening in the curtain. He looked stricken.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"You don't want to see this," he said, without taking his eyes away from the window, but he didn't object when she came to stand beside him. That was when she heard the sound again, a sharp cry from outside.

She was aware first of movement, a confused motion in the middle of the lawn just at the point where the light cast from the house met darkness, two figures moving on the edge of visibility. It took her a moment to decipher the scene.

There were two men in the backyard. For a moment it was almost a balanced fight, both men punching, but then one fell to his knees and seemed to retreat into himself, curled up on the grass in a ball, and the other— Paul, she realized— struck the fallen man again and again and again.

"He's going to kill him," Anna whispered.

"He won't," Daniel whispered back. His eyes were very wide. "The last thing a guy like him wants is to get in trouble with the law."

"We have to stop him," she hissed, but neither of them moved and the blows continued until Paul gave his victim a final vicious kick and turned toward them, stalking back to the house, sweat shining on his face and soaking through his shirt. Knuckles bleeding and eyes bright, his tattoo slick on the side of his neck. Daniel pulled her away from the window.

Anna woke late in the morning and wondered if it had perhaps been a dream. Daniel had left for work already. She looked through the gap in the curtains, half-expecting to see a body on the grass, but the yard was empty. When she went outside she saw the blood, spattered here and there, less than she was expecting for the violence she'd seen. There was a pine tree in the back corner of the yard by the fence, a wooden picnic table beneath it, and she liked to sit out there sometimes when the air in the house was too close. Today she walked past the blood and lay on her back on the table, numb, staring up at the patterns of pine needles and branches against the overcast sky. She closed her eyes and still saw the patterns on the inside of her eyelids.

"What are you thinking of?"

Anna hadn't heard Paul's approach over the dead grass. She started when she heard his voice and sat up on the table.

"Nothing," she said.

It was difficult not to look at his hands. He'd wrapped both knuckles in gauze and she remembered the impact of fists on ribs, the fallen man's cries.

"I've seen you out here before," he said.

She shrugged.

"So you just lie there on the table by the hour, thinking of nothing?"

"Yeah," she said, "that's sort of the point."

"Cigarette?"

"Yes please."

He hesitated a moment before he lit it for her. "You supposed to smoke when you're pregnant?"

"No." She inhaled slowly. "But I figure the occasional one can't hurt." He shrugged and sat down on the other end of the table. "I like your tattoo," she said. Perhaps this was adulthood, this feeling of danger, smoking a cigarette far from home with a man who'd beaten another man almost to death the night before.