Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"Once you step into the underworld it's hard to come out again," she said to William Chandler. This was a few months before Gavin appeared in the Starlight Diner with his arm in a sling. Sasha and William met in the diner a few times a month to drink coffee together before the start of her shift. William wasn't her official sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous, her official sponsor had left town a long time ago and Sasha wasn't sure what had become of her, but they had gravitated toward one another over years of meetings and he often seemed more like a sponsor than a friend.

"Don't be melodramatic," he said. "You were never that far in."

But she knew it wasn't really a question of how far in she'd gone. It

was true, she'd never sold herself to pay her gambling debts or been physically harmed. The meetings were full of lost marriages and personal bankruptcies and parents who had lost their children forever and women who'd turned to prostitution to finance their debts. She'd played poker a few times in high school, gathered with friends in someone's parents' basement on boring Friday nights. The game made them feel like adults, even if they were usually just playing for pennies. She'd begun playing regularly in her first semester of college, just to have something to think about other than English literature and finance.

It would have been impossible to imagine the slide that followed. By the end of the first semester she was playing almost every day. She'd lost a student-loan payment and had to leave school. She'd stolen money from two previous jobs. She'd taken her father's car and sold it in a parking lot and now he didn't talk to her anymore. She'd lived in terror of a particular loan shark. She'd skated across a dark surface, but the surface was all she'd needed to touch. Sasha could always find the door in the back of the wardrobe after that, she was always already halfway through—"I'd like ten lottery tickets," a man murmured near her in a dusty convenience store on Caroline Street, and there was that shadow angling over the day again. Traces of her old world were everywhere. She saw it in glances, in people sitting together in parked cars, in exchanges of envelopes outside closed businesses. She was aware of it all around her, as if all the off-track betting parlors and basement poker and scratch-and-win tickets were part of the same game, a never-ending continuous transaction of currency and numbers and cards that she could sense in the air but no longer touch. When she drove the streets of Sebastian she always knew where the casino was, where she was in relation to it. She was constantly aware of the casino's gravitational pull, dark star.

Sasha shuffled and reshuffled a deck of cards in the evenings in front of a television set, almost without noticing anymore. She felt tainted but also she wanted to slip back in again, back to the beautiful casino poker room where she'd always been on the verge of winning everything, everything, the patterns of cards unfolding around her and the night so bright sometimes, evenings of ice cubes glinting in glasses and hard chips and money.

"You're getting better," Anna said. "When was the last time you lost any money?" She'd been living with Sasha for years now, ever since she'd broken up with the guitarist and come back down from New York with her daughter and enough money to pay off Sasha's gambling debt. Sasha had known that night that never again in her lifetime would anyone show up on her doorstep with eleven thousand dollars in cash. She'd known that this was her last chance and she'd fought every day since then to not gamble, but she could never bring herself to think of it as a disease. She'd had arguments with William about it.

"If I had pneumonia," she'd said, "I wouldn't be able to will myself to get better. There's no such thing as Pneumonia Anonymous. There's a difference between a disease and a character flaw."

"It's thinking like that that keeps treatment programs underfunded," he'd said, and changed the subject. He'd never felt he stood a chance before the poisonous allure of horse racing. Now, sitting in front of the television set shuffling a card deck over and over again, Sasha looked up from the cards and didn't know what to say. Anna was watching her from the doorway. Cards made Anna nervous.

"I don't know," Sasha said finally, because she had to say something. "I can't remember the last thing I lost."

"That's good," Anna said. She was a little bleary-eyed. She'd slept for an hour between work and night school and was on her way out again. Chloe was at the babysitter's house. "Are you hungry? There's a pizza in the freezer."

" Thank you," Sasha said. There were nights when it was easy, but she knew this wasn't going to be one of them. "I'm leaving for work soon."

T h e i r s h a k y mother married twice. Sasha and Anna had different fathers and different last names and different clothes, and one was luckier than the other. "Your mother dresses that kid like a whore," Sasha's father muttered once when Sasha was thirteen or so, picking her up from her mother's house where Anna waved good-bye on the driveway in high cut-off shorts and a too-small tank top, and Sasha felt bad about him saying this but she couldn't disagree. People didn't know they were sisters and it was the shame of her life that she sometimes didn't mind this and sometimes even let it slide. Anna wore clothes that Sasha wouldn't have left the house in. Anna often had bruises and did poorly in school. Anna was suspended twice for fighting, once for graffiti. Anna ran away for days at a time. Her friends were mostly drug addicts and dropouts until she changed schools and found the jazz quartet.

Sasha hadn't minded Anna hanging around on the outskirts of the quartet but she'd always secretly thought of Anna as a bit of a basket case, wayward child, lost girl. When things were bad at their mother's house, during Sasha's increasingly infrequent visits, she tried her best to protect Anna because she thought it was her duty. She'd told Anna to go upstairs and she'd faced their mother and Anna's father on her own, scared but also a little virtuous about it, and it was shocking that after all this Anna had been the one to save her. Sasha had owed ten thousand seven hundred dollars to a man named Lizard who was threatening to beat her and then Anna appeared one night on her doorstep with Chloe and eleven thousand dollars, all that remained by then of the hundred and twenty-one thousand from Utah after three years of rent and groceries and the production of Deval & Morelli's first album. Sasha had just got off the phone with Lizard when the doorbell rang. Anna stood on her doorstep holding the tired three-year-old's hand and asked why Sasha was crying, and by late afternoon the next day Sasha's gambling debts were erased. Anna tried to pretend it was nothing. "You'd have done the same for me," she said, and through all the days of her life Sasha hoped this was true.

Sa s h a h a d been working the graveyard shift at the Starlight Diner for four years now. At first just because she was new and had no say in her schedule and they needed someone for the night shift, later because she liked it. She felt too jangled there in daylight, overexposed in the clatter of plates and voices, always falling behind. She arrived every night in time for the dinner rush. It was the time of day she most hated, but she knew it was necessary. The diner served decent dinner entrees, and it was a popular destination. The tips from the dinner rush were what made the night shift financially viable, and beyond the rush lay the promise of long quiet hours.

The nights were serene. Usually just she and Bianca or sometimes Jocelyn, Luis and Freddy in the kitchen. Bianca was in her fifties, Jocelyn forty-three. They had both been working nights for years and had identical looks of permanent tiredness. They'd told Sasha they didn't want to work days, though, and Sasha understood. It was Sasha's first night job but she already knew she didn't want to work in daylight again either.