Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"What the hell can he do?" Anna asked. "All he's ever done is—"

"He's a cop," Sasha said. "Snap out of it. I'll call you back." She disconnected and watched the call fade from her cell-phone screen. "A stranger showed up and took a picture of Chloe," she said. Saying the words aloud made the story real, and she began to be afraid.

"It might be nothing," Daniel said, when she told him the story about the real estate agent. "A misunderstanding."

"But it might not be."

"It might not be," he agreed, and she thought she'd never seen anyone look so tired.

"Do we go to the police?"

"Of course you can't go to the police." Daniel spoke softly, looking into his coffee. "The only police you can tell is me, and that's only because I'm your friend." He stood up from the table and left some money next to his coffee cup. "Let me think about this. I'll be back in tomorrow or the next night."

She almost asked why they couldn't go to the police, but she under stood as she watched him leave. Anna was in trouble because she'd stolen a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars. Anna was the criminal. Once you've slipped into the underworld, it's difficult to come back out. Shadows slanting over everything.

An n a w o r k e d full-time as a file clerk at a law firm. She never missed a day of work but when Sasha came home that morning she was still in her bathrobe, red-eyed at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in her hand. She'd been crying. Sasha wanted to go to bed but she sat across from Anna instead.

"You're usually home earlier," Anna said. Her voice was very small, and all of Sasha's old instincts— to protect Anna, to shield Anna from everything bad— flashed through her.

" There was an accident on Route 77."

"An accident. That's awful." Anna was smoking, which was startling— she had always been vehement that no one was allowed to smoke in the house, not with a kid living here— and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray as she spoke. "Was anyone hurt?"

"I think so," Sasha said. " There was an ambulance. You look tired."

"I've been up all night."

"Me too," Sasha said. "You have to stay calm."

"He has a picture of her, Sasha."

"You don't know that."

"Even if he doesn't," Anna said, "he's always out there. He'll always be out there. And I don't have the money anymore. Any of it."

Sasha looked away. There were moments even now when she wanted to drown. Walk out the door, drive to the casino, play poker until her chips were gone and then dive into the ocean and swim away from the shore.

"I'm sorry," Anna said quickly. "I didn't mean it like that. I was happy to help, you know I was. You were sick."

"This language of disease," Sasha said, but she was too tired to finish the thought.

"Sasha, I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I'm sorry too. What do you want to do?"

"I called Liam. He's coming down here."

"Liam Deval? Why would you call him?"

"Because he's my best friend," Anna said. Sasha had never understood this. She found it unnatural. All of her own relationships had ended in disaster and she couldn't conceive of being friends with any of her former boyfriends. "Because he said to call me if I was ever in trouble, and we talk all the time anyway. And because Gloria's his mother," Anna said. "It's his mother's house. He needs to know."

"This woman, she was probably just who she said she was. You don't know—"

"A real estate agent who takes pictures of kids? Asks them their names, identifies them?" A high edge of hysteria. She lit another cigarette.

Sasha sighed and dropped her head into her hands. Every cell in her body was straining toward sleep.

"What do you want to do?" she asked, again.

"I don't know," Anna said. "I just want this to be over."

"Are you going to work?"

"I called in sick."

"Where's Chloe?"

"In her room. She's not going to school today. But maybe even that's not safe. I keep thinking, what if he knows where we live?"

"Anna, I have to get some sleep. Let's talk about this later." Sasha stood and left her sister alone in the kitchen. Theirs was a very small house on a street of small houses. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. But the basement was finished and she had it to herself, which suited her. It was a large room with her own small bathroom and a cool cement floor, easy to darken completely against the daylight. She drew the blackout blinds, locked the door and undressed, turned on the air conditioner and lay still on the bed. The ceiling was creaking softly, Anna pacing overhead. She heard Chloe and Anna talking but couldn't make out the words. She fell asleep and dreamed of snow.

Sa s h a w o k e at two in the afternoon. The movement upstairs had ceased. She opened the door to the stairway, blinking in the light from upstairs, and the silence of the house came over her. There was a note on the kitchen table. Liam arrived in town. We're staying with him in his motel for a while. I'll call you. Love, A.

Her first thought was that now it would be easy to gamble, and the fact of that having been her first thought made her shiver. She went through the mechanical motions of coffee and breakfast, and even though she was almost always alone at this time of day— Anna at work, Chloe at her after-school program— their absence from the house was overwhelming. The light through the windows was too bright. She drank two cups of coffee, spent a long time in the shower, tidied the basement. She moved slowly, willing the time to pass, but when she was done with all of this she was still alone, there were still hours to get through before she could go to work. She called Anna, but Anna didn't answer her phone.

Sasha did a load of laundry, sat in the basement watching the dryer spin. Four fifteen. She did the ironing, hung up two clean uniforms and went outside. She stood on the front steps for a few minutes, unsure what to do with herself. It was going to rain later but for now light still hung in the air outside. She found her deck of cards and sat in front of the television set while the afternoon faded outside the window, shuffling and reshuffling and playing solitaire until her cell phone rang at four forty.

"Is tonight still good for you?" William Chandler asked. She'd forgotten that it was one of their regular coffee nights.

"Tonight's fine," she said. The relief of being saved from solitude. "You'll come after the dinner rush?"

"I'll be there," he said.

The television couldn't mask the emptiness of the house all around her. When she'd disconnected the call she went from room to room turning on every light, but it wasn't enough, so she left early and spent a half-hour drinking coffee and reading the paper in a booth before her shift started.

After the dinner rush she clocked out on break and returned to the same booth with her dinner. The rain had started. William Chandler shook his umbrella under the awning, a spray of silver droplets flying out through the air, and set it down in the foyer before he came to her.

"

Y o u s e e m distracted," William said.

"I am." Sasha hadn't turned the lights off before she'd left because the thought of coming home to a black and empty house was unbearable, but now she was worried about the electric bill. She thought of the house with every window ablaze through the night, a beacon on the darkened street. Rain was streaking the diner windows, light slipping down the glass. She found herself wishing for a real storm, for a hurricane, a reason to get in the car and drive away from this life. She'd read that the evacuees of Hurricane Katrina had dispersed to every corner of the country, a New Orleans diaspora from Washington state to Boston to California. Couldn't she join them? There were moments when she wanted to leave everyone, even Anna and Chloe, strike out alone into a new state and a new way of living. After everything Anna had done for her.