Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"I don't know where she is," Sasha said. "She just said she was going to another motel."

"If she— if you speak with her," he said, "will you tell her I'd like to talk?"

"I will," Sasha said.

" Thank you." He crossed the room and opened the door with his good hand, walked out of the air conditioning into the heat and the darkness of the parking lot. Long after dark but he still felt heat radiating from the pavement.

A taxi was pulling into the parking lot. Gavin stepped between two cars and watched Liam Deval get out. Deval paid the driver, but he didn't enter the diner. He was walking toward the back of the building, where shadows hung black and the parking lot faded into bushes and weeds, and Gavin didn't want to see any more. When he looked up Grace was still listening to music in the window, her hair falling over her face. Sasha was staring into her coffee cup.

The diner wasn't far from his apartment, two miles, maybe three. Gavin slipped between the parked cars and walked quickly away from there, turned away from Route 77 onto a side street. The beauty of the suburbs at night, streetlight shining through palm trees, the flicker of sprinklers on lawns, strange shadows. The pleasure of being alone outside after all these days of interiors. He was wandering through a new housing development when he realized he was lost. He didn't recognize the name of the street he was on. Half of the new houses seemed vacant. At the far end of the development they weren't even finished yet, skeletal beams against the sky. Raw dirt driveways with tall weeds, an abandoned bulldozer silhouetted black. Does a house still count as a ruin if it's abandoned before it's done? Asphalt soft beneath his shoes. He was aware of his footsteps on the silent street.

He crossed an expanse of weeds to the next cul-de-sac, an older neighborhood where the houses had people in them, out onto a wider commercial strip. A 7-Eleven was shining like a beacon ahead. He went in and bought a map. His thoughts were scattered. He didn't think he'd wandered that far from Route 77, but it took Gavin and the 7-Eleven counter guy a solid five minutes to find themselves on the map. All the streets looped and circled back on themselves and crashed up against grids, the grids broke into a spaghetti chaos of freeways and came back together on the other side and then disintegrated into loops again, and also the 7-Eleven guy was stoned.

Gavin found the intersection closest to his apartment after a while, but the loops and circles of the outer suburbs made for a confounding route and the 7-Eleven guy was distracted by the way all the streets converged , man. Gavin thanked him and set off in what he thought was the correct direction, but it wasn't easy to tell and all his thoughts were of Anna, Chloe, the girl in the diner. He kept realizing that he'd been walking without thinking, taking random turns. He wandered in and out of three cul-de-sacs. All the houses looked the same to him. Dogs barked occasionally. A shadow in the middle of the street turned into the silhouette of an animal he couldn't identify, then ran off into the bushes. An iguana, he decided a few blocks later, and he wished the street had been bright enough to see its skin.

Gavin lost track of where he was on the map, so he resolved to set his course by the stars. It was a clear night and in theory he was trying to get home again, but it seemed to him later that he'd really just wanted to keep walking and stay alone with his thoughts, away from the diner where at this moment a glassy-eyed runaway in a frilly dress was playing the part of his daughter and a plan that had a gun in it was moving into action. He was trying to understand and something was pulling at him, a memory of a story covered years ago by the New York Star , something about a lost child. Gavin found the North Star and kept it over his left shoulder, or tried to, but the streets wouldn't cooperate.

Af t e r s o m e time Gavin came upon a wider road— a semitrailer roared past in the darkness— and ahead were the bright signs of chain restaurants, a shopping mall that he recognized. The mall had faux-Greek pillars around the entrance, a banner reading summer midnite madness !!!

sagging over the glass doors.

Gavin walked blinking into the mall's winter chill and found a bench under a plastic-and-fabric palm tree. It was a mall filled with elevators and mezzanines. He found himself gazing blankly up at the levels of other people, these stragglers under the spell of a late-night summer sale, sales clerks smiling fixedly from store entrances. What was the Star story? It had been published years ago but there was something in it that he thought might somehow pull everything together, if only he could remember the details. There had been a lost boy in the Bronx, a transaction. He hadn't worked on the story but he remembered his editor and another reporter talking about it, and what was startling was that after all these months, here under the halogen lights of this distant southern land, in this unrecognizable life, he still had his editor's cell-phone number programmed into his phone. He scrolled through the names, all these ghosts from his vanished life, let her name slide past on the screen three times before he summoned the courage to press the button that sent the call through the satellites to New York.

"I almost didn't pick up," Julie said. He imagined her in the night quiet of the Star newsroom, her stocking feet on her desk and her hand on her forehead, the far-off look she always had when she talked on the telephone.

"Hello, Julie," he said. He hadn't seen her since an afternoon months earlier, a different lifetime actually, when he'd risen from a conference-room table with her and the editor-in-chief and the directors of the personnel and legal departments staring at him and walked out of the Star building for the last time.

"You know where I work now?" Her tone was studiedly casual. "A website, Gavin. There isn't even paper involved anymore."

"You lost your job?"

"Most of us did."

"I'm sorry," he said. "I can't tell you how sorry I am." He could think of nothing else to say. He closed his eyes against the mall's cool light and pressed the palm of his hand against the plastic bench.

"I'm not even going to ask why you lied in your stories, Gavin. Nothing you could possibly say would make it better."

"I wasn't myself," he said. "I came a little undone."

"Just like that," Julie said, but she sounded deflated, the fight fading from her voice. It was, after all, one thirty in the morning. She sighed audibly and he reformatted his image of her into another, imagined office. What kind of space would a website occupy? He pictured a loft, an open workspace, her feet up on a different desk, the ceiling so high that shadows gathered up above her.

"Julie, I have to ask you something. It's about a story."

"You know, I've often wished over the past few months that you'd

come to me to ask about stories," she said. "But it seems a little late now, doesn't it?"

"You have no reason to believe me," he said, "but it's important. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't."

She was silent, but she didn't hang up.

"Do you remember two years ago, maybe two and a half, the paper covered a story about an abandoned boy in the Bronx? You worked on the story. I think there'd been a shootout or something, and the kid had somehow been part of it. There was some kind of drug connection."

"Theo," she said, after a moment. "Theo Cordell. He was seven."

"Will you tell me about it? I was thinking about it just now."

"You called me at, what, one thirty-five in the morning," Julie said, "to ask about a story I worked on two years ago?"

"I knew you'd be up."

"You knew I'd be up. Fine," she said, "why not? Let's tell each other stories. A seven-year-old boy was found wandering in the Bronx after a shootout. Turned out the boy's father was one of the men who'd been shot. He'd taken the kid along to some meeting, I can't remember all the details but it was a drop-off of some kind, at the other party's request."