Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"Family problems," Sasha said. It pained her to lie to Bianca. "Bad divorce. I told her, you feel like you can't be at home, you come visit me here, no matter what time it is. Listen, I'm clocking out on break."

Sasha went to the girl and stood before her. The girl's eyes were flat, a greenish shade of blue. An unnerving blankness in her stare that made Sasha wonder if she was entirely well.

"Come sit with me a while," Sasha said.

.

Ho u r s l a t e r, afterward, when Gavin had come and left and everything had gone exactly as Daniel had said it would, when Grace had finished her milkshake and was dozing off in the booth, Sasha told Bianca she wasn't feeling well and clocked out. At three in the morning she was driving slowly down Mortimer Street with Grace in the passenger seat, reading street numbers.

"Here," Grace said.

"This is where you live?" Sasha stopped the car in front of 1196 Mortimer and she was certain that she'd been here before, perhaps years ago, but she couldn't fix an event in memory. Grace didn't answer. She closed the car door behind her and disappeared around the side of the house.

Sasha cut the engine and got out of the car. She waited for a light to come on in the house, but none did. A window on the first floor was broken; the other windows reflected streetlight but this one absorbed it, a blank rectangle of cardboard or wood. She stood on the street for a few minutes, looking at the darkened house and the shadowed chaos of plants all around it, pale explosions of blossoms in ink-black leaves. The front lawn hadn't been cut in some time. A faint scent of flowers in the still air. She was alone.

Sasha knew she should be exhausted but she wasn't. She drove to an open-all-night doughnut shop and drank coffee for a while, trying to read the paper but too jittery. She was waiting in her car in the recreation center parking lot when the doors opened at five a.m. At this hour fourteen out of fifteen lanes belonged to the swim team, a flock of teenagers and adults in black swimsuits who dove in one after another with hardly a splash and shot through the water with such speed and power that she felt her breath catch in her chest. She slipped as unobtrusively as possible into the unoccupied lane.

Something was troubling her, a memory from a few hours before. As far as she was aware the transaction had gone flawlessly and Anna's debt had been paid. She had been sitting in the diner with Grace when her cell phone had vibrated on the table. A text message from Daniel: Hi Sasha. This was her cue.

"Come with me," she said to Grace, who hesitated just a moment and then obeyed. She walked slowly with Grace down the length of the restaurant— all but deserted at this hour— and when they were almost at the back door she'd said "Grace, go in there for a few minutes, will you?" and Grace went as directed into the restroom. Sasha turned her back to the windows. But first she glanced outside— she didn't mean to — and saw a man's pale face looking up at her. He was standing at the very back of the parking lot. She looked away quickly and it seemed that he turned away at the same time, as if both were embarrassed to have met one another's eyes in the middle of all this, whatever this transaction was that they'd found themselves in. But what was strange— and all these hours later she lost her rhythm in the pool, turned over onto her back in the middle of her third lap to look up at the distant ceiling with her breath tight in her chest— was that just at the instant when she averted her gaze he seemed to fall away, as if a trapdoor had opened under his feet or his knees had failed him.

Sasha reached for the edge of the pool and hauled herself gasping up on the side. She sat with her feet in the water, the swim team flashing up and down the lanes before her. She'd walked to the back of the restaurant. She'd looked out the window. The man's pale face, a half-second of descent in her peripheral vision as she'd turned from him.

She left the pool and the clamor of the swim team, washed the chemicals from her hair and put her uniform back on. When she stepped out into the parking lot it was six a.m., bright morning. She drove home and prepared herself for bed, but sleep was elusive. At eleven a.m. she gave up and turned on the light. She wanted to go outside into the fresh air and sunlight, but she knew she could fall asleep again only if she kept the illusion of night.

Sasha had long ago fallen into the habit of reading when she couldn't sleep. Easy to forget sometimes that there were books back at the beginning of everything, that she'd gone to Florida State because she'd loved books and that even in the long fall into patterns and numbers she hadn't lost this. She turned on the lamp in the late-morning darkness of the basement and pulled a volume at random from the shelf above her bed. A translated-from-the-Russian novel that she'd read twice already, Delirious Things. She read for a while about the unreliability of memory, about snow and northern lights.

She had never left the state of Florida and had never thought seriously about leaving, but she liked to imagine living under the aurora borealis and she'd looked up pictures of it on the Internet. Sasha sometimes imagined stepping through the front door of the house into a parallel universe where the aurora borealis came south to the Florida skies, a shadowed empty neighborhood with colors shifting overhead. When her alarm clock rang she woke exhausted, the bedside lamp shining and the book fallen from her hands.

Gavin woke with a dull headache throbbing behind his eyes, a morning news anchor in a pink suit telling him about the weather. Lights burned uselessly in the unoccupied rooms. It seemed crazy now that he'd found this place haunted a few hours earlier. If it weren't for the blanket he'd slept under, the empty cup on the coffee table, he might not have believed that Deval had been there at all. He considered the cup for a moment, took it to the sink and scrubbed it over and over again with hot water and soap and paper towels, wondering about the tenacity of DNA. At eight a.m. he called Eilo and told her he wasn't feeling well.

The story didn't appear till later in the day, in the online edition of the local paper. A body had been found behind the Starlight Diner. The victim had been identified as Paul J. Harris of Salt Lake City, Utah, shot twice in the chest with no witnesses sometime between the hours of midnight and three a.m. A quote from a detective on the Sebastian police force: while the police were actively pursuing all leads, there were no suspects at this time. Gavin turned away from his computer and looked down from his window at the movement of cars on the street. Thinking of Liam Deval sitting on his sofa twelve hours earlier, his hands shaking around the mug of hot water and lemon juice.

It was necessary to stop twice for scratch-and-win tickets on the way to work, but Sasha didn't buy many and she managed not to spend very much. She found when she pulled into the diner parking lot that night that she had been expecting the police tape. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel but she felt no surprise. There wasn't much to see. Bright yellow tape blocking the back half of the parking lot, two officers standing around talking in the end-of-day light, a police cruiser. She clocked into the clamor of the dinner rush. Some hours later when the restaurant was quiet she found herself standing next to Bianca, but it was a moment before she could bring herself to ask.

"No one told you yet? It's an awful thing," Bianca said. "You left what time last night? Around two thirty?" Sasha nodded. Around two thirty. "Well, early this morning," Bianca said, "maybe five a.m., Freddy goes out for a cigarette, I hear a yell. He comes running back in here, pale as a sheet, says there's someone lying in the parking lot out back, says it looks like he's been shot in the chest. Well, you know that detective comes in sometimes, friend of yours?"