Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"I am thinking about my niece. My niece is the only reason I haven't gone to the police yet."

"Who would believe you if you did?"

"Daniel. "

"But suppose you did go to the police," Daniel said. "Suppose a troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling did go to my colleagues and tell an improbable story about a detective with an impeccable record, even if that story was somehow believed, I was thinking of something earlier. That girl who was here last night, Grace. Did you know she's a runaway whose mother's in prison?"

"So?" But she understood, and she felt a chill down her spine.

"So you could turn Chloe into Grace, just by saying the word. You could take a little girl who lives happily with a mother who loves her, and you could set her adrift." He was speaking very quietly, leaning close across the table. His voice was flat but his eyes were shining. " Grace has been arrested three times, Sasha. She's a runaway living with a stripper and a drug addict. I'd say there but for the grace of God goes Chloe, but it isn't really God who gets to decide this one, is it?"

"You know that isn't what I want."

"Then let this blow over," Daniel said. "Let this go."

"Is that what you've done, Daniel? Let this go?"

But Daniel paid and left without answering her.

Sa s h a w e n t home in the morning and took two sleeping pills that held her only just below the surface of sleep. After three hours she was awake again in the silence of the basement. A troubled and unreliable woman with a long history of compulsive gambling . The sleeping pills had left her dizzy and drugged. She was aware of the weight of her skeleton, her sluggish heart. She lay still for two more hours before she gave up on sleep, turned on the bedside lamp and tried to read but her thoughts were scattered. She showered and dressed and went upstairs into the violent daylight, sat on the front step and called William. He answered through a burst of static. She knew this meant he was far out in the field, in the swamps beyond town where reception was spotty.

"Can you meet me?" she asked.

"How soon?"

"As soon as you can."

"I'm at work all day," he said. "I could be at the diner by six."

She wished she could go swimming but she was far too tired; she closed her eyes in the sunlight and thought for a moment she might fall asleep. Daydreams of swimming laps and weightlessness.

Hours later in the diner she sat across a table from William, who was still in his Parks Department uniform, and it was all she could do to stay awake.

"How was work?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I was hunting," he said. William was only supposed to track the Burmese pythons, he was supposed to log their whereabouts and report sightings, but he'd confessed to Sasha that he'd taken to killing them. He knew how dangerous they were. He thought of those kids who lived near the canals and his heart just constricted. He was afraid of opening the paper one morning and seeing that one of the snakes had swallowed a four-year-old. He followed them through swamps with the radio transmitter, a quick loop of wire around the fleshy throat. His boss was turning a blind eye.

"You seem agitated," he said.

"I've been thinking about leaving town." Sasha glanced out the window. The crime scene had been dismantled, the police tape gone from the parking lot.

"You in trouble?"

"I haven't been gambling. Just the tickets."

"That's not what I asked."

"I don't know," she said. "When you were gambling, or anytime else in your life, did you ever. " She tried to find the right word while William watched her. "Did you ever witness anything?"

"Sasha, what are you talking about?"

"I think I saw something," she said.

"Are you saying you witnessed a crime?"

"Two nights ago."

"Have you gone to the police?"

"I can't."

"Why can't you?"

"I just can't," she said. "William, I need your help."

"What can I do?" He had set his coffee cup down on the table.

"I have to leave town," she said. "I have to get out, and I only know one way to raise money."

"Don't be crazy," he said.

"Can't you see I have no choice? I saw something." But what had she seen? A man's face tilted up toward the window, something almost plaintive in his look, a possibly imagined instant of falling as she turned away. It didn't matter what she'd seen. She'd lifted her cell phone from the table and obeyed a text message that had perhaps helped send him on his way to the next world.

"If it saves me," she said, "then isn't it worth it?"

He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before.

"When you were gambling," she said, "it was only horses, wasn't it?"

" Only ," he said.

"I'm sorry. I just mean that that was the only kind of gambling you ever did."

"That was the only kind that was a problem."

"William, I need you to come with me to a poker game."

"Sasha, please."

"I need you to come with me to a poker game, and pull me away from the table if I'm losing too much."

" Think about who you're asking. I can't."

"I can't ask anyone else, William. I'm sorry." She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes. "William," she said, "I have to leave town soon, and I'm going to go to the casino before work tomorrow whether you'll meet me there or not. But I hope you'll meet me, because I need your help."

"I can't help you," he said. "You're asking too much."

I n t h e casino it was always night. Sasha stood for a few minutes near the door, afraid to go further, adrift on the wild patterns of the carpet. She had slept for only three hours after the end of her shift and then woken in tears from a dream she couldn't remember, heart racing. She felt slightly delirious. It had been some years since she'd been here and she'd forgotten the sounds of this place, the chimes and bells of machines, the voices and laughter. The slot machines, row upon row of men and women staring at screens and pulling levers, cherries and pineapples and bananas lining up and falling away before them. Beyond the slot machines she stood for a moment by the roulette table, watching the game. An impassive woman in a white shirt and black trousers spun the wheel, a dial of smooth heavy wood that gleamed under the lights.

This was what had caught her once, and held her here: once you stepped beyond the slot machines— and even these held a certain glinting allure— the casino was beautiful. White-and-gold ceilings arcing high between mahogany pillars, complicated parquet floors and thick carpets. When everything else around her had been squalid, there had always been this. This place had always held beauty even when it was killing her and the beauty reached her even now, even knowing what she did about how much could be lost here.

Sasha walked under mahogany archways into the hush of the poker room, where games were playing out at a dozen tables, bought into a no-limit game and sat with her chips in a small tower before her. After all these years of effort, of Gamblers Anonymous meetings, she was disappointed by an inescapable sense of homecoming.

The blinds were laid and the cards dealt. For a moment Sasha didn't want to look at her hand. She hesitated for so long that the man sitting beside her— a pinch-faced small person in a cowboy hat— glanced curiously at her. But she did look, finally, and it wasn't terrible. A jack and a nine, both hearts. There was hope there, or she could still fold and not have lost very much. Sasha raised a small bet and put in twenty, the first chips sliding away from her over the felt. She half-wanted to snatch them back and leave immediately before she lost anything important, but she forced herself to sit still. The flop was a two, a five, a queen. Nothing enormously useful, but the fourth card— the turn— was a ten of hearts and she felt the old quickening. It would be difficult, she realized, to hold on to herself here. She was thinking of Delirious Things , of northern lights and snow. She would go to Alaska! A half-formed idea that became a plan between the turn and the river card. She had always loved Florida but if her life was changing into something unrecognizable then she wanted Florida's opposite, she wanted winter and cold landscapes under northern lights. She would be alone there, but she was alone now. The river was the eight of hearts. She had the best hand and won three hundred dollars.