Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

" Where are your parents?" Bianca asked. They were standing together by the cash register, a momentary lull. The question was unexpected. It took Sasha a moment to compose her thoughts.

"I don't know anymore," Sasha said. "Why?"

"It would've been my mother's birthday today," Bianca said. "I've been thinking about parents, I suppose."

"What was your mother like?"

"She was kind. She worked hard. She raised five kids. Liked soap operas and calla lilies. Yours?"

"My mother isn't any good. I haven't spoken to her since high school."

"What do you mean, she isn't any good?"

"She just never was."

"Where's your father?"

"He doesn't talk to me," Sasha said. "I stole his car and sold it for gambling money."

"But you're better now, aren't you?"

"I don't know," Sasha said. "I'm trying to be better."

It occurred to her around midnight that this might be her last night here. The idea of departure cast the diner in a vivid light, a picture coming into focus. She felt suddenly awake, the fog lifted. The brilliant red banquettes and the gleam of chrome under the lights, pebbled Formica tabletops and all the sounds she barely heard anymore, the clatter from the kitchen and the voices of other diners and the passage of cars on Route 77. She looked around, blinking, she caught Bianca's eye and smiled.

"I just want you to know," she said, "I've always enjoyed working with you."

"Well, thank you, sweetheart." Bianca didn't smile back. "You sound like you're saying your good-byes."

"I don't know," Sasha said. "Maybe."

She moved like a ghost through the caffeinated hours.

A brief history of the money:

A h u n d r e d and twenty-one thousand dollars in a gym bag in a basement in Salt Lake City, destined to be taken to a sympathetic investment banker the following morning. Cameras in the basement caught the image clearly: Anna descends the stairs—"She looks kind of wild-eyed," Daniel said nervously, watching the footage with Paul in the hours after the theft was discovered, afraid for his life— and she unzips the bag at the bottom of the stairs, grabs it, and slips like a shadow back up to the first floor. The theft takes less than a minute. Careless to leave the money unsecured and Paul never did it again. He was still new in those days. He'd been in his profession less than a year.

A f e w hours earlier Anna had been lying on top of the sofa bed in the storage room at Paul's house, watching the movement of the fan on the ceiling above. A charitable organization at the hospital had given Anna an infant car seat, a package of diapers, a bottle and formula, some brochures. She threw out the brochure about adoption and read the others over and over again, trying to memorize everything. Paul's house wasn't home but she didn't know where else she could go, marooned as she was that night in the Kingdom of Deseret. She was alone in the storage room with her baby and she'd been putting Chloe to sleep in the car seat at night, because she was afraid of rolling over on her in the bed. Daniel was living in an upstairs room, not speaking to her. Sasha had wired her two hundred dollars. Anna took expensive taxis to the pharmacy for diapers and infant formula. She didn't know what she would do when the money ran out, if it would be possible to ask Daniel for more. Whenever she saw him in passing in the house he looked at her with such fury that words froze in her throat. She tried to avoid him.

How well did she know Daniel? Not well, when she considered the question, but who else did she have? There was Sasha far away in Florida, struggling. There was Gavin, but the thought of Gavin filled her with guilt and approaching him seemed unthinkable after what she'd done; she had ideas about honor and knew she'd transgressed. She wasn't sure what would become of her, or what Daniel would do. Every part of her ached with exhaustion. Days slipped into a week and then two and even music didn't soothe her. Chloe slept and woke, cried and made small noises, gurgled and kicked her feet. Anna had never imagined such an intensity of love.

On the night she took the money she was restless and ill at ease. When Chloe finally fell asleep Anna lay on her back on the sofa bed, fully dressed. Shadows passed over the ceiling from a branch blowing in front of the backyard light, and a cold wind came into the room. She stood to close the window, and this was when she heard them. Paul and Daniel were in the backyard, far back in the shadows by the picnic bench under the tree. A woman's voice, Paul's girlfriend, a too-thin woman with blond hair whom Anna had seen only in passing. The faint smell of cigarettes. She didn't hear what Paul said— she caught her name and the word responsibility, nothing else— but Daniel's reply carried clearly on the breeze.

"I could kill her," he said. "That's how angry I am."

She stepped away from the window. Chloe was still sleeping. All she could think of as she left the room and slipped down the stairs to the basement was Paul beating that man in the backyard a few months earlier, the blood on the grass the following morning. You're judged by the company you keep, a social worker had told her once, you are the company you keep, and wasn't Daniel Paul's friend?

The bag wasn't heavy. She had no idea how much money weighed, but she was half-blind with fear and the thought occurred to her that this couldn't be more than a few thousand dollars, five thousand perhaps, she would take it and use it to get away from here and pay Paul back later and perhaps someday he'd even understand. Back in the storage room she was fast and silent, throwing everything she could see into her duffel bag. Cigarette smoke still drifted in through the window; she heard them talking, too quietly to hear, and the miracle was that Chloe didn't wake when Anna lifted the car seat and slipped out the front door. She half-walked, half-ran down the hill to the doughnut store where she'd worked, called a taxi, and bought a doughnut and a cup of coffee while she waited for the car to arrive. It wasn't until much later, waiting for the bus that would take her out of Utah, hiding in the ladies' room until the last possible moment, locked in a handicapped stall with Chloe and the two bags, that she looked for the first time at the money in the bathroom's harsh light and understood exactly how much trouble she was in.

.

In t h e small hours of morning Anna held Chloe wrapped in a blanket in her arms and they fell together into a fitful sleep, Utah passing outside the window. Mostly darkness, every so often a town in the distance. In the house in the suburbs in Salt Lake City, the theft had just been discovered. In the master bedroom where he'd set up his command center Paul was watching the footage from the basement camera over and over again, and Daniel was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. Paul's girlfriend had been waiting, smoking and painting her nails in the kitchen, for a half-hour before she finally came in.

"I told you not to come in," Paul said, but he was distracted. The girl on the screen lifted the bag for the twelfth time.

"Tell me what's wrong," Paul's girlfriend said. "Why won't you just tell me?" But she was already moving toward the screen. She watched Anna slip quickly up the stairs.

"A hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars," Paul said, but this, after leaving the basement door unsecured, was his second mistake of the evening.

"Are you serious? That little girl?" She spoke with such derision that a decade later Daniel remembered her exact wording, the look on her face, even though he couldn't remember her name. "That little girl stole a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars from you? Oh my God, baby, that's hilarious. You gonna let that slide?"