Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"You haven't changed," she said. " Still can't take the heat."

"I never could."

"So what are you doing back in Sebastian?" She had the same quick bright way of speaking. Here she stood before him and he realized that he was still looking for her, trying to find the Anna he'd known in her face, in her movements, still searching for clues.

"It's a long, boring story."

"You were a journalist, weren't you?"

"I was," he said.

"Daniel told me you got fired. He said you lied in all your stories."

"Not all of them. The last few."

"Why did you lie?" Anna asked.

"I don't know, there was so much pressure at that place."

"Come on," she said.

"You come from nowhere, some suburb somewhere, there's such an expectation that you'll succeed, everyone back home talking about you—"

"Why did you lie?"

"I just came undone," Gavin said. "I wasn't expecting it."

She had nothing to say to this. She pulled herself up to sit on the counter and sipped her beer and in that motion he saw a glimpse of her as a girl— but had he ever actually seen her sit on a counter? Perhaps at a house party? Or was it just that sitting on a counter was something he expected teenagers to do? She was wearing sandals. Her toenails were painted a sparkly blue. He glanced around in the awkward silence that followed and saw that she'd gone to some effort to make the motel room look like home. A child's drawings had been Scotch-taped to the walls. One in particular caught his eye: a house with a child and two women beside it and a sun with spiked rays overhead, Chloe's name written carefully in a corner in rounded letters with a heart after it. There were pictures of acrobats executing squiggly backflips, suspended in the air with red and blue birds flying overhead. A dish and a fork were drying on a dish towel beside the sink, and a faint aroma of macaroni and cheese lingered in the air.

"You went to Utah," he said.

"I did." She was sipping her beer, expressionless, and he tried to imagine what her memories might be like.

"What was it like there?"

"What was it like? It was lonely. It was uncomfortable. Nothing terrible happened to me. I just spent whole days alone in the house, pregnant, whole days waiting in this unfamiliar house while Daniel was at work, and the rest of the time I was working at a doughnut shop. It's so long ago now," she said. "I don't think about it."

"You took some money," he said.

"I did." She regarded him for a moment. "Have you ever made a decision in a moment of panic and then regretted it for the rest of your life?"

"I've done regrettable things. Why did you come back here?"

"Back to Sebastian? It'd been three years. I'd broken up with Liam.

I wanted to be near Sasha again. We figured if anyone were still looking for us, they'd have found us by then."

"Anna," he said, "is that my daughter?"

"No," she said. "She's my daughter. No one else raised her."

"If I'd known she existed. "

"Then what? You would have stayed in Florida?"

"I don't know, Anna. I would have done something."

She shrugged. "Well," she said, "you didn't." A hardness in her voice. He was looking at her and thinking, The robin' s-egg-blue headphones. The way you listened to music. The way your hair fell over your face while you did your homework. The way you stood before the wall in the park and showed me the word you'd spra y- painted over and over again, NO for New Order. The girl he'd searched for, he realized, no longer existed. He was shot through with unease.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I came here to apologize. I think I knew you were pregnant. There were all those rumors, and you said you had to tell me something but you didn't, and then you disappeared. I didn't really make inquiries. I didn't really look for you. I just took off for New York and let you go."

"I didn't tell you," she said. "I left town before you did."

"But you know what? I should have known. You were always— you were good," he said. "You deserved better than what I did."

She smiled. "Good? Is that how you remember me?"

"Yes." In the long silence that followed he tried to think of a way of casually enquiring about the death behind the Starlight Diner, came up short and opted for bluntness. "Did you give Deval my address?" he asked.

"He insisted. He said he had to apologize to you." Her voice had changed, her smile gone. "I told him he was out of his mind, going to see you in the state he was in. He wasn't thinking clearly."

"He told me your troubles are over."

"One of them," she said. "The most dangerous one."

"What happens now, Anna?"

"Now?" She spoke quietly, contemplating the bottle in her hand. "Life continues. I get up and go to work every day. I'm going to move back in with my sister next week."

"And you're. someone died last night," he said. "Aren't you troubled by that?"

"Keep your voice down." Anna was peeling the label from her beer bottle, working sparkly blue fingernails under the corners. "I am," she said after a moment. "Of course I am. I know what I've done."

"But you're—"

"But I'm not wrecked by it," she said, "because there was nothing else I could do. Sasha's pretty torn up about it. Want to know something about Sasha? She's never gone anywhere or done anything, and it's made her naive. You know what people like Sasha assume? They assume every human life is equal."

He felt a touch of vertigo that he couldn't blame on his arm. "You think some lives deserve to end."

"He was a dealer who threatened my daughter." She was rolling the torn-off label into a tiny ball between her fingertips, a quick nervous motion. "I watched him beat a man almost to death once. Surely you don't wish he were still walking this earth."

"I think it isn't for me to decide."

Anna was cast in yellow by the stove-top light, a shine of sweat on her nose. " Think about it," she said. She wasn't nearly as calm as he'd thought, he realized. Her voice was strained now, tears in her eyes. "It was a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars plus interest. None of us had money, or families with money, or friends with money, or the kinds of credit ratings that lend themselves to loans. Daniel thought he had an inheritance, but it fell through at the last minute. What were we supposed to do?"

"I don't know," he said. He was struck by a sudden mad thought that he was speaking with an impostor, but there was the bass-clef tattoo on her shoulder.

"You see? We didn't know either. What would have been the right thing to do, Gavin, under the circumstances?"

"I can't help but think. " He was short of breath. "I just think there's always another way."

"We couldn't think of one," she said.

"I just don't know how you move on from something like this," Gavin said.

"You mean, you don't know how you're going to move on from this." She set her half-empty beer bottle next to the sink and jumped down off the counter, opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of ginger ale. She filled a glass with ice and they both listened to the cubes cracking as she poured the soda. She didn't offer him a glass. "Or are you implying that I've moved on from it? I haven't, of course I haven't. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life. But if you're asking how to keep going, what you do is you remind yourself of the truth," she said, "which is that there wasn't a choice. That's the difference between me and Sasha. I understand that and she doesn't."

"You could have turned him in. Cooperated with the police."

"You mean, help convict an alleged drug dealer for having had a hundred twenty-one thousand dollars stolen from him ten years ago in a distant state? Don't be stupid. I was the thief. The way I see it, the theft and the provenance of the money cancel each other out. How could anyone possibly prove that the money I found in his basement ten years ago came from dealing crystal?" Her eyes were shining. "You don't understand the position we were placed in," she said. "He found us, he forced our hands. He had someone take Chloe's picture at Liam's mother's house. Daniel went to talk to him about repayment, but then it turned out there was no money after all. None of us was even close. We could have done. this , we could've done what we did, or I could have disappeared again with Chloe, and Liam's mother would probably have been in danger. Sasha too, and Daniel's children. People like him, they come after your family and friends."