Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

the middle of a long block between a shopping mall and an office park. He was entering the city of Cassidy, according to the signs, and now he'd crossed Alberly Street. This was yet another demarcation. He'd put at least six precincts between himself and Daniel. After some time had passed he saw a sign for a police station and pulled into the exit lane. The station was a massive square of cinder blocks in an ocean of parking lot.

Gavin parked the car and retrieved the photograph of Chloe from the glove box. Ten years old, standing by the window in an almost empty dining room. He put his hand on the car door, but he didn't open it.

He'd played the sequence of events over in his head so many times that it felt almost like a memory. I get out of my car and walk across the parking lot, I push open the glass doors of the police station and cross a threshold into a bright world of blue paint and fluorescent light panels humming, voices and the crackling of radios. I address myself to the police officer watching me from behind a high blue countertop, I say the words that change everything: I have information about a murder. I make statements, I name names. I do the technically correct thing, the right thing, the thing a law-abiding citizen does in the presence of a crime.

A knock on the driver' s-side window made Gavin jump. He'd been too lost in the dream to register the police cruiser pulling into the lot, and now a police officer was looking at him through the glass. Gavin rolled the window down and the cool air of the car escaped.

"Can I help you?" the officer asked. His tone was unexpectedly friendly.

"Just getting my bearings." Gavin was grateful now for the map, open on the passenger seat. He gestured weakly at it.

"You need directions?"

"I'm trying to get on the interstate," he said. It came out a whisper. He was having trouble finding his voice. He cleared his throat and repeated himself. The photograph of Chloe was still in his hand. "Just pulled in here to take a look at the map."

" Where you going?"

"Chicago."

"You want I-95." Gavin tried to listen while the police officer described a series of turns. "Anything else I can help you with this evening?"

Gavin set the photograph of Chloe on the seat beside him. " Thank you," he said. "There's nothing else."

He pulled out of the police-station parking lot and left the town of Cassidy, lights burning all along the interstate, northward flight. His lips moving with the words of a letter that he would transcribe some days later in Chicago, a letter that he would write but never send: I wanted to find you, dear Chloe, I wanted to help, but in the end the best I could do for you was to leave you in peace. I love you. I'll never know you. I'll always wonder who you are.

On either side of the highway the suburbs continued uninterrupted, a continuous centerless glimmering of lights, shadows of palm trees on parking lots, malls shining like beacons and he was nowhere, this could be any suburb on the edge of any city but it seemed to him that none of the cities had edges anymore, just a long slow reach across landscapes. At four a.m. he stopped for food and coffee at a diner very much like the Starlight, left a long message on his sister's cell phone, and drove on toward Chicago, toward the north star and morning.

With thanks to my editor, Greg Michalson; to Steven

Wallace, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Libby Jordan,

Rich Rennicks, Fred Ramey, Rachel Kinbar Grace,

and all of their colleagues at Unbridled Books;

to Kim McArthur, Devon Pool, Ann Ledden,

Kendra Martin, and their colleagues at McArthur &

Company;

to my wonderful agent, Katherine Fausset, and her colleagues at Curtis Brown;

to Sohail Tavazoie, for so graciously accommodating my book tour schedule;

to Gina Frangello, whose review of my two previous

novels on The Nervous Breakdown influenced this

work;

to Alexander Chee, for his help with titles;

to Jessica Lowery, for telling me about Chicago;

to Mandy Keifetz and Peter Geye for reading and commenting on early drafts;

and to Kevin Mandel, for being an early reader and for everything.