Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

It was increasingly clear that Anna had left him, that I'm sorry meant I'm sorry but it's over or I'm sorry but I can't do this anymore . As the weeks passed the fact of her absence began to seem like something he could live with. He didn't hear from her again, and in the fall he went to school in New York City.

The journalism track at Columbia. His ideas about his future were vague. But he'd been obsessed with film noir and detective novels from the ninth grade onward and had decided long ago that he was going to be either a newspaperman or a private detective.

Te n y e a r s later in the newsroom of the New York Star Gavin handed in a piece about cuts to playground funding in the Bronx, went out into the cold air and took a northbound subway to his apartment. The sound from the leaking shower was like rain. He lay on the sofa to listen to it, just for a moment, and woke stiff and disoriented at six a.m. He showered and found a clean shirt, took the subway back to the newsroom. It was a blue-tinged morning, a cold wind in the streets. In the light of day it was obvious that he'd made an unforgivable mistake. He called Eilo from his desk.

"It's just such a strange situation," he said, meaning everything. "I never imagined this could happen."

"I'm sorry," Eilo said. "I thought about not showing you the photograph. Are you okay? You sound a bit. "

"I keep thinking, if the kid was staying with that woman whose house was getting foreclosed, what happened to Anna? And I keep thinking that I should have known," he said. "Her sister always said she was fine, but the way she vanished like that. The rumors at the prom."

"Well, if we're to be honest with ourselves, I guess we both always knew it was a possibility," Eilo said. "I keep thinking of that time we ran into Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall, how off she seemed that day."

"What?"

"You don't remember this?"

"No," he said. "What happened?"

"I can't believe you don't remember. We ran into Sasha in the mall, and she had a bag from Babies 'R' Us. You said, 'Who had a baby, Sasha?' and she seemed so jumpy, she just stammered something and walked away without really answering you. It was weird."

"Why were we in the mall together?"

"We were buying a gift for Mom for her birthday."

"I don't remember this." A passing reporter glanced at him, and Gavin realized he was speaking too loudly. He made an apologetic gesture and sank down further into his chair. "I don't remember," he said, quieter now. "What was it we got for Mom?"

"One of those horrible little glass figurines she likes," Eilo said. "I think it was a dog."

"I really don't remember," Gavin said. Eilo's memory was impeccable. He had no reason to doubt her. He wondered, as he hung up the phone, if he'd always known that Anna was pregnant and had managed to block this fact from his mind in order to leave without guilt for New York. This idea was somewhat more than he could live with, and he felt himself slipping deeper into fog.

Some things Gavin remembered: Her enormous headphones. Anna in the evenings cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom with her homework all around her. She liked constant music but Gavin could study only when the room was quiet so she'd put on her headphones and retreat into sound. She liked electronica, mostly '80s stuff that didn't move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea. The headphones were a shiny robin' s-egg blue, surprisingly heavy when he tried them but the sound was perfect. Sasha had bought them for her, a Christmas present.

A small scar just above her right ankle from a bicycle accident when she was six.

Dark hair falling over her face, blue eyes, a habit of drawing little circles instead of dots over her i's when she did her homework.

Her extravagant charisma. Was charisma the word? He tried to analyze it sometimes. He knew there were obvious reasons why everyone liked her, why half the school was half in love— she was pretty, she was kind, she laughed at everyone's jokes and she knew how to listen— but also she was capable of drawing blood. The tension between her loveliness and her violence was captivating. Once a girl spit her gum at Anna's feet and Anna delivered a swift punch to the girl's jaw, tripped her, tore her clothes. Anna came back in after recess laughing with a bleeding lip. Gavin saw her pass by and trailed behind her, watching the way the crowds parted before her all the way to the girls' room. She was suspended twice in the tenth grade for fighting.

A tattoo of a bass clef on her left shoulder—

The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin's high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She'd fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She'd been gone for three days but her parents hadn't reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker's idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said "Even when I'm stoned I have good taste in tattoos."

She showed him the graffiti she'd done in the park before she'd transferred to the magnet school. Pinkish tags faded by rain and sun light on the wall behind the bleachers. She went quiet looking at them. An earlier version of herself had spray-painted NO over and over again in big bubbly letters. She said it wasn't what it looked like. NO stood for New Order.

Her favorite joke—

— Knock knock.

— Who's there?

— Interrupting pirate.

— Interrupting pirate wh—

— ARRRRRRR!

The way she went still in the presence of music. You could talk to her while music was playing but she'd only be half-listening to you because she was also half-listening to the music. She didn't play an instrument— she said she didn't want to play at all if she couldn't play perfectly— but she wanted to work with music someday, work beside it somehow. She said maybe she'd be a DJ or a music producer or something.

She listened to the Lola Quartet and liked them but it was the wrong kind of music, not electronica, her heart wasn't really in it. Gavin didn't mind. She leaned back on the sofa in the basement where they used to practice, half-lost in the shadows at the edge of the room, staring up at the ceiling, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and when he raised his trumpet to his lips he often thought I am playing for you but he never told her this.

Gavin's last story was about a fire in Brooklyn. It was a horrible assignment, the worst he'd ever had to do. A nine-year-old girl had died and every time he thought of her he thought of Chloe. He went to the scene and stood across the street from the burned-out apartment. Three windows on the fourth floor were blackened holes in the brick, smoke stains rising toward the sky. Shattered glass glittered on the sidewalk below. He longed at that moment to be anywhere else.