Twenty-Nine
Ten years later in the city of Sebastian Gavin read the account of Paul's death and sat still for some time looking at nothing before he closed his laptop and continued on with his day. Later that evening he showered and shaved, put on his best shirt and drove to the address on the torn corner of newspaper. Driving was unpleasant and nerve-wracking with his bad arm, he didn't like having only one hand on the steering wheel, but he was tired of taxis. The address Deval had given him was another motel, even farther out than the Draker, a run-down place just within Sebastian city limits. It was late already, ten thirty p.m., and lights were on in no more than five or six motel-room windows. He parked his car and made his way toward the building.
A girl was jumping rope by the stairs that led up to the second story. He couldn't see her face, a blur of long dark hair in the shadows, but something in her movement arrested him. He sat down on a step and waited until she stopped.
"Hello," he said. The girl from the photograph stared back at him. Eilo's thin lips and straight dark hair, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Traces of Japan in the shape of her eyes although her eyes were the color of Anna's, bright blue. "Is your mom around?"
"No," she said. There was something deerlike about her. She was winding the skipping rope around her hand, watching him, and her bearing suggested that she might bolt at any moment.
"Where's your dad?"
"I don't have a dad," the girl said. "He died before I was born."
" Really," Gavin said. "Before you were born?" He wanted nothing more than to stay in this moment forever, sitting here on this step with his daughter before him. Trying to imagine all the years he'd missed, what she'd looked like at nine, at seven, at two.
"My mom said it was a car accident."
"A car accident," Gavin said. "I'm sorry to hear that."
She shrugged. "It's okay," she said. "I didn't know him."
"Where's your mom?"
"She's at night school," the girl said.
"What time does she get home?"
"Late. Maybe eleven."
The desolation of this small motel. The dirty stucco, the paint coming off the doors in patches and strips. She dropped the wound-up skipping rope at her feet, raised her arms and did a slow back handstand off the cement walkway onto the grass, walked on her hands for a few steps, and pivoted to face him once she was upright. He applauded.
"I've been practicing," she said. He was watching her with tears in his eyes. A memory of Eilo doing backflips in a circle around the yard when they were little. A firefly sparked in the nearby air and she crouched down to look at it.
"I'm not sure what your name is," he said.
"Chloe." The firefly blinked out. She stood.
" Chloe Montgomery?"
"How did you know?"
"I know your mom," he said.
"But how did you know she was my mom?"
"You look like her."
"No, I don't," Chloe said.
"You have the same color eyes," he said.
"What happened to your arm?"
"Just a silly accident," he said. "It's getting better."
"How do you know her?"
"Your mom? We went to school together."
"How old were you?" Chloe asked.
" Older than you," Gavin said. "I guess I was fifteen when I first met her. She was fourteen."
"Were you her boyfriend?"
"Yes."
"Oh," she said. She was studying him closely.
"Why are you here at the motel?"
"I don't know," she said. A flicker of doubt crossed her face. "My mom said it was a vacation."
"A vacation?"
"She said sometimes people stay in motels for a while and that's what a vacation is."
"Oh," Gavin said. "You know, she's right, actually. That's exactly what people do on vacation."
"We keep going from motel to motel," Chloe said.
"Chloe, I have to talk to your mom."
"She gets home late," Chloe said. "I make my own dinner."
"What do you make?"
"Macaroni and cheese. 'Bye," she said abruptly, and went to the
door of a motel room halfway down the row. She fumbled in her pocket for a key, unlocked the door and closed it behind her, and a light flicked on behind the curtain. He stayed on the steps for a long time, waiting, listening to crickets and muffled television noises, watching cars pass on the street. Two cars pulled up to the motel in the interval, people coming home with bags of groceries. This was a motel, he realized, where people stayed for some time, a place for people who didn't have houses or apartments anymore.
A third car pulled in, a small battered Toyota. The driver parked in front of the room that Chloe had disappeared into. It took him a moment to recognize Anna, hazy in the blue-white light. She had cut her hair short and dyed it. But she was wearing a sleeveless shirt that night and when she got out of the car he saw the bass-clef tattoo. She was less than thirty feet away.
"Anna," he said. She started and took a step backward, came up hard against the door of the car. He raised his hands.
"It's me," he said, "it's Gavin. Gavin Sasaki."
"Gavin. Christ." He remembered her smoking when they were teenagers, and understood from her voice that she'd never stopped. "How did you find me?"
" Deval gave me your address. I just wanted to talk to you. It's been years." He stood up slowly from the step. He didn't want to frighten her.
She looked at him for a moment, walked around the car to retrieve a bag of groceries from the passenger seat. She unlocked the door to the motel room, fumbling with her keys. "Why don't you come in," she said.
An n a h a d a job as a file clerk, but she was studying to be a paralegal. She was twenty-six and looked older, pale when she turned on the dim light over the stove in the kitchenette. She was blond but he saw the dark roots of her natural hair. She lived with her daughter in a single motel room. Chloe was nowhere to be seen, but Anna raised a finger to her lips and pointed at a squared-off corner of folding screens, and Gavin understood this to be Chloe's room. There were two mismatched stools at the kitchenette counter, no table. The room had two beds; he could see the flattened-down space of carpet where Chloe's bed had been, before it had been pushed into the corner and hidden from view. Anna moved efficiently in the tiny kitchenette, putting groceries away. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge, popped both, and passed him one. He held the bottle briefly to his forehead.
"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 spray- 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."
He looked away from her. His arm hurt.
"The photograph of Chloe . . ." he began, but couldn't finish. Not telling her, he realized, was the only kindness he could give her.
"I had to hide before," Anna said. She cleared her throat and continued in a steadier voice. " After I left Utah that time, when I was seventeen. I ran and hid for years, and I just couldn't do it again. You don't know what it's like. Always looking over your shoulder, looking out for strange cars, the way all the windows have eyes. This time there wouldn't have been any money, Gavin, this time we would've been in hiding forever, Chloe and I. New names, no friends, no more family, no money, and this time I'd be with a child who was old enough to understand and old enough to give us away, and the people we left behind would be in danger, like I said. There wasn't a choice."
Chloe stirred in her sleep and they were both silent for a moment, looking in her direction.
"I'm sorry," Gavin said. "I don't think you had to do what you think you had to do."
Anna said nothing. What were they capable of, Anna and Daniel and Liam? If you've gone all the way once, isn't it easier to do it again? He was chilled in the dim air of the motel room.
"It was your idea," he said, "wasn't it?"
"It wasn't anyone's idea." She sounded immeasurably weary. "We were talking about what to do, the three of us—"
"You, Daniel, Liam Deval?"
"Right. I can't remember anyone bringing it up, but the idea was there, in the room. We were talking and it was something we were skirting around. No one said it directly. It just . . . it slowly became something that had been decided on. If we hadn't done this," she said, and there were tears on her face now, "how much danger would we have been in? What might have happened to Chloe, to Sasha, to Daniel's kids? 'You pay with money or you pay with your family.' That's what he said to Daniel."
"But it was the wrong thing to do," Gavin said. "It's the worst thing anyone I know has ever done."
Anna had gone still. She was watching him intently. Could she throw something at him? Everything within her reach was suddenly a weapon; the toaster, the heavy glass in her hand, the hard bowl on the dish towel by the sink. Gavin backed away from her and opened the door. He was afraid to look away until he'd closed the door between them, and he glanced twice at the motel on the fast walk back to his car but the door remained shut, the curtain over the window unmoving.
Gavin drove to his apartment. He hadn't accumulated much. He made a neat stack of his clothes and bedding in the backseat of his car, working quickly. His socks and underwear went into a cardboard box behind the front passenger seat. He hid his laptop under a pillow on the backseat and packed a plastic bag with half a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, all the bottles of water from the fridge, an unripe banana and an orange. The kettle, which was of course easily replaceable but was his favorite of all the kettles he'd ever owned, a pleasing fire-engine red. His magnificent 1973 Yashica and the gold pocket watch he'd found at a stoop sale in New York, the glass dog stolen from his mother, the photograph of Chloe. When he was finished all that remained was the sofa that had been there when he moved in, a cheap bed and dresser and coffee table from Ikea. On the way out he dropped the apartment key through the mail slot.
H e d r o v e to the Starlight Diner and parked in the shadows by the back door. No trace remained of the crime scene. The diner was quiet at this hour, a midnight lull. When he came in Sasha was standing by the cash register with another waitress, the older blond woman with turquoise eye shadow whom he'd met once or twice before. Gavin waved at them and sat in a banquette where he could see the parking lot.
"Will you sit for a moment?" he asked, when Sasha came to his table. She did, sliding onto the padded bench across from him. She looked worse than she had the last time he'd seen her, paler, dark smudges under her eyes.
"You look tired," he said. He realized it was a tactless thing to say as the words left his mouth, but she didn't seem to take offense.
"I was up all day playing poker." Something tugged at him when she said this— a long-ago conversation he'd had with her outside the school, money lost in a high school poker game— but the memory was fleeting and vague.
"Where's Grace?"
"I don't know. I drove her home that night."
"Sasha, you told me once that you hated the plan."
She glanced at Bianca, but Bianca was across the room and couldn't hear them.
"I did," she said softly. "I do. Yes."
"Did you know what the plan was?"
"That's just it," she said. "I thought I did, but I think the plan was
actually something different." Her hands were clenched on the table. "Did you know what the plan was, Gavin?"
"I didn't know anything."
"I thought it was just money." There were tears in her eyes. "Anna and Daniel, I thought they were just paying back a debt. I didn't know."
"Sasha," he said, "we were friends back then, weren't we? In high school?"
"That was a nice time," she said. He hadn't expected her to turn nostalgic on him. Her eyes drifted toward the window, and he saw how tired she was. She was losing focus, not as sharp as she had been a week or two ago, not even as sharp as she'd been in high school. She closed her eyes for just a moment and touched her fingertips to her forehead. "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't been sleeping much. Do you ever miss the quartet?"
"We were good."
She smiled. "We were. You remember our last concert?"
"Behind the school. How could I forget? It was the only time I ever played in the back of a pickup truck."
"I think about it sometimes," she said. "Taylor singing, the fireflies, everyone dancing."
"Sasha," he said, "have you thought about going somewhere else?"
"I have." She was still gazing out the window. "I'm leaving soon," she said.
"When?"
"I don't know, I just want to get away from all this." She looked at him. "I can't go to the police," she said. "She's my sister. You don't know what she's done for me."
"I want to ask you a favor," Gavin said. "As a friend."
"What kind of favor?"
"Sasha," he said, "I want you to leave town tonight. Please. Don't tell anyone you're going."
"Tonight?"
"Will you do it?"
"Why . . . ?"
"Because you're complicit," he said, "and because I don't know if you're safe here."
"But you're not going to say anything about this, are you? What would happen to Chloe?"
The thought of his daughter made his heart seize up.
"Just say you'll do it, Sasha, please."
"Okay," she said, "I'll leave town tonight." A brightness in her eyes that he hadn't anticipated. She was frightened, he realized, but also excited. How many times in your life do you get to flee town? How often do you get to lose everything and start all over again?
G a v i n h a d already researched the boundaries of police precincts in this part of Florida and now he pulled out of the parking lot and turned right on Route 77. He crossed the first boundary within a few minutes— Fellever Road— and kept driving. It wouldn't hurt, he thought, to cover some distance. He stopped for gas and a road map. The suburbs were shining, glass and stucco and lights along the freeway and palm trees silhouetted along the edge of the sky. He was traveling north. He had a few thousand dollars, the savings from his work with Eilo. He would stop and call Eilo to explain and then keep going, up out of this land of palm trees and alligators, somewhere far. He was thinking about Chicago. He didn't think his life would be easier there but he was certain it would be different.
Gavin crossed the Sebastian city limits. The city-limits sign was in
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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
