Thirteen

The strangest thing about waking up in Eilo's house was the silence. In Gavin's apartment in New York he'd heard birdsong in the mornings from the tree outside his bedroom window, soft sounds of traffic from the streets. But now he woke in the mornings in a soundproofed house as closed as a space station, cool air humming through a vent in the wall. The carpets silenced his footsteps. He usually opened his bedroom window a crack to admit the outside world, just to be sure that it was there, and the noise of the freeway behind the house flooded in. The sound reminded him of the ocean.

In the mornings he showered, dressed, made himself breakfast in Eilo's vast kitchen, walked down the length of the house to the rec room that Eilo had turned into an office. She had bought four desks and a wall of filing cabinets in anticipation of future expansion, but the transition from rec room to office was incomplete. There was still a pool table in the center of the room, left behind by the house's previous owners, half-hidden under files and neat stacks of paperwork. Gavin and Eilo's desks were fifteen feet apart but she was miles away. By the time he reached the office she was usually on the telephone, and there was always a stack of folders waiting on his desk. Each one labeled with the address of a house slipping rapidly from its owner's hands.

E i l o c a m e into people's lives in the last few weeks before they left their foreclosed houses. Her business card identified her as an R.E.O. broker— she and Gavin had a halfhearted debate over whether she should change it to O.R.E.O., since R.E.O. somehow indicated "other real estate owned" and Gavin was troubled by the missing letter. Banks retained her to sell foreclosed properties. The first task of the R.E.O. broker, she told him, is to determine whether anyone's living at the property, and if so, Gavin, you offer them cash for keys. This means settling on a sum, a few thousand, for them to clean the place and leave. The goal is to sell the home as quickly as possible.

He shadowed Eilo for a week and observed the rituals of the transaction, and on the following Monday he went out on his own. Eilo and her husband had had three cars, for reasons that Gavin could never remember because the explanation was so tedious, and Eilo had somehow ended up with two of them. She gave him the keys to a little blue Kia that reminded him of a toy. Another task of the R.E.O. broker was to take photographs for the real estate listing. She gave him a digital camera and insisted he use it.

He drove out to Emory Street, where a couple had been slipping into financial perdition for some months. The property was far from Eilo's house, almost beyond the outer suburbs. The suburbs broke apart and subsided into disconnected gated communities strung along the wide road, each block a mile long, and then there were gaps between the walled villages with straggly trees and enormous signs advertising future developments, the occasional enormous church or synagogue, a sprawl of outlet stores. The outlets had been far out of town when Gavin was a kid, but now the city of Sebastian had come out to meet them.

The house on Emory Street was small and neat, the lawn an impeccable rectangle. He took a photograph of the house from the street— the camera had a maddening way of beeping when the picture was taken— and another of the freshly painted front steps with pots of roses on either side. He took unnecessary pictures of the neighborhood from his position on the front step until a woman answered the doorbell.

She was polite and embarrassed, a straightforward cash for keys transaction— they settled on two thousand dollars for her and her husband to clean and vacate the premises within thirty days— and he was gone in a half-hour with a camera full of photographs. There were two more stops to make but he suddenly couldn't stand it. He pulled off the freeway and drove into a mall parking lot, turned off the ignition and sat still for a moment. Missing New York and Barbès and Karen. With the air conditioning off the heat crept in quickly, so he got out of the car and crossed the white light of the parking lot to the mall.

There was something familiar about the place. He wandered through the Cinnabon-scented air, looking for anything that might trigger a memory, but he wasn't sure if he'd been here before or if it was just that all malls looked the same to him. He went down to the food court, bought a blueberry smoothie that tasted mostly of sugar, and found a secluded bench beside a pillar. His forehead was damp with sweat beneath his summer fedora. Halfway through the blue smoothie, his cell phone began to ring. Washed-up ex-journalist and reluctant digital photographer Gavin Sasaki contemplates the number on his cell-phone screen for just a moment before he answers.

The next two houses were easy, although the woman at the second house was crying a little. "We just didn't think it would come to this," she kept saying, and he wanted to tell her about his apartment in New York, the rain dripping silently from the bathroom ceiling and the gaping abyss of his credit-card debt, he wanted to commiserate about ruinous financial decisions and lost homes, but instead he just said "I'm sorry about all this," which was against Eilo's rules. She'd warned that apologies weakened his bargaining position.

He reached an agreement with the tearful woman, and the drive back to Eilo's house was long and still. The heat made everything unreal. Palm trees in the distance separated from the earth and floated upward. There was something dreamlike about the movement of cars on the expressway, false lakes shimmering on the pavement ahead. He liked the solitude of driving, all these cars traveling around him with one passenger each. He wondered where Karen was at that moment. Living her life in New York or in some other city, waking each morning and putting on clothes that were unfamiliar to him, perhaps even spending time with someone else by now, a life that he'd slipped out of. Unsettling to think of himself as someone else's memory. He found himself wondering how Anna remembered him.

As i d e f r o m the music, the robin' s-egg-blue headphones, the spray-painted NOs in the park in Sebastian, the scar and the tattoo and the way her hair fell across her face when she leaned over her homework, what he remembered about Anna was that he'd loved her. He couldn't remember her ever being unkind to him, from the day they met in a corridor outside one of the band rooms, Sasha's pretty little sister, until she threw a paper airplane at him through the still night air.

On long drives through the suburbs he found himself thinking of Anna constantly. He'd let her slip away so easily. He assumed it was too late to make anything right, for Anna or her daughter, but it had occurred to him that the least he could do was find them.