The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

After dinner Gavin walked out to his car and drove past his hotel on purpose. He wanted to keep driving for a while, alone in the air conditioning. He turned off his cellphone. He was thinking about the girl, the other Eilo. Thinking about trying to find her, trying to imagine what he might say if he did. My name is Gavin Sasaki. You look exactly like my sister. I had a girlfriend named Anna who disappeared ten years ago and you have her last name. I know this sounds crazy but I think we have the same genes.

“Hell of a quote,” Julie said when he saw her in the staff kitchen the next morning. He was helping himself to his third cup of coffee. He hadn’t slept. “Thank you,” Gavin said. He returned to his desk with a strange feeling of floating. No one could prove that no investor had said those words to him but he still felt sick every time he thought about it. Amy Torren was the name of his eleventh grade English teacher.

The last time Gavin had spoken with Anna, a little over ten years before Karen left him and his shower in New York started dripping, they were sitting together on the back porch of her house in Sebastiana and his shirt was soaked to his back with sweat. Gavin was eighteen, in his last month of high school. At the end of summer he was going to New York City to study journalism. Anna still had a year of high school left, and the weight of the conversation they hadn’t had yet—the what happens to us now that we’ll be in different states? talk—was opening up longer and longer silences between them.

Classic Emily

In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastiana he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks—he couldn’t find the kind he liked best, but close enough—and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin?

“I know,” she said, “maybe I’ll still do it.” But the future was abstract and none of it mattered as much as Chloe did. The idea of leaving Chloe with a stranger was unthinkable. She was going to be a better parent than her parents had been. She was going to save Chloe from everything bad.

“Want to walk on the sand?” she asked Chloe, who was staring mesmerized over her shoulder. Chloe pointed and cried out “Wucks!” which meant ducks, which was her go-to word for birds of any kind. There were seagulls on the beach today, congregating around a dropped sandwich. Anna pulled Chloe’s hat down over her ears, manoeuvred her chubby hands into her mittens. “Happy birthday,” she said. “I am so glad you’re here.” Chloe looked at her and for an instant Anna was certain she understood.

but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.

“Oh,” Taylor said. She was looking at him a little desperately, her smile slipping. She wanted lightness, he realized. She wanted to be saved by a self-deprecating one-liner that might keep things moving. She’d told him nothing very serious about herself. If her life had held the slightest trace of sorrow or any disappointments deeper than her postponed ambition to travel the world, she’d kept it out of the narrative. He was acutely aware of the soft hum of central air conditioning, the far-off drone of a lawn mower. “But anyway,” he said, “do you still keep up with anyone from high school?” “Oh, I do.” She smiled to thank him for the conversational rescue and then launched a twenty-minute monologue concerning people whom Gavin hadn’t thought of in a decade, trips she’d taken with her high school girlfriends, gossip about people he barely remembered, the last reunion she’d been to.

Sasha nodded. She knew that part. It was the part that always made her perversely jealous. She’d been spinning down into a tedious glazed-eyed oblivion of scratch cards and poker and Anna had been fleeing across the country with a baby and a gym bag full of money, Anna had been falling into the arms of jazz musicians and evading villains across the continental United States. Anna insisted that this life had mostly been a dull, grinding shadow existence but there was a small part of Sasha that didn’t entirely believe it. That life did sound horrible, but also—and she was shot through with guilt whenever she let herself think this—it sounded more exciting than Sasha’s life had ever been.

The thing about private investigators, Gavin had read somewhere—Raymond Chandler? A dim memory of an essay with heavy underlining among his abandoned papers in New York, no doubt dragged out to the curb by his landlord and turning to mush in a landfill now—was that they wore trench coats. It sounds trivial but it isn’t, because the profession exploded in the 1920s. These were men who’d been through trench warfare and emerged hard and half-broken into the glitter and commotion of the between-wars world; men out of time, out of place, hanging on by the threads of their uneven souls. The detectives were honourable but they’d seen too much to be good. The hardest among them had seen too much to be frightened. The mean streets were nothing compared to the trenches of Europe. Some of them had lost everything and all of them had lost something, and consequently most of them drank too much.

Half of the new houses seemed vacant. At the far end of the development they weren’t even finished yet, skeletal beams against the sky. Raw dirt driveways with tall weeds, an abandoned bulldozer silhouetted black. Does a house still count as a ruin if it’s abandoned before it’s done?

“Why did you stop playing together?” “We had a falling-out.” Deval reached for the blanket and pulled it close around him. “It’s hard to play with someone for a long time. It’s like a marriage. Sometimes it lasts forever, sometimes you get sick of each other, sometimes the other party gets tired of playing the rhythm part.”

“How far would you go for someone you love?” “Is that a serious question?” “Yes.” “I don’t know,” Gavin said. “Far.” Who did he love? Eilo. Maybe Karen, he realized, even now. It seemed paltry, loving only two people in the entire teeming world, but he knew some people had far less. “Exactly. You never know how far you’ll go till you’re faced with it.” “How far . . . ?” But he didn’t want to know.

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.”

“The photograph of Chloe . . .” he began, but couldn’t finish. Not telling her, he realized, was the only kindness he could give her.

“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.