The Lola Quartet (20 page)

   "Forever?" the man's voice was almost squeaky now. "Are there others with you?"

   "What? No, I'm alone," Gavin said. "I'm alone." It wouldn't be so bad to take a short nap, would it, just to drift off for a moment or two? He felt too sick to open his eyes. How long had he been out here? He was seized by a sudden chill. What was strange was that the wall of the motel was softening. He was sinking into it.

   There was a sound as if from a long way off, and he realized that the door had opened beside him. Gavin stood upright with tremendous difficulty. His legs were like water.

   The man's voice was nervous. "Why did you come here?"

   Gavin was so dizzy now that he could no longer see. A blinding wash of swimming dots over his vision, a haze.

   "I'm here for Anna," he said. The open doorway was all cold air and black shadow, a sanctuary— he forced himself to move and lurched forward, trying to get inside before he blacked out.

   "Hold it right there!" the man called out, from somewhere farther back in the room. "Don't come any closer! I don't know who you are!"

   But Gavin knew only that he had to get inside, into the cool. He kept moving.

   "Stop," the man cried, "oh God, please," but Gavin didn't. He heard a dull sound but didn't immediately understand what it had to do with the sudden pain singing out from his left arm, his rapidly numbing hand. He fell to his knees.

   "I think I have heatstroke," he mumbled, to no one in particular. He fell forward then and closed his eyes, soft carpet. His shirt was wet and he was impossibly tired. It seemed like a good moment to sleep, and he drifted off into a confused dream about New York City, Sasha, the pleasant chaos of the
Star
newsroom, a trumpet.

T
he Lola Quartet's last concert: Anna threw the paper airplane and took a step backward, dry leaves breaking under her shoes. The quartet was playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck in the night heat with dancers all around them. Daniel was playing with his eyes closed. She watched the airplane rise through the air and descend, the way Gavin looked up a moment before it landed at his feet. The bass solo was ending. Gavin lifted his trumpet to his lips and he half-smiled at her around the mouthpiece before he blew the first note, but she couldn't bring herself to smile back. In a moment he would unfold the paper airplane and read the two-word message it carried, but at this instant he was playing "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön," the quartet's signature piece, the horns in perfect unison, and Taylor was singing again. Gavin let Jack's saxophone take over the brass line. He stooped to pick up the airplane, but Anna couldn't bear to watch him read it so she stepped behind a bush. A childish desire to hide, to disappear for a moment. When she was little she used to stay for hours under her bed.

She heard footsteps approaching. Gavin walked close by her where

she stood against the leaves, but he was coming from a haze of light into darkness and he was momentarily a little blind. She kept still, almost not breathing. Gavin called her name, but he didn't look back. He was moving quickly, his trumpet in his hand, and he receded into the trees and bushes until she couldn't see his white t-shirt anymore.

   She waited a moment before she turned back toward the lights. The song was done, everyone tired and a little high, people dispersing and picking up water bottles and beer cans from the grass. Jack was standing by the truck, flirting with a twelfth grader whose name Anna didn't know. She saw Taylor looking at her, but Taylor's boyfriend whispered something in her ear just then and they both turned away from Anna. Sasha was packing up her drum kit and this was the hardest thing, not going to her at that moment, not telling her about her departure. Anna and Daniel had agreed that even Sasha couldn't know where they were going, not yet. She would call Sasha when they were settled in Utah. Daniel wrestled his bass into its enormous carrying case, lowered it down from the truck and jumped after it.

   "I'm glad you're here," he said. Anna knew he hadn't seen the paper airplane— he played his solos with his eyes closed— but she still felt like a traitor. She wasn't sure in that moment what she'd hoped to accomplish with the airplane note. She couldn't tell Gavin she was leaving, she couldn't tell anyone, everything had all been decided in these past two weeks, long afternoons of cutting school and sitting in Daniel's basement talking about the plan, which was at first so wild that two weeks was how much time they'd needed to talk it into reality.

   "Did you see where Gavin went?" he asked. "Did he see you?"

   "No," she said. "He didn't see me." She looked back at the trees, where Gavin had disappeared. She wasn't sure how far back the woods went, if it might be possible to get lost in them.

   Daniel glanced around. The others were drifting away in twos and threes, no one paying attention to them.

   "Why don't you get your bag," he murmured.

   Her duffel bag was waiting at the base of a tree. She felt piercingly lonely and in that moment she wanted nothing more than to see Gavin again. She stood for a second at the edge of the shadows, but Gavin didn't emerge and Daniel was waiting for her. They walked together away from the pickup truck where Jack and Sasha and Taylor and a half-dozen others still lingered, their voices fading into sounds of frogs and crickets. Anna and Daniel turned the corner around the side of the gym and she felt safer then, out of sight, fireflies rising silently from the grass all around her.

   Daniel had parked his station wagon at the far end of the student parking lot. He struggled to fit the bass into the back while she sat in the passenger seat, staring out the side window at the pavement bright with moonlight, the lights of the school. A thought: I might never see this place again. This didn't make her as wistful as she'd thought it would. It stirred nothing in her except a vague unease. Daniel dropped into the driver's seat.

   "Ready?" he asked.

   "Yes." She was impatient with the question. What had she been doing these past two weeks, spending time with Daniel and avoiding Gavin, if not readying herself for this? The passing streets were dense with memory. It was unfathomable that before morning they'd be across state lines, like imagining driving off the edge of a map. She had never left Florida before.

   "You'll get to come back someday," Daniel said, as if reading her thoughts. "Once this all blows over. This doesn't have to be forever."

   Anna only nodded. She didn't feel like talking anymore. She

realized then why she'd sent the paper airplane sailing through the air to Gavin: it was too late for anything to change now, the plan was already in motion and it was the only plan she'd been able to come up with that she thought might save her and keep her child out of foster care, they were going to Utah and she risked everything if Gavin or anyone else knew, but she at least wanted him to know she was sorry. She wished now that she'd written more.

   They drove all night. Daniel was nervous, talking to fill the silence. His aunt was a good person, he said. He'd been visiting Utah in the summertime all his life and he knew for a fact that his aunt didn't talk to his parents, who he thought would probably cry if they knew he'd fathered a child out of wedlock. He'd told his aunt about the situation and she'd said they could stay at her house, he said. The aunt just wanted to help, because that's what good people do in situations like this, they help, and if there were more people like that in the world—

   "Daniel," she said, "it's okay. We're going to be okay."

   "He's your boyfriend," he said after a moment. "I don't like to think of myself as the kind of guy who steals girls from their boyfriends."

   "You didn't steal me," she said. She was tired. It was all too much, actually. She was feeling queasy again. The radio was off. They moved in silence up the interstate. Daniel was looking straight ahead, his face illuminated only occasionally by passing lights. He was wearing his hair in an Afro that year, and it turned briefly into a halo each time a set of headlights passed. "Daniel," she said, "I'm going to try to sleep for a bit."

   "Okay." He sounded scared and uncertain, and it occurred to her as she was drifting off to sleep that both of them were very young. She was looking at Daniel's dark hands on the wheel and thinking, Please, oh please let the child be black.

. . .

W h e n  A n n a
  thought about Utah she had an impression of desert and also an impression of ski slopes, and the two images didn't fit together in her mind. But in the car with Daniel she imagined a house, orderly and large, with a couple of rooms set aside for her and Daniel and the baby. Their own bathroom maybe. A suite! It was a long drive, two days broken up by roadside motels, and there were moments when she wished they could travel forever. A state of suspension, sitting still in the passenger seat while the landscape changed all around her. Daniel did all the driving, because Anna didn't know how to drive— her parents shared a single car that she'd been forbidden to go near— and Daniel didn't like anyone driving his car anyway, even though it was just an enormous old station wagon that his parents had given him when they'd upgraded. On the long drive out of South Florida Anna was free to close her eyes in the passenger seat and imagine being a different kind of person in a different kind of life.

   At the end she woke from a long nap and the quality of light had changed. They were on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. The sunlight here had a hard high-altitude brilliance. The landscape had been distilled into the barest palette of colors— brown mountains tinged with green under a blue-white sky, the gray of the highway ahead, white light.

   "Are we getting close?"

   "We're almost there."

   "Daniel," she said, "I don't know how to thank you. Most people wouldn't have done this."

   "Look, Anna, there's something I should tell you."

   "What?"

   "My aunt doesn't have a lot of money," he said. "She and my uncle got divorced a few years back, he's the one with the construction firm I told you about, and it's the kind of situation . . . look, you'll be safe there, she's a trustworthy person. But it's not a really nice place or anything."

   "Oh," Anna said. "It's okay. It doesn't have to be nice." She carefully replaced her vision of the large house, the suite, the deep white carpets with a modest but still cozy house, a spare room.

   "I'm glad you don't mind," Daniel said. "I wish I could take you somewhere nicer."

   "It's okay," she said.

   They were passing through suburbs now. There were things here that were different— mountains rising up at the edge of the sky, an absence of palm trees, less-green lawns— but these suburbs weren't really different from the place where she'd spent her entire life, endless similar houses and cul-de-sacs. She was left with an unsettling sense that they hadn't gone anywhere, that this was only a variation on the place where they'd started. Daniel pulled into the driveway of a low single-story house with peeling white paint. A run-down street bleached by high sunlight, a neighborhood of brownish lawns and toys left out in yards.

   "Well!" Daniel said, too brightly. "Here we are!" She stepped out of the car into the thin bright air. Daniel pulled their duffel bags from the backseat and came to stand beside her.

   "It's nice," she said.

   "Wait till you see the inside." He seemed nervous, trying to keep his voice light but she understood his strain. The same fear she'd felt every time she'd ever brought a friend home, Please oh please let everything be calm inside the house today. She took his arm as they approached the front door.

   "It's okay," she said, while they stood waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. "Even if it isn't good, it's better than what I left, isn't it?"

   "I don't know," he said. "I hope this was the right thing."

. . .

D
a n i e l ' s  a u n t  was a thin nervous woman who worked as a hotel maid near the convention center. Delia was kind but tired, distracted by worry. Her hair was caught up in a hundred tiny braids with beads on the ends. She had a daughter in college and she'd taken in subletters to help with the tuition. Anna gathered that Daniel hadn't been aware of this fact. This meant that another family was living in the basement, and there was, it seemed, nowhere for Anna and Daniel to stay.

   "I thought you could maybe take Tanya's old room," Delia said, but her daughter's bedroom was being used for storage, stacked high with boxes filled with things that Delia and Tanya were trying to sell on eBay. The people downstairs were playing loud music. Anna stood in the hall listening to Daniel and his aunt, and she felt the rhythm coming up through the walls. She was mesmerized by the movement of the beads at the ends of Delia's braids, the soft musical clicking every time she turned her head.