"That makes no sense, Gavin. It's not like they're slithering all over the backyard."
Pythons weren't the reason. He wanted to be back on concrete, in the company of neon lights. He'd found a one-bedroom apartment above a Laundromat. It was small, but it would be his, and the rent was cheap. The neighborhood was a lost section of grid in between a handful of squat glass office complexes and a mall. His street was barely two blocks long and all but deserted, a parallel row of low run-down buildings that ended in the mall's parking lot, but he felt no menace. This street was only empty, not dangerous. There was an open-all-night Chinese restaurant across from his apartment.
They unloaded the car in the twilight. His worldly belongings didn't amount to much. Two boxes of new clothes, bedding that Eilo was giving him, the carry-on bag that he'd brought from New York.
"You could stay with me for longer, you know," Eilo said.
"I need my own place," he said. "I've been staying with you for weeks."
"You're making good money. You could rent a perfectly nice house somewhere."
"But I don't like houses," Gavin said. "I don't need that much space."
It wasn't just that. It was all the obvious things, of course— he thought he'd feel better about his life if he were living less obviously off the charity of his sister— but it was also that he needed a private base of operations from which to conduct his investigation. All his thoughts were of Anna and the little girl.
Th e m o r n i n g sunlight was brilliant in the new apartment. What was strange was that he felt less alone here than he had in New York. He thought it was perhaps because Karen had never occupied these rooms, therefore her absence didn't fill them. He purchased some cheap furniture, a bed and a mattress, a desk. He filled the second page of his notebook with questions. Why does Daniel Smith dislike me? Where are Chloe and Anna? What does Sasha know? Who were Anna's friends in high school?
It was almost like being a reporter again. He woke every morning thinking of his secret investigation, and it was the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep.
W h o h a d Anna been close to in high school? No one, it seemed, when he examined his memories. Almost everyone had liked her but she had had no close friends. Why hadn't he realized this at the time? He was trying to take notes on the people in her life one evening in the apartment, but his pen was stalled after her half-sister's name. Her friends had been a shifty, druggy crowd whom she'd mostly abandoned by the time he had known her, derelicts from her old school. He didn't know any of their names. She'd been nominally involved in the Drama program after she'd transferred to his school, but only to the extent that she was a stagehand in their productions and helped out with costumes and sets. If she'd had Drama friends, he didn't remember them. She'd been on the outskirts of the music scene, but only because she'd been dating him. She wasn't really interested in the kind of music that was being played at the school. She'd spent time with the quartet and with their occasional singer, Taylor.
He found himself reaching for the phone almost without meaning to. His fingertips still retained the memory of Karen's cell number, the pattern on the keypad.
"It's me," he said.
"It's you." Karen's voice was neutral. "How are you, Gavin?"
"I moved back to Florida," he said. "I lost my job."
"Yeah, I saw that story about you." Her voice softened then, as if she'd seen him wince. "I'm sorry. That's probably the last thing you want to talk about."
"It's okay," he said. "I don't even know why I did it." There was a moment of silence.
"You blew up your career," she said, "and you don't know why?"
"It was difficult after you left," he said. "You know it wasn't what I wanted." She was silent. "And then something happened, I found out I had a—" But children were a terrible topic—"I got some news," he said, floundering. "I was horribly distracted. I think I lost my mind a little bit."
She had nothing to say to this.
"But anyway," he said, "how have you been?"
"I'm okay." She was quiet for a moment. "Florida," she said. "I thought you hated hot weather."
"I didn't have anywhere else to go."
"You always said you'd move to Chicago," she said, "if you ever got tired of New York."
" Maybe I'll go there someday. I've been saving money. You remember that weekend we spent there?" The memory had ambushed him that morning in the shower. It had been spring and the trees were blooming. They'd bought pretzels from a street vendor and looked at the animals in Lincoln Park Zoo. They'd had a picnic and Karen had fallen asleep on the grass in Hyde Park.
"It was a nice weekend," she said. "Listen, Gavin, I have to get back to work. I'd love to talk longer, but . . ."
"You got a new job? Congratulations." She'd been an administrative assistant at Lehman Brothers until the day the firm collapsed.
"I'm a temporary night-shift proofreader," she said. "It barely qualifies as employment. Goodnight, Gavin."
" Good night," he said. He disconnected and held the phone in his hands for a moment. The apartment was silent except for the air conditioner, the soft hum of the fridge.
Gavin went downstairs to the quiet street. The Laundromat below his apartment was alight, dryers spinning, a woman folding laundry. He drove to the house where Anna and Sasha's mother had lived, but now the name on the mailbox was Sabharwal and there were small unfamiliar children playing in the front yard, throwing a Frisbee that shone white in the gathering darkness.
G a v i n l e t a few days slide past in the heat. The temperature was soaring and he found it difficult to be outside. It was almost a pleasure to lose himself in work. The foreclosures were endless. He had as many houses to inspect as he could handle. But he couldn't stop thinking about Anna or the child, an obsessive worry that tugged him out of sleep at night, so the investigation continued. He found Taylor after a half-hour of online stalking, called her and drove at her invitation to a gated community in a section of town that he thought might not have existed when he'd lived here before. He waited ten minutes in his car for his turn with the security guard, who was taking his time interrogating a contractor in a pickup truck.
Inside the gates of the subdivision the streets curved around a park, and Taylor's house was on one of the outer loops. It was pink with gardens all around it, a fountain out front. When he cut the engine the quiet was almost complete. He got out of the car and stood for a moment listening to the falling water. The windows of the house reflected the sky and dark palm fronds.
"I'm sorry I'm late," he said, when she opened the door. "The gates—" he made a vague gesture back toward the entrance, but she only smiled at him blankly. "I had to wait forever to get through," he said. "The security guard."
"I don't understand," she said, although not unkindly, so he started from the beginning again and said, " Sorry I'm late," which seemed to reset the conversation. In her immaculate blue-and-white kitchen she poured lemonade over ice and talked about her life. A year in a music program at a school he'd never heard of, a shift in priorities that led to a BA in finance and then to a job at a bank, a marriage—"Todd's at a conference in Miami, otherwise he'd be here"—unrealized dreams of traveling the world—"I always thought I'd see everything, but then I had kids, so, you know"—and the kids, yes, Amy and Jaden, twins, at their summer day camp this afternoon. Gavin had never gone to camp as a kid— his pediatrician had suggested that a boy who made repeated visits to the ER with heat exhaustion was perhaps not ideally suited to outdoor summer activities in Florida— and he found himself imagining what it might be like. Lakes and sunlight, bright water. It would be nice to get out of the suburbs, he thought. There was so much green here, such riotous growth, but nothing close to true wilderness. When was the last time he'd been away from a city, from a suburb, from clipped lawns and cement? He was thinking about the time he'd gone camping with Karen in upstate New York, the perfect quiet in the morning, a bird gliding over a lake, the smell of tent fabric in sunlight.
He realized that Taylor was still talking. He had been looking at her and smiling and nodding as his thoughts wandered. She was still beautiful. The same blue eyes and cascading blond hair, the same smile. He found himself wondering idly if she might want to sleep with him. She was talking about her garden now, and had been for a while. His gaze drifted to the microwave clock. She'd been talking about herself for a little under an hour.
"Well," she said finally, "it's just so great to catch up with you. How's your life been?"
This was a competition, he realized. She'd presented him with a gorgeous life and now she wanted to hold his life up to the light and compare. He thought about the photograph of himself on the front page of the New York Star and briefly considered spinning something halfway plausible, I am a famous reporter taking some time off to write a book on Florida's exotic wildlife problem, but he didn't want to lie anymore and he knew he wasn't famous so much as disgraced.
"Well," he said, "I went to Columbia. I was a reporter at the New York Star. I met a girl and we were going to get married, but then she had a miscarriage in the second trimester and she didn't want to be with me anymore after that. I lost my job and moved back to Florida. I'm selling real estate with my sister."
"Oh," Taylor said. She was looking at him a little desperately, her half-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 lawnmower.
"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. Kind of a sad affair actually, just fifty or so people standing around under streamers in the high school gymnasium—
"Was Anna Montgomery there?" Gavin asked. "You two were in the same grade, weren't you?"
"Anna? Your high school girlfriend? No. I mean yes, we were in the same year, but she wasn't there at the reunion. You know, I haven't seen her in so long," she said.
"Do you remember the last time you saw her?"
"Hoping to rekindle the flame?" Taylor widened her eyes as she said this, and Gavin understood for the first time that she was killingly bored.
"We were close," he said, "and I just wanted to find out what'd become of her. It's like she disappeared from the face of the earth."
"You should maybe ask Daniel about her," Taylor said.
" Really. Why Daniel?"
"It's probably nothing. But do you remember the Lola Quartet's last concert?"
"Behind the school," Gavin said. "We were playing on the back of your father's pickup truck."
"Yes," she said. "Exactly. I have such vivid memories of that concert, I guess because it was the last one. Do you know, I haven't sung 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' since that night? And it was one of my favorite songs. But anyway, that was the last time I saw her. We were playing that song and I remember you took off in the middle of it, just ran into the woods like you were going to be sick or something. We didn't know what the matter was but we were winding down anyway, that was our last song of the night. It was something like two o'clock in the morning, and I remember I saw Anna there. I noticed because she hadn't been there before, it was like she'd just stepped out of the woods, and I thought it was weird for her to come so late in the evening when everything was done, but I was talking to my boyfriend at the time— you remember Brian? That guy who did the penguin imitations?"
Gavin didn't remember Brian or his penguin imitations. He nodded anyway.
"I was talking to him, so I didn't talk to Anna when I saw her. But I remember I looked up a while later," she said, "and she was walking around the side of the school with Daniel, and he was carrying his instrument and she was carrying a duffel bag. I thought it was strange for them to be going off together. I mean she was your girlfriend, not his. But there'd been all this talk about her and I thought, you know, we're all friends anyway so it's probably nothing. But then I remembered it later because when school started up again in September she wasn't there, and it occurred to me that that had been the last time I'd seen her, disappearing with Daniel that night. I never saw her again."
"What kind of talk?" Gavin asked.
"What?"
"You said there'd been all this talk about her. What kind of talk had there been?"
Taylor looked away from him and stood up. "Oh, you know how high school was," she said. "We were all just bored suburban kids telling vicious rumors about each other."
Did he know how high school was? He knew he should, but his memories of those years were for the most part hazy. He remembered small details. The clean waxed-floor scent of the corridors, a band teacher named Mr. Winters raising his baton with pure joy in his eyes, the way sunlight angled through the windows of a particular classroom in the afternoons, Daniel and Sasha and Jack all around him with their instruments and Anna listening somewhere off to the side, long hours in the van driving to music competitions, the pine-scented-disinfectant smell of the locker rooms, a red pencil case with a zipper. "Like what?" he asked. "What were the rumors you remember?"
She was refilling their glasses.
"Just, you know, unkind things . . ."
"Come on, Taylor, I can take it. What were they saying about her?"
"They said— you know, it's stupid, just stupid rumors— they said she was . . . well, they said she was seeing people. They said it was a bit of a crowded field there right before she left school, toward the end." She returned the lemonade pitcher to the fridge. "I'm sorry. It's nasty. I know it's not true."
"How would you know that?"
"Well, it's just— I guess I should say I hope it's not true. I don't like that kind of thing. They said she was sleeping around, and then the story was that she'd gone to live with her aunt in Georgia, but there was this crazy rumor that she'd left school because she was pregnant and had a miscarriage, or sometimes the rumor was that she'd had a baby and was still living in Florida, just one or two towns over. You know, just rumors. Crazy stuff."
"What about Anna's sister?" Gavin asked. "You ever see Sasha around?"
"Never," Taylor said. "I don't know what happened to her."
He left her house soon after that—"We should do this again," they told one another without conviction— and drove out of the closed streets of the subdivision, past the security guard and out into the larger world. It was five o'clock. He drove to the police station and parked his car within view of the front door— the station shared parking with a mall and an auto-body shop, so he felt reasonably inconspicuous— and waited until Daniel appeared in the station doorway around six.
Daniel didn't move quickly. He was slow, distracted, jingling the change in his pockets and staring at the pavement. He looked up when Gavin said his name.
"You're so persistent," Daniel said. "I admire that about you."
"Daniel, I need to talk to you."
"I don't really have a lot to say to you, Gavin. I don't think we know each other very well." Daniel had resumed his slow progress across the parking lot. "High school was a very long time ago."
"Daniel—" He was almost dancing at Daniel's side, so agitated that he couldn't be still. "Daniel, every time I ask anyone about Anna, they tell me to talk to you."
" Really."
"Daniel, I know she had a baby. I think the baby was mine."
"That's none of my business," Daniel said, "and again, that was really quite a while ago, wasn't it?" He swatted at a drip of sweat on his forehead. "Why don't you drop it, Gavin?"
"Because I thin
k she's my kid," Gavin said. "I want to find her and make sure she's okay."
"And make sure she's okay?" They'd reached Daniel's car, a gray Jeep with a dented fender and rust on the side. "If you'd been paying more attention ten years ago—"
"I want to do the right thing. I'm trying to do something good here."
Daniel looked at him for a moment.
"This is just a shot at redemption for you," he said. "You don't even know the kid. You fucked up your life in New York and you feel like a failure, so now you want to do something good."
"So the kid exists," Gavin said. " Thank you for confirming that."
"Now that we've established your superb interrogative skills, I'd appreciate it tremendously if you'd step away from my car."
"Can you please just tell me where Anna is? That's all I want to know."
"This isn't something you want to be involved in." Daniel was getting into the Jeep. "I don't want to see you again. Are we clear?"