"This isn't something I'm proud of. You do stupid things in high school. I made a mistake. But listen, she was pregnant, and she told me the kid was mine."
Gavin opened his eyes. Daniel's face was dim, hard to make out in the swarm of stars. "So what did you do?" he asked.
"I drove her to Utah. We were going to live with my aunt until we could get our own place."
"Why would she go with you? What did you offer her?"
"What do you think I offered her? A getaway car," Daniel said. "If you'd had a car and a place to take her, she'd have said the kid was yours."
"I didn't think she was . . ." He couldn't focus his thoughts. "I thought she was different than that."
"She was desperate. People are capable of anything when they're desperate. Look, I don't flatter myself. She wasn't in love with me. But you must have known what her family was like. I offered her a lifeline and she took it."
"She never wanted a lifeline," Gavin said. "I was always offering—"
"No, you were always threatening," Daniel said. "You were always threatening to call the authorities, every time she showed up at school with a bruise. That was your idea of helping her? Calling Family Services? They knew all about that household. She spent a year in foster care when she was a little kid. They were at that house all the time."
"She never told me that."
"They could easily have taken her child away from her. She was afraid of being separated from the baby."
"But she always said she didn't want any help." The whole thing was too much for him. The room was tilting, so he closed his eyes again. His throat was dry.
"If someone's drowning in front of you and they say they don't want to be saved, do you take them at their word or do you pull them out of the water? The way you stood by and did nothing."
"I didn't know—"
"You weren't paying attention."
"I need some water," Gavin whispered. "My throat . . ."
There was a plastic cup of water by the bed. Daniel lifted the cup and guided the straw to Gavin's lips. The water was warm.
"You took her to Utah," Gavin said. "What happened then?"
"The baby wasn't mine. We broke up. She left. She got in some trouble, ended up with Liam Deval."
"Why do I get the impression you're leaving out details?"
"Gavin, does it matter? This was all a decade ago."
"Everything matters, Daniel. Didn't you used to say that in high school?"
"I don't remember saying that."
"If you'll just tell me how to find Anna, I'll stay out of your way. I'll even forget who shot me. I don't know what you and Deval are doing, or why you're helping him. I actually don't even really care, so long as no one shoots me again and Anna and Chloe are safe."
Gavin heard footsteps in the corridor, Eilo's voice. He registered dimly that she'd been here earlier.
"Hello," she said from the doorway. Gavin smiled as best he could. Daniel turned to look at her, and Gavin saw that she didn't recognize him.
"I'll just be another minute, ma'am," Daniel said. He leaned over the bed. "Do I have your word?"
"Yes."
"Go to the Starlight Diner on Route 77," he said softly. "Her sister works the night shift. Maybe she'll tell you where to find her."
"I don't want to talk to Sasha. I want to talk to Anna."
"She switched motels last night. Sasha's the only one who knows where she is."
"Was she there when I was shot? In the room, with Deval?"
"No." Daniel was looking at the floor. "I'm sorry about what happened," he said. "All of it." He stood then and turned away from the bed.
. . .
On h i s first day home from the hospital Gavin lay on the sofa in Eilo's living room looking up at the underside of the freeway across the yard. The bullet had struck the bone between his elbow and his shoulder. His arm was fractured. He would have extravagant scars. A little higher and he would have been crippled. "There's not a surgeon alive who can repair a shattered shoulder socket," a doctor at the hospital had told him. "You're a lucky man." He knew he was lucky but every movement was painful. Eilo came in sometimes to see how he was. He heard the sounds of distant telephones from the office, the soft percussion of Eilo's fists against the heavy bag.
After two or three hours on the sofa he forced himself to sit up, and in the swampy shadows under the freeway he thought he saw something move. A quick inhuman movement, a lizard perhaps. He was thinking of Nile monitors, of anacondas, of the extremities of nature, William Chandler in the swamps. This place is slipping away from us, Chandler had said. These new animals. This sure as hell isn't the Florida I grew up in.
"I don't understand what happened," Eilo had said. Speaking cautiously, the way she almost always spoke to him now. The bullet had pushed him into a different world, one she didn't inhabit, and he could see her calculations every time she looked at him: if he had been shot he must be involved in something. If he was involved in something, perhaps it would follow him here. She had taken to double-checking that the doors were locked.
"It was a mistake," he'd told her. "Someone thought I was someone else and shot me by accident. I just got the wrong room."
"But why were you there?"
"I thought a friend from New York was staying at the motel. Did
you see the police report?" But he saw the doubt in her eyes and he knew she was thinking about the New York Star. Liar. Liar. "Tell me about my medical expenses," he said.
"Don't worry about that," she said. "I've made some money."
"Eilo, you can't . . ."
"I've always tried to take care of you." Eilo was quiet for a moment, sitting on the edge of the sofa. "Why were you at the motel?"
"I was looking for her."
"For Anna?"
"Anna and the little girl."
"Did you find them?"
"No," Gavin said.
"And it was a coincidence that you were shot?"
"It had nothing to do with anything. I just got the wrong room."
She left him alone then, and a few minutes later he heard the muted sounds of her fists hitting the heavy bag.
He w o k e on Eilo's sofa at two in the morning. The freeway was a blaze of light high over the lawn. He lay for a while in the half-light, got up with difficulty and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. He hadn't shaved in a few days but he thought he didn't look too bad, except for the pallor and the dark circles under his eyes, and anyway the thought of shaving was exhausting. His car was at his apartment, he realized, and it occurred to him that he wouldn't want to drive it with one hand anyway. He called a taxi company and went outside to wait on the front lawn. At this hour the neighborhood was silent and the taxi almost silent too, the only car on the street when it came for him. The letters on the side door read Greenlight Taxi Co. The car was the color of a lime.
"Do you know the Starlight Diner?" Gavin asked. " Route 77?"
"Sure," the driver said. "Good pancakes there."
The Starlight Diner was some distance from Eilo's house, not far from Gavin's apartment. There are certain restaurants meant to be viewed at night and the Starlight was among them. A gleaming chrome-and-red-Naugahyde interior visible from the parking lot, a neon sign shining over a bank of flowers near the front door. It was close to three a.m. when the taxi dropped him off. He opened the door of the diner awkwardly— the sling made everything difficult— and glanced around, but he didn't see anyone who looked like Sasha. Daniel had said she worked the night shift, but perhaps there was more than one night shift, or more than one Starlight Diner on Route 77, or it was her night off.
"Anywhere you like," a waitress said. She was fiftyish, eyes bright with caffeine, bleached hair piled on top of her head and turquoise eye shadow.
He chose a booth by the window where he could see the street, ordered a coffee, and realized as he drank it that he wasn't going to sleep again that night. Gavin had brought a newspaper with him, but it was dif
ficult to concentrate. The pain was a dull constant throb from his elbow to his shoulder but when he gave in and took a Vicodin he thought of Jack, so he'd been trying to get by on aspirin. It wasn't working very well. He looked out at the lights of passing cars and his thoughts wandered. He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Deval and Morelli play together at Barbès, the apparent falling-out at the end of the set, Deval stalking out of the room and Morelli glaring after him. Why had Deval come to Sebastian, if not to play his canceled gig at the Lemon Club? He felt that he was on the periphery of some great drama, trapped on the wrong side of the locked stage door while the action transpired just out of sight. He didn't understand the story. He was distracted by the pain. He'd been shot four days ago and it had occurred to him that it was a nice thing, actually, that he'd been halfway unconscious from heat exhaustion and sunstroke when it had happened. He was lucky, he thought, that he had no memory of facing a gun. But even so, he'd noticed that loud noises rattled him. The man slamming a car door in the parking lot, for instance. Gavin tensed but it was just another man, no one he knew, coming in for a doughnut and a cup of coffee to go.
"Gavin?"
He looked up with a start. Sasha was sliding into the booth across from him. It took him a moment to recognize her. He hadn't seen her since she was eighteen years old. "I thought that was you," she said. "I just came back from my break and saw you here." She'd brought two cups of coffee. " Cream or sugar?"
"Both. Thank you."
"You're welcome." She carried a faint aura of cigarette smoke. The preceding decade had been hard on her. She carried the kind of exhaustion that he'd seen only rarely in a woman so young, and mostly only in his time as a reporter. She had the look of women who've worried too much, smoked too many cigarettes, been too poor for too many years, and worked too hard for long hours. She was studying him. "Gavin," she said, "you don't look so good."
"I've had better weeks."
"Are you trying to grow a beard?"
"Not on purpose."
"Well, what brings you here?"
"You know," he said. "Anna."
"Don't tell me you're involved in this."
He nodded carefully. She sighed.
"I don't like it," she said. "Anything about it."
Gavin wasn't sure what to say, so he just watched her. A trick taught to him by an older reporter at the paper: Sometimes if you're silent they'll just keep talking.
"I just can't stand the way they're using the girl," she said.
"Perhaps it's the only way to do it," Gavin ventured, when it became clear that she was waiting for a response. The girl? Could she possibly mean his daughter?
"It's a terrible plan," she said, "and has been from the beginning. If it were up to me it wouldn't be this way. What happened to your arm?"
"Just a stupid accident," Gavin said.
"God, I'm sorry, I'm usually not this rude." Sasha glanced out at the parking lot. She seemed ill at ease. "I haven't seen you in ten years, and all I can talk about is the goddamned plan. This week aside, Gavin, how's your decade been?"
"Good and then bad. How was your decade?"
"Difficult," she said, "but there were a few good moments. Didn't you go to New York and become a reporter or something?"
"I did," Gavin said. "I became a reporter, and then I got fired, and now I'm working for my sister."
"Here in Sebastian?"
"Here in Sebastian."
"Why were you fired?"
"Fraud," he said.
She sipped her coffee, her eyes on his face. "I heard you were engaged."
"I was," Gavin said. "I'm not anymore." He hadn't thought of Karen in a while, but her presence once summoned hadn't dulled with time. Karen's smile, Karen moving through a room, Karen brushing a strand of hair from her forehead as she read the Sunday Times over coffee in their sunlit kitchen in Manhattan. He wondered where she was tonight.
"I'm sorry," Sasha said. "It sounds like you've lost some things."
Gavin didn't know what to say, so he nodded and said nothing. They sat together for a moment in silence. "I heard you went to Florida State," he said finally.
"I did. I was studying English lit." She seemed disinclined to explain how she'd gone from studying literature to working the graveyard shift in a roadside diner, and Gavin didn't know how to ask without being rude. "If you know the plan, you've spoken with Daniel since you've been back," she said. "Tell me something, has he seemed strange to you lately?"
"Strange in what way?"
"Like something's horribly wrong," she said. "I don't mean to be melodramatic."
"I don't know," Gavin said. "He seems to have changed considerably since high school."
"Do you know if the time's been set?"
It took Gavin a moment to understand that she was talking about the plan again, and he wished more than anything at that moment that he could shed the pretense and just ask her what she was talking about.
"I haven't heard anything about that."
"Well, Daniel or Liam will let us know, I suppose. All I know is it's going to be sometime between one and three in the morning." She was looking out at the parking lot again, her eyes moving over the few parked cars. It wasn't just that she was ill at ease, he realized. She was frightened.
"Right," he said.
"Well," she said, "I should get back to work. Are you sticking with coffee?"
"I'm not that hungry. Sasha, could you tell me about my daughter?"
"How long have you known about Chloe?"
"Not long," he said. "Why didn't Anna ever tell me?"
"I don't know. I think she was embarrassed about running off with someone else."
"Is there anything you could tell me about her?"
Sasha smiled. " About Chloe? You'd like her," she said. "She's a good kid. Polite, good grades at school. She wants to be an acrobat when she grows up. She likes to draw."
"What does she draw? If you don't mind me asking."
"Houses," Sasha said. "Flowers, people, trees, the usual kid things. Suns with smiley faces. Bicycles."
"And she's— is she okay?"
"She's fine. Well, I don't know, actually, she's staying in a motel with Anna. I assume she's fine. I haven't seen her in a while."
" Thank you," Gavin said. There was a tightness in his throat. " Could I possibly talk to Anna?"
"Not till this is over," she said. "You've no idea how nervous she is."
"Will you tell her that I asked about her?"
Sasha was standing now, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of her apron. "I will. I'll tell her."
"Wait," he said. "Can I borrow your pen?" She gave it to him and he wrote his address and cell number on a corner of the place mat, tore it off and gave it to her. "If you wouldn't mind," he said. "In case she wants to know where to find me."
"I'll give it to her," Sasha said. He watched her move away across the room.
Part Three
Twenty-One
Sasha was raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Narnia was behind the coats in a wardrobe. Alice fell down the rabbit hole. There was another story whose name she couldn't remember about a brother and sister picking up a golden pinecone in the woods and in that motion, that lifting of an enchanted object from the forest floor, a new world rotated silently into place around them.
"Once you step into the underworld it's hard to come out again," she said to William Chandler. This was a few months before Gavin appeared in the Starlight Diner with his arm in a sling. Sasha and William met in the diner a few times a month to drink coffee together before the start of her shift. William wasn't her official sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous, her official sponsor had left town a long time ago and Sasha wasn't sure what had become of her, but they had gravitated toward one another over years of meetings and he often seemed more like a sponsor than a friend.
"Don't be melodramatic," he said. "You were never that far in."
But she knew it wasn't really a
question of how far in she'd gone. It
was true, she'd never sold herself to pay her gambling debts or been physically harmed. The meetings were full of lost marriages and personal bankruptcies and parents who had lost their children forever and women who'd turned to prostitution to finance their debts. She'd played poker a few times in high school, gathered with friends in someone's parents' basement on boring Friday nights. The game made them feel like adults, even if they were usually just playing for pennies. She'd begun playing regularly in her first semester of college, just to have something to think about other than English literature and finance.