"—But Gavin, if you want to come home—"
"Home? Eilo, you know how I feel about Florida—"
"I'm saying if you need a job," Eilo said, "my business is ex panding."
"Real estate? But I have no experience—"
"What I'm saying is that if you want to cut your losses, Gavin, if you want to leave New York for a while, if it's all come unglued and you don't really have a reason to be there at all anymore and it happens that your phone's been cut off, I can offer you a place to stay and a job."
"In Florida," he said.
"Gavin," she said, "why don't you go buy a copy of the paper and then call me back when you've had a chance to think about it."
He went out and bought the paper. He was on the front page. It was a brief story, three short columns below the fold, but there was his face, the photo from his employee ID card, and the headline was "Star Journalist Committed Fraud." For a moment he was flattered that they'd called him a star journalist, then he realized they just meant he'd been a journalist for the Star. He read the first few lines, about a promising young reporter who'd invented characters and written dialogue for them for his stories, and let his gaze slide over the paragraphs that followed— there they all were, Amy Torren and the others, a congregation of ghosts— and then he came upon a sentence that stopped him cold: "This episode is deeply regretted by everyone here at the New York Star, and marks a low in the 82-year history of the paper."
He was almost in tears when he called Eilo back. "They plagiarized the New York Times's Jayson Blair apology," he said, before she could say anything.
"The what apology?"
Gavin was pacing back and forth by the newsstand. The sidewalk blurred and quivered before him. "That bit about marking a low in the history of the paper? Eilo, they lifted that from the Times."
"Gavin," she said, "what difference does it make?"
"Plagiarism matters," he said. "They teach you that on the first day of journalism school. Actually, you know what? Before journalism school. I think they covered that in maybe the ninth grade. It makes a difference, Eilo, believe me. I would never, I would never—"
"Gavin."
"I would never do it, Eilo. Yeah, I lied. I made up people who gave me quotes because real people are so goddamn disappointing, Eilo, real people have nothing good to say when something happens, you ask them for a reaction and they just stare at you like 'uh . . .' and they can't string a sentence together, they're pitiful—"
"Gavin, I'm worried about you."
"Yeah, well." He meant for this to sound tough, but there was a lump in his throat. "It's all gone to hell," he said, and he forced a laugh but it sounded wrong. "I'm an unemployed guy with a bad reputation and no electricity."
"Gavin, I want to buy you a ticket to Florida," she said. "Will you come back down here for a while and stay with me?"
"Eilo," he said, "I can't let you—"
"You'd do the same for me," she said. "Go home and pack and I'll call you with your flight information, okay?"
G a v i n a r r i v e d home just as the locksmith was leaving. There was a notice of eviction on his apartment door and his first thought was that now Karen wouldn't be able to find him, but he'd been avoiding her since he'd lost his job and she hadn't called once. It occurred to him that she'd very likely seen the story in the Star by now. He stood looking at his apartment door for a moment, thought about tearing down the eviction notice, calling a different locksmith and pretending to be locked out, but he knew that locksmiths in Manhattan ran in the two-hundred-dollar range for lockouts and if he was going to lose his apartment anyway, why not today? He had the important things with him, the camera, the computer, his favorite hat.
Back out on the street he wandered aimlessly for a while. The city was pressing down upon him. He thought at that moment that he might've done anything to escape the gray of the city, his static life, and that thought— anything— made him stop in his tracks. It was the worst thought he'd had in a while, because what was left to lose? His hands were shaking. He sat on a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway until his cell phone rang.
"Eilo, I want to get out of the city today," he said. "Can we do that? I don't recognize myself."
"Well, I was going to ask if you wanted to come next week," she said, "but I suppose there's no reason why you couldn't fly down this afternoon. Does that give you enough time to pack your things?"
"I don't have things," he said, "so yes. Thank you."
"Hold on a moment." He heard the clatter of her typing and then she was quiet, reading a screen. "It looks like there's a flight departing LaGuardia in five hours," she said. "I'll book you a ticket."
She gave him the flight information and he wrote it on his hand, hailed a taxi and watched the city slip away from him. It was late spring but a cloud hung low over the streets and Manhattan had already turned into a ghost of itself, gray with tower lights shining high in the fog. At LaGuardia he paid for the taxi with a credit card. He bought an extra pair of socks and two cheap paperbacks in the terminal. He refused to look directly at the New York Star in the newsstand. He'd checked in hours early. He paced the length of the terminal and read both paperbacks cover to cover. It occurred to him in the airplane that he might never live in New York City again, and he was surprised to discover that the thought came as a relief. Night had fallen by the time the plane began the descent. The lights of Florida glimmered to the horizon, one suburb bleeding into another along the blackness of the Everglades.
Eilo met him at the baggage claim.
"Gavin, where's your luggage? Don't you have a suitcase?"
He shook his head. A crease of worry appeared on her forehead, but she was kind enough not to make further inquiries. The heat struck him when they stepped out of the terminal. The old dread came over him, childhood memories of dizziness and heatstroke, but in the cool of Eilo's air-conditioned car it was possible to forget all this for a moment. Eilo flicked between stations on the radio, her hand lit pale by the console lights. The interior of the car smelled faintly of lavender. The outskirts of Boca Raton bled into the outskirts of Sebastian and the streets became gradually familiar, except it seemed to him that Eilo was making all the wrong turns.
" Where are we going?"
"I've moved," Eilo said. He saw in the passing streetlight that she no longer wore a wedding ring.
"You and Mike . . . ?"
"He met someone."
"I'm sorry. How long has it been?"
" Three months. We're not legally divorced yet." Eilo took an off-ramp that spiraled down into a dim wide street, made a sharp right turn and pulled up into the driveway of a low-slung brick house. The house looked large and Gavin supposed it was relatively nice, as houses went— he vastly preferred apartments— but when he got out of the car the air was filled with sound. After a moment he realized that the freeway was almost overhead, massive pylons rising up just beyond the backyard.
"Eilo," he said, "you're living under the freeway?"
"We're not under the freeway," she said. "It's behind the house. And you can't hear it from inside. The place is completely soundproofed." She punched a code into a console by the garage door and went back to the car, got in and drove into the garage, and Gavin found himself alone on a suburban driveway. He was thinking about how he'd frame the image if he were taking a photograph. The bright square of the garage door opening at the lower left corner of the frame, darkness all around it and above.
Twelve
After the negotiations were complete Daniel left Paul's house in the suburbs and drove his rental car back to the Salt Lake City airport. When he showed his boarding pass to the security agent he found that his hands were shaking. The visit with Paul had taken longer than anticipated; once he'd cleared security he had to half-run through the terminal, jostling people and apologizing, a gasping nightmare of bright lights and slow-moving people and distant elevator music. Daniel arrived at his gate at the last possible moment and as the
plane rose out of Salt Lake City he stared down at Utah's sci-filandscape, abandoned planet. Unearthly forms of brown and white, high plateaus and long ridges with violet shadows lengthening alongside. He was having some difficulty catching his breath. Daniel was a large man and the run hadn't been easy.
He'd admired the landscape that morning when he'd flown in. He'd never seen this part of the country from the air before and he liked the austerity of it, the opposite of Florida's feverish greenery and lakes, but now on the return flight he was distracted by his calculations. The debts of his life were as follows: his rent, which was minimal, as his house was small and in a bad school district. His cellular telephone— Daniel considered landlines an extravagance— and his television. He watched only sports and the news, and had canceled the cable some time ago. Groceries and takeout food. He had pared all of these expenses down as far as possible, because on top of them he paid alimony and child support to two ex-wives and four children. He didn't take vacations and worked considerable overtime. There was no extra money and there never had been. He expected that the inheritance would cover the debt, but it had occurred to him that coming up with the extra money for the interest would likely require a second job.
Still, though, did it matter? The plane ascended into a cloud and Utah was lost beneath him. What was a second job in the face of a chance to erase a long-ago mistake, to make amends? He'd walked for ten years with terrible guilt and the thought of being free of this was exhilarating. Money is opportunity. He'd known this all his life. But he realized then why he was having such trouble catching his breath, well over a half-hour since his dash through the terminal: if you pay with money or you pay with your family, then what would happen to his children if he couldn't come up with the interest? His memories of Paul suggested that there were very few things that Paul was unwilling to do. He stared unseeing out the window into white.
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.
"It's the twenty-first century," she said, when she gave it to him. "In case you hadn't noticed."
"Yes," he said, "I'm painfully aware."
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.
"I'm Gavin Sasaki from the real estate company," he said. "I believe you spoke with my colleague Eileen earlier in the day."
"Oh," she said. "Please, come in."
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.
"How did it go?" Eilo asked.
"Fine. I gave her two thousand dollars."
"Good. That's perfect. You could've gone higher."
"I know," he said. "I started at one."
"Good work. You're going on to the other two houses?"
"I just stopped at a mall for a minute."
"Take your time," she said. "It's a hundred and five degrees today."
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.