Jack gestured through the sliding glass door, and for the first time Gavin noticed the tent out back. It was on a raised cement platform under an orange tree.
"Nah, it's my friend Laila's house. I'm just camping here for a while," Jack said. "I always really liked camping, you know?"
"I didn't know that. Jack, who's that girl who answered the door?"
"Oh, that's Grace," Jack said. "She's Laila's little sister or her stepsister or something. I think she's just here for the summer." He blinked very slowly. "How are you doing? You doing okay?"
"No," Gavin said. "Not really." The Jack he remembered, the Jack who'd leaned on the band-room door frame and flirted with every girl passing by in the hallway, seemed very far from here.
"Well, I'm sorry to hear that." Jack really did sound sorry. "Things get bad sometimes."
"Are all these books yours?"
"All of them," Jack said. Gavin knelt to examine the stacks. Mostly jazz history, a few musicians' memoirs, a lot of Whitney Balliett. American Singers, New York Jazz Notes, Django Reinhardt: A Life in Music.
"It's a good collection." Jack was beaming when Gavin looked up. "Do you still have that synesthesia thing you used to talk about in high school? You still see music?"
" Still the brightest thing in the room," Jack said.
"I always wished I could see it too." Gavin stood, but standing over Jack was a little awkward, so he sat on an arm of the sofa. "Jack, can I ask you something?"
"Sure, sure. Ask me about anything except college. I don't like talking about college very much."
"Do you remember that night when we played the concert behind the school?"
Jack blinked, concentrating. "Why? What concert?"
"I was just thinking about it the other day. It was the last performance we did. We played 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön' twice and Taylor was singing."
" 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.' " Jack sounded doubtful. "I think I remember that one."
"We used to win competitions with that song," Gavin said. "But this concert, we were playing on the back of Taylor's dad's pickup truck. We drove it onto school grounds and parked behind the gym, used it as a stage."
"But how would we all fit in the bed of a pickup truck? Me, you, Sasha, Daniel, the double bass, the drum kit?"
Gavin was silent. He couldn't remember how they'd all fit. It seemed improbable in retrospect.
"I mean, the drums alone," Jack said. "Drum kits are kind of big."
"Okay, so maybe it wasn't in the back of a pickup truck," Gavin said, "maybe I'm remembering wrong, but it was definitely behind the school in the unbelievable heat. And then Anna came up to the edge of where the swing kids were dancing and threw a paper airplane, and—"
"A paper airplane?"
"My point is, Anna came to the concert that night," Gavin said. "You remember her? My high school girlfriend?"
"Sure. Short blond hair, real pretty."
"Well, she was pretty, but her hair was long and dark. That was the last time I saw her. Do you know what happened to her? Back then, or after high school?"
Jack shrugged and looked away. His smile was gone. He was fum bling in his pocket. "Hey," he said, "you don't mind, do you? I've got this back problem." He held up an unlabeled bottle of pills.
"Go ahead," Gavin said. Jack swallowed three without water. " Sorry about your back."
"Yeah, well. The pills help."
"I need to know," Gavin said. "I really need to know where she is. I know you and her were friendly, I mean, we were all friendly, I just thought maybe you'd kept in touch. I wondered if you ever saw her again after that concert."
Jack leaned back against the sofa cushions. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he spoke. "You should ask Daniel about all this, Gavin."
"Daniel as in Daniel Smith? The bass player who turned into an asshole cop?"
"He helps me out sometimes," Jack said. "You shouldn't call him that. He's nice." His eyes were drifting shut.
"Jack! Jack, wake up."
Jack's eyelids fluttered open.
"Sorry," he said. "Nodding off when there's company. Way to be a bad host, right?"
"It's okay," Gavin said. "When was the last time you saw Anna?"
"I dunno. While back." Jack's eyes were closing again. "Few years ago."
"How about Chloe?"
" Sweet kid," Jack murmured.
"Jack," Gavin said, but it was hopeless. Jack was snoring softly. Gavin stood and checked his clothing for cockroaches. Out in the darkened hallway the girl was standing where he'd left her. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning against the wall, her forehead pressed to the edge of the door frame. He remembered a fairy tale he'd read as a kid, or perhaps Eilo had read it to him— a story about a castle in the middle of a labyrinth of thorns, everyone sleeping for a century inside. There was something eerie about the drugged silence of the house, a spellbound stillness that made him want to run. Gavin held his cell phone near the girl's face and took her picture. She startled awake at the digital click of the shutter and stared at him, blinking. He closed the door, went back to his car and drove as quickly as possible away from there.
In his room at Eilo's house he sat on his mattress with the notebook on his lap. He wrote Has met Chloe and Pills under Jack's name.
Gavin put the notebook down and went to the window. The squalor of the house and the tent in the backyard weren't things he wanted to think about. He'd always liked Sasha and Daniel but Jack was the one he'd felt closest to. Gavin wore fedoras and read noir and watched Chinatown over and over again and Jack understood, Jack was in the wrong decade too, Jack was going to be a jazzman. There had been long stoned hours in Jack's basement after school, listening to jazz and talking about how things used to be, how things were going to be, talking about anywhere other than the stultifying present.
Gavin's room was at the back of the house, facing the freeway. On the far side of the yard pylons rose up with dark shadows beneath them, cars passing in a blur of light high above. How could he have let Jack slip away so completely? The traffic was no more than two hundred yards from him, but with the windows closed the room was silent. There were evenings when he didn't understand the world at all.
"Y o u ' r e c e r t a i n you don't know where they went?" he asked Eilo that night. " Chloe and that woman she was with?" They were eating Thai food out of takeout containers.
"I drove by the house two days after I took the photograph," Eilo said. "They were gone already."
"No forwarding address?"
" These people don't always leave forwarding addresses," Eilo said. "They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear."
"I've been thinking about trying to find them," Gavin said.
"Good luck," Eilo said. "I wouldn't know where to begin. Have you thought of hiring a private investigator?"