On her last morning in Virginia Anna sipped her coffee and stared up at the sky. It was a clear bright day, clouds passing over blue. She was tired in a way that made the world seem insubstantial. The sun was rising and the park held a dreamlike sheen. No leaves on the trees but the air was bright. She sat on a swing with her first coffee of the morning, scuffing her shoes in the sand. Only when she looked at her daughter did she feel awake.
Chloe lay on her back in the stroller staring up at the clouds.
An n a a n d Chloe were in the park when Liam Deval came to them. Anna looked up— a man approaching over the lawn, the sunrise behind him so she couldn't see his face— and because she couldn't see who it was she assumed the worst and thought she was finished, she clutched the chains of the swing so tightly that blood began to throb in the palms of her hands, she tried to steel herself but her last thoughts raced together and all she could think of was how sad it was that she'd had so little time with her daughter. She looked at Chloe, trying to memorize the soft flush of her skin and her wide unfocused eyes, her miniature hands clenching and unclenching above the blankets, the heartbreaking smallness of her fingernails, but then Liam called out her name over the grass. Anna let her breath out all at once and blinked away tears.
"It's you," she said, "I'm so glad it's you," but she understood immediately that something was wrong. He held her for a moment and stroked her hair when she stood up from the swing, glanced over his shoulder before he looked at her again.
"Anna, we have to leave again," he said. "I think he knows you're here."
Four
The morning after the dinner with his sister Gavin woke early in his room in the Ramada Inn, troubled, and lay still in the bed for a few minutes before he remembered the photograph. He turned on the bedside light and went to the desk to retrieve it. The girl stared back at him, ten years old and the image of his sister, half-smiling in an unfurnished room.
He showered and packed quickly, checked out of the hotel, and drove toward the airport for five minutes before he remembered that he still had one last interview. A woman in a planned community far out near the swamps, a friend of William Chandler's. He pulled into a parking lot to check the directions and had to read them three times. It took him twice as long to reach his destination as it should have. He kept forgetting street names, making wrong turns, looking for roads he was already driving on. Where had they been all these years, Anna and the girl? They were all he could think of. If the house where the girl had been staying had been foreclosed, what if she was in a homeless shelter? Or what if it was worse than that, what if she was on the street? The thought of his daughter sleeping under an overpass. He found the condominium complex— far from anywhere, almost beyond Sebastian city limits— and sat in his car for a full two minutes staring at the photograph before he went in.
He sat drinking a glass of water in a large bright kitchen, taking notes and trying to concentrate on what the woman was saying. Her name was Ella Thompson and she wanted to tell him about her children.
"When I was out with William Chandler the other day," he said, "he told me you saw a Burmese python in your backyard."
"Oh, I did," she said. "Well, not in the backyard exactly, but there's this point where the yard sort of blends into the canal, and—" She was interrupted by the chime of a doorbell. It was her neighbor, a beautiful woman of about fifty with very high cheekbones and silver hair, here to see if she might borrow a stepladder, and yes, she would be delighted to speak with the reporter from New York for a few minutes. She talked about the beauty of Florida, the flowers and the palm trees and the endless summertime, blue pools.
"And how long have you lived out here," Gavin asked, "by the swamps?"
"A few years." The neighbor smiled. "It's funny. We thought we were coming closer to nature," she said, "but all along nature was creeping closer to us."
Gavin said his good-byes and drove to the airport. He found himself staring at children in the terminal lounge. On the flight north out of Florida he tried not to think about anything except the story he was writing, William Chandler in hip waders standing up to his knees in the swamps at the far edge of the suburbs, a radio-tracking device beeping in his hand, "This means there's a python right at our feet, Gavin, right at our feet, you just can't see it because the water's so murky." The nervous residents of the outer suburbs, gazing out their back windows at canals. The conservationist who'd told him that the creatures in the swamps meant they were entering a time when every place would look the same as every other place, the same pythons, the same parrots, the same palm trees from Florida to Indonesia to Argentina, an ecological flattening of experience. He worked steadily until the island of Manhattan appeared below his window, and then he closed his laptop and tried not to think about the girl during the descent.
Th e f i r s t thing Gavin heard when he opened the door to his apartment was the leaking shower. It seemed to be getting worse, the drips more frequent, but he still didn't know where the landlord's phone number was and now he was too distracted to care. He left his suitcase in the apartment and took the subway to work. The newsroom seemed somehow changed in his absence. There were fewer people here than usual. A sense of dissipation hung in the air. It reminded him of the time when he'd come in late on a Christmas Eve to wrap up a piece and found the newsroom a shadow of itself, a ghost town. But the difference now, he realized with a lurching feeling in his stomach, was that a dozen desks had been cleared. Silas's papers and notebooks and the photograph of his wife had vanished, his computer monitor a dark window reflecting Gavin back at himself and behind him a ghostly version of the newsroom, all shadows and pale smudges of light.
"You missed all the fun," his editor said when he came to her.
"Where's Silas?"
"Sit down." There was a tiredness around her eyes that he hadn't seen before. He sat by her desk. "We were treated to a speech the day after you left," she said. "Declining ad revenue, ever fewer subscribers, the relentless expectation of free online content, et cetera. You've heard it before. It's a boring story."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Why didn't I take the time to call you in Florida and explain that twelve of your colleagues had been laid off? Because believe it or not, kiddo, I've been a little busy in their absence." She told him the names and some of them were friends of his.
"Christ," he said. "Can you tell me anything else?"
"You're wondering about your job. I'm wondering about mine too." Julie sighed. "I don't know what to tell you," she said. "You're in a strange position. On the one hand, you're not that senior. On the other hand, that means you're relatively cheap. No offense."
"None taken. I've seen my pay stubs."
She took off her glasses and massaged her temples for a moment before she spoke again. "Listen," she said, "just between us, there's likely to be a second round of layoffs."
"Do you know who.?"