"I could kill her," he said. "That's how angry I am."
She stepped away from the window. Chloe was still sleeping. All she could think of as she left the room and slipped down the stairs to the basement was Paul beating that man in the backyard a few months earlier, the blood on the grass the following morning. You're judged by the company you keep, a social worker had told her once, you are the company you keep, and wasn't Daniel Paul's friend?
The bag wasn't heavy. She had no idea how much money weighed, but she was half-blind with fear and the thought occurred to her that this couldn't be more than a few thousand dollars, five thousand perhaps, she would take it and use it to get away from here and pay Paul back later and perhaps someday he'd even understand. Back in the storage room she was fast and silent, throwing everything she could see into her duffel bag. Cigarette smoke still drifted in through the window; she heard them talking, too quietly to hear, and the miracle was that Chloe didn't wake when Anna lifted the car seat and slipped out the front door. She half-walked, half-ran down the hill to the doughnut store where she'd worked, called a taxi, and bought a doughnut and a cup of coffee while she waited for the car to arrive. It wasn't until much later, waiting for the bus that would take her out of Utah, hiding in the ladies' room until the last possible moment, locked in a handicapped stall with Chloe and the two bags, that she looked for the first time at the money in the bathroom's harsh light and understood exactly how much trouble she was in.
.
In t h e small hours of morning Anna held Chloe wrapped in a blanket in her arms and they fell together into a fitful sleep, Utah passing outside the window. Mostly darkness, every so often a town in the distance. In the house in the suburbs in Salt Lake City, the theft had just been discovered. In the master bedroom where he'd set up his command center Paul was watching the footage from the basement camera over and over again, and Daniel was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. Paul's girlfriend had been waiting, smoking and painting her nails in the kitchen, for a half-hour before she finally came in.
"I told you not to come in," Paul said, but he was distracted. The girl on the screen lifted the bag for the twelfth time.
"Tell me what's wrong," Paul's girlfriend said. "Why won't you just tell me?" But she was already moving toward the screen. She watched Anna slip quickly up the stairs.
"A hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars," Paul said, but this, after leaving the basement door unsecured, was his second mistake of the evening.
"Are you serious? That little girl?" She spoke with such derision that a decade later Daniel remembered her exact wording, the look on her face, even though he couldn't remember her name. "That little girl stole a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars from you? Oh my God, baby, that's hilarious. You gonna let that slide?"
Paul stared at the screen and even though Daniel was far from the underworld, he'd seen enough movies to understand. Paul couldn't let this slide because the girl was a witness. Daniel assumed that if word got out that it was possible to get away with stealing a hundred twenty-one thousand dollars, then Paul was finished.
"Of course not," Paul said. He turned to Daniel, as he had a half-dozen times in the past half-hour; but now everything was different, because now someone was watching them. "I could hold you responsible," he said. Daniel hoped this was for the benefit of the girl.
"I told you I had nothing to do with this. I haven't spoken a word to her since the baby was born."
" Where would she have gone?"
"I have no idea," Daniel said.
"I might be willing to believe you," Paul said, "but first you have to tell me who her friends are." The girl was chewing gum, looking from one to the other.
"She doesn't really have—"
"Who did she spend time with before she came here?" Paul asked.
Daniel spent the rest of his life laden with guilt, but at that moment telling him seemed the only way out of that house. He gave him the names of the rest of the Lola Quartet. "But look, the only place she would go is Florida," he said. This bit of misdirection seemed the last thing he could do for her. In an hour he would call her and speak into her voice mail, he would tell her how sorry he was and how stupid she'd been and beg her to go anywhere but Florida. In two hours she would stand at a counter in a small town in Colorado and change her bus ticket to South Carolina. "She's never in her life been anywhere else."
Twenty-Nine
Ten years later in the city of Sebastian Gavin read the account of Paul's death and sat still for some time looking at nothing before he closed his laptop and continued on with his day. Later that evening he showered and shaved, put on his best shirt and drove to the address on the torn corner of newspaper. Driving was unpleasant and nerve-wracking with his bad arm, he didn't like having only one hand on the steering wheel, but he was tired of taxis. The address Deval had given him was another motel, even farther out than the Draker, a run-down place just within Sebastian city limits. It was late already, ten thirty p.m., and lights were on in no more than five or six motel-room windows. He parked his car and made his way toward the building.
A girl was jumping rope by the stairs that led up to the second story. He couldn't see her face, a blur of long dark hair in the shadows, but something in her movement arrested him. He sat down on a step and waited until she stopped.
"Hello," he said. The girl from the photograph stared back at him. Eilo's thin lips and straight dark hair, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Traces of Japan in the shape of her eyes although her eyes were the color of Anna's, bright blue. "Is your mom around?"
"No," she said. There was something deerlike about her. She was winding the skipping rope around her hand, watching him, and her bearing suggested that she might bolt at any moment.
"Where's your dad?"
"I don't have a dad," the girl said. "He died before I was born."
" Really," Gavin said. "Before you were born?" He wanted nothing more than to stay in this moment forever, sitting here on this step with his daughter before him. Trying to imagine all the years he'd missed, what she'd looked like at nine, at seven, at two.
"My mom said it was a car accident."
"A car accident," Gavin said. "I'm sorry to hear that."
She shrugged. "It's okay," she said. "I didn't know him."
"Where's your mom?"
"She's at night school," the girl said.
"What time does she get home?"
"Late. Maybe eleven."
The desolation of this small motel. The dirty stucco, the paint coming off the doors in patches and strips. She dropped the wound-up skipping rope at her feet, raised her arms and did a slow back handstand off the cement walkway onto the grass, walked on her hands for a few steps, and pivoted to face him once she was upright. He applauded.