"I've been practicing," she said. He was watching her with tears in his eyes. A memory of Eilo doing backflips in a circle around the yard when they were little. A firefly sparked in the nearby air and she crouched down to look at it.
"I'm not sure what your name is," he said.
"Chloe." The firefly blinked out. She stood.
" Chloe Montgomery?"
"How did you know?"
"I know your mom," he said.
"But how did you know she was my mom?"
"You look like her."
"No, I don't," Chloe said.
"You have the same color eyes," he said.
"What happened to your arm?"
"Just a silly accident," he said. "It's getting better."
"How do you know her?"
"Your mom? We went to school together."
"How old were you?" Chloe asked.
" Older than you," Gavin said. "I guess I was fifteen when I first met her. She was fourteen."
"Were you her boyfriend?"
"Yes."
"Oh," she said. She was studying him closely.
"Why are you here at the motel?"
"I don't know," she said. A flicker of doubt crossed her face. "My mom said it was a vacation."
"A vacation?"
"She said sometimes people stay in motels for a while and that's what a vacation is."
"Oh," Gavin said. "You know, she's right, actually. That's exactly what people do on vacation."
"We keep going from motel to motel," Chloe said.
"Chloe, I have to talk to your mom."
"She gets home late," Chloe said. "I make my own dinner."
"What do you make?"
"Macaroni and cheese. 'Bye," she said abruptly, and went to the
door of a motel room halfway down the row. She fumbled in her pocket for a key, unlocked the door and closed it behind her, and a light flicked on behind the curtain. He stayed on the steps for a long time, waiting, listening to crickets and muffled television noises, watching cars pass on the street. Two cars pulled up to the motel in the interval, people coming home with bags of groceries. This was a motel, he realized, where people stayed for some time, a place for people who didn't have houses or apartments anymore.
A third car pulled in, a small battered Toyota. The driver parked in front of the room that Chloe had disappeared into. It took him a moment to recognize Anna, hazy in the blue-white light. She had cut her hair short and dyed it. But she was wearing a sleeveless shirt that night and when she got out of the car he saw the bass-clef tattoo. She was less than thirty feet away.
"Anna," he said. She started and took a step backward, came up hard against the door of the car. He raised his hands.
"It's me," he said, "it's Gavin. Gavin Sasaki."
"Gavin. Christ." He remembered her smoking when they were teenagers, and understood from her voice that she'd never stopped. "How did you find me?"
" Deval gave me your address. I just wanted to talk to you. It's been years." He stood up slowly from the step. He didn't want to frighten her.
She looked at him for a moment, walked around the car to retrieve a bag of groceries from the passenger seat. She unlocked the door to the motel room, fumbling with her keys. "Why don't you come in," she said.
An n a h a d a job as a file clerk, but she was studying to be a paralegal. She was twenty-six and looked older, pale when she turned on the dim light over the stove in the kitchenette. She was blond but he saw the dark roots of her natural hair. She lived with her daughter in a single motel room. Chloe was nowhere to be seen, but Anna raised a finger to her lips and pointed at a squared-off corner of folding screens, and Gavin understood this to be Chloe's room. There were two mismatched stools at the kitchenette counter, no table. The room had two beds; he could see the flattened-down space of carpet where Chloe's bed had been, before it had been pushed into the corner and hidden from view. Anna moved efficiently in the tiny kitchenette, putting groceries away. She took two bottles of beer from the fridge, popped both, and passed him one. He held the bottle briefly to his forehead.
"You haven't changed," she said. " Still can't take the heat."
"I never could."
"So what are you doing back in Sebastian?" She had the same quick bright way of speaking. Here she stood before him and he realized that he was still looking for her, trying to find the Anna he'd known in her face, in her movements, still searching for clues.
"It's a long, boring story."
"You were a journalist, weren't you?"
"I was," he said.
"Daniel told me you got fired. He said you lied in all your stories."
"Not all of them. The last few."
"Why did you lie?" Anna asked.
"I don't know, there was so much pressure at that place."
"Come on," she said.
"You come from nowhere, some suburb somewhere, there's such an expectation that you'll succeed, everyone back home talking about you—"
"Why did you lie?"
"I just came undone," Gavin said. "I wasn't expecting it."
She had nothing to say to this. She pulled herself up to sit on the counter and sipped her beer and in that motion he saw a glimpse of her as a girl— but had he ever actually seen her sit on a counter? Perhaps at a house party? Or was it just that sitting on a counter was something he expected teenagers to do? She was wearing sandals. Her toenails were painted a sparkly blue. He glanced around in the awkward silence that followed and saw that she'd gone to some effort to make the motel room look like home. A child's drawings had been Scotch-taped to the walls. One in particular caught his eye: a house with a child and two women beside it and a sun with spiked rays overhead, Chloe's name written carefully in a corner in rounded letters with a heart after it. There were pictures of acrobats executing squiggly backflips, suspended in the air with red and blue birds flying overhead. A dish and a fork were drying on a dish towel beside the sink, and a faint aroma of macaroni and cheese lingered in the air.
"You went to Utah," he said.
"I did." She was sipping her beer, expressionless, and he tried to imagine what her memories might be like.
"What was it like there?"
"What was it like? It was lonely. It was uncomfortable. Nothing terrible happened to me. I just spent whole days alone in the house, pregnant, whole days waiting in this unfamiliar house while Daniel was at work, and the rest of the time I was working at a doughnut shop. It's so long ago now," she said. "I don't think about it."
"You took some money," he said.
"I did." She regarded him for a moment. "Have you ever made a decision in a moment of panic and then regretted it for the rest of your life?"
"I've done regrettable things. Why did you come back here?"