"Where'd you go?" Sasha asked.
"I thought I saw Anna."
"She was just here a few minutes ago. After you ran into the trees."
" Where is she now?"
"I don't know, I didn't see where she went," Sasha said. "I was packing up the drum kit."
"Well, if you see her, will you tell her to call me?"
But Anna didn't call, and school was over. Gavin had taken his last exam. He called Anna six times and left messages but she didn't call back, and no one answered when he knocked on her door. He called Sasha, but Sasha was staying at her father's house and hadn't seen her sister since the day of the concert. She was distracted and tired, working two jobs to save up before college. In two of his six messages Gavin had asked Anna to come to the senior prom with him, so he went by himself in the hope that she might be there. He sat for a long time in the gymnasium under streamers hung from the ceiling, watching girls in bright dresses and boys stiff in rented tuxedos dance to music he didn't like. Anna was nowhere. Late in the evening Taylor slid into the chair beside him, hopelessly drunk with fake diamonds in her hair. Her dress was a cloud of pink.
"Hey," she said, "I heard Anna's pregnant."
"What?"
"Is it just a rumor?" Her smile was lopsided. She was sliding off her chair.
"It's just a rumor," Gavin said. " Where did you hear.?" But a knot of her friends had swirled around her, helping her up. She stood, giggling and unsteady, and they swept her away. He saw Jack in a corner, drinking too much from a sloppily concealed flask with a redheaded cellist from the eleventh grade, but Sasha and Daniel were both absent. He remembered that Sasha was working tonight. Out in the parking lot Gavin tried to call a taxi, but half the schools in Sebastian had prom that night and the dispatcher's phone rang unanswered. He looked back at the school, at the light and the music spilling out from the gymnasium and all the girls in long dresses who weren't Anna, and he wanted very much to get away from there so he set off on foot, five miles of heat that brought him to his knees just inside the front door of his house and sent him to the hospital for a night.
"You can't do this kind of thing," Gavin's doctor told him. Gavin had had the same doctor all his life. There was a degree of mutual exasperation. "I've been treating you for heat exhaustion since you were a kid."
"Surely you don't expect him to miss his own prom," Eilo said. She'd driven down from college to be with him and had so far been his only visitor.
"I expect him not to walk five miles in hot weather," the doctor said. "You'd think he'd have figured this out by now. Have your parents arrived yet?"
"They're stuck in traffic," Eilo said, because this was easier than explaining that their father was on a business trip and their mother was most likely at home drinking. She flashed the doctor her most winning smile and left the room to deal with the discharge paperwork.
F l o r i d a w a s caught in a tropical heat wave. The air conditioner in Gavin's bedroom rattled and hummed, and when he stood by the window he felt heat radiating through the glass. Three days passed before he was well enough to go outside again, and Anna still hadn't called. Two months slipped by without her. He was leaving for New York in a matter of weeks. The quartet was a memory. Jack was still around but Daniel had left town already without saying goodbye, which was puzzling. Gavin supposed they weren't best friends, exactly, but they'd spent an enormous amount of time together and he'd thought they were fairly close. He'd known Daniel since the first grade and didn't understand why he'd disappear without saying anything. Daniel had told Jack he was going to Utah. Jack thought he'd maybe gone there to work for his uncle's construction company like he'd done the past two summers. Sasha was working days in a clothing store and nights in an ice-cream parlor.
It was increasingly clear that Anna had left him, that I'm sorry meant I'm sorry but it's over or I'm sorry but I can't do this anymore. As the weeks passed the fact of her absence began to seem like something he could live with. He didn't hear from her again, and in the fall he went to school in New York City.
The journalism track at Columbia. His ideas about his future were vague. But he'd been obsessed with film noir and detective novels from the ninth grade onward and had decided long ago that he was going to be either a newspaperman or a private detective.
Te n y e a r s later in the newsroom of the New York Star Gavin handed in a piece about cuts to playground funding in the Bronx, went out into the cold air and took a northbound subway to his apartment. The sound from the leaking shower was like rain. He lay on the sofa to listen to it, just for a moment, and woke stiff and disoriented at six a.m. He showered and found a clean shirt, took the subway back to the newsroom. It was a blue-tinged morning, a cold wind in the streets. In the light of day it was obvious that he'd made an unforgivable mistake. He called Eilo from his desk.
"It's just such a strange situation," he said, meaning everything. "I never imagined this could happen."
"I'm sorry," Eilo said. "I thought about not showing you the photograph. Are you okay? You sound a bit. "
"I keep thinking, if the kid was staying with that woman whose house was getting foreclosed, what happened to Anna? And I keep thinking that I should have known," he said. "Her sister always said she was fine, but the way she vanished like that. The rumors at the prom."
"Well, if we're to be honest with ourselves, I guess we both always knew it was a possibility," Eilo said. "I keep thinking of that time we ran into Sasha buying baby clothes at the mall, how off she seemed that day."
"What?"
"You don't remember this?"
"No," he said. "What happened?"
"I can't believe you don't remember. We ran into Sasha in the mall, and she had a bag from Babies 'R' Us. You said, 'Who had a baby, Sasha?' and she seemed so jumpy, she just stammered something and walked away without really answering you. It was weird."
"Why were we in the mall together?"
"We were buying a gift for Mom for her birthday."
"I don't remember this." A passing reporter glanced at him, and Gavin realized he was speaking too loudly. He made an apologetic gesture and sank down further into his chair. "I don't remember," he said, quieter now. "What was it we got for Mom?"
"One of those horrible little glass figurines she likes," Eilo said. "I think it was a dog."
"I really don't remember," Gavin said. Eilo's memory was impeccable. He had no reason to doubt her. He wondered, as he hung up the phone, if he'd always known that Anna was pregnant and had managed to block this fact from his mind in order to leave without guilt for New York. This idea was somewhat more than he could live with, and he felt himself slipping deeper into fog.