The Lola Quartet Read Online Free Page A

twice, put on his fedora and went for a walk. He'd always thought of the newspaper as a ship sailing over a digital sea. Now that it was obvious the ship was sinking he didn't know what to do with himself, he couldn't imagine not being a newspaperman and in Karen's absence the newspaper was all he really had. Everyone he'd liked had been laid off now except Julie. He sometimes caught himself composing letters in his head. Dear Chloe, dear Anna, I wish I knew where you were. I have failed in my responsibilities. The thought of you keeps me up at night. It was raining in his apartment and he kept forgetting to shave in the mornings. The newsroom an ocean of empty desks. He sat in front of his computer, marooned.
       "I've been meaning to ask you," Julie said. "I don't remember seeing an Amy Torren on the list of Alkaitis's victims."
       "Oh, the investments were under her husband's name."
       "Okay," she said, with an air of relief. "What's her husband's name?"
       " Jacob Fischer," Gavin said. It was just the first name that came to him. Fischer was the man in his eighties who'd lost everything to Alkaitis and cried on the phone.

    G a v i n ' s  n e x t  story was about cuts to funding for playground maintenance in the Bronx. He traveled far north on the subway to reach a desolate neighborhood where wind moaned around the corners of low brick buildings. It was cold and he spent an hour standing by a playground on a street that scared him, trying to get suspicious mothers to talk to him about broken swing sets. That was when the mothers showed up at all— more often it was gangs of half-feral eight-and nine-year-olds who hit the swing set with sticks and threw rocks at the slide, stared blankly at Gavin when he tried to talk to them and snickered as they walked off. They knew about lone men in playgrounds.
       He stood at the edge of the playground, alone after forty-five minutes of trying to get people to talk to him, and tears came suddenly to his eyes. The slide was rusted. There were broken bottles in the grass. Was this the sort of place where his lost daughter might play, in whatever transitory postforeclosure hellhole she might have landed in?
       Gavin took the train back to the newsroom, where he wrote the story and then stared for a long time at the blinking cursor on the screen. A memory of Karen, lying beside him on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. One of their last happy Sundays together, late in the third month of her four-month pregnancy. They'd told Eilo and Karen's parents but almost no one else. Sunlight angled through a window and caught in her hair. Had that only been two months ago? If it's a girl, we'll name her Rose, she said. If it's a boy, Thomas.

    As local parent Rose Thomas put it, "It's really the children who are suff ering. The cuts in playground funding have been a night mare for us."

       Gavin read the quote over and over again. Seeing the words on the screen made them real, even though he hadn't sent them to anyone yet, even though this could still be undone. There had been two lapses now but turning back was still possible. There could still be an evening years or decades from now when he might look back at a strange period far earlier in his career, a few shadowy months before the Pulitzer but after his fiancée had left him when he'd started to slide but pulled himself back just in time, two stories with small lies in them and then no more after that.
       But everyone knew there would be more layoffs at the newspaper and the story as written was a dud, filler, a flightless bird, all facts and budget numbers and no humanity. The Rose Thomas quote was exactly the sort of thing a concerned parent would say. When you came down to it, he thought, it was a question of names again, the same as that shadow across his Florida story had been. It was something he'd said, and he was almost certainly a father. Did it matter, did it actually matter that the words on the screen