Last Night in Montreal

10

In a low-lit jazz club in Montreal, some years before Eli arrived in the city, a detective was sitting alone at the bar. He was meeting an old friend, who was running late, and while he waited he examined his fedora in the warm dim light. His wife had given it to him for his birthday a month earlier, and it had an appealing newness about it. It was a perfect shade of chocolate brown. He rotated it slowly, admiring every angle, set it down on the gleaming dark wood of the bar, and ordered a pint of Guinness which took some time to arrive.

He was trained in the reading of malevolent patterns. His work was essentially the study of intersections: the crosshairs where childhood trauma meets a longing for violence, where specific temperaments come up against messages written on mirrors in red lipstick, torn pairs of stockings in the empty industrial streets out by Métro Pie-IX, the backseats of secondhand automobiles and angles of moonlight over stains on concrete. He possessed a brilliant and sometimes eerie sense of intuition, which he wielded like a scalpel, and in the Montreal police department he was unsurpassed. His work usually involved rapists or murderers, and he had never worked with missing children until this particular afternoon at an almost deserted downtown jazz club, when his friend showed up forty-five minutes late, bought him a second beer to make up for it, and pulled a Bible out of his briefcase.

“Christopher,” his friend said, “I need your help on something.”

Christopher glanced at the Bible and then at Peter. “Don’t tell me you’ve found religion,” he said.

“No, this is evidence. Listen,” Peter said, leaning toward him a little, “have you ever thought about coming to work for me?”

“Thought never crossed my mind.”

“You’d like working for me. You get a little more leeway to do your job. It’s less. . procedural, for lack of a better word. I don’t believe in paperwork. But anyway, look, you don’t have to decide right away about coming to work for me, I just want you to take a look at this. You know that parental abduction case I’ve been working on, the one I was telling you about?”

Peter opened the Bible on the bar. A certain page had been marked with a yellow sticky note.

A child’s uneven handwriting sloped downward across the page in blue ink, overlapping the beginning of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia.

“Good Lord,” said the detective. He took the Bible from Peter’s hands. “I could find her in ten minutes with something like this. How old did you say she was?”

“She’s eleven and a half. Been missing a little over four years.”

“Same age as my daughter. Missing from where?”

“Middle of nowhere, south of here. Her mother has a house near St.-Jean, not far from the American border. Her father’s an American, so the kid has dual citizenship, and they’d probably crossed the border before the mother even reported her missing. Anyway, the girl’s been missing for years, and the police’ve been useless. Someone recognized them from a poster and they almost caught her in Cincinnati a year ago, but nothing after that. There’s just no trail. She could be anywhere this evening.”

“This note is recent?”

“Not particularly. Some religiously inclined traveling salesman found it in his motel room in Toledo three years ago.”

“Three years ago. So she was eight when she wrote this.” He was still looking at the note, shaking his head. An image flashed through him — a small girl with short blond hair sitting cross-legged on a bed in a motel room, writing carefully in a Bible — and he blinked.

“At most. She might’ve still been seven. Three years ago was just when the salesman happened to find it. Listen,” Peter said, “I could use your help on this. It’s a solvable case, but she could be anywhere, literally anywhere tonight, I am out of leads, and I’m having a bad month. You know Anya left me. Take a leave of absence from the police force, come work with me on this. The money’s better.”

“Christ,” he said, “I didn’t know about Anya. I’m sorry.”

“Well, she always said she was going to. Has it been that long since we’ve spoken?”

“I guess it’s been a while,” Christopher said.

“Think about coming to work with me on this. If anyone can find her. .”

“I’ll think about it. May I borrow this?”

“Of course.”

He left the bar not long afterward. It was August in Montreal, and an airless day had turned to a perfect evening; there was a cool breeze from the distant river and Rue St.-Denis was alight, outdoor cafés spilling their light and voices out into the street, streetlamps shining down through the leaves of the trees that lined the sidewalk, and people everywhere: couples out walking in the twilight, girls with short skirts and multicolored hair and combat boots, young men with berets and goatees smoking cigarettes and walking somewhere quickly, slow-moving hippies with scarves wrapped over their dreadlocks and benevolent expressions, people eating dinner at small round tables on the sidewalk, everyone surreptitiously watching everyone else.

He walked slowly down the long slope to Rue Ste.-Catherine, in love with the city, the Bible in his shoulder bag. It was a lightweight book, mass-produced on thin paper to be stolen from an American motel room, but he felt the weight. He’d spent his childhood traveling too, and felt a certain empathy on that front, but it seemed to him later that he’d been seduced by her language. I wish to remain vanishing. He knew exactly what she meant. He walked home from the jazz club because the walk took two hours and he wanted to be alone, turning the phrase over and over like a polished stone in his pocket. He told himself as he walked that he was trying to make the decision but realized long before he got home that the decision had already been made.

His wife was in the kitchen, listening to the radio with the newspaper spread out over the table; she looked up and smiled when he looked in but had nothing to say. He smiled back at her and went to the dining room, flicked on the overhead light, opened the Bible on the table to read the note again. He felt less than tranquil. I do not want to be found. Later he went upstairs but he couldn’t sleep; he got up once to look in on his daughter, asleep under a quilt that had sheep all around the edges. Afterward he lay reading for a long time, an old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology that he’d picked up from a street vendor, listening to his wife moving restlessly around the house and turning the radio on and off in the kitchen. Something was bothering him; he put the book down on the bedside table and picked up the Bible again. The child’s handwriting obscured part of the Twenty-second Psalm. He read the psalm aloud once, and then recited the first two stanzas by memory to the plaster ceiling: “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”

He heard his wife turn the volume of the radio up somewhere far away in the house, as if she was hoping to drown him out, but realized that she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The radio was abstract from this distance, soft static and inaudible voices. He glanced at the bedside clock; it was three-forty-five in the morning.

“If you don’t want to be rescued,” Christopher said aloud to the ceiling, “then why the Twenty-second Psalm?”

11

On Lilia’s twelfth birthday her father gave her a book of photographs: Life magazine’s collection of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. Women in bell-bottoms and big round glasses, antiwar banners above a sea of faces on the Washington Mall, cars full of families moving slowly across a 1930s field of dust. But there was a particular image that she turned to over and over again: the crater formed by the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert, in the final year of the Second World War. (“Not far from here,” her father said, glancing briefly over her shoulder and then back at the road. “No, we can’t visit it. It’s still radioactive.”)

The crater showed the aftermath of an ungodly heat: the center was purest black, the brightest black imaginable, and around the edges of this brilliant darkness was a shining ring. This was where the unimaginable heat of the explosion had changed the sand to glass, and the glass reflected the sky. The same force levels cities and creates mirrors in the desert. It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray. Tears came to her eyes in the passenger seat.

“Lilia, Lilia. Let’s stop driving for the day. Look, there’s a restaurant, let’s get you something to eat. .”

“Why aren’t there any pictures of me?” she asked later, sipping iced tea in the air-conditioned calm of a diner.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t most people have pictures? Of when they were kids?”

He looked at her for a moment and then stood up from the table. When she looked up he was leaning on the counter, talking to the waitress. He said something that made the waitress laugh and beckoned Lilia over.

“We’re in luck, Katie. They do have a camera here.”

“So what’re you doing traveling on your birthday, Katie?” the waitress asked. She had a cloud of blond curls and red lipstick, and she winked at Lilia while she handed the camera to her father. He motioned Lilia up on a stool and stood back.

“We’re going to visit my cousins,” Lilia said.

The waitress leaned on the counter to be in the picture, although she hadn’t been asked. Click “Much obliged,” Lilia’s father said. He handed Lilia the Polaroid, and she watched her face rise slowly out of milky white.

Eleven years later she knelt on Eli’s bed in Brooklyn and pinned the picture to the wall with a thumbtack.

12

Late at night Christopher liked to read Shakespeare sometimes, while he waited for his wife to come to bed or for sleep to overtake him, whichever happened first, and at three in the morning on an unremarkable night he caught himself reading and rereading a line from Romeo and Juliet: She is as a stranger in the world. He had met Peter in the bar only two or three nights earlier, and the line resonated strangely. There was a particular song playing on the radio a lot around that time; it had a lyric that he particularly liked, something about being a stranger in your own hometown, and he caught himself singing this line sometimes at quiet moments. His voice was unfamiliar. He’d never sung in his life, except under his breath at birthday parties, but these days he no longer entirely recognized himself.

Christopher was forty-five that year and felt somewhat older, but on the drive to work this morning he felt younger than he had in years. The Bible with the note from the missing child was in his bag on the passenger side. He hadn’t slept much — his wife had taken to coming to bed just before dawn lately, and she talked incoherently in her sleep — but he wasn’t tired, and he felt an enormous weight lifting from his shoulders when his leave-of-absence request was approved in the early afternoon. A week later he dragged the crate filled with Lilia’s case files into a dusty corner office at Peter’s agency and began attempting to settle in.

“A change is as good as a vacation,” his supervisor had said, a bit too meaningfully in retrospect, when the leave-of-absence request had been granted. This led him to suspect that he’d been becoming a stranger for longer than he realized, and perhaps slipping a little in general. He knew he was getting too tired these days, fading out perhaps, not as self-sustaining as he had been, and his hair was going grey above his ears. He told himself, sitting in the new office that afternoon, that this change was exactly what he needed. He put Michaela’s most recent school photograph in a desk drawer, spent a meditative few minutes arranging his notebooks and pens, pulled the first file from the crate, and began to immerse himself in the case. Like sliding into a lake.

There were stills from a surveillance tape in a motel lobby in Cincinnati, the day before she had almost been caught, two or three years after she’d written in the Bible; Christopher looked at these with great interest. Lilia was rendered as a small child with short blond hair, caught at the instant she glanced up into the camera lens. The whole scene was a little fuzzy and unclear in the enlargement, the expression unreadable on her pixilated face. The man behind her could have been anyone: head down, shuffling through a wallet. Notes in Peter’s handwriting in the lower margin: Appears at ease, but he never looks up at cameras. He flipped back through the folders, feeling less displaced than he’d felt in months, and began reading from the beginning. It began with a missing-persons report, filed in the middle of November some years ago: in a rural area between the town of St.-Jean and the American border, a seven-year-old girl disappeared in the night. Her footprints were visible in the snow by the front door; she ran out barefoot into the lawn, and then someone lifted her and carried her away. The prints of a man’s boots led to the tire tracks down by the road.

Sunlight slanted in through the window and warmed the back of Christopher’s head. He closed his eyes for a second. The angle of light had changed; he was hungry; he had been reading for hours. The initial investigation seemed somehow botched to him; he had been reading a transcript of an interview with the girl’s mother and thinking that she seemed curiously detached, although it was of course a possibility that she had still been in shock at that point. He decided it might be necessary to interview her again at some point. Perhaps Lilia’s half-brother as well. He penciled Lilia’s half-brother’s name into a notebook, feeling more purposeful than he had in some time.

Christopher stood up, stretched, and went out into the street. The air outside was hot and still, and tourists wandered speaking English in a sea of French. A pair of girls were playing cellos on a street corner, and on the way back to the office with a sandwich and a coffee he stopped to listen to them for a few minutes, sipping his coffee and feeling that everything would be all right. He thought he might speak to his daughter tonight; it had been a long time since he’d had a real conversation with her. He’d ask her about school, maybe even offer to help out with her homework. He’d tell his wife that her hair looked beautiful. Once back at the desk he stretched out his legs and leaned back in the chair, the coffee immediately forgotten on a pile of old notes. He had read through everything. There was a map that Peter had started — a continental road map, four or five possible sightings circled in red with notations. There was a page of typed contact information: Lilia’s mother, one of Lilia’s schoolteachers, the detective who had initially handled the case in Quebec.

“You can’t,” Peter said when Christopher came to him later. “It’s in the contract.”

“It’s in the contract that I can’t talk to Lilia’s brother? Are you serious?”

“I am. I’m afraid the mother was adamant.” Peter was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, looking through a stack of black-and-white photographs; all twenty of them had been taken within a space of seconds and depicted a man and a woman entering a motel.

“I see.”

“Oh, don’t read into it,” Peter said “She said her son had been through enough already; he’d been interviewed three times by various police detectives the day after his sister vanished, and I had to agree not to try to speak with him if I was going to take the case. She’s just being protective.”

“You’re certain that you couldn’t convince her otherwise?”

“I’m certain. You haven’t met this woman.”

“Fine,” he said.

He returned to his office and closed the door behind him. He looked at the Bible again for a moment and then set it aside to look at the map. He stared at the lines of highways leading out of Cincinnati and let his mind drift, looking for a pattern in the circles and notations and interstate lines, waiting for the old instinct to tell him which way they had gone. He closed his eyes. Follow the trajectory, cities circled in red, a car moving quickly over the surface of a map. His hand was writing her name in the margin of his notebook. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. His focus was absolute.

A thousand miles away in another country, but separated from him only by the thinnest possible sheen, a car moved quickly across the New Mexico desert. A landscape composed of sand and light, and the map folded on the dashboard was beginning to fade in the sunlight.

13

There was a red pencil that Lilia’s father had purchased specifically for drawing squiggly lines on maps, and in a series of motel rooms they charted a course. They could go almost anywhere. Every direction was possible. They tossed a coin whenever they couldn’t reach an immediate agreement — if it’s heads we go to Santa Barbara, tails means we’re going north — unless there was a music festival or a concert of some sort that her father wanted to go to, in which case he had veto power. In the impeccable past before the broken-down present, in the long hectic interlude before she’d begun leaving people behind, pre-Eli, it sometimes really was as simple as a coin toss.

“One thing you might want to think about,” her father said when she was sixteen, “is whether you maybe want to stop traveling someday.” She knew him well enough to understand that what he meant was I’m worried about you, I want you to stop, but she couldn’t: at sixteen she was traveling alone to San Diego with her father worrying about her in the small town where he’d settled in the New Mexico desert, and when she was seventeen and eighteen she hadn’t come back yet, except for short visits, and she lived in another ten or fifteen cities and towns in the confused interlude of time between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays.

She never asked for money from him, although he sent it sometimes unsolicited. It was possible to get by, from city to city: there was always a room she could rent, there was always a dishwashing job or a job in a stockroom or a job sweeping the floor in a salon, there was always enough to get by and eventually enough to travel away again. What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. There were complicated sequences of travel: maps, suitcases, buses moving slowly through the interstate nights, garbled announcements of departures and delays in the tiled aquarium acoustics of bus terminals and train stations, clocks set high on the walls of station waiting rooms.

In San Diego there was no one; she arrived young and exuberantly alone and stayed for three months working in a doughnut shop, and then began making her way up the coast. When she’d reached the top of the American coastline (it seemed unwise to cross the border) she turned and started to make her way back down again, and by then she was seventeen and people had begun to attach themselves to her in almost every city she stopped in. In San Francisco there was Edwin. He walked up and down hills in the rain with her and held her hand in the park. In Sacramento there was Arthur, who made exquisite pasta dishes and wanted to be a professional chef. In Santa Paula there was Gene, and Santos lived in Pinto Beach. In Los Angeles there was Trent, and later another Edwin, who was more interesting than the first one but not as kind. Her second time through San Diego there was Gareth, and then she turned inland toward the middle of the continent and a string of barely memorable Michaels and Daves. In her memories of a dozen other cities there are ghosts with no names; conversely, there are several minor lovers whose geographical locations can’t be pinpointed in memory beyond small details like a Persian rug in one of their apartments, an angle of streetlight across the living room ceiling of another, a bright-blue alarm clock in the bedroom of a third. The first girl, Lucy, lived in Denver. In Indianapolis there was Peter, who played Vivaldi on his record player and made origami swans. In St. Paul there was a more important Michael, who liked expensive red wine and was trying to be a freelance writer, and in Minneapolis there was Theo. In St. Louis there was no one, but she was only there for a week.

In Chicago there was Erica. Lilia was twenty-two years old by then, getting a little tired and beginning to think about New York, which was one of the few cities in the United States where she had never been; she stayed in Chicago for two months and then left with very little warning. On the last night she got into an argument with Erica, and they sat together in silence for a long time afterward at a table by the railing on the high mezzanine of Erica’s favorite bar. Erica sipped her beer and gazed down over the edge. It was close to midnight, and a waitress had brought a candle to each table; the candles flickered individually in the dimness and Lilia stared blankly at the hundred scattered bits of flame, thinking of what New York City might be like and how she might get out of the bar without making Erica cry again.

Erica moved her glass in front of the candle. The flame shining through it transformed her beer into a glass of pure light. It took a moment for Lilia to realize that Erica was speaking to her.

“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

“That waitress,” Erica said “I was saying she’s interesting, don’t you think?” She was looking down over the mezzanine railing. The girl who’d brought the beer and the candlelight was wiping down a table by the bar, and to Lilia’s eye she wasn’t fascinating at first glance: white shirt, black pants, well-executed ponytail, autopilot expression, red lipstick.

“What’s interesting about her?” Lilia was distracted and upset, thinking of tomorrow morning’s bus schedule and never seeing Erica again, and from the mezzanine the waitress just looked like any other waitress. One thing that had begun to trouble Lilia lately was the way that sometimes all people and all cities looked the same to her.

“She has a tattoo on the back of her wrist,” said Erica dreamily. “You can see it when she reaches for things.” She was watching the girl wipe the surface of a dark wood table.

“So?”

“I like waitresses with tattoos,” Erica said. “It implies the existence of a secret life.”

Lilia liked this idea, although she didn’t tell Erica that, and she saw what Erica meant when the waitress brought a new ashtray. The tattoo was a snake biting its own tail, in a perfect bluish-green infinite circle on the back of her left wrist.

“It’s a good tattoo,” Lilia said, but Erica’s thoughts were already elsewhere; she was smiling at Lilia now, looking at her consideringly; she pushed a long strand of blue hair back from her face before she spoke.

“I still think it’s courageous, Lilia,” she said brightly, picking up the scent of the earlier argument, “whatever you want to call it.”

Lilia sighed and sipped halfheartedly at her wine, wishing she was gone already. She had decided earlier in the evening never to give anyone advance warning of departure ever again.

“I mean, I know you think it’s nothing, but it just impresses me. I could never do that. Just pack up and go like that, without any warning, or almost none, to just pick up and move your whole life. .”

“There’s nothing very brave about it, actually. I didn’t say it was nothing, I just said it isn’t courageous.”

“Please.” Erica was momentarily distracted by her pint of beer. “Do you even know anyone in New York City?”

Lilia shook her head. She was playing idly with two empty cigarette boxes, combining them with the salt and pepper shakers to build an unstable little house.

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“No.”

“A job?”

“I’ll find something.”

“There, you see?” Erica leaned back in her chair as if she’d just proved something. Her smile bordered on smug. “That’s courage,” she said, “whatever you want to call it.”

“You don’t understand.” Lilia found at that moment that she had no patience for anything: for this city, this street, this relentlessly trendy split-level bar, the identically dressed waitresses gliding between tables, this blue-haired girl across the table with the beer. The sadness of the waitress’s blue-green snake tattoo, circling forever on the same tired wrist. She let her cigarette-box house fall down in disarray. “It isn’t courage, Erica, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s nothing good about it. It’s exactly like running away from everything that matters, and I wish I could make you understand that.”

“Please. How many places have you moved to since you went out on your own?”

“Since I was sixteen? I don’t know. Maybe twenty. Probably more. But you’re still missing the point completely.”

“Just in the last two years, say. How many have you moved to in the last two years?”

“I don’t know, Erica. You’re still not getting this. It’s just, listen, I’ve never moved to anywhere in my life. When I show up in a city, it doesn’t mean I’m arriving, it only means. . when I show up,” Lilia said, floundering now, repeating herself, “I’m not arriving anywhere, I’m only leaving somewhere else.”

“I still think—”

“You’re not listening. You don’t get it. It isn’t admirable. I cannot stop. All I ever do is leave, and I apparently don’t even do that very well, since you’re sitting there starting to cry because I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m always running out of time. I am always running out of time. Are you completely incapable of understanding this? This, is all, I ever, do, and there is absolutely nothing admirable about it.”

Erica was stricken. The tears were starting to win. This only made her more beautiful, and Lilia thought she might die if the moment didn’t end, so she stood up and moved around the table and kissed the blue hair that she’d already kissed so many times. The kiss released a sob, and Erica held one hand over her eyes, her face shining in the candlelight. Lilia was moving quickly past her, down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where the Friday-night crowd moved around her like ghosts. She fumbled in her jacket pocket for her cell phone and dialed as she walked down the crowded sidewalk; she crossed the street quickly and stood in a doorway while the call went through.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” her father said. There was a baby crying in the background, her latest half-sibling, and she could hear his girlfriend’s soothing voice. The sounds brought her back to his house in the desert, the smell of French fries in the diner where her father’s girlfriend worked, long walks down cracked streets in the cool desert twilight, and she closed her eyes against the sheer oppositeness of the cold bright city. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Still in Chicago.” She forced her voice to be light. “But I wanted to call and tell you that I’m moving to New York City tomorrow.”

“New York New York,” he said. “Fine choice, kiddo. I spent some years there. Do you need money?”

“I’ll find another job.”

“I’ll send you a wire transfer tomorrow.”

Across the street, some distance down the block, Erica had emerged from the bar. She had an unsteady look about her. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking up and down the street. Lilia sank back into the doorway for a moment, then changed her mind and walked away quickly.

“Do you know what’s strange?” she asked.

“What’s that, my dove?”

“I thought I saw the detective in St. Louis a couple of months ago. I walked out of a deli, and there was a man across the street with that same kind of hat, that fedora thing. He had a cane. He was just stepping into another store, and I couldn’t see his face, but I felt like he was watching me, just for that instant when I came out of the deli.”

“Is that why you left St. Louis?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I wanted to see Chicago again.”

“Seems impossible that he’d be around, after what happened,” her father said carefully. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Lilia had turned a corner; she was looking up and down the street, but Erica was nowhere. “It must have been someone else. But it seemed like he was watching me.”

“I’m worried about you,” her father said.

“Don’t be. I’m always fine.”

“I know you’re always fine,” he said, “but there’s no reason to be traveling quite so constantly these days, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You taught me how to travel.”

“Quite true, my lily. However, since you were so clearly paying attention to my example, you’ll notice that I did eventually stop. Have you considered settling somewhere for a year or two, just as an experiment?”

“The thought does cross my mind occasionally.”

“No one’s watching you anymore.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because you’re not an abducted child, you’re a legal adult. No one has any reason to be looking for you. You successfully disappeared.”

“A private detective could still look for me.”

“He was in an accident,” her father said softly.

“He was from Montreal, wasn’t he? It made me want to go there. Just to finally face it.”

“Of all places,” said her father. “Don’t.”

14

There was a cufflink under the bed when Christopher reached down for his slippers that morning. That morning; a few months after he’d taken Lilia’s case. He picked it up with the care of a jeweler handling a diamond, examined it from every angle, held it to the light. It was unextraordinary. It also wasn’t his. His wife lay sleeping at the far edge of the bed, close against the wall. Christopher dressed slowly and put the cufflink in his pocket. He felt that the right thing to do in these circumstances would be to wake her, either to ask her or just to hold it up in silence until she said something, wept, denied, confessed, but his thoughts were scattered, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and he realized as he watched her sleep that he was thinking of lions. Of chasing his future wife down the midway when they were eleven and ten, of traveling with her across the length of nine provinces and thirty-four states, over the border and back again. He ran two red lights by accident on his way to work that morning.

The cufflink was composed of two plastic buttons with a bit of wire between them, obviously from a very cheap shirt. He sat at his desk, turning it over and over between his fingers. A salesman? Door-to-door? Vacuum cleaners? Insurance? Days had passed now since he’d found it, and he’d hardly been home. His wife hadn’t commented. She was working longer hours herself, and she’d been unusually courteous of late. Polite strangers in the bedroom. They barely spoke. But he still imagined, watching her sleep at night, that all of this might still be salvageable in some way. He sometimes touched her pale hair on the pillow and imagined what he might say to her if he had the strength of will to say it. He felt that he was working his way up to something, an action of some kind, some redemptive collection of words that would restore his marriage and bring her back to him and make Michaela reachable again, all at once. It wasn’t impossible. He began a separate set of notes, somewhat random, unrelated to Lilia’s case. Notes on the second law of thermodynamics, memorized in high school: The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend toward entropy. Is this irreparable, or might the process be reversed? Notes on Michaela: skittish, secretive, brown hair, green eyes. Notes on his wife: governed inordinately by the second law of thermodynamics. He was careful to keep this notebook separate from the other ones and leave it at the office; he labeled it Family and put it in a drawer. He read through these notes sometimes when it was late and he’d been working all day and he couldn’t read one more word or make one more phone call about his missing Lilia. Michaela: always quiet at dinner, can’t meet her eyes across the dinner table some nights. The feeling of one’s daughter having been replaced by a changeling. Elaine: barely sleeps, but never seems tired. Red garnet earrings. Matching red nails. He wished to come home one evening and perform a pulling-together motion, like tying a piece of string; he spent a great deal of time thinking about how he might achieve this, and these other notes felt like preparation; at some point, he felt, he’d have amassed enough evidence to have a complete picture of the situation, at which point he could act decisively and pull things back together again.

There were a few days when he felt that the preparations were going smoothly, that he was approaching the level of understanding that he needed, but then there was a tie he didn’t recognize on the floor of his closet. He saw it when he was getting dressed on a particular morning, a week or two after the cufflink; it lay discarded, as if thrown carelessly from elsewhere in the room. But the angle didn’t work; he’d tried to throw things into the closet often enough to know that it just wasn’t possible, things thrown from the room hit the wall or the closet door, even if the closet door happened to be open, ergo, the tie was obviously planted. He was a detective, for God’s sake. He knew he was being baited and that he should say something, that he was meant to say something and that saying something might even help, but the tie made everything seem foreign and unsalvageable and impossible again. On the way to work he talked to himself, trying to summon something — sadness? anger? — alarmed by a soft but unmistakable sense of relief. At least, he thought, things were becoming clearer. Much later he sat at his desk in the dwindling evening, looking at the cufflink and lost in the past.

He’d met his wife when they were children in a traveling circus. Strange upbringing by most standards, but it had seemed normal at the time: his father was a lion tamer, and her parents walked on tightropes. A childhood played out across a thousand dusty towns between Vancouver and Halifax, in the bright perilous years when most people still took their kids to circuses and everyone was waiting for the atomic bomb to drop and the Soviet Union was still the dark empire far away across the sea, and Elaine had permanently skinned knees and ribbons in her hair and ferocious arguments with her parents. She came from a long line of tightrope walkers; her parents didn’t understand why their daughter hated the profession so much, and were somewhat inclined to take it personally. There were winters spent waiting for the season to start, staring out the classroom window at the winter sunlight thinking about leaving again, meeting Elaine in the hallways and counting down the days with her—“Twenty-eight days,” she’d say mysteriously, as she passed, and the other kids around them pretended not to be envious because everyone wants to travel away with a circus, “Fifteen days,” “Four,” until finally she could whisper “Tomorrow,” with her eyes all alight, because even if she didn’t want to be a tightrope walker, the thought of going to school for longer than a semester at a time seemed unbearably stultifying to both of them; and then in the very early morning, the long caravan of transport trucks moving east out of Calgary while he lay on the floor of their moving house reading Spiderman comics. Elaine, his best and only friend, sometimes traveled in his family’s trailer with him between stops. He kissed her for the first time between Ottawa and Toronto.

Decades later in Montreal he closed his eyes, his fist clenched over the cufflink, rested his elbows on his desk and his forehead on his fists. He remained that way for several minutes, unmoving, and then straightened very slowly, placed the cufflink in the drawer that held Michaela’s school picture, and reached for the stack of files on the edge of his desk. He opened the top folder and unfolded a map with Lilia’s name written twenty-eight times in the margin. He was beginning to neglect his other cases.

He followed her quietly over the mountains, tracing lines on maps of the North American continent, making phone calls, talking to far-off police departments, picking up sightings, rumors, tips. He followed her out of his life and into a hinterland composed of folders and documents, each holding the keys to her missing life, his path through the wilderness marked by coffee rings. He worked late into the night. There were over a hundred pages of documents relating to the case: photographs, police reports, possible sightings. Memory reduced to manila envelopes and typed documents, stills from surveillance videos, early-childhood photographs. There was one photograph in particular that haunted him: it was used by the Quebec press shortly after her disappearance and depicted two unsmiling dark-haired children, Lilia and her half-brother Simon, in front of their beaming mother on the steps of a distant porch. The small boy has his arm around his tiny sister. The two children gaze seriously at the camera, their mother radiant behind them. What drives a seven-year-old to run out barefoot into snow? The question troubled him.

Still, Lilia wasn’t far away from him; as the months passed he felt at times that he was getting close. There were strange moments like flashes of light, when he looked at the map and thought he knew where she was. He brought the folders home in the evenings and spread documents over the dining room table. From there he followed the missing girl over the desert, like something winged and distant in the blazing sky; the car curved around the highway, just out of sight, while he stared at a map in his dining room in Montreal. Michaela watched his departure from the stairs.

He glanced at his daughter across the dining room table sometimes, on the increasingly rare nights when they all sat down for dinner together, and silently wondered if he would be able to explain this to her later on, in some unimaginably pleasant future when they could sit down for a drink together, reconciled in Michaela’s adulthood: I wasn’t avoiding you, it wasn’t your fault, but there was a cufflink and a tie and she wasn’t speaking to me, and my marriage. . The explanation fell apart even in his mind. (Notes on the second law of thermodynamics: All systems tend inevitably toward entropy. Why should my family be any exception?)

15

When Lilia was very young the entire world seemed composed of motel rooms, strung like an archipelago across the continental United States. Island life was fast and transient, all cars and motel rooms and roadside diners, trading used cars at sketchy lots on the edges of places, long rides down highways in the sunlight, in the rain, talking to waitresses who thought she was too young for coffee, nights spent under the scratchy sheets of cheap roadside motels, messages written secretly in motel-room Bibles. I don’t want to be found.

There were hours spent in quiet libraries. Her father brought her history books, books about science, books about people he thought she should be aware of, then sat nearby reading the paper while she worked her way through the stack. He tested her on comprehension back in the motel room in the evening. There were sometimes questions: “Isn’t it a school day?” a librarian or a bookstore clerk would ask.

Her father had coached her in the appropriate response: “I’m homeschooled,” Lilia said. If this seemed insufficient, she added, “for religious reasons.” She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different; there were often, especially in the beginning, several names and stories in the course of any given month. At first Lilia and her father concocted the stories carefully together and practiced them on the way into town. Later they could play off each other without rehearsal— “Elizabeth,” he’d call out, in the magazine section of a gas station store (those bright new stores, too large for the smallness of the town outside, with rows of shiny packaging and a strange stale smell like dead coffee and mildew), “Elizabeth, it’s time to go—” and although she wouldn’t ever have been called that name before, she’d recognize his voice and turn around and smile just like a real Elizabeth would, and then note the new name on the list in a library later. It wasn’t an unhappy life. She liked traveling.

But the sense of being chased overtook him without warning. It always registered first as a tension in his hands on the steering wheel; he would start tapping out a rhythm on the wheel with his thumb and two fingers, a beating three-four rhythm, fast ruinous waltz. Sometimes he glanced in the rearview mirror and thought he saw something, or saw nothing but was frightened anyway, and he motioned silently toward the backseat. She would climb between the front seats and slip into the back of the car, frightened into smallness, and hide in a private improvised tent.

In the first year her father used to pull the car over and hide her, but later she knew how to build her own shelter, and she’d perfected her hiding place by the time she turned eight; she knew how to build a tent with blankets and pillows and suitcases in the backseat of a car, a way of disappearing into the chaos of luggage and pillows and blankets and coats. She hid there by the hour in the shifting darkness until her clothes clung to her body with sweat. She was suspicious of the dark, so her father gave her a flashlight, and she liked to shine it in circles on the blanket ceiling, practicing a new kind of cursive writing, drawn in light, and the car moved beneath her like a ship. She was a stowaway crossing hazardous seas. A fugitive, always. When she was small she imagined that her tent was dug deep into snow far up in the arctic, or half buried in a sandstorm in a hot treacherous land. She imagined there were search parties out looking for her: Bedouin nomads, explorers on sleighs drawn by teams of huskies, sailors going through the crates and spools of rope in the depths of the ship — but in her happiest daydreams they passed her by. She was never unearthed from the snowdrift, the nomads never found her in the sand dunes, she was never pulled flailing up out of the hold. She lay still by the hour, lost and undiscovered, and she sometimes imagined Simon lying there beside her, although the details of his face were fading and she wasn’t sure she remembered what he looked like anymore, and the beam of her flashlight traced patterns on the blanket overhead. The light circling like a signal in her limited sky.

16

When Michaela was eleven and twelve and thirteen she liked movies about cat burglars and had ideas about dynamite. It wasn’t so much a yearning to blow up anything specific; it was something more like an idea that she could probably figure out how to make things explode if she had to. She had similar suspicions about scaling the walls of bank towers and walking on tightropes across streets, but her feelings about tightropes were much more definite, or at the very least better-informed: partly on the theory that talent skips generations and partly to appease two irate sets of grandparents, it had been decided very early on to send Michaela to circus school. Three days a week after school she took a bus to a neighborhood near McGill University, arriving early if at all possible. The circus school, a dusty venture run out of a vaulted church basement by double-jointed Moscow Circus veterans, was equipped with a rudimentary high wire, and she spent as much time as possible walking back and forth.

At home she had a practice tightrope installed in the living room; it was only a foot off the floor but she imagined a hundred feet of space beneath her, crowds cheering, all the people and lights. Or absolute stillness between bank towers, making a perfect getaway with the safe-deposit-box master key, moving like water over the opposite window ledge. She walked back and forth, back and forth, expert and alone. The tightrope-walking calmed her when the house was too silent and no one was home. It seemed that the length of time between the end of school and her parents’ return home was growing longer from one evening to the next. Michaela felt herself to be on the vanguard of a brave new world; it was as if her parents had simply given her the house. Her father came home late and had little to say. He spread his files over the dining room table after dinner and stayed there poring over them deep into the night. He stood sometimes, he paced, he threw back his head and closed his eyes, he said a name sometimes aloud like a mantra (Lilia, Lilia), but he never looked up and saw his daughter watching through the banister railings. There were nights when she fell asleep on the stairs.

Her mother came home around midnight and carried the child up to bed. She kissed her softly on the forehead and Michaela opened her eyes for a moment, not quite awake: Why do you work so much? Sometimes her mother didn’t answer. Sometimes she did: Because I have things to do, my darling. Everyone around here is consumed by work, haven’t you noticed? She held Michaela close against her, and the collar of her blouse smelled faintly of tobacco and aftershave.

“I FIND HER somewhat. . ferocious,” the seventh grade teacher said diplomatically in the last parent-teacher conference Michaela’s mother ever attended.

“Really,” said Michaela’s mother. She was interested but having a hard time concentrating. “Ferocious?”

“Intense,” said the teacher immediately, attempting to switch the words in midair. “She’s very focused. Ms. Graydon, I think we need to discuss your daughter’s progress in French.”

This was a matter of lingering concern among the faculty; Michaela had qualified for a coveted English-language education under the terms of the Quebec language laws and had been failing her French classes since the first grade.

“Oh, I imagine she’ll pick it up,” said Michaela’s mother. She was running her fingers through her hair and looking down at the floor. “I should get back to the office,” she announced abruptly. “My boss is waiting for me.”

“Of course,” said Michaela’s teacher. “I just think—”

“That she’s ferocious?”

“I was going to say, I just think that we may be looking at possible dyslexia at this point. Her grades are excellent in every subject except French. She just doesn’t seem able to pick it up. I don’t have to tell you that in this political climate, an inability to speak the language—”

“Ferocious,” Michaela’s mother persisted, smiling slightly.

“A little, well, a little intense. Yes.” The teacher couldn’t help but notice that Michaela’s mother seemed almost pleased by this. It wasn’t so disturbing that she ever mentioned it to anyone, but she didn’t schedule any more meetings with Michaela’s parents.

The following week Christopher got a call from the circus school — Michaela, a young assistant informed him breathlessly, had fallen off the high wire — his breath caught in his throat— but she’d only sprained her ankle, all was well, could he come and pick her up? Michaela’s mother, inexplicably, couldn’t be reached. Michaela didn’t tell anyone that she’d hardly seen her father in two weeks; he stood awkwardly in the church basement with his hands in his coat pockets, gloomy about the interruption from his work but too conscious of appearances not to show up, and examined her ankle along with her instructor. He agreed that it was slightly swollen and that she’d probably be fine by tomorrow.

“How did you fall off a high wire?” he asked. “There’s supposed to be a safety net.”

“I sprained my ankle in the safety net,” she said. “It was the safety net that distracted me and made me fall in the first place.”

“How can a safety net distract you?”

“It moved,” she said. “Someone brushed up against it from underneath. If it hadn’t been there, I probably would’ve been fine.”

“If it hadn’t been there—” her father said, but then found that he couldn’t finish the sentence. There was an awkward silence. He cleared his throat.

“Well,” her instructor said. He was a middle-aged man with a Russian accent and a missing finger on his left hand. “You’ll want to take her home, I imagine.”

“Yes,” Christopher said, surprised by the notion. “Yes, of course. Thank you.” He nodded awkwardly and walked with his daughter out into the street. This was one of the neighborhoods that he loved the most, and he was thinking about how rarely he came up here. The architecture was beautiful in this corner of town. They walked together for a few minutes in silence, Michaela limping, Christopher looking at the spiral staircases on the outside of the buildings.

“Dad?” He looked at her, startled out of his thoughts, but wasn’t sure what to say. “Dad, I want to join the circus.”

“Absolutely not,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked, a little petulant. She increased the severity of her limp for a few steps.

“You can’t join a circus,” he said. “You’re thirteen.”

“Fourteen. There’s a girl a year older than me at the circus school who already worked with Cirque du Soleil when she was my age. I could audition,” she said.

He decided to ignore this. “Tightrope-walking is not a life,” he said. “And besides your age, you know why not. It’s devolution.” The thought of joining circuses upset him; he’d run away from his parents’ circus with his wife when they were seventeen and eighteen.

“What’s devolution?”

“The opposite of evolving. Why would you want to join a circus?”

“To travel away,” Michaela said. “I don’t like it here.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t. I can’t even speak French,” she said, “and everyone speaks French. Why can’t I move somewhere else and join a circus?”

“Because,” he said, “you should be happy here. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to get you into an English school? And now you want to speak French?” He was hailing a cab; when one pulled up he gave his address, his daughter, and a ten-dollar bill to the cab driver and saw them off with a wave. He was thinking about Lilia. The cab glided to a halt in front of the house, and Michaela gave the ten to the driver, who said something she didn’t understand in French. She climbed awkwardly out of the cab, ignoring him, and limped to the front door while the cab pulled away. Her ankle hurt. She unlocked the door and relocked it behind her, then stood for a moment leaning against it. The house was silent. There was a dusty umbrella near her feet; she kicked at it, limped a few steps toward the stairs, changed her mind and went to the dining room instead. She stopped just inside, went back out to the hall closet, and groped around on the top shelf until she found the in-case-of-emergency flashlight.

The first notebook that she opened began with the chambermaid. Michaela played the flashlight over the page. She could have just turned on the dining room light, but she was pretending to be a cat burglar. The notebook began with a Motel 6 in the town of Leonard, Arizona, a room on the second floor paid for in cash by a man traveling alone with his daughter, a thirty-two-year-old chambermaid’s utterly forgettable name. (Sara? Kate? Jane?) She squinted (the name was written illegibly) and turned the page.

Lilia was far from Arizona on that particular afternoon; while Michaela was reading those pages in Montreal, she was fly-fishing with her father in an Oregon river. But a year earlier, in a small desert town, Lilia had stayed with her father in a room the chambermaid had cleaned.

17

The room the chambermaid cleaned: two double beds with scratchy orange-and-white-patterned bedspreads, a side table containing a motel pen and a Gideon Bible between them, a TV on a low dresser at the foot of the beds. Lilia’s father had gone to get takeout hamburgers at the restaurant downstairs, and Lilia sat cross-legged on one of the beds reading about sea horses in National Geographic. The lamps cast a dim yellow light, and the television flickered quiet and blue, and the painting on the wall behind her was a splash of abstract color in the mirror above the television set. Until that night, although never afterward, she always kept the television on for company in the rare times when she was alone in any given room. She was unused to being alone, and the state made her uneasy. She seldom paid attention to the television; on this particular evening she looked up only because she heard her name.

“Lilia Grace Albert,” the host intoned. Lilia looked up in time to make eye contact; the camera lingered for a moment on his face. He stood on an industrial-looking multilevel set, where people with their backs to the camera typed on computers. “It’s every parent’s nightmare,” he continued darkly. “A noncustodial parent with citizenship in two nations abducts his daughter, in this case snatching her from her bed in the dead of night, and spirits her away into another country. Once there, it’s relatively easy to change her name, to assume a new identity, and, in short, to disappear. Our focus this episode is on the problem of international abductions. We’ll examine several individual cases. .”

It was Unsolved Cases, and Lilia was Unsolved that night. Her father’s image flashed across the screen, followed by the last school photograph taken before she had disappeared. The host was talking ponderously about the problem of international abductions in general and Lilia’s case in particular, which was apparently considered dramatic because of the snatched-from-her-own-bed angle. She was thinking that her picture wasn’t bad, as school photographs go; in the first grade she had been wide-eyed and serious, pretty in an unsmiling way. Her father’s photograph, on the other hand, was the photo her mother had supplied to the police shortly after Lilia vanished. The photo had been taken fourteen years earlier at an airport in Nairobi, on the way home from a disastrous African honeymoon: it showed Lilia’s father leaning on a concrete pillar near the baggage claim, wild-eyed with malarial fever, his hair sticking up in all directions and three days’ beard on his sweat-streaked face. He looked exactly like the kind of man who’d snatch a child from her bed.

Cut to the face of a pretty young interviewer, all impeccable makeup and perfect hair. She sat on an armchair angled toward a sofa, on which a woman identified in subtitles as Lilia’s mother was sitting beside Lilia’s brother, who was awkward in a transitional teenaged-boy kind of way and didn’t look much like Lilia at all. In the dim light of the motel room Lilia studied them, but their faces stirred nothing. They were utterly unfamiliar. She had no recollection of ever having seen them before. The time before she left her mother’s house was all closed doors and blind corners; her memories began the night her father appeared on the lawn below her window.

“It’s been a difficult few years for you,” the interviewer remarked. Her suit was the color of roses.

“Very difficult,” Lilia’s mother said. It seemed to Lilia that she had once been very pretty; now she had a benign, motherly look, tired and a little worn. She wore a very large turquoise pendant over a big grey sweater. Her hair looked a little like Lilia’s, or the way Lilia thought her hair would look if she stopped dyeing it a different color every three months. In that moment, sitting on the motel-room bed, Lilia would have given almost anything to remember her mother. The woman on the screen could have been anyone.

“Have there been any recent developments in the case?”

“I’ve recently engaged the services of a private investigative agency.” She spoke with a slight accent that Lilia couldn’t quite place.

“A private detective.”

“A private detective, yes. It does make me feel that things are hopeful, although of course it’s all been very difficult. And there have actually been a few promising leads recently, since the agency began working for me. They’re working with the FBI. I think it’s hopeful.”

“I’m so glad. What has been the most difficult aspect for you,” the interviewer asked, “on a day-to-day basis?” She leaned a hairbreadth closer, all warmth and benign concern and hoping-for-higher-ratings harmlessness, and the camera closed in on the mother’s face.

“The nights are difficult. When I sleep,” and her mother’s voice was strained, “I sometimes dream that she’s leaving me. She was so little, she was only seven that year, and I always dream of her walking away down the stairs. .”

She trailed off. The camera tried to catch Lilia’s brother, but he was staring uncooperatively into space. He seemed, if anything, beside himself with boredom.

“Would you like a tissue?” the interviewer asked rhetorically. A box of tissues had appeared on a small table by the arm of the sofa. Lilia’s mother took one and touched it lightly to her eyes, and then her hands folded and refolded it into a tiny white square on her lap.

“She’s mine,” Lilia’s mother said quietly. “She belongs with me.”

“Of course she does. Of course. Let’s talk about your son for a moment. Simon no longer lives with you, is that correct?”

“Simon lives with my first husband,” her mother said, “but he still comes to stay with me on weekends.”

“Simon,” the interviewer said, “would you like to talk a little bit about your sister?”

The camera cut to Simon, but he just looked at his shoes.

“What do you find yourself wishing for the most, more than anything else in the world?” the interviewer asked quickly.

“I wish more than anything that she would come home to me. She belongs with her mother. But if she doesn’t, if she can’t, if something — if she won’t come home, then I wish. .”

The interviewer leaned forward in her armchair, waiting. Simon said something inaudible and closed his eyes for a moment, and it was difficult to escape the impression that he’d heard all this before. What was strange to Lilia, staring at the television, was that she thought the words she almost heard from him were French.

“I know it’s terrible.” Her mother touched the tissue lightly to her eyes. “I mean, it’s terrible even to think it, but. .” Lilia touched her hands to her face while her mother kept speaking, saltwater on her fingertips, and the motel room grew dim around her; all she could see was the television screen, while the room around it faded to outlines and shadows. “But the thought of her disappearance is so terrible, I sometimes wish I could forget. .” She trailed off, twisting the tissue in her hands, and Lilia touched her fingertips to her lips.

“Forget the abduction?” the interviewer asked.

“No. I wish I could forget her.”

(Michaela, one year later in another country, rewound the tape to make sure she’d heard right: No. . forget her.)

Lilia knelt by the side table between the beds, extracted the hotel-room Bible from the top drawer and opened it to the Sixty-ninth Psalm, fumbled in the drawer for a motel pen. She wrote fast and scrawling over the text on the page, I am not missing. Stop searching for me. I want to stay with my father. Stop searching for me. Leave me alone. She signed her name and her hand was shaking, because there were still people in the world who wanted her found: she had been leaving this message in motel-room Bibles for so long now, so long, and the messages were reaching no one. It was like throwing messages in bottles into the ocean, but the bottles were drifting far from shore. There were still invisible forces moving against her, and now her picture was shining on a million screens. She left the Bible open on the bed and went to her suitcase, where her plastic change purse was a solid weight in the inner pocket. She took it with her when she slipped out of the room.

Outside the air was bright and still. It was night, but the motel balcony was made shadowless by a long line of bare lightbulbs, one above every closed blue door. Lilia left the door to the motel room slightly ajar. This was a prearranged signal: it meant that something was wrong and she was waiting in the car. From the motel balcony she surveyed the topography: there was the long low motel, a bright sprawling chain restaurant, and a gas station in between; the buildings formed a rough L shape on a large parking lot. A few trucks were parked off to one side; some distance beyond them, across the highway and away in the chaparral, the town of Leonard was a scattering of lights. There were two streetlights in the parking lot, and around them a halo of bugs swirled in a frenzy of wings. She could see the pay phone in the shadows by the restaurant, a hundred miles of parking lot away.

She moved as quietly as possible along the balcony, down the stairs, aware of the weight of every footstep. The stairs were enclosed and lit too brightly, and at every corner she expected the loom of a police officer, the dark uniform, the badge: Are you Lilia Grace Albert? We just arrested your father. Would you come with us, please? But she kept moving down the stairs as silently as possible, clutching the change purse and trying to be invisible. She had to leave the shadows along the edge of the motel and run across the harrowing brilliance of parking lot to get to the pay phone; once there she fell panting into the booth, convinced that everything was lost, and it took several fast heartbeats to realize that no one had seen her, or if they had they didn’t care. No heavy hand clamped down on her shoulder, no footsteps rang out on the parking-lot pavement, no sirens cut the dry desert air. Only three or four cars were parked here, and there were only a few silhouettes visible through the bright windows of the restaurant, where a television was shining above the bar. She couldn’t see her father among them. Shadows moved here and there behind the curtains of the motel windows, ghosts against the blue flicker of a dozen screens. She turned her back on the motel and lifted the receiver, and what was strange was that she knew the number to dial when she lifted her hand. There was silence, and then a recorded voice asking for three dollars and seventy-five cents made her jump. She fumbled in the change purse and dropped in quarters and nickels and dimes until a robotic Thank you sounded; the coins clicked softly and she turned again so that she could watch the parking lot, the dark silhouettes of gas pumps, the ceaseless movement of waitresses behind the windows of the restaurant. The steel phone cord was cool against her arm. A wind had started out of nowhere, and tumble-weeds rolled fast on the dead sand and asphalt just outside the lights of the parking lot, and she stood still, her heart pounding, listening to the sounds of the call going through. There was a click, and then another; switches flicking across a continent of mis-crossed wires, over oceans of static and disarray.

Someone answered on the second ring. And she’d known exactly what she was going to say as she dialed the number: I’m not missing, I don’t want to be found, tell them to stop looking for me, I want to stay with my father, I will never come back again and I don’t want anyone to find me, the same thing she’d written in a dozen variations in motel-room Bibles across the United States, but it wasn’t her mother who answered the phone.

“Oui?” Simon’s voice was indistinct. There was a whisper of static like a thought down the wires. Simon stays with me on weekends. Lilia realized that it was a Saturday, and also that she couldn’t form a sound in her throat.

She stood frozen for a moment in the shadows of the phone booth, pressing the receiver hard against her face.

“Is anyone there?” he asked, in French.

The breeze was picking up. A tumbleweed the size of a rabbit was skittering across the parking lot, and she was watching its escape. She found herself looking at the parking-lot lights, the way they swayed slightly in the wind, the haze of winged specks fluttering around them. Across the parking lot she saw her father moving on the upper balcony, toward the abandoned room. He pushed open the door and the flicker of the television went dark. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t put down the phone.

“Who is this?” He was at an age where his voice was breaking; it cracked across two octaves as he spoke.

“Simon,” she said finally. “C’est Lilia.”

“Where are you?” he whispered.

“I’m traveling,” she said.

“Lilia,” he whispered. “Lilia, don’t stop. Don’t come home.”

Her father was coming out of the motel room now, overlit as he hurried the length of the second-floor balcony, jackets over his shoulder, a suitcase in either hand.

“Keep traveling,” her brother whispered. “You have to stay away, even if you’re in trouble, no matter where you are. .”

Her father disappeared into the stairwell, almost running, and in that instant she found that she could run too. She let the receiver fall on its cord, the spell broken, running now, and she was across the parking lot before her father reached the foot of the stairs. In those days they were crossing Arizona in a red convertible; she climbed over the door and curled into the passenger seat, gasping, a moment before her father emerged from the stairwell and the suitcases landed in the seat behind her. A second later her father was beside her; he threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking lot. The car sped lurchingly out onto the highway, and she stared up at streetlights passing against the indigo sky.

He didn’t speak for a long time. He was tapping a nervous waltz rhythm on the wheel. His other hand was a steady, reassuring weight on Lilia’s shoulder.

“You saw the show, and you went straight to the car,” he said. “That was good. I’m proud of you. You did the right thing.”

“I can’t remember her.”

“Well. You were young.”

“I can remember my phone number,” she said.

“Your phone number? Really?”

“I can remember my phone number from when I was seven, but I can’t remember her.”

“Memory’s a strange thing.”

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

He was quiet.

“Please.”

“You meet a young beautiful divorcée in a bar,” he said finally. “She’s twenty-six years old with a two-year-old son, she’s beautiful, she’s alive, she wants to go to Africa for your honeymoon, and then it all goes dark so quickly, and the next thing you know you’re taking your kid away in the night. She’s the past, kiddo. You don’t want to live in the past, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What was her accent?”

“What?”

“My mother,” she said. “In the interview. She had an accent.”

“She’s from Quebec,” he said after a very long pause. “But I’m surprised you noticed it. Her English is immaculate.”

“What was my first language?”

“What?”

“Was it English or French?”

“We lived near Montreal,” her father said. “Just north of the American border. Your mother and I spoke both English and French. You always knew both languages.”

“But which was my first?”

“There was no first,” he said. “You have no first language.”

“How can someone have no first language?”

“You just always knew both. Your mother was French, and I was English, and it’s just the way it was. But it’s no good living in the past, my dove. I don’t want to talk about this.” And then he said, again, “I’m surprised you noticed her accent.”

She couldn’t speak, freighted by treason. The streetlights became fewer and farther between until they were replaced altogether by stars, achingly close in the dry night air. It took her a few weeks to understand that Simon had told no one. If he had, Lilia realized, she would have been caught that night.

18

Simon told no one; he’d always known exactly why his sister had gone away.

He hung up the phone, pressed *69, and wrote down the number on the palm of his hand. But before that he stayed on the line for a long time, listening to static and the desert wind.

19

The phone records for Lilia’s mother’s house arrived on Christopher’s desk once a month in a thick envelope, and a couple of years after he’d taken the case he could skim through the pages quickly; he knew most of the numbers by heart. The dentist, the psychiatrist, her first husband’s house where her son lived most of the time, her son’s friends in St.-Jean when he was visiting her on the weekends — and here he stopped cold at an incoming call from a foreign telephone number. The duration of the call had been a little over an hour. He dialed the number and listened to the endless ringing. No one picked up. He wrote, Pay phone? in the lower margin and within an hour had confirmed his suspicion.

“Only a week,” he told his wife that evening. They sat on opposite sides of the bed, formally, like lovers at the calm ending of a motel-room affair.

“A week,” she repeated tonelessly. He’d never left her alone before.

“It could be a breakthrough,” he said. “I spoke to the girl’s mother, and she knew nothing; she said she was out that night. I asked if I might speak to her son, and she reminded me of the terms of her contract and then hung up on me. I think Lilia’s brother could easily have spoken to one of them, the girl or her father, but if I can’t talk to him, I have to just. . listen, you know I hate leaving you alone.”

She smiled suddenly, insincerely it seemed to him, and said, “Well. I hope you have a lovely time.”

“It’s work,” he said. “Not a vacation. I’m just going to fly down for a week and rent a car and try to find this kid. It’s a hell of a long shot.”

“Well, try to have a lovely time anyway.”

“Thank you,” he said awkwardly. “Thank you, I’ll try.”

In Arizona he stood before the pay phone in the noonday sun; he could almost see her there in front of him, a ghost, a mirage, dialing a number dredged up from some recess of childhood memory. He turned back toward the motel. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the parking lot was silent. Two cars and an eighteen-wheeler shimmered in the heat. He stood facing the motel until he saw what he was looking for: a movement of white on the upstairs balcony, a chambermaid pushing her cart between rooms. He was walking across the expanse of parking lot when she disappeared into a dim open doorway, the door a rectangle of shadow in the brilliant light. He tried to walk loudly on the balcony so she wouldn’t be startled by anyone sneaking up behind her, but she still jumped and pressed a hand briefly to her chest when he knocked on the door of the room she was cleaning.

“I apologize for disturbing you,” he said. “Christopher Gray-don. I’m a private investigator.”

She smiled and told him a name that he wrote illegibly in his notebook. The chambermaid had lived all her life in the town of Leonard. In the long hot afternoon after the interview had aired, she had been vacuuming the abandoned room. She’d found the key in the door that morning. She hadn’t seen the Unsolved Cases episode, but she had noticed the Bible; she’d picked it up from the bed where it had been discarded, more out of an instinct for tidiness than out of any kind of religious curiosity, and noticed the note written across the page. She’d read it through a couple of times, frowning. There was something a little creepy about it, and she’d suddenly felt like she was being watched and the silence in the room was oppressive, so she’d closed the Bible quickly and put it back in the drawer. She hadn’t thought of it again until Christopher appeared in the doorway of a room she was cleaning two weeks later.

“This will sound like a very strange request,” he said after he introduced himself, “but I wonder if you might remember. .”

The chambermaid had always wanted to be famous. And she was, very briefly: “Local Tip Brings Breakthrough in Missing Girl Case” (Leonard Gazette, issue number 486), and she smiled beneath the caption with resplendently bleached hair and hoop earrings. “I didn’t think nothing of it,” she told the newspaper reporter, who changed nothing to anything before the story went to press. “Just that it was kind of weird, you know, to write something in a Bible like that, but then a detective came to see me.”

He rented a car and spent six weeks driving, tracing wider and wider circles around the town of Leonard, stopping at motels, asking questions, pulling over to close his eyes and try to imagine which way they might have gone. He called Peter, who told him to stay down there as long as he needed to; his other cases could wait. He called his wife on two consecutive evenings but got only the answering machine and so gave up trying to reach her and continued driving. On the flight home from Tempe he held the new Bible open on his lap, his eyes falling back to the message when he wasn’t staring out the window. It sent a shiver up his spine every time he looked at it. The handwriting was scrawled and uneven. She was writing fast. I am not missing. Stop searching for me. I want to stay with my father. Stop searching for me. Leave me alone. — Lilia.

She had written stop searching for me twice. He thought she must have just seen the Unsolved Cases episode, or perhaps she’d been watching it as she wrote; he imagined her writing from the edge of panic, her image flashing across the screen. She understood that she was being pursued. Her strain, telegraphed back to him through this latest message, seemed to Christopher like an acknowledgment of his existence; after two years of pursuit she had received the message that he was following her, opened a Bible to the Sixty-ninth Psalm, and written a reply. He imagined that she was speaking to him. He arrived back in Montreal in the early afternoon, and went directly from the airport to the office instead of going home. He stared at the photograph in her file, the first grade school portrait that had been used on Unsolved Cases, and caught himself whispering the same words over and over again, looking into her inscrutable eyes: Where do you go? Where do you go? He felt he’d never been so close.

MICHAELA’S MOTHER began smoking in her husband’s absence but neglected to purchase ashtrays. When Christopher came home the house had a strange, burnt smell about it; there were cigarette burns here and there on the furniture. He would have thought himself to be the kind of man who draws the line somewhere, but he found it no easier to talk to her about putting out cigarettes on the furniture than about strange ties and cheap cufflinks. He purchased a number of cheap glass ashtrays and left them here and there throughout the house. He began going to the office before sunrise, and he didn’t come home before dark. He slept with his secretary occasionally, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Michaela carefully collected perfect grades, attended the circus school in the afternoons, and began walking home from the bus stop as slowly as she possibly could.

Michaela’s mother was losing interest in domesticity. It was hard to think of it in any other way; she had attended a parent-teacher conference some months earlier and had announced that it was her last; if the school required parental involvement, she said, it wouldn’t kill Michaela’s father to take a couple hours off work. She was no longer cleaning the house; the rooms gathered dust until Christopher quietly hired a once-a-month cleaning lady. Sometime after this, she stopped cooking; her expensive set of copper pans collected dust in the kitchen, and her library of cookbooks went unopened. She brought in Chinese takeout or deli sandwiches and started buying disposable plates; they ate off Styrofoam with plastic forks. There were strange combinations: an enormous container of deli coleslaw with takeout sushi and a container of pickles. Pizza with fortune cookies. Small cartons of milk in lieu of glasses.

Once the dinner was laid out on the table, each one less dinnerlike than the one before, once Michaela and her father were seated, her mother glanced expectantly from one to the other until they started eating. Then she brought out the newspaper and proceeded to ignore both of them.

“Elaine,” Christopher said.

“I’m sorry, am I being rude?” She put the paper down. “How was work, darling?” She was like an actress impersonating a wife. Something shone terribly in her eyes in those days; she had the look of a woman with a permanent fever. It seemed that she almost never went to sleep.

“Very productive,” her father said. He no longer recognized this as the life they’d left the circus for, and he felt that there’d been some kind of a bait and switch.

“Good,” her mother said, and picked up the paper again.

In the silence after that moment Michaela tried to eat as quickly as possible, or as little as possible, or both; she wanted to leave the table as fast as she could. Her mother put the paper down.

“But no one asked me about my day!” she said. “Don’t you want to know what I did?”

“Please,” said her father, “not in front of the kid.” He didn’t look at Michaela, although she stared at his face.

“Well,” she said, “never mind, then. It doesn’t matter what I did.”

(Notes on the fragility of family, written in his other notebook much later that night: Everything matters. Everything matters. Do not ever pretend that it doesn’t matter what you did.) But instead of saying that he just said her name. She snapped at him and the conversation was carried into the kitchen, where it billowed up quickly and raged into a storm. This was the point in the evening when Michaela always left the table. She went upstairs to her bedroom and did homework or drew sketches involving tightropes and great expanses of air. She was plotting the distance to the nearest tree from her bedroom window, although this was during a period in her life when she still knew better than to try that kind of thing; no one at the circus school was allowed to walk on a tightrope without a safety net or a spotter at the very least, depending on the height of the rope, and there was a time in her life when she still understood why this was. The battle in the kitchen was loud but abstract; it was impossible to make out the content of what either of her parents was saying, only the tenor of shrieked accusations and counterattacks. There was an evening when she wandered into her parents’ bedroom, perhaps in search of silence, or of clues. Her mother’s clothes were scattered here and there. Her father’s leather bag was lying at the foot of the bed. In the months since she’d sprained her ankle at the circus school she had gone through all of her father’s files that she could find; the case he was obsessed with held a strange fascination for her.

Her father’s bag held very little of interest: a wallet, a comb, an autobiography of an LAPD hostage negotiator, a beat-up Montreal subway map, a road atlas for the Southwestern United States, half a pack of DuMaurier cigarettes. But what was strange to her was that it contained two Bibles, each with a bookmark protruding from the center pages. To the best of her recollection she had never attended a church service, and she had always been under the impression that her parents were atheists. She opened the first Bible to the bookmark, and it took a moment to make out the scrawled message in the dim glow cast by the streetlight outside the window. Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home. — Lilia.

Her breath caught in her throat. No, the missing girl’s mother said in a grainy 1987 videotape of a long-archived television episode, I wish I could forget her. The pitch of the argument downstairs was changing, moving closer to the foot of the stairs. She tore the page from the Bible, folded it quickly, put it in her pocket and left the room.

20

In the times when Lilia wasn’t hiding in the backseat of the car, when there was no one else on the road and the breeze through the passenger-side window was perfect, when she could forget that she was being chased and that she might be found someday, when it was only her father and the radio and the highway — in these times Lilia and her father could talk for hours, and life seemed gorgeous and magnificent and safe. Safety is a car driving quickly away.

He wasn’t content with showing her the country: he wanted to show her what he saw in it, to share his private love affair with the sheer beauty of all the details that he could never stop noticing no matter how long he traveled or how fast. When he talked about details — flowers, fences, individual buildings, the poetry hidden in the names of towns — Lilia felt her heart swelling up with an awkward adoration for it all. But she never felt at ease in the world. It couldn’t be claimed that she was really a part of it, and from the specific night when her memories began (ice against window, lost bunny, snow), the traditions of the world were foreign to her. She picked up what she could from books and television shows, noting carefully the existence of two-parent families, houses, schools, family dogs, memorizing intriguingly home-specific phrases like latchkey kid and back garden and state-of-the-art kitchen appliance and basement. She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.

At the gas stations her father bought magazines: the NewYorker, Newsweek, Science Times. These she studied carefully, anthropologically, for information on the world she traveled through. Or he’d buy a book written in a language that she was supposed to be learning at the time (Spanish, Italian, German) and set parameters: By the time we reach St. Louis, kiddo, I’d like a written translation of the first half page. And she’d bend feverishly over the relevant split-language dictionary (English-German, Español-Inglés, Italiana-Inglese), and he’d give warnings— Ten miles, kiddo, eight, six, time. And at the motel that night he’d go over the page with a red pencil while she pretended not to care and stared coolly at the television set. It flickered bluely in a thousand motel rooms while she watched it and half expected to see herself there on the screen.

When she was younger she used to tell herself, with some smugness, that some people vanish forever and never are found. Until the interview on Unsolved Cases, she still believed herself to be one of them. It wasn’t that she ceased to be happy after she saw herself on television; it was that after she saw herself on television she was aware that someday all of this would end.

21

“Dad,” Michaela said once, standing at the foot of the stairs while he worked at the dining room table, “can I run away and join the circus?”

Christopher looked up, blinking. He had hardly been home since the page had been torn from the oldest Bible; he couldn’t look at his wife without thinking about it, without wondering how she could sabotage him so completely, and so had taken to avoiding her altogether. Michaela looked different somehow, and then he realized that she’d gotten a haircut since the last time he’d really looked at her.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“One A.M.”

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can I join the circus?”

“You can’t join the circus,” he replied, annoyed by the question but still grateful to be forced into conversation with her, remembering when he looked at her face that her latest school picture was still in a desk drawer at work. “We’ve discussed this, remember? A few weeks ago, when you sprained your ankle? The answer’s no.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Six months,” he said, and shook his head.

She was looking at him blankly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “the answer’s still no.”

“But why not?”

“You know why not. We already left the circus.”

When he said it aloud, he felt curiously bereft; he didn’t come home very often at all after that, even at night. When her parents didn’t come home Michaela sat in the living room, watching television alone late at night. One evening a commercial she didn’t like came on, and she threw a coffee mug at the screen. The screen cracked with a satisfying pop of light and went dark, and the mug rolled broken under the sofa. After that when she turned on the television the screen lit up but was blue and blank and had a jagged crackling dark line down the center. Days began to go by when she saw neither of them; she came and went in a house filled with large spaces and shadows, did her laundry sometimes in the evenings in the quiet basement, did her homework in her room at night. She pushed a shopping cart through the wide bright aisles of a grocery store a few blocks away, filling it up with microwave dinners and toaster waffles in a dozen flavors, and spent a great deal of time arranging these in the freezer. She wouldn’t have said that she was particularly unhappy; she valued her privacy, and the house was more peaceful without them. She rarely saw her father except in passing; coming out of the upstairs bedroom with a shirt over his arm, going through a box of his files in the dining room. Her mother was prone to coming home at unexpected times— the middle of the afternoon, three A.M., eight in the morning. She had very little to say, right up until the evening when Michaela came home and found her father sitting alone in the dining room with a half-eaten layer cake. The icing was pink.

“You missed the party,” her father said. He was leaning as far back as his chair would go without falling over, looking at his hands clasped on the table. He didn’t look up at her.

“My birthday isn’t for another week,” Michaela said. “I’m still fourteen.”

“It was a going-away party. Your mother left.”

“Left where? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “She didn’t tell me. She just brought home a cake and said she was leaving.”

“Did she say when she’d be back?”

“Well, that’s just it, pumpkin,” he said. “She was a little noncommittal on the subject of whether she was coming back again.”

“Did she say why?”

“Apparently I work too much.”

Michaela went up to her room then, and closed the door. She didn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that. It was much easier to drop out of school than she would have expected, but after a week her father got a phone call from the principal’s office and made her go back. A few days later he left a note on her bedside table (Gone to U.S. on business, back in a couple weeks, keep going to school, will wire grocery money to your checking account, call Peter if you need anything) and disappeared. She was used to his business trips, which generally lasted three weeks; this time, however, she didn’t see him again for a year. When she told Eli this, some years later, he understood that she thought of the quiet dissolution of her family as having been more or less Lilia’s fault. Lilia had, after all, written her name in a Bible, and she did run out barefoot into the snow.

“You can see why I hate her,” Michaela said.