Last Night in Montreal

36

The day after Lilia’s sixteenth birthday Lilia’s father drove through the morning and afternoon. Mirages shimmered on the desert: pools of water appeared on the highway ahead, and the mountains broke from the horizon and floated between the earth and the sky. The heat was unspeakable. She was profoundly happy. Her father drove in silence, every so often blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. They stopped that night in a town the color of dust where the only restaurants were a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and the Denny’s attached to the motel, and the waitress who took their breakfast order there in the morning looked hungover, pale and blinking. Her father studied the map across the table, leaning in close to peer at the faded lines.

“We could be in the mountains by afternoon,” he said. “Just another few hours of desert.”

Lilia was supposed to be the navigator, but the map had been folded on the dashboard of the car for nine years now, and it was fading under the barrage of light. Entire states were dissolving into pinkish sepia, the lines of highways fading to grey. The names of certain cities were indistinct now along the fold, and all the borders were vanishing. Her seat-belt buckle was searing to the touch. She put on dark glasses and stared out the window. This fever-dream landscape awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars reflected in phantom water on the highway far ahead. Everything drowning in light and false water, borders irrelevant and disappearing fast, all edges blunted in the brilliant light; she closed her eyes in the heat of the day and realized that she was thinking for the first time in several months of her mother. There was always a place in Lilia’s mind where her mother existed as a shadow, or perhaps it was the other way around; not a memory, exactly, more of a ghost. It seemed possible sometimes that Lilia was the one who was haunting her, even from this far away. She was disappearing into sunlight in a secondhand car two days after her sixteenth birthday, and her mother was inconsolable in the distance.

Lilia’s mother asleep the night she went away; she didn’t hear the sound that woke her daughter up that night, the sharp clear percussion of ice hitting the windowpane from outside. That night Lilia’s father put her in the car and wrapped a blanket around her and they drove for a hundred miles through the dark, well over the border; he had their passports ready, and they were waved across. In the northern United States he pulled over and retrieved a silver thermos from between the seats. He unscrewed the top and poured out a plastic cup of hot chocolate and placed it steaming in her hands. Lilia took it without a word. She hadn’t seen him in years, and she was too shy to speak to him yet; she looked down at the gauze bandages and then closed her eyes instead of answering when her father asked if she was okay, and her father touched her face to make her look at him.

“It will be all right,” he said. “I promise.” She stared up at him and sipped the chocolate and nodded. Her memories of that night held no trace of regret.

But nine years later she closed her eyes in a car in the desert, and despite the happiness of the moment she was shot through with doubt. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping was imminent; after this one last birthday road trip they were going back to Stillspell, to Clara’s house in the desert, Clara’s creaky staircases and blue rooms and morning coffee.

“Aren’t you looking forward to staying there?” her father asked. “Not traveling anymore?”

“I’m not sure I know how to stay,” Lilia said.

37

“Did she ever give you an explanation?” Michaela asked. She had hair like cartoon lightning, hard and spiky; she ran her hands through it and it stood on end. She had dyed her hair that afternoon. Black hair, black bustier, black vinyl miniskirt. Everything about her reminded Eli of midnight. He sat at the small wooden table behind her, watching her reflection, overwhelmed by her presence, her ferocious green eyes, trying to think of something to say. The palms of his hands were pressed to the tabletop, and he could feel the vibration of the music upstairs.

“How late did you sleep?” he asked instead of answering her. He had left her asleep on the carpet the previous morning, walking back to the hotel past the amused stares of desk clerks, up to the dim early-morning grey of the room, where he’d fallen asleep instantly on top of the covers. In the early afternoon he sat for a long time in a café not far from Club Electrolite, composing a rambling letter to Zed. He’d gone so far as to buy a number of stamps, but it wasn’t clear to him whether he would mail it; the envelope was folded in half in his jacket pocket, along with the page from the Gideon Bible that Lilia had written on as a child, and from time to time — he never took his jacket off anymore, even indoors — he would reach into his pocket and run his fingers over the envelope just to be sure it was still there.

“I don’t know,” she said, “midafternoon. Then I got up and dyed my hair.”

“It looks nice,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.” She was drawing a dark pencil outline around the edges of her lipstick. “Do you think anyone would miss me if I didn’t go out?”

“No one would miss you,” he said. “You’re like a part of the night.”

Anyone else would have taken that badly, but she was smiling as she set her lip-liner pencil down on the countertop. They were quiet for a while, Eli looking down at the ruined surface of the table. Someone had stubbed out a great many cigarettes on the wood, over a long period of time; the surface was scarred with dark craters and lines.

“How long have you been here?” Michaela asked.

He looked up. She leaned back in her chair, studied herself in the mirror for a second, and began searching for a slightly darker shade of lipstick. Her pale hand hovered over the chaos of tubes and jars on the countertop.

“Two weeks,” he said. “I’m about to max out my last credit card.” The weight of the fourteen days in this city descended like a curtain over everything, and he couldn’t see her for a moment.

She made a sound that could have been a laugh. She’d found the lipstick she’d been searching for; when Eli looked at her she was applying it slowly, her lips turning to a shade midway between black and blood-red.

“My fellow sailor,” she said. Her voice was kind. “Did she ever give you an explanation?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

She looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the mirror. “Two acquaintances,” she said, “two friends, two fellow sailors marooned together on a hostile ice floe, speaking the wrong language, talking about an accident that occurred six or seven years ago in another country.” She was putting gel in her hair, making it harder and spikier. “What harm would it do?”

He sighed.

“Why not tell me? She betrayed you.”

“She didn’t—”

“She left.”

He stared down at the tabletop.

“When you find her,” she said, “when you finally find her, do you really think she’ll come home with you, after all this?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

A long time passed in silence, while she sprayed something in her hair to make it stand on end and then brushed silver powder over her eyelids.

“Michaela,” he said finally, “I would do a great deal for you. But I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“You know,” she said, “I was thinking earlier today, while I was dyeing my hair, I was thinking my father and you have a lot in common. You were both left by Lilia.”

“You were left by Lilia too.”

She sat still for a moment, looking at her reflection, and then stood up slowly and moved past him to the clothing rack. There was a new-looking plastic bag hanging from one of the cheap wire hangers; she tore it open and pulled out a pair of black feathery wings. They were the sort of thing a child might wear on Halloween night, fluffy and not very large. She slipped the elastic loops over her bony shoulders and spent a few minutes trying to make them even in the mirror.

“Jacques bought them for me,” she said. “So I’ll be like the sign.”

He watched her. She smiled at herself and did one slow turn in the mirror, admiring the wings from every angle. She was beautiful to him. He had an image of Michaela as a little girl, dressing up for Halloween in a pair of angel wings in the years before her parents left her, and he closed his eyes.

“If I told you. .” he began, “if I did tell you, would you promise. .” and instantly regretted saying even this much, but it was already too late; she was already moving around the table to kneel in front of his chair, there were already tears in her eyes, she was already holding his hands in her own, and Lilia, far away in a previous life, was already careening toward the accident in the backseat of her father’s car.

38

In a bar on the outskirts of Ellington, New Mexico, a few miles from the town of Stillspell, Christopher was sitting alone with a whiskey and planning his departure from the United States. It was evening, the day after Lilia’s sixteenth birthday, and Lilia was moving ever farther away. He was aware that she was somewhere to the north, and frightened by his awareness. He didn’t see Clara come in; she slipped onto the barstool beside him and ordered a Coke without looking at him.

“I don’t know anything,” she said, “first of all.”

“Right.” He struggled to flatten his voice and make his accent longer and more Southern, more American.

“But let’s say I knew someone,” she said. “Let’s say I knew someone who knew someone.”

He nodded.

“I mean, suppose I knew someone who’d been, for a very long time, perhaps years, inviting a fugitive. .” She glanced around theatrically and lowered her voice. “What if she’d been inviting a fugitive into her home for a long time? A criminal. Would she be implicated?”

“Not if she were ignorant of his crimes.”

“What if she weren’t?”

“Well,” he said, “then I suppose it’s something else.”

“What if she’d seen this man. . what if she’d seen him on television, with his little girl, before she even met him, what if she knew exactly who he was when she saw him in person for the first time, but never let on and never told anyone?”

“For Christ’s sake, Clara, stop speaking in the third person. I’m not asking you to turn him in.”

“But I thought you were,” she said, and turned white when she realized what she’d said.

“Listen,” he said, “I approached you for a reason, and it wasn’t to get to him. I don’t want you to ever go to the police, do you understand?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she replied indistinctly.

“No, you’re not planning on it, but you might get scared, and the thought might cross your mind. You might get into a fight with him, you might wake up one day and decide you’re sick of wondering why he did it. I can see that you’re pregnant, and you might be panicking because you’re going to have his child and you’re not convinced that he won’t take that child away too, you might do something unplanned and regrettable and tell someone before you realize what you’re doing, and I’m asking you not to.”

“Why would you ask that?”

“It’s never black and white,” he said. “You know it was an abduction. But what if he saved his child?”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

“No,” he said, “you do follow; stay with me here. Look, it isn’t the best parent who gains custody. It’s just the one with the best lawyer.”

She was silent.

“Even setting the question of lawyers aside for a moment,” Christopher said, “the mother almost always gets custody. It’s just the way it is. Imagine that his ex-wife wouldn’t let him see their daughter, imagine that she’d obtained a restraining order for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, so that the man was barred from approaching his daughter by legal means. And then, after all this, imagine that the child was in danger and had been hurt once, badly; imagine if he was alerted to this, and the only action he could think of was to take her away in the middle of the night? Once he’d done that, there was no undoing that moment. It never was possible to stop taking her away, once he started; he’s still taking her away, because he’s still taking care of her.”

Clara was still, looking down at her glass.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve been working on this case for years now. I interviewed her brother a few months ago, finally, and he—”

“What took you so long?” she asked indistinctly.

“It’s a long story. A contract expired. Clara, listen, I know what happened to her. I know why she has scars on her arms. It’s still an abduction, it’s still against the law, but imagine that he saved her life. Wouldn’t that mitigate everything else? Absolutely everything?” He was silent for a moment, toying with his hat on the bar. “Her father took her away because he felt he had to, and if you care for either of them, never go to the police. That’s all I wanted to say to you.”

There were tears on her face. “Thank you,” she said.

He left her there and went back to his car in the half-empty parking lot. He drove back past the Stillspell Hotel, past the Morning Star Diner with all its windows alight. The highway was almost empty. He drove well above the speed limit, covering ground. In a car somewhere far ahead, Lilia was singing along to the radio with her father. They had left New Mexico. They would stop at a motel soon; it was getting late. But Christopher, behind them, drove through the night.

39

“Are you still awake?” Lilia whispered. It was the middle of October, and a crescent moon was rising outside the bedroom window of the apartment in Brooklyn. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and Eli was lying on his back beside her in the darkness; she had been speaking softly for nearly a half hour, telling a long story about cars and motel rooms and driving away, and he was listening in perfect silence.

“Of course I’m awake. It was your sixteenth birthday. Clara brought home a cake.”

“Right,” she said. “We ate cake up on the rooftop, and then the next day we left. It was just a short trip we were taking, gone for a few days and then back home to Stillspell, but the day after we left there was an accident.”

“A car accident? Were you hurt?”

“You have to promise never to tell anyone.”

“Sure,” he said.

“No, promise you won’t tell anyone this part, no matter what, even a long time from now, even if you’re angry with me.”

“Why would I be angry with you?” In sixteen days she would leave him and travel away again, but only one of them knew that.

“Just promise you won’t tell anyone, no matter what.”

“Okay,” he said, “I promise. No matter what.”

40

On a narrow highway in the mountains, old and in considerable disrepair, two cars moved quickly under a brilliant sky. The car in front was a small grey Toyota, purchased specifically because it was absolutely forgettable. The car traveling behind was a sky-blue Ford Valiant with Quebec license plates, and it had been directly behind the Toyota for nearly an hour. There was a newer highway nearby — wider, safer, with a less calamitous drop-off on the right shoulder — but the first car had pulled onto the old highway an hour ago, and the second car was in pursuit. Lilia’s father swerved around potholes, a fallen branch, hands clenched on the steering wheel. Sometime earlier he had turned off the radio. Now he drove ten miles above the speed limit in charged speechlessness, and ten miles above the speed limit wasn’t fast enough.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said finally, quietly. For him, it was an extraordinary admission. He pulled over sharply to the side of the highway and cut the engine. The blue Valiant slowed as it moved past them and pulled over on the shoulder of the road ahead. In that moment before the driver’s-side door opened, the stillness was nearly absolute.

The man who emerged from the car had an almost spindly look about him. He was tall and slump-shouldered, in a rumpled brown suit jacket and faded blue jeans. He had a brown fedora, which he removed from his head as he approached. He carried it in both hands in front of him, like a present. Lilia’s father was rolling down his window, and the only sounds were the man’s footsteps approaching on the pavement, and wind in the pine trees by the sides of the road. Her father’s other hand was on the key.

The man rested his forearm on the roof of the car, looking in. He didn’t look like an FBI agent.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. He spoke with the softest traces of Lilia’s mother’s accent. “It’s just that I’ve been traveling alongside you for a while. For quite some time.” He was looking directly at Lilia, frozen in the passenger seat. “I’m going home tomorrow, and I won’t be coming back to this country again. I just wanted to tell you that you don’t need to travel anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lilia’s father said.

“Look, I understand why you did it,” the detective said. “I have a daughter in Montreal, and I wish I’d done the same sometimes.” A car was approaching; it passed in a blur of red and he was quiet for a moment, watching it recede. “I spoke to Simon last year, and I know why you did what you did. I know what happened that night. I just wanted to say good-bye, to wish you the best, I just wanted to tell you—”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“You ever heard the story of Icarus?” the detective asked. “I’ve been reading it recently. This is what it comes down to: I don’t mind not being the hero of the story, I don’t mind being the shepherd watching you fly out over the sea with your child, but I don’t want to be the Minotaur.” He straightened up, his hands in his pockets, looking away down the hill. “I don’t know how else to put it,” he said. “I just don’t want to chase you anymore. I’m going to say I couldn’t find you, and that’ll be it. That’ll be it. I don’t think anyone else is looking for you anymore.”

Lilia’s father was staring straight ahead through the windshield, not speaking, but Lilia saw a muscle working frantically in his jaw.

“Good luck,” said Christopher. “Lilia.” He stared at her for a moment longer and smiled. “A pleasure to see you, as always. Your brother sends his regards. Happy birthday, my love.” He turned away and walked back toward his car. Lilia sat still beside her father, watching Christopher recede; the detective started his car and drove away, disappeared around a bend in the highway ahead and was lost behind the pine trees, and only then did her father turn the key in the ignition.

It took her a few minutes to realize that he was still driving too fast.

“You don’t know your mother,” he said when she looked at him. His voice was hoarse and he’d gone pale. There was sweat on his forehead.

“He said he wasn’t going to chase us anymore.” She felt sick.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing she’d tell him to say. You don’t know your mother, it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d. .” The blue car had come into sight up ahead. “She will never stop chasing you,” her father said. “She will never give you up.” The detective was driving slowly now, like a sightseer. He was driving one-handed, resting his other arm on the edge of the open window. He craned his neck briefly to look up; Lilia followed his gaze and saw the mountains, the sheer rock just visible above the trees to the left. “Lilia,” her father said, abruptly calm, “get in the backseat behind me, and put on your seat belt.”

The highway turned and twisted through dark pine forest. In the seat behind him Lilia pressed her face to the glass to look up at the sky. She wanted to be anywhere else in the world. There were hawks circling in the high blue air. The Valiant was very close now, and she forced herself to look at it. She saw the detective glance up into his rearview mirror, and she was close enough to see the expression of benign surprise. He raised his hand to wave, uncomprehending.

“Lilia,” said her father, “cover your eyes.”

She didn’t cover her eyes. Her father was pulling up alongside the detective’s car; he glanced back and forth between the detective’s car and the highway ahead, and then slowly, with methodical precision, he began to turn the wheel to the right. The grind and screech of metal on metal was unbearable, but she couldn’t look away, and both cars were moving toward the edge of the road. Lilia’s father was looking out the passenger-side window, judging the distance and the degree of force required, gradually easing the other car off the road. There was a very short period when it seemed possible that the detective might still manage to stay on the highway, might still swerve to safety at the very last possible instant and speed ahead and make it after all, but her father gave the wheel one last, barely perceptible turn, so that Christopher’s car left the highway altogether and began a sideways, almost slowmotion slide off the edge of the embankment, down the hill, flipping slowly over onto its side and then upside down and then out of sight as she turned to watch out the back window, and she heard the nerve-shattering impact of metal around the trunk of a tree.

It wasn’t the accident itself that broke her, but the way he surrendered to it. It seemed, no matter how she tried to reconfigure the moment in her memory, that the detective looked sideways at the car forcing him off the road with a calm, almost eager expression. He was ready for the accident. There was a fleeting moment when he met Lilia’s eyes, just at the end: he smiled and allowed himself to slide over the edge. He made no discernible effort to stay on the road.

41

Michaela rose from the floor of the dressing room and left the room without speaking, picking her jacket up off the floor as she went, pulling it on over her lopsided wings. Eli followed her up the stairs, lost her in the crowds on the dance floor, and found her again on the frozen sidewalk outside, shivering and speaking into her cell phone. “I don’t care,” she said, “meet me there anyway.” She put the cell phone in her jacket pocket and looked at him as if they’d never met.

“Michaela?”

“Eli,” she said.

“Who were you talking to?”

She looked at him without answering. There was a blankness about her. He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

“I told you the story,” he said. “Now you have to tell me where she is.”

“I don’t know. She was here the night you came.” She began walking away from him with stiff, tottering steps; he reached out to steady her, and they walked together arm in arm. “She was in the dressing room that night, before I brought you down there. I guess I should’ve brought you down sooner, before she had a chance to leave.” She stopped, pulled her arm away from his, fumbled in her jacket pocket. “She said she’d wait for me in the dressing room till I came back,” she muttered. “Fucking liar.” She extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her jacket.

“People fail you,” he said impatiently. “It’s a chance you take. Where’s Lilia?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “She left. She was supposed to be in my dressing room when you. . fuck,” she said. The lighter was clicking uselessly. “You have a light?”

There were two matchbooks in his pocket. He didn’t smoke but had at some point acquired the habit of compulsively collecting promotional matchbooks from restaurants.

“You want Le Gamin matches or Café Universale matches?”

She gave him a blankly vicious look, like a wild creature deprived of food. He gave her both matchbooks.

“Your pronunciation’s terrible,” she said when the cigarette was safely ignited. They’d made slow, wavering progress to a street corner; the light changed to red just as they reached the edge of the sidewalk, and he watched her shivering and smoking. He took her arm again and she leaned into him silently.

“I’m sorry, Michaela,” he said uselessly. “It’s an awful story.” The cold was agonizing; he’d never imagined this quality of wind. It was possible to imagine his blood freezing under his skin, and there was ice in his eyelashes. It was eleven P.M. on a Sunday, and Rue Ste.-Catherine was all but deserted. Neon signs flickered from behind the barred windows of clubs. Girls Girls Girls. Danseuses Nues.

“I need to find Lilia,” he said.

She laughed. “You’d be amazed at how many people have said that in her lifetime. I don’t know where she is.”

“You have to know, you promised to tell me. Is she still in the city?”

She didn’t answer. They’d crossed the street and were heading slowly downhill, past the Musique Plus building, past electronics stores and closed cafés. They were passing into a surreal public space that he’d walked past many times without venturing into, a sweeping expanse of concrete and terraced steps. It was lit by regularly spaced black lampposts, each holding five round orbs of blue light. In the midst of all this was a rectangular pool, utterly still and locked in dark ice.

Michaela seemed exhausted; she was leaning on his arm, breathing heavily. She broke away from him to walk slowly up the steps, sat down haltingly about halfway to the top. She stayed there in an apparent daze, smoking, while he shivered up and down and tried to figure out what to do. Her teeth were chattering. After a couple of minutes he sat beside her, wrapped his arms around his body, and tried to convince himself that he would someday regain feeling in his toes.

“Well, look,” he said, “when did you see her last?”

She opened her box of cigarettes, extracted one delicately, and then lit it expertly with the remains of its predecessor. She tossed the old one away, toward the street; he watched it smolder for an instant on the ice. She didn’t seem likely to answer him, so he tried another tack.

“What’s this place called?”

“Place-des-Arts. It’s nicer in summer.” She removed the cigarette from her mouth, studied it while she exhaled, reinserted it languidly, all without looking at him.

“I think,” said Eli, “that we should probably keep moving. It can’t be more than twenty degrees out.”

She glanced at him briefly. “I don’t know Fahrenheit.”

“It’s no warmer in Celsius. The point is that we’re going to die out here. We should go,” he said, but Michaela was weeping. She swept tears away from her face with one shaking hand and held the cigarette loosely with the other. Ashes drifted to the snow.

“I always thought I wanted to know what happened,” she said.

“Hey,” he said helplessly, “it’ll be all right. We just have to keep walking. We’ll go somewhere, my sailor, we’ll go to the café, I’ll buy you tea. .”

She was pulling herself up by a metal railing, shaking her head.

“I don’t want tea,” she said.

He held her shoulder to steady her, and her silver jacket was shining in the blue lights of the plaza. He looked away from her, toward the long expanse of Rue Ste.-Catherine. A nightmare of locked doors and closed restaurants and buzzing neon signs, panhandlers begging to be rescued from the cold, wrong city, and he wished to be absolutely anywhere else. He wished he had never walked into the Café Matisse in Brooklyn, or at least that he’d waited for his own table instead of sitting down with Lilia. He wished he had been paying attention on the morning she’d left and stopped her on her way out the door. He wished, if those previous wishes had failed, that at least he hadn’t followed her here. An eternal half-life in Brooklyn, he thought, an eternal half-life of posers and unfinished manuscripts and fake artists and failed scholarship and guilt-inducing phone calls from his mother and letters from his unmatchable and unsurpassable brother would have been better than an hour of this.

“I don’t understand how you can live here,” he said.

“I can’t. I’ll be leaving soon.” She started up the steps, and he stepped close to hold her arm again. There was a layer of ice over everything; they were passing slowly over the concrete plaza away from Rue St.-Catherine, stepping carefully, Rue Ontario deserted on the other side. “Do you know what Lilia said about this city?”

The name still made his heart constrict in his chest.

“What did she say about it?”

“She said she’d traveled one city too far. She said she wished she’d never left New York.”

And there in the concrete plaza, the weight of centuries and continents lifted away from him into the night; he was suddenly, absurdly, fantastically light. She wished she’d never left him. This could all be undone. He could have leapt into the air just then and never landed, but he stayed on the ground and seized her shoulders instead.

“Please tell me where she is.”

“You’ll go back to Brooklyn with her,” she said, “and I’ll still be here.”

“You just said you were leaving.”

“She only stayed with me because she wanted me to tell her what happened that night, why she had those scars on her arms. I only stayed with her because I wanted her to tell me about an accident, and now that you’ve told me, I wish I didn’t know.” There was an uneven quality to her voice, and a brightness in her eyes that struck him as unhealthy. “Did you notice them?”

“Notice what?”

“The scars,” she said.

“Of course I did.”

“Her mother threw her through a window.” She fumbled in her pockets again; she lit another cigarette and smiled terribly. “That’s the part of the story she doesn’t know, the part she doesn’t remember. Partial amnesia is the most remarkable thing.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Fortunately,” said Michaela, “it’d snowed heavily the night before. Cushioned the fall, I’d imagine. Probably saved her life.”

“I don’t want to know any of this. All I want to know is where she is.”

“No,” she said, “you need to know the story, so you can tell it to her when you see her next. I’m not sure if I’m going to see her again. So listen to me, this will just take a second: her mother threw her through a window. She was seven years old. She lay in the snow until her brother came out to get her.”

“Her brother?”

“Simon. He was nine or ten at the time. Simon said the mother was hysterical, weeping and carrying on. She told Simon much later that she never knew what it was about Lilia that made her want to annihilate her so desperately, but there it is: she throws her seven-year-old daughter through a window at night and leaves her outside in the snow. Remember, we’re talking about Quebec in the wintertime. It was probably as cold that night as it is now.”

He was silent, watching her.

“Simon went outside to get her. She landed in a deep snowdrift outside the window; nothing was broken, but she had cuts all over her arms from the glass. He got her back into the house and put towels around her arms to stop the bleeding, and then he called Lilia’s father, his ex-stepfather. . He told his sister’s father to come get her. Do you understand? Her own brother arranged her abduction,” she said.

It took him a moment to recover his voice. “Lilia doesn’t remember this?”

“None of it. She doesn’t know what happened. There was a first-aid kit somewhere in the house; Simon bandaged his sister’s arms as best he could, got her upstairs and put her to bed and lay down to wait in the room next door. He left the front door unlocked. Lilia’s father came late that night and saw the broken glass in the snow, just like Simon told him. When she came downstairs, her father took her away. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s the moment when Lilia’s memories begin; her father throws broken glass at her bedroom window, and she hears the sound and sits up in bed.”

“Michaela, you have to tell me where she is.”

“Fairly close by, I imagine. She rents a room not far from here.” She held her cigarette up in the air. “My last cigarette,” she announced. “I’m quitting tonight.”

“Good. You smoke too much.”

“I’m going into the subway system,” Michaela said. She stepped backward. “Which way are you going?”

“I don’t know yet, Michaela. You have to tell me where to go.”

“Why should I?” She was more interested in the cigarette. She inhaled deeply, looked at it for a second, and then dropped it half finished into the snow.

“I am so tired,” Eli said. “It’s so cold out here. I want to go home.”

She took a few more steps backward, away from him. He watched the movements of her sleek boots on the precarious ice. The toes were scuffed. “She’s been renting a room on Rue de la Visitation,” she said finally. “Corner of Ontario Street, in Centre-Sud. East of here. You just follow Ontario Street that way, ten or so blocks. It’s the brown building on the southwest corner, across from a restaurant that used to be a gas station. Her building sort of sags outward toward the street. There’re always transvestite hookers in front of it.” She gestured in a northeasterly direction. “Say good-bye to her for me?”

“I will.” He was moving away from her, waving, already somewhere else. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She turned away without answering. He watched her recede for a moment and then began walking as fast as he could over the ice. West on Ontario Street toward Rue de la Visitation, and even this coldest of cities seemed suddenly exquisite to him. The blank cement architecture was refreshingly clean-lined. The wide empty streets were calm instead of lifeless. The cold was almost bracing. The exhaustion that had settled over him in the weeks since she’d gone was beginning to lift, slowly, in increments too small to be individually observed, the way mist rises from a river in the morning. She wished she’d never left New York.

He didn’t get very close to Rue de la Visitation. Michaela’s last few words were pulling at him—Say good-bye to her for me? — and near the corner of St.-Laurent he understood; Eli stopped as if shot in the amber streetlight and turned back the way he had come. Walking quickly at first, but then he broke into a run; back toward the parking lot, gasping in the ice-locked air. His teeth hurt with each footstep on the frozen pavement, the cold burning his face. He ran back to Place-des-Arts in the staggering cold, he threw himself down the stairs of the Métro Place-des-Arts station and ran past the ticket booth, vaulting over a turnstile and running faster, down to the level of fast underground trains, faster still, but the girl at the far end of the westbound platform had been standing there for several minutes by the time he saw her, and the trains were running slightly ahead of schedule that night. It was warm down here; she had taken off her silver jacket and folded it neatly on a nearby bench. The Halloween wings were still on her back, although now they were lopsided, and an empty red cigarette box was crushed in one hand.

Although the subway lines of all cities differ in details, the sequence of events is more or less the same: first a slight wind down the length of the tunnel, a few seconds before even the sound of the train. Then (depending on the city, the design of the subway system, the specifics of the individual station) there are a few seconds or even a full minute of approaching light: twin beams through the darkness, and by now the approaching thunder of sound. By the time Eli reached the platform, pursued by a police officer who’d watched him jump the turnstile at the ticket booth, he could already see the lights. Approaching at a merciless speed into the station, closer and closer to the waiting girl. There were people on the platform, some looking at him now as he ran — he thought he heard someone say his name — but he was aware of no one but Michaela in that moment.

It’s possible that she didn’t hear him screaming her name as he ran full speed down the platform toward her. She was utterly intent on what she was about to do just then, poised on the edge with one foot slightly forward, like a tightrope walker about to step out onto the rope. She was looking at the approaching lights.

Eli was screaming in formless sounds now — although the pursuing official hadn’t noticed the girl and kept calling out for him to stop in perfectly comprehensible French — but screaming halts nothing.

In the instant before the train would have passed her, the girl stepped forward into the onslaught of air.

42

Sometimes at night Simon still thinks of his sister’s departure, of watching from the landing window as Lilia’s father carried her away across the lawn, the way she clung so tightly to her father’s neck — the bandages Simon had put on her arms a few hours earlier stark white in the moonlight — until they disappeared into the forest. There’s a number that he dials sometimes from memory, on nights when he can’t sleep. He pressed *69 once, when he was very young, and wrote the number down on his hand. No one ever picks up, but he’s soothed by the crackle of static over the line, and there’s a pleasing sense of bridging tremendous distance. The ringing sounds unfathomably far away.

There is a pay phone by a truck stop near the town of Leonard, Arizona. Sometimes at night it starts to ring.

43

Eli’s bed was the hull of a fishing boat. An antique figurehead had been mounted on the bow; in daylight she took the form of a woman rising out of foam, her eyes burning a path toward the north star and morning. Her hair had been painted the color of fire, her eyes a terrible and final blue. In her arms she held a fish: an hour by subway from the nearest ocean, it opened its gasping mouth to the sky.

Her eyes guarded the door to his bedroom, which had been painted like the entrance to a pirate’s cave, and he was grateful for her presence; in the first days after the hospital, his blood heavy with memory and sedatives, he felt too sick to be alone in the room. Nothing in the room, he found, was quite real. This had been the case since midchildhood, but it was more problematic these days than it had been. The walls were blue, and streaked with lighter and darker shades that made them look watery in certain lights. This effect had been noticed by his brother when they were nine and eleven, and they’d spent a few weeks painting desert islands and fish. Their mother, who had a great love of consistency, had installed the figurehead bed the following year. The room was a dreamish seascape, more amateurish in some places than in others; Zed, besides being two years older, was a better painter than Eli. In bad moments Eli thought he might be drowning, but he didn’t want to say anything or request a move to another bedroom. He felt bad about all the trouble everyone had already gone to.

It hadn’t been easy to retrieve him from Montreal; the hospital had lost his wallet. This was hardly unprecedented, but in this particular case it was unusually disastrous; with the wallet missing somewhere in the understaffed chaos of the emergency room and the patient in no mood to illuminate anyone, no one knew the patient’s name. The police liked to come by occasionally, particularly in the first few days, and ask leading questions from the chair next to the bed, alternating hopefully between English and French. The patient would reply in neither language and stared blankly or tearfully out the window instead.

In those days he existed in a state of profound distraction; he was deeply preoccupied with watching the same two nightmares playing over and over and over again on an agonizingly continuous loop. The first was a speeded-up version of his girlfriend leaving his apartment in Brooklyn. This had happened some time before he had arrived at the hospital, but the details remained brilliant: she stands before the sofa running her fingers through her still damp hair, she kisses him on the head for the third time that morning, she announces that she’s going for the paper, the door closes and he hears her footsteps going down the stairs. The other involved a train, a girl holding a crushed red cigarette box, and the brownish interior of the Métro Place-des-Arts subway station in downtown Montreal. He closes his eyes and sees the way the tightrope walker steps out into the empty air, sans tightrope, the way the small dark figure is suspended for an instant in front of the blue train until she falls and is lost in the thudding conspiracy of machinery and rails and heavy dark wheels, now slick. He fell down by the platform edge and this was where he was plucked from, later. He’d thought he heard Lilia’s voice. Later he woke in a pale blank room, unspeaking, and this was where he remained for weeks after the fact, lost in distraction while a succession of professionals passed through his hospital room. He was aware of them in flashes: the police officer who changed into a nurse, then a doctor, then a nice lady with a lump of clay for him to express himself with, then a chair. He couldn’t hear their questions over the din of the train, but the procession continued on looped replay (nurse, doctor, doctor, chair) until the morning when Zed walked into the room.

Eli wasn’t looking at the door; the fragile wintery light through the window had held his attention for hours. But (here, a sudden miracle) all at once Zed’s voice was in this room, in this city, and he turned his face toward it. He hadn’t seen his brother in a year and a half.

Zed was speaking rapidly in French to one nurse among several, his eyes never leaving Eli’s face and his voice brimming with impatience. Eli heard his own name repeated twice. Zed kept up a rapid monologue as he corralled a small crowd of concerned medical professionals toward the exit; with the phantoms safely exiled to the hallway, he closed the door, held it shut for a second lest anyone get any clever ideas, turned back to Eli, and finally smiled. He approached the bed, turned the chair around, and sat down sideways on it.

“Hello,” Eli said. This was, at least, the intent; after twenty-seven days without talking, it came out as a whispery croak. He swallowed.

“Eli. Good morning. Why wouldn’t you tell them your name?”

“I didn’t feel like talking,” Eli said, slightly more audibly.

Zed laughed quietly and went to the window. The low skyline was blurred by falling snow.

“I didn’t know you spoke French,” Eli said.

“I picked it up over the years.”

“I tried to jump after her.”

“I know. They told me,” his brother said.

“I’m always too late, Zed. I’m always just a beat too late.”

“Everyone’s too late sometimes.”

“Have you ever seen what a train does to a girl?”

Zed was silent for a moment, looking out the window.

“This place is dire,” he said finally. “I’m taking you home.”

What followed was a complicated, unbearable sequence, difficult to remember in detail later on. A red vinyl chair at an airport in Dorval, just outside the city of Montreal. A check-in counter on which he leaned heavily and stared at the floor. Wheelchairs had been offered. He insisted on walking through the airport but couldn’t remember what direction he was meant to be walking in for more than a minute; Zed, laden with luggage and worry, was forever seizing him by the elbow and realigning him. Eli had an odd way of walking: shuffling, tripful, stumbling over shadows on the smooth glossy floor.

A brief flight over a border in wintertime. The grey wing of a plane outside the window. The world glimpsed in barely remembered flashes of snow and air and the corners of buildings (memories of a dream he’d had once: snow, wartime, the vague impression of heroism, hiding in a ditch in the cold). The streets of Manhattan through the windows of a taxicab. (“At least it’s alive here,” he said to his brother, before he closed his eyes again. It was the first thing he’d said in four hours, and did nothing to reassure Zed.) Their mother reduced to a kind of concerned impression, insubstantial and far off, like a sketch of a mother drawn on transparent architect’s vellum. A door opening into the blue room where he’d slept as a child, assurances that he could rest here as long as he needed to and that everything was going to be all right, pajamas, the sound of worried voices out in the hallway afterward. He closed his eyes and went to sleep immediately.

In the first few days he didn’t move very much. He lay still on the bed watching light move across the ceiling. Later on the days assumed a particular rhythm: cadences of winter light in the clear afternoons, the white-and-black expanse of Central Park out the window of his mother’s apartment, white snow and silvery trees and dark paths winding between them — he could lose himself in this vision for hours on end. There were entire afternoons when life distilled into precisely this: a blue room on the Upper West Side and snow outside the window, his mother’s favorite Bach or Vivaldi playing quietly somewhere in another room and his mother humming tunelessly along with it, and people passing small and dark in the icy world below.

“The question,” Zed remarked, “is what you’re going to do now.”

Zed wasn’t staying much longer. He was going back to Africa for a few weeks, and after that he was making plans to go to Europe; he wanted, he said, to sit where the oracle had sat at Delphi. He wanted Eli to come with him. They had halfhearted arguments on whether there was still an oracle there; Eli thought there might be. Zed tended toward the school of thought that all of us are oracles but was inclined to believe that this particular one no longer walked the earth.

“I want to travel.”

“I meant after Greece. After our trip. Are you going back to Brooklyn?”

“To Brooklyn? No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because nothing I did there meant anything,” Eli said. “Because I was ice-skating in that life as much as she was, I do have friends there, but I think I’d rather be. .” He hesitated, looking at a solitary man walking into the park, his coat dark against the snowy path, and he pressed his fingertips against the glass. “I haven’t been outside in a while,” he said. “I’d like to immerse myself in all that.”

“In all what?”

“I’d like to immerse myself in the world. That was her problem,” Eli said. “She couldn’t immerse herself. It isn’t enough to observe the world and take pictures of it.” He was quiet for a second and then said, “It isn’t enough to just go ice-skating. Lilia’s metaphor, not mine — she was talking about how she lived. About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.”

“Some people only know how to skate.”

“How did you find me in Montreal?”

“There was an unmailed letter to me in your jacket pocket.”

“Do you still have it?”

It was in Zed’s pocket; he passed it over to Eli without a word. It was longer than Eli remembered, four or five pages wadded tightly together, and seemed foreign now; the writing was wild and allowed for no margins, words crashing up against the edges of the page:

I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafés in the mornings and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same.

“I don’t even recognize the handwriting,” Eli said.

“Any idea where she went?”

“No idea. She could be anywhere by now. I actually thought I heard her voice on the train platform in Montreal, but I think I was hallucinating.” He was looking at the letter. “This is like a dispatch from a foreign country,” he said. He refolded it carefully and gave it back to Zed. “I mean, technically it is a dispatch from a foreign country, it’s just, I don’t recognize. .”

“The handwriting? The sentiment?”

“Both, actually. Neither.”

“You don’t still wish you could be with her?”

“I think I’d rather be alone,” he said.

44

On her last morning in Montreal Lilia woke early and lay still for a while under the blankets. She slept fully clothed in those days and wore two pairs of socks to bed, but winter seeped through the windows of her rented room. She rose and showered quickly, shivering, and put on her waitressing uniform. At the Bistro de Porto down the street she fell into the trance of work, cleaning and serving, and in the late afternoon she went back to her room and changed out of the uniform. Out on the street again she wandered for some hours. but it was too cold to take photographs; she didn’t want to take her hands out of her pockets. She walked past Club Electrolite in the early evening, half hoping to catch a glimpse of Michaela again, but there was no one out front. She spent some time in her favorite bookstore, reading a history of New York City in French, and then started home in the gathering night. The cold in Montreal was like nothing she’d experienced; she was wearing three sweaters under her jacket, but none of them were thick enough, and her clenched hands felt like ice in her gloves. She stopped for a while in an all-night coffee shop in Centre-Sud to read the paper, trying to avoid the loneliness of her rented room, and she was just stepping out into the darkness again when her cell phone rang. Only Michaela and her employer knew the number.

“I want you to meet me somewhere,” Michaela said.

“Why?”

“Meet me on the westbound platform at Métro Place-des-Arts. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“You’ve said that before. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care,” Michaela said. “Meet me there anyway.”

Two hours later Lilia was in a taxi to the airport, staring blankly at the passing night. She flew from Montreal to Rome at three in the morning, Rome chosen because it was the flight leaving soonest when she arrived at the airport that night and she knew how to speak the language. She withdrew the contents of her bank account from an airport ATM and paid for the ticket in cash. She looked out the airplane window into darkness through all of the long transatlantic night, weeping intermittently, and in the early-morning light she disembarked from a taxi in the Piazzo di Popolo. Later she stood on a bridge over the Tiber River and let the three lists fall from her hands: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with Lilia; a list of places, nine pages, beginning and ending with the province of Quebec; a shorter list of words, of phrases, all Eli’s. She had to leave quickly then because a policeman was approaching meaningfully from the Trastevere side of the bridge, apparently having observed her dropping pieces of paper into the Tiber, so she didn’t get to watch the pieces of her old life float away the way she had wanted to.

Lilia walked quickly down the boulevard that ran alongside the river, hands in her pockets in the morning light, and the city foremost in her mind at that moment wasn’t Montreal or New York or even Chicago, but San Diego. A place far back toward the genesis of everything, a version of herself so distant that the memory itself was third-person: Lilia, young and unstable and awakened frequently by nightmares about a car accident in the mountains, prone to weeping in moments of frenzy or disarray. Lilia, sixteen years old and unaware of her own story, still in shock from an accident a month or two before, fervent and always running out of time, arriving in San Diego alone after dark. Her father and Clara had said good-bye in New Mexico and given her money, made her promise to call and write and come back to visit before too much time had passed. San Diego was the first city she’d ever traveled to by herself, they were terrified and knew they couldn’t stop her, and she was shocked by the exhilaration of solo travel. She pressed her forehead against the bus window and watched the landscape passing by, anguished and exultant and perfectly free. In those days she was tightly wound and always ready to cry, and life seemed fraught with an almost unbearable intensity; in the bus on the way to San Diego she saw a dead cat by the side of the highway, recent roadkill, and she burst into hysterical tears.

In the San Diego bus terminal she stood in front of a long line of pay phones, mesmerized by the way they caught the light, trying to remember a certain phone number and failing. She had a guidebook that was supposed to contain every youth hostel in the state of California, and the closest San Diego entry was miles from the bus terminal but she walked there anyway; she moved slowly through the delirious streets in the early evening, pavement still radiating heat from the afternoon sunlight, dance music pounding from slow-moving cars with tinted windows. Her suitcase made her a stranger, so she dropped it into a garbage can as she passed and after that she went on feeling light and infinitely anonymous, much less wary, much less sharp, hands in her pockets and sometimes whistling brief picked-up snatches of tunes that came and went. She passed a gospel church and sat for awhile on the steps in the vertiginous twilight, the church and her soul both swelling with music, and then onward again past a bodega where two small boys lingered in the doorway; they watched her and one said something in Spanish as she passed. She spoke to him in his own language and he smiled, abruptly shy, and she kept on walking in the fading day. In those days she kept the lists in her pocket (languages, names), and it was excellent, the way the folded wads of paper fitted perfectly in her right hand.

On her first day in Rome she went to an Internet café, and after some time she emerged with a phone number for a house in Quebec. In the motel room she sat for a long time holding the scrap of paper in her hands and then placed a wildly expensive long-distance call. A man answered on the second ring.

“Simon,” she said.

“Who is this?” he asked, in French.

“C’est moi.”

“Lilia?”

“I just wanted to thank you,” Lilia said.

Simon was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “Don’t thank me,” he said finally. “It was all I could do.”

An hour later she hung up the phone and went out into the city. She made her way back to the Tiber River and walked back to the same bridge, the lists far downstream and the policeman long departed, and stayed there for a long time looking down at the water. Ten years later she stood in the same place with her Italian husband on the day of their seventh anniversary of marriage, and he laughed when she imitated the policeman.

“It was scary,” she insisted. “I thought I’d be arrested for littering and deported on the spot.”

“I know,” he said, still laughing. “You tell me that every year, my love, but when in your life were you ever scared?”

Once on a highway in the American mountains, once on a subway platform in Montreal. Seldom, in other words, but she was left with strange memories. It wasn’t a question of unhappiness, but her thoughts drifted back at odd moments: when she was walking alone on certain boulevards in the rain; “There’s a Central Australian language,” Eli once told her, “that has a word, nyimpe, I’m mispronouncing it, that means ‘the smell of rain.’” (Difficult now to remember his face; his hair was dark, but were his eyes brown or blue?) Or sometimes when she woke up in winter and the covers had fallen off the bed, the mere sensation of cold was enough to bring the streets of Montreal back to her; wandering with Michaela through the ice-locked landscape, arguing, shivering, talking in circles about memory and accidents. Michaela wasn’t someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia’s suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.

Or when she stood in a metro station at the end of the day, waiting for the train that brought her from a translation job at the Vatican to the apartment she shared with her husband a few miles away, Lilia was sometimes shocked by a memory so forceful that it rendered her breathless. She could close her eyes and watch Michaela coming down the stairs at Métro Place-des-Arts; Michaela had been crying a short time earlier but now she came to Lilia smiling, a red cigarette box crushed in one hand. The moment Lilia saw her she stood up from the bench and started to repeat herself, Tell me what happened, but Michaela was smiling as she came toward her and she kissed Lilia lightly on the lips before Lilia could finish the sentence. Her lips were cold from the air aboveground.

“Listen,” Michaela said. She put her hands on Lilia’s shoulders then and whispered a story in her ear. It was an old story about broken windows and snow, over in a few sentences, and when she was done Lilia sank down onto the bench, staring up at her, shocked into silence. In a few minutes Eli would run past her screaming Michaela’s name, in a few minutes the night would implode into noise and catastrophe, but for now Michaela stood near her, watching her, and Lilia had never seen her so still or so calm. Michaela’s voice was gentle when she spoke.

“Do you remember now?”

Lilia nodded. Yes. I remember everything.

“I’ve made my decision,” Michaela said. Lilia was struck by a look she’d never seen before; there were tears in Michaela’s eyes, but her face was radiant. “I’m leaving tonight.”

Lilia swallowed and found her voice. “You sound happy.”

“I am.”

“Where are you going?”

“Far away,” Michaela said. She smiled then, already leaving, and walked away down the platform to meet her train.