Last Night in Montreal (17 page)

Part Four

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.”