Last Night in Montreal (8 page)

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?
)