Last Night in Montreal (9 page)

15.

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

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

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

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

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

16.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That she’s ferocious?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can a safety net distract you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Absolutely not,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“What’s devolution?”

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

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

“Sure you do.”

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

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

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

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

17.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A private detective.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forget the abduction?” the interviewer asked.

“No. I wish I could forget her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you?” he whispered.

“I’m traveling,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t remember her.”

“Well. You were young.”

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