“What could a car accident that happened when she was sixteen possibly have to do with you?”
She just looked at him.
“No,” Eli said. “She didn’t tell me anything about that. I don’t know anything about a car accident.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, I suppose that’s your choice. Listen, I’m tired, and I want to get out of here. Can you tell me where she is?”
“I read my father’s case notes,” Michaela said. “My father was, well, let’s say my father was a little obsessed. The ironic thing is, I know everything about her life except the one thing that I really want to know. I even know the things she doesn’t.”
“I’m not following you. How could you know things about her life that she doesn’t?”
“I know why she has those scars on her arms, for instance. Do you?”
“No,” Eli said. “I never asked.”
“Even if you’d asked,” she said, “Lilia couldn’t have told you.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“She doesn’t remember.”
He was silent, watching her.
“I know Lilia’s story,” she said. “I know why she was abducted, I know what happened to her before her father took her away, I know all the things that she can’t remember herself. I offered them to her in exchange for telling me about the accident, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell me about it, even though I could tell she wanted to know what had happened to her, and we argued horribly about it earlier. But she told you her story, didn’t she?”
“Yes. No. All of her story except that.”
“Tell me about the accident,” she said, “and I will tell you where she is.”
“I don’t want to use Lilia’s story as a bargaining chip.”
“But what else do you have?”
Eli looked at her across the table until she stood up and kissed him on the forehead and told him to meet her here again same time tomorrow and then maybe they could talk, and then she was gone in a blast of cold air through the closing glass doors. And it was hard to say later how any moment this ghastly could possibly become a routine, but he knew no one else in the city, and she knew where Lilia was. He waited for her every night after that in the all-night coffee house on the corner of St.-Laurent and Prince Arthur Boulevards, drinking coffee by the window and watching for her shape, for the platform boot emerging from the cab or the narrow figure walking slowly up the hill. She came in exhausted but strangely bright, sometimes feverish, glassy-eyed. She smiled wanly when she saw him, two or three or four A.M., and slid into the opposite chair. She had a curious smell about her at this hour, especially if she’d been in the VIP lounge on the second floor: hairspray, men’s cologne, her perfume. Other, subtler notes that he preferred not to identify too closely. Her hair had softened by this time of night, and her makeup was blurred. There was a loose, dangerous quality to her movements. Her face was flushed. It was sometimes a long time before she spoke.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course,” Michaela said, but in those moments her smile seemed empty, her eyes unfocused. He wanted to press her for Lilia’s location, to somehow force her to produce Lilia from thin air, but it was impossible: there was something broken in her, something exposed and open to the elements that made forcing her to do anything seem almost unthinkable. She claimed she didn’t know where Lilia was. Then she amended this and claimed that she did know where Lilia was but that she wouldn’t tell him unless he told her about the car accident. She claimed that Lilia was still in the city but that she wasn’t sure where. Then she claimed that Lilia was going to reappear at the moment they least expected, but the moment they least expected never seemed to come, and days passed slowly in the startling cold.
“Can I get you something?”
She wanted tea. A day or two earlier Eli had bought a dictionary and a phrasebook and figured out how to order tea in what he believed to be reasonably passable French, but the barista invariably replied in English no matter which language he tried to use. It seemed clear that this was a rejection of some kind, but he hadn’t decided whether it was a rejection of the English language or a rejection of him personally, and either way it was exhausting and he preferred not to think about it too much. He went to the counter and came back with tea and she sipped at it, looking away from him, her mind elsewhere. She looked out the window and told him again how she’d like to travel away from here, but in the week that he’d known her Eli had heard this monologue four or five times, and he was quickly running out of sympathetic comments. He could only nod and watch her light another cigarette.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Eli said. “How did Lilia know who you are?”
“What?”
“To write you the letter. You said she wrote to you from New York.”
“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment. “It isn’t entirely accurate to say she wrote to me, actually.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. Her eyes were troubled. “It was a letter to my father. I got a call from the private investigative agency, maybe a month and a half ago. They said he’d left six months earlier and they didn’t have a forwarding address for him, and they didn’t know what to do with all his mail. I was hoping maybe someone had sent him money, so I went there and picked up his mail and opened all of it. It was mostly junk, but there was a letter from Lilia.”
“What did she write?”
“She requested a truce. She said she was tired of always being followed and watched.”
“She was being followed?”
“All her life,” Michaela said.
26.
Lilia turned fourteen in a small city in Illinois, and her father gave her a camera. Her first shot was out the window of the chain restaurant where she was eating birthday cake, at the movie theater blinking across the wide evening street. Somewhere near Indianapolis she knelt down by the side of the road to take a picture of a sign with the paint peeling off—Farm-Fresh Corn and Tomatoes— and found beauty in the worn wood and faded lettering. She developed the film after that at one-hour photo places, loitering around shopping malls until the pictures were ready, and pored over them in the car, in a park, in the motel room at night. The pictures gave her a sense of continuity, of a record being constructed; she had been in flight for seven years now, traveling quickly, and it was a bright pleasure to have a means of capturing the flight path. She took pictures of signs, mostly, although not signs that could be traced easily to any particular place. She especially liked signs with misspellings, or with the paint peeling off. She liked taking very wide shots of deserted streets, and pictures of cars approaching from great distances away.
Lilia was allowed to take pictures of anything except herself and her father. “We must be careful,” he warned, “about the accumulation of evidence.”
27.
Michaela was always running out of cigarettes. She coughed dryly sometimes, in a rasping way, and the spasms brightened the red veins of her eyes. Her eyes were almost always red, even when sober; she couldn’t sleep. She would do anything to avoid being alone at night with her insomnia, and Eli was willing to go to great lengths to avoid being alone in general; they sat together in the café at the corner, watching the gradual progression of night. The night passed through stages: first the crowds of beautiful strangers in the electric midnight, enthusiastic and painted and dressed for the clubs, then the fleet of mismatched taxicabs at the intersection, and later an inky blackness, these last few hours of night, four in the morning and the occasional drunken kid stumbling by with a slice of greasy pizza, a girl with fishnet stockings and vacant eyes weaving over the sidewalk, the cold amber of streetlights on pavement and ice. After the taxis passed, wave upon wave, the streets went quiet till morning. The city slept uneasily, under the sign of the cross: it shone in brilliant white high up on the hillside outside Eli’s hotel-room window, a charm over the wide blank streets and deserted sidewalks and shadowy parks.
&n
bsp; Michaela laughed softly to herself, said something inaudible. She was an original, but slowly losing her mind, and it seemed to Eli that it was departing in pieces: the names of certain acquaintances, the linear connectors that hold thoughts together after dark, certain bridges of logic and convention, the part of the mind that knows when to let go and send the body sliding into sleep. She was dazed and tired in the afternoons, sharp and lucid in the evenings, and slipping into incoherence by three A.M.
“What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.”
“My parents were in a traveling circus,” she told him, gorgeous and exhausted and coming undone sometime between three and four o’clock in the morning. “Did I tell you that?”
“A couple of times, yes. It’s kind of unbelievable.”
“Isn’t it? A family of actual circus people. My grandparents too,” she said. “Both sides. Do you believe the desire to travel is genetic?”
“You sound like Lilia.”
Her name broke the conversation and they stayed together for a long time in silence. The moon was setting behind the rooftops on the other side of Boulevard St.-Laurent. They had had the same argument every night for a week: Michaela wasn’t going to tell him where Lilia was unless he told her about the accident. Strange limbo. Michaela lit a new cigarette off the end of the old one and then dropped the old one into the last few drops of her tea. She turned the still-warm glass between her hands for a while, smoking, looking down at the extinguished ashes. She smoked with the practiced elegance of a career smoker, one who was perhaps born holding a cigarette and doesn’t mind admitting that she smokes rather well.
“She traveled beautifully,” she said finally.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who actually literally chain smokes,” Eli said.
“She’s a bit like a ghost,” said Michaela, still thinking of Lilia.
“No, not a ghost. It’s the world that’s ghostly.”
“What was it like, living with her?”
“She was different than anyone I’ve ever . . . she had strange habits,” he said. “But there was something perfect about it.”
“All of it?”
“Of course not all of it. Nothing’s perfect all the time.”
“What, then?”
“The times we were alone. We spent a lot of time alone in the apartment, or out walking, and there was this silence that’d fall between us, and I know this sounds . . . I know this sounds stupid or absurd, but it was perfect. I can’t explain it any better than that. The silence was perfect.”
“Silence? What else?”
“We had these friends in Brooklyn—actually, I had these friends, she didn’t have friends, she came out of thin air with a suitcase— anyway, I had these friends who thought they were artists. Well, I don’t know, maybe they were. Maybe we were. I can’t judge it anymore, what we were doing there. I didn’t think that what we were doing was good enough at the time, but maybe it was. I don’t know.”
She watched him without speaking.
“You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seemed all wrong to me. The inertia, I mean. The inertia made everything seem fraudulent. There we were, talking about art, but no one was doing anything except Lilia. She was taking pictures. She spoke four languages.”
“Five.”
“You’re counting Russian? Anyway, what I’m saying is that no one was doing anything important except her. She worked as a dishwasher, she lived cheaply, she took beautiful pictures and translated things. She never made any money off it, it was just something she did. The point is, she never talked about it. She never seemed like she was posing. She never theorized or deconstructed. She just practiced her art, practiced it instead of analyzing it to death, and it rendered the rest of us fraudulent. There aren’t many people in the world . . .” He stopped talking and shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to continue.
Michaela was silent for a moment, looking down at her hands. “I have a picture she took,” she said finally, “if you’d like to see it.” She was reaching for her purse at her feet. She put it on the table, the fake leather gleaming under the café lights, pulled an envelope from a secret inside pocket and passed it to him.
The corners of the envelope were softened with wear. It held a single black-and-white photograph of Michaela and Lilia standing side by side before the mirror of a public washroom, a line of cubicle doors open behind them. Lilia held her camera just below her face with both hands. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her face was serious and still. Michaela, beside her, was smiling slightly, and both of them were watching Lilia’s eyes in the mirror.
“Where was this taken?” He couldn’t stop his voice from shaking. He was looking into Lilia’s eyes for a trace of something, remorse perhaps, but of course she could have been thinking of anything.
“Here,” she said. “In the washroom at the back.” She took the photograph from him, put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope back in the secret pocket in her bag.
28.
The year Michaela was fifteen, she lived alone. Her father was traveling in another country.
Christopher was moving quickly. He was having strange dreams about cars and pay phones. He had never felt so clear. In a mountainous state in the middle of the country, he realized that he’d fallen into Lilia’s wake. He’d felt himself for a long time to be moving closer to her, drawing near as he circled outward from the town of Leonard, Arizona, but it still seemed faintly miraculous when the trail suddenly became clear. At first he didn’t believe it. But a woman at a quiet gas station said that yes, upon reflection, she did seem to recall a man and his daughter passing through yesterday morning with suitcases in the back of the car, and a clerk at a motel down the highway said the same thing. He trailed them down into Florida, through Miami, then up into a semiurban hinterland of highway overpasses and towns with wide empty streets, straggly palm trees, blank almost identical houses set far back from the street. He followed them silently, traveling alongside, propelled and haunted by visions and dreams. He moved alone and weightless over several Midwestern states, just behind or sometimes alongside the fugitives, just out of sight. He had always had an intuition stronger than any of his senses, and it seemed that it had hardened and crystallized into something formidable. What he found, and this was both disturbing and miraculous (that word again, but no other word came to him when he thought of it), was that after he’d seen them for the first time (emerging like apparitions from a chain restaurant in a small city in Illinois across the street from a movie theater on Lilia’s birthday, climbing back into their car, Lilia stopping first to take a photograph of the street) he always knew where they were. Sometimes he gave them a head start, to test himself: an hour, a day. He’d stay in his motel room, reading in solitude for long periods; he bought books in the towns he passed through, histories and biographies mostly, and left them behind in motel rooms when he was done with them. The only books he kept were a battered copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology and the two Bibles that Lilia had written in. The page that she’d written on had been torn out of one of them years earlier—he suspected his vanished wife—but he had a photocopy of the missing note folded into the back page. It was the Shakespeare that he went back to most frequently; he had been reading Twelfth Night back when he’d first taken Lilia’s case, and there was something soothing about the continuity. He would read for a while and later he would check out of the motel room and drive after them, and find as he traveled that he knew where they’d gone; sure enough, he’d see their latest car in a motel parking lot, or drive past on the street of the next town as they walked together. He felt that he could exist this way forever; just behind them, watching over them, traveling alongside, aware of their every move, able to bring them in at any time. He didn’t have to do anything. The connection was effortless. His family was suspende
d; it was as though they’d disappeared. Weeks passed when he didn’t think of them. It was a beautiful state of limbo to be in.
Six months after Christopher had left his daughter in Montreal he pulled over to the side of the road in Oklahoma after a full day of driving, a little lost, and stared hard at the horizon for a while to clear his head. That was the first time he realized how long he’d been gone; in the next town he wired money to his daughter’s checking account and kept driving.
29.
On Eli’s third week in the city he thought he heard Lilia’s name. It was one A.M. at the Café Depot, and he was waiting alone for Michaela to arrive; he looked up at the two girls speaking French at a nearby table, but waited until one stood up to leave before he made his approach.
“Excusez-moi,” he said awkwardly, to the girl remaining.
She looked up and smiled. “You sound like you’d prefer to speak English,” she said.
He found himself smiling back. “I would,” he admitted. “Thank you.”
“I’ve seen you here a few times,” she said.
“I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s just that I’ve been looking for someone in the city, a friend, and I thought I heard you say her name just now. Lilia?”
She shook her head, still smiling but puzzled, and then brightened suddenly. “Lillian,” she said. “Lillian Bouchard. We were just talking about her. That was the name you heard.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s all right,” she said. She extended a hand. “Ondine. Where are you from?”
“Eli.” Her hand was soft and warm in his own. “Visiting from New York.”
“New York,” she said vaguely, and he understood from her smile that she’d never been. “First time in Montreal?”