“I don’t believe you,” she answered, settling back in her chair, the moment passed.
30.
In the spring when Lilia was fifteen she was traveling north out of Florida. It had been two years since the Unsolved Cases feature, and her life was played out in a shifting, paranoid landscape: abandoned meals on restaurant tables, impressions of figures passing just out of sight, an old blue car with Quebec license plates that she saw three times in different places, a constant feeling of being watched from behind.
There was no sense in talking about it. At some point that year, by unspoken agreement, she had stopped hiding in the back of the car. She was getting too big to comfortably disappear into the backseat of an automobile anyway, and there was a feeling of waiting for something inevitable to occur; her father was moving her faster and faster from place to place. By that frenzied summer they were in a different motel room every night. Sometimes they’d check into one motel, pay for two nights, and then drive to another a few miles away. Sometimes they’d sleep through the day and then drive all through the night, speaking softly or sitting together in silence, listening to night radio, hypnotized by headlights, three A.M. meals in the hallucinogenic glare of open-all-night restaurants on the interstate, going to bed near morning in a cheap motel with parking around back. She dyed her hair at least every month, from blond to dark brown and back again, across entire spectrums of auburns and reds, forever covering the trail. Lilia’s hair felt dry and soft to the touch, and her scalp was always itchy; she spent an hour at a time in the motel shower, soothed by the water, massaging conditioner into her head. She wore dark glasses during the daytime, a baseball cap pulled down low. She met no one’s eyes in public. She wanted gazes to pass over her without stopping. She wanted to be forgotten.
That was the spring she crossed into Arizona for the one hundredth time and had her first glass of red wine to celebrate. It was possibly the worst thing she’d ever tasted, but her father told her that all the best tastes in life are acquired, and she liked the way the liquid in the glass caught the light. That night her father woke her at two in the morning, not for any reason that he could articulate, and they were gone by two-twenty. On the highway she tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t; she sat awake, wired and anxious, into the morning and all through the afternoon, until finally on the other side of the state her father pulled into the parking lot of the Stillspell Motel. She had a dull pounding headache from sleeplessness and the half glass of wine.
“Here,” he said. “I can’t drive anymore. Let’s get some rest.” He was haggard in the sunlight, hollow-eyed. In the motel room he went to bed and slept for three hours while Lilia read newsmagazines at the fake-wood table in the lamplight. He was breathing almost silently. She kept reading the same paragraph over and over again, looking over at him in the dimness to make sure she could still see his chest moving. She had never been so tired, but when she lay on the other bed a few feet away from him, there was a strange feeling of responsibility; for the first time in her life, she felt that she had to stay awake so he could sleep. Three or four cars pulled into the parking lot, and every single time she went to the window, but none of them were the blue car with foreign license plates. After a while she got out her camera and stood by the window taking photographs of the parking lot in the late-afternoon light to calm herself.
“You don’t need to keep watch,” he said.
“I thought you were asleep.”
He was sitting up and pulling his boots on. Smiling the way he used to, before they were traveling to a new town every night.
“I was,” he said. “But you still don’t have to watch over me.”
They walked out together into the warm May afternoon. The Stillspell Motel faced the highway. It was flanked on either side by the Morning Star Diner and Stillspell Auto Repair, and the three buildings (all low-slung, old, and in need of renovations) formed a decrepit open horseshoe facing away from the town. Or if not a horseshoe, perhaps a stage: three buildings at more-or-less right angles and a parking lot between them, the highway blank and grey along the invisible fourth wall. Across the highway was a landscape of chaparral that seemed more or less infinite.
“Where are we?” Lilia asked.
“Town of Stillspell, apparently.”
“I meant which state.”
“Arizona. No. Wait. New Mexico. I’m almost sure we’re in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico,” the waitress in the Morning Star Diner confirmed brightly. She liked Stillspell, she said, although she did think sometimes about leaving. When she’d brought the food she installed herself not far from them, leaning on the side of a banquette, while Lilia slumped over her chocolate milkshake and tried to remember her current name. She hadn’t slept in far too long, and it was getting on into the evening. There weren’t that many people left here, the waitress said; the population had dropped so low that it couldn’t really be considered a town anymore. There was virtually no work here. It was almost a ghost village. But she had a job and a house, and she thought she might stay a while. She’d never really left, except when she was young and had run away with her boyfriend to Phoenix. But Phoenix was so big, and people weren’t friendly to her, and fourteen’s a bit young for that kind of thing, actually, and would they like some more coffee?
“No,” said Lilia’s father. “Thank you. But I’d be curious to know your name.”
“Clara,” said the waitress. “A pleasure.”
“Likewise,” he said, and gave her a fake name that Lilia immediately forgot.
“Are you staying long?”
“Oh, a day or two maybe,” her father said, “just to rest up a little. We’ve been traveling cross-country, Allie and I.”
“Allie,” said the waitress. “What’s that short for?”
“Alessandra,” Lilia said, and flashed an exhausted smile.
“Alessandra,” the waitress repeated. She flicked a strand of hair behind her left ear. Her hair was straight and red and went to her shoulders, and she had china-blue eyes. She liked the name: “Alessandra,” she said again. “Spanish, right?”
Lilia was tired, and the details of the night grew hazy. Her father and the waitress were talking about music. Lilia was falling asleep at the table; her father and Clara were talking for what seemed like a long time; later on she couldn’t remember how it had been decided that they’d be staying at Clara’s house that night instead of, say, in their paid-for room in the Stillspell Motel, but she found herself walking with Clara and her father down a cracked street in the moonlight, old houses silent on either side. A dog was barking in the distance. Lights were on in some houses; other houses stood silent and unlit. There were a few stores with boards over the windows.
Clara had a house like an optical illusion. A glance around the living room revealed her singular interests: she liked shoes, and the ocean, and things that flew. A dozen sets of stilettos were lined up at attention along one wall in the living room. The walls had pictures of winged things, hummingbirds and pterodactyls and rickety-looking antique airplanes. The house, in the meantime, left no doubt as to her vast and final passion. Every wall, every ceiling, every surface was blue. There were watercolor fishes swimming up the staircase. She told Lilia much later that she was happy never having seen a real ocean; she was afraid it wouldn’t live up to her expectations.
She’d hung blue silk curtains over the living room windows and they rippled, water-like, in the breeze of a fan. There was a fish mobile hanging from the ceiling. The house was old and big—her grandfather had bought it for a song, she said, a few years after the mine had closed, back when everyone was leaving all at once. Lilia pictured an old man standing in the desert singing, open and pleading with eyes as blue as Clara’s. Clara insisted on an immediate tour of the kingdom: later Lilia remembered trailing after them through stranger and stranger rooms, until she asked to take a bath and was left with towels and a bathrobe in the upstairs bathroom.
Lilia lay almost fl
oating in the claw-footed bathtub, the water around her deep and green and still. There were extravagant fish painted freehand on the walls, intensely brilliant creatures of pure color, pure light, with watercolor-green seaweed floating between them in the deep. There was a rubber fish toy on a tiled shelf by the bathtub, smiling next to a rubber yellow duck. She lay still in the water for a long time, listening to the steady dripping of the tap. Her father and Clara were somewhere distant in the house. Their voices and laughter floated up the stairs.
In the morning Lilia woke in an upstairs guest bedroom. There were old-looking toy airplanes suspended from the ceiling above her head. Her father and Clara were up already, drinking coffee; later on her father left Lilia with Clara and a stack of pancakes and walked back to the hotel to get the car and the luggage.
“Someone came by looking for you the other night,” the desk clerk said helpfully.
“What?”
“Here, he left me his card.” The desk clerk dug around in the receipts for a moment and produced a plain white card with neat black type: Christopher Graydon, Private Investigator, an address in Montreal. It took Lilia’s father a moment to recover.
“Did he say anything?”
“Just that he was looking for you. He said he needed to speak with you as soon as possible.”
“Is he still here?”
“He left this morning.”
“He hasn’t been back?”
“No. He went off down the highway.”
“Which way did he go?”
The man stared curiously at him for a moment. “Well, I guess it was east,” he said.
The door to the motel room was swinging open. The room was subtly altered; Lilia’s father stood looking in, and it took a moment to see the disturbance that he sensed: a Bible was open on the bed, with a page ripped out. He didn’t know about Lilia’s habit of leaving messages and so didn’t understand why this was. What he did understand was that someone had been here. He stood for a while on the threshold, the detective’s business card in his pocket, and realized that he’d been saved the night before. It was never possible for him to look at Clara afterward without imagining that she was in some way protective, in some way divine, a patron saint of fugitives in a roadside café. He decided to stop traveling and stay by her side.
31.
“Did you find her?” the bellboy asked.
It was early afternoon, and Eli had woken up only recently; he hadn’t noticed the bellboy board the elevator. He looked up, blinking, and remembered being given directions to Club Electrolite on his first night in the city.
“The girl you’re looking for,” the bellboy said.
“No. Not yet.”
“Where have you been looking?” the bellboy asked, just before the doors opened into the lobby.
“Everywhere,” Eli said.
In the afternoons he walked through Montreal with a map of the city folded up small in his jacket pocket. He walked for miles, moved in and out of the subway system, tried to look at everyone he could in case they might be Lilia. It was an effort to keep his head up, to look into the faces of passersby; his eyes watered from the cold and then his eyelashes froze, and he was forever blinking against the winter light. In the old city he walked the old narrow streets along the waterfront, stopping into a café every time he lost feeling in his feet. He left the first footsteps in pristine snow in the deserted parks; he lingered in English bookstores in Westmount and French bookstores in Mile End, on the theory that Lilia might buy books in either language and might be just as desperate to escape the cold as he was. Downtown he found a building that he thought Lilia might like, and he returned again and again, at first just in case she arrived to photograph it, and later on because it moved him. It was an old and very narrow building, three stories high and surrounded on three sides by a cracked parking lot, and it had been transformed almost entirely into an anime cartoon: on the east side was a woman screaming, with dark purple hair and furious pale-blue eyes. Her face took up the entire side of the building. On the west side a man stared west, blond and suspicious and narrow-eyed, partially obscured by a billboard advertising Cuban vacations, but it was the screaming woman who held Eli’s attention. She was screaming in fury, he realized, not fear. There could be no doubt when he studied her eyes. Eli couldn’t stand out in the street for very long in the cold, but he returned to the cartoon building over and over again, wishing he was a photographer, standing on nearby corners and looking up at it. The painted woman screamed out over the city, east toward the low brick apartment blocks of Centre-Sud, over the alleyways turned by graffiti artists into dark beautiful murals, over the dilapidated houses with their spiral staircases and strange turrets, the endless porn theaters and strip clubs, the people who walked on frozen sidewalks with their hands in their pockets and their breath turning to ice inside their scarves. She seemed like the only passionate thing in the landscape, and her fury gave him a certain kind of hope.
He came down to Michaela’s dressing room in the evenings and lay on his back on the carpet, or sat on the chair by the table behind her while she prepared herself for the night, reading the English papers, studying his map. Sometimes he stretched out on the floor and fell asleep while she was performing; he seemed to have fallen into limitless exhaustion. It was always possible for him to fall asleep. He had dreams about ice cubes. He was almost always cold. Once he woke up and she’d turned off the lights in the room. A candle flickered between them on the carpet, melting into a grimy plate. She was lying on the other side of the candle, still dressed in tight vinyl, her hands over her eyes. The room smelled of hairspray and candle smoke.
“What time is it?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Three A.M.,” she said. “You’re awake.”
“Barely.” His neck was stiff. “You’ll burn this place down.”
“It’s on a plate, Eli. Did you ever read about the Gnostics?”
He sat up slowly, looking at her. Her face was barely visible in the dimness.
“Yes,” he said. “How many pills have you taken?”
“Lilia used to talk about them.”
“The pills?”
“The Gnostics. She never talked about them with you?”
“Maybe once,” he lied, obscurely jealous. Michaela smiled.
“They appeared seventeen years after the death of Jesus Christ. She talked about these stories. Prophets walking the streets of Je rusalem, her words, not mine . . .”
“They’re not her words,” he said. “They’re from a book I own. I didn’t know she read it.”
“Anyway, I like them. The Gnostics believed that none of this is real,” she said. “None of this seems real to me.”
“It’s the pills,” he said.
“No, it’s everything. This life, these pills, Club Electrolite, this dressing room. How could there be a city like this in the world? How could it possibly be so cold? What I mean is that every light is too bright for me. Every sound is too loud.”
“It’s late,” he said quietly. “You must be exhausted. You should go to sleep.”
Her eyes were shining. “You move like a ghost over the surface of the world,” she said. “Am I right?”
He realized that she was talking about him specifically, and also that she was somewhat more unhinged than usual, and said, “I’m not sure.”
“The thing is,” she said, sitting upright and holding her knees to her chest, “the thing is, I can’t sleep anymore. Days go by sometimes if I don’t send myself to sleep with all these white little pills. And I used to think I could find some kind of peace in this city. I had a job that I liked . . .” Eli propped himself up on one elbow to watch her face in the guttering candlelight. Her voice was somnambulant.
She talked on through the night, while Eli listened and eventually fell asleep again on the carpet, and her voice was a current through fitful dreams. When he woke up she was still talking, lying on her back, and the candle was drowning in a pool of wax.
There were no windows here, no natural light to give a clue as to the hour of the night, of the morning, but he had a sense of having been asleep for some time. She was mumbling, whispering, and he couldn’t understand her.
“Michaela.” She fell silent and turned her head to look at him. There was a cold draft from somewhere and he couldn’t keep his eyes open. His throat was dry. “What time is it?”
She sat up slowly and fumbled in the darkness for her purse. After a moment she extracted her cell phone, and her face was lit blue for a moment when she looked at the screen.
“It’s six-thirty,” she said. “No, six-thirty-five. I’ve been awake for two days.” She put her cell phone back in her bag and sat there with her legs outstretched on the carpet in front of her, slumped over and looking at her hands, shaking her head, a ghost in the half light. She was barefoot.
“Do you have any sleeping pills?”
She nodded and gestured toward the purse. He thought perhaps she was crying, but it was impossible to tell in the dimness. The candle was a flicker of blue in a pool of melted wax. He could barely make out her face.
“What’s the worst thing you could imagine happening?” she asked suddenly. She was watching his struggle with the child-proof cap.
“I don’t know. I’m too tired for rhetorical questions.”
“It’s not rhetorical, it’s theoretical. There’s a difference.” Her voice cracked, and she coughed once. “My throat’s dry.”
“I’ll get you some water. What’s the worst thing you could imagine?” He succeeded in opening the cap and mea sured three white dots into the palm of his hand. He stood up and moved stiffly to the counter. It took a minute to find the glass he’d seen there earlier. The tap gurgled invisibly in the darkness. He held his hand under the cold water until he began losing feeling in his fingertips and then touched his wet fingertips lightly to his forehead before he returned to her. A trick Zed had taught him; the cold water on his forehead made him feel awake.