Last Night in Montreal (10 page)

“Your phone number? Really?”

“I can remember my phone number from when I was seven, but I can’t remember her.”

“Memory’s a strange thing.”

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

He was quiet.

“Please.”

“You meet a young beautiful divorcée in a bar,” he said finally. “She’s twenty-six years old with a two-year-old son, she’s beautiful, she’s alive, she wants to go to Africa for your honeymoon, and then it all goes dark so quickly, and the next thing you know you’re taking your kid away in the night. She’s the past, kiddo. You don’t want to live in the past, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What was her accent?”

“What?”

“My mother,” she said. “In the interview. She had an accent.”

“She’s from Quebec,” he said after a very long pause. “But I’m surprised you noticed it. Her English is immaculate.”

“What was my first language?”

“What?”

“Was it English or French?”

“We lived near Montreal,” her father said. “Just north of the American border. Your mother and I spoke both English and French. You always knew both languages.”

“But which was my first?”

“There was no
first,
” he said. “You have no first language.”

“How can someone have no first language?”

“You just always knew both. Your mother was French, and I was English, and it’s just the way it was. But it’s no good living in the past, my dove. I don’t want to talk about this.” And then he said, again, “I’m surprised you noticed her accent.”

She couldn’t speak, freighted by treason. The streetlights became fewer and farther between until they were replaced altogether by stars, achingly close in the dry night air. It took her a few weeks to understand that Simon had told no one. If he had, Lilia realized, she would have been caught that night.

18.

Simon told no one; he’d always known exactly why his sister had gone away.

He hung up the phone, pressed *69, and wrote down the number on the palm of his hand. But before that he stayed on the line for a long time, listening to static and the desert wind.

19.

The phone records for Lilia’s mother’s house arrived on Christopher’s desk once a month in a thick envelope, and a couple of years after he’d taken the case he could skim through the pages quickly; he knew most of the numbers by heart. The dentist, the psychiatrist, her first husband’s house where her son lived most of the time, her son’s friends in St.-Jean when he was visiting her on the weekends—and here he stopped cold at an incoming call from a foreign telephone number. The duration of the call had been a little over an hour. He dialed the number and listened to the endless ringing. No one picked up. He wrote,
Pay phone?
in the lower margin and within an hour had confirmed his suspicion.

“Only a week,” he told his wife that evening. They sat on opposite sides of the bed, formally, like lovers at the calm ending of a motel-room affair.

“A week,” she repeated tonelessly. He’d never left her alone before.

“It could be a breakthrough,” he said. “I spoke to the girl’s mother, and she knew nothing; she said she was out that night. I asked if I might speak to her son, and she reminded me of the terms of her contract and then hung up on me. I think Lilia’s brother could easily have spoken to one of them, the girl or her father, but if I can’t talk to him, I have to just . . . listen, you know I hate leaving you alone.”

She smiled suddenly, insincerely it seemed to him, and said, “Well. I hope you have a lovely time.”

“It’s work,” he said. “Not a vacation. I’m just going to fly down for a week and rent a car and try to find this kid. It’s a hell of a long shot.”

“Well, try to have a lovely time anyway.”

“Thank you,” he said awkwardly. “Thank you, I’ll try.”

In Arizona he stood before the pay phone in the noonday sun; he could almost see her there in front of him, a ghost, a mirage, dialing a number dredged up from some recess of childhood memory. He turned back toward the motel. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the parking lot was silent. Two cars and an eighteen-wheeler shimmered in the heat. He stood facing the motel until he saw what he was looking for: a movement of white on the upstairs balcony, a chambermaid pushing her cart between rooms. He was walking across the expanse of parking lot when she disappeared into a dim open doorway, the door a rectangle of shadow in the brilliant light. He tried to walk loudly on the balcony so she wouldn’t be startled by anyone sneaking up behind her, but she still jumped and pressed a hand briefly to her chest when he knocked on the door of the room she was cleaning.

“I apologize for disturbing you,” he said. “Christopher Gray-don. I’m a private investigator.”

She smiled and told him a name that he wrote illegibly in his notebook. The chambermaid had lived all her life in the town of Leonard. In the long hot afternoon after the interview had aired, she had been vacuuming the abandoned room. She’d found the key in the door that morning. She hadn’t seen the
Unsolved Cases
episode, but she had noticed the Bible; she’d picked it up from the bed where it had been discarded, more out of an instinct for tidiness than out of any kind of religious curiosity, and noticed the note written across the page. She’d read it through a couple of times, frowning. There was something a little creepy about it, and she’d suddenly felt like she was being watched and the silence in the room was oppressive, so she’d closed the Bible quickly and put it back in the drawer. She hadn’t thought of it again until Christopher appeared in the doorway of a room she was cleaning two weeks later.

“This will sound like a very strange request,” he said after he introduced himself, “but I wonder if you might remember . . .”

The chambermaid had always wanted to be famous. And she was, very briefly: “Local Tip Brings Breakthrough in Missing Girl Case” (
Leonard Gazette,
issue number 486), and she smiled beneath the caption with resplendently bleached hair and hoop earrings. “I didn’t think nothing of it,” she told the newspaper reporter, who changed
nothing
to
anything
before the story went to press. “Just that it was kind of weird, you know, to write something in a Bible like that, but then a detective came to see me.”

He rented a car and spent six weeks driving, tracing wider and wider circles around the town of Leonard, stopping at motels, asking questions, pulling over to close his eyes and try to imagine which way they might have gone. He called Peter, who told him to stay down there as long as he needed to; his other cases could wait. He called his wife on two consecutive evenings but got only the answering machine and so gave up trying to reach her and continued driving. On the flight home from Tempe he held the new Bible open on his lap, his eyes falling back to the message when he wasn’t staring out the window. It sent a shiver up his spine every time he looked at it. The handwriting was scrawled and uneven. She was writing fast.
I am not missing. Stop searching for me. I want to stay with my father. Stop searching for me. Leave me alone.—Lilia.

She had written
stop searching for me
twice. He thought she must have just seen the
Unsolved Cases
episode, or perhaps she’d been watching it as she wrote; he imagined her writing from the edge of panic, her image flashing across the screen. She understood that she was being pursued. Her strain, telegraphed back to him through this latest message, seemed to Christopher like an acknowledgment of his existence; after two years of pursuit she had received the message that he was following her, opened a Bible to the Sixty-ninth Psalm, and written a reply. He imagined that she was speaking to him. He arrived back in Montreal in the early afternoon, and went directly from the airport to the office instead of going home. He stared at the photograph in her file, the first grade school portrait that had been used on
Unsolved Cases,
and caught himself whispering the same words over and over again, looking into her inscrutable eyes:
Where do you go? Where do you go?
He felt he’d never been so close.

MICHAELA’S MOTHER
began smoking in her husband’s absence but neglected to purchase ashtrays. When Christopher came home the house had a strange, burnt smell about it; there were cigarette burns here and there on the furniture. He would have thought himself to be the kind of man who draws the line somewhere, but he found it no easier to talk to her about putting out cigarettes on the furniture than about strange ties and cheap cufflinks. He purchased a number of cheap glass ashtrays and left them here and there throughout the house. He began going to the office before sunrise, and he didn’t come home before dark. He slept with his secretary occasionally, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Michaela carefully collected perfect grades, attended the circus school in the afternoons, and began walking home from the bus stop as slowly as she possibly could.

Michaela’s mother was losing interest in domesticity. It was hard to think of it in any other way; she had attended a parent-teacher conference some months earlier and had announced that it was her last; if the school required parental involvement, she said, it wouldn’t kill Michaela’s father to take a couple hours off work. She was no longer cleaning the house; the rooms gathered dust until Christopher quietly hired a once-a-month cleaning lady. Sometime after this, she stopped cooking; her expensive set of copper pans collected dust in the kitchen, and her library of cookbooks went unopened. She brought in Chinese takeout or deli sandwiches and started buying disposable plates; they ate off Styrofoam with plastic forks. There were strange combinations: an enormous container of deli coleslaw with takeout sushi and a container of pickles. Pizza with fortune cookies. Small cartons of milk in lieu of glasses.

Once the dinner was laid out on the table, each one less dinnerlike than the one before, once Michaela and her father were seated, her mother glanced expectantly from one to the other until they started eating. Then she brought out the newspaper and proceeded to ignore both of them.

“Elaine,”
Christopher said.

“I’m sorry, am I being rude?” She put the paper down. “How was work, darling?” She was like an actress impersonating a wife. Something shone terribly in her eyes in those days; she had the look of a woman with a permanent fever. It seemed that she almost never went to sleep.

“Very productive,” her father said. He no longer recognized this as the life they’d left the circus for, and he felt that there’d been some kind of a bait and switch.

“Good,” her mother said, and picked up the paper again.

In the silence after that moment Michaela tried to eat as quickly as possible, or as little as possible, or both; she wanted to leave the table as fast as she could. Her mother put the paper down.

“But no one asked me about my day!” she said. “Don’t you want to know what I did?”

“Please,” said her father, “not in front of the kid.” He didn’t look at Michaela, although she stared at his face.

“Well,” she said, “never mind, then. It doesn’t matter what I did.”

(Notes on the fragility of family, written in his other notebook much later that night:
Everything matters. Everything matters. Do not ever pretend that it doesn’t matter what you did.
) But instead of saying that he just said her name. She snapped at him and the conversation was carried into the kitchen, where it billowed up quickly and raged into a storm. This was the point in the evening when Michaela always left the table. She went upstairs to her bedroom and did homework or drew sketches involving tightropes and great expanses of air. She was plotting the distance to the nearest tree from her bedroom window, although this was during a period in her life when she still knew better than to try that kind of thing; no one at the circus school was allowed to walk on a tightrope without a safety net or a spotter at the very least, depending on the height of the rope, and there was a time in her life when she still understood why this was. The battle in the kitchen was loud but abstract; it was impossible to make out the content of what either of her parents was saying, only the tenor of shrieked accusations and counterattacks. There was an evening when she wandered into her parents’ bedroom, perhaps in search of silence, or of clues. Her mother’s clothes were scattered here and there. Her father’s leather bag was lying at the foot of the bed. In the months since she’d sprained her ankle at the circus school she had gone through all of her father’s files that she could find; the case he was obsessed with held a strange fascination for her.

Her father’s bag held very little of interest: a wallet, a comb, an autobiography of an LAPD hostage negotiator, a beat-up Montreal subway map, a road atlas for the Southwestern United States, half a pack of DuMaurier cigarettes. But what was strange to her was that it contained two Bibles, each with a bookmark protruding from the center pages. To the best of her recollection she had never attended a church service, and she had always been under the impression that her parents were atheists. She opened the first Bible to the bookmark, and it took a moment to make out the scrawled message in the dim glow cast by the streetlight outside the window.
Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.—Lilia.

Her breath caught in her throat.
No,
the missing girl’s mother said in a grainy 1987 videotape of a long-archived television episode,
I wish I could forget her.
The pitch of the argument downstairs was changing, moving closer to the foot of the stairs. She tore the page from the Bible, folded it quickly, put it in her pocket and left the room.

20.

In the times when Lilia wasn’t hiding in the backseat of the car, when there was no one else on the road and the breeze through the passenger-side window was perfect, when she could forget that she was being chased and that she might be found someday, when it was only her father and the radio and the highway—in these times Lilia and her father could talk for hours, and life seemed gorgeous and magnificent and safe. Safety is a car driving quickly away.

He wasn’t content with showing her the country: he wanted to show her what he saw in it, to share his private love affair with the sheer beauty of all the details that he could never stop noticing no matter how long he traveled or how fast. When he talked about details—flowers, fences, individual buildings, the poetry hidden in the names of towns—Lilia felt her heart swelling up with an awkward adoration for it all. But she never felt at ease in the world. It couldn’t be claimed that she was really a part of it, and from the specific night when her memories began (ice against window, lost bunny, snow), the traditions of the world were foreign to her. She picked up what she could from books and television shows, noting carefully the existence of two-parent families, houses, schools, family dogs, memorizing intriguingly home-specific phrases like
latchkey kid
and
back garden
and
state-of-the-art kitchen appliance
and
basement.
She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.

At the gas stations her father bought magazines: the
NewYorker, Newsweek, Science Times
. These she studied carefully, anthropologically, for information on the world she traveled through. Or he’d buy a book written in a language that she was supposed to be learning at the time (Spanish, Italian, German) and set parameters:
By the time we reach St. Louis, kiddo, I’d like a written translation of the first half page.
And she’d bend feverishly over the relevant split-language dictionary (English-German, Español-Inglés, Italiana-Inglese), and he’d give warnings—
Ten miles, kiddo, eight, six, time.
And at the motel that night he’d go over the page with a red pencil while she pretended not to care and stared coolly at the television set. It flickered bluely in a thousand motel rooms while she watched it and half expected to see herself there on the screen.

When she was younger she used to tell herself, with some smugness, that some people vanish forever and never are found. Until the interview on
Unsolved Cases,
she still believed herself to be one of them. It wasn’t that she ceased to be happy after she saw herself on television; it was that after she saw herself on television she was aware that someday all of this would end.