Last Night in Montreal (14 page)

Her loneliness was like a third presence at the café table; they sat together by the hour, and both were aware that the moment he knew where Lilia was he would vanish back to New York and she’d be shipwrecked alone on the ice floe. She held her stories like currency and dispensed small change night by night. Notes on the circular qualities of obsession, like a snake tattoo forever biting its tail: the little girl scheming about dynamite and tightropes in her bedroom, the detective father obsessed with Lilia downstairs, the mother who brought home a cake and then disappeared forever. Michaela always had another story to tell him. Her stories were always in the margins of Lilia’s life. She was always about to tell him where Lilia was. And he was usually only too happy to sit with her indefinitely and avoid the hotel with its painfully empty bed and deadpan bellboys, but he sometimes fell asleep in his café chair with his chin on his chest, arms folded, drifting off into cold dreams about exploding cafés and cake and tightropes. She stayed with him, ordered more tea at intervals, glared with bloodshot eyes at the arrival of morning. He fell asleep to the sound of her voice, and sometimes when he woke up she was still talking.

She talked about languages sometimes near morning. Specifically, what it was like to speak the wrong one in a place where the use of a particular language is enforced by means of a tip line for citizen informants. Laws were in place in the province of Quebec to ensure the usage of French, agencies were set up to enforce them, and a 1-800 number connected callers to La commission de protection de la langue français to report violations. A violation could be as small as English appearing before French on a sign, she said, or the English appearing in larger letters, or a salesgirl saying
hello
instead of
bonjour
on a Sunday afternoon in the ladies’ shoe department. Penalties included fines and the revocation of business licenses.

“Try to imagine,” she said, “what it’s like when you can’t speak the right language in a place like this.” She had been explaining a graffiti tag they’d walked by near Club Electrolite:
Montreal en français: 101 ou 401.
Bill 101 was one of the laws that specifically restricts the use of the English language. The 401 was the highway out of the city.
Speak French or get out.

“I know,” he said gently, “but did I ever tell you about my field of study?”

She went silent, noncommittal, tracing tightropish lines with one finger in the fog of a café windowpane. Outside the streets were achingly cold, and he felt it through the windows; Eli held his coffee mug with both hands to keep warm. It was almost four
A.M.

“There are six thousand languages spoken on this earth,” he said. “I told you that much, right?”

She wrote a slow, looping
6,000
in the windowpane fog without looking at him.

“And the thing is, almost all of them will disappear.”

She seemed to like this idea; she smiled, stopped writing on the windowpane and sipped her newest cup of tea, gazed out the window at the huddled pedestrians, didn’t speak again for quite a while. The thought of disappearing languages seemed to make her happy.

“I found a new alleyway the other day,” she said finally. “Well, the same alleyway, but another spot farther down.”

“The one where I met you?”

“No. A different one.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous. Why do you walk on tightropes?”

“It’s as close as I can get to all that . . .” And
all that,
at that moment in that café in that cold northern city, was the time that she could almost see and almost remember, genetic memory planted long before her birth: an imagined life spent traveling through small towns with lions and tents and tightropes and sideshows, a long line of trailers winding down the highway between fields and trees, sunlight glinting on windshields; setting up tents in the field, the parking lot, the smell of popcorn and candy apples.

“You’ve traveled?” she asked.

“A little. Yes. I’ve been to Europe a few times with my brother. Spain, Paris, Eastern Europe, Turkey, one time we traveled around a bit in southern Italy.”

“The time with the boat?”

“I told you about that trip?”

“No, Lilia did.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. The time with the boat. She liked that story. We were fishing for squids.”

“Did you catch any?”

“No.”

“I dated a guy once,” she said, “who’d traveled around Europe a lot, and he said eventually everywhere seemed kind of interchangeable. Is it like that? When you travel, do all the places seem the same?”

How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard:
flight or fight,
and a switch jammed permanently in the
flight
position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes. It leapfrogs a generation (she said her parents had wanted to be a detective and a real estate agent, even when they were kids), and is thwarted when it reappears. She leaned across the table, asked him if it was true that all places look the same, and the least unkind thing he could do at that moment was nod and lie to her.
Yes. It’s true. I have been to half-a-dozen countries, and all the world looks the same to me.
He thought it would be unimaginably cruel to tell her that all of the individual places she hadn’t seen were different.

“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 floating 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.