Last Night in Montreal (18 page)

40.

On a narrow highway in the mountains, old and in considerable disrepair, two cars moved quickly under a brilliant sky. The car in front was a small grey Toyota, purchased specifically because it was absolutely forgettable. The car traveling behind was a sky-blue Ford Valiant with Quebec license plates, and it had been directly behind the Toyota for nearly an hour. There was a newer highway nearby—wider, safer, with a less calamitous drop-off on the right shoulder—but the first car had pulled onto the old highway an hour ago, and the second car was in pursuit. Lilia’s father swerved around potholes, a fallen branch, hands clenched on the steering wheel. Sometime earlier he had turned off the radio. Now he drove ten miles above the speed limit in charged speechlessness, and ten miles above the speed limit wasn’t fast enough.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said finally, quietly. For him, it was an extraordinary admission. He pulled over sharply to the side of the highway and cut the engine. The blue Valiant slowed as it moved past them and pulled over on the shoulder of the road ahead. In that moment before the driver’s-side door opened, the stillness was nearly absolute.

The man who emerged from the car had an almost spindly look about him. He was tall and slump-shouldered, in a rumpled brown suit jacket and faded blue jeans. He had a brown fedora, which he removed from his head as he approached. He carried it in both hands in front of him, like a present. Lilia’s father was rolling down his window, and the only sounds were the man’s footsteps approaching on the pavement, and wind in the pine trees by the sides of the road. Her father’s other hand was on the key.

The man rested his forearm on the roof of the car, looking in. He didn’t look like an FBI agent.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. He spoke with the softest traces of Lilia’s mother’s accent. “It’s just that I’ve been traveling alongside you for a while. For quite some time.” He was looking directly at Lilia, frozen in the passenger seat. “I’m going home tomorrow, and I won’t be coming back to this country again. I just wanted to tell you that you don’t need to travel anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lilia’s father said.

“Look, I understand why you did it,” the detective said. “I have a daughter in Montreal, and I wish I’d done the same sometimes.” A car was approaching; it passed in a blur of red and he was quiet for a moment, watching it recede. “I spoke to Simon last year, and I know why you did what you did. I know what happened that night. I just wanted to say good-bye, to wish you the best, I just wanted to tell you—”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“You ever heard the story of Icarus?” the detective asked. “I’ve been reading it recently. This is what it comes down to: I don’t mind not being the hero of the story, I don’t mind being the shepherd watching you fly out over the sea with your child, but I don’t want to be the Minotaur.” He straightened up, his hands in his pockets, looking away down the hill. “I don’t know how else to put it,” he said. “I just don’t want to chase you anymore. I’m going to say I couldn’t find you, and that’ll be it. That’ll be it. I don’t think anyone else is looking for you anymore.”

Lilia’s father was staring straight ahead through the windshield, not speaking, but Lilia saw a muscle working frantically in his jaw.

“Good luck,” said Christopher. “Lilia.” He stared at her for a moment longer and smiled. “A pleasure to see you, as always. Your brother sends his regards. Happy birthday, my love.” He turned away and walked back toward his car. Lilia sat still beside her father, watching Christopher recede; the detective started his car and drove away, disappeared around a bend in the highway ahead and was lost behind the pine trees, and only then did her father turn the key in the ignition.

It took her a few minutes to realize that he was still driving too fast.

“You don’t know your mother,” he said when she looked at him. His voice was hoarse and he’d gone pale. There was sweat on his forehead.

“He said he wasn’t going to chase us anymore.” She felt sick.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing she’d tell him to say. You don’t know your mother, it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d . . .” The blue car had come into sight up ahead. “She will never stop chasing you,” her father said. “She will never give you up.” The detective was driving slowly now, like a sightseer. He was driving one-handed, resting his other arm on the edge of the open window. He craned his neck briefly to look up; Lilia followed his gaze and saw the mountains, the sheer rock just visible above the trees to the left. “Lilia,” her father said, abruptly calm, “get in the backseat behind me, and put on your seat belt.”

The highway turned and twisted through dark pine forest. In the seat behind him Lilia pressed her face to the glass to look up at the sky. She wanted to be anywhere else in the world. There were hawks circling in the high blue air. The Valiant was very close now, and she forced herself to look at it. She saw the detective glance up into his rearview mirror, and she was close enough to see the expression of benign surprise. He raised his hand to wave, uncomprehending.

“Lilia,” said her father, “cover your eyes.”

She didn’t cover her eyes. Her father was pulling up alongside the detective’s car; he glanced back and forth between the detective’s car and the highway ahead, and then slowly, with methodical precision, he began to turn the wheel to the right. The grind and screech of metal on metal was unbearable, but she couldn’t look away, and both cars were moving toward the edge of the road. Lilia’s father was looking out the passenger-side window, judging the distance and the degree of force required, gradually easing the other car off the road. There was a very short period when it seemed possible that the detective might still manage to stay on the highway, might still swerve to safety at the very last possible instant and speed ahead and make it after all, but her father gave the wheel one last, barely perceptible turn, so that Christopher’s car left the highway altogether and began a sideways, almost slowmotion slide off the edge of the embankment, down the hill, flipping slowly over onto its side and then upside down and then out of sight as she turned to watch out the back window, and she heard the nerve-shattering impact of metal around the trunk of a tree.

It wasn’t the accident itself that broke her, but the way he surrendered to it. It seemed, no matter how she tried to reconfigure the moment in her memory, that the detective looked sideways at the car forcing him off the road with a calm, almost eager expression. He was ready for the accident. There was a fleeting moment when he met Lilia’s eyes, just at the end: he smiled and allowed himself to slide over the edge. He made no discernible effort to stay on the road.

41.

Michaela rose from the floor of the dressing room and left the room without speaking, picking her jacket up off the floor as she went, pulling it on over her lopsided wings. Eli followed her up the stairs, lost her in the crowds on the dance floor, and found her again on the frozen sidewalk outside, shivering and speaking into her cell phone. “I don’t care,” she said, “meet me there anyway.” She put the cell phone in her jacket pocket and looked at him as if they’d never met.

“Michaela?”

“Eli,” she said.

“Who were you talking to?”

She looked at him without answering. There was a blankness about her. He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

“I told you the story,” he said. “Now you have to tell me where she is.”

“I don’t know. She was here the night you came.” She began walking away from him with stiff, tottering steps; he reached out to steady her, and they walked together arm in arm. “She
was
in the dressing room that night, before I brought you down there. I guess I should’ve brought you down sooner, before she had a chance to leave.” She stopped, pulled her arm away from his, fumbled in her jacket pocket. “She said she’d wait for me in the dressing room till I came back,” she muttered. “Fucking liar.” She extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her jacket.

“People fail you,” he said impatiently. “It’s a chance you take. Where’s Lilia?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “She left. She was supposed to be in my dressing room when you . . .
fuck,
” she said. The lighter was clicking uselessly. “You have a light?”

There were two matchbooks in his pocket. He didn’t smoke but had at some point acquired the habit of compulsively collecting promotional matchbooks from restaurants.

“You want Le Gamin matches or Café Universale matches?”

She gave him a blankly vicious look, like a wild creature deprived of food. He gave her both matchbooks.

“Your pronunciation’s terrible,” she said when the cigarette was safely ignited. They’d made slow, wavering progress to a street corner; the light changed to red just as they reached the edge of the sidewalk, and he watched her shivering and smoking. He took her arm again and she leaned into him silently.

“I’m sorry, Michaela,” he said uselessly. “It’s an awful story.” The cold was agonizing; he’d never imagined this quality of wind. It was possible to imagine his blood freezing under his skin, and there was ice in his eyelashes. It was eleven
P.M.
on a Sunday, and Rue Ste.-Catherine was all but deserted. Neon signs flickered from behind the barred windows of clubs.
Girls Girls Girls. Danseuses Nues.

“I need to find Lilia,” he said.

She laughed. “You’d be amazed at how many people have said that in her lifetime. I don’t know where she is.”

“You have to know, you promised to tell me. Is she still in the city?”

She didn’t answer. They’d crossed the street and were heading slowly downhill, past the Musique Plus building, past electronics stores and closed cafés. They were passing into a surreal public space that he’d walked past many times without venturing into, a sweeping expanse of concrete and terraced steps. It was lit by regularly spaced black lampposts, each holding five round orbs of blue light. In the midst of all this was a rectangular pool, utterly still and locked in dark ice.

Michaela seemed exhausted; she was leaning on his arm, breathing heavily. She broke away from him to walk slowly up the steps, sat down haltingly about halfway to the top. She stayed there in an apparent daze, smoking, while he shivered up and down and tried to figure out what to do. Her teeth were chattering. After a couple of minutes he sat beside her, wrapped his arms around his body, and tried to convince himself that he would someday regain feeling in his toes.

“Well, look,” he said, “when did you see her last?”

She opened her box of cigarettes, extracted one delicately, and then lit it expertly with the remains of its predecessor. She tossed the old one away, toward the street; he watched it smolder for an instant on the ice. She didn’t seem likely to answer him, so he tried another tack.

“What’s this place called?”

“Place-des-Arts. It’s nicer in summer.” She removed the cigarette from her mouth, studied it while she exhaled, reinserted it languidly, all without looking at him.

“I think,” said Eli, “that we should probably keep moving. It can’t be more than twenty degrees out.”

She glanced at him briefly. “I don’t know Fahrenheit.”

“It’s no warmer in Celsius. The point is that we’re going to die out here. We should go,” he said, but Michaela was weeping. She swept tears away from her face with one shaking hand and held the cigarette loosely with the other. Ashes drifted to the snow.

“I always thought I wanted to know what happened,” she said.

“Hey,” he said helplessly, “it’ll be all right. We just have to keep walking. We’ll go somewhere, my sailor, we’ll go to the café, I’ll buy you tea . . .”

She was pulling herself up by a metal railing, shaking her head.

“I don’t want
tea,
” she said.

He held her shoulder to steady her, and her silver jacket was shining in the blue lights of the plaza. He looked away from her, toward the long expanse of Rue Ste.-Catherine. A nightmare of locked doors and closed restaurants and buzzing neon signs, panhandlers begging to be rescued from the cold, wrong city, and he wished to be absolutely anywhere else. He wished he had never walked into the Café Matisse in Brooklyn, or at least that he’d waited for his own table instead of sitting down with Lilia. He wished he had been paying attention on the morning she’d left and stopped her on her way out the door. He wished, if those previous wishes had failed, that at least he hadn’t followed her here. An eternal half-life in Brooklyn, he thought, an eternal half-life of posers and unfinished manuscripts and fake artists and failed scholarship and guilt-inducing phone calls from his mother and letters from his unmatchable and unsurpassable brother would have been better than an hour of this.

“I don’t understand how you can live here,” he said.

“I can’t. I’ll be leaving soon.” She started up the steps, and he stepped close to hold her arm again. There was a layer of ice over everything; they were passing slowly over the concrete plaza away from Rue St.-Catherine, stepping carefully, Rue Ontario deserted on the other side. “Do you know what Lilia said about this city?”

The name still made his heart constrict in his chest.

“What did she say about it?”

“She said she’d traveled one city too far. She said she wished she’d never left New York.”

And there in the concrete plaza, the weight of centuries and continents lifted away from him into the night; he was suddenly, absurdly, fantastically light. She wished she’d never left him. This could all be undone. He could have leapt into the air just then and never landed, but he stayed on the ground and seized her shoulders instead.

“Please tell me where she is.”

“You’ll go back to Brooklyn with her,” she said, “and I’ll still be here.”

“You just said you were leaving.”

“She only stayed with me because she wanted me to tell her what happened that night, why she had those scars on her arms. I only stayed with her because I wanted her to tell me about an accident, and now that you’ve told me, I wish I didn’t know.” There was an uneven quality to her voice, and a brightness in her eyes that struck him as unhealthy. “Did you notice them?”

“Notice what?”

“The
scars,
” she said.

“Of course I did.”

“Her mother threw her through a window.” She fumbled in her pockets again; she lit another cigarette and smiled terribly. “That’s the part of the story she doesn’t know, the part she doesn’t remember. Partial amnesia is the most remarkable thing.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Fortunately,” said Michaela, “it’d snowed heavily the night before. Cushioned the fall, I’d imagine. Probably saved her life.”

“I don’t want to know any of this. All I want to know is where she is.”

“No,” she said, “you need to know the story, so you can tell it to her when you see her next. I’m not sure if I’m going to see her again. So listen to me, this will just take a second: her mother threw her through a window. She was seven years old. She lay in the snow until her brother came out to get her.”

“Her brother?”

“Simon. He was nine or ten at the time. Simon said the mother was hysterical, weeping and carrying on. She told Simon much later that she never knew what it was about Lilia that made her want to annihilate her so desperately, but there it is: she throws her seven-year-old daughter through a window at night and leaves her outside in the snow. Remember, we’re talking about Quebec in the wintertime. It was probably as cold that night as it is now.”

He was silent, watching her.

“Simon went outside to get her. She landed in a deep snowdrift outside the window; nothing was broken, but she had cuts all over her arms from the glass. He got her back into the house and put towels around her arms to stop the bleeding, and then he called Lilia’s father, his ex-stepfather . . . He told his sister’s father to come get her. Do you understand? Her own brother arranged her abduction,” she said.

It took him a moment to recover his voice. “Lilia doesn’t remember this?”

“None of it. She doesn’t know what happened. There was a first-aid kit somewhere in the house; Simon bandaged his sister’s arms as best he could, got her upstairs and put her to bed and lay down to wait in the room next door. He left the front door unlocked. Lilia’s father came late that night and saw the broken glass in the snow, just like Simon told him. When she came downstairs, her father took her away. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s the moment when Lilia’s memories begin; her father throws broken glass at her bedroom window, and she hears the sound and sits up in bed.”

“Michaela, you have to tell me where she is.”

“Fairly close by, I imagine. She rents a room not far from here.” She held her cigarette up in the air. “My last cigarette,” she announced. “I’m quitting tonight.”

“Good. You smoke too much.”

“I’m going into the subway system,” Michaela said. She stepped backward. “Which way are you going?”

“I don’t know yet, Michaela. You have to tell me where to go.”

“Why should I?” She was more interested in the cigarette. She inhaled deeply, looked at it for a second, and then dropped it half finished into the snow.

“I am so tired,” Eli said. “It’s so cold out here. I want to go home.”

She took a few more steps backward, away from him. He watched the movements of her sleek boots on the precarious ice. The toes were scuffed. “She’s been renting a room on Rue de la Visitation,” she said finally. “Corner of Ontario Street, in Centre-Sud. East of here. You just follow Ontario Street that way, ten or so blocks. It’s the brown building on the southwest corner, across from a restaurant that used to be a gas station. Her building sort of sags outward toward the street. There’re always transvestite hookers in front of it.” She gestured in a northeasterly direction. “Say good-bye to her for me?”

“I will.” He was moving away from her, waving, already somewhere else. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She turned away without answering. He watched her recede for a moment and then began walking as fast as he could over the ice. West on Ontario Street toward Rue de la Visitation, and even this coldest of cities seemed suddenly exquisite to him. The blank cement architecture was refreshingly clean-lined. The wide empty streets were calm instead of lifeless. The cold was almost bracing. The exhaustion that had settled over him in the weeks since she’d gone was beginning to lift, slowly, in increments too small to be individually observed, the way mist rises from a river in the morning.
She wished she’d never left New York.

He didn’t get very close to Rue de la Visitation. Michaela’s last few words were pulling at him—
Say good-bye to her for me?—
and near the corner of St.-Laurent he understood; Eli stopped as if shot in the amber streetlight and turned back the way he had come. Walking quickly at first, but then he broke into a run; back toward the parking lot, gasping in the ice-locked air. His teeth hurt with each footstep on the frozen pavement, the cold burning his face. He ran back to Place-des-Arts in the staggering cold, he threw himself down the stairs of the Métro Place-des-Arts station and ran past the ticket booth, vaulting over a turnstile and running faster, down to the level of fast underground trains, faster still, but the girl at the far end of the westbound platform had been standing there for several minutes by the time he saw her, and the trains were running slightly ahead of schedule that night. It was warm down here; she had taken off her silver jacket and folded it neatly on a nearby bench. The Halloween wings were still on her back, although now they were lopsided, and an empty red cigarette box was crushed in one hand.

Although the subway lines of all cities differ in details, the sequence of events is more or less the same: first a slight wind down the length of the tunnel, a few seconds before even the sound of the train. Then (depending on the city, the design of the subway system, the specifics of the individual station) there are a few seconds or even a full minute of approaching light: twin beams through the darkness, and by now the approaching thunder of sound. By the time Eli reached the platform, pursued by a police officer who’d watched him jump the turnstile at the ticket booth, he could already see the lights. Approaching at a merciless speed into the station, closer and closer to the waiting girl. There were people on the platform, some looking at him now as he ran—he thought he heard someone say his name—but he was aware of no one but Michaela in that moment.

It’s possible that she didn’t hear him screaming her name as he ran full speed down the platform toward her. She was utterly intent on what she was about to do just then, poised on the edge with one foot slightly forward, like a tightrope walker about to step out onto the rope. She was looking at the approaching lights.