Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

There were stills from a surveillance tape in a motel lobby in Cincinnati, the day before she had almost been caught, two or three years after she’d written in the Bible; Christopher looked at these with great interest. Lilia was rendered as a small child with short blond hair, caught at the instant she glanced up into the camera lens. The whole scene was a little fuzzy and unclear in the enlargement, the expression unreadable on her pixilated face. The man behind her could have been anyone: head down, shuffling through a wallet. Notes in Peter’s handwriting in the lower margin: Appears at ease, but he never looks up at cameras. He flipped back through the folders, feeling less displaced than he’d felt in months, and began reading from the beginning. It began with a missing-persons report, filed in the middle of November some years ago: in a rural area between the town of St.-Jean and the American border, a seven-year-old girl disappeared in the night. Her footprints were visible in the snow by the front door; she ran out barefoot into the lawn, and then someone lifted her and carried her away. The prints of a man’s boots led to the tire tracks down by the road.

Sunlight slanted in through the window and warmed the back of Christopher’s head. He closed his eyes for a second. The angle of light had changed; he was hungry; he had been reading for hours. The initial investigation seemed somehow botched to him; he had been reading a transcript of an interview with the girl’s mother and thinking that she seemed curiously detached, although it was of course a possibility that she had still been in shock at that point. He decided it might be necessary to interview her again at some point. Perhaps Lilia’s half-brother as well. He penciled Lilia’s half-brother’s name into a notebook, feeling more purposeful than he had in some time.

Christopher stood up, stretched, and went out into the street. The air outside was hot and still, and tourists wandered speaking English in a sea of French. A pair of girls were playing cellos on a street corner, and on the way back to the office with a sandwich and a coffee he stopped to listen to them for a few minutes, sipping his coffee and feeling that everything would be all right. He thought he might speak to his daughter tonight; it had been a long time since he’d had a real conversation with her. He’d ask her about school, maybe even offer to help out with her homework. He’d tell his wife that her hair looked beautiful. Once back at the desk he stretched out his legs and leaned back in the chair, the coffee immediately forgotten on a pile of old notes. He had read through everything. There was a map that Peter had started — a continental road map, four or five possible sightings circled in red with notations. There was a page of typed contact information: Lilia’s mother, one of Lilia’s schoolteachers, the detective who had initially handled the case in Quebec.

“You can’t,” Peter said when Christopher came to him later. “It’s in the contract.”

“It’s in the contract that I can’t talk to Lilia’s brother? Are you serious?”

“I am. I’m afraid the mother was adamant.” Peter was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, looking through a stack of black-and-white photographs; all twenty of them had been taken within a space of seconds and depicted a man and a woman entering a motel.

“I see.”

“Oh, don’t read into it,” Peter said “She said her son had been through enough already; he’d been interviewed three times by various police detectives the day after his sister vanished, and I had to agree not to try to speak with him if I was going to take the case. She’s just being protective.”

“You’re certain that you couldn’t convince her otherwise?”

“I’m certain. You haven’t met this woman.”

“Fine,” he said.

He returned to his office and closed the door behind him. He looked at the Bible again for a moment and then set it aside to look at the map. He stared at the lines of highways leading out of Cincinnati and let his mind drift, looking for a pattern in the circles and notations and interstate lines, waiting for the old instinct to tell him which way they had gone. He closed his eyes. Follow the trajectory, cities circled in red, a car moving quickly over the surface of a map. His hand was writing her name in the margin of his notebook. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. His focus was absolute.

A thousand miles away in another country, but separated from him only by the thinnest possible sheen, a car moved quickly across the New Mexico desert. A landscape composed of sand and light, and the map folded on the dashboard was beginning to fade in the sunlight.

There was a red pencil that Lilia’s father had purchased specifically for drawing squiggly lines on maps, and in a series of motel rooms they charted a course. They could go almost anywhere. Every direction was possible. They tossed a coin whenever they couldn’t reach an immediate agreement — if it’s heads we go to Santa Barbara, tails means we’re going north — unless there was a music festival or a concert of some sort that her father wanted to go to, in which case he had veto power. In the impeccable past before the broken-down present, in the long hectic interlude before she’d begun leaving people behind, pre-Eli, it sometimes really was as simple as a coin toss.

“One thing you might want to think about,” her father said when she was sixteen, “is whether you maybe want to stop traveling someday.” She knew him well enough to understand that what he meant was I’m worried about you, I want you to stop, but she couldn’t: at sixteen she was traveling alone to San Diego with her father worrying about her in the small town where he’d settled in the New Mexico desert, and when she was seventeen and eighteen she hadn’t come back yet, except for short visits, and she lived in another ten or fifteen cities and towns in the confused interlude of time between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays.

She never asked for money from him, although he sent it sometimes unsolicited. It was possible to get by, from city to city: there was always a room she could rent, there was always a dishwashing job or a job in a stockroom or a job sweeping the floor in a salon, there was always enough to get by and eventually enough to travel away again. What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. There were complicated sequences of travel: maps, suitcases, buses moving slowly through the interstate nights, garbled announcements of departures and delays in the tiled aquarium acoustics of bus terminals and train stations, clocks set high on the walls of station waiting rooms.

In San Diego there was no one; she arrived young and exuberantly alone and stayed for three months working in a doughnut shop, and then began making her way up the coast. When she’d reached the top of the American coastline (it seemed unwise to cross the border) she turned and started to make her way back down again, and by then she was seventeen and people had begun to attach themselves to her in almost every city she stopped in. In San Francisco there was Edwin. He walked up and down hills in the rain with her and held her hand in the park. In Sacramento there was Arthur, who made exquisite pasta dishes and wanted to be a professional chef. In Santa Paula there was Gene, and Santos lived in Pinto Beach. In Los Angeles there was Trent, and later another Edwin, who was more interesting than the first one but not as kind. Her second time through San Diego there was Gareth, and then she turned inland toward the middle of the continent and a string of barely memorable Michaels and Daves. In her memories of a dozen other cities there are ghosts with no names; conversely, there are several minor lovers whose geographical locations can’t be pinpointed in memory beyond small details like a Persian rug in one of their apartments, an angle of streetlight across the living room ceiling of another, a bright-blue alarm clock in the bedroom of a third. The first girl, Lucy, lived in Denver. In Indianapolis there was Peter, who played Vivaldi on his record player and made origami swans. In St. Paul there was a more important Michael, who liked expensive red wine and was trying to be a freelance writer, and in Minneapolis there was Theo. In St. Louis there was no one, but she was only there for a week.