Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

At home she had a practice tightrope installed in the living room; it was only a foot off the floor but she imagined a hundred feet of space beneath her, crowds cheering, all the people and lights. Or absolute stillness between bank towers, making a perfect getaway with the safe-deposit-box master key, moving like water over the opposite window ledge. She walked back and forth, back and forth, expert and alone. The tightrope-walking calmed her when the house was too silent and no one was home. It seemed that the length of time between the end of school and her parents’ return home was growing longer from one evening to the next. Michaela felt herself to be on the vanguard of a brave new world; it was as if her parents had simply given her the house. Her father came home late and had little to say. He spread his files over the dining room table after dinner and stayed there poring over them deep into the night. He stood sometimes, he paced, he threw back his head and closed his eyes, he said a name sometimes aloud like a mantra (Lilia, Lilia), but he never looked up and saw his daughter watching through the banister railings. There were nights when she fell asleep on the stairs.

Her mother came home around midnight and carried the child up to bed. She kissed her softly on the forehead and Michaela opened her eyes for a moment, not quite awake: Why do you work so much? Sometimes her mother didn’t answer. Sometimes she did: Because I have things to do, my darling. Everyone around here is consumed by work, haven’t you noticed? She held Michaela close against her, and the collar of her blouse smelled faintly of tobacco and aftershave.

“I FIND HER somewhat. . ferocious,” the seventh grade teacher said diplomatically in the last parent-teacher conference Michaela’s mother ever attended.

“Really,” said Michaela’s mother. She was interested but having a hard time concentrating. “Ferocious?”

“ Intense,” said the teacher immediately, attempting to switch the words in midair. “She’s very focused. Ms. Graydon, I think we need to discuss your daughter’s progress in French.”

This was a matter of lingering concern among the faculty; Michaela had qualified for a coveted English-language education under the terms of the Quebec language laws and had been failing her French classes since the first grade.

“Oh, I imagine she’ll pick it up,” said Michaela’s mother. She was running her fingers through her hair and looking down at the floor. “I should get back to the office,” she announced abruptly. “My boss is waiting for me.”

“Of course,” said Michaela’s teacher. “I just think—”

“That she’s ferocious?”

“I was going to say, I just think that we may be looking at possible dyslexia at this point. Her grades are excellent in every subject except French. She just doesn’t seem able to pick it up. I don’t have to tell you that in this political climate, an inability to speak the language—”

“Ferocious,” Michaela’s mother persisted, smiling slightly.

“A little, well, a little intense. Yes.” The teacher couldn’t help but notice that Michaela’s mother seemed almost pleased by this. It wasn’t so disturbing that she ever mentioned it to anyone, but she didn’t schedule any more meetings with Michaela’s parents.

The following week Christopher got a call from the circus school — Michaela, a young assistant informed him breathlessly, had fallen off the high wire — his breath caught in his throat— but she’d only sprained her ankle, all was well, could he come and pick her up? Michaela’s mother, inexplicably, couldn’t be reached. Michaela didn’t tell anyone that she’d hardly seen her father in two weeks; he stood awkwardly in the church basement with his hands in his coat pockets, gloomy about the interruption from his work but too conscious of appearances not to show up, and examined her ankle along with her instructor. He agreed that it was slightly swollen and that she’d probably be fine by tomorrow.

“How did you fall off a high wire?” he asked. “There’s supposed to be a safety net.”

“I sprained my ankle in the safety net,” she said. “It was the safety net that distracted me and made me fall in the first place.”

“How can a safety net distract you?”

“It moved,” she said. “Someone brushed up against it from underneath. If it hadn’t been there, I probably would’ve been fine.”

“If it hadn’t been there—” her father said, but then found that he couldn’t finish the sentence. There was an awkward silence. He cleared his throat.

“Well,” her instructor said. He was a middle-aged man with a Russian accent and a missing finger on his left hand. “You’ll want to take her home, I imagine.”

“Yes,” Christopher said, surprised by the notion. “Yes, of course. Thank you.” He nodded awkwardly and walked with his daughter out into the street. This was one of the neighborhoods that he loved the most, and he was thinking about how rarely he came up here. The architecture was beautiful in this corner of town. They walked together for a few minutes in silence, Michaela limping, Christopher looking at the spiral staircases on the outside of the buildings.

“Dad?” He looked at her, startled out of his thoughts, but wasn’t sure what to say. “Dad, I want to join the circus.”

“Absolutely not,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked, a little petulant. She increased the severity of her limp for a few steps.

“You can’t join a circus,” he said. “You’re thirteen.”

“Fourteen. There’s a girl a year older than me at the circus school who already worked with Cirque du Soleil when she was my age. I could audition,” she said.

He decided to ignore this. “Tightrope-walking is not a life,” he said. “And besides your age, you know why not. It’s devolution.” The thought of joining circuses upset him; he’d run away from his parents’ circus with his wife when they were seventeen and eighteen.

“What’s devolution?”

“The opposite of evolving. Why would you want to join a circus?”

“To travel away,” Michaela said. “I don’t like it here.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t. I can’t even speak French,” she said, “and everyone speaks French. Why can’t I move somewhere else and join a circus?”

“Because,” he said, “you should be happy here. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to get you into an English school? And now you want to speak French? ” He was hailing a cab; when one pulled up he gave his address, his daughter, and a ten-dollar bill to the cab driver and saw them off with a wave. He was thinking about Lilia. The cab glided to a halt in front of the house, and Michaela gave the ten to the driver, who said something she didn’t understand in French. She climbed awkwardly out of the cab, ignoring him, and limped to the front door while the cab pulled away. Her ankle hurt. She unlocked the door and relocked it behind her, then stood for a moment leaning against it. The house was silent. There was a dusty umbrella near her feet; she kicked at it, limped a few steps toward the stairs, changed her mind and went to the dining room instead. She stopped just inside, went back out to the hall closet, and groped around on the top shelf until she found the in-case-of-emergency flashlight.

The first notebook that she opened began with the chambermaid. Michaela played the flashlight over the page. She could have just turned on the dining room light, but she was pretending to be a cat burglar. The notebook began with a Motel 6 in the town of Leonard, Arizona, a room on the second floor paid for in cash by a man traveling alone with his daughter, a thirty-two-year-old chambermaid’s utterly forgettable name. (Sara? Kate? Jane?) She squinted (the name was written illegibly) and turned the page.