Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

Lilia was far from Arizona on that particular afternoon; while Michaela was reading those pages in Montreal, she was fly-fishing with her father in an Oregon river. But a year earlier, in a small desert town, Lilia had stayed with her father in a room the chambermaid had cleaned.

The room the chambermaid cleaned: two double beds with scratchy orange-and-white-patterned bedspreads, a side table containing a motel pen and a Gideon Bible between them, a TV on a low dresser at the foot of the beds. Lilia’s father had gone to get takeout hamburgers at the restaurant downstairs, and Lilia sat cross-legged on one of the beds reading about sea horses in National Geographic . The lamps cast a dim yellow light, and the television flickered quiet and blue, and the painting on the wall behind her was a splash of abstract color in the mirror above the television set. Until that night, although never afterward, she always kept the television on for company in the rare times when she was alone in any given room. She was unused to being alone, and the state made her uneasy. She seldom paid attention to the television; on this particular evening she looked up only because she heard her name.

“Lilia Grace Albert,” the host intoned. Lilia looked up in time to make eye contact; the camera lingered for a moment on his face. He stood on an industrial-looking multilevel set, where people with their backs to the camera typed on computers. “It’s every parent’s nightmare,” he continued darkly. “A noncustodial parent with citizenship in two nations abducts his daughter, in this case snatching her from her bed in the dead of night, and spirits her away into another country. Once there, it’s relatively easy to change her name, to assume a new identity, and, in short, to disappear. Our focus this episode is on the problem of international abductions. We’ll examine several individual cases. .”

It was Unsolved Cases, and Lilia was Unsolved that night. Her father’s image flashed across the screen, followed by the last school photograph taken before she had disappeared. The host was talking ponderously about the problem of international abductions in general and Lilia’s case in particular, which was apparently considered dramatic because of the snatched-from-her-own-bed angle. She was thinking that her picture wasn’t bad, as school photographs go; in the first grade she had been wide-eyed and serious, pretty in an unsmiling way. Her father’s photograph, on the other hand, was the photo her mother had supplied to the police shortly after Lilia vanished. The photo had been taken fourteen years earlier at an airport in Nairobi, on the way home from a disastrous African honeymoon: it showed Lilia’s father leaning on a concrete pillar near the baggage claim, wild-eyed with malarial fever, his hair sticking up in all directions and three days’ beard on his sweat-streaked face. He looked exactly like the kind of man who’d snatch a child from her bed.

Cut to the face of a pretty young interviewer, all impeccable makeup and perfect hair. She sat on an armchair angled toward a sofa, on which a woman identified in subtitles as Lilia’s mother was sitting beside Lilia’s brother, who was awkward in a transitional teenaged-boy kind of way and didn’t look much like Lilia at all. In the dim light of the motel room Lilia studied them, but their faces stirred nothing. They were utterly unfamiliar. She had no recollection of ever having seen them before. The time before she left her mother’s house was all closed doors and blind corners; her memories began the night her father appeared on the lawn below her window.

“It’s been a difficult few years for you,” the interviewer remarked. Her suit was the color of roses.

“Very difficult,” Lilia’s mother said. It seemed to Lilia that she had once been very pretty; now she had a benign, motherly look, tired and a little worn. She wore a very large turquoise pendant over a big grey sweater. Her hair looked a little like Lilia’s, or the way Lilia thought her hair would look if she stopped dyeing it a different color every three months. In that moment, sitting on the motel-room bed, Lilia would have given almost anything to remember her mother. The woman on the screen could have been anyone.

“Have there been any recent developments in the case?”

“I’ve recently engaged the services of a private investigative agency.” She spoke with a slight accent that Lilia couldn’t quite place.

“A private detective.”

“A private detective, yes. It does make me feel that things are hopeful, although of course it’s all been very difficult. And there have actually been a few promising leads recently, since the agency began working for me. They’re working with the FBI. I think it’s hopeful.”

“I’m so glad. What has been the most difficult aspect for you,” the interviewer asked, “on a day-to-day basis?” She leaned a hairbreadth closer, all warmth and benign concern and hoping-for-higher-ratings harmlessness, and the camera closed in on the mother’s face.

“The nights are difficult. When I sleep,” and her mother’s voice was strained, “I sometimes dream that she’s leaving me. She was so little, she was only seven that year, and I always dream of her walking away down the stairs. .”

She trailed off. The camera tried to catch Lilia’s brother, but he was staring uncooperatively into space. He seemed, if anything, beside himself with boredom.

“Would you like a tissue?” the interviewer asked rhetorically. A box of tissues had appeared on a small table by the arm of the sofa. Lilia’s mother took one and touched it lightly to her eyes, and then her hands folded and refolded it into a tiny white square on her lap.

“She’s mine,” Lilia’s mother said quietly. “She belongs with me.”

“Of course she does. Of course. Let’s talk about your son for a moment. Simon no longer lives with you, is that correct?”

“Simon lives with my first husband,” her mother said, “but he still comes to stay with me on weekends.”

“Simon,” the interviewer said, “would you like to talk a little bit about your sister?”

The camera cut to Simon, but he just looked at his shoes.

“What do you find yourself wishing for the most, more than anything else in the world?” the interviewer asked quickly.

“I wish more than anything that she would come home to me. She belongs with her mother. But if she doesn’t, if she can’t, if something — if she won’t come home, then I wish. .”

The interviewer leaned forward in her armchair, waiting. Simon said something inaudible and closed his eyes for a moment, and it was difficult to escape the impression that he’d heard all this before. What was strange to Lilia, staring at the television, was that she thought the words she almost heard from him were French.

“I know it’s terrible.” Her mother touched the tissue lightly to her eyes. “I mean, it’s terrible even to think it, but. .” Lilia touched her hands to her face while her mother kept speaking, saltwater on her fingertips, and the motel room grew dim around her; all she could see was the television screen, while the room around it faded to outlines and shadows. “But the thought of her disappearance is so terrible, I sometimes wish I could forget. .” She trailed off, twisting the tissue in her hands, and Lilia touched her fingertips to her lips.

“Forget the abduction?” the interviewer asked.

“No. I wish I could forget her.”

(Michaela, one year later in another country, rewound the tape to make sure she’d heard right: No. . forget her. )

Lilia knelt by the side table between the beds, extracted the hotel-room Bible from the top drawer and opened it to the Sixty-ninth Psalm, fumbled in the drawer for a motel pen. She wrote fast and scrawling over the text on the page, I am not missing. Stop searching for me. I want to stay with my father. Stop searching for me. Leave me alone. She signed her name and her hand was shaking, because there were still people in the world who wanted her found: she had been leaving this message in motel-room Bibles for so long now, so long, and the messages were reaching no one. It was like throwing messages in bottles into the ocean, but the bottles were drifting far from shore. There were still invisible forces moving against her, and now her picture was shining on a million screens. She left the Bible open on the bed and went to her suitcase, where her plastic change purse was a solid weight in the inner pocket. She took it with her when she slipped out of the room.