Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

Outside the air was bright and still. It was night, but the motel balcony was made shadowless by a long line of bare lightbulbs, one above every closed blue door. Lilia left the door to the motel room slightly ajar. This was a prearranged signal: it meant that something was wrong and she was waiting in the car. From the motel balcony she surveyed the topography: there was the long low motel, a bright sprawling chain restaurant, and a gas station in between; the buildings formed a rough L shape on a large parking lot. A few trucks were parked off to one side; some distance beyond them, across the highway and away in the chaparral, the town of Leonard was a scattering of lights. There were two streetlights in the parking lot, and around them a halo of bugs swirled in a frenzy of wings. She could see the pay phone in the shadows by the restaurant, a hundred miles of parking lot away.

She moved as quietly as possible along the balcony, down the stairs, aware of the weight of every footstep. The stairs were enclosed and lit too brightly, and at every corner she expected the loom of a police officer, the dark uniform, the badge: Are you Lilia Grace Albert? We just arrested your father. Would you come with us, please? But she kept moving down the stairs as silently as possible, clutching the change purse and trying to be invisible. She had to leave the shadows along the edge of the motel and run across the harrowing brilliance of parking lot to get to the pay phone; once there she fell panting into the booth, convinced that everything was lost, and it took several fast heartbeats to realize that no one had seen her, or if they had they didn’t care. No heavy hand clamped down on her shoulder, no footsteps rang out on the parking-lot pavement, no sirens cut the dry desert air. Only three or four cars were parked here, and there were only a few silhouettes visible through the bright windows of the restaurant, where a television was shining above the bar. She couldn’t see her father among them. Shadows moved here and there behind the curtains of the motel windows, ghosts against the blue flicker of a dozen screens. She turned her back on the motel and lifted the receiver, and what was strange was that she knew the number to dial when she lifted her hand. There was silence, and then a recorded voice asking for three dollars and seventy-five cents made her jump. She fumbled in the change purse and dropped in quarters and nickels and dimes until a robotic Thank you sounded; the coins clicked softly and she turned again so that she could watch the parking lot, the dark silhouettes of gas pumps, the ceaseless movement of waitresses behind the windows of the restaurant. The steel phone cord was cool against her arm. A wind had started out of nowhere, and tumble-weeds rolled fast on the dead sand and asphalt just outside the lights of the parking lot, and she stood still, her heart pounding, listening to the sounds of the call going through. There was a click, and then another; switches flicking across a continent of mis-crossed wires, over oceans of static and disarray.

Someone answered on the second ring. And she’d known exactly what she was going to say as she dialed the number: I’m not missing, I don’t want to be found, tell them to stop looking for me, I want to stay with my father, I will never come back again and I don’t want anyone to find me, the same thing she’d written in a dozen variations in motel-room Bibles across the United States, but it wasn’t her mother who answered the phone.

“Oui?” Simon’s voice was indistinct. There was a whisper of static like a thought down the wires. Simon stays with me on weekends. Lilia realized that it was a Saturday, and also that she couldn’t form a sound in her throat.

She stood frozen for a moment in the shadows of the phone booth, pressing the receiver hard against her face.

“Is anyone there?” he asked, in French.

The breeze was picking up. A tumbleweed the size of a rabbit was skittering across the parking lot, and she was watching its escape. She found herself looking at the parking-lot lights, the way they swayed slightly in the wind, the haze of winged specks fluttering around them. Across the parking lot she saw her father moving on the upper balcony, toward the abandoned room. He pushed open the door and the flicker of the television went dark. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t put down the phone.

“Who is this?” He was at an age where his voice was breaking; it cracked across two octaves as he spoke.

“Simon,” she said finally. “C’est Lilia.”

“Where are you?” he whispered.

“I’m traveling,” she said.

“Lilia,” he whispered. “Lilia, don’t stop. Don’t come home.”

Her father was coming out of the motel room now, overlit as he hurried the length of the second-floor balcony, jackets over his shoulder, a suitcase in either hand.

“Keep traveling,” her brother whispered. “You have to stay away, even if you’re in trouble, no matter where you are. .”

Her father disappeared into the stairwell, almost running, and in that instant she found that she could run too. She let the receiver fall on its cord, the spell broken, running now, and she was across the parking lot before her father reached the foot of the stairs. In those days they were crossing Arizona in a red convertible; she climbed over the door and curled into the passenger seat, gasping, a moment before her father emerged from the stairwell and the suitcases landed in the seat behind her. A second later her father was beside her; he threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking lot. The car sped lurchingly out onto the highway, and she stared up at streetlights passing against the indigo sky.

He didn’t speak for a long time. He was tapping a nervous waltz rhythm on the wheel. His other hand was a steady, reassuring weight on Lilia’s shoulder.

“You saw the show, and you went straight to the car,” he said. “That was good. I’m proud of you. You did the right thing.”

“I can’t remember her.”

“Well. You were young.”

“I can remember my phone number,” she said.

“Your phone number? Really?”

“I can remember my phone number from when I was seven, but I can’t remember her.”

“Memory’s a strange thing.”

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

He was quiet.

“Please.”

“You meet a young beautiful divorcée in a bar,” he said finally. “She’s twenty-six years old with a two-year-old son, she’s beautiful, she’s alive, she wants to go to Africa for your honeymoon, and then it all goes dark so quickly, and the next thing you know you’re taking your kid away in the night. She’s the past, kiddo. You don’t want to live in the past, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What was her accent?”

“What?”

“My mother,” she said. “In the interview. She had an accent.”

“She’s from Quebec,” he said after a very long pause. “But I’m surprised you noticed it. Her English is immaculate.”

“What was my first language?”

“What?”

“Was it English or French?”

“We lived near Montreal,” her father said. “Just north of the American border. Your mother and I spoke both English and French. You always knew both languages.”

“But which was my first?”

“There was no first, ” he said. “You have no first language.”

“How can someone have no first language?”

“You just always knew both. Your mother was French, and I was English, and it’s just the way it was. But it’s no good living in the past, my dove. I don’t want to talk about this.” And then he said, again, “I’m surprised you noticed her accent.”

She couldn’t speak, freighted by treason. The streetlights became fewer and farther between until they were replaced altogether by stars, achingly close in the dry night air. It took her a few weeks to understand that Simon had told no one. If he had, Lilia realized, she would have been caught that night.