Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

“How long have you been here?” Michaela asked.

He looked up. She leaned back in her chair, studied herself in the mirror for a second, and began searching for a slightly darker shade of lipstick. Her pale hand hovered over the chaos of tubes and jars on the countertop.

“Two weeks,” he said. “I’m about to max out my last credit card.” The weight of the fourteen days in this city descended like a curtain over everything, and he couldn’t see her for a moment.

She made a sound that could have been a laugh. She’d found the lipstick she’d been searching for; when Eli looked at her she was applying it slowly, her lips turning to a shade midway between black and blood-red.

“My fellow sailor,” she said. Her voice was kind. “Did she ever give you an explanation?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

She looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the mirror. “Two acquaintances,” she said, “two friends, two fellow sailors marooned together on a hostile ice floe, speaking the wrong language, talking about an accident that occurred six or seven years ago in another country.” She was putting gel in her hair, making it harder and spikier. “What harm would it do?”

He sighed.

“Why not tell me? She betrayed you.”

“She didn’t—”

“She left. ”

He stared down at the tabletop.

“When you find her,” she said, “when you finally find her, do you really think she’ll come home with you, after all this?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

A long time passed in silence, while she sprayed something in her hair to make it stand on end and then brushed silver powder over her eyelids.

“Michaela,” he said finally, “I would do a great deal for you. But I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“You know,” she said, “I was thinking earlier today, while I was dyeing my hair, I was thinking my father and you have a lot in common. You were both left by Lilia.”

“You were left by Lilia too.”

She sat still for a moment, looking at her reflection, and then stood up slowly and moved past him to the clothing rack. There was a new-looking plastic bag hanging from one of the cheap wire hangers; she tore it open and pulled out a pair of black feathery wings. They were the sort of thing a child might wear on Halloween night, fluffy and not very large. She slipped the elastic loops over her bony shoulders and spent a few minutes trying to make them even in the mirror.

“Jacques bought them for me,” she said. “So I’ll be like the sign.”

He watched her. She smiled at herself and did one slow turn in the mirror, admiring the wings from every angle. She was beautiful to him. He had an image of Michaela as a little girl, dressing up for Halloween in a pair of angel wings in the years before her parents left her, and he closed his eyes.

“If I told you. .” he began, “if I did tell you, would you promise. .” and instantly regretted saying even this much, but it was already too late; she was already moving around the table to kneel in front of his chair, there were already tears in her eyes, she was already holding his hands in her own, and Lilia, far away in a previous life, was already careening toward the accident in the backseat of her father’s car.

In a bar on the outskirts of Ellington, New Mexico, a few miles from the town of Stillspell, Christopher was sitting alone with a whiskey and planning his departure from the United States. It was evening, the day after Lilia’s sixteenth birthday, and Lilia was moving ever farther away. He was aware that she was somewhere to the north, and frightened by his awareness. He didn’t see Clara come in; she slipped onto the barstool beside him and ordered a Coke without looking at him.

“I don’t know anything,” she said, “first of all.”

“Right.” He struggled to flatten his voice and make his accent longer and more Southern, more American.

“But let’s say I knew someone,” she said. “Let’s say I knew someone who knew someone.”

He nodded.

“I mean, suppose I knew someone who’d been, for a very long time, perhaps years, inviting a fugitive. .” She glanced around theatrically and lowered her voice. “What if she’d been inviting a fugitive into her home for a long time? A criminal. Would she be implicated?”

“Not if she were ignorant of his crimes.”

“What if she weren’t?”

“Well,” he said, “then I suppose it’s something else.”

“What if she’d seen this man. . what if she’d seen him on television, with his little girl, before she even met him, what if she knew exactly who he was when she saw him in person for the first time, but never let on and never told anyone?”

“For Christ’s sake, Clara, stop speaking in the third person. I’m not asking you to turn him in.”

“But I thought you were,” she said, and turned white when she realized what she’d said.

“Listen,” he said, “I approached you for a reason, and it wasn’t to get to him. I don’t want you to ever go to the police, do you understand?”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she replied indistinctly.

“No, you’re not planning on it, but you might get scared, and the thought might cross your mind. You might get into a fight with him, you might wake up one day and decide you’re sick of wondering why he did it. I can see that you’re pregnant, and you might be panicking because you’re going to have his child and you’re not convinced that he won’t take that child away too, you might do something unplanned and regrettable and tell someone before you realize what you’re doing, and I’m asking you not to.”

“Why would you ask that?”

“It’s never black and white,” he said. “You know it was an abduction. But what if he saved his child?”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

“No,” he said, “you do follow; stay with me here. Look, it isn’t the best parent who gains custody. It’s just the one with the best lawyer.”

She was silent.

“Even setting the question of lawyers aside for a moment,” Christopher said, “the mother almost always gets custody. It’s just the way it is. Imagine that his ex-wife wouldn’t let him see their daughter, imagine that she’d obtained a restraining order for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, so that the man was barred from approaching his daughter by legal means. And then, after all this, imagine that the child was in danger and had been hurt once, badly; imagine if he was alerted to this, and the only action he could think of was to take her away in the middle of the night? Once he’d done that, there was no undoing that moment. It never was possible to stop taking her away, once he started; he’s still taking her away, because he’s still taking care of her.”

Clara was still, looking down at her glass.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve been working on this case for years now. I interviewed her brother a few months ago, finally, and he—”

“What took you so long?” she asked indistinctly.

“It’s a long story. A contract expired. Clara, listen, I know what happened to her. I know why she has scars on her arms. It’s still an abduction, it’s still against the law, but imagine that he saved her life. Wouldn’t that mitigate everything else? Absolutely everything?” He was silent for a moment, toying with his hat on the bar. “Her father took her away because he felt he had to, and if you care for either of them, never go to the police. That’s all I wanted to say to you.”

There were tears on her face. “Thank you,” she said.