Emily St. John Mandel - Last Night in Montreal

He left her there and went back to his car in the half-empty parking lot. He drove back past the Stillspell Hotel, past the Morning Star Diner with all its windows alight. The highway was almost empty. He drove well above the speed limit, covering ground. In a car somewhere far ahead, Lilia was singing along to the radio with her father. They had left New Mexico. They would stop at a motel soon; it was getting late. But Christopher, behind them, drove through the night.

“Are you still awake?” Lilia whispered. It was the middle of October, and a crescent moon was rising outside the bedroom window of the apartment in Brooklyn. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and Eli was lying on his back beside her in the darkness; she had been speaking softly for nearly a half hour, telling a long story about cars and motel rooms and driving away, and he was listening in perfect silence.

“Of course I’m awake. It was your sixteenth birthday. Clara brought home a cake.”

“Right,” she said. “We ate cake up on the rooftop, and then the next day we left. It was just a short trip we were taking, gone for a few days and then back home to Stillspell, but the day after we left there was an accident.”

“A car accident? Were you hurt?”

“You have to promise never to tell anyone.”

“Sure,” he said.

“No, promise you won’t tell anyone this part, no matter what, even a long time from now, even if you’re angry with me.”

“Why would I be angry with you?” In sixteen days she would leave him and travel away again, but only one of them knew that.

“Just promise you won’t tell anyone, no matter what.”

“Okay,” he said, “I promise. No matter what.”

On a narrow highway in the mountains, old and in considerable disrepair, two cars moved quickly under a brilliant sky. The car in front was a small grey Toyota, purchased specifically because it was absolutely forgettable. The car traveling behind was a sky-blue Ford Valiant with Quebec license plates, and it had been directly behind the Toyota for nearly an hour. There was a newer highway nearby — wider, safer, with a less calamitous drop-off on the right shoulder — but the first car had pulled onto the old highway an hour ago, and the second car was in pursuit. Lilia’s father swerved around potholes, a fallen branch, hands clenched on the steering wheel. Sometime earlier he had turned off the radio. Now he drove ten miles above the speed limit in charged speechlessness, and ten miles above the speed limit wasn’t fast enough.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said finally, quietly. For him, it was an extraordinary admission. He pulled over sharply to the side of the highway and cut the engine. The blue Valiant slowed as it moved past them and pulled over on the shoulder of the road ahead. In that moment before the driver’s-side door opened, the stillness was nearly absolute.

The man who emerged from the car had an almost spindly look about him. He was tall and slump-shouldered, in a rumpled brown suit jacket and faded blue jeans. He had a brown fedora, which he removed from his head as he approached. He carried it in both hands in front of him, like a present. Lilia’s father was rolling down his window, and the only sounds were the man’s footsteps approaching on the pavement, and wind in the pine trees by the sides of the road. Her father’s other hand was on the key.

The man rested his forearm on the roof of the car, looking in. He didn’t look like an FBI agent.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. He spoke with the softest traces of Lilia’s mother’s accent. “It’s just that I’ve been traveling alongside you for a while. For quite some time.” He was looking directly at Lilia, frozen in the passenger seat. “I’m going home tomorrow, and I won’t be coming back to this country again. I just wanted to tell you that you don’t need to travel anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lilia’s father said.

“Look, I understand why you did it,” the detective said. “I have a daughter in Montreal, and I wish I’d done the same sometimes.” A car was approaching; it passed in a blur of red and he was quiet for a moment, watching it recede. “I spoke to Simon last year, and I know why you did what you did. I know what happened that night. I just wanted to say good-bye, to wish you the best, I just wanted to tell you—”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“You ever heard the story of Icarus?” the detective asked. “I’ve been reading it recently. This is what it comes down to: I don’t mind not being the hero of the story, I don’t mind being the shepherd watching you fly out over the sea with your child, but I don’t want to be the Minotaur.” He straightened up, his hands in his pockets, looking away down the hill. “I don’t know how else to put it,” he said. “I just don’t want to chase you anymore. I’m going to say I couldn’t find you, and that’ll be it. That’ll be it. I don’t think anyone else is looking for you anymore.”

Lilia’s father was staring straight ahead through the windshield, not speaking, but Lilia saw a muscle working frantically in his jaw.

“Good luck,” said Christopher. “Lilia.” He stared at her for a moment longer and smiled. “A pleasure to see you, as always. Your brother sends his regards. Happy birthday, my love.” He turned away and walked back toward his car. Lilia sat still beside her father, watching Christopher recede; the detective started his car and drove away, disappeared around a bend in the highway ahead and was lost behind the pine trees, and only then did her father turn the key in the ignition.

It took her a few minutes to realize that he was still driving too fast.

“You don’t know your mother,” he said when she looked at him. His voice was hoarse and he’d gone pale. There was sweat on his forehead.

“He said he wasn’t going to chase us anymore.” She felt sick.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing she’d tell him to say. You don’t know your mother, it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d. .” The blue car had come into sight up ahead. “She will never stop chasing you,” her father said. “She will never give you up.” The detective was driving slowly now, like a sightseer. He was driving one-handed, resting his other arm on the edge of the open window. He craned his neck briefly to look up; Lilia followed his gaze and saw the mountains, the sheer rock just visible above the trees to the left. “Lilia,” her father said, abruptly calm, “get in the backseat behind me, and put on your seat belt.”

The highway turned and twisted through dark pine forest. In the seat behind him Lilia pressed her face to the glass to look up at the sky. She wanted to be anywhere else in the world. There were hawks circling in the high blue air. The Valiant was very close now, and she forced herself to look at it. She saw the detective glance up into his rearview mirror, and she was close enough to see the expression of benign surprise. He raised his hand to wave, uncomprehending.

“Lilia,” said her father, “cover your eyes.”

She didn’t cover her eyes. Her father was pulling up alongside the detective’s car; he glanced back and forth between the detective’s car and the highway ahead, and then slowly, with methodical precision, he began to turn the wheel to the right. The grind and screech of metal on metal was unbearable, but she couldn’t look away, and both cars were moving toward the edge of the road. Lilia’s father was looking out the passenger-side window, judging the distance and the degree of force required, gradually easing the other car off the road. There was a very short period when it seemed possible that the detective might still manage to stay on the highway, might still swerve to safety at the very last possible instant and speed ahead and make it after all, but her father gave the wheel one last, barely perceptible turn, so that Christopher’s car left the highway altogether and began a sideways, almost slowmotion slide off the edge of the embankment, down the hill, flipping slowly over onto its side and then upside down and then out of sight as she turned to watch out the back window, and she heard the nerve-shattering impact of metal around the trunk of a tree.