Emily St. John Mandel: Last Night in Montreal

“I was just collecting the words,” she explained. “I didn’t meant to plagiarize, I just liked the way they looked. I wanted to save them on the page,” she said. “Like pressed flowers in a book.”

He found this perfectly understandable. He liked patterns too. But the rest of it, my love, these other pages. .

“I make lists,” she said, stating the obvious. “I always did.” He’d brought the papers to her in a panic— Lilia, what is this, tell me what this means— but she refused to be anything but calm. He was pacing distractedly around the apartment; she sat in the armchair, regarding him quietly. She was interested to know why he’d gone through her suitcase in the first place.

He forced his voice to be steady. “I’m curious about the names.”

She began to tell him a story in bed that night, a long story about deserts and aliases and driving away, motel pay phones and a blue Ford Valiant in the mountains. She spoke in measured tones, her hands moving ceaselessly over his skin. He listened, at first incredulous and then shocked into belief, but he wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades.

There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent. Eli told Lilia the word once when they were lying in bed together, and it was hard not to think of her mother when she heard it.

Lilia’s mother said once in an interview that she wished she could forget her daughter. (The interview aired on Unsolved Cases . It’s on record somewhere, although Lilia can’t quite bring herself to watch it again.) It was a cruel thing to say, but touchingly pragmatic. She had a daughter who disappeared: this is the kind of catastrophe that marks a person forever afterward, as indelibly as a missing limb.

On the night her daughter disappeared it was late November, and a heavy snowfall had blanketed the lawn. Just before Lilia left the house for the last time a sound startled her out of sleep, or perhaps she was lying awake already. When the sound came again she climbed out of bed and went to the window, the floorboards cold beneath her feet. She opened the window and the air outside was exquisitely cold, the lawn brilliant with snow and moonlight, and beyond the lawn the forest rose up like a wall. Her breath was pale in the frozen air. Her father was standing in the snow beneath the window; he waved to her and smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. Shh. She turned back into the room, clutching her bunny (it was blue, and its eyes were startled round buttons that gleamed dark in the half light), and she made her way out into the silent hall. A bare floorboard creaked softly as she passed her half-brother’s room. He lay still, but he wasn’t sleeping; he listened to her footsteps recede unsteadily on the stairs. Lilia skipped the ninth stair which sometimes creaked and tiptoed through moonlight on the landing, the banister railing at shoulder height. Down through the shadows of the living room, then the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow.

Her father came forward to meet her; in an easy swooping movement he lifted her up into his arms, and she dropped the bunny as her feet left the ground. My lily, he kept saying, Lilia, my dove. . He hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half, but he remembered how to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. He kept saying her name as he took her away from there, Lilia’s bandaged arms around his neck and her heart beating fast against his shoulder, teeth chattering in the cold. She closed her eyes against his shoulder. He carried her quickly across the lawn and into the forest, where everything was silent and waiting and dark; the air was a little warmer here, and no snow penetrated the branches on the forest floor. The only snow here was on the driveway, a pale ribbon winding down between the trees. To her brother, watching from the window on the staircase landing, it was as though the forest closed behind them like a gate.

Far from the house, beyond the wall of the forest, a car started down by the road; Lilia’s mother stirred uneasily in her sleep as it receded. Her brother turned away from the window and returned to his bed.

This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers.

In the morning Eli left her sleeping and went alone to the café where he’d met her. He bought a coffee and a newspaper and took a seat in the corner, trying to sink into the clatter of voices and coffee cups. He spent a few minutes staring at the date on his newspaper before he glanced at the headlines, hoping that reading today’s date in typeface might have a steadying effect. He reread the front page a few times but couldn’t concentrate on it well enough to open the first section. He turned to Arts and Leisure: certain musicals were sweeping Broadway and might stay there forever, certain others were failing and would soon disappear, some films were brilliant and others were not, and none of it seemed to matter much. He refolded the paper and looked for a while at the print of Icarus on the opposite wall, trying to decipher her by association, but Icarus persisted in falling through the clueless blue. Eli pulled his notebook out of his bag and then put it back in again. He abandoned his coffee and went back to the apartment.

She wasn’t there, and he wondered about her whereabouts through a torturous day. She came back in the evening and was vague about where she’d been, as always. She’d been at a bookstore, she said, and then a park, and then walking, and then another park, and before all that she’d seen Geneviève on the street. Lilia didn’t like Geneviève very much and suspected this was mutual, but when Geneviève was fired up about something she couldn’t restrain herself from discussing it with the first person she happened to come across, so she’d swept Lilia into the nearest café.

“It was almost malicious,” Lilia said. “I kept on having to order things because we were there for so long. She talked about string theory through two cups of coffee and a scone, and I still don’t really know what string theory is.”

“It involves strings,” he said tiredly. “I think they sort of waver.”

He sat on the couch and pulled her close to him, relieved and peaceful and restless in equal measure, while she asked about the wavering. He didn’t know, he just had an idea that they wavered. Metaphorically wavered? Were they metaphorical strings? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He didn’t know much about physics. Actually, he didn’t know anything about — she didn’t even like scones, she said, interrupting him. They were just there, and she couldn’t bring herself to drink another cup of coffee. But it was a good afternoon, she said, despite Geneviève; she’d found a Russian edition of Delirious Things. He’d never heard of it. She repeated the title in Russian, taking obvious pleasure in what he could only assume was an impeccable pronunciation, and got up to show it to him. The Cyrillic alphabet spiked inscrutably at him from the cover above an artfully blurry black-and-white photograph that may or may not have depicted a girl in a nightgown walking over hot coals, or perhaps walking on water. It was Great Russian Literature, she said. In the absence of any knowledge of Russian, he was in no position to contest this.

“It’s late,” he said finally. He’d been holding her on the couch while she lapsed into quiet, flipping through the first few pages. He was half asleep, almost dreaming, her warmth against him; he was breathing the scent of her latest shampoo, like cinnamon and violets.