“Never falling asleep again. Now tell me yours.”
He knelt beside her on the carpet and touched her wrist. He placed the pills in her hand.
“Take these. I have some water for you.”
“I need the water first. Tell me yours.”
“Here’s the water.”
“Tell me.”
“I hate being alone.” He took a sip of water and passed her the glass. She drank almost all of it and swallowed all three pills at once. “Where’s Lilia tonight?” He spoke very softly.
“Close,” she said. “She’s very close.” She finished the glass of water, set it down empty on the carpet, and then lay down beside it. She turned over on her side toward the candle, away from him. He stayed beside her.
“What would change if you knew about the accident? What difference would it make?”
“I just want to know,” she said. “I want to know what happened to my family. My father disappeared earlier this year, did I tell you that? He sold the house and left, and I don’t know where he is anymore. You never expect both of your parents to just vanish like that. It’s a missing piece.”
“But what happens when you have the final missing piece? Are you happy then? Can you stop taking pills? Do you stop entertaining bachelor parties in the VIP lounge on weekends? Does the knowledge solve anything?”
“Then I can sleep,” she said. She closed her eyes. “Please don’t raise your voice.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Will you stay with me a minute?”
“Of course.”
He stayed beside her until her breathing slowed, then he stood and groped in the dimness for the clothing rack. Under it, behind it, the sheep quilt was crumpled on the child-sized mattress. He pulled the quilt out and spread it over her, blew out the candle, and felt his way out of the room in absolute darkness.
32.
In a small town in New Mexico, more of a truck stop really, a detective wearing a battered fedora sat in a car in a parking lot. He was watching a particular couple emerge from the Morning Star Diner: a man he’d been following for some years, and a waitress. The man was forty-seven years old that year, according to Christopher’s records; he had a benevolent, somewhat weathered look, and brown hair that fell just below his ears. The woman was younger, with straight red hair and an old-fashioned blue-and-white waitressing uniform. She was holding a square white box. The detective remembered that it was Lilia’s sixteenth birthday tomorrow and decided that Clara must be holding her birthday cake.
They paused for a moment outside the diner, the man pulled the waitress close against him, and they kissed briefly in the warm end-of-day light. The detective slowly lowered his forehead to rest on the steering wheel and stayed that way for some time with his eyes closed. He had been following them for five years now, but he was no longer sure why. The helpless observer: everyone knows that Icarus fell into the sea. But only one book he’d ever read on the subject remarked on the possible existence of witnesses: wandering with his flock on a hillside not far from the ocean, a shepherd looked up in time to watch the disastrous, improbable flight—the at-first-awkward beating of wings as the child and the father moved like the spirit of God over the face of the water, the small shape that grew exultantly smaller as it flew closer and closer to the sun, until Icarus was so far away that the shepherd could no longer see him, only knew where he was from the way the father kept looking anxiously up into the sky, and then the scream from an almost unfathomable distance above, an unseen sense of faltering far overhead and then the fall, the coming apart of wax and feathers, that fast awful descent into the sea; the father moving down through the air to catch his child, too late. The cloud of feathers drifting up as Icarus broke the surface of the water, and the father circling desperately in the beaten air overhead. The shepherd, watching all of this from a slight distance, leaning on his staff while his sheep scattered like clouds. Awestruck, stunned, perhaps already composing the story he’d tell his wife that evening in his head, but at ease in the often uncomfortable awareness of being an extraneous figure in a world-historical event. His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them.
Or perhaps it’s just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real? The witness, the man in the car in the parking lot told himself miserably, is not unimportant. (The couple was walking away from him now, toward Clara’s house.) He had been traveling alone for thousands of miles, and the only thing he was at all certain of at that moment was that he didn’t want to catch them anymore. He only wanted to watch their flight. Christopher raised his head from the steering wheel, rubbed his face with his hands, and decided that he needed to talk to Clara.
Two thousand miles to the north in another country, Michaela was sitting alone in her room. She was smoking fitfully, looking out the window. She had just turned sixteen, and she’d stopped going to school to celebrate. While she waited for her father to come back to her (she hadn’t seen him in a year), she began taking walks to the old city alleyways on weekends with a measuring tape. She had wished her whole life for a chance to walk on a high wire without a safety net. She had ideas involving alleyways and lengths of rope.
33.
Clara in the mornings: she came down the stairs in a bathrobe, yawning, the stairs creaking under her feet. In the kitchen she stood for a moment by the open back door. She lived on the edge of town, and all the backyards on her side of the street opened out into the desert, a landscape of cacti and dry grass and scrubby blue-grey sagebrush that kept going until it met the hazy outlines of the mountains far away. The collapsed wreckage of an ancient picket fence marked a rectangle behind the house, but the lawn had been overtaken two decades before by the desert.
She came away from the door to begin making coffee. Lilia watched her from the kitchen table; she liked to sit there in the mornings, partly to read in the warm kitchen light and mostly to drink coffee with Clara. Clara poured coffee beans into an ancient cast-iron grinder mounted on the wall, measuring by eye, and then turned the iron handle until the smell of ground coffee filled the room. On the rare mornings when Lilia slept later than Clara did, this was the sound that woke her up. Clara was moving efficiently in and out of cupboards, removing mugs and the coffeepot, she was boiling water on the stove. She used cloth filters in a battered plastic funnel the color of sand. She poured boiling water until the clear glass coffeepot was almost full and then poured the coffee into the biggest mug in the house. She stood at the counter, sipping it black, and then she poured a second cup for Lilia, this one with milk in it. It was only after she’d brought the mugs to the table and sat in the chair closest to the back door, only after she’d taken another look out at the beautifully degenerate back lawn and the sky overhead, only then was she prepared to wish Lilia good morning, to have her first conversation of the day. She would smile companionably at Lilia before that moment, but her solitude before her first cup of coffee was almost impenetrable.
Lilia wrote in her notebook: This is life in a house. Clara had never traveled, and was perfectly serene. She’d lived alone for years in her small desert town and enjoyed her independence, although now her face lit up when Lilia’s father entered the room.
When Lilia’s father was with Clara he no longer looked like he was being chased, and Lilia was old enough to recognize this as happiness, but she was already moving away again. She was almost sixteen, and fraught with restlessness. She had had the same name for months now: Alessandra. The name was beautiful, but it wasn’t hers. She loved her father, she adored Clara, she was desperate to leave. She walked for hours along the streets of this dusty outpost, she wandered out into the desert behind the house, she read endlessly and translated literature in and out of four languages, she lay awake at night
and felt enclosed in the silent house. She had been thinking lately about traveling away on her own. But at that moment the kitchen was cool and pleasant and she was happy to be there, and Clara stood with her back to the kitchen table looking out the window above the kitchen sink, sipping her coffee for a moment before she brought Lilia a cup. She set the coffee down on the table in front of her, kissed Lilia unexpectedly on the forehead, smiled as she moved around the table to her favorite chair.
“Happy birthday,” she said. “I’ll bring home a cake tonight.”
In the evening Lilia father and Clara sang “Happy Birthday,” her father’s arm over Clara’s shoulders, and Clara pulled a cake triumphantly from a square white box. The cake was white, with Sweet 16 across the top in pink icing. Later the three of them climbed out Lilia’s bedroom window to look at stars from the rooftop.
“It’s hard to imagine a place much quieter than this,” her father said. There was a dog barking somewhere far away, sporadically, but it only deepened the surrounding silence. Lilia held her hand up white against the stars and had the feeling of floating in space.
“It’s why I stay here,” Clara said.
“Are you ever going to leave?” Lilia asked.
Clara was quiet for a moment. “No. I mean, who can predict the future, but I don’t think so. I left a couple of times before, and I didn’t like it. Everywhere else was so . . . loud,” she said. “It was too loud out there, in every way. The people weren’t nice. No one knew my name. I didn’t like it. I don’t like traveling.”
They had been in Stillspell for five months and the next day they were leaving. Just for four days, one last little birthday road trip for old times’ sake, and then they were coming back to Stillspell forever. Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable. They left in the morning; her father’s car pulled out of Clara’s driveway with the suitcases in the back, Clara waving from the porch; Lilia waved out the window until she was certain Clara couldn’t see her anymore, the car turning behind a row of decrepit storefronts at the end of the street, and then she settled back in the passenger seat with a guilty sense of rhythm restored.
“Where should we go, my lily?”
“The desert for a day or two. Then the mountains.”
“Brilliant plan.” He nodded toward the map folded on the dashboard. “What’s our course?”
Lilia took the map in her hands, marked with red lines drawn over the past nine years in motel rooms all around the continent, faded from nine summers of sun through the windshield. “Hard to say,” she said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be the navigator?”
“I know, I know, but look how faded this map is . . .”
He glanced at it and laughed. “We should hang this one in the house,” he said, “and buy a new one for the road.”
Clara was turning to go back into the house when she saw another car approaching; this one was blue, and had foreign license plates. It pulled into her driveway as Lilia’s father’s car was turning out of sight. Clara stood by the door, obscurely afraid. A neighbor was trimming and trimming and trimming the adjoining hedge.
The man who emerged from the car was tall and stoop-shouldered, and he held a hat in front of his rumpled suit. He smiled as he approached her, but she didn’t smile back.
“Clara Williams?”
She nodded and glanced at the neighbor, who met her eyes above the hedge and then looked away quickly.
“My name is Christopher Graydon. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Not here,” she said.
34.
Michaela’s father returned from the United States in a wheelchair. He spent hours staring out the window in the living room, blinking and sometimes shaking his head. Private nurses came and went. His car had gone sideways off a highway in the mountains, he said. When pressed he was able to give the date of the accident, but he was vague on the question of how exactly it had occurred. He said he might have fallen asleep at the wheel. Over the next two years he began walking on crutches, and then with a cane, stiffly, dragging one leg, not at all like the way he had walked before. He was given light assignments by the private investigative agency, mostly photographing cheating spouses from cars, and he drew a small pension from his years on the police force.
There was no more talk of Lilia’s case. He told Peter the trail had gone cold; Peter reported that Lilia’s mother had screamed at him and threatened to sue. But in the few years that followed Christopher used to disappear for a few days at a time, traveling back into the States whenever he could. Just a long weekend sometimes, driving from Friday to Monday and arriving at work on Tuesday exhausted and worn. He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia’s safety. He would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United States and realize with absolute, inexplicable certainty that she was in West Virginia, the way he tried to ignore his terrifying clairvoyance and forget where she was and couldn’t, the way he knew where she was but had to keep driving south to check, the horror of always being right: he saw her face in the crowd on Sunset Boulevard, he stepped into a hardware store in St. Louis at the moment she stepped out of the deli across the street, he stood on a corner in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago and watched her emerge from an apartment building down the block. After each sighting he returned north more depleted, more frightened, less intact.
The last time Michaela saw him was in the evening, when he’d just returned from the United States. She’d lost her job earlier in the day. In the six years since she’d left high school she’d fallen into a pleasant double life: she worked at a clothing store five days a week and walked on ferociously dangerous tightropes strung across alleyways in the old city on weekends. But her manager had fired her in the early afternoon for speaking the wrong language on the sales floor, walked her to the door, shaken her hand when they got to the street. “Good luck,” he’d said brightly, as if she were a needy stranger to whom he’d given a quarter, as though he hadn’t just put her out of a job. “I hope things go well for you.”
“I hope you die,” Michaela said sweetly. She turned away from his aghast expression and soundlessly moving lips and wandered down the street in the cool September light, hands in her pockets and shaking inside, and the store receded instantly into the distant past; it seemed inconceivable that she’d gone to work there just that morning. It seemed inconceivable that she’d been living a life so ordinary for so long now, so long, living in her father’s house in the almost-suburb of Westmount and folding clothes for a living. People were talking and laughing and the leaves on the trees hadn’t fallen yet. The air was bright. A little girl was playing a violin at the corner of St. Catherine and McGill; she was no older than ten, and her face was a vision of impeccable serenity. Michaela stood watching her face for a while, but she couldn’t hear the music above the din of her thoughts. A band of tourists passed, speaking English, and only then did she notice that everyone else walking past her was speaking French. It struck her that she’d rarely been so lonely, or so incompatible with the world, or so strange. She spent some time in the park and arrived home after nightfall, slightly drunk.
The newspapers had been collected from the front step. The front-step newspapers were a private marker; she let them pile up in the weeks when her father was traveling, and when they disappeared it meant he was home and she knew what to expect when she opened the front door. When she came in this evening, her father was eating dinner in the dining room. He
looked up and smiled briefly as she walked into the room; she sank into a chair across the table from him and sat watching him eat for a moment.
“Where did you go this time?”
He swallowed, and took a sip of water before he answered. “Chicago,” he said.
“Chicago.”
“Yes.” He swallowed another spoonful of soup and took a bite of bread. “I was following a lead.”
“You were following Lilia.”
There was an uncomfortable pause, during which he finished his bread, sipped at his water again, and set the glass back down on the table with perhaps slightly more force than was strictly necessary.”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, yes. I was interviewing a girl who knew her there.”
“What was her name?”
“Erica.”
“What was she like?”
He hesitated a moment. “She was sad,” he said. “How was your day?”
“I lost my job.”
“At the clothing store? I’m sorry,” he said. “You were laid off ? Business was slow?”
“Fired, actually. I said hello to a little kid on the sales floor. His mother complained to the manager.”
“Why would she complain to the manager? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” said Michaela. “I said hello in English.”
“Oh,” he said.
“She felt quite strongly about the issue, apparently.”
“Zealots,” said Christopher. He shook his head. “You just have to ignore them. What did your manager say?” It occurred to him that this was the most substantial conversation he could remember having with his daughter since she was nine or ten, or possibly ever, and he tried not to look pleased.