“He was regretful. Said she’d told him she was going to call the language commission, said he liked me but we’d been through this before and he couldn’t afford to be fined by the language police again, hoped I understood, but I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Understand. I don’t understand this place. I liked working there.”
“Well. I don’t think it’s right either. But maybe there’s a chance of getting your job back in a week or two, once he calms down a little. How did you leave off with him?”
“I told him to drop dead,” said Michaela.
He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. There was a certain look about her eyes that reminded him of her mother. He dipped a piece of bread in his soup and ate without looking at her.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ve got some news of my own. I’m selling the house. An appraiser’s coming by tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“I need the money,” Christopher said, “to be honest with you.”
“You have a job.”
“I do,” he said. “Photographing people from cars, mostly. But I want to do some traveling, so I’m going to have to leave the job for a while.”
“Don’t you have savings?” she asked.
“I did,” he said.
“But where will we live?”
“Well,” he said, “I’ll be traveling. And you, well, I thought maybe you might want to find your own place one of these days. Have a little independence, maybe live closer to downtown?”
“But I just lost my job.”
He had nothing to say to this.
“By traveling,” she said, “you mean following Lilia?”
“Yes. It’s an open case.”
“There isn’t a retainer? You said once there’s always a retainer when you’re following someone.”
“It ran out a while ago. The contract expired.”
“There’s something that I don’t quite understand,” she said.
He glanced up briefly, and then down at his soup. She was making him uneasy. He reached out with his left hand and his fingertips passed nervously over the smooth handle of his walking cane, leaning against the table by his side.
“What’s that?” He lifted the glass of water a few inches, changed his mind, lowered it to the table again, and adjusted his napkin on his lap.
“Why you’re still following her.”
“She’s an abducted child,” he said. “That’s what I do.”
“An abducted child? Do you know how old she is?”
He swallowed a spoonful of soup and chased it with a sip of water. He set the glass down on the table and then, with a thumb and two fingers, moved it carefully an inch to the left.
“Of course I know how old she is,” he said quietly. He didn’t take his eyes from the glass. “I know almost everything about her.”
“She’s two months older than I am. Do you know how old I am?”
A spoonful of soup was halfway to his mouth; he lowered it back into the bowl and touched a corner of napkin to his lips.
“You’re my daughter,” he said.
“It seems very strange to me,” Michaela continued, very quietly now, “that you would chase a twenty-two-year-old woman to Chicago. She was abducted quite some time ago, wasn’t she?”
“Don’t,” he whispered. He wanted to explain it to her: the cufflink he’d found on the floor that morning, that tie on the floor of the closet, the way Elaine had sometimes looked at him when he got into bed at night, with such contempt, as if he couldn’t find a lost sock, let alone a missing child, but it came to him suddenly that it was years too late.
“You’ve been chasing her since we were both eleven years old,” said Michaela relentlessly. She felt giddy and dangerous, slightly drunk, and she couldn’t stop talking although she knew she should. “And now she isn’t a child anymore. Not that that negates the crime, but then, if you were trying to solve the crime, you’d be chasing her father, wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t speak. A muscle in his jaw worked uselessly, and his face was slowly turning red.
“You’d be chasing Lilia’s father,” she said, “except that you’re obsessed with Lilia. And I wish you’d just admit it.”
“Admit what?” His voice was a croak.
“That you want to fuck her,” Michaela said.
It would have been difficult to predict what happened next. He had, after all, never even hit her. But then the glass in his hand was abruptly airborne, almost of its own volition; he couldn’t remember deciding to throw it. He watched the trajectory unfold in slow motion, the girl in the gradually-becoming-clearer line of flight, the intersection of her forehead with the edge of the glass, her backward fall, the sound she made. His cane was in his hand, although he couldn’t remember having reached for it; he made his way around the table and saw her lying still and white in the overturned chair. There was blood on her forehead. He was aware in that instant of nothing but color and light: the deep-blue evening behind his ghostly reflection in the dining room windows, and fragments of light from the chandelier caught in the broken angles of glass, spilled water. He had shocked himself. He reeled backward, touched the wall with his hand and slid down it. He was clutching his cane with both hands, white-knuckled. The room was moving like a boat on rough water.
When he opened his eyes she was staggering to her feet, bleeding from the forehead, backing up and clutching the table. She swore softly and spat at his feet. She left the room like a sleepwalker, leaning to the right. The door slammed. He heard her fall once on the gravel outside, her receding stumbling footsteps, and then silence. The room had stopped spinning in her absence, but everything was too bright. He sat still for a long time, looking at the way light caught in the angles of broken glass and spilled water and along the glinting handle of her soup spoon, on the varnish of her chair lying on its back, in a smear of blood on the hardwood where she’d fallen.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or to his ex-wife; he talked to Michaela’s mother sometimes, the old Elaine, the circus Elaine who hadn’t disappeared yet, before they were detective and real estate agent and before Michaela was even born, playing on the midway before the show opened, riding together in the house trailer from town to town and looking out the windows at the prairie passing by, holding hands in the shadows behind the tent. It hadn’t really been so bad in retrospect, traveling around like that, and he found himself speaking to her sometimes in moments of disarray. He stood up unsteadily and returned very slowly to his side of the table, leaning heavily on the cane as he sank into the chair and lifted his spoon. He found himself looking at the spoon for several long minutes, almost unsure what to do with it, but he eventually resumed eating his soup.
35.
Erica was outside Lilia’s apartment in the morning. The last morning, the day Lilia left Chicago; she stepped out with her suitcase and Erica was there on the sidewalk, blue-haired and shivering in an old velvet smoking jacket the color of peaches. She was leaning against the side of the building, staring at her feet, or perhaps her eyes were closed—her hair fell over her face—and Lilia had the impression that she’d been standing there for some time. The lines of her shoulders spoke of exhaustion and night.
Lilia said her name, and she looked up quickly with swollen eyes.
“It’s so early, Erica, what are you—”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
Lilia set down her suitcase. Erica took a cautious step toward her, stumbled forward and was suddenly in Lilia’s arms. She was wearing perfume; she smelled like roses and cigarettes.
“Erica,” Lilia whispered into her blue hair, “Erica, I’m so sorry, I really am . . .”
“What’s in New York City?” Erica’s voice was muffled against Lilia’s shoulder. “Why won’t you stay with me? You don’t know anyone there.”
“I’m so sorry, but I have to go.” Erica’s shoulders were shaking now. Lilia h
eld her awkwardly. “You knew I wasn’t staying here long when you met me.” Her own words sounded unforgivable when she heard them, but she closed her eyes and pressed on nonetheless. “You know I always leave again.”
Erica pushed away from her then. She was still crying, but she wouldn’t meet Lilia’s eyes anymore. Blue hair falling over her face. She turned and almost seemed to drift as she walked away down the cracked sidewalk, hands deep in her pockets. An empty, narrow-shouldered figure, hair like tropical water and shadows gathering underfoot, slouching and broken on the predawn street. At the corner she turned left and she was gone then, but it was several minutes before Lilia could pick up the suitcase and turn away from the scene of the crime, and she kept looking back. Half expecting that Erica would come running up behind her, half hoping she would.
Lilia stood at the corner with her suitcase waiting for the light to change, and all she could think of was dancing with Erica last night, when she told Erica she was leaving and at first Erica was acting so hopeful and so adorably brave; she gave Lilia her silver chain necklace to wear—“to remember me by,” she actually said— and it was a while before it warmed to Lilia’s skin. “So you’re finally going,” Erica said, “just like you said you would.” Just like I said I would. I’m sorry. Yes. Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving. The ticket’s in my pocket. We are almost out of time. Lilia didn’t say, And you’re the first one who ever mattered enough to me to warn in advance that I’m leaving. “Well, good for you,” Erica said. The beginning of the only argument Lilia ever had with her. “I think it’s courageous.”
Erica’s voice trembled a little. She went upstairs to the dance floor and danced ferociously. She was beautiful. Lilia followed her up there and watched her for a while, leaning against a wall, not sure what to do with herself, and then she moved to join Erica in the throng. Thinking as she danced that she could just get a refund on the ticket, that this one time perhaps she could stay, and knowing even in the midst of these thoughts that it was hopeless: if she didn’t leave now she’d only leave later, and Erica danced with her eyes closed, sweat and tears shining on her face. Lilia danced in front of her for a few minutes, but Erica refused to look at her. Later they sat together in the mezzanine of the bar and argued about courage and bus schedules. The second-to-last time Lilia ever saw her.
The last time Lilia saw her she drifted away around the corner, the way newspapers drift when they’re caught in slow wind. Every detail of the moment was clear to Lilia later, when she closed her eyes in a departing bus and tortured herself with the scene: Erica disappearing around the corner in the watery predawn light. The striking, final lines of the apartment buildings of this particular neighborhood, the kind of low ugly buildings that look to stand a fair chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust with their freight of cockroaches intact. The sidewalk shining a little, cement fraught with crushed glass, the neon lights of the restaurant across the street. A police siren in the distance. A decrepit woman passing by on the opposite sidewalk, shuffling unevenly and pushing a cart heaped with cans and old clothing. The quiet stoicism of a man across the street, leaning on the wall of the restaurant. One hand in his pocket, the other on his cane. Watching her, perhaps, from under his fedora.
Part Four
36.
The day after Lilia’s sixteenth birthday Lilia’s father drove through the morning and afternoon. Mirages shimmered on the desert: pools of water appeared on the highway ahead, and the mountains broke from the horizon and floated between the earth and the sky. The heat was unspeakable. She was profoundly happy. Her father drove in silence, every so often blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. The dashboard clock marked slow-motion time. They stopped that night in a town the color of dust where the only restaurants were a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and the Denny’s attached to the motel, and the waitress who took their breakfast order there in the morning looked hungover, pale and blinking. Her father studied the map across the table, leaning in close to peer at the faded lines.
“We could be in the mountains by afternoon,” he said. “Just another few hours of desert.”
Lilia was supposed to be the navigator, but the map had been folded on the dashboard of the car for nine years now, and it was fading under the barrage of light. Entire states were dissolving into pinkish sepia, the lines of highways fading to grey. The names of certain cities were indistinct now along the fold, and all the borders were vanishing. Her seat-belt buckle was searing to the touch. She put on dark glasses and stared out the window. This fever-dream landscape awash in light, in mirages, the sky white with heat along the horizon on every side, cars reflected in phantom water on the highway far ahead. Everything drowning in light and false water, borders irrelevant and disappearing fast, all edges blunted in the brilliant light; she closed her eyes in the heat of the day and realized that she was thinking for the first time in several months of her mother. There was always a place in Lilia’s mind where her mother existed as a shadow, or perhaps it was the other way around; not a memory, exactly, more of a ghost. It seemed possible sometimes that Lilia was the one who was haunting her, even from this far away. She was disappearing into sunlight in a secondhand car two days after her sixteenth birthday, and her mother was inconsolable in the distance.
Lilia’s mother asleep the night she went away; she didn’t hear the sound that woke her daughter up that night, the sharp clear percussion of ice hitting the windowpane from outside. That night Lilia’s father put her in the car and wrapped a blanket around her and they drove for a hundred miles through the dark, well over the border; he had their passports ready, and they were waved across. In the northern United States he pulled over and retrieved a silver thermos from between the seats. He unscrewed the top and poured out a plastic cup of hot chocolate and placed it steaming in her hands. Lilia took it without a word. She hadn’t seen him in years, and she was too shy to speak to him yet; she looked down at the gauze bandages and then closed her eyes instead of answering when her father asked if she was okay, and her father touched her face to make her look at him.
“It will be all right,” he said. “I promise.” She stared up at him and sipped the chocolate and nodded. Her memories of that night held no trace of regret.
But nine years later she closed her eyes in a car in the desert, and despite the happiness of the moment she was shot through with doubt. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping was imminent; after this one last birthday road trip they were going back to Stillspell, to Clara’s house in the desert, Clara’s creaky staircases and blue rooms and morning coffee.
“Aren’t you looking forward to staying there?” her father asked. “Not traveling anymore?”
“I’m not sure I know how to stay,” Lilia said.
37.
“Did she ever give you an explanation?” Michaela asked. She had hair like cartoon lightning, hard and spiky; she ran her hands through it and it stood on end. She had dyed her hair that afternoon. Black hair, black bustier, black vinyl miniskirt. Everything about her reminded Eli of midnight. He sat at the small wooden table behind her, watching her reflection, overwhelmed by her presence, her ferocious green eyes, trying to think of something to say. The palms of his hands were pressed to the tabletop, and he could feel the vibration of the music upstairs.
“How late did you sleep?” he asked instead of answering her. He had left her asleep on the carpet the previous morning, walking back to the hotel past the amused stares of desk clerks, up to the dim early-morning grey of the room, where he’d fallen asleep instantly on top of the covers. In the early afternoon he sat for a long time in a café not far from Club Electrolite, composing a rambling letter to Zed. He’d gone so far as to buy a number of stamps, but it wasn’t clear to him whether he would mail it; the envelope was folded in half in his jacket pocket, along with the page from the Gideon Bible that Lilia had w
ritten on as a child, and from time to time—he never took his jacket off anymore, even indoors—he would reach into his pocket and run his fingers over the envelope just to be sure it was still there.
“I don’t know,” she said, “midafternoon. Then I got up and dyed my hair.”
“It looks nice,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Not really.” She was drawing a dark pencil outline around the edges of her lipstick. “Do you think anyone would miss me if I didn’t go out?”
“No one would miss you,” he said. “You’re like a part of the night.”
Anyone else would have taken that badly, but she was smiling as she set her lip-liner pencil down on the countertop. They were quiet for a while, Eli looking down at the ruined surface of the table. Someone had stubbed out a great many cigarettes on the wood, over a long period of time; the surface was scarred with dark craters and lines.
“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?”