“I need to find Lilia,” he said.
She laughed. “You’d be amazed at how many people have said that in her lifetime. I don’t know where she is.”
“You have to know, you promised to tell me. Is she still in the city?”
She didn’t answer. They’d crossed the street and were heading slowly downhill, past the Musique Plus building, past electronics stores and closed cafés. They were passing into a surreal public space that he’d walked past many times without venturing into, a sweeping expanse of concrete and terraced steps. It was lit by regularly spaced black lampposts, each holding five round orbs of blue light. In the midst of all this was a rectangular pool, utterly still and locked in dark ice.
Michaela seemed exhausted; she was leaning on his arm, breathing heavily. She broke away from him to walk slowly up the steps, sat down haltingly about halfway to the top. She stayed there in an apparent daze, smoking, while he shivered up and down and tried to figure out what to do. Her teeth were chattering. After a couple of minutes he sat beside her, wrapped his arms around his body, and tried to convince himself that he would someday regain feeling in his toes.
“Well, look,” he said, “when did you see her last?”
She opened her box of cigarettes, extracted one delicately, and then lit it expertly with the remains of its predecessor. She tossed the old one away, toward the street; he watched it smolder for an instant on the ice. She didn’t seem likely to answer him, so he tried another tack.
“What’s this place called?”
“Place-des-Arts. It’s nicer in summer.” She removed the cigarette from her mouth, studied it while she exhaled, reinserted it languidly, all without looking at him.
“I think,” said Eli, “that we should probably keep moving. It can’t be more than twenty degrees out.”
She glanced at him briefly. “I don’t know Fahrenheit.”
“It’s no warmer in Celsius. The point is that we’re going to die out here. We should go,” he said, but Michaela was weeping. She swept tears away from her face with one shaking hand and held the cigarette loosely with the other. Ashes drifted to the snow.
“I always thought I wanted to know what happened,” she said.
“Hey,” he said helplessly, “it’ll be all right. We just have to keep walking. We’ll go somewhere, my sailor, we’ll go to the café, I’ll buy you tea . . .”
She was pulling herself up by a metal railing, shaking her head.
“I don’t want tea,” she said.
He held her shoulder to steady her, and her silver jacket was shining in the blue lights of the plaza. He looked away from her, toward the long expanse of Rue Ste.-Catherine. A nightmare of locked doors and closed restaurants and buzzing neon signs, panhandlers begging to be rescued from the cold, wrong city, and he wished to be absolutely anywhere else. He wished he had never walked into the Café Matisse in Brooklyn, or at least that he’d waited for his own table instead of sitting down with Lilia. He wished he had been paying attention on the morning she’d left and stopped her on her way out the door. He wished, if those previous wishes had failed, that at least he hadn’t followed her here. An eternal half-life in Brooklyn, he thought, an eternal half-life of posers and unfinished manuscripts and fake artists and failed scholarship and guilt-inducing phone calls from his mother and letters from his unmatchable and unsurpassable brother would have been better than an hour of this.
“I don’t understand how you can live here,” he said.
“I can’t. I’ll be leaving soon.” She started up the steps, and he stepped close to hold her arm again. There was a layer of ice over everything; they were passing slowly over the concrete plaza away from Rue St.-Catherine, stepping carefully, Rue Ontario deserted on the other side. “Do you know what Lilia said about this city?”
The name still made his heart constrict in his chest.
“What did she say about it?”
“She said she’d traveled one city too far. She said she wished she’d never left New York.”
And there in the concrete plaza, the weight of centuries and continents lifted away from him into the night; he was suddenly, absurdly, fantastically light. She wished she’d never left him. This could all be undone. He could have leapt into the air just then and never landed, but he stayed on the ground and seized her shoulders instead.
“Please tell me where she is.”
“You’ll go back to Brooklyn with her,” she said, “and I’ll still be here.”
“You just said you were leaving.”
“She only stayed with me because she wanted me to tell her what happened that night, why she had those scars on her arms. I only stayed with her because I wanted her to tell me about an accident, and now that you’ve told me, I wish I didn’t know.” There was an uneven quality to her voice, and a brightness in her eyes that struck him as unhealthy. “Did you notice them?”
“Notice what?”
“The scars,” she said.
“Of course I did.”
“Her mother threw her through a window.” She fumbled in her pockets again; she lit another cigarette and smiled terribly. “That’s the part of the story she doesn’t know, the part she doesn’t remember. Partial amnesia is the most remarkable thing.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Fortunately,” said Michaela, “it’d snowed heavily the night before. Cushioned the fall, I’d imagine. Probably saved her life.”
“I don’t want to know any of this. All I want to know is where she is.”
“No,” she said, “you need to know the story, so you can tell it to her when you see her next. I’m not sure if I’m going to see her again. So listen to me, this will just take a second: her mother threw her through a window. She was seven years old. She lay in the snow until her brother came out to get her.”
“Her brother?”
“Simon. He was nine or ten at the time. Simon said the mother was hysterical, weeping and carrying on. She told Simon much later that she never knew what it was about Lilia that made her want to annihilate her so desperately, but there it is: she throws her seven-year-old daughter through a window at night and leaves her outside in the snow. Remember, we’re talking about Quebec in the wintertime. It was probably as cold that night as it is now.”
He was silent, watching her.
“Simon went outside to get her. She landed in a deep snowdrift outside the window; nothing was broken, but she had cuts all over her arms from the glass. He got her back into the house and put towels around her arms to stop the bleeding, and then he called Lilia’s father, his ex-stepfather . . . He told his sister’s father to come get her. Do you understand? Her own brother arranged her abduction,” she said.
It took him a moment to recover his voice. “Lilia doesn’t remember this?”
“None of it. She doesn’t know what happened. There was a first-aid kit somewhere in the house; Simon bandaged his sister’s arms as best he could, got her upstairs and put her to bed and lay down to wait in the room next door. He left the front door unlocked. Lilia’s father came late that night and saw the broken glass in the snow, just like Simon told him. When she came downstairs, her father took her away. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s the moment when Lilia’s memories begin; her father throws broken glass at her bedroom window, and she hears the sound and sits up in bed.”
“Michaela, you have to tell me where she is.”
“Fairly close by, I imagine. She rents a room not far from here.” She held her cigarette up in the air. “My last cigarette,” she announced. “I’m quitting tonight.”
“Good. You smoke too much.”
“I’m going into the subway system,” Michaela said. She stepped backward. “Which way are you going?”
“I don’t know yet, Michaela. You have to tell me where to go.”
“Why should I?” She was more interested in the cigarette. She inhaled deeply, looked at it for a second, and then dropped it half finished into the snow.
?
??I am so tired,” Eli said. “It’s so cold out here. I want to go home.”
She took a few more steps backward, away from him. He watched the movements of her sleek boots on the precarious ice. The toes were scuffed. “She’s been renting a room on Rue de la Visitation,” she said finally. “Corner of Ontario Street, in Centre-Sud. East of here. You just follow Ontario Street that way, ten or so blocks. It’s the brown building on the southwest corner, across from a restaurant that used to be a gas station. Her building sort of sags outward toward the street. There’re always transvestite hookers in front of it.” She gestured in a northeasterly direction. “Say good-bye to her for me?”
“I will.” He was moving away from her, waving, already somewhere else. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She turned away without answering. He watched her recede for a moment and then began walking as fast as he could over the ice. West on Ontario Street toward Rue de la Visitation, and even this coldest of cities seemed suddenly exquisite to him. The blank cement architecture was refreshingly clean-lined. The wide empty streets were calm instead of lifeless. The cold was almost bracing. The exhaustion that had settled over him in the weeks since she’d gone was beginning to lift, slowly, in increments too small to be individually observed, the way mist rises from a river in the morning. She wished she’d never left New York.
He didn’t get very close to Rue de la Visitation. Michaela’s last few words were pulling at him—Say good-bye to her for me?— and near the corner of St.-Laurent he understood; Eli stopped as if shot in the amber streetlight and turned back the way he had come. Walking quickly at first, but then he broke into a run; back toward the parking lot, gasping in the ice-locked air. His teeth hurt with each footstep on the frozen pavement, the cold burning his face. He ran back to Place-des-Arts in the staggering cold, he threw himself down the stairs of the Métro Place-des-Arts station and ran past the ticket booth, vaulting over a turnstile and running faster, down to the level of fast underground trains, faster still, but the girl at the far end of the westbound platform had been standing there for several minutes by the time he saw her, and the trains were running slightly ahead of schedule that night. It was warm down here; she had taken off her silver jacket and folded it neatly on a nearby bench. The Halloween wings were still on her back, although now they were lopsided, and an empty red cigarette box was crushed in one hand.
Although the subway lines of all cities differ in details, the sequence of events is more or less the same: first a slight wind down the length of the tunnel, a few seconds before even the sound of the train. Then (depending on the city, the design of the subway system, the specifics of the individual station) there are a few seconds or even a full minute of approaching light: twin beams through the darkness, and by now the approaching thunder of sound. By the time Eli reached the platform, pursued by a police officer who’d watched him jump the turnstile at the ticket booth, he could already see the lights. Approaching at a merciless speed into the station, closer and closer to the waiting girl. There were people on the platform, some looking at him now as he ran—he thought he heard someone say his name—but he was aware of no one but Michaela in that moment.
It’s possible that she didn’t hear him screaming her name as he ran full speed down the platform toward her. She was utterly intent on what she was about to do just then, poised on the edge with one foot slightly forward, like a tightrope walker about to step out onto the rope. She was looking at the approaching lights.
Eli was screaming in formless sounds now—although the pursuing official hadn’t noticed the girl and kept calling out for him to stop in perfectly comprehensible French—but screaming halts nothing.
In the instant before the train would have passed her, the girl stepped forward into the onslaught of air.
42.
Sometimes at night Simon still thinks of his sister’s departure, of watching from the landing window as Lilia’s father carried her away across the lawn, the way she clung so tightly to her father’s neck—the bandages Simon had put on her arms a few hours earlier stark white in the moonlight—until they disappeared into the forest. There’s a number that he dials sometimes from memory, on nights when he can’t sleep. He pressed *69 once, when he was very young, and wrote the number down on his hand. No one ever picks up, but he’s soothed by the crackle of static over the line, and there’s a pleasing sense of bridging tremendous distance. The ringing sounds unfathomably far away.
There is a pay phone by a truck stop near the town of Leonard, Arizona. Sometimes at night it starts to ring.
43.
Eli’s bed was the hull of a fishing boat. An antique figurehead had been mounted on the bow; in daylight she took the form of a woman rising out of foam, her eyes burning a path toward the north star and morning. Her hair had been painted the color of fire, her eyes a terrible and final blue. In her arms she held a fish: an hour by subway from the nearest ocean, it opened its gasping mouth to the sky.
Her eyes guarded the door to his bedroom, which had been painted like the entrance to a pirate’s cave, and he was grateful for her presence; in the first days after the hospital, his blood heavy with memory and sedatives, he felt too sick to be alone in the room. Nothing in the room, he found, was quite real. This had been the case since midchildhood, but it was more problematic these days than it had been. The walls were blue, and streaked with lighter and darker shades that made them look watery in certain lights. This effect had been noticed by his brother when they were nine and eleven, and they’d spent a few weeks painting desert islands and fish. Their mother, who had a great love of consistency, had installed the figurehead bed the following year. The room was a dreamish seascape, more amateurish in some places than in others; Zed, besides being two years older, was a better painter than Eli. In bad moments Eli thought he might be drowning, but he didn’t want to say anything or request a move to another bedroom. He felt bad about all the trouble everyone had already gone to.
It hadn’t been easy to retrieve him from Montreal; the hospital had lost his wallet. This was hardly unprecedented, but in this particular case it was unusually disastrous; with the wallet missing somewhere in the understaffed chaos of the emergency room and the patient in no mood to illuminate anyone, no one knew the patient’s name. The police liked to come by occasionally, particularly in the first few days, and ask leading questions from the chair next to the bed, alternating hopefully between English and French. The patient would reply in neither language and stared blankly or tearfully out the window instead.
In those days he existed in a state of profound distraction; he was deeply preoccupied with watching the same two nightmares playing over and over and over again on an agonizingly continuous loop. The first was a speeded-up version of his girlfriend leaving his apartment in Brooklyn. This had happened some time before he had arrived at the hospital, but the details remained brilliant: she stands before the sofa running her fingers through her still damp hair, she kisses him on the head for the third time that morning, she announces that she’s going for the paper, the door closes and he hears her footsteps going down the stairs. The other involved a train, a girl holding a crushed red cigarette box, and the brownish interior of the Métro Place-des-Arts subway station in downtown Montreal. He closes his eyes and sees the way the tightrope walker steps out into the empty air, sans tightrope, the way the small dark figure is suspended for an instant in front of the blue train until she falls and is lost in the thudding conspiracy of machinery and rails and heavy dark wheels, now slick. He fell down by the platform edge and this was where he was plucked from, later. He’d thought he heard Lilia’s voice. Later he woke in a pale blank room, unspeaking, and this was where he remained for weeks after the fact, lost in distraction while a succession of professionals passed through his hospital room. He was aware of them in flashes: the police officer who changed into a nurse, then a doctor, then a nice lady with a lump of clay for him to express himself with, then a chair. He
couldn’t hear their questions over the din of the train, but the procession continued on looped replay (nurse, doctor, doctor, chair) until the morning when Zed walked into the room.
Eli wasn’t looking at the door; the fragile wintery light through the window had held his attention for hours. But (here, a sudden miracle) all at once Zed’s voice was in this room, in this city, and he turned his face toward it. He hadn’t seen his brother in a year and a half.
Zed was speaking rapidly in French to one nurse among several, his eyes never leaving Eli’s face and his voice brimming with impatience. Eli heard his own name repeated twice. Zed kept up a rapid monologue as he corralled a small crowd of concerned medical professionals toward the exit; with the phantoms safely exiled to the hallway, he closed the door, held it shut for a second lest anyone get any clever ideas, turned back to Eli, and finally smiled. He approached the bed, turned the chair around, and sat down sideways on it.
“Hello,” Eli said. This was, at least, the intent; after twenty-seven days without talking, it came out as a whispery croak. He swallowed.
“Eli. Good morning. Why wouldn’t you tell them your name?”
“I didn’t feel like talking,” Eli said, slightly more audibly.
Zed laughed quietly and went to the window. The low skyline was blurred by falling snow.
“I didn’t know you spoke French,” Eli said.
“I picked it up over the years.”
“I tried to jump after her.”
“I know. They told me,” his brother said.
“I’m always too late, Zed. I’m always just a beat too late.”
“Everyone’s too late sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen what a train does to a girl?”
Zed was silent for a moment, looking out the window.
“This place is dire,” he said finally. “I’m taking you home.”
What followed was a complicated, unbearable sequence, difficult to remember in detail later on. A red vinyl chair at an airport in Dorval, just outside the city of Montreal. A check-in counter on which he leaned heavily and stared at the floor. Wheelchairs had been offered. He insisted on walking through the airport but couldn’t remember what direction he was meant to be walking in for more than a minute; Zed, laden with luggage and worry, was forever seizing him by the elbow and realigning him. Eli had an odd way of walking: shuffling, tripful, stumbling over shadows on the smooth glossy floor.