“What kind of restaurant?”
“The kind that serves ice cream.”
“But then we’d have to stay in Lafoy,” her father said. “We’d have a house.”
“I don’t want to stop.” This was true, she didn’t, and she’d been writing messages in motel Bibles to this effect for over a year now. Lilia saw motel Bibles as a kind of bulletin board, where messages might be left for other travelers following behind. When she was nine Lilia and her father lived together, a unit, usually in the same motel room or in the same small car, and the messages in motel Bibles were almost her only secret. She scrawled them furtively while her father was in the shower, taking pleasure in the idea that he wouldn’t approve. The shred of privacy afforded by having a secret somehow seemed about as close as she’d ever come to having her own room.
“In that case, kiddo, better come up with a new plan.”
“Let’s drive through Lafoy, and go to the library, and then stay at a motel, and then go to a restaurant and have ice cream, and then leave again.”
“I like that plan much better,” her father said.
Their lives were easiest in the summer, when they didn’t have to make up explanations for why Lilia wasn’t in school and there were other children to play with in the parks. They camped for months at a time when it was warm enough; a week at one campground, a week somewhere else. She liked camping, although it took her a long time to fall asleep in campgrounds. There was sometimes rain on the roof of her tent, and it rendered the night mysterious and full of hidden sounds. In campgrounds she heard footsteps, or sometimes the sounds of trains in the distance; lie still and she could hear the night trains passing, carrying freight between the prairies and the seas. They hiked in national parks and went to outdoor concerts in small towns. Her father loved music of almost any kind; he would seek out concerts and summer music festivals and drive for miles to get to them; at outdoor performances they’d sit together on the grass with bottles of lemonade and when the music started he’d close his eyes and seem very distant.
It was harder in the wintertime. They tried to stay in the Southern states during the school year because Lilia’s father hated cold weather and Lilia liked the desert and palm trees, but the explanations were more difficult. Sometimes when she got tired of lying about being homeschooled she’d stay in the motel room until three o’clock in the afternoon, reading books that her father brought her from a bookstore or working on the mathematics problems that he came up with for her; in the late afternoons they went to the movies, to a mall for ice cream, to a museum if there was one, to a park if it was warm enough. Her father insisted that she learn to swim, and to this end they stayed for nearly five months in a town near Albuquerque while she took a full course of after-school swimming lessons at the local pool. Strange being in the same place for so long; by the time she was good enough to dive from the high diving board and swim laps, she was skittish and uneasy and not sleeping well at night. The day after her first swim meet her father suggested that they go somewhere else, and she was happy to get back in the car and drive away again.
Her father didn’t like stopping for long in any one place, even after the first frantic year when capture seemed most imminent. Her father knew about endless travel, and he wanted to show her everything he knew. He had been born to American diplomats in Colombia, started high school in Bangkok, finished it in Australia, and then moved to the United States. He’d spent the next few years earning multiple degrees from a random sampling of universities, too restless to settle on any one of them; afterward he’d worked for a few months as an adjunct professor of languages until an unfortunate incident involving an undergrad who’d looked much older than seventeen had put an abrupt halt to his academic career. He’d worked as a shipping clerk for a while after that, taught himself to write software at night, served six months in a minimum-security prison for some complicated counterfeiting scheme that he was never inclined to explain in any great detail except to remark that obviously it hadn’t worked out very well, been employed for some time as a bartender in a hotel in Las Vegas, married Lilia’s mother, and was divorced from her by the time Lilia was three. She was, he said, an impossible woman. He wouldn’t tell Lilia what was specifically impossible about her mother, although he did show her a small scar below his left cheekbone from the time Lilia’s mother had thrown a telephone at his head. In the four years between the thrown telephone and the night he’d appeared on the lawn beneath Lilia’s bedroom window, he’d made a minor fortune on the stock market.
In the beginning her father drove and kept driving because it was necessary to flee quickly, but it seemed to Lilia later on that eventually they probably could have stopped. Ceased their endless driving after enough time had passed, perhaps settled in some anonymous town when she was ten or eleven, somewhere far from where they had begun. Changed her name one last time, enrolled her in an elementary school with the help of a forged birth certificate, settled into a quiet, almost ordinary life. (And Lilia could almost see this other life at times, like a scene playing out on the other side of a gauze curtain, dim but glimpsable: the first quiet years of elementary school and forgetting, kissing boys in cars parked at lookout spots, a front porch with flowers planted in the backs of plastic swans, her father recast eventually as the slightly eccentric but kindly grandfather smoking his pipe on the front steps and lending his lawn mower to the neighbors, and the early upheaval so distant that she’s no longer sure it wasn’t a dream. My mother died when I was born, she tells her sympathetic future husband on a quiet night in August, believing it enough herself that it doesn’t even feel like a lie anymore, and a passing jet leaves a sunset-colored trail across the sky.)
But they didn’t stop. He was afraid, he told her much later, that if the two of them paused too long anywhere, especially in the early days, she’d start to dwell on things: the increasing strangeness of her upbringing, the missing parts of her family, events that may or may not have transpired just before he’d taken her away. There were weeks that were mostly spent driving; singing along with her father in a car passing over an infinity of highways, making friends with waitresses in small-town cafés, conjugating Italian verbs in motel rooms from California to Vermont and then Spanish all the way back west again. Her father regretted that he couldn’t send her to school, he said, but to make up for it he wanted to teach her all the languages he knew. In the glove box they carried a battered prayer card for St. Brigid of Ireland, the patron saint of fugitives; Lilia’s father wasn’t religious but said the prayer card couldn’t hurt.
This was a skittish, almost catastrophic life, in which nothing was certain; paradoxically, Lilia was unusually calm. Nothing could startle her. She was profoundly unafraid, although there were near disasters: when she escaped from the motel in Cincinnati, police rapping on the door of the motel room as she squeezed out the bathroom window and dropped down into the wet grass and then climbed through a dark hedge and sprinted, her frantic father waiting in the parking lot of a gas station half a block away, she was calm all the rest of that night. Her father asked if she was scared, and she said she was too old to be afraid of things. She knew something about getting older: she was almost ten and a half. And it was true that her voice was tense when she asked if the police were still close, but it was also true that she was asleep within a couple of hours. Her father that night was scattered and frantic, driving fast but trying not to speed, looking in the mirror for flashing lights and glancing sideways at his daughter and fraught with directionless guilt, trying to drive away quickly and take care of her and let her be all at once. Hours out of Cincinnati he said something and she didn’t answer, and in the passing lights of automobiles he saw that she’d fallen asleep. He tuned the radio to a classical music station, Chopin and then Mendelssohn with the volume low, night lullabies, and he hummed softly to the music and drove all through the night.
9.
At the end of November, Eli received a postcard from Montreal. There w
as no return address. The front depicted a pretty line of grey stone houses with flowerboxes and iron staircases that spiraled from the second floors down to the street, with Montréal in drop-shadowed italics across the bottom. The back held a peculiar message, scrawled in what very clearly wasn’t Lilia’s handwriting: She’s here. Come to Club Electrolite on Rue Ste.-Catherine, and raise a white flag on the dance floor. I’ll see you. Come here soon. Michaela.
If the whole business of life on earth had ever made sense to him, it ceased to at that moment. She unmoored him, her departure made him want to disappear, et cetera—but if the world was askew in the time after he met her, in the time after she left, the postcard spun it entirely from its axis. The day at the gallery passed like a dream. He took the postcard and the continental map to the usual café, where Thomas had been camped out for two weeks trying to pick up a new waitress. Thomas stared at the postcard, whistled softly and shook his head.
“What would you do?” Eli felt fairly unhinged.
“I’d tear up the postcard and go find another girl. Or if you can’t do that, at least forget about this one.”
“What if she needs help?”
“What if she doesn’t? This isn’t a ransom note, it’s just a weird message on the back of an ugly postcard. What if this is some kind of sick joke she’s pulling, some ploy to get you back?”
“I have to go to her.”
“No, you have to move on. What kind of a person disappears like that? Look, things happen. Life continues. So you had a girlfriend who disappeared.”
“Easy for you to—”
“Do you think no one’s ever left me? You can’t chase after them,” Thomas said. “When they leave like that, they’re screwed up, and when they’re screwed up, you can’t save them. You can’t save them. You just have to let them go.” He made an airplane-like letting-go motion with one hand, jetting off to the left. Eli followed it with his eyes and then looked at the postcard again. “You just have to put your life back together and move on and pretend you never knew them, you just have to let them do whatever it is that they can’t do with you around. It’s the way it is.”
“Thomas, this isn’t her handwriting. Leave aside the fact that she left me, I have a postcard that someone’s written about her from a foreign city.”
“She left you, and you want to go find her?”
“I just want to make sure she’s okay. I know she left me, it’s just, I don’t think she has anyone else.”
“She might be with someone else, have you considered that? Some other guy could just . . . Eli, I’m sorry, wait . . .”
Eli stood up and pulled his coat from the back of his chair, the map in his other hand. Thomas made a grasping motion at his arm, which he evaded. Out through the warmth of the café with the map crumpled in his fist, Thomas calling after him, and outside night was falling and it was far too cold. He had a frantic desire to get out of Williamsburg, out of Brooklyn altogether, and found himself walking quickly toward the L-train stairs. There was a girl playing a guitar on the subway platform, sitting on a folding stool. She was singing soft songs about love and pay phones, almost to herself, until the sound of the oncoming train canceled everything. In the crowd that spilled out through the train doors there was an old woman pulling a little boy by the hand; the boy had a harmonica and played a long, wavering note in a minor key as Eli stepped into the train. He sank down onto a plastic bench and stared up at an overlit advertisement for skin care (“Dr. Z sees every patient personally!”) for all of the long clattering journey under the river, and then up the stairs into the lights and sounds of the Manhattan street. He walked aimlessly down First Avenue against the wind.
He stopped at a Don’t Walk signal somewhere deep into Chinatown, waiting for the direction of traffic to change. A bottle had been smashed in the gutter. He stood staring at it for a while, the mesmerizing sparkle of broken glass. A van paused a beat too long in the intersection and was attacked by a blaring cacophony of car horns. The sound brought tears to his eyes. He stood on the corner while passersby streamed around him like ghosts and lights changed from green to red to yellow to green again and the stream of traffic before him continued unchecked. He looked down and flecks of glass on the pavement sparkled, like crystal, like ice, tears blurring the pinpoints of light. It was a long time before he could force himself into motion.
. . .
“TELL ME ABOUT MONTREAL,” he said to Geneviève. Thomas and Geneviève had been arguing earlier, but the argument was lost in passion and long words. Now they were both a bit flushed, mutually offended, and reading different sections of the same paper without speaking. Geneviève was making occasional notes in a weathered spiral-bound notebook. She had a scribbly, doctor’s-prescription way of writing that produced long lines of cramped hieroglyphics, and he had been watching her write. It was the first thing he’d said in an hour.
“I thought maybe you’d forgotten how to talk,” she said. “Why Montreal?” But her eyes held a sudden light. She loved talking about Montreal. She’d spent the early part of her life there. Her parents had moved her to Brooklyn when she was nine, but she still considered herself something of an expatriate and took enormous pleasure in pronouncing her name in French.
“I’m curious. I’m thinking about going there.”
Thomas was giving him a dangerous look. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” asked Geneviève, who didn’t know about the postcard.
“Because it’s fucking cold,” Thomas said, without taking his eyes from Eli’s face. “That’s all anyone needs to know about it. You’d be insane to go there this time of year.”
“I doubt you’ve even been.” She was always ready to pounce on an opportunity to argue with anyone, but especially with Thomas. “You should go. It’s a city with a probably doomed language. The Quebecois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that the actual French can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”
“What do you mean, a fortress?”
“Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”
“I don’t get it,” said Thomas, without looking up from his paper. “That’s a stupid metaphor.”
“I think I do,” said Eli quickly, trying to avoid losing them to another fight, but Geneviève had ignored Thomas anyway.
“You’ve spent your whole academic career thinking about dying languages,” she said. “Thinking about doomed languages, shamelessly romanticizing doomed languages, picking up girls with doomed languages, and imagining what life played out in a doomed language might be like. Wouldn’t you like to see what it really means to live in a city with a doomed language?”
“I would,” he said. “I really would. Although I’m not sure that career is exactly the word for my academic situation. How cold is it?”
“Arctic,” she said, “but it’s worth it. There’s no place like it on earth. I try to go back there every year. It’s a great city.” She was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said, “provided you speak French.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thomas asked. He was still flushed and still wouldn’t look up at her. “Eli, you can’t chase them. We talked about this.”
“Chase who? What are you talking about? What it means is certain laws are in place to protect the French language,” she said. “Like I said, it’s a fortress. Whether or not the scope of them is justified is somewhat controversial, but anyway, the English are more conservative, whereas the French . . .”
> This sparked an instant argument on the subject of cultural stereotypes; they barely noticed when Eli walked out. There was a bad moment out on the street, where the fact of her absence slammed into his chest and he had to sit on a park bench for a while until the exhaustion lifted enough for him to stand up and get home. He spent the afternoon staring at the bedroom ceiling.
An envelope arrived the following morning. It was postmarked Montreal, and Queen Elizabeth II half smiled against the sky-blue background of a stamp. The envelope contained a page torn from a Bible, with a child’s awkward ballpoint-pen letters scrawled bluely over the surface of the Twenty-second Psalm: Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.—Lilia. The page was thin and slightly yellowed, and it trembled in his hands. There was nothing else in the envelope, but a phone number was scrawled on the inside of the flap with the message Call me when you get to Montreal, and he recognized the handwriting and the return address, Michaela, c/o Club Electrolite, a street number on Rue Ste.-Catherine. He was still staring at the envelope when the phone rang.