“He was from Montreal, wasn’t he? It made me want to go there. Just to finally face it.”
“Of all places,” said her father. “Don’t.”
14.
There was a cufflink under the bed when Christopher reached down for his slippers that morning. That morning; a few months after he’d taken Lilia’s case. He picked it up with the care of a jeweler handling a diamond, examined it from every angle, held it to the light. It was unextraordinary. It also wasn’t his. His wife lay sleeping at the far edge of the bed, close against the wall. Christopher dressed slowly and put the cufflink in his pocket. He felt that the right thing to do in these circumstances would be to wake her, either to ask her or just to hold it up in silence until she said something, wept, denied, confessed, but his thoughts were scattered, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and he realized as he watched her sleep that he was thinking of lions. Of chasing his future wife down the midway when they were eleven and ten, of traveling with her across the length of nine provinces and thirty-four states, over the border and back again. He ran two red lights by accident on his way to work that morning.
The cufflink was composed of two plastic buttons with a bit of wire between them, obviously from a very cheap shirt. He sat at his desk, turning it over and over between his fingers. A salesman? Door-to-door? Vacuum cleaners? Insurance? Days had passed now since he’d found it, and he’d hardly been home. His wife hadn’t commented. She was working longer hours herself, and she’d been unusually courteous of late. Polite strangers in the bedroom. They barely spoke. But he still imagined, watching her sleep at night, that all of this might still be salvageable in some way. He sometimes touched her pale hair on the pillow and imagined what he might say to her if he had the strength of will to say it. He felt that he was working his way up to something, an action of some kind, some redemptive collection of words that would restore his marriage and bring her back to him and make Michaela reachable again, all at once. It wasn’t impossible. He began a separate set of notes, somewhat random, unrelated to Lilia’s case. Notes on the second law of thermodynamics, memorized in high school: The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend toward entropy. Is this irreparable, or might the process be reversed? Notes on Michaela: skittish, secretive, brown hair, green eyes. Notes on his wife: governed inordinately by the second law of thermodynamics. He was careful to keep this notebook separate from the other ones and leave it at the office; he labeled it Family and put it in a drawer. He read through these notes sometimes when it was late and he’d been working all day and he couldn’t read one more word or make one more phone call about his missing Lilia. Michaela: always quiet at dinner, can’t meet her eyes across the dinner table some nights. The feeling of one’s daughter having been replaced by a changeling. Elaine: barely sleeps, but never seems tired. Red garnet earrings. Matching red nails. He wished to come home one evening and perform a pulling-together motion, like tying a piece of string; he spent a great deal of time thinking about how he might achieve this, and these other notes felt like preparation; at some point, he felt, he’d have amassed enough evidence to have a complete picture of the situation, at which point he could act decisively and pull things back together again.
There were a few days when he felt that the preparations were going smoothly, that he was approaching the level of understanding that he needed, but then there was a tie he didn’t recognize on the floor of his closet. He saw it when he was getting dressed on a particular morning, a week or two after the cufflink; it lay discarded, as if thrown carelessly from elsewhere in the room. But the angle didn’t work; he’d tried to throw things into the closet often enough to know that it just wasn’t possible, things thrown from the room hit the wall or the closet door, even if the closet door happened to be open, ergo, the tie was obviously planted. He was a detective, for God’s sake. He knew he was being baited and that he should say something, that he was meant to say something and that saying something might even help, but the tie made everything seem foreign and unsalvageable and impossible again. On the way to work he talked to himself, trying to summon something—sadness? anger?—alarmed by a soft but unmistakable sense of relief. At least, he thought, things were becoming clearer. Much later he sat at his desk in the dwindling evening, looking at the cufflink and lost in the past.
He’d met his wife when they were children in a traveling circus. Strange upbringing by most standards, but it had seemed normal at the time: his father was a lion tamer, and her parents walked on tightropes. A childhood played out across a thousand dusty towns between Vancouver and Halifax, in the bright perilous years when most people still took their kids to circuses and everyone was waiting for the atomic bomb to drop and the Soviet Union was still the dark empire far away across the sea, and Elaine had permanently skinned knees and ribbons in her hair and ferocious arguments with her parents. She came from a long line of tightrope walkers; her parents didn’t understand why their daughter hated the profession so much, and were somewhat inclined to take it personally. There were winters spent waiting for the season to start, staring out the classroom window at the winter sunlight thinking about leaving again, meeting Elaine in the hallways and counting down the days with her—“Twenty-eight days,” she’d say mysteriously, as she passed, and the other kids around them pretended not to be envious because everyone wants to travel away with a circus, “Fifteen days,” “Four,” until finally she could whisper “Tomorrow,” with her eyes all alight, because even if she didn’t want to be a tightrope walker, the thought of going to school for longer than a semester at a time seemed unbearably stultifying to both of them; and then in the very early morning, the long caravan of transport trucks moving east out of Calgary while he lay on the floor of their moving house reading Spiderman comics. Elaine, his best and only friend, sometimes traveled in his family’s trailer with him between stops. He kissed her for the first time between Ottawa and Toronto.
Decades later in Montreal he closed his eyes, his fist clenched over the cufflink, rested his elbows on his desk and his forehead on his fists. He remained that way for several minutes, unmoving, and then straightened very slowly, placed the cufflink in the drawer that held Michaela’s school picture, and reached for the stack of files on the edge of his desk. He opened the top folder and unfolded a map with Lilia’s name written twenty-eight times in the margin. He was beginning to neglect his other cases.
He followed her quietly over the mountains, tracing lines on maps of the North American continent, making phone calls, talking to far-off police departments, picking up sightings, rumors, tips. He followed her out of his life and into a hinterland composed of folders and documents, each holding the keys to her missing life, his path through the wilderness marked by coffee rings. He worked late into the night. There were over a hundred pages of documents relating to the case: photographs, police reports, possible sightings. Memory reduced to manila envelopes and typed documents, stills from surveillance videos, early-childhood photographs. There was one photograph in particular that haunted him: it was used by the Quebec press shortly after her disappearance and depicted two unsmiling dark-haired children, Lilia and her half-brother Simon, in front of their beaming mother on the steps of a distant porch. The small boy has his arm around his tiny sister. The two children gaze seriously at the camera, their mother radiant behind them. What drives a seven-year-old to run out barefoot into snow? The question troubled him.
Still, Lilia wasn’t far away from him; as the months passed he felt at times that he was getting close. There were strange moments like flashes of light, when he looked at the map and thought he knew where she was. He brought the folders home in the evenings and spread documents over the dining room table. From there he followed the missing girl over the desert, like something winged and distant in the blazing sky; the car curved around the highway, just out of sight, while he stared at a map in his dining room in Montreal. Michaela watched his departure from the stairs.
He glanced at his dau
ghter across the dining room table sometimes, on the increasingly rare nights when they all sat down for dinner together, and silently wondered if he would be able to explain this to her later on, in some unimaginably pleasant future when they could sit down for a drink together, reconciled in Michaela’s adulthood: I wasn’t avoiding you, it wasn’t your fault, but there was a cufflink and a tie and she wasn’t speaking to me, and my marriage . . . The explanation fell apart even in his mind. (Notes on the second law of thermodynamics: All systems tend inevitably toward entropy. Why should my family be any exception?)
15.
When Lilia was very young the entire world seemed composed of motel rooms, strung like an archipelago across the continental United States. Island life was fast and transient, all cars and motel rooms and roadside diners, trading used cars at sketchy lots on the edges of places, long rides down highways in the sunlight, in the rain, talking to waitresses who thought she was too young for coffee, nights spent under the scratchy sheets of cheap roadside motels, messages written secretly in motel-room Bibles. I don’t want to be found.
There were hours spent in quiet libraries. Her father brought her history books, books about science, books about people he thought she should be aware of, then sat nearby reading the paper while she worked her way through the stack. He tested her on comprehension back in the motel room in the evening. There were sometimes questions: “Isn’t it a school day?” a librarian or a bookstore clerk would ask.
Her father had coached her in the appropriate response: “I’m homeschooled,” Lilia said. If this seemed insufficient, she added, “for religious reasons.” She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different; there were often, especially in the beginning, several names and stories in the course of any given month. At first Lilia and her father concocted the stories carefully together and practiced them on the way into town. Later they could play off each other without rehearsal— “Elizabeth,” he’d call out, in the magazine section of a gas station store (those bright new stores, too large for the smallness of the town outside, with rows of shiny packaging and a strange stale smell like dead coffee and mildew), “Elizabeth, it’s time to go—” and although she wouldn’t ever have been called that name before, she’d recognize his voice and turn around and smile just like a real Elizabeth would, and then note the new name on the list in a library later. It wasn’t an unhappy life. She liked traveling.
But the sense of being chased overtook him without warning. It always registered first as a tension in his hands on the steering wheel; he would start tapping out a rhythm on the wheel with his thumb and two fingers, a beating three-four rhythm, fast ruinous waltz. Sometimes he glanced in the rearview mirror and thought he saw something, or saw nothing but was frightened anyway, and he motioned silently toward the backseat. She would climb between the front seats and slip into the back of the car, frightened into smallness, and hide in a private improvised tent.
In the first year her father used to pull the car over and hide her, but later she knew how to build her own shelter, and she’d perfected her hiding place by the time she turned eight; she knew how to build a tent with blankets and pillows and suitcases in the backseat of a car, a way of disappearing into the chaos of luggage and pillows and blankets and coats. She hid there by the hour in the shifting darkness until her clothes clung to her body with sweat. She was suspicious of the dark, so her father gave her a flashlight, and she liked to shine it in circles on the blanket ceiling, practicing a new kind of cursive writing, drawn in light, and the car moved beneath her like a ship. She was a stowaway crossing hazardous seas. A fugitive, always. When she was small she imagined that her tent was dug deep into snow far up in the arctic, or half buried in a sandstorm in a hot treacherous land. She imagined there were search parties out looking for her: Bedouin nomads, explorers on sleighs drawn by teams of huskies, sailors going through the crates and spools of rope in the depths of the ship—but in her happiest daydreams they passed her by. She was never unearthed from the snowdrift, the nomads never found her in the sand dunes, she was never pulled flailing up out of the hold. She lay still by the hour, lost and undiscovered, and she sometimes imagined Simon lying there beside her, although the details of his face were fading and she wasn’t sure she remembered what he looked like anymore, and the beam of her flashlight traced patterns on the blanket overhead. The light circling like a signal in her limited sky.
16.
When Michaela was eleven and twelve and thirteen she liked movies about cat burglars and had ideas about dynamite. It wasn’t so much a yearning to blow up anything specific; it was something more like an idea that she could probably figure out how to make things explode if she had to. She had similar suspicions about scaling the walls of bank towers and walking on tightropes across streets, but her feelings about tightropes were much more definite, or at the very least better-informed: partly on the theory that talent skips generations and partly to appease two irate sets of grandparents, it had been decided very early on to send Michaela to circus school. Three days a week after school she took a bus to a neighborhood near McGill University, arriving early if at all possible. The circus school, a dusty venture run out of a vaulted church basement by double-jointed Moscow Circus veterans, was equipped with a rudimentary high wire, and she spent as much time as possible walking back and forth.
At home she had a practice tightrope installed in the living room; it was only a foot off the floor but she imagined a hundred feet of space beneath her, crowds cheering, all the people and lights. Or absolute stillness between bank towers, making a perfect getaway with the safe-deposit-box master key, moving like water over the opposite window ledge. She walked back and forth, back and forth, expert and alone. The tightrope-walking calmed her when the house was too silent and no one was home. It seemed that the length of time between the end of school and her parents’ return home was growing longer from one evening to the next. Michaela felt herself to be on the vanguard of a brave new world; it was as if her parents had simply given her the house. Her father came home late and had little to say. He spread his files over the dining room table after dinner and stayed there poring over them deep into the night. He stood sometimes, he paced, he threw back his head and closed his eyes, he said a name sometimes aloud like a mantra (Lilia, Lilia), but he never looked up and saw his daughter watching through the banister railings. There were nights when she fell asleep on the stairs.
Her mother came home around midnight and carried the child up to bed. She kissed her softly on the forehead and Michaela opened her eyes for a moment, not quite awake: Why do you work so much? Sometimes her mother didn’t answer. Sometimes she did: Because I have things to do, my darling. Everyone around here is consumed by work, haven’t you noticed? She held Michaela close against her, and the collar of her blouse smelled faintly of tobacco and aftershave.
“I FIND HER somewhat . . . ferocious,” the seventh grade teacher said diplomatically in the last parent-teacher conference Michaela’s mother ever attended.
“Really,” said Michaela’s mother. She was interested but having a hard time concentrating. “Ferocious?”
“Intense,” said the teacher immediately, attempting to switch the words in midair. “She’s very focused. Ms. Graydon, I think we need to discuss your daughter’s progress in French.”
This was a matter of lingering concern among the faculty; Michaela had qualified for a coveted English-language education under the terms of the Quebec language laws and had been failing her French classes since the first grade.
“Oh, I imagine she’ll pick it up,” said Michaela’s mother. She was running her fingers through her hair and looking down at the floor. “I should get back to the office,” she announced abruptly. “My boss is waiting for me.”
“Of c
ourse,” said Michaela’s teacher. “I just think—”
“That she’s ferocious?”
“I was going to say, I just think that we may be looking at possible dyslexia at this point. Her grades are excellent in every subject except French. She just doesn’t seem able to pick it up. I don’t have to tell you that in this political climate, an inability to speak the language—”
“Ferocious,” Michaela’s mother persisted, smiling slightly.
“A little, well, a little intense. Yes.” The teacher couldn’t help but notice that Michaela’s mother seemed almost pleased by this. It wasn’t so disturbing that she ever mentioned it to anyone, but she didn’t schedule any more meetings with Michaela’s parents.
The following week Christopher got a call from the circus school—Michaela, a young assistant informed him breathlessly, had fallen off the high wire—his breath caught in his throat— but she’d only sprained her ankle, all was well, could he come and pick her up? Michaela’s mother, inexplicably, couldn’t be reached. Michaela didn’t tell anyone that she’d hardly seen her father in two weeks; he stood awkwardly in the church basement with his hands in his coat pockets, gloomy about the interruption from his work but too conscious of appearances not to show up, and examined her ankle along with her instructor. He agreed that it was slightly swollen and that she’d probably be fine by tomorrow.
“How did you fall off a high wire?” he asked. “There’s supposed to be a safety net.”
“I sprained my ankle in the safety net,” she said. “It was the safety net that distracted me and made me fall in the first place.”
“How can a safety net distract you?”
“It moved,” she said. “Someone brushed up against it from underneath. If it hadn’t been there, I probably would’ve been fine.”