Last Night in Montreal

by Emily St. John Mandel

In the very beginning her arms had gauze bandages on them, for reasons that were almost immediately unclear.

What is going on with Lilia’s bandages and the broken kitchen window? And her brother cowering from their mother and lying to the police for her?

The first false name was Gabriel, chosen because with short hair she looked very much like a boy, and he figured a little ambiguity couldn’t hurt. Still, the name didn’t seem fraudulent. She couldn’t help but feel that Gabriel was just as real as Lilia,

Gabriel was also Anton’s pseudonym from The Singer’s Gun. And, like Anton’s Gabriel, Lilia’s seems to “fit”, an identity that can be slipped into and out of easily.

The more time passed, the harder it was to say what was real and what wasn’t.

The simulation hypothesis from Sea of Tranquility.

There were scars on her arms for which she had no explanation.

And the scarred arms are still a mystery…

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.

Lilia has scars. Her brother had scars. And now we learn that her dad has a scar, for sure from her mother. Are the kids’ scars also from their mother?

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.

Forged documents — a central theme of The Singer’s Gun.

He’d always been so good at writing, he’d always been so passionate about those dead languages of his, and she understood about writer’s block, well, she thought she did, but how hard could it be?

Lol!

so the kid has dual citizenship,

Elena, in The Singer’s Gun, had dual Canadian/American citizenship.

There was a song playing on the radio a lot around that time with a lyric that he liked, something about being a stranger in your own hometown, and he caught himself singing this line sometimes at quiet moments. His voice was unfamiliar.

My vibe!

He decided it might be necessary to interview her again at some point. Perhaps Lilia’s half-brother as well. He pencilled Lilia’s half-brother’s name into a notebook,

Do we even know Lilia’s half-brother’s name?

“It’s in the contract that I can’t talk to Lilia’s brother?

Yeah… that’s immediately suspect!

“No one’s watching you anymore.” “How can you be sure?” “Because you’re not an abducted child, you’re a legal adult. No one has any reason to be looking for you. You successfully disappeared.” “A private detective could still look for me.” “He was in an accident,” her father said softly. “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.”

Oh shit! Christopher is going to have an accident?

He’d met his wife when they were children in a travelling circus.

Station Eleven!

There was one photograph in particular that haunted him. It had been used by the local press shortly after her disappearance, and it 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.

Ok her brother’s name is Simon. And, what a creepy picture…

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?

What is Elaine’s work?? Oh right, real estate.

“Simon.” Her voice was hoarse. “C’est Lilia.” “Where are you?” he whispered. “I’m travelling,” she said. “Lilia,” he whispered. “Lilia, don’t stop. Don’t come home.”

Yeah, there is some weird shit going on with their mother.

It took her a few weeks to understand that Simon had told no one. If he had, Lilia realized, she would have been caught that night.

Doesn’t she want to know why Simon told her not to come back??? I mean, *I* do! (This is actually the final mystery of the story, which Laila learns in her last night in Montreal…)

But before that he stayed on the line until Lilia’s quarters ran out, listening to static and the desert wind.

Simon wants out too… :-(

She tore the page from the Bible, folded it quickly, put it in her pocket and left the room.

Wtf is going on? Why did she take the page? Why doesn’t her family talk? What’s going on with her mother? We still don’t know why she stays up all night, or what her work is, other than “real estate”… And why does the author almost never use their names? The whole of both of these families are almost faceless.

She was used to his business trips, which generally lasted three or four weeks. This time, however, she didn’t see him again for a year. When she told Eli this, some years later, he understood that she thought of the quiet dissolution of her family as having been more or less Lilia’s fault. Lilia had, after all, written her name in a Bible, and she did run out barefoot into the snow. “You can see why I hate her,” Michaela said.

Wait— this Michaela knows Eli? Eli, whom Lilia left in New York? Right!: Michaela sent the Bible note to Eli and told him that Lilia was in Montreal.

“Michaela,” he said. “Michaela, wait—” But she blew him a kiss from just outside the alleyway, and when he walked out after her he couldn’t tell which way she’d gone, in all the narrow ancient streets.

Hmm! Maybe Eli and Michaela will get together?

He’d told Peter that he was leaving town for a few weeks and asked him to look in on Michaela occasionally. He convinced himself that the arrangement wasn’t unreasonable. It was true that Michaela was only fifteen, he thought, but his daughter was never in any trouble that he heard about and didn’t seem to need him anyway.

Wtf??? How can he just fucking leave his daughter?? Especially after her fucking mother left???

I have to ask you something, and I want you to answer me honestly. There’s an argument that I was having with her, very recently.” “How recently?” “A few hours ago, just before I saw you on the dance floor. We were talking about a car accident. Did she ever speak to you about a car accident?”

Her dad’s car accident?

It was mostly junk, but there was a letter from Lilia.” “What did she write?” “She requested a truce. She said she was tired of always being followed and watched.” “She was being followed?” “All her life,” Michaela said.

But how does Lilia know Christopher? The car accident? Did they get into a wreck together?

He moved alone and weightless over several Midwestern states, just behind or sometimes alongside the fugitives, just out of sight.

So she WAS seeing him!

Behind the clothing rack was a child-sized mattress, on which Michaela usually slept. It had a single sheet, a flat stained pillow, and an old quilt with little white sheep frolicking around the edges.

Yes, Michaela’s childhood quilt.

Jacques carried himself with an air of long-suffering calm and said almost nothing himself. He didn’t appear to have noticed Eli, which gave Eli the impression that he was far from the first guest to take up semi-residence in Michaela’s dressing room, and then he spent hours and days wondering why he was upset by this.

He likes her!

“My bed at home,” he said, “it has a figurehead attached to it. Talking about ships always makes me think of it.”

Like Anton’s family warehouse (from the Singer’s Gun)!

had been two years since the Unsolved Cases feature, and her life was played out in a shifting, paranoid landscape: abandoned meals on restaurant tables, impressions of figures passing just out of sight, an old blue car with Quebec licence plates that she saw three times in different places, a constant feeling of being watched from behind.

Christopher.

“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.

Yeah, that’s fucked up.

“Clara Williams?” She nodded and glanced at the neighbour, 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.

Whoa. Well, somewhere in between these two moments Christopher had a car accident.

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.

This is what Michaela knows about her dad’s accident.

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.

Climax!

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.

I hate this motherfucker. For ignoring his fucking family and especially his daughter… until now, when he assaulted her with his drinking glass.

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.

Christopher, before he assaulted his daughter.

“Simon went outside to get her. Lilia had 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.

Oh my. Poor Simon. Poor Lilia…

She wished she’d never left New York.

Yes, New York. Not *him*.

In the instant before the train would have passed her, the girl stepped forward into the onslaught of air.

Oh my. Poor Michaela. Poor Eli.

There is a pay phone by a truck stop near the town of Leonard, Arizona. Sometimes at night it starts to ring.

Poor Simon.

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 colour 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.

This is Sam’s! The very one he was restoring in The Singer’s Gun!

A man answered on the second ring. “Simon,” she said. “Who is this?” he asked, in French. “C’est moi.” “Lilia?” “I just wanted to thank you,” Lilia said. Simon was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “Don’t thank me,” he said finally. “It was all I could do.” After an hour of conversation, she hung up the phone and went out into the city.

An hour talking with Simon!

She made her way back to the Tiber River and walked back to the same bridge, the lists far downstream and the policeman long departed, and stayed there for a long time looking down at the water. Ten years later she stood in the same place with her Italian husband on the day of their seventh anniversary of marriage, and he laughed when she imitated the policeman.

Ten years from one sentence to the next.

“Where are you going?” “Far away,” Michaela said. She smiled then, already leaving, and walked away down the platform to meet her train.

Ugh. To literally meet. Her train to far away.