Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel Read Free Book Online

police officers everywhere. Some wanted to speak to him. He answered questions in a polite monotone, lying mostly, and when they were finished with him he took the bunny upstairs to his room and set it up on a folded towel on the corner of the bed. It still wasn’t completely dry, but he didn’t want to be downstairs anymore.
    His mother came to him in the evening, when almost everyone had gone. There was a social worker in the kitchen and someone from the police station rigging something to the telephone, and there was a car down by the road with two police officers in it. She sat on the edge of his bed and stared tearfully at him. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
    “Thank you for helping me with the glass,” she said.
    IN A MOTEL ROOM three hundred miles to the south, Lilia’s father was cutting off her hair. In the very beginning her arms had gauze bandages on them, for reasons that were almost immediately unclear; she sat on a chair in the bathroom and watched dark curls falling past her face and landing on the bandages, on the floor, on her legs, while her father moved around her with the scissors.
    “Hold still, now,” he said gently, although she hadn’t been moving. She didn’t answer, but she did wrinkle her nose at the smell of bleach. It hurt much more than she had thought it would. She winced and tried to ignore the smell and the tingling while he stood close beside her and kept up a soothing, uninterrupted monologue: “Did I ever tell you, my dove, about the time I was working as a magician in Vegas? This was at a place called La Carnivale, one of the big old casinos, and . . .” And she didn’t say anything, but he didn’t expect her to. She never could remember why they’d left in the first place, but she did remember that in the first year of traveling she didn’t say very much. She was unmoored and her memories were eroding in the sunlight, and she was rendered shy by the strangeness of this fast new life. He was driving south.
    He would talk to her whether she’d talk to him or not, and it was his voice that gradually put her at ease. He could talk about types of stone, about Goya’s black paintings or the magnificent staircase in Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation, about genetics: the specific signatures of persistent genes, replicating themselves endlessly through the diluting generations. When she grew quiet and despondent, which was often in the beginning, he liked to save her with a fact. Did you know that my favorite composer went deaf at the height of his career? Did I ever tell you about the moons of Jupiter? There’s this one in particular that’s covered in ice . . . She didn’t know him well in the very beginning, but she was profoundly soothed by the sound of his voice. On this particular night, twenty hours after he’d lifted her from the snow, he was talking about the arcing bridge in Monet’s garden, the way it changed, over the passage of the painter’s career, from sharpness into an almost abstract vagueness. “Think of that,” he was saying. “An object changing in the manner of a memory.” He rubbed her burning head with a towel. “Et voilà!” he said. “Brace yourself, my dove, this will be startling . . .” and he held Lilia up to the motel bathroom mirror.
    The effect was shocking. She remembered that moment as the first time she ever looked in a mirror and didn’t recognize herself. A strange child with short disheveled blond hair stared back at her, and she felt suddenly, inexplicably safe. Not only safe but elated; the first time true happiness ever coursed through her chest, like the breaking open of a gate.
    “You like it?”
    She smiled.
    “I’m glad you approve. Now you just need a new name,” he said.
    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