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

in a sea of Spanish or Mandarin or English. Perhaps loved by many but still profoundly alone; reluctantly fluent in the language of her grandchildren but unable to tell anyone her dreams. How much loss can be carried in a single human frame? Their last words hold entire civilizations.
    In the language of the Hopi tribe, there is no differentiation between past, present, and future tense. The divisions do not exist. “What does that do to time?” he asked one night, half drunk on red wine. They had long since closed their books for the evening. He was running his fingertips over her collarbone, tracing that little hollow just below her throat with his thumb. It was already October. She would be gone in a week.
    “No,” she said softly, “what does it do to free will?”
    He was preoccupied with kissing her neck and didn’t immediately understand what she meant. But he couldn’t fall asleep that night, and when the understanding finally hardened and crystallized, hours later, it was enough to jolt him out of bed. He sat for a long time in the darkened living room, wide awake, listening to her breathing in the adjoining room.
    What does it do to free will? You disappeared. You are disappearing. You will disappear. If there is a language in which all those sentences are the same, then who are we to say that they’re different?
    ON THE EVENING of Lilia’s disappearance Eli sat at his desk for hours, trying to read at first, then staring at his computer screen, and then just staring at his hands. I surrender. She either didn’t hear this thought or heard it and still didn’t come home. He taped a white napkin to the inside of the bedroom window, the only window that faced the street. He would have done anything. It was the closest thing he had to a flag. When the trick-or-treaters had gone he returned to his desk, and the hours slid away from him. Five in the morning: cold grey light. By night’s end the apartment seemed like an illusion. She was here a moment ago, in the bed, in the shower, her towel on the floor of the bedroom is still damp, none of this can possibly be real. He fell asleep at dawn with his head on his arms, listening for her footsteps, and slept in this position again the next night. Two days passed before he could bring himself to even look at the bed; the rumpled duvet still held the shape of her body.
    The day after she left he bought a map of the continent. He remembered every location she’d told him in her story and he circled the cities she’d passed through in red, looking for a pattern, looking for the next city along the line. If there was a way to find her, he would. He had an idea that if he stared at the map long enough, he might possibly be able to divine where she had gone.

8.
    Lilia’s father had purchased a map at an all-night gas station, on his way through the darkness to his ex-wife’s house, a few hours before he’d abducted her. When she was seven Lilia used to trace the ink-line ridges of the Rocky Mountains with her fingertips and admire the patterns made by highways across the continental United States. When she was eight he taught her how to read the map, and by nine she was the navigator. When he showed her how it all worked (north, border, highway, town) she asked where they’d started from, but her father shook his head and said, “It’s not important, kiddo, you’ve got to live in the present.” Map reading was a skill she took enormous pleasure in; every town, to her way of thinking, held an alternative life. She liked to close her eyes and touch a spot on the map, open her eyes and move her finger to the nearest place name, and sketch out the future she might have there as he drove: “We should go to Lafoy, and buy a house, and get a library membership and a cat and a dog, and then start a restaurant—”
    “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