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

when he looked in but had nothing to say. He smiled back at her and went to the dining room, flicked on the overhead light, opened the Bible on the table to read the note again. He felt less than tranquil. I do not want to be found. Later he went upstairs but he couldn’t sleep; he got up once to look in on his daughter, asleep under a quilt that had sheep all around the edges. Afterward he lay reading for a long time, an old copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology that he’d picked up from a street vendor, listening to his wife moving restlessly around the house and turning the radio on and off in the kitchen. Something was bothering him; he put the book down on the bedside table and picked up the Bible again. The child’s handwriting obscured part of the Twenty-second Psalm. He read the psalm aloud once, and then recited the first two stanzas by memory to the plaster ceiling: “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”
    He heard his wife turn the volume of the radio up somewhere far away in the house, as if she was hoping to drown him out, but realized that she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The radio was abstract from this distance, soft static and inaudible voices. He glanced at the bedside clock; it was three-forty-five in the morning.
    “If you don’t want to be rescued,” Christopher said aloud to the ceiling, “then why the Twenty-second Psalm?”

11.
    On Lilia’s twelfth birthday her father gave her a book of photographs: Life magazine’s collection of the most memorable images of the twentieth century. Women in bell-bottoms and big round glasses, antiwar banners above a sea of faces on the Washington Mall, cars full of families moving slowly across a 1930s field of dust. But there was a particular image that she turned to over and over again: the crater formed by the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert, in the final year of the Second World War. (“Not far from here,” her father said, glancing briefly over her shoulder and then back at the road. “No, we can’t visit it. It’s still radioactive.”)
    The crater showed the aftermath of an ungodly heat: the center was purest black, the brightest black imaginable, and around the edges of this brilliant darkness was a shining ring. This was where the unimaginable heat of the explosion had changed the sand to glass, and the glass reflected the sky. The same force levels cities and creates mirrors in the desert. It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray. Tears came to her eyes in the passenger seat.
    “Lilia, Lilia. Let’s stop driving for the day. Look, there’s a restaurant, let’s get you something to eat . . .”
    “Why aren’t there any pictures of me?” she asked later, sipping iced tea in the air-conditioned calm of a diner.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Don’t most people have pictures? Of when they were kids?”
    He looked at her for a moment and then stood up from the table. When she looked up he was leaning on the counter, talking to the waitress. He said something that made the waitress laugh and beckoned Lilia over.
    “We’re in luck, Katie. They do have a camera here.”
    “So what’re you doing traveling on your birthday, Katie?” the waitress asked. She had a cloud of blond curls and red lipstick, and she winked at Lilia while she handed the camera to her father. He motioned Lilia up on a stool and stood back.
    “We’re going to visit my cousins,” Lilia said.
    The waitress leaned on the counter to be in the picture, although she hadn’t been asked. Click “Much obliged,” Lilia’s father said. He handed Lilia the Polaroid, and she watched her face rise slowly out of milky white.
    Eleven years later