Last Night in Montreal Read Online Free PDF

banister railing at shoulder height. Down through the shadows of the living room, then the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow.
    Her father came forward to meet her; in an easy swooping movement he lifted her up into his arms, and she dropped the bunny as her feet left the ground. My lily, he kept saying, Lilia, my dove . . . He hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half, but he remembered how to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. He kept saying her name as he took her away from there, Lilia’s bandaged arms around his neck and her heart beating fast against his shoulder, teeth chattering in the cold. She closed her eyes against his shoulder. He carried her quickly across the lawn and into the forest, where everything was silent and waiting and dark; the air was a little warmer here, and no snow penetrated the branches on the forest floor. The only snow here was on the driveway, a pale ribbon winding down between the trees. To her brother, watching from the window on the staircase landing, it was as though the forest closed behind them like a gate.
    Far from the house, beyond the wall of the forest, a car started down by the road; Lilia’s mother stirred uneasily in her sleep as it receded. Her brother turned away from the window and returned to his bed.
    This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers.

5.
    In the morning Eli left her sleeping and went alone to the café where he’d met her. He bought a coffee and a newspaper and took a seat in the corner, trying to sink into the clatter of voices and coffee cups. He spent a few minutes staring at the date on his newspaper before he glanced at the headlines, hoping that reading today’s date in typeface might have a steadying effect. He reread the front page a few times but couldn’t concentrate on it well enough to open the first section. He turned to Arts and Leisure: certain musicals were sweeping Broadway and might stay there forever, certain others were failing and would soon disappear, some films were brilliant and others were not, and none of it seemed to matter much. He refolded the paper and looked for a while at the print of Icarus on the opposite wall, trying to decipher her by association, but Icarus persisted in falling through the clueless blue. Eli pulled his notebook out of his bag and then put it back in again. He abandoned his coffee and went back to the apartment.
    She wasn’t there, and he wondered about her whereabouts through a torturous day. She came back in the evening and was vague about where she’d been, as always. She’d been at a bookstore, she said, and then a park, and then walking, and then another park, and before all that she’d seen Geneviève on the street. Lilia didn’t like Geneviève very much and suspected this was mutual, but when Geneviève was fired up about something she couldn’t restrain herself from discussing it with the first person she happened to come across, so she’d swept Lilia into the nearest café.
    “It was almost malicious,” Lilia said. “I kept on having to order things because we were there for so long. She talked about string theory through two cups of coffee and a scone, and I still don’t really know what string theory is.”
    “It involves strings,” he said tiredly. “I think they sort of waver.”
    He sat on the couch and pulled her close to him, relieved and peaceful and restless in equal measure, while she asked about the wavering. He didn’t know, he just had an idea that they wavered. Metaphorically wavered? Were they metaphorical strings? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He didn’t know much about physics. Actually, he didn’t know anything about—she didn’t even like scones, she said, interrupting him. They were just there, and she couldn’t bring herself to drink another cup of coffee. But it was a good afternoon, she said, despite Geneviève; she’d found a Russian edition of Delirious Things. He’d never heard of it. She repeated the