Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Author:Emily St. John Mandel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2009-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

21.

“Dad,” Michaela said once, standing at the foot of the stairs while he worked at the dining room table, “can I run away and join the circus?”

Christopher looked up, blinking. He had hardly been home since the page had been torn from the oldest Bible; he couldn’t look at his wife without thinking about it, without wondering how she could sabotage him so completely, and so had taken to avoiding her altogether. Michaela looked different somehow, and then he realized that she’d gotten a haircut since the last time he’d really looked at her.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“One A.M.”

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can I join the circus?”

“You can’t join the circus,” he replied, annoyed by the question but still grateful to be forced into conversation with her, remembering when he looked at her face that her latest school picture was still in a desk drawer at work. “We’ve discussed this, remember? A few weeks ago, when you sprained your ankle? The answer’s no.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Six months,” he said, and shook his head.

She was looking at him blankly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “the answer’s still no.”

“But why not?”

“You know why not. We already left the circus.”

When he said it aloud, he felt curiously bereft; he didn’t come home very often at all after that, even at night. When her parents didn’t come home Michaela sat in the living room, watching television alone late at night. One evening a commercial she didn’t like came on, and she threw a coffee mug at the screen. The screen cracked with a satisfying pop of light and went dark, and the mug rolled broken under the sofa. After that when she turned on the television the screen lit up but was blue and blank and had a jagged crackling dark line down the center. Days began to go by when she saw neither of them; she came and went in a house filled with large spaces and shadows, did her laundry sometimes in the evenings in the quiet basement, did her homework in her room at night. She pushed a shopping cart through the wide bright aisles of a grocery store a few blocks away, filling it up with microwave dinners and toaster waffles in a dozen flavors, and spent a great deal of time arranging these in the freezer. She wouldn’t have said that she was particularly unhappy; she valued her privacy, and the house was more peaceful without them. She rarely saw her father except in passing; coming out of the upstairs bedroom with a shirt over his arm, going through a box of his files in the dining room. Her mother was prone to coming home at unexpected times— the middle of the afternoon, three A.M., eight in the morning. She had very little to say, right up until the evening when Michaela came home and found her father sitting alone in the dining room with a half-eaten layer cake. The icing was pink.

“You missed the party,” her father said.

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