he saw something, or saw nothing but was frightened anyway, and he motioned silently toward the backseat. She would climb between the front seats and slip into the back of the car, frightened into smallness, and hide in a private improvised tent.
In the first year her father used to pull the car over and hide her, but later she knew how to build her own shelter, and she’d perfected her hiding place by the time she turned eight; she knew how to build a tent with blankets and pillows and suitcases in the backseat of a car, a way of disappearing into the chaos of luggage and pillows and blankets and coats. She hid there by the hour in the shifting darkness until her clothes clung to her body with sweat. She was suspicious of the dark, so her father gave her a flashlight, and she liked to shine it in circles on the blanket ceiling, practicing a new kind of cursive writing, drawn in light, and the car moved beneath her like a ship. She was a stowaway crossing hazardous seas. A fugitive, always. When she was small she imagined that her tent was dug deep into snow far up in the arctic, or half buried in a sandstorm in a hot treacherous land. She imagined there were search parties out looking for her: Bedouin nomads, explorers on sleighs drawn by teams of huskies, sailors going through the crates and spools of rope in the depths of the ship—but in her happiest daydreams they passed her by. She was never unearthed from the snowdrift, the nomads never found her in the sand dunes, she was never pulled flailing up out of the hold. She lay still by the hour, lost and undiscovered, and she sometimes imagined Simon lying there beside her, although the details of his face were fading and she wasn’t sure she remembered what he looked like anymore, and the beam of her flashlight traced patterns on the blanket overhead. The light circling like a signal in her limited sky.
16.
When Michaela was eleven and twelve and thirteen she liked movies about cat burglars and had ideas about dynamite. It wasn’t so much a yearning to blow up anything specific; it was something more like an idea that she could probably figure out how to make things explode if she had to. She had similar suspicions about scaling the walls of bank towers and walking on tightropes across streets, but her feelings about tightropes were much more definite, or at the very least better-informed: partly on the theory that talent skips generations and partly to appease two irate sets of grandparents, it had been decided very early on to send Michaela to circus school. Three days a week after school she took a bus to a neighborhood near McGill University, arriving early if at all possible. The circus school, a dusty venture run out of a vaulted church basement by double-jointed Moscow Circus veterans, was equipped with a rudimentary high wire, and she spent as much time as possible walking back and forth.
At home she had a practice tightrope installed in the living room; it was only a foot off the floor but she imagined a hundred feet of space beneath her, crowds cheering, all the people and lights. Or absolute stillness between bank towers, making a perfect getaway with the safe-deposit-box master key, moving like water over the opposite window ledge. She walked back and forth, back and forth, expert and alone. The tightrope-walking calmed her when the house was too silent and no one was home. It seemed that the length of time between the end of school and her parents’ return home was growing longer from one evening to the next. Michaela felt herself to be on the vanguard of a brave new world; it was as if her parents had simply given her the house. Her father came home late and had little to say. He spread his files over the dining room table after dinner and stayed there poring over them deep into the night. He stood sometimes, he paced, he threw back his head and closed his eyes, he said a name sometimes aloud like a mantra (Lilia, Lilia), but he never looked up and
In the first year her father used to pull the car over and hide her, but later she knew how to build her own shelter, and she’d perfected her hiding place by the time she turned eight; she knew how to build a tent with blankets and pillows and suitcases in the backseat of a car, a way of disappearing into the chaos of luggage and pillows and blankets and coats. She hid there by the hour in the shifting darkness until her clothes clung to her body with sweat. She was suspicious of the dark, so her father gave her a flashlight, and she liked to shine it in circles on the blanket ceiling, practicing a new kind of cursive writing, drawn in light, and the car moved beneath her like a ship. She was a stowaway crossing hazardous seas. A fugitive, always. When she was small she imagined that her tent was dug deep into snow far up in the arctic, or half buried in a sandstorm in a hot treacherous land. She imagined there were search parties out looking for her: Bedouin nomads, explorers on sleighs drawn by teams of huskies, sailors going through the crates and spools of rope in the depths of the ship—but in her happiest daydreams they passed her by. She was never unearthed from the snowdrift, the nomads never found her in the sand dunes, she was never pulled flailing up out of the hold. She lay still by the hour, lost and undiscovered, and she sometimes imagined Simon lying there beside her, although the details of his face were fading and she wasn’t sure she remembered what he looked like anymore, and the beam of her flashlight traced patterns on the blanket overhead. The light circling like a signal in her limited sky.
16.
When Michaela was eleven and twelve and thirteen she liked movies about cat burglars and had ideas about dynamite. It wasn’t so much a yearning to blow up anything specific; it was something more like an idea that she could probably figure out how to make things explode if she had to. She had similar suspicions about scaling the walls of bank towers and walking on tightropes across streets, but her feelings about tightropes were much more definite, or at the very least better-informed: partly on the theory that talent skips generations and partly to appease two irate sets of grandparents, it had been decided very early on to send Michaela to circus school. Three days a week after school she took a bus to a neighborhood near McGill University, arriving early if at all possible. The circus school, a dusty venture run out of a vaulted church basement by double-jointed Moscow Circus veterans, was equipped with a rudimentary high wire, and she spent as much time as possible walking back and forth.
At home she had a practice tightrope installed in the living room; it was only a foot off the floor but she imagined a hundred feet of space beneath her, crowds cheering, all the people and lights. Or absolute stillness between bank towers, making a perfect getaway with the safe-deposit-box master key, moving like water over the opposite window ledge. She walked back and forth, back and forth, expert and alone. The tightrope-walking calmed her when the house was too silent and no one was home. It seemed that the length of time between the end of school and her parents’ return home was growing longer from one evening to the next. Michaela felt herself to be on the vanguard of a brave new world; it was as if her parents had simply given her the house. Her father came home late and had little to say. He spread his files over the dining room table after dinner and stayed there poring over them deep into the night. He stood sometimes, he paced, he threw back his head and closed his eyes, he said a name sometimes aloud like a mantra (Lilia, Lilia), but he never looked up and
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