Excerpt: 'Last Night In Montreal'

No one stays forever. On the morning of her disappearance Lilia woke early, and lay still for a moment in the softness of sheets. It was the last day of October. She slept naked.

Eli was up already, and working on his thesis; while he was typing up yesterday's research notes he heard the sounds of awakening, the rustling of the duvet, her bare footsteps on the hardwood floor, and she kissed the top of his head very lightly en route to the bathroom -- he made an agreeable humming noise, but didn't look up -- and the shower started on the other side of the almost-closed door. Steam and the scent of apricot shampoo escaped around the edges. She stayed in the shower for forty-five minutes, but this wasn't unusual; the day was still unremarkable. Eli glanced up briefly when she emerged from the bathroom. Lilia, naked: pale skin wrapped in a soft white towel, short dark hair wet on her forehead, and she smiled when he met her eyes.

"Good morning," he said. Smiling back at her. "How did you sleep?" He was already typing again.

She kissed his hair again instead of answering, and left a trail of wet footprints all the way back to the bedroom. He heard her towel fall softly to the bedroom floor and he wanted to go and make love to her just then; but he was immersed so deeply in the work that morning, accomplishing things, and he didn't want to break the spell. He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom.

She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trashcan before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her; and it seemed to him later that she'd been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined -- later it seemed possible that she'd simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she didn't stand in front of the sofa at all -- merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extends into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point.

He was reasonably certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate (or as reasonably accurate as a reasonably videographic memory could be, under the circumstances), but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running over into each other and becoming slightly confused; she's across the room, she's kissing him for a third time -- and why didn't he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss landed on his head -- and putting on her shoes; did she kiss him before she put on her shoes, or afterwards? He couldn't swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

"I'm going for the paper," she said. The door closed behind her. He heard her clattering footsteps on the stairs.

He was hunting just then, hot on the trail of something obscure, tracking a rare butterfly-like quotation as it fluttered through thickets of dense tropical paragraphs. The chase seemed to require utmost concentration; still, he couldn't help but think later on that if he'd only glanced up from the work, he might've seen something; a look in her eyes, foreshadowing of doom, perhaps a train ticket in her hand or the words I'm Leaving You Forever stitched on the front of her coat. Something did seem slightly amiss, but he was lost in the excitement of butterfly-hunting and ignored it; until later, too late, when somewhere between Andean loanwords and the lost languages of ancient California he happened to glance at the clock. It was afternoon. He was hungry. It had been four and a half hours since she'd gone for the paper, and her watery footsteps had evaporated from the floor, and he realized what it was; for the first time he could remember, she didn't ask if he wanted a coffee from the deli.

He told himself to stay calm, and realized in the telling that he'd been waiting for this moment. He told himself that she'd just been distracted by a bookstore. It was entirely possible. Alternatively, she liked trains: at this moment she could be halfway back from Coney Island, taking pictures of passengers, unaware of what time it was. With this in mind, he returned reluctantly to the chase; a particular sentence had gotten all coiled up on him, and he spent an uneasy half-hour trying to untangle the wiring and making a valiant effort not to dwell on her increasingly gaping absence, while several academic points he was trying to clarify got bored and wandered off into the middle distance. It took some time to coax them back into focus, once the sentence had been mangled beyond all recognition and the final destination of the paragraph worked out. But by the time the paragraph arrived at the station it was five o'clock, she'd left to get the paper before noon, and it seemed unreasonable to think that something wasn't horribly wrong by this point.

He stood up then, conceding defeat, and began to check the apartment. At first glance it appeared unchanged. In the washroom nothing was different; her comb was where it had always lived, on the haphazard shelf between the toilet and the sink. Her toothbrush was where she'd left it, beside a silver pair of tweezers on the windowsill. The living area was unchanged. Her towel was lying damply on the bedroom floor. She'd taken her purse, as she always did. But then he glanced at the wall in the bedroom, and his life broke neatly into two parts.

Excerpted from Last Night In Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel. Copyright 2010 by Emily St. John Mandel. Excerpted by permission of Unbridled Books. All rights reserved.