Going Home Again (18 page)

“Mr. Everything’s Fine.”

“Just think about it a bit more, okay? Your dad’s back in a few days. We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, stop ditching school.”

The look on his face told me he wasn’t convinced. The screen saver on the laptop we’d been watching skateboarding videos on showed a number of sharks swimming back and forth in front of a sunken pirate ship. He was watching the screen now, maybe lost in thought. I touched the top of his head. “Let me know how you like that book, okay?”

I found my host standing beside the coffee table downstairs holding a weird-looking rifle and vest. “You okay?” he said.

“I’m good.”

“You’ve got to give this a try.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll love it,” he said. “It’s the latest model in the laser-tag market. Just got it in up at the place. The kids are eating it up.”

I’d heard all about Wonderworld by then. They had Whirlyball, paintball, sports courts and indoor minigolf, arcade and redemption games, simulators and batting cages. Their laser-tag facilities were the jewel in the crown. Kids from all around donned futuristic vests and goggles and set out in pursuit of one another in one of four different landscapes—jungle, war zone, planet ZOINKS and the Old West.

“Hand that vest over,” I said.

I slipped it on and held my hands up in the air.

He shot me three times at point-blank range. “How do you like that?” he said. “Zing, zing, zing.”

It felt like a finger jabbing my heart.

I took Titus and Quinn to a movie later that week. Their dad was out of town again, Cincinnati, then Dunedin, then Naples. I’d said nothing to him about my conversation with Monica, though I’d left the question open in my own mind. Like I said, it wasn’t my place, and I was also afraid that sharing this with him might set him off on some path I wasn’t prepared to follow. I imagined again the sense of betrayal he’d feel. It would be a final crushing of the spirit. I then wondered if my leaving Madrid had something to do with avoiding putting Ava in the position where she’d have to choose between me and her mother, knowing that I’d barely have a fighting chance if it actually came down to that. I worried, too, how news of Titus’s dissatisfaction would make their relationship even more adversarial than it already was.

At the movie I sat in the aisle seat next to Quinn. Up on the screen a man’s brains exploded from his head, and the villain holding the weapon grimaced and wiped the blood from his cheek. Halfway through the film, Quinn whispered that he had to use the washroom. I stood waiting outside the men’s room and watched the teenagers we’d bought our popcorn and Cokes from at the concession stand. With buds plugged into their ears, their heads bobbing in unison, they were having a great time. The girl wore a railroad
track of braces in her mouth. She smiled, much like Ava did, first broadly and unconsciously, then quickly drew her upper lip down over the teeth. The sound of machine guns crackled up from the theatre. What bank robbery was I missing, I wondered. What soppy kiss, when the silence returned, had I been spared?

On the flat screens stationed around the foyer I saw, as in a hall of mirrors, the bright flash of an armored personnel carrier erupting in a ball of flame on what might have been a road leading into a city in Iraq or Afghanistan, the lens capturing bodies and debris riding the explosive waves in slow motion.

Neither I nor anyone I loved or cared about had been anywhere near the trains that were blown up in Madrid back in 2004. One of the teachers I’d employed at the time claimed she knew someone who’d come down with flu the night before and missed her usual train into the city—and of course it was hit. Stories like this immediately became popular, and in the following week I heard variations on the theme over and over. Half the city had only narrowly escaped the attack. It became a sort of urban legend and a warning that the line between life and death is very fine indeed. It’s an alluring prospect to think you’ve been spared for reasons beyond your comprehension, though for some this only confirms that existence is essentially chaotic. But for others it might serve as an inspiring invitation to get a jump on making some long-overdue changes—like back in Montreal when the
Challenger
exploded on live television.

For a week or two the Atocha attack was all the
shock I needed to remind me of what really mattered. A tragedy of that size put your own troubles into perspective. I booked time for us with a marriage counselor, whom we visited for a few months, and on weekends we took Ava up into the sierra whenever we could. I tried to look past the neutral smiles, the rush to get home before a certain hour. I believed we were on the mend, drilling back down into the bedrock of our past. At the time it had seemed a hopeful exercise. I thought these trips might remind us about some of the good things, starting with why we’d fallen in love in the first place and how we used to invade one of the restaurants or bars in the village square with old friends and spend the day exploring the area. There were trails cut everywhere in the pine forests. We’d spend the weekend up there, and in the deep blue light that fell between the trees Isabel and I would separate ourselves from the group and find a perch that afforded a view of the town below and the wide grey mountains on the other side of the valley and wait for the hawks to appear, three or four at a time, cutting their wings against the sky. At the end of the afternoon we’d all pile into the cars again and drive down to José’s big stone house in the village one over from Isabel’s and there grill lamb chops and drink out in the garden until well after dark.

I know now that trying to go back to some better time is doomed to failure. You can never really turn back the clock. But the drives up into the pine forests all those years later, in the spring of 2004 while I was setting up the Dublin school and the Atocha station
still smoldered, were a powerful tonic for me—even though part of me understood that those family weekends together were nothing but a rolling last hurrah.

After the movie I took the boys around the corner for a bite to eat. We ordered, then I stepped away from the table and called Madrid. It was four in the morning over there, but this wasn’t the first time one of us had pulled the other out of a restless sleep. I held the phone against my ear and heard the overseas ring. An urge to call would come every so often and usually I was able to fight it off, yet for some reason I couldn’t that night. What seized me now was the need to hear Isabel’s voice and to know our daughter was sleeping safely in the room next to hers, which for years had been ours, and that somehow the small space that had contained our lives together was still intact.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” I said when Isabel asked why I was calling at this hour.

“Aye,
cariño
,” she said, and gently hung up the phone.

After the boys were asleep that night, I listened to a message on the machine from their dad. When I called back he picked up in Naples, Florida, with a yelp of professional enthusiasm.

“What is it down there, seventy degrees?” I said.

“Some guys have all the luck, right? I guess that’s me!”

He was sitting across the table from a well-known baseball player, four drinks into a big night. I told him
I’d taken the boys to a movie; at least they’d enjoyed themselves. Hearing excited, lubricated voices behind him, I imagined cockatoos drowsing on low, moss-bearded branches and large athletes wearing fat gold rings.

“We signed the sweetest free-agency deal today,” he told me. “We ate those assholes for lunch.”

Envy and pity flooded through me after we hung up. He had the freedom that I’d longed for, that we all hoped for while waiting for our children to grow up, the freedom that, when it finally comes, feels more like a burden of lost opportunity than anything else. I wondered if he just didn’t care anymore, or if he ever had. Did he know something that I didn’t? Would his sons simply not remember his indifference? Would they care at all? Would those difficult months and years of his absence not matter in the end? I walked downstairs and poured myself a drink and drank it slowly, standing alone in my kitchen.

I was just back from a bike ride one Tuesday morning in May—one of the first warm days of spring—when a Skype request came up from Ava, which sometimes popped up at the strangest moments. I was drinking a glass of orange juice and watching the laptop I kept open in the kitchen whenever I was home.

“Hey, Daddy,” she said.

“Peanut,” I said, leaning into the screen. “What’s up? How are you?”

“You look silly.”

I was still wearing my cycling gear, including my helmet.

“Guess what,” she said with a great big smile.

“Tell me.”

“Mom said I can visit you this summer.”

I cycled to work that morning, like a man reborn, my heart exploding. I’d already started making plans in my head—places I’d show her, things we’d do together. I turned a fresh eye to the city for the first time in months. The sunshine was warm, and a thin line of clouds sat benignly on the farthest horizon. The trees on the front lawns and parks I passed were budding out, their leaves pressing into the air like little green wings.

Later the same afternoon Holly Grey broke the silence between us with a phone call. “It’s me, Charlie,” she said. “How are you? Is this a good time?”

As we spoke, I began to believe she was calling for more than the reason she eventually presented, which was to invite the four of us to a barbecue one Saturday afternoon in June. I told her that sounded like a good idea, and she named a few dates. I wrote them down and told her I’d ask my brother if he’d like to join us. But I believed I heard something else in her voice. Did she want to talk about who we’d been and what we’d once had? Why I’d left her hanging like that all those years ago? Were there any feelings left? I thought these
questions hung between us now as we spoke and that the excuse of this barbecue was only an occasion to answer them.

“Touch football in the yard,” she said. “Some burgers. Totally casual.”

“Perfect. The kids’ll have a great time. I’ll look at these dates and get back to you.”

I didn’t tell Hilary about this phone call or where I was going with Nate and his boys, and I drove out there three Saturdays later.

The truth was I didn’t know what to expect, but the fantasy of starting up something again was, in the light of day, little more than a pleasant daydream I dipped into from time to time. I was more aware than anyone that life rolls on, people change and the circumstances that separated us were wider and more telling than the past we shared. Holly’s kids, as if to remind me of this fact, were shooting baskets in their driveway when we pulled up to the house sometime around three that afternoon.

It was close to the middle of June now, and the sun was high and the streets were filled with a brilliant clear light. Riley was wearing cutoffs and a maroon Harvard T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up over the shoulders. Luke, shirtless and smiling, fist-bumped the boys and shook our hands. “Good to see you guys again,” he said.

Riley’s long chestnut hair was loose and sweaty, and small lines of perspiration traced down the front of her shirt between her breasts and under her armpits. She was the image of her mother in the pictures I’d seen of her when she was that age.

“Looks like you’re getting a real workout,” Nate said, shaking her hand. “That’s good to see, kids keeping fit.”

She smiled, the basketball tucked under her arm, and that’s when I first noticed a habit of hers that surfaced often that day—holding the tip of her tongue against the back of her front teeth, her mouth parted slightly, when she smiled.

In a moment Holly and Glenn came around from the other side of the house, both smiling broadly. “We were starting to wonder!” she said, holding a small gardening shovel in her gloved hand.

“Good to see you both,” Glenn said.

She looked great, of course, and when I went to shake her hand, she said, “Oh, right!” and kissed my cheek. She smelled like the bright day and the soil she’d been turning and the vaguest scent of perfume or bath soap, and as I breathed in, I felt the same nervous wonder that had taken me last fall and feared that my face and eyes betrayed my nervousness and longing.

“The kids are excited about being here,” I said. “This is a good idea—getting together like this.”

Glenn nodded with a smile. “We should’ve invited you earlier. We had to get through that winter first, but Holly’s been talking about reconnecting for months. Faces from the past.”

“It’s true,” Holly said, not at all defensively. “I kept wanting to call. Come. We’ll get you a drink and show you around.”

As they led us to the far side of the house, out of earshot of where the kids were playing basketball
on the long sloping driveway, I tried to focus on the moment—Glenn was to my right pointing out some feature of the house he thought I’d find interesting—but I couldn’t help watching Holly as she walked ahead with my brother into the side yard. The old white dress shirt she wore was tied in front at the waist, and the faded jeans that hung loosely off her hips hinted at a figure that had hardly changed in the past twenty years.

With drinks in hand, they showed us the work they’d done on the garden just that day, naming flowers and vines and filling us in on this neighbor and that and the charms of small-town living. Nate pitched in, keeping the conversation going. Seeming pleased to be sipping a cold gin on a hot day in the company of an attractive woman, he kept offering up compliments on the garden and the house, a redbrick Victorian that sat squarely in the middle of a generous corner lot. As the afternoon rolled forward, I began to suspect that I’d been well off the mark in thinking that Holly had some ulterior motive for asking me here. That everything suggested she was perfectly happy served to confuse my sense of balance. I didn’t know whether I felt impressed or saddened that here in front of me were two people who actually
gardened
together on weekends. They were one of those rare couples who still did things together. With two kids and a man she enjoyed spending time with, it looked to me like she was making a real run at happiness. She’d chosen right, something few of us could claim to have done with any honesty. I watched as her husband spoke—talking
about the trouble they’d been having with the aphids this season—and followed her eyes and mouth for any sign to the contrary; and when none came I felt foolish and relieved and disappointed all at once. And so I dragged myself back into the middle of a fine day while they gamely carried on.