Going Home Again (2 page)

“Very nice,” I said. “The crown is yours.”

She was the queen of riddles in the family and very smart indeed—in Spanish, English
and
French—even if she had hauled that brainteaser off some website. One day she was going to be a writer, she said, the next Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf all wrapped up into one. Apparently (according to her mother) she was already talking about universities where she was interested in studying. For reasons unknown to me, there was one in Buenos Aires that figured at the top of her list. I had no idea what any
of this was based on, though it heartened me to know that our daughter’s possibilities were all the brighter for the fact that she was fluent in three languages.

Her Spanish mother spoke English well enough—quite well, in fact—but you needed a native speaker’s proficiency to grasp a linguistic parallelogram as lovely as that. I asked Ava if she was going to translate for her mom.

“I would, but I’m sure you two have lots to talk about,” she said. It was—and she knew it—the understatement of the year. She dipped a hand into the purse hanging on the back of her chair and produced one of those gargantuan novels she carried with her everywhere, opened it to where a green ribbon marked her place roughly halfway through, leaned forward and started reading.

Ava was our little scholar in the making. I’d always known she was a brilliant kid. But I was fully aware that a novel like that, in a situation like ours, was as much a shield against stupid adult high jinks and petty bickering as it was a rollicking good read. She was into something called dark fantasy at the time, which, if I understood correctly, usually included some sort of urban werewolf, a compulsive but sympathetic murderer or a vampire challenged by the crushing human need to be loved. I was sure that over the past year, since I’d left Madrid, she’d cast her mother and me in roles every bit as compromising and bloody as those she chose to read about. I’d never asked her how those novels typically ended, whether in bloodbath or in reconciliation, or which of the two endings, the gory
or the romantic, she preferred; but I knew—and not without the guilt that still kept me awake at night—she hadn’t given up on us yet.

Thirteen years on and I could still remember clearly the weeks leading up to the day Ava was born: the rolling waves of anxiety and excitement; how Isabel walked around with her right hand pasted to the side of her amazingly huge stomach; the endless baths she ran, blue candles placed around the edge of the tub. And at night how the mysterious being inside her pressed itself against my waiting hand, like she was already fully conscious in there and just counting down the days. And when I finally held our daughter in my arms for the first time, I felt that she’d been part of me my whole life. The feeling was so powerful I found myself moved to tears.

The fact that Ava was turning thirteen probably made a bigger impression on me than it made on her. It almost felt that night as if I were stepping into a finished painting, and all I had to do to figure out what that painting meant was get to the other side of this weekend. Ava was excited, of course—she was the one getting the presents and blowing out the candles. But my first year as a bachelor in two decades was just coming to a close, and now like magic, as if time had snapped its fingers, it came to me that I was in the middle of a life I hadn’t really paid much attention to. My old self was buried in the irretrievable past, the world had continued, and suddenly my baby daughter was a teenager.

“And your brother?” Isabel said.

I glanced at Ava to make sure she was deep into her book. “Difficult, as usual,” I said. “Bit of a prick, actually.”

“Don’t tell me he’s the same,” she said.

“Worse.”

And like a spy in one of those old movies, Ava lowered her book conspicuously, stared at us for a moment, then slipped back into her story.

 One

There was no reason
to think anything would be different between me and my brother the previous summer, in 2005, when I called ahead to tell him I was coming back to Toronto to try out my new life as a single man. I’d been studying the possibility of taking the business across the Atlantic for years, but for too many reasons to count, I’d never managed to pull it off. After finding out about the Supreme Court justice named Pablo, though, and having by then bunkered down at the Reina Victoria Hotel for two months, I was feeling sufficiently unsettled to actually do it. I needed some changes in my life. New schedule, new people, new rhythms. I was hoping for something else but wasn’t at all sure what it might be. The challenge of setting up my fifth language academy was a project that would focus my energies in the meantime and perhaps turn off the panicked voice in my head that kept telling me things I didn’t want to hear.

I wondered if some overlooked germ of hope had lain dormant in my heart over the years since I’d last seen my brother. But it wasn’t an easy telephone call to make at the time. There had always been some fundamental confusion between us, a wall, in effect an
unending failure to imagine how the other saw and thought about the world that too often made things go sideways between us. That’s what had happened in Madrid the last time I’d seen him. We’d spoken by phone half a dozen times since then—on a birthday, his or mine, or the shared anniversary of our parents’ deaths—and I’d always come away glad to know he was well but also relieved that our lives were separate and distinct and that the problems between us might remain buried to the end of our days.

They had met only once, Isabel and Nate, when he came through Madrid back in 1992, the summer of the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville World’s Fair, after dumping the girl he was traveling with in France. He turned up at our door one night and told us he was heading down to check out the señoritas in Seville, then going back north to try to score some tickets for the sailing competitions in Catalonia. We put him up on the couch for a week. Showing him around my adopted hometown, I took him to the oldest restaurant in the world and spent a wad of money I didn’t really have. We wandered through neighborhoods packed with bars and clubs. Nothing seemed to impress him. In fact he found it all just a little bit irritating. The city was too hot and dirty and loud; he bitched and moaned about train schedules and shitty restaurants and the near-complete absence of spoken English in the streets and hotels. I got the impression that everything he saw in Spain made him feel superior, though of course he didn’t say as much. His last night with us he got stupidly drunk and said he wanted to go find
some prostitutes. At first it was a joke I could almost brush aside. But he kept insisting. Then he draped his arm around Isabel’s neck and asked if out of the goodness of her heart she could possibly loosen that grip she’d fastened around my balls, the boys just wanted to go out and have some fun for a change. That’s when I took him out for a drink he didn’t need and told him he could find some other couch to sleep on. I knew he had some experience with prostitutes. I didn’t care so much about that, since we both did. What I couldn’t stand was him treating Isabel as if she were some sort of obstacle in my life. The whole week had been building up to that moment. He’d been throwing out little put-downs and challenges, testing to see how far he could push me. When I told him what a selfish prick I thought he was, he took a swing at me right there in front of the bar. Not nearly as drunk as he was, I just stepped aside, went back to the apartment and took Isabel out to dinner. His backpack was gone when we got home a few hours later. The taps in the kitchen and bathroom were open full blast and a jug of water had been emptied into our bed. It was probably three or four years before I talked to him again.

So I was surprised, maybe even a little suspicious, I’ll admit now, when he offered to pick me up at the airport. What might have changed, I wondered. A few hours into my flight I became convinced it had to be a misunderstanding and doubted he’d show. At baggage collection I watched an empty baby bassinet make
three solitary revolutions and weighed my immediate prospects. I had a pocketful of euro coins that weren’t going to do me a lick of good here, a cell phone with thirty-seven Madrid numbers on speed dial and one single solitary local address written out on an old Post-it in my wallet. For an uncomfortable moment I felt something like a college student on the first leg of the big trip, tired, woefully underprepared and full of conflicting emotion. I saw my brother for an instant then—he was standing in the concourse—when the automatic doors that separated us opened. I almost didn’t recognize him, not because he’d changed—he hadn’t—but for the simple shock of seeing him there.

He was holding a newspaper in his right hand and wearing jeans and a green golf shirt. I might have smiled when I saw him—surprised he’d actually come to meet me—and then I wondered if he somehow knew I was limping home at the end of my marriage. Would he remind me, after thirteen years apart, that he’d always come out on top in the competition that seemed to rule us? Steeling myself, I collected my luggage and continued to the doors. He saw me and waved, and when we embraced, I recognized the cologne that our father had worn when we were boys. I didn’t know what it was called, but its scent opened my eyes like an old family photograph.

“My big little brother,” he said. “Welcome home.”

“It’s good to see you, Nate,” I said.

I’m taller than my brother by two fingers, have been since I caught up and passed him at the age of fourteen, and when we stood back from our embrace,
he put his hand on my shoulder—the railing still separated us at hip level—and nodded and smiled as if some pleasant observation was registering in his mind. His hair was thick and dark, gelled or greased and cut short in a way that made him look younger than his years. He looked more or less as I remembered him. He was a fit and handsome man, like our father, with strong shoulders and a natural athletic grace that had favored him throughout and beyond his high school years. I couldn’t begin to imagine how much my appearance had changed since then. I had expected a similar aging in my brother, of course, the beginnings of a paunch or the thinning of hair that followed on our father’s side. But there was no hint of that. The years seemed to have passed him by. His face was still unlined and youthful-looking, his dark hair was thick as ever, and he wore the same conspiratorial and dazzling smile he’d used to his advantage when we were kids.

There were no awkward silences between us that day. As he drove me into the city—we were riding in air-conditioned comfort in a big white Escalade that afforded us a bird’s-eye view of the laps of the drivers in the next lane—he mentioned his kids three or four times, how great they were, what they did for fun, how he liked nothing more than hanging out in the backyard and grilling hot dogs and burgers for them. Sticking to the upside of my life, I told him that Ava was an athletic and popular kid, almost twelve years old at that point, a kid who loved to read, did great in school and had a knack for languages. “Can you believe it? Us as dads,” he said. “The mind boggles.”

A few minutes later he pointed out an office tower in the distance, tall and glassy and shimmering in the afternoon sunshine, sixty stories of gold-tinted windows. He was a partner with one of the big law firms in that building, specializing in sports and entertainment. His client list had a number of golf and baseball and hockey players on it. The only name that stood out for me was a young female tennis player’s, likely because I’d always kept an eye on that game for its connection to memories of summer evenings spent rallying tennis balls against the south wall of my high school. Cycling, tennis and swimming had been my areas of concentration, solitary sports whose lack of bullish camaraderie seemed to make him suspicious at the time.

“Sounds like you enjoy what you do,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of guys around these days who can make that claim.”

“I’m not saying life’s perfect where I’m sitting. I’ve got a bit of a domestic situation going on.”

“Oh?”

He told me that Monica—his sons’ mother—had moved out in April, three days after tossing her wedding band into the Toronto harbor at the end of a night on the town with three girlfriends. Now she was living with an older Swedish man who owned what he described as a multidimensional sports-and-entertainment complex for the modern adventure-seeking kid, a high-end, one-stop birthday emporium called Wonderworld. The man in question had come over from Scandinavia
in the early nineties and doggedly built a chain of these franchises across the country.

“That’s where she met the guy. At our kid’s tenth birthday party. Nice, eh?”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

Since then Nate and Monica had hashed out an agreement where the kids were concerned. Everything else was still up in the air. Technically he took his sons every other week, but now he was traveling so much and so often that he was barely able to keep up his end of the deal. His tone when he told me this wasn’t whiny or bitter, not on that first afternoon, anyway. If anything he seemed contemplative—a word I never expected to use to describe my brother. But that’s how he came off that day as he drove me into the city. It seemed he’d been humbled. It stood to reason. You can’t go through something like that and not be.