Going Home Again (24 page)

Later that night, standing side by side at the edge of that valley, Isabel and I saw the cluster of bright lights shining on the horizon. My arm might have been draped around her neck or hers around mine. “There,” she said, “you can see Madrid.”

“That’s where you live,” I said.

“You too,” she told me. “You live there, too, now.”

 Fourteen

We spent twenty minutes
in the back of a police car that Saturday night before our daughter’s thirteenth birthday. One of the two officers on the scene went back and forth between us and the cabbie, taking statements. We gave him our side of the story. Who knew what the driver was telling him?

Eyes closed, he’d sat there leaning against the front tire of his taxi long enough for me to start worrying this might turn into something much bigger. The cop was there when he stood back up, and as they talked he was still pressing his hand against his head and looking over at us like he wanted to pay back some serious damage. Every minute or so he’d touch his hand to his head and glance at it to see if the bleeding had stopped. It looked like it had.

By then most of the crowd had been moved along. Now the regular flow of after-hours Madrid streamed by, hipsters and preppies and hip-hop teenagers and nicely dressed older couples touring from bar to bar for drinks and snacks and enjoying the nighttime break in the heat.

I had a cut the size of a quarter under my eye, but it wasn’t bleeding, partly because Isabel had dabbed a
thumb in her saliva and gently pushed it against the abrasion.

“What are the odds, right?” I said. “I get picked up by the same cabbie you end up clocking a night later.”

“Sounds like an Almodóvar film.”

“Maybe Fellini,” I said.

“I just hope he doesn’t sue us into the Stone Age,” she said.

“I’m having a serious case of déjà vu,” I said.

“Are you seeing double?” she said, getting in close to my face.

“No.”

“You think we should go to emergency?”

“My head’s all right. It’s just that I bashed Nate on the head with a bottle last week. And then here you are doing the same thing to that guy with a radio. Isn’t that weird? I mean, for two people who’ve never hit anybody in their life?”

“Why the hell did you do that?” she said.

So I told her about everything—Holly and Riley, what sort of man my brother had turned into and how I’d learned that the death of my old friend from my university days wasn’t the accident I’d always believed it to be. I told Isabel all this as slowly and as completely as I could, and when I finished she asked me one quick question, which was if Ava had ever been left alone with Nate. When I told her no, she never had, she nodded and whispered, “Thank God,” under her breath, then turned forward and looked out the windshield. She didn’t say anything for a while after
that, and I started to wonder if I’d crossed the line somehow, possibly telling her too much about what was happening back there. It was hard enough for me to digest. We weren’t a couple anymore, after all. Maybe all this business about Nate and Holly and Miles was confirmation that everything I represented was just too complicated.

“I guess all that makes it sound like a hell of a year,” I said.

“Maybe life always looks bigger when you look at it from a distance,” she said. “Maybe that’s the moral of the story.”

“I’m thinking this story’s fresh out of morals.”

“I mean the way we look back at things. What are you going to do with all that? It’s still part of you. And those people, too. Maybe that’s the question you’re going to ask yourself one day. I don’t know. We’re just sitting in a cop car watching the night go by.”

And then, just as that confined space seemed to get smaller, enough to push us closer together and maybe even into each other’s arms, the door on my side opened and this skinny-faced cop was leaning forward into the backseat like an overeager bellhop.

“Bonnie and Clyde,” he said.

“What’s the story?” I said.

“The story is you’re free to go. As long as you stop beating up on defenseless cabdrivers. You see those people over there?”

A respectable-looking couple, it turned out, an older man and woman, had seen the whole thing and
told all concerned that the woman in the police car, the Good Samaritan, had chased off the real thief, and all she’d done in bashing the cabdriver over the head was try to protect her husband from taking a beating he didn’t deserve.

Now the cabbie gestured dismissively, making it clear he was done with us, that he’d be happy never to see the likes of us again, then climbed into his taxi and peeled off.

It was coming on two in the morning when we got home, by which I mean the place that used to be my home but wasn’t anymore. I was feeling light-headed, and the evening was still swirling around inside me, full of new and unusual possibilities. We stood at the foot of Ava’s bed for half a minute, quietly admiring the small lump of pajamas that was our sleeping daughter, and then walked quietly back down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Isabel wrapped a clean dishcloth around a bag of ice and held it against my face. The kitchen was dark except for the light in the hallway, but I could see the stress of the night in her eyes and two lines at the sides of her mouth I’d never noticed before.

“We’ve got a birthday party tomorrow,” she said, adjusting the ice bag. “Does it still hurt?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She left the kitchen without saying anything more and came back a minute later with a couple Advils. I took them with a glass of water.

“Everything happened tonight,” she said.

“Almost everything,” I said, then took the ice from her hand and placed it gently against the side of her face.

“It’s cold,” she said, cupping my hand. “It’s nice.” She closed her eyes, and her lips parted, and I felt her breath coming slow and clear, passing over the coolness off the ice. “I’m not sorry we went through this year. I hated every minute of it. But I’m not sorry. Why do you think all that had to happen?”

“The choices we made,” I said.

“It’s just the way we are,” she said. “We’re just people making choices.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. “Tell me the worst thing you did over there.”

“There’s a lot of days I’d like to forget.”

“Just one,” she said. Her eyes still closed, she pressed her other hand against mine, pulling the ice harder into her face, then returned it to the cut under my eye.

“What about something I didn’t do?” I said. “Does that count?”

“Okay. What didn’t you do that you should have?”

“I didn’t visit my friend’s grave.”

“There’s time,” she said, “always time,” and took the bag of ice from my face once more, and we led each other to the bedroom, which smelled of soapy perfumes and her deep aroma on the sheets and pillows, and we undressed in the light of the August moon and shared the ice until our skin and the bedding were soaked through and small, unforgettable shudders leaped between our bodies like little sparks in the night.

•  •  •

Ava was sitting at the breakfast table reading one of those gargantuan novels when I shuffled into the kitchen the next morning.

She looked up with an expression of horror on her face. “What happened to you?”

For a second I had no idea what she was talking about. It was her birthday, her father had slept in his own bed for the first time in more than a year, and this is how she said good morning.

“Your eye. It’s black-and-blue. You got into a fight!”

“You should see the other guy,” I said, leaning in to give her a kiss.

I told her the story while I made French toast with cinnamon and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, her favorite birthday breakfast for as far back as I could remember.

“She did not!” she said. “Over the head? With a radio?”

“Oh, yes she did! You should’ve seen it. Down like a sack of potatoes. Don’t mess with that lady, I’ve seen her in action.”

“Did your father tell you?” Isabel said when she emerged from the bedroom a little while later. She gave Ava a hug and a kiss, then turned to me and put her hand on my face and got in close to look at the cut. She smelled like a garden after a light rain, like the woman I’d made love to last night for the first time in too long. “The man’s a punching bag. Look at him!”

Morning sunshine was pouring through the kitchen window; the room filled with the smells of fresh coffee
and maple syrup. Exhausted, feeling like I’d been run over by a mountain bike, I was the happiest man in Madrid.

“Dad told me the cop called you guys Bonnie and Clyde,” Ava said, grinning. “You two are
so
not Bonnie and Clyde.”

How she knew who they were was another wonderful mystery. As a family we leveled that stack of French toast, her mother and I putting all our attention onto Ava, and geared up for a great birthday party. I watched Isabel carefully, listening for an edge in her voice or anything that might register as the first sign of dawning regret. But I saw none. Were we back on track again, I wondered, or might this collapse at any minute? So far as I could tell, it was as if some invisible dam had burst, and now everything ahead of us was open and clear. Ava was going to start with the questions, too, ones she had every right and reason to ask. Are you guys suddenly together again? Or is this just one of those sympathy things? Why are my parents such helpless idiots? But no questions came.

We walked over to the Retiro, just four blocks away, and strolled past men selling beads and necklaces, their blankets spread out under the plane trees opposite the boating lake. The fortune-tellers and tarot-card readers were there as usual, and as usual I didn’t ask. I’m not sure I would have wanted to know. We found a seat at a café and had something cool to drink and watched the crowds growing along the promenade.

Ava was happy because it was her birthday and we’d soon be in the car driving north and her dad had
spent the night. It was the greatest birthday present she could have hoped for. She didn’t ask a single question, and part of me was glad she didn’t. I was afraid that her mother and I had just set a standard we couldn’t possibly keep up. But here I was, home again and back in her life, and neither of us had the heart to explain that our troubles weren’t so easily solved.

The big stone house where we’d always held the party had been in José’s family for four generations. It was a handsome old building, too big for one person to keep up or to fill with new furniture—or anything new, for that matter. Overrun with wild grass and bushes, the yard was more than José could keep under control. Once or twice a summer the two of us took turns hacking at the growth with the old scythe we’d found in the shed, but it was never enough. In the garden there was an old-fashioned hand pump and cistern rimmed with blue and green and red tiles, that I’d never seen anyone take water from, and on any of the four stone walls that closed in the property we usually found a salamander sunning itself, which Ava always loved when she was little. There was a rail line just beyond those walls, and every hour on the hour the train rumbled past carrying passengers down into the heart of the city. It was quiet as a church up there except for the trains, and the birds and the crickets and maybe a neighbor’s kid bouncing a basketball out on the road, and much cooler than it was in the city. José used to host his end-of-summer party up here before Ava came along, and
we always gathered around the huge granite table set back under the pergola that dangled wild vines over our heads as we talked long into the late afternoon. The table sat more than twenty, and every seat was always filled. The food would keep coming—most of it prepared by José—for two or three hours. And then at some point, when Ava was four or five, her birthday party started absorbing this annual feast and slowly, over time, became the main event.

After unloading the presents the three of us passed through the side gate and joined the party, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. All the guests were already milling in the back and side gardens, waiting for the birthday girl. They were, for the most part, the people who years earlier had known well before we ourselves did that Isabel and I were going to fall into each other’s arms. What they knew in particular was the look of two people who were crazy about each other and wouldn’t let anything come between them. They were here now, of course, and smiling, but it was a different smile I saw on their faces that afternoon—one that seemed to recognize hard times and the effort we’d made to get back to where we were, which unbeknownst to them was approximately twelve hours into a sort of marital détente.

Ava found her grandparents sitting together in the shade of the pergola. Her face aglow, she wrapped her arms around them and whispered that her father had slept at home last night, that it looked like her mom and dad were back together again, and this was the greatest birthday present she could have asked for. Her
grandfather looked at me and smiled a half smile and raised his finger, as if to say,
Give me a minute of your time
. And I remembered then the first minutes he held his granddaughter in his arms. He’d wept openly and deeply and cupped the back of my neck in his hand and pulled me into him, Ava still in the cradle of his arm and said, “Now you are with us completely, you hear? Now you are my son.”