by Robin Sharma
“Hi,” I said eventually.
“Oh, hi.” She smiled when she looked up, and kept smiling when she saw it was me. Either she was very nice or it was a good sign. Maybe both.
“Sorry to bug you,” I said. “Umm. I think you were in my ancient history class in second year?”
Annisha tilted her head to one side and paused, as if in thought. After a moment she said, “The engineer, right?” She said it slowly, as if she was still searching her memory as she spoke.
“Right, right,” I said. “It was my elective.”
I realized that I had started to shift my weight from foot to foot. I forced myself to stand still. Then I blurted it out.
“I was just wondering if you wanted to go out for coffee sometime?”
She was still smiling, but she didn’t respond right away. She was clearly weighing the idea.
“This is kind of a busy week,” she said. “I’m catching up with a lot of friends I haven’t seen since last year.”
I started nodding my head, composing my response, trying to think of something to say that would make it sound as if I really didn’t care that she didn’t want to see me.
“But next week I should have time.” She was ripping a small piece of paper from the receipts piled in front of her. She wrote a phone number on it and handed it to me.
“My name is Annisha, by the way,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten yours.”
LLUIS SHOWED UP in front of the hotel right at eight a.m. He wasn’t in his taxi.
“I thought we could start by walking,” he said. “I love to drive, but walking is the best way to see the city.”
Lluis had convinced me the previous night that I should spend what little time I had in Barcelona looking at the architecture. He claimed it was one of Barcelona’s major contributions to the world of art.
“We have nine buildings that are UNESCO heritage sites. And there is Gaudí and all that wonderful Catalan modernism architecture you saw yesterday afternoon. But architecture isn’t some artifact of the past in Barcelona. We care deeply about our buildings still today.”
Lluis explained that the city was home to more than five thousand working architects. “I challenge you to find more architects per capita anywhere else in the world,” he said. I didn’t take him up on that. He told me about buildings by Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers. Gehry’s was the only name I recognized, but I didn’t like to admit that.
With just a short break for an early lunch, we spent the morning and afternoon walking and walking. Occasionally we hopped on a bus, but most of the time we strolled along, our necks craned up, our heads moving back and forth to take in the buildings around us.
We saw Gaudí’s La Pedrera apartments. With their wavy walls, look of water-worn stone, and seaweedy iron balconies, it made me think of the lost city of Atlantis. Surely a city at the bottom of the ocean would look like this. We wandered through Parc Güell with the mushroom-topped gatehouse, the mosaic lizard sculpture, the circular tile-adorned esplanade. And we ended our day back where we had been last evening, in front of Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s unfinished testament to his vision and his faith, according to Lluis.
“I love this place,” said Lluis thoughtfully, gazing up at the four soaring spires. “Did I tell you that my great-grandfather worked on it?”
“Really?” I said. “Was he a stone mason?”
“No,” said Lluis. “Just a laborer, I believe. I suspect he spent a lot of time pushing wheelbarrows and hauling bricks. But you know, like Julian’s note says, there is no insignificant work. I like to think of him sweating and dirty, looking up at the end of a long day, seeing this magnificent church rising above him and knowing that without his muscle and his time, something like this would simply not happen.”
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Lluis walked me back to the hotel. He had some errands to run, and we both wanted to make it an early evening. My flight left at eight the next morning, and Lluis insisted on picking me up at five to get me there.
Once in my suite, I ordered dinner from room service. I wrote a couple of notes in my journal, and then pulled out my phone and composed a short message to Adam. The longing I had felt for him in Mexico lingered. I wondered how I could have gone so many days without phoning or visiting him when I was home. I started the note with a plaintive “I miss you so much, buddy.” But then I thought of Adam’s sad eyes when I had kissed him good-bye before flying to Istanbul. I erased the sentence. I wanted to be there for him, even if only with a note, rather than underlining my absence. Instead I wrote about the Temple of the Magician and about the Mayan ruins I had seen. I wrote about the sounds of the birds in the trees and the pumas that roam the forests of the Yucatán—and how I was mighty glad I didn’t meet any. And then I told him I had just spent the day in Barcelona. Remember last summer when we made castles on the beach and we dribbled wet sand to make the tops tall and pointy? That’s what the church I saw yesterday looked like. It was covered with spiky towers. It was designed by a guy named Antoni Gaudí, and I bet that when he was a boy, he made sand castles just like you.
I paused for a second, thinking about my next sentence. Then I wrote, When I get back, I will take you to the beach for a weekend. I knew the dangers of making promises, but I was determined to keep this one. It would break my heart, as well as Adam’s, if I didn’t.
THE EARLY MORNING LIGHT was still breaking across the horizon when Lluis let me out of the taxi at the terminal the next day. He was bright and cheerful as usual, but he obviously noticed that I was still engulfed in my early morning fog. As he pulled my suitcase from the trunk, he looked at me with concern. “Are you sure you have everything, Jonathan?” he said. I patted my pocket to check for my wallet and passport, and then I had a momentary rush of panic. The talismans. Was the pouch around my neck? I couldn’t feel it. I opened my jacket and patted my shirt front, and sure enough, there it was—a lumpy little bag lying next to my skin. How could I have missed it? I was surprised that while it was heavier than it ever had been, the leather string did not seem to be cutting into my neck anymore. I took the pouch out from under my shirt and shoved it in my pocket. I would have to stick it in one of the plastic tubs at security.
ONCE I HAD CHECKED IN and reached the departures lounge, I found a quiet corner and dialed Annisha. It would be late—midnight, I guessed—but I was longing to talk with her, to hear some news of Adam.
When Annisha answered the phone, I apologized about the hour, but she sounded relieved to hear from me. “I’m so glad you called,” she said. “There was a little incident at school today that I wanted to talk about with you. Apparently—”
Annisha stopped. I could hear a tiny voice in the background.
“Mommy,” Adam was saying, “I can’t sleep.”
“Oh dear,” I could hear Annisha reply. “Come here and sit with Mommy. Do you want to talk to Daddy about what’s keeping you up?”
When Adam got on the phone, I asked him how he was.
“Fine,” he said in a quiet voice.
“What’s new?” I tried again.
“Nothing,” he said. Then I heard Annisha in the background.
“You wanted to tell Daddy what happened at school today, remember?”
With a little coaxing on my part, and a little prompting on Annisha’s, Adam told me that one of the second-grade students had tripped him, pushed him down and taken his granola bar at lunch.
“What did you do?” I asked. Adam said he’d told his teacher, Ms. Vanderwees, who was on yard duty. Ms. Vanderwees sent the older boy to the office.
“Did that ever happen to you?” asked Adam. “When you were little, were other kids ever bullies?”
I told Adam all about Phil Stefak, who stole all my baseball cards and teased me about my glasses. I told him how Phil used to follow me home from school and shout strings of insults. I explained that I had been afraid to tell anyone, but finally when Phil actually grabbed my glasses from my face
and stepped on them, I told my teacher. I never really found out what happened. But after that, Phil only glared at me. He never touched me again. We talked for a long time before Annisha took the phone back from Adam. I looked at my watch.
“Sorry,” I said to Annisha. “You must both be exhausted.”
“That’s okay,” said Annisha. “He really needed to talk to you. But I should try to get him back to sleep now.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just one more thing—do you know what the school is doing about this kid?”
Annisha told Adam to head back to his room, and she would join him there in a minute. Then she told me that Ms. Vanderwees had phoned her after lunch. This wasn’t the first time the boy had bullied other students. The principal called his parents and asked them to come in for a talk. Ms. Vanderwees also said she would go out for yard duty as much as she could in the coming week so she could keep an eye on things. And she had talked to the whole class about being helpful bystanders when they saw another child being hurt in the school yard.
“She is taking it really seriously,” said Annisha. “I felt a lot better after I talked with her.”
Annisha and I chatted a little bit more about Adam and school and then I said goodnight.
THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE was quite crowded now. Most of the seats were full. Men and women with briefcases and laptops. A few parents with small children. And across from me, a teenage girl, earphones on her head, slumped in her seat, glaring at her mother who was offering her a piece of gum.
I thought of my surly teenage self. My parents’ patience with me. I felt a familiar ache beneath my ribs. I missed my father.
Sitting there in the Barcelona airport, thinking about my son being watched over by Ms. Vanderwees, remembering my dad and my own childhood, it struck me that my five-year-old self had got it right. My dad was a classroom genius, working in a truly noble profession. He had achieved the greatness Lluis aspired to. I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to come close to being the man he became.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHILE I WAS IN SPAIN, Julian had sent me some information about my next two destinations. The first one would land me back in North America, sending me to Cape Breton Island, on the east coast of Canada.
So, with a connection in London and one in Halifax, and more than sixteen hours after Lluis had left me at the airport in Barcelona, I landed in Sydney, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It was early evening. As Julian had promised, a rental car was waiting for me. I was relieved to find it had a GPS. I realized that I had no real idea about how to get from Sydney to St. Ann’s.
“It’ll take you about an hour,” said the fellow at the rental agency.
The safekeeper here was a woman named Mary McNeil. I sent her a message to tell her I was on my way.
As I pulled out of Sydney and hit the highway, I was reminded of what I had seen of the Yucatán Peninsula. Not the weather, or the houses, or the vegetation. No, here the air was crisp and cool; the firs and balsams and birches, thick and deep green. And water. There was water everywhere. The road twisted and turned—I could see from the GPS that my route was almost circuitous, but after every few miles of trees and woods, an expanse of water—some bay or lake—would flicker into view. What reminded me of the Yucatán was the sparseness of the population on Cape Breton. Like leaving Mérida, as soon as I exited Sydney I felt as if I had left people behind. I drove past vast stretches where hardly anyone lived. A house or two might pop up on the roadside only to slide into the rearview mirror, vanishing into a sea of trees. There was something, however, about traveling through this remote place to meet someone, even if that someone was a stranger, that was comforting. At the end of this journey, I thought, a person is waiting for me.
Mary McNeil and Angus Macdonald lived just off a scenic highway called the Cabot Trail, across the road from St. Ann’s Bay. In a message, Mary had said I would see a mailbox at the side of the road, and a post with a number, but I wouldn’t be able to see the house until I’d driven some distance down the lane. Luckily, the GPS did the work for me, and before long I was climbing up a gravel road, thick bush on either side, the pitch of a roof peeking above the trees ahead of me. She must have been looking out the window because as soon I pulled the car behind the two trucks at the side of the house, a tall woman with salt-and-pepper hair was on the front steps waving at me. That had to be Mary, I thought.
By the time I had stepped out of the car, Mary was by my side, as was a man who I assumed was her husband, Angus. He was slightly shorter than Mary, definitely rounder, and with a warm smile that matched her own. Neither grabbed me like Lluis had, but Angus patted me on the shoulder and Mary held my hand in both of hers as she introduced herself. They seemed happy to see me, but Mary’s eyes were pinched, as if with concern. “You must be so tired,” she said. “Angus, Angus,” she continued with some alarm, gesturing at the backseat of the car. In the next moment, Angus and I were wrestling over my baggage in what must have looked like a cartoon dust-up. I finally relented and let him carry everything into the house for me.
“I understand from Julian that you’ve been on quite a journey,” Mary said. “So we’ve got a little supper ready for you, and then you can disappear to bed if you’d like. I imagine it’s almost midnight Spain time.”
Mary and Angus led me into the living room. It was eclectically furnished, and there were a couple of enormous canvases on the wall. One looked like a vaguely aquatic scene—brilliant turquoise and green with dark shadows dancing across the color. The other was a pastiche of colored blocks that seemed to re arrange themselves before my eyes. Mary pointed me to a deep chair that faced a bank of windows. When I sat down, I immediately noticed the most spectacular thing in the room. A great wave of green swept before me and at its end a thin strip of dark blue—St. Ann’s Bay, and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Sit, sit,” said Angus. “I’ll just get things on the table and then call you both.”
Mary brought me a beer and then sat down next to me. She asked a few questions about my travels.
“It sounds as if you’ve been very busy. You may just want to rest tomorrow, but Angus and I were thinking of doing a few things with you.”
I was not surprised. Antoine in Paris was, so far, the only safekeeper who left me to my own devices. I had mixed feelings. After sitting on so many long flights, it was probably good to be busy. But I wasn’t sure if I felt like a lot of planned activity.
Mary said that if I was up to it, she was hoping to have a small dinner party in my honor the next night.
“Nothing fancy,” she assured me. “Just a few friends and relatives. And lobsters. It’s lobster season, so I thought you might enjoy that.”
I smiled and said that sounded delightful, but in my heart, I wasn’t so sure. Mary also said she was planning to spend the day getting ready for the party, while Angus drove me around the Cabot Trail—a loop of roadway that circled the mountains of the Cape Breton Highlands on the northern end of the island.
“It’s beautiful,” Mary said. “I’ve lived here almost my whole life, and I never tire of it.”
I said I hadn’t done that before and would love to see this part of the world. “I’ve heard it reminds people of the green hills of Ireland,” I said.
Mary nodded. “Yes, but somehow wilder. At least that’s how it strikes me.”
I had been traveling now for about two weeks, but in truth I had lost any real sense of time. I was tired and homesick, but my anxiety about work and all the urgency I felt about getting back to it were becoming strangely muted. I knew I should be worried, but it was as if I no longer had the energy. I might have insisted that I fly back out the next day, I might have tried to hurry the trip along, but I no longer wanted to do that. A long drive might be just the thing.
It was only a few minutes later when Angus’s voice came from the kitchen.
“Time to chow down,” he called out. Mary picked up my glass and led the way.
The kitchen was
huge, but not fancy. A pine harvest table stretched out on one side of the room—circled by eight high-back chairs. An old-fashioned sideboard was crammed with bits of antique china and bright, hand-blown glass bowls. There were some colorful prints on the walls around the table.
Angus placed a steaming pan of lasagna on a trivet in the center of the table. There was already a green salad there, and a basket of bread.
“I don’t know how hungry you are, Jonathan, so I’ll just let you help yourself,” he said.
I was not in the mood to talk about myself, and I knew the best way to deflect any demand for that was by asking the questions. Angus, I learned, was a dentist with a practice in Baddeck. He had grown up in Glace Bay, the son of a coal miner. In fact, all the men in his family had worked the mines, until his dad’s youngest brother headed out to Moncton in New Brunswick, where he eventually became an accountant. Angus had met Mary when the two of them were in university, but they hadn’t dated until they were in their thirties. Mary was an artist and worked in a studio up the hill, behind the house.
“It has the most beautiful light,” said Mary.
I asked them how they came to know Julian. Mary told me she had met him many, many years ago, when she was a young artist working in New York City.
“Julian bought a number of my pieces,” she said. “This was when he was a litigation lawyer and was spending money like a drunken sailor.” Mary laughed at that. “We lost touch for a while, and then after I’d moved back here, he found me.”
“He must have been a big fan of your work to track you here,” I said.
“No,” said Mary. “This was after he had returned from Sivana. He got in touch with me just to talk.”