by Dennis Bock
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 betw
een 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.
They led us around to the front of the house and up to the wraparound porch, which had heavy colonial pillars and a grey plank floor and overlooked the quiet tree-lined street. Glenn went inside to refresh the drinks, and when we settled in he told me and Nate what had drawn them here in the first place, back in the midnineties. Things hadn’t changed that much since. It was still on the small side and charming; even now, he said, the Anglican church rang its bells every Sunday morning, the farmers’ market kept its regular weekend hours, and along the banks of the modest river cutting through town you could still see kids eating an ice cream or paddling a canoe on a summer’s day.
“And you, Charlie?” he said. “I guess you’re over the culture shock by now?” He took a sip of his drink and set it on the table between us.
“I’ve been too busy to notice,” I said, exaggerating only slightly. “There’ve been some changes, anyway. I was just a kid when I left.”
“I’ll bet. Twenty years in Madrid’s a long time. Holly tells me you’ve got a daughter.”
“More Spanish than the siesta itself.”
“You must miss her,” he said.
“In fact, she’s coming over next month.”
“Excellent.”
“It’s taken some planning,” I said.
“Some arm-twisting, more like it,” Nate said.
“Niagara Falls, the CN Tower. The whole bit. I’m giving her the whirlwind tour. Pulling out all the stops.”
“And your ex-wife is over there?” Glenn said.
“That’s right,” I said.
He nodded serenely.
“There’s so many things you can do when she comes over,” Holly said, leaning forward in her chair now, hands on her knees. “Maybe we could get the kids together.”
“That might be a nice idea,” I said.
“He’s booked some time at the cottage,” Nate said.
“You’ve got a cottage?” Glenn said.
Nate named the lake, which Glenn, raising his glass again, said was great for bass and muskie. “Cottage living,” he said. “That’s a real vacation, if you ask me.”
“She’s never been here, right?” Holly said.
“First time.”
“Oh, she’ll love it here,” she said.
“It’s like a first love,” Glenn said, looking at me and Holly, “seeing a new country. The impression lasts forever, right? She’ll have a great time.”
It was a simple observation about first love, but I understood by the way he smiled and looked at us both, and by the slight shudder that seemed to pass through Holly, that Glenn had never heard of Miles Esler.
“No pressure there,” I said. “But let’s hope it’s a positive inauguration.”
So she’d never told her husband about the love of her life. As the conversation regained its footing from that strange stumble, I wondered how such a thing was possible. How do you live with someone all those years and keep something like that separate and hidden like some ugly secret? Glenn had no idea about a time when his wife knew with absolute certainty the boundless freedom of being in love for the first time. Or had I misread him? On that afternoon I didn’t believe I had. Was this a memory she needed to protect from retelling in order to keep it intact and pure? I could think of no other reason. And then, as I rolled my glass between my palms, I noticed that Nate was no longer sitting with us.
I excused myself and found the three boys glued to the Xbox upstairs in the sunroom. “You guys seen Nate?”
When they shrugged, I continued down the hall and found him propped up against Riley’s door frame in the same pose my old roommate from Montreal used to hold when he talked about taking me out to get laid.
“Private party?”
“Speak of the devil,” he said, turning.
“We’re missing you downstairs.”
Riley was sitting on the floor in her bedroom, leaning back on her hands. Her tongue was pressed gently up against her teeth, her mouth open slightly, as if she had a cold and couldn’t breathe through her nose. Her jeans were sliced horizontally, purposely and expensively, down the long length of her thighs.
“You dated my mom in university. And you actually lived together in Europe? I think that’s so cool.”
“A hundred years ago,” I said.
“I’ve never met one of my mom’s old boyfriends before.”
“I don’t think there’s that many of us out there.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “No kidding!”
“Riley’s practically got a gymnastics scholarship wrapped up,” Nate said, and he almost looked proud. “I was telling her about Syracuse. They’ve got a lot of good sports program
s on offer.”
“The only problem being that it’s in Syracuse,” I said.
“It’s a good town,” Nate said, turning back to her. “Don’t you worry about that. I had an awesome time down there. You’d love it. Friendly people, nice campus.”
“Cool,” she said. Her face was as bright as a cherry. “You two don’t look much like brothers.”
“I doubt it myself on occasion,” I said, putting my hand on Nate’s shoulder. “Walk with me,” I told him.
I was annoyed that he’d slipped away to flirt with Riley—whether he knew it or not, that’s exactly what he was doing. But it didn’t occur to me that it could go any further than that. I just let it slide.
Ten minutes after we stepped back onto the front porch, Glenn fired up the barbecue, and soon the steaks and hamburgers and salads were brought out to the side yard. The patio table was set, and the kids came down, and as the day rolled into a long gentle evening and the light softened into a warm shimmering glow over that unsuspecting town, we all dug in and ate and toasted old and new friends alike.
Ten
The notion that Ava had come over to have a look at my new life as much as to actually spend time with me was never far from my mind once she arrived. She wanted to know what had changed in my circumstances, and I was eager to show her that very little had, at least where it concerned her. On the surface my life here would seem as strange to her as it felt temporary to me. More than once I explained that Toronto was only a way station, and I had no intention of staying longer than necessary to get the academy off the ground. I’d long since focused my ambitions in five-year intervals and mapped out with relative certainty the shape of the modest empire I aspired to build. One day I’d have schools in Japan and South Korea. But I couldn’t say I had the same sense of control and determination about my personal life. Looking ahead by increments of thirty days was difficult enough. Five years was simply inconceivable. But I knew there was no future for me in a city without my daughter.