by Dennis Bock
I collected her at the airport on a Thursday in July, close to a year since I myself had come over, and the following morning, after an early night, Nate and the boys came by the house to pick us up.
“The señorita! This can’t be the señorita!” he said, walking up the front path, arms open wide. We were standing on the porch, cereal bowls in hand, blinking into the sunshine.
“I’ll bet you’re my uncle,” she said.
He took her in his arms and gave her a welcoming hug. Titus and Quinn lurked shyly behind.
She liked him immediately, of course. What wasn’t there to like? He was enthusiastic, confident, friendly, solicitous.
“This one’s riding shotgun today,” he said.
We had planned, perhaps too typically, a drive out to Niagara Falls that morning. It was just the first of many excursions I had organized for Ava. The academy was up and running well enough now that I could take some time off. I’d keep her busy and hopefully any interest she had in this country might deepen, some connection would form, a reason to return again and again would present itself. I had hoped a visit to this natural wonder might make her father’s home seem a northern paradise where such marvels abound. An adventure that would later be talked about in Madrid, it was our Taj Mahal. I’d first seen the falls myself when I was a boy and spent an hour lost and wandering through the park looking for my parents. When they found me, Nate punched me in the shoulder and told me not to get lost again. I remember very little other than that. Ava was still free of the wearying irony that dripped from the pores of the hypercool teenagers I dealt with at work every day now. I believed (or hoped, at least) that she might feature this in the mental brochure we keep of family destinations.
“Shotgun?” she said, unfamiliar with the idiom. “What’s that?”
“It means the Three Stooges ride in the back.”
He kept up the shtick—that she was some sort of prize, an object of reverence—for most of the day. At Niagara the kids tramped over the park green as a pack of three while Nate and I strolled behind, cameras slung over our shoulders. We got hot dogs and watched the cataracts from the vantage point of a picnic table set back against a stand of willow trees. It was an easy day. The falls were inarguably a sight, and they held the children’s attention for longer than I could have hoped. Later the five of us stood at the railing and watched mountains of water slide into the abyss. By virtue of age Ava seemed to take on the role of the leader, a part that was new to her, as far as I could tell, but seemed to please her. Though the boys had no idea what it meant to come from a country as little known to them as Spain, her sudden and mysterious appearance in their lives made them—Titus especially, I think—expand their sense of horizons. Until then neither had seemed much interested in the place I’d lived for the past twenty years. As we strolled up Main Street looking for the wax museum that afternoon, the three of them stopped and coalesced in front of a storefront window twenty paces ahead of me and Nate. The boys stood on either side of Ava staring at her finger, which was pressed against the glass. To me at that moment she looked disturbingly and marvelously like a young woman. Quinn turned to us and said, “It’s a map of the world. We’ve found where she lives! We’ve found Spain!”
I introduced Ava to Hilary a few days after the trip to Niagara Falls, and on the strength of an evening that went better than I’d anticipated, I took the chance that my daughter and girlfriend might actually enjoy each other’s company and floated the idea of a night or two up at Nate’s cottage.
“The one in the book you showed me?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
It was all blue water and pine trees ringing the wide circle of the bay when we pulled in that afternoon a week or so into the visit, and ten minutes later Ava was standing on the dock in her bathing suit and looking at the lake and nodding with approval. I came down and stood beside her. She’d never seen anything like these northern forests and lakes we’d passed on the drive up here.
“Look at that hill of trees on the other side,” she said. “It’s like a dragon’s back, how it narrows down to the neck and goes up again where his head is?”
“I see it,” I said.
“This is amazing.”
“So what do you say, you going in?”
“Well, yes!”
“Okay then.”
She jumped in, swam out to the diving platform, climbed up the ladder and called for me to come in, too. I went up to the cottage and got into my bathing suit and came back down a minute later and met her at the tire swing. The rope was tied to the biggest branch of a tree that leaned out over the water. She grabbed hold, and I got the swing going in wide swooping arcs, and after a few hesitations she launched herself and swam through the air, arms and legs going like mad, and slapped heavily against the surface. After three or four tries she got the hang of it. She’d come up with a joyful shriek and call out that she wanted to do it all over again.
When I saw Hilary standing on the dock a few minutes later, I thought maybe I had everything I wanted and needed. Ava was having the time of her life, and this smart woman who looked terrific in a bathing suit wasn’t threatened in the least that I was a dad first and foremost and the kid I loved meant more than anything else in the world to me. If Holly at that moment had paddled by, I wouldn’t have even noticed. Or that’s what I told myself, anyway. For the first time in too long I was staring at my future, and what I saw filled my heart like it hadn’t been in a long time.
I threw Hilary a smile from where I stood by the tree, pushing the rubber tire Ava had crawled into again, and she smiled back as she slipped into the water and swam toward the diving platform. I turned my attention back to my daughter and gave her another good push, and Hilary went past the platform out into the middle of the bay. She grew smaller and smaller until she looked no bigger than an otter and then disappeared around a bend into the wider lake.
We played on the tire for another twenty minutes at least. Then I went up to the cottage to put lunch together and brought it down on a tray. We sat on the dock and ate sandwiches and drank iced tea and enjoyed the views and the sunshine, and Hilary was gone a good hour before I started worrying that something had gone wrong.
I pulled the canoe out from the crawl space under the building and carried it down to the dock and set it in the water, then got two paddles and a life jacket and helped Ava into the canoe, and ten minutes later we were out in open water.
Ava had never been in a canoe before but seemed to like it. “You think she’s okay, right?” she said.
“Yes, I do. We’re just having a paddle here.”
By now I was thinking it was a mistake to come out this far with Ava. I should have just called some emergency number, if there was one. What if we tipped over or found Hilary struggling, or worse?
And that’s when Hilary’s head appeared again, a dot on the horizon. At least I thought it was Hilary, though it was too small for me to be sure. But as we got closer, I saw her lift an arm and wave, and we heard her voice traveling over the water.
“Ahoy there,” she called.
She was smiling and radiant when she came up alongside the canoe. “There’s an island just around there,” she said, pointing. “An island of wild blueberries!”
“Jesus,” I said.
“You weren’t worried!”
“Are you some sort of Olympic swimmer or something?” Ava said, smiling.
Hilary let go of the gunwale and swam under the canoe and appeared on the other side. “Nope. Just a happy fish.”
After a late supper we went down to the dock to watch for falling stars. The sky was clear and dazzling, and the loons were hidden out there on the black water and calling to one another in a lonesome, plaintive way that made me feel happy and connected to the night. The three of us lay out on the warm boards, waiting for something in the sky to move. One came almost right away, but then for a long time the only thing we saw up there was the clumsy track of a satellite cutting the
dark at its snail’s pace. We didn’t talk for a long while and just lay there peacefully, the anxiety of that scare out on the water that afternoon long gone.
“Silence,” I said.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Hilary said.
“It is. That’s the answer, right?” I said. “It’s silence.”
At the Falls, leaning against the handrail watching the water disappear over the gorge, Ava had dangled one of her brainteasers under my nose. What’s broken every time it’s spoken?
Sprawled out on the dock, the three of us still looking skyward, I felt Ava’s arm tuck into mine. “Muy bien, Papá,” she said quietly, still watching the stars.
Then, again, the silence.
• • •
Next day I went down to the water with a fishing rod and took a few casts into the lily pads. Ava was already down there reading cross-legged on the dock. The water was dead still, and bands of mist snaked over the surface and rolled upward in small vanishing leaps. The light was new and fresh, and the heat of the day hadn’t yet gathered.
“There’s no fish in here,” I said, flipping the rod tip forward.
She turned a page.
I took a few more casts watching the lake. “But it sure looks nice,” I said.
This went on a little longer, then Ava folded the book over a finger and looked at me with an annoyed smile.
“Good book?” I said.
“You know you two don’t have to sleep in different rooms just because I’m here.”
I had no idea whether she’d been brooding about this all morning or the thought had only just then jumped into her head.
“We’re taking things slow,” I said.
“I’m almost thirteen, Dad. I know what grown-ups do when they’re alone together.”
“You do, do you?”
There was a pause.
“I mean other than argue,” she said.
“Your mother and I barely ever argued,” I said.
“Yeah, right. Maybe not with your voices,” she said, opening her book again.
Near the end, the freeze-out between me and Isabel was as loud as any shouting match. Ava knew this better than anyone, of course. I remember being conscious that things were unraveling quickly, but at the same time not quite believing it. Out of optimism or perhaps ignorance, I held on to the idea that things would right themselves between us—that just ahead on the horizon was some natural watershed we were approaching and that the best plan was to keep a steady course and ride forward until the landscape forced the issue. I didn’t know what role I’d have in that happening other than offering dogged perseverance and patience. But patience in a man’s world is little more in a woman’s than circumvention and avoidance.
Ava turned another page.
“Maybe we can take the canoe out later,” I said. “Or go for a hike. We could follow the road around the lake. Check out that dragon on the other side.”
“Don’t treat me like a child, okay?” she said.
“You said that yourself, how it looked like a dragon over there.”
She fixed me with an annoyed and pitying stare. “Everything looks like whatever you want it to look like if you’re far enough away. That’s why you’re here.”
I couldn’t argue the point. Somehow she’d gotten into my head. “But I’m coming back,” I said.
“No, you’re not. You’re just running away. You and Mom. You’re both stupid selfish idiots with your new Pablos and Hilarys.”
She didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the day. She could barely even look at me. She just sat in the shade under a tree and read her novel and then, after a tense supper, shut herself in her bedroom. I’d told Hilary what was going on, and after the lights in Ava’s room finally went dark around eleven, we stood out on the deck and shared a cigarette. I felt like all the life had been kicked out of me. I’d never heard that kind of anger from my daughter before and kept hearing it in my head, over and over. Stupid selfish idiots. And she was right. You can’t get mad at your kid for calling it like it is.
“You’re thinking about going back, aren’t you?” Hilary said, handing me the cigarette.
“I always am. How could I not?”
“Looks like it’s decision time.”
“It’s always decision time when you have kids,” I said.
“It’ll be all right,” she said.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent Ava’s whole life just waiting for her to grow up. And now she’s half out the door, and I can’t do anything about it. That’s no way to spend your life, is it? Just waiting for your kid to grow up?”
The night air was cool, and the lights from the cottage windows shimmered over the grass and the silvery fingers of the beech trees. The lake was lost in darkness, and the night was deep and still, and all I wanted to do was swim out into the middle and let myself sink to the bottom.
“No, it’s not,” Hilary said, “though this isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s mine, either. You can probably see that by now.”
“You shouldn’t beat yourself up.”
“I don’t know a lot of men who gave it much thought before it happened. Having kids. And then you’re in the middle of it, and you’re dealing with it, people changing all around you.”
Voices came through the dark from the opposite shore, joyful and relaxed, people celebrating a fine night up north. I couldn’t make out the words, but they were the sounds of summer by the water, notes of celebration and renewal.
“I suppose it serves me right,” Hilary said.
“What’s that?”
“Your heart’s going where your daughter is. Every time. You’d be an asshole if it didn’t, right?”
“I’m a dad before anything. At least I know that much. But I thought maybe it would be easier. Coming over here, I mean. I thought maybe everything would be easier.”
“I think that’s why I’m starting to like you,” she said, taking the cigarette from between my fingers. She took a puff, then flicked it over the railing. “I’m not keeping you here. As long as you know that.”
We got ready for bed after that. While Hilary used the washroom, I stayed in the kitchen and watched a moth bouncing off the ceiling light.
“You do know this separate-room thing is silly, right?” she said when she was done. Her mouth tasted like toothpaste.
“I know it is,” I said.
“But I guess it’s kind of sweet, too.”
I switched off the kitchen light and climbed miserably into my cold bed at the end of the hall, my daughter’s words still ringing in my ears. I listened to the lake and the voices and the bounce of a springboard echoing through the night and thought about the days when I used to push Ava in a stroller down into the heart of the Retiro Park, watching the fortune-tellers reading palms and flipping tarot cards. I never stopped to hear my fortune but always wondered what lay ahead for us, where we’d be in ten or twenty years and what the little kid in the stroller I was pushing was going to end up being like. It was different every time I thought about it, but I never imagined her giving up on her parents like she had this day at the lake.
Eleven
I looked up and saw Holly talking to the receptionist at the front desk. It was Monday in late August now, and I was on the phone organizing some meetings in Dublin and Madrid for the following Friday and Saturday. I told the person on the other end of the line that I’d call back and went out to meet her.
“You’re busy,” she said. “I guess I’m barging in.”
“No, no,” I said, “this is great.”
I led her to my office and closed the door behind us. She took a seat in the chair across from my desk, her back to the window looking out over College Street.
“What’s up? This is a nice surprise.”
“I was in town. I just dropped Riley off at a friend’s house. She’s going to a concert tonight. I thought I’d say hello.”
“Good. I’
m glad you did.”
We hadn’t spoken since the barbecue. Now she made a show of turning her head and checking out the office. “It looks great. A lot of work, I’m sure, but it has a good feel.”
“I was having my doubts there for a while that we’d actually see the day it was done.”
“You’ve got something to be proud of.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And your daughter? Ava, right? You said she was coming?”
“Been and gone. A few rough patches. But we managed. Just working out the new situation. It’s tough for kids.”
“For parents, too, right?” she said.
I wondered if she was here to tell me that she and her husband were splitting, that he’d picked up on something between us and got her talking about the past he never knew she had. I didn’t know what to think. But it seemed she had something to tell me.
“Do you ever think about those days back in Montreal?” she said.
“It was a pretty intense time. Sure, I do. A lot, actually.”
“Sometimes I can get pretty nostalgic,” she said.
“When I saw you last fall—I don’t know how to say it. It really took me back. It was great. I felt great. Confused but great. It was nice to be reminded that we had that in our lives.”
“It’s nice to hear you say that,” she said.
“It was pretty tough when I first got over here. What do you do when you’re uprooted, right? You look for something to hold on to. And there you were.”