by Dennis Bock
Not sure what he was talking about, I said, “You can explain that one if you like.”
“The trial.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be called,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll be called.”
“I doubt your dad wants to hear what I have to say on the matter of character.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it if you are,” he said.
“I guess I wouldn’t.”
“Just remember what he did,” he said, then turned and looked at his little brother asleep in the backseat. “Quinn still thinks it was just a fight. And Kaj’s just gone off on some trip or something.”
The Florida landscape rolled by, billboards and windblown plastic bags hanging like laundry in the branches of the swamp chestnuts along the highway.
Looking over at Titus, I saw that he was now the very picture of his father. The strong chin and high, handsome cheekbones. His long hair hung partly over his eyes. I’d noticed in the past few weeks that his voice had started to crack.
“You’re stronger than your dad,” I told him. “I know what you’re thinking.”
He was staring out the window. He didn’t look at me or say anything.
“You’re not going to be like him, Titus.”
He flicked the hair out of his eyes with a sharp turn of his head. “You sound pretty sure of that,” he said.
“I know it better than I know anything.”
He believed he’d been given a look into his future, or part of it, and what he saw disturbed him.
But my brother’s character was not his son’s fate. The thoughtfulness and the silences that fell over Titus were the opposite of the ravenous hunger for acceptance I’d seen lurch to life in Nate after our parents died. Through to the end of our vacation Titus carried that worry on his face and in his heart. Out of the corner of my eye I’d catch him staring off at nothing or standing there with his hands in his front pockets looking down at his shoes. I knew what he was doing. He was struggling with it, as we all were. But he was more alive to the possibility of his own failure than anyone I’d ever met. Still some part of him was aware of this—maybe something as basic as a conscience—and so he would fight that much harder to find the good in the world, I was convinced. I tried to help him see this in himself.
Along with their mother, the boys had been in counseling for a month or so now, trying to put their lives back together. I could tell it was uncomfortable living in Kaj’s house, for all the obvious reasons, but they would not be staying long in any case. Once the house in Riverdale sold, Monica planned to buy a new one in the west end, as far from either of those neighborhoods as you could get without leaving the city.
I’d biked down a few times and seen that the Realtor’s sign was up now, the black-and-red placard staked in the grass and swinging poignantly in the autumn wind, a sad reminder of how dreams can go so far off the rails.
Around this time Hilary came to the house to celebrate over a bottle of wine. She’d sent off her collection of essays to a university press down in the States that day, to be admired or ignored, she didn’t yet know. But she was feeling good that the project was finally off her desk. We were only friends now. I’d told her about my plans to return to Madrid and that Isabel and I might give it another shot. This news didn’t surprise her. I suspect she believed something in me had been shaken to the core in the aftermath of the murder and that I needed to mend fences with those closest to me.
After supper we turned on the news and heard that a typhoon had torn through the Philippines at Luzon. I didn’t make the connection at first, but this was where she’d worked with that NGO years before. Three villages had disappeared. The images were incredible—corrugated-iron roofs and crumbled shacks, toothpick trees, toy cars, a whole landscape swept under a world of mud. She immediately scoured the Internet for details, and over the next few days she got in touch with some old associates in Manila and hatched a plan to go back again to help. Two weeks later, as I drove her out to the airport, I said how happy I was for her. She’d been spinning her wheels here, anyway, and now she was going where she needed to be. “Sometimes good things come out of the worst sort of disaster,” I said. “Maybe that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true.”
“It’s been a good year,” she said.
I nodded, still driving.
“I don’t know if you ever heard me say that.”
“It’s been a good year for me, too,” I said.
That wasn’t exactly true, not in any comprehensive sense, but it was where Hilary was concerned. Miles and Holly had both slipped back into the past, where they belonged, and now Hilary was moving off to a life that she hadn’t invited me into and that held no interest for me.
Did Holly ever know that her daughter had given herself to my brother just days before he committed that second, greater crime? I never knew. But as she might have turned the earth in her garden that fall, she may well have wondered if this recent family history didn’t connect back to the night the three of us were together for the last time in Montreal. Did she wonder about the man Miles would’ve become, the life he would’ve led? Where would the three of us be had the course of events taken a less dramatic turn? And in a moment of whimsy, I imagined an annual get-together on some sun-scorched Greek island where we ate and drank like in the old days and did our level best to invoke better times. But she was gone, a ghost in my life now, swept away like those villages in the far-off Philippines, and all I could do was hope and remember her as the girl she used to be.
That afternoon, after dropping Hilary at the airport, I detoured to a cemetery I hadn’t visited in more than twenty years. It was the tail end of a cold sunny day, and I’d been pondering the question Isabel had posed that night she held the ice against my face three months earlier. What should I have done in my time here that I’d failed to do? It was almost dark when I found the headstone, and as I stood by Miles’s grave I told him something about the man I’d become, my successes and failures, about the woman I’d married and had a daughter with and that I hoped he was at peace and somehow, maybe looking down on us now, knew that I had not betrayed him.
• • •
It was a long hard fall and early winter. I had the academy to keep me busy, and once or twice a week I called Madrid and spoke with Ava and Isabel, counting down the days to my departure. I visited Nate regularly, though we had little to say to each other. I was all he had left. The trial date had finally been set, and the three lawyers he had working for him had decided that I should be called as a character witness. I was to tell the world, in my own words, what sort of a man my brother was.
He put his hand on the Plexiglas and said, “You know me better than anyone else does.”
I met his hand with mine, fingers and palms separated by the cold plastic, and said I would do what I could, though the truth was I didn’t feel I knew him at all anymore.
“That’s all I can ask,” he said.
I flew to Spain the next day. I tried to sleep on the plane but couldn’t. I watched two movies, read some magazines, and finally the turbulent coastline of Portugal appeared outside my window. Forty-five minutes later, when we banked over Madrid, I was able to identify the Plaza Mayor, the Retiro Park, even Atocha Street, or what I thought was Atocha Street, where Isabel and I spent time in the back of a police car before going home together.
Once I cleared customs and immigration, I took a cab to the Reina Victoria, thinking it best, at least for now, to give Isabel and myself time to adjust to the new possibilities that had arisen between us.
The cleaning lady was still working on the room I usually stayed in, so I sipped coffee in the bar downstairs until a bellhop walked over and told me my room was ready. I got cleaned up, unpacked and ate a proper breakfast, then went into work.
It was the last day before the Christmas break, and the academy was buzzing. Rosa welcomed me back as she always did, with two pecks on the cheek. I told her she smelled like a pine forest.
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sp; She smiled and pointed at the Christmas tree she’d set up in the corner. “Always working,” she said.
I walked through the academy wishing my students and teachers a happy holiday. The stack of bonus checks was waiting for me on my desk. I put on a silly white beard Rosa had purchased for the occasion and handed out the envelopes.
At the end of the day I crossed back over the street and looked in the window of the café. It was packed with students and starry-eyed lovers and Christmas shoppers stopping in to warm themselves over a hot drink. I watched an old man and a little girl rolling a blue marble back and forth between cups of steaming chocolate. They were sitting at the table closest to the window, and at the next table over were two tired-looking backpackers conferring over a copy of The Rough Guide to Spain. Then Ava called me on my cell and said, “I can’t wait to see you. We’re already here.”
“I’m on my way. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“I’ve got the best one ever. You’ll never get this one. Not in a million years.”
“I’m shaking in my boots,” I said.
“It’s worse than tough. This one’ll twist your brain into a pretzel. Worse than a pretzel.”
“Let’s have it,” I said.
“Now?”
“I’ll need a head start, right?”
“But you’ve got to promise me something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“There’s no giving up this time. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said.
And then she told me her latest brainteaser. Long and complicated, it worked on a number of levels. She made me repeat it back to her to make sure I had it straight.
“All right,” she said. “Have fun with that one.”
After we hung up I looked into the café a short while longer and started pondering my daughter’s new riddle. The backpackers were hoisting their heavy bags, getting set to move on, but the old man was still sitting there with the girl. It looked like they were in no hurry to leave, rolling that marble back and forth over the white tabletop and sipping at their chocolate.
I started walking toward the restaurant where my wife and daughter were waiting, my jacket open in the cold winter air. All the cafés and sidewalks were busy with people loaded down with bags of Christmas gifts. It was a wonderful time of the year to find yourself in a city like Madrid. The storefront windows flooded the street with a warm glow. The taverns and restaurants were filling up. The smell of chestnuts and roasting chicken carried on the air. Briefcase in hand, I admired the lights and the beauty in the faces of the people I passed while trying to solve my daughter’s riddle. But the longer I thought about it, the more confusing it became. Every time I believed I was closing in on the answer, a fresh and richer likelihood presented itself to me, and then this one, too, would soon find itself stripped away by an even newer and more exciting probability. And finally, twenty blocks later, pushing through the door of our old favorite restaurant, I saw my daughter sitting beside her mother, and the smile that grew on Ava’s face when our eyes met made it clear to me that the possibilities were practically endless.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, as well as the kind folks at the Little Inn of Bayfield, Ontario.
A Note About the Author
Dennis Bock was awarded the Canada-Japan Literary Award in 2002 for The Ash Garden. He lives in Toronto.
Other titles available by Dennis Bock in eBook format
The Ash Garden • 978-0-375-41427-5
The Communist’s Daughter • 978-0-307-26738-2
Visit: www.dennisbock.com
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY DENNIS BOCK
Olympia
The Ash Garden
The Communist’s Daughter