Cities of Refuge (24 page)

He’d saved the
CV
, like most of the junk, by chance, and wouldn’t even know it was here. But she’d found a line to lead her, evidence to follow. Her training, intuition, even common sense told her so. Here was a detail within the larger mystery of his deep past. He liked to tell stories from his life, often of his travels, and often self-ridiculing, but always from the Montreal and Toronto years – at the cottage last winter he’d remembered a day trip he’d made with a boatload of historians up the Demerara into the Amazon, and when the motor died, their combined education left them unable to make fire and so they sat around in the dark all night imagining snakes in the trees. He never told stories from the time before he met Marian in ’74. Only from Marian had she learned that Harold’s mother had died when he was two, and his father had been itinerant, an alcoholic war veteran, quite likely a petty criminal. When she was old enough to be curious about his youth, and had asked him about it, he’d waved his hand and said, “I don’t live there. I never really did,” and that was understood to be the end of it.

It wasn’t just that he’d remade himself, or repudiated his origins. She’d always had the sense that part of his remaking involved forgetting his past. Now she had evidence that he’d actually erased a part of it, and a part that must have been at the very least vividly interesting to a budding historian of Latin America, and likely fraught with experience.

His life had two stories. Had she found the time and place where the first one ended?

She repacked and restacked the two boxes, took the
CV
, went into the house quietly through the back and found Marian still asleep, as she’d left her on last inspection. She sat at the kitchen table. It occurred to her to wonder whether she should bring Marian into the question of Harold’s time in Chile. Had she known? And if not, was there any point in altering her mother’s sense of the past, the early days with him, with the news that he’d been withholding something even then? Or maybe the missing line was, in fact, explicable, insignificant.

She would leave Marian’s past undisturbed. She took the
CV
to her room and tucked it into her computer case where she’d put the Colombian heartbreaker’s story.

When she returned to the kitchen she remembered her sweater and went back outside. The door to the garage was wide open. She’d closed it, she was certain. She’d even registered the click of the bolt as she’d pulled it to. The sense memory was strong, precise. For a second she just stood there, twenty feet from the building. Donald was at work, Marian asleep. Had Harold returned?

She approached the garage, looked inside. Something was wrong but she couldn’t say what, a feeling she’d had before but couldn’t place. There was no one inside, unless they were crouching behind boxes. The boxes stood in their orderly, nearly true lines. The yard tools hung on the wall as always. Her bike in its profile.

And then it came to her. The sweater was missing.

Once she was inside the house again, and past the confusion of the moment, she decided the missing sweater meant next to
nothing. In this neighbourhood, kids cut through backyards. Things sometimes went missing. Often bikes, it was true – kids steal bikes, not sweaters – but she must have interrupted the theft when she opened the sliding-glass door. It made a sound in its tracks, and it had taken a few extra seconds to do it quietly so as not to wake Marian, and in stepping through it she turned a little sideways and so wasn’t directly facing the garage. And of course a kid would be quick enough to take off running and be gone before she noticed. Or in fact he might have slipped inside to hide behind the boxes, or concealed himself between the garage and the fence and waited for her to come and go before making a break for it. He probably made his escape while she was back inside, deciding what it all meant.

It was a mark of her recovery that she hadn’t run to the phone and called her detective. Cosintino had said that in a small percentage of cases, attackers contacted their victims after the assault. Sometimes directly, often not. But even knowing this, she was going to keep her wits and not let a pilfered sweater get the best of her.

And because she was now practised at securing details, she let the doubts be doubts. As in why, having gotten close enough to take the sweater from the seat, the thief had not had time to actually take hold of the bike. She’d known in one glance that it hadn’t been touched. She always balanced it with the front wheel turned slightly to keep pressure off the handbrake, and set the pedals at two and eight o’clock so she could mount it and glide off in one motion. Everything had been in position.

And so, to be honest with herself, it wasn’t that she felt no fear but that she knew its causes and dimensions, and thereby had been able to isolate it. And this was a triumph. She felt triumphant. She
had not relapsed. And she would not, upon having her mind occupied with questions of Harold, let him come to be associated yet again by chance with the attack. She would spare him that.

Even in bed that night, having told no one about the
CV
or the missing sweater, she allowed into her thoughts whatever would come, and in not fighting the thoughts, disarmed all but two vivid images. The bike standing there with the pedals at two and eight. And her blue cotton sweater, like the flag of another’s triumph, hanging on a bedpost in some dim basement room.

I
n his office on campus, at just past eight in the morning, Harold gathered himself to read. It had been a bad night. He was just another cowardly insomniac, but things were worsening. The insomniacs he knew tended to be men like himself – he imagined women had a better take on life and death – men who’d remembered the terrors in their little-boy hearts. Around four in the morning he decided to address the problem directly and went online to find the latest research. There was nothing helpful, studies on pills and unlikely therapies, poems about the night bringing its “special way of being afraid,” Goya’s
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
. In time he managed to nod off on his couch until the sun woke him, not so oddly, from a dream of growing light, to a memory of a morning somewhere long ago when he’d wept with relief at the daybreak.

The disturbances were still with him, laid over his reading, but what was work for if not to dispel fear? He’d been asked to act as a peer reviewer of yet another article on monastic orders in the New World. He recognized the unattributed paper before
him as that of Myles DeGroot, who’d authored a book two years ago on
conversos
in Mexico and started a debate about the role of illiterate women as the unreliable repositories of Jewish faith. Myles produced these things despite a crushing teaching load at some sham university in the Carolinas. They’d gone out drinking one night in Cartagena with six or seven other conference-goers, and Myles had put back the rum until he was on all fours on the dance floor, singing into the veneer. There was a similar intemperance in his work.

When he looked up he caught sight, as if for the first time, of the hundreds of spines lining his shelves. He pictured his own two monographs shelved and forgotten in a few such offices around the Americas. The books, so many walled cities in the kingdom of academia. He didn’t contribute much to the kingdom anymore. His productivity had fallen off, likely for good. The sheer physical drain of hunting through archives in the tropics, fending off rats and mosquitoes, receiving daily a hantavirus mask from the librarian with elephantiasis – he always had the best archive stories at any dinner party – it took too much out of him now. And the centuries-old documents he’d learned to photograph were an ordeal to work through, dim script in a distant Spanish that he used to read effortlessly. He busied himself these days with smaller projects and a little devoted mentoring. Neither of which kept him quite busy enough to help him through the night.

He missed the old case of Marian’s books from the house. The shelves had offered a place to put his thoughts, even on the day she kicked him out for good. The first sign that something was wrong – he knew it as it was upon him – was the cello suite he heard on coming home, music that she listened
to, she’d once told him, only when she was “mad enough to stab someone.” He closed the door quietly. Everything was in its place but for her keys, which should have been in the hollow-backed ceramic cow on the table in the entryway, but when he went to the kitchen, there they sat on the counter where he’d had breakfast that morning. There had been nothing unusual at breakfast that he recalled except the sight of her opening the fridge door and going still for a few seconds as if transfixed by the leftovers, a moment he now thought it was odd that he’d noticed. He walked in, under the music, and surveyed the living area. Something had changed. The bookshelf, or rather, the books on it, the spines, to be precise. Over time, from his usual corner of the couch, he’d more or less memorized the colour and shape pattern. It was where he looked whenever she needed to accuse or hurt him. He’d find the brightest title – the black, yellow, and red
Barcelona
– and move left or right, up or down, trying to remember what he’d ever known about terracotta, the French Baroque period, eco-activism, all her past aborted passions after she’d quit law. Novels. Travel guides. Bad books expanded out of better magazine articles. A few primers on religions and ideas. Yes, something was different here – the categories were mostly in place, but the order was all wrong. For one,
Barcelona
was now on the far left side of the bottom shelf, next to a study of Voudon. When had this happened? Only hours earlier, he learned when she walked into the room a moment later, her face unmade, bone white. She’d been looking for his first book, to rip out the dedication page. She didn’t know what she’d intended to do with the page –
to Marian
. What she did know was that a woman named Marla had left a message for him.

He couldn’t now remember Marla distinctly. Celina had been almost two decades into the past, he and Marian and Kim were clipping along, and then one night at a faculty party, the host’s sister kept catching his eye and holding it, unambiguously. Her dark hair was cut very short, like a pelt, and she was tall and toothy. Before they spoke, before he learned that she was visiting from Rochester, as she did every second weekend, what surfaced in him, other than desire, was a profound self-awareness. He understood that he was false. His life, its stability, were false. He and Marian hadn’t made love in months, going on years. And he had been false to himself and so to everyone. Saying hello to Marla, knowing what it would bring, felt like the truest thing he’d ever done. By the time he realized his error, he was indulging in a disaster, and she had his number.

He’d been the first to arrive in the department this morning, and even now the secretaries were his only company, so upon hearing the bike being wheeled along the hallway, he assumed it must be a grad student who’d been stuck with a summer tutorial class.

When Kim rolled the bike into his office and stood before him, he experienced a moment of disjuncture, the feeling of her being here made sense but only in an earlier life. She said nothing for a moment.

“They have hitching posts out there. Hello.”

She was studying him.

Her gaze lifted and fixed on something over his head. Then it was back on him. He invited her to sit down but she ignored him. Her presence made him feel slightly ashamed of his space, his shelves of books, his mounted prints of sixteenth-century maps, the
New Yorker
cartoons taped to his door. She
saw through it all so easily; none of it made the least impression on her.

“I found some stuff in the garage. You never mentioned you were in Chile when you were young.”

He felt something far in the distance change its course and turn towards him.

“I was down there, yes.”

“During the coup.”

“Yes. As it turned out.”

“I noticed you took the travel scholarship off your
CV
.”

There she was, his talented daughter, finding what wasn’t even on the record.

“Well, there I outsmarted myself.” He composed his voice. “I put it on in applying for grad school but expunged it as I was going into the job market. I couldn’t guess the political makeup of any given hiring committee, so I played it safe. After I got hired I kept it off because, frankly, I was embarrassed by the omission. And if it suddenly showed up during my tenure review, for instance, it would look professionally suspect.”

“That explains the
CV
. But I wasn’t hiring you. Why not tell me?”

Where to look? The enduring simplicity of the chain and sprocket, spoke and rim.

“There likely hasn’t been occasion to, and I haven’t gone out of my way to bring it up. Maybe there is a bit of an old fracture there that I’d just rather not reinjure.”

“What kind of fracture?”

He needed to be careful not to speak too long. She would catch any misplay.

“Well. Nothing awful happened to me. But awfulness was
going around. There were moments of real fear, but I don’t dwell on them. They passed and I let them go. I guess to some extent this was a forced forgetting. I didn’t want to think about what it must have been like for others. I don’t blame myself for suppressing those thoughts long enough to save my mental health.” Maybe it was good she had asked him, he thought. He was finally voicing the matter something like he’d imagined he might someday. Maybe there would be better prospects for them, sure and fully shared attentions on the far side of this conversation. “I guess I’ve thought this through by now. You and I both distrust simple explanations, but there is something in all people that makes them want to find a root cause for their behaviour – what’s behind my failings as a husband and father and so on? – but for most of us, it’s not so simple. Do you understand?”

“You were worried for your mental health but you tell me nothing happened.”

What she couldn’t admit, he thought, was that a part of her wanted to learn that something terrible had befallen him in Chile, something that could account for his misjudgments and troubles over the years.