Garcia's Heart (36 page)

With Celia watching the two of them and smiling herself, he felt something stir, the furnace of Pavlovian response being stoked within him. He wanted to protect the boy. He wanted Celia. The boy needed a father.
He
could be the boy's father. They could all be together.
Jesus.
The blithe intensity of the feeling shocked him, it must be innate, buried deep and waiting to be trip-wired by the appropriate child-and-female stimuli. Maybe if Roberto were here, he'd feel less of the default alpha male, but Roberto was nowhere in sight and Patrick knew if he had plumage, it would be preened and fully fanned. He was thankful he had enough functioning frontal lobe to prevent him from dropping to one knee for a quick Dutch proposal or saying something even more ridiculous. Then, as quickly as it came, the sentiment passed, as if acknowledging that any resolution made on a beach carried
the same weight as a Las Vegas wedding vow or a campaign promise. This was not his child, he remembered; and, well, Celia didn't like him.

They rolled the ball back and forth until Paul grabbed it and tomahawked it off the sand and down the tarmac flats of Scheveningen beach. Nina got up to chase after the ball and threw it back. The recent sweep of paternal plumage aside, Patrick was never one for children. The sole benefit of being so much younger than his sisters was being almost the same age as his nieces and nephews and therefore spared the indignities of uncledom. No sitcom attempts at babysitting, no inevitable uncle categorization as creepy rogue or charmless loser. It occurred to him that as an adult, outside the setting of a mandatory medical-school rotation in Pediatrics, he'd never actually seen a child this close up. They were fascinating. A frontal lobe still in the process of developing, not yet capable of reining in behaviour. A little Gage who would outgrow his tantrums.

Suddenly Patrick felt drained, and he sat down. It took seconds for him to remember that sitting was simply not a natural posture at the beach and he stretched out on the edge of the blanket. The sand was neither cool nor warm in the late morning sunshine. But the sun was warm on his face, and soon random, unclaimed images carouselled by him as he began to doze. A flash of Birgita's face. His old office at the university. His mother sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword. The antidepressant he had been taking was lighter fluid to the dreams, breathing a vivid heat into them. A park in the middle of summer, municipal park green, serotonin intense. Next, the face of Hernan, draining of colour, looking at him with all the hopeless expectation of a teacher who has
placed too much importance on a certain lesson being learned. Hernan was in the tribunal's booth, but Patrick was much closer than his usual seat in the gallery, next to him really, sensing something wrong. The tube of a stethoscope connected them. From that to a tunnel he remembered from Schiphol Airport, a moving sidewalk and fluorescent lights so dim it seemed the overcast sky had moved indoors to provide a more uniform distribution of weather woe. Through it all he felt the warmth, the animal comfort of warmth like a blanket pulled up over his shoulders. He shuddered awake to the sound of Nina talking. A hand to her head, cradling a phone. It used to be so comforting to listen to people talking to themselves, you knew they were crazy. Nina said goodbye in a singsong to someone half a world away. A different voice entirely. No produce being rerouted. Celia and Paul had disappeared from the blanket and were halfway to the water's edge, the child plough-horse-pulling her there.

“You clear things up with your sister?”

“Yeah, we're fine.”

“So,” Patrick said sitting up and trying not to make old man grunting noises, “you're running the store. I'm impressed.”

“If I can turn it around, it'll be a miracle.”

“I went in a while back, when I was in town. I liked the expansion.”

“That was Roberto's decision, not mine. It put us in a difficult position; too big to be the friendly corner dep, still too small to have a hope of competing with the chains.”

“It looked prosperous enough.”

Nina smiled. “It's getting there. There was a drop in business after all this with my dad came out in the news. But the neighbourhood is doing well, that's been the most important factor.”
She flipped open her phone again, checked a text message, grinned, and thumbed in a response. She closed the little clamshell and put it in her pocket.

“Celia told me that you still think Hernan is innocent,” Patrick announced.

“She's projecting.”
Projecting.
The last time he'd spoken to Nina alone she wore a retainer and had posters of non-threatening boy bands on her bedroom wall.

“You think?”

“You saw how she reacted just now,” Nina said. “She gives this impression of being so together, but at the core, she has so much invested in him, in getting him out.” Patrick squinted at her through his better eye. She was a shadow with the late morning sun behind her, haloing her. He caught a glimpse of the sun and turned away, looking into the blue sky over the pier, and the sun persisted in flashbulb footsteps across the horizon. “As for me, guilty or not, you fight. That's what upsets me most, the silence stuff. We all come over here to support him, to fight for him, and he won't even speak to
us
.”

“I asked di Costini what he thought–”

“Don't mention that loser to me. Sometimes I think he's happy Dad's not speaking.”

“He's trying his best.”

Nina let out a sarcastic snort.

“If it weren't for Caesar Oliveira, my father would be convicted already.”

“You're not worried about Oliveira?”

“Why should I be worried?”

“Roberto thinks that–”

“A person could get rich betting against my brother.”

“I don't know this Oliveira, but I look at the Democratic Voice, I look at what they do, and it worries me.”

Nina listened but made no effort to conceal her displeasure at what he was saying. He tried to remember what he'd read about the group, the names of former congressmen who worked for it, but the details were escaping him. “They supported using Guantanamo for interrogations, and I read they were behind those protests in Venezuela.”

“I didn't know you were political, Mopito,” she said, laughing, and it was because he never considered himself political, always thought of himself as somehow above politics, that the words felt like an insult.

“Your mother wouldn't have wanted them involved.”

“Well, my mother is dead. And you know what?” Nina continued, as though she didn't want to give him the time to apologize. “I'd be worried about their motives if we had our choice of supporters, but we don't. They're it. The Canadian government washed its hands of us and you can imagine the Honduran community. The Democratic Voice found those witnesses, not di Costini. The Democratic Voice saved our store from bankruptcy and paid our way here and they're the only ones who are trying to figure out where Dad will be able to go once this is over.”

“Do you mean if he's acquitted?”

“Well, that too, but also if he's convicted. They'll have to find a country that'll accept him. If not, he stays in Holland. That's what Oliveira said.”

“Did you meet with him too, yesterday?”

Nina paused. She was no stranger to making blunt appraisals of value, and Patrick felt her weighing the question.

“No.”

Fifty yards away, Celia and Paul had become indistinct in the glare off the sand.

“For a long time I felt guilty about not calling.”

“What?”

“I didn't call when he was accused of all this. I wrote him a letter after Marta died, but I didn't, you know, give him my support. I feel like I betrayed him.”

“There wasn't much you could have said.”

“How did he deal with it?”

“Dad? He dealt with it pretty much as you'd expect. He got a lawyer. I was the only one living at home with them and nobody ever said much about it. Isn't that weird? I mean, how sick is that? Everyone is so up in arms about him not talking, but he never talked, never explained himself to any of us. But Mum waited for his explanation. She pleaded with him for months. But he still didn't say anything. And after that, things got worse, Mum got depressed and I was freaking out, but when Celia came back from Toronto it was better, it was almost normal, and it was like we all concentrated on Mum getting better. She just wanted to stay in her room, she wanted nothing except her books. For a while it was like we could avoid even thinking about it. We just kept going. Then, one day, after another article in the newspaper, he sat Celia and me down and told us that the situation in Honduras was complicated but that the story would eventually come out. He asked us to be patient, he told us that we'd all get through this. I remember that word.
Patient.
Even back then I thought, oh boy, this isn't going to turn out well. That was a month before Mum died.”

“And Celia stayed.”

Nina nodded. “I'm probably to blame for that. My father wasn't saying much, as usual, and Roberto was angry after
Mum died and they started fighting. I needed Celia. It was either I go to Toronto or she stay in Montreal. And if I went, the store would close.”

“Is Celia happy?”

Nina looked off in the direction of her sister, shoes off and toeing the liquid edge of the North Sea.

“Dad's in jail. We're in Holland. It's November. Not the recipe for happiness.”

“But before all this. Has she been with Paul's father for a long time?”

“She told me not to talk about that with you.”

He was pleasantly appalled that Celia had even thought about it.

“Get out.”

“No, really. She called you insidious.”

“Tell me about Paul's father,” Patrick urged, but Nina was a sphinx. “What's everyone so paranoid about? I see you people every ten years. I live in another country. It's natural to want to know what you people are up to.”

Nina looked at him. “You didn't ask who I was seeing. Or Roberto.”

“I need to take a bath after what you told me about Roberto. And I saw you sending text-messages. But I was being discreet, you know, you're still in your formative years,” he teased.

“Pfft. Like you care,” she said and smiled. “She was with Steven for three years.”

Any pleasure he felt with the past tense soured with mention of the name.
Steven.
An open audition for the part of Steven was called in Patrick's mind. The truth was he had ego enough to allow only permutations of himself, allowing for minor improvements in looks or disposition. Steven, the
sensitive boy, pallid and occasionally morose, less a personality than a series of affectations. Well, maybe that was too close. Stevo, then, the polar opposite: purveyor of good moods and possessor of a physique straight from the rugby scrum. Untroubled by doubts or deep thought and no match for her. Then came the brooding visionary Stefan, disdainful of any art form less painful than German expressionist cinema, lowering himself to associate with a commercial artist. Patrick hated them all.

“I'm going for a walk,” Patrick said, and Nina just nodded, sunflowering to catch the warmth.

He tried to get up from his seated position in one motion but felt dizzy and so he opted for the staged ascent, leaning to one side and using an arm as a support to get him to a steadier tripod stance and then to his feet. He brushed the sand off and looked around. Behind them, a grand, old-fashioned hotel with a complicated-looking red-tile roof occupied most of the prime real estate on the other side of the Strandweg.

It wasn't far to Der Pier. A small staircase climb from the Strandweg. From the top, it was easier to appreciate the height of the bluffs that backed the beach and the vast expanse of sand to the west. Behind him, he found the hotel he'd seen in the guidebook, the Kurhaus. In the November sunshine it looked like an abandoned temple, an Angkor Wat of beach life. He continued walking on the pier, the North Sea visible below, from this angle a grey slate floor, freshly washed and scattering sudsy foam.

He was surprised by how painful it still was to think about Celia with someone else. He knew this was all nothing more than the conceit of the former boyfriend, that it was only a short dip in emotional maturity to the degenerative sphere of
plaintively themed tattoos or drunken, wordless telephone calls in the middle of the night. And while he never expected Celia to resign herself to spinsterhood or wander through the rest of her life mumbling like a shattered Ophelia, the thought of her getting over him, being happy with someone else, seemed to be the most complete form of vengeance. He had no right. She'd say that to him if they were alone. He'd given up any right to even think about her in that way ten years ago.

It would have been easier on him if his relationship with Celia had ended differently. He would have preferred a seismic argument or a parting that followed on the heels of a long-simmering philosophical disagreement. That way, he could have kept believing they were incompatible and the end was coming sooner or later. But they never fought. They were content. Celia spoke in vague terms about going to New York, just as he did about applying for a residency in Boston, and it all seemed so adult, so sophisticated.

Patrick reasoned that for Celia, living in a house with all those voices–Nina now eleven, Roberto still taking pleasure in baiting her–his apartment, with its silence and further freedom not to have to say anything, was a relief. Silence meant no argument, no dissenting voice. No ultimatum. He grew used to Celia being in the apartment, more conscious of her absences, something that he hated about himself, something he promised wouldn't happen. She would stay with him for days and then go back to Harvard Street for a week, without explanation, then he would come home to find her painting in the back room again. He'd asked her to move in permanently, she was already there incrementally, her paints were there, he said. But she said no.