Going Home Again (17 page)

Titus showed me the secret when I told him this was a trick I couldn’t live without. His brother and I listened to his instructions, and then we both tried it. I couldn’t stand the feeling of milk crawling up my nose like a cold finger. The moment I felt it approaching the spot behind my eyeball, I blew a heavy stream from my nose over the table, and they both burst out laughing and laughed until they practically rolled off their seats.

What was certain was that fifteen years from now they’d spill their guts to a wife or girlfriend or therapist about how disastrously their parents had destroyed each other’s prospects of happiness, as well as the push and pull of hating and loving them and wishing them dead or remarried or in love all over again in the same lightning, contradictory thought.

I knew that Quinn and Titus needed to be with their mother. Their dad was a distant second best, and I began to suspect that what he was going through was bigger than the end of a marriage, though I really had no idea. I wondered if he was hiding a bankruptcy or some crushing lawsuit. And I was prepared to listen if he wanted to start talking. But I knew Monica’s new boyfriend was like a pitchfork in his guts, as Pablo was in mine. His only solution to this was to despise her and start sleeping with every woman in sight, which is what I thought he was doing on all those trips of his. Maybe in the short run he needed to bury himself
in some temporary fantasy. Eventually the vitriol against Monica would fade, and he’d settle into a quietly resentful and outwardly smooth bachelorhood.

He didn’t come home that night. I hoped that my heartsick and chronically selfish brother, despite the odds and all the patterns he’d traced through his life, had met a nice girl. I don’t tend toward fairy tales but was almost optimistic that night after I got his kids to bed. I thought maybe he’d found a woman who might teach him, by her own steady measure of strength and generosity, that there was power and comfort in beneficence and that he still had something positive to give.

Then, just before two o’clock, a knock on his front door woke me up. Thinking Nate had locked himself out, I wrapped myself in his housecoat, went downstairs and opened the door. It wasn’t Nate.

“You Nathaniel?” the man said. He was overweight, about fifty and wore a nice suit with a red carnation in his lapel. It looked like he was coming from a fancy event.

I told him it was a bit late to be knocking on the doors of people you didn’t even know to look at.

He muttered a quick apology, then turned and walked to the big white SUV idling on the curb, climbed in and pulled away. After watching the tail-lights disappear, I went upstairs and started snooping through Nate’s desk, dresser drawers and bedroom closets. I had no idea what I was looking for. The two possibilities that had crossed my mind were equally troubling. First, that this guy was the boyfriend or
husband of the woman Nate had taken out that night. Or that I was looking for pills or a Baggie that might have been intended for this late-night visitor.

“Someone driving a white SUV Benz came by last night,” I said the next morning. Nate was texting at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee steaming beside him. “Any idea what he was looking for? He thought I was you.”

“Tall thin guy?”

“On the fat side actually.”

He shrugged. “No clue.”

I walked home with Miles’s copy of
Rubber Soul
tucked under my arm. I left it on the kitchen counter while I made some business calls and tried to organize the day in my head. But my thoughts kept turning to Holly. The obsession I’d felt after seeing her for the first time in years had softened by then. But it was still there, buried like a seed, and that old Beatles record, like a spot of sunshine, brought it curling back up to the surface.

 Nine

In the early spring
we learned that Titus was playing hooky. He’d been doing this for close to two weeks when Monica called me at work to say that the police had picked him up on Yonge Street, just a few blocks south of the academy. She wanted me to come over and try to talk some sense into him. Nate was traveling—“not that he’d have any idea how to talk to his son”—and wouldn’t be home until the weekend. So I drove over and knocked on their door.

Kaj Adolfsson opened it with a smile on his face. “Come on in,” he said. When I stepped forward, he shut the door behind me and offered to take my coat.

“I won’t be staying long,” I said.

“Okay, you’ll be wanting to speak with Monica?” he said in that strange singsong accent of his.

He was a handsome man with sharp blue eyes, a few inches shorter than me, and balding. He wore a greying blond Frank Zappa–style mustache and goatee that drew your attention away from that shiny pate of his.

I’d been feeling like a traitor since the minute I agreed to do Monica this favor, and now it only got worse. Stepping through that threshold had compromised
whatever loyalty my brother might have reasonably expected of me. Here was a summit in progress, agreed to by me and held in enemy territory. Only a few hours earlier I’d spoken with Nate as he’d passed through some airport in the Midwest, caught between planes. Of course I’d failed to mention my plans for the evening, that I’d be standing in the Swede’s living room making nice. I wondered now if this had been a strategic misstep. My brother would hear about it, surely, and the fact that I’d set foot in the house of the man who had stolen his wife would erase any purchase I’d gained with him since coming back. He’d see it as nothing but the betrayal I myself might have felt if he’d agreed to a secret meeting with Pablo on the far side of the Atlantic.

The foyer, whose centrepiece was a spiral staircase leading to the second floor, was the size of an average living room. I stood silently, waiting, as he went to the stairs and called up.

“Nathaniel’s brother is here.”

I felt something turn inside me that I can only describe as nostalgia and regret when I heard Monica’s response echo around up there. What I heard was the voice of a woman who already seemed at home in her new life. It wasn’t the nature of Monica’s sudden shift that astounded me—that she could end up so quickly in another man’s bed—but the envy that weighed on my heart. Here stood the victor, the balding Frank Zappa look-alike, the Swedish version of my constitutional court lawyer, the man whose heart and entrails my brother ate every night in his dreams.

Nate, who at that very moment might have been standing at some airport hotel window staring soulfully over a bleak America, was defeated. Whom did he have left but me, his only brother and last ally? By his reckoning his wife had begun cheating on him sometime shortly after Titus’s tenth birthday. He should’ve known what was happening, he said, but hadn’t picked up on the signs. Suddenly, out of the blue, his terminally grumpy wife was all smiles, which was, to a slightly lesser degree, what had happened in my own case. Isabel, busier than ever and dutifully occupied with committees and meetings and late dinners with friends I barely knew and associates I’d never heard of, seemed to breeze in and out of our home like a harried movie star dropping in for a quick wardrobe change. She played the role well enough for Ava to believe that her mother was entering into a demanding and exciting new phase in her life. My brother had no idea what Monica was up to until the day he got home after a trip and saw that half her closets had been cleared out. He said he sat down on the edge of their bed and cried, though I have a hard time believing this. In my own story Isabel had inched her wedding band off her finger and slid it quietly across the breakfast table and said she had something to tell me.

I found Titus and his mother sitting at a computer in his bedroom on the second floor watching YouTube videos of Japanese kids on skateboards smacking themselves against sidewalks and lampposts. They waved me in, and I watched a couple of spectacular wipeouts
with them, and then Monica, who was dressed in jeans and a light blue sweatshirt, led me out of the room and downstairs.

“Titus doesn’t want to go back to his father’s house,” she said. “He hates it there.” There was a serving window between the kitchen and the living room, where Monica and I sat facing each other. Hearing the fridge door open and plates clattering, I knew Kaj was hovering back there somewhere.

“I was hoping you’d help prepare Nate for this,” she said.

“You want
me
to tell him? I don’t think that’s my place.”

“Just start easing him into the thought. I don’t know. He can’t even look at me anymore without calling me some name.”

She seemed nervous, almost afraid. I guessed it wasn’t an easy thing for her to ask me.

“I’m thinking of the boys,” she said. “It’s mostly you who takes care of them, anyway. I know that.”

“Maybe Titus just needs time. It’s still pretty fresh, right?”

“You know what your brother’s like. He’s not changing.”

Kaj entered the living room now and handed me a glass of beer. His uncomfortable expression—he was trying to smile—told me he knew exactly why I’d been called here.

“My brother may have trouble showing it,” I said, “but he loves those kids. He’s just—”

“Loving your kids doesn’t make you a good father,” she said.

This was true. You could love your child up and down with every last fiber in your heart and soul and still be a shitty parent. You can fuck them up every which way and have no idea that you’re doing it. I wondered how much of that statement had been directed at me. She knew the basics of my story, of course, but beyond that she’d have her own theories and speculations. Did she think I was as cold and irresponsible as my brother was? I didn’t think so. I reasoned that she might not appreciate that I’d gradually been taking over his fatherly duties. Did she believe Isabel had asked me to clear out of my daughter’s life, like she wanted Nate out of their sons’? It was an uncomfortable parallel that hadn’t occurred to me before now. Maybe she thought I knew something about dilemmas like the one we were facing now. Did she think I’d been on the receiving end of such a conversation and now might apply some much-needed experience to my brother’s case?

“Does Quinn feel the same?” I said.

“No.”

I took a sip of beer and leaned back in my seat and thought things through. “Let me talk to him,” I said.

“Good.”

“I mean Titus.”

Upstairs I found him reading on his back on the floor in his bedroom, the book positioned in his two hands like a small shield between his face and the ceiling light. He seemed relaxed and gripped by what he
was reading, the most recent novel by Holly’s author, the young man we’d seen at the fair in September.

“Hola,”
Titus said.

“There’s hope for you yet.”

“
Yo quiero
Taco Bell.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“Isn’t it awesome?” He grimaced, let out a loud fart, then went back to his reading. I waited for him to stop giggling.

“Listen, Titus,” I said. “Your mom says you’d rather stay here. I get that.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You’re not getting along with your dad.”

He shrugged.

“I guess he’s not in town much these days,” I said.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“I like it here,” he said, shrugging again. He turned the book over on his chest. “It’s awesome. This place is a mansion. There’s practically a TV in every room.”

“I wonder if you should think a bit more about this before we talk to your dad. Can you do that?”

“Are you two really related?” he said.

“We’re not that different.” I’d meant to suggest that my brother had some reserve of good sense that would surprise his son one day, though when I said these words it sounded more like a nod toward some waiting calamity, that both my brother and I were turned in the wrong direction. “Your dad’s busy. I think that’s all it is.” The lie almost caught in my throat.

“You actually give a shit about other people, not just yourself,” he said. “Or is that a big lie, too?”

“It’s just easier for an uncle. And I’m not such a great dad, either. Look at me. I’m over here, and my daughter’s back in Spain.” I reached down and lifted the book off his chest and read the first line on the open page.

“It’s nowhere near as good as his last one,” he said, taking it back.

“Your dad’s a complicated guy. Maybe that runs in the family. But he loves you guys.”

“You’re divorced, too, right?”

“Soon to be.”

“Are you sad about that?”

“Yes.”

“And what about your daughter? Is she sad about it?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you and her mom just make up?” he said.

It was a question I couldn’t answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “People change. Time changes people.” It was one of those stupid adult evasions he’d heard a hundred times in his life, I was sure. I regretted pulling him out of the forgetfulness of his book.

“Okay. Tell me this: if getting a divorce is so great,” he said, “then why’s everybody still so miserable? Why are you miserable? Why’s my mom always so sad?”

“Everything always works out in the end. You’ll see.”