Going Home Again (19 page)

They led us around to the front of the house and up to the wraparound porch, which had heavy colonial pillars and a grey plank floor and overlooked the quiet tree-lined street. Glenn went inside to refresh the drinks, and when we settled in he told me and Nate what had drawn them here in the first place, back in the midnineties. Things hadn’t changed that much since. It was still on the small side and charming; even now, he said, the Anglican church rang its bells every Sunday morning, the farmers’ market kept its regular weekend hours, and along the banks of the modest river cutting through town you could still see kids eating an ice cream or paddling a canoe on a summer’s day.

“And you, Charlie?” he said. “I guess you’re over the culture shock by now?” He took a sip of his drink and set it on the table between us.

“I’ve been too busy to notice,” I said, exaggerating only slightly. “There’ve been some changes, anyway. I was just a kid when I left.”

“I’ll bet. Twenty years in Madrid’s a long time. Holly tells me you’ve got a daughter.”

“More Spanish than the siesta itself.”

“You must miss her,” he said.

“In fact, she’s coming over next month.”

“Excellent.”

“It’s taken some planning,” I said.

“Some arm-twisting, more like it,” Nate said.

“Niagara Falls, the CN Tower. The whole bit. I’m giving her the whirlwind tour. Pulling out all the stops.”

“And your ex-wife is over there?” Glenn said.

“That’s right,” I said.

He nodded serenely.

“There’s so many things you can do when she comes over,” Holly said, leaning forward in her chair now, hands on her knees. “Maybe we could get the kids together.”

“That might be a nice idea,” I said.

“He’s booked some time at the cottage,” Nate said.

“You’ve got a cottage?” Glenn said.

Nate named the lake, which Glenn, raising his glass again, said was great for bass and muskie. “Cottage living,” he said. “That’s a real vacation, if you ask me.”

“She’s never been here, right?” Holly said.

“First time.”

“Oh, she’ll love it here,” she said.

“It’s like a first love,” Glenn said, looking at me and Holly, “seeing a new country. The impression lasts forever, right? She’ll have a great time.”

It was a simple observation about first love, but I understood by the way he smiled and looked at us both, and by the slight shudder that seemed to pass through Holly, that Glenn had never heard of Miles Esler.

“No pressure there,” I said. “But let’s hope it’s a positive inauguration.”

So she’d never told her husband about the love of her life. As the conversation regained its footing from that strange stumble, I wondered how such a thing was possible. How do you live with someone all those years and keep something like that separate and hidden like some ugly secret? Glenn had no idea about a time when his wife knew with absolute certainty the boundless freedom of being in love for the first time. Or had I misread him? On that afternoon I didn’t believe I had. Was this a memory she needed to protect from retelling in order to keep it intact and pure? I could think of no other reason. And then, as I rolled my glass between my palms, I noticed that Nate was no longer sitting with us.

I excused myself and found the three boys glued to the Xbox upstairs in the sunroom. “You guys seen Nate?”

When they shrugged, I continued down the hall and found him propped up against Riley’s door frame in the same pose my old roommate from Montreal used to hold when he talked about taking me out to get laid.

“Private party?”

“Speak of the devil,” he said, turning.

“We’re missing you downstairs.”

Riley was sitting on the floor in her bedroom, leaning back on her hands. Her tongue was pressed gently up against her teeth, her mouth open slightly, as if she
had a cold and couldn’t breathe through her nose. Her jeans were sliced horizontally, purposely and expensively, down the long length of her thighs.

“You dated my mom in university. And you actually lived together in Europe? I think that’s
so
cool.”

“A hundred years ago,” I said.

“I’ve never met one of my mom’s old boyfriends before.”

“I don’t think there’s that many of us out there.”

She smiled and rolled her eyes. “No
kidding
!”

“Riley’s practically got a gymnastics scholarship wrapped up,” Nate said, and he almost looked proud. “I was telling her about Syracuse. They’ve got a lot of good sports programs on offer.”

“The only problem being that it’s in Syracuse,” I said.

“It’s a good town,” Nate said, turning back to her. “Don’t you worry about that. I had an
awesome
time down there. You’d love it. Friendly people, nice campus.”

“Cool,” she said. Her face was as bright as a cherry. “You two don’t look much like brothers.”

“I doubt it myself on occasion,” I said, putting my hand on Nate’s shoulder. “Walk with me,” I told him.

I was annoyed that he’d slipped away to flirt with Riley—whether he knew it or not, that’s exactly what he was doing. But it didn’t occur to me that it could go any further than that. I just let it slide.

Ten minutes after we stepped back onto the front porch, Glenn fired up the barbecue, and soon the steaks and hamburgers and salads were brought out
to the side yard. The patio table was set, and the kids came down, and as the day rolled into a long gentle evening and the light softened into a warm shimmering glow over that unsuspecting town, we all dug in and ate and toasted old and new friends alike.

 Ten

The notion that Ava had come over
to have a look at my new life as much as to actually spend time with me was never far from my mind once she arrived. She wanted to know what had changed in my circumstances, and I was eager to show her that very little had, at least where it concerned her. On the surface my life here would seem as strange to her as it felt temporary to me. More than once I explained that Toronto was only a way station, and I had no intention of staying longer than necessary to get the academy off the ground. I’d long since focused my ambitions in five-year intervals and mapped out with relative certainty the shape of the modest empire I aspired to build. One day I’d have schools in Japan and South Korea. But I couldn’t say I had the same sense of control and determination about my personal life. Looking ahead by increments of thirty days was difficult enough. Five years was simply inconceivable. But I knew there was no future for me in a city without my daughter.

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.