Going Home Again (25 page)

Santiago was not well these days. He was close to eighty and had a chest problem that caused Pilar, his wife of fifty-two years, to worry over and pamper him, but this condition he never talked about or acknowledged in my presence. His problems were his own and meant to be worn privately. Still, he would have something to say about my year away and this tentative reunion of ours. He told me that men like us who grew up without parents had to work even harder to keep our loved ones near.
“You and I do not have this luxury otherwise,”
he said in Spanish. Family was a conscious act of will, not a habit you simply fall into and take for granted; that was for the lucky ones. Ours was a reality that demanded moral courage and determination.
“There is no room for false pride,”
he said.
“You understand that, don’t you?”

After this talking-to, I took a turn through the yard looking for faces I hadn’t seen in more than a year. A dozen adults, all friends of ours, were talking and laughing and pouring drinks. Their kids were everywhere, climbing the short trees, throwing water balloons, stealing cakes from the dessert trays. Now in our fifth decade, with kids and houses and all the problems that
come to us at that age, youth’s defining passages were long ended, and we were each who we’d always be from this point on. And as I turned these thoughts in my mind, I found a couple, dear friends of mine, sitting by the hand pump with the girl they’d brought from China only ten months earlier. She was a beautiful little thing dressed in a blue bathing diaper with a little red ribbon in her hair. They had tried to conceive a child for more than ten years and now were holding up objects and naming them in the girl’s new language and smothering her in kisses whenever she got the Spanish words for them right. I sat with them for a time, watching this little miracle, then got up again and resumed my tour.

Isabel was pouring herself a beer at the drinks table set up in the shade of the chestnut tree in a corner of the garden. She’d traded in the red dress of last night for a simple grey blouse and beige slacks. Ava had braided her hair in a ponytail after breakfast. It was raised up off the back of her neck and gave her face a thin, narrow look.

“Here’s to strange nights,” she said.

“And stranger days.”

She smiled, hopefully, and the train on the other side of the stone wall rumbled past. We waited for it to disappear down the track.

“I’m coming back,” I said. “This is where I want to be.”

“You know I’m not asking for anything,” she said. “I didn’t plan for last night to happen.”

“I’m glad it did,” I said. “But that’s not why.”

“Things happen for a reason,” she said. “I guess we have to believe that. Maybe that’s as close to religion as I’ll ever get.”

A few hours later, after a meal that was course after course after course, the birthday cake came out just as the sun was beginning to set. The whole party gathered around the table, and Isabel and I stood on opposite sides of our daughter, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and cheered, and all the cameras came out and started snapping. The candles flickered.

“Here’s my wish,” Ava said. When she smiled she didn’t seem at all self-conscious about the braces on her teeth. I think she was too happy to notice. She turned to us, touched her chin with her fingers to make like she was really thinking, then blew out her thirteen candles with a big draining breath.

I was flipping through pictures of the party and snacking on salted peanuts on Monday afternoon, thirty-six thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, when the flight attendant brought me an apple juice. A pleasant-looking woman with light blue eyes, she smiled and leaned forward when she poured the juice into a plastic cup and placed it on the seat-back table.

“Now that’s one happy girl,” she said, nodding at the photograph of Ava staring wide-eyed at a birthday cake bristling with lit candles.

I turned the screen to her to give her a better look. “My daughter turned thirteen yesterday.”

“They grow up fast, don’t they?” she said.

“They do.”

“I have a boy and a girl. The older one’s starting university this fall.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Enjoy your drink.”

“Thanks.”

After she disappeared up the aisle, I turned to the window and stared dreamily out over the clouds. They were below us now, rolling mountains of white that looked dense enough to bounce you back up if you jumped off the wing.

At the end of that weekend in Madrid I was full of conflicting emotions. Thoughts of my brother were there again. In fact they hadn’t really left me entirely, and now I wondered what game he was up to. I knew I was flying back into the heart of it, and most likely the game would involve me, even if he wasn’t planning on collecting me at the airport in Toronto as he had thirteen months earlier. I’d heard from Monica only once after that first call, with no news of his whereabouts, and nothing had followed since.

I tried to sleep on the plane, but images of Saturday and Sunday night kept coming back to me—I’d stayed over at the old flat for a second evening after the party—and now the silly, sexy smile on Isabel’s face kept spinning in my head. We’d made love those two nights with an intensity that rivaled the passion we’d felt when we were first together, and after we came we both started to laugh. It was something we used to do together but hadn’t done in years. There was nothing in our period of separation that couldn’t be let go
of. Wasn’t our capacity for atonement and absolution a measure of our best selves? That’s what I thought the night after Ava’s birthday as we lay together, those spasms still riding through our bodies.

I stared out the window and watched the clouds race by. Far below, the broad sheet of ocean went on and on, as if to the ends of the earth. I turned my camera back on and began swiping through the pictures again until I found the one that showed the three of us leaning over the birthday cake and smiling.

“Are you all right, sir? Sir? Are you okay?”

It was the flight attendant standing over me with a concerned smile on her face.

“Yes, sure. I’m fine. Thank you.”

At customs I was interviewed by a large Caribbean woman who studied me a little longer than she should have. She tilted her head, squinting slightly.

For a moment I flashed back to the afternoon I’d been detained while trying to make that flight to Paris, and I might’ve squirmed. “Is there a problem?” I said.

“Where are you coming from, sir?” she said.

When I told her, she motioned to the eye. “Looks like you overstayed your welcome.”

When I got home, just after six p.m., I called Isabel and told her I’d made it back all right. I grabbed a quick shower, turned on the TV and fixed myself a sandwich. It was already midnight Madrid time, but I’d been cooped up on that plane all day, and my head was still turning with everything that had happened.

I put my cycling gear on and biked down into the valley and burned up and down the trails, hoping
to work off some nervous energy. After an hour I pulled up beside the sports field at the bottom of the Riverdale Park and watched a girls’ soccer team take turns piggybacking partners up and down the hill. The coach, a short man in a blue tracksuit, circulated among his players, egging them on with encouraging shouts. Overhead the gulls were gulping down dragon-flies as they swarmed by the thousands, three or four dozen birds taking turns cutting through the shimmering mist of wings, snapping and choking them down. I walked my bike up the hill and watched as the last insects were picked off and the gulls flew back toward the lake.

The new fall term started the day after tomorrow. In Madrid the term kicked off in October, but here the end of summer came earlier. This was a season I loved from my old school days, remembering the heady sense that another great adventure was finally beginning. In the air and the light over the valley that afternoon I felt and saw hints of the change of seasons and tried to slow them down and hold them in my mind and my heart. Here was my last autumn in this city, and I wasn’t saddened to know I would soon be leaving. The moment carried such weight and significance that I lingered there minutes longer than I might have otherwise. And as I turned to leave it occurred to me for the first time since that phone call three days ago that my brother might actually be in trouble. I started for his house, hoping for a sign. He’d be back by now, I thought, of course he would.

I saw three police cars parked in front when I
turned onto his street a few minutes later. A dozen or so people were gathered on the sidewalk. At the front door a yellow police cordon barred access to the house, and a police officer stood there flipping through a small notepad. I dropped my bike and stepped forward and identified myself. The officer pivoted inside and called down the hallway. Then a detective appeared and questioned me as to the whereabouts of my brother. When I asked what this was all about, he told me that Kaj Adolfsson was dead.

 Epilogue

A strange portrait of my brother
was rolled out before the public eye in the days and weeks that followed. At first I rejected the profile of a man who had more time for sailing and partying than he did for his family. It was too ugly, and too true. Cable news showed photographs of him. In one, his arm was draped over the shoulder of a well-known athlete, cigars alight; in another he was hoisting a glass of champagne at a New Year’s Eve party. The photos only added weight to the argument that he’d led a frivolous life. There was a nod to the inevitability of the whole sad mess.

To drive the point home, the spokesman for the Adolfsson family—a man named Edvard, who’d flown in on receiving word of his brother-in-law’s death—spoke movingly to a local reporter about Kaj’s gentle nature and sense of goodwill. I watched all this with grotesque fascination. Of course Monica didn’t subject herself to any such interviews. On the late news one evening Hilary and I saw the
Get My Kicks
, Nate’s sailboat, moored in the Naples harbor, along with a catalogue of the places he’d supposedly visited before coming north. We learned from those reports that my brother had checked out of the Cove Inn on Monday morning
and was driven by cab to the Naples Municipal Airport and then flew to Tampa International, where he caught his flight home. The airport limo service he frequently used was waiting for him that afternoon. The driver, who recognized this frequent customer, described his demeanor as nervous and agitated, “like a man late for something big that’s going to happen.” But he thought nothing of it, really, he said into the camera. He got fares like that all the time. Likewise, he didn’t think it strange that a man—Kaj Adolfsson, obviously—seemed to be waiting for his passenger on the front steps of that big house on Riverdale Avenue. In a statement that might have seemed remarkable only to me, the driver said that he supposed this “was the guy’s brother, the brother of the accused.” I don’t know why he would have said that, for Kaj and I looked nothing alike. In other words, though, there was nothing unusual at all about the scene. The driver helped the client with his bag and, after collecting his fare, drove off as the real drama unfolded.

Monica was already upstairs going through the boys’ closets by this time. Titus and Quinn were out back saying good-bye to their tree fort. Nate, who surely would’ve been surprised to see his wife’s boyfriend standing on his doorstep, pushed past him and headed for the stairs, Kaj following behind. After hearing the story my brother told to me in the weeks that followed, I wondered what Kaj had been thinking as he stood outside watching the neighborhood while waiting for his girlfriend to clear out some things from
her former home. Part of me wanted to believe he was contemplating how sadly spouses sometimes end things between themselves, sneaking around through each other’s lives—in effect turning against those they once loved. Another part wanted to think that he’d drawn the line there, deciding that this simply wasn’t who he was, a man who pushes himself into another man’s home. He had won fair and square but would afford that fundamental respect to my brother. He couldn’t understand the full scope of the story, of course, or who my brother really was. At least I doubt that Monica would have told him everything, and he knew nothing about the girl I’d caught Nate with. He would’ve known only that a marriage had ended, and he’d come out on top where the two men were concerned. Until the moment Nate grabbed the putter while storming through the house, it had been a fair fight, just a matter of rivals in love.

Maybe it had been lying on the couch. Or leaning against a wall. I’d seen it in various places. He was a man for whom leisure, good times and easy distractions always needed to be close at hand. So there it was, the putter—snatched up and steadying him as he took the stairs two at a time to find his wife in the final stages of clearing his sons out of his life. The boys were in the backyard when it happened. All it took was thirty seconds, maybe a minute. They didn’t see or hear a thing as their father bludgeoned the Swede to death, then dropped the golf club and walked back into the late afternoon.