The Night Watchman (38 page)

‘Ana, listen. I don’t think he meant to hurt you. I don’t know all that much about him, but I’m sure he doesn’t know how to behave with other people. I call him Gabriel. I’ve called him that since I was little. I think he may never have been with a woman before. He must have seen this as his one chance to . . .’ I stopped speaking because her impatient expression showed me how ridiculous I sounded. But I had to say it. ‘Try to imagine that you have just one chance to be intimate with another person. Maybe you’d risk everything for it?’

She heaved a sigh. ‘Hank, do you think I’m a total idiot?’

‘Of course not. I’m trying to tell you that it wasn’t what you think, that he—’

‘Don’t make me shout at you again,’ she cut in. ‘It’ll upset the kids.’

I started making a list in my head of all the things I couldn’t let happen. At the top was that I couldn’t let Jorge and Nati grow up without my protection.

‘But I want to be with you and the kids,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

‘Right now, I don’t care what you want. I may care a lot tomorrow – I probably will, but not right now.’ She showed me a disappointed look.

Something more than shame made me turn away – something born of the hundred scars that Ernie carried on his body, and the hundred others that I carried inside me.

‘Stay with Ernie,’ Ana said more gently. ‘He’ll take care of you while I figure out what to do.’

I put my trousers on. The compressed urgency in her face told me she wanted to cry but wouldn’t. I sensed an opening, yet my thoughts seemed to be scattering around me. My one chance at a good life was turning around this moment and I couldn’t put a single coherent sentence together.

‘If you give me just fifteen minutes,’ I told her, ‘I’ll explain everything. I’m trying to handle way too much right now, Ana. It’s this case. It seems like it chose me. And I see myself in Sandi. I don’t—’

‘Why should I believe you?’ she interrupted.

Time was ticking down loudly inside my head. If I could only make it stop, I might figure out the incantation that would permit me to stay.

I patted the air between us. It was an awkward gesture, but I was hoping she’d understand that I meant that if we took this very slowly, I might yet be able to make her understand. ‘Because I’m backed up to the wall of everything I’ve done wrong,’ I told her. I took another step towards her but she held up her hands to block me. When I realized she’d become frightened of me, all my hopes collapsed inside me.

A man watches his feet meet the pavement of a Lisbon street, listening to each step as though it might be a clue about his future. Cobbling together the fate of his adopted homeland with his own, he thinks,
We’ve been undone by our lies.

I crouched around the corner from headquarters, as though I were a criminal in a B-movie waiting to give myself up at daybreak. For a time, I watched a pigeon ripping at a crust of pizza. When my phone rang, I knew it would be Ana, and my heart leapt, but it was Ernie’s name that appeared on my screen.

‘Nati called me,’ he said breathlessly. ‘He told me what happened. He was very upset.’

My son must have reconsidered his amusement or faked it in order to convince us not to move our argument behind closed doors.

I answered all of Ernie’s questions about what had taken place between Ana and me, though I wasn’t able to explain the quarrel in anything resembling a coherent order.

‘Look, just come to my house,’ he finally interrupted.

‘I’ve got to stay in Lisbon. That’s where Ana and my kids are.’

‘But you shouldn’t be alone,’ Ernie said.

I lowered my phone to my side; there seemed no point in speaking if I couldn’t be with Ana when I most needed her.

Ernie shouted my name and, when I didn’t reply, continued hollering it until I had no choice but to lift up my phone again. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him.

‘You won’t be! Drive here. Please, Rico!’

‘I’ve been trained to cope, so just go back to sleep.’

‘Okay, listen, Rico. Go to your office and call me from there. I need to know you’re somewhere safe.’

‘Ernie,’ I said, ‘where I am on your GPS won’t change anything.’

‘Christ, Rico, do what I tell you for once in your life!’

I could see no point in quarrelling. ‘I’ll call you when I get to my office,’ I told him.

That was a lie when I said it, but for lack of anywhere else to go, I ended up at headquarters a few minutes later. Filipe, our night guard, always brought apples to work as a snack. I caught the big Granny Smith he tossed me in one hand, which gave him a respectful grin.

At my desk, I sent Ernie an SMS saying I was in my office. He didn’t call back, which was a relief. With any luck, he’d already drifted off to sleep again.

I watched the video of ‘Dog Days Are Over’ on YouTube over and over, studying the singer’s hands as she danced, trying to catch the hidden messages she’d given to Sandi, but all I could think of was how stupid it was of me not to have realized that I needed Ana more even than I needed my secrets. Eager to escape the corner I’d backed myself into, I shifted over to Google Maps and looked at images of Black Canyon.

I pictured myself sitting between the canyon walls, listening to the Gunnison River rushing by in torrents, then gazing up to the blue scratch of sky two thousand feet above me. I held my Walther semi-automatic pistol in my hand. It seemed the perfect partner for a last magic act – silver and black, and absolutely certain of its own expertise.

For the second time in my life, I counted to ten with a gun barrel in my mouth. Dad had put it there the first time. He’d pulled the trigger, too, but surprise of surprises, he hadn’t loaded it. Back then, I’d passed out before finding out that I wasn’t going to die. And when I came to, Ernie was lying next to me. We were under an overheated clump of blankets. I didn’t understand why, until he told me that I’d turned to ice after passing out. What neither of us yet knew was that a part of me would never completely thaw.

This time, an important realization surged through me while I was counting down towards death: that Mom’s killing herself meant that I’d never do to my kids what she did to me and Ernie; I could never do to Jorge and Nati what she had done to my brother and me when she crashed Dad’s Plymouth into a tree on the road to Crawford on a warm spring day in 1981.

More than thirty years after her death, Mom had saved me from putting a bullet in my head.

After I stopped counting, I realized a second thing that seemed even more important: that my mother hadn’t been scared of dying. Everything about that day must have felt just right to her.
Foi canja, Hank,
she’d have told me if she could have.
Easy as pie.

Though maybe that was just what I wanted most to believe. With the dead, it seemed you could never get definitive answers.

Footsteps awakened me. Lifting my head off my desk, I saw a tall, slender silhouette in the doorway. The cowboy hat in his hand told me it was Ernie, and yet I knew he’d never travel this far from home.

‘Is that really you?’ I heard myself ask, and although it seemed impossible, I saw my voice flutter down from the ceiling and land on the floor. A butterfly of sound.

And then I was awake for sure, and Ernie was stepping into my office. His face was older than I remembered it, and his eyes a softer shade of green.

‘You’re way too far from home,’ I told him.

I didn’t stand up and go to him. I wanted to feel the urgent tension of needing to hug him before I let it go. Or maybe, for the first time in my life, I needed him to come to me. I put my head back down on the desk and closed my eyes.

By the time I’d counted to seven, I sensed him squatting beside me. At twelve, he put his hand atop my head. I lost count then, because the oatmeal smell of him became a deep well that I was tumbling into. Down there in the dark, sitting with my brother, he rubbed his cheek against mine, and the scratch of his whiskers convinced me that we had made it to adulthood – and that there was still hope for me.

‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ he whispered. It was our incantation of incantations, though by now we both knew it came with no guarantee.

He caressed my hair. My gratitude for that simple kindness was so wide that it held forty years of our shared past and still had room for the present moment. I sat up and let Ernie wrap his lean, strong arms around me because I was sure now I was made out of things I’d never wanted – broken things that I didn’t want to hold onto any longer.

‘I fucked up badly,’ I confessed.

‘We’ll make things right,’ he told me, and his voice sounded so confident that I was able to let myself go. When my tears finally ended, I leaned back in my chair, but he held onto my hand. Our entwined fingers were our bridge – and always had been.

He took two big, gulping breaths. Beads of sweat trailed down his cheek.

‘Is it bad?’ I asked.

‘It’s just that I left so quickly that I forgot to bring any medications with me. I may need to sit in the dark a while or . . . Do you have a spare Valium with you?’

‘You never take Valium.’

He held out his hand. ‘I do now.’

After he downed the pill, he sat on the chair in front of my desk and bent forward with his head between his legs. I turned off the lights and rubbed his back.

When he finally sat back up, he said, ‘Everything is okay. I’ll be fine now.’ His voice was strangely secure. ‘Maybe you should call Ana,’ he added.

He put his cowboy hat down between us. Its feather looked like a thick black arrow in the darkness.

‘Later,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t survive another quarrel right now.’

‘And Nati – you’ll need to speak to him,’ he added.

‘I’ll call him.’ I put Ernie’s cowboy hat on. He said I looked like Alan Ladd in
Shane.
‘I’m feeling very odd,’ I said, just so he’d know.

‘Tell me.’

‘I feel like we’ve finally managed to escape from time. You and I . . . We’re living between ticks of a clock. It’s always going to be now.’

I realized I was no longer afraid of what would happen with me and Ana – not because everything would be all right but because I knew that nothing would ever be good again unless I risked everything to get her back.

Ernie gazed over my shoulder at the parking lot. ‘Your view really sucks,’ he said.

‘Thanks. How did you get past reception?’

‘I was here once before, years ago. Remember?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Well, anyway, the guy from Cape Verde at reception remembered I was your brother. He thinks we look alike.’

‘But we don’t.’

‘Our eyes are our Mom’s, even though they’re different colours.’

‘Yours are nicer.’

‘You think?’

I nodded. He picked up my apple. ‘You going to eat this?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Can we split it?’

‘Sure.’

He took a bite and handed it to me. It was good to pass it back and forth between us. After he’d nibbled down to the core, I held up my garbage can and he tossed it inside.

‘Thanks for crossing the Continental Divide,’ I said. That was what we called the imaginary line west of Évora that he hadn’t driven beyond since Aunt Olivia’s death in April of 2006.

‘I almost didn’t,’ he said. ‘My heart froze the moment I started visualizing the drive. But then I figured the worst that could happen is I’d have a heart attack and drop dead on the freeway. Which wasn’t so bad when compared to what not coming here would mean.’

‘What would it mean?’

‘That my whole life was a failure.’

‘I don’t see how that could be true.’

‘Because I’ve prepared all my life for this – to help you when no one else could. If I didn’t come here now, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.’

‘You have no mirrors,’ I pointed out.

‘You can stop trying to be witty. It’s just the two of us.’

‘What if I don’t want to? Listen, Ernie, you don’t owe me anything. I want you to live your life anyway you want and not care what I think.’

The forced way he gazed down told me that something I said put Colorado on the horizon of his thoughts.

‘There are some things you can’t help me with,’ I added. ‘Nobody could.’

‘But at least I can take you home,’ he said.

‘No, I’ve got to stay in Lisbon. I’ve just started to understand that this case has a lot more to do with you and me than I thought. It’s like some sort of test.’

‘I meant I could take you to
your
home,’ he said.

I turned to face the doorway, because time would start up again the moment I left my office.

‘I’ll talk to Ana,’ my brother told me.

Ernie being assertive made me suspicious. ‘What’ll you tell her?’ I asked.

‘The truth.’

‘But you’ve always said that was the one thing we could never reveal!’ I said resentfully.

‘I was wrong. I realize that now – though I needed to have Évora in my rear-view mirror to realize it.’

‘Ernie, what’s going on?’

‘We know who we are now, Rico. When we arrived in Portugal, we were just kids. We were lost, we needed rules. Dad had just been killed, and I was—’

‘Killed?’ I pounced – because for thirty years I’d suspected that he knew more than me. ‘Ernie, what’s the truth about Dad?’

‘You know what I know, Rico – he vanished. And if he hasn’t shown up by now, he must be dead.’

‘You don’t know any more than that?’

‘No.’

I didn’t believe him. Maybe he’d heard from an investigator in Colorado. ‘Have the police finally found what was left of him?’ I asked.

‘No. At least, not that I know of.’

Another lie – I was sure of it. But Ernie’s profile hardened. From experience, I knew I’d get nothing more out of him.

‘And this is what you’re going to tell Ana?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘She’s not going to buy it, Ernie. She’s going to get angry at you.’

I realized I wanted my wife to holler at my brother because I couldn’t.

‘What happened in Colorado happened to both of us,’ he said. ‘So we need to tell Ana together. It’s the only way. She deserves to know.’

Could my past become hers, too? I realized now that in the world I wanted to live in, the people who loved you wanted to inherit all that had made you who you were.