Going Home Again

Dennis Bock

On the Friday evening before
Kaj Adolfsson was killed, I was actually feeling pretty
good about things. I had just landed in Madrid, which
was home, and a big round sun the color of orange
sherbet was three-quarters gone in a fine late-summer
sky. I was coming off a strange year, a bit battered and
bruised, but my circumstances were looking up. The
language business was going well, my love life had
crawled back up out of a deep dark hole, and the day
after tomorrow I was hosting my daughter’s thirteenth
birthday. My problems seemed at that moment destined
to disappear like that setting sun. And then, as I
watched the city come into view from the backseat of
my taxi, my brother’s wife called with the news that set
everything moving off in the wrong direction.
“And you haven’t heard from him since?” I said,
leaning forward and pointing to the dashboard radio.
When the cabdriver reached for the dial to turn down
the volume, I saw the little stub on his right hand
where his index finger used to be.
“That’s why I’m calling,” Monica said. “I thought
maybe he’d called you.”
“No. Nothing. I just got in. There were no messages.”
My brother and Monica were in the middle of a
divorce full to overflowing with discord and grievance.
Over the past year they’d told me in so many words
that they each wished the other had never been born.
Now she was on the phone telling me Nate’s sailboat
had been found crewless and adrift thirty miles south
of Naples, Florida.
“The Coast Guard contacted me three hours ago.
I don’t know what to think. That stupid boat was his
baby.”
“Is his baby,” I said, maybe a little too forcefully.
“He’s two days overdue, Charlie. He was supposed
to pick up the kids yesterday. Of course he doesn’t show
up. Now they call telling me his sailboat’s under tow
and do I know the whereabouts of my husband? The
partners at his office haven’t heard from him, either.
No one knows a thing. You can imagine what this is
doing to my head right now.”
I did what I could to convince Monica that Nate
was probably fine and all we could do was sit tight, he’d
call soon enough. I’d be back in three days, on Monday,
in any case. But after slipping the phone back into
my pocket, I wondered if he wasn’t already somewhere
over the Atlantic en route to finishing up the business
we’d left hanging between us. He was capable of much
more than I could ever understand, that much I knew
by then, and this sort of grand gesture—popping up
in Madrid on the weekend of my daughter’s thirteenth
birthday—provided the retributive drama favored by
a man on the verge of losing his family. I ran through
as many likely explanations as occurred to me in the
time it took to get into the city. But half an hour later,
when the cabbie dropped me at the door of the Mesón
Txistu, that feeling of unease still hung over me.
Men and women were sitting and standing in small
groups taking aperitifs at the front bar when I walked
in. I nodded to the bartender and continued up the
stairs into the back room and found Isabel and Ava,
our daughter, sitting at the table beneath the bull’s
head on the south wall, a pitcher of ice water between
them. Ava’s hair was shoulder length and chestnut
brown, like her mother’s, and she looked, despite my
northern complexion, every bit the Spaniard. When
she turned and saw me at the far end of the room, she
got up and met me between tables, throwing herself
into my arms. I gave her a spin and a hug.
“How was your flight, Daddy? How was Ireland ?”
“It was good,” I said, slipping out from under a
shoulder strap. I handed her the lighter of two carryon
bags, the one loaded with presents. “You’re looking
great. How’s Mom? She okay?”
“She’s fine,” she said, then led me by the hand to
where Isabel sat, wearing a smile I wasn’t quite able to
pin down.
“Good to see you,” I said, stooping to kiss both
cheeks.
I didn’t recognize the dress she was wearing that
night. It was a green-and-white summery number that
showed those great arms of hers, shaped and tanned at
the tail end of an active and outdoorsy season. We’d
been separated for more than a year now, and the fact
that she had a man in her life was old news. Through
a family friend named José, whom I’d known since my
earliest days in Madrid, I’d heard more about him than
I needed to know—for instance, that he was a constitutional
lawyer in the Spanish Supreme Court and, at
forty-two, the youngest justice in the history of the
institution. He owned a house in Ibiza, as well as the
flat in Paris I’d visited the previous Christmas. As far
as I knew, he had no kids and lived the kind of life that
stressed-out parents like to dream about.
The waiter appeared, helped me with my seat and
left us with three leather-bound menus. Isabel was sitting
directly across from me, Ava to my right.
“Are you feeling okay?” Isabel said. “You look
worried.”
“Just glad to be back,” I told her. “No problem.”
We usually spoke Spanish when the three of us were
together. But for some reason we spoke English that
night.
“You know Dad always looks tired, anyway,” Ava
said, opening her menu. “It’s all that thinking he does.
Right, Dad?”
“There you go,” I said. “Nail on the head.”
“I hope no one drops dead at my party,” Ava said.
“The heat’s killed forty-one people in France this summer.
Can you believe that?”
“That’s horrible,” I said.
“Mostly old people, I know. They were talking
about it on the news this morning.”
“At least it’s cooler up there in the mountains,” I
said.
We’d celebrated Ava’s birthday at a friend’s house
in the Madrid sierra, thirty-five minutes north of the
city, for the past ten years. I’d flown into Dublin from
Toronto that morning and spent the day putting out
fires at the Bellerose Academy—one of the language
schools I owned and operated—before hopping a shuttle
over to Madrid for the occasion. Since splitting up
the previous summer, her mother and I had managed
to keep the lawyering to a minimum. Now, whenever
we found ourselves in the same room together (which
wasn’t very often), we did our best to keep the edge
out of our voices. In calmer moments we’d agreed that
the success we’d have in raising our daughter would
rise or fall in direct relation to the number of conflicting
issues we chose to leave by the wayside. There
just weren’t enough hours in the day. Choose your
battles. Wasn’t that the best advice you could ever give
or receive? By then it wasn’t a question of solving anything
or determining who was in the wrong, as too
often someone was, but managing to move forward
with our dignity intact.
“Grandpa’s going to talk your ear off about his gardening.
He’s on this new thing. He’s ordering papaya
seeds from Brazil or something.”
“And you?” I said, leaning forward to kiss her forehead.
“What’s up with you? I’m sure you’ve got a doozy waiting for me.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, her big brown eyes glowing.

Excerpted from GOING HOME AGAIN by Dennis Bock. Copyright © Dennis Bock, 2013. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.