Going Home Again Page 3

  The girl wore a green two-piece bathing suit and a thin silver necklace. Her long blond hair was wet and pressed against the side of her head in curling thick cords, and goose bumps pocked her arms and legs. She was standing beside her mother, as far from me and Titus as the small room would allow.

  “Maybe this was an accident?” the man said, hopefully, I thought, his eyes moving slowly between me and the woman. “You think that’s possible? It’s a crowded pool right now. Look at it out there. This sort of thing can happen.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what are we talking about here?”

  “The girl has told her mother that this boy—your nephew—touched her body. Very directly. She referred specifically to a certain part of her body. And that it happened more than once.”

  “Two times,” the woman said.

  Titus didn’t raise his eyes to mine when I looked at him. “Do you know what he’s talking about?” I said.

  “No,” Titus said.

  “Are you sure you understand what’s being said here?” I saw the first trembling take his upper lip when I laid my hand on his shoulder.

  “I didn’t do anything like that,” he said.

  “You’re sure that didn’t happen?”

  “I didn’t touch anyone like that. Quinn and I were playing. We were just swimming. I didn’t even notice her.”

  “You know this is for real, right?” I said. “Is what you’re saying the truth?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking up at me. “It’s the truth.”

  “Okay, buddy. Go wait outside with your brother.”

  Once he was standing out there on the deck a moment later, his small shoulders began to quake and roll with sobbing.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said, turning to the woman. “Look what you’ve done to that poor kid.”

  “That’s an ignorant statement considering the circumstances,” she said. An unpleasant distortion of her pretty daughter’s, her little carnivorous mouth turned narrow and sharp.

  “He brushed up against your daughter in a crowded pool. There’s a hundred people in there.”

  “I am protecting my daughter,” she said. “That’s my job. I am her mother.”

  “God knows with a mother like you I can see why she’s got fear in her heart.”

  Her face, already distorted with anger, seemed to change shape altogether. “I want this man and those children removed from here,” she said, turning to the supervisor.

  “I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir. I’m very sorry.”

  “Did it occur to you that the boy might be telling the truth?” I said. “Did it occur to you that the only reason this woman’s got the upper hand here is because she’s the one who’s going to start shouting? Is that how it works here? The loudest one wins?”

  “This is a difficult situation,” the man said. “If you could understand my position.”

  “I’m not sure your position has anything to do with it,” I said.

  “That boy should be on some sort of registry,” the woman said. “He should be identified and put on some sort of registry. Parks and Recreation should know about people like him. Who knows how many girls he’s done this to.”

  “He’s ten years old!”

  “That’s the scary part,” she said wildly, as if vindicated.

  “What’s scary is people like you destroying a perfectly innocent afternoon.”

  “This afternoon is far from innocent, thanks to you.”

  “And when something bad does happen, what then?” I said. “You won’t even know enough to recognize it. And neither will your daughter because she’s been so warped by you.”

  “Are you threatening us?” she said, pulling the girl tight against her.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’re so completely—”

  The man stepped out from behind his desk, his whistles chiming merrily.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Don’t bother. We’re done here.”

  I slammed the door on the way out. We collected our towels and flip-flops and steered toward the exit.

  “What’s going on?” Quinn said. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Some people are just idiots.”

  That walk seemed to last forever. The corridor echoed with voices and the sounds of locker doors creaking and slamming. We finally emerged on the other side, walked past the teenager handing out the wristbands and stepped out into the bright day.

  Whether the incident had been big enough to merit a larger conversation or simply left behind I couldn’t be sure. Titus had cried, briefly, but seemed fine once we got out of there. One afternoon at the Retiro Park in Madrid something similar had happened to me and Ava. I remembered that now as we walked back into our afternoon. Ava and I had been strolling on a path on a fine spring day when we approached a man lying on the grass with his hand tucked under a heavy coat. I turned Ava in the opposite direction—she was probably seven at the time—before she noticed anything. Nothing happened. We continued our walk, found an open-air café and ordered hazelnut milk shakes. But for days afterward I wondered if I’d done the right thing—turning away from the situation, rather than shaming the man or siccing the police on him.

  I didn’t tell Nate about the woman at the pool when we sat up later that night talking about the baseball season and the bench-clearing brawl that happened earlier that day at Comerica Park in Detroit. He’d been sitting behind home plate when Runelvys Hernández picked off Carlos Guillén with a bullet pitch to the head. It was a hell of a fastball, he said, and an intentional attack, no doubt about it. We had drinks and a couple of serious Cohibas going. He told the whole story like an old pro recounting the good old days, sitting there rolling that cigar between his fingers or dusting off the ash against the bottom of his sandal. The crickets were humming away out there in the dark. The kids were upstairs watching a movie, and it was like one of those summer nights I remembered from when we were kids and it seemed that our neighborhood had little or no connection to the world as we knew it in the daytime, as if the dark were a knife that split open the world to show us another dimension entirely.

  Monica came by the house to collect the boys in the morning. I was in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and going through the listings a real-estate agent had sent over. I’d started looking for a space for the new academy by then. Nate was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. When the doorbell rang, I saw the sad look of resignation descend over his face. Slowly he closed the paper, got up and went to let her in.

  I heard only a tinge of impatience and tension when a female voice said, “But I’d like to meet him, if you don’t mind.”

  A strained silence followed, and the clearing of a throat, then the sound of a heel turning on the polished floor. Upstairs, a heavy rapid thumping began, as if one of the boys had started performing ollies on a skateboard up there in the hallway.

  An athletic-looking woman, blond and broad-shouldered, Monica was exactly the sort of girl my brother used to date in high school. We shook hands in the hallway by the stairs after Nate went up to hurry the kids along. She was wearing faded jeans, a baseball cap, a red blouse and sandals. I knew she worked as a producer on a live call-in sports show called The Sports Animal and, since moving in with the Swedish businessman, had started training for a marathon.

  “The boys can’t stop talking about you,” she said, her wide, pleasant mouth breaking into a Julia Roberts smile.

  “They’re great kids. I’m glad I’ve finally met them.”

  It was easy to see her younger son’s dark eyes in hers. I didn’t know what else to say. Here was the woman who’d stabbed my brother in the heart. At that moment I felt for him as deeply as I did for myself. We’d been dealt the same hand and now were obliged to grit our teeth and move on. Upstairs I heard the impatient bass of my brother’s stressed-out voice telling Titus and Quinn to get ready for the transfer.

  “I wanted to say thank you,” she sa
id. We were in the kitchen now, standing in the light streaming through the glass doors.

  “For what?” I said.

  “What you did at the pool. Titus called and told me what happened.”

  “That woman was a nut. Don’t mention it.”

  “He said you stuck up for him. That means a lot to me.”

  “You’re welcome. I felt terrible for him.”

  Once they’d cleared out, Nate gave me a long, hard stare. “What do you think about that?”

  “It’s tough,” I said.

  “You’re telling me. Six months ago we’re talking about the Mayan Riviera. It almost feels like a sick joke. Sometimes I think I’d like to stick a fork in her eye.”

  I didn’t know the half of what had gone on between them, but I was prepared and even inclined to take his side. All I knew was that she’d taken a lover, and that was enough for me. She had moved from one bed to another in the space of two or three days. Despite all I knew about my brother’s failings, this fact in my eyes was resonant enough to absolve him of all sins. I didn’t mention this as I listened to him rhyme off his list of complaints about Monica and the general injustice he’d been dealt, but his kids had looked happy to be transferring over to their mother. When they’d finally come downstairs with their little backpacks crammed to overflowing with books and clothes, they’d hung off her in a way that had caused a hopeful note to ring somewhere at the top of my heart. They would be fine with her. It had also caused me to wonder about my own situation with Ava. If the boys were pleased to go off with their mother at that point, wouldn’t my daughter, if pushed, likely follow the same pattern? She would go—in fact had gone—with her mother on countless occasions rather than riding it out with the old man. I didn’t draw this question of loyalty to my brother’s attention. He was as aware of it as I was, and another kick in the balls wasn’t something he needed right then. What he needed to do was vent, to cast Monica as the villain. It was his right to do so. How could you find fault in a man’s anger after such a wounding? I did everything a brother can do at a time like that. I shut up and listened and nodded my head and agreed with him in spirit that she was a lousy human being who could stand to learn a thing or two about common decency and respect.

  That afternoon I turned his situation around in my head. What came to mind was the realization that our loved ones were capable of far more than we were able to handle. Wasn’t that a lesson we could take to the bank—that there were conflicting worlds within us all, and those worlds were ready and willing to defy us at the worst possible moment? As was my own, my brother’s life was proof enough of this. There was no reason to feel surprise that the woman who’d wounded him so deeply had seemed a decent person when we’d spoken—a decent person who’d happened to destroy my brother’s family and then been able to thank me with real sincerity for sticking up for her son—and that it was likely that Nate, suddenly poleaxed and humiliated, was the only person alive who felt as he did about her, which was angry and resentful as hell.

  We took the boys to Toronto’s annual book festival the third weekend of September. I’d moved into my rental by then, a nice three-bedroom semidetached house, and was more or less settled in, physically, anyway; and the office space, under lease now for a five-year term, was in the middle of renovations. There was a fresh bite of autumn in the air, and the sky was clear and wide and blue. It was a rare day. I was feeling the same sort of optimism I recalled experiencing at the start of a new school year, when everything seemed possible, and expectation and promise and goodwill swelled in your heart.

  The festival was staged in the park between the Royal Ontario Museum and the pink-granite edifice of our provincial Parliament buildings. Under the wide canopy and random patches of blue sky, we trolled the booths and kiosks, thumbing through magazines and books. It was carnival, county fair and trade show pinned like a butterfly under a bright autumn sky.

  I hadn’t told Titus that the author of the novels I’d seen him reading and rereading around the house would be signing his books here today. The writer in question was scheduled to give a presentation midafternoon. What this might entail I had no clue, but the advertisement had called it a “signing event,” and I was hopeful that Titus would be pleased. The three-volume series was in the backpack I was carrying, and now, twenty minutes before the event would begin, we snacked on hot dogs at a picnic table under a big maple. I was watching people flowing past, taken by the simplicity of the moment and the warm sun on my face, when in the crowd I saw the woman I’d dated and lived with back in my university days. Her name was Holly Grey, and she had been my first love.

  It was very clearly her. I knew this with absolute certainty, though people passed between us and her back was partially turned. It helped, I suppose, that she’d neither gained nor lost any weight, and her hair was much the same, despite being cut shorter now than I remembered it. I was suddenly in another time and place. And then after an instant I was back again.

  She was wearing a long grey skirt, a light blue blouse and a leather-strap necklace that looped three or four times around her neck. She looked elegant and graceful and beautiful. In fact she looked better than she had at twenty-three. I saw her hands moving with that casual familiarity I remembered, and when she turned her head slightly, I caught the smile at the corner of her mouth.

  She was standing in line with a young man at the roti and shawarma stand, close enough that I could have called out to her if I’d wanted to. Holly seemed, I didn’t know what—happy? Animated? Pleased with the world? At that moment I was a man gazing into the deepest pool of them all, that of the irretrievable past, and trying to figure out his part in it. I could see only Holly’s back and arms and hands, which were moving as gracefully as if she were illustrating a story for the benefit of the young man she was standing with. I remembered that about her. She was animated. Once, she’d scratched her forearm so hard with a fingernail—making some point I don’t recall—that she actually drew blood. I can’t say I was moved to jealousy or regret when I saw her now, though a powerful nostalgia took root in my heart. It was an odd stirring that startled me, some combination of puzzlement, awe and whimsy.

  She turned as the music began. I hadn’t noticed the silence, but when the heavy steel drums started somewhere behind us, the clamor filled the park as if a new light had been thrown down from the sun, and the world felt cheery and bright. It was an African or Caribbean lineup, and the six or seven individuals, dressed in yellow and white and orange robes, moved together, knee-bend for knee-bend, shoulder to shoulder, with rhythmic ease. Now I saw Holly’s face clearly for the first time, and I thought for a second as my heart trembled that she saw me, too. The young man was handsome and in his early thirties, holding a stack of books between his right forearm and chest. They stepped forward and placed their order and in a moment, after they were served, started off down the busy street and disappeared in the crowd. She was gone. But the woman I thought I’d never see again had established some warbling new presence in my life. I strained my neck, peering through the press of bodies. It hardly mattered that she hadn’t seen me or that I’d never lay eyes on her again and that it was unlikely that any thought of me crossed her mind more than once a year when conversation turned to failed love or the tumble of years. What mattered was that I’d been offered a glimpse into my younger heart.

  As we moved across the green now, the strange sensation that I’d made contact with my past began to subside. The boys were hanging off my arms, half wrestling, taken in by the fair’s high spirit. The leaves above our heads moved in a gentle rolling motion against the blue sky. I lifted Quinn over my shoulders and helicoptered him and let him down again and watched him wobble off in a dizzied circle.

  We found our tent, a big white marquee, and gathered around were a hundred or more kids and parents. The man who’d been speaking with Holly Grey was standing beside the lectern talking to someone seated in the first row of stacking chairs. Finally the crowd began to settle,
the people shuffling around and clearing their throats, and then Holly stood up from the front row and stepped to the microphone. She smiled, waiting for the audience to fall silent, and as she did I felt a strange and distant hope that we might both fall back in time, and those good years we’d shared would be ours again.

  Holly was the editor of the books we’d come to have signed, and the author, she declared with familiar confidence, was a wonderful talent she took great pride in working with. She spoke briefly before introducing him, and twenty minutes later, after reading a few pages from his books, he invited everyone to the signing table where a line of young readers was already forming. By now the sun had moved behind the wall of buildings on the park’s western edge. It was past four o’clock, and I was standing off to the side, thinking about that part of my life I’d shared with Holly and the slippage of time that beguiles us all, when I heard my name called.

  “Charlie Bellerose? Oh my God. Charlie. I can’t believe this!”

  “Hey. Wow,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  I had constructed conversations based on just such a chance meeting many times in my imagination. In these fantasies she was as I had always liked to remember her—warm, joyful, and welcoming. Of course I hadn’t let her change one bit in these reveries. A lover from your past will retain all those youthful qualities that have long since fallen away from your own life. She will remain emergent and at the edge of all possibility, every bit as young as the day you met. I had always wondered what I’d do and say in such a circumstance; and I wondered, too, if she still loved me, or at least the memory of me, as I still loved her, and if all those crises and banalities that occur over the course of your twenties and thirties would have shaped us similarly. Over the past twenty years I’d often felt the shuffle of memory and the small shift in the air that seemed to accompany this sensation and tried to remind myself that the nostalgia afflicting me wasn’t so unusual—that a father and husband of my age might look back in wonder with good reason. And then the air would clear, and the nostalgia would vanish as quickly as it had come, these thoughts of my first love retreating again into the dim recesses of memory.