Going Home Again Read online

“Miles was gone when I woke up. He’s still not here.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “He’s probably crashed out at the library, sound asleep on a stack of chemistry textbooks.”

  The apartment was quiet for a few hours. I was sitting on the couch underlining places and things I wanted to see in the Let’s Go Greece I’d been carrying around for weeks. Holly sat at the far end of the couch dipping in and out of The Magic Mountain. It was obvious that she wasn’t able to focus. By now I was also starting to think it was strange that Miles wasn’t home yet and that he hadn’t called to say where he was. Then around eight o’clock two police officers came to the door, two big Francophones with mustaches and worried expressions. They asked us if Miles Esler lived here. Yes, we told them, he did. When I asked what the problem was, they said he’d been found in the north end of the city. He had fallen thirty feet from a pedestrian footbridge. My best friend was dead.

  Five

  I thought constantly about my father and mother in the weeks that followed. All I had left of them by now were memories and a few keepsakes and photographs. They didn’t add up to much. Not enough, anyway. I knew what to expect after Miles died: the same thing. Over time all those details that were still so fresh in my head would start slipping away. That terrified me. I tried to recall specific moments and burn them into my memory, things we’d done together, conversations we’d had. Him leaning up against the couch in his apartment and talking that first night I stayed over. I thought about those afternoons we’d spent after school down by the lakeshore watching the gulls and talking about music and girls and getting out of Toronto. I tried to burn his memory into my brain. I promised myself over and over that I’d never let myself forget him. I created lists in my head of things we’d done, places we’d been to, things we’d talked about. Each of these categories spun off in dozens of different directions, each of which I charted as meticulously as someone moving along various branching paths that carried him deeper and deeper into some mystery. I could not let these memories fade as I’d let certain memories of my parents slip away. I remembered them now as people I’d once known and loved deeply, but always flittering about was the odd sensation that I’d made them up out of thin air, that their lives had been as fleeting as a dream. I don’t mean to say I doubted they had ever lived and loved me and helped make me who I was. But had they really known me? Had I known them? I was a boy when they died. And that boy was a stranger to me now. When I tried to remember them, I pictured the family together and where I would have stood, but seeing my old self, I recognized only the surface of this person. I could not imagine myself fully into that family portrait.

  I recalled that my mother wore her hair as all mothers did at that time, cut short with high bangs, and that my father, a carpenter, seemed unable to sit still. He was always busy, always at work. He had come from Belgium at the age of twelve and met my mother in 1958 at the age of twenty-two at a Victoria Day fireworks display. At the public park where they later took their young sons for picnics and Easter-egg hunts, they watched rockets explode over Lake Ontario. This story had been told to me a number of times. My father, by then apprenticed at the shipyard, led his shy date away from the crowd gathered there, and together they stood in darkness at the edge of the water and watched mesmerized, hearts agallop, as if the invention of the world were at hand. This was a moment of first love, my mother assured me. In another memory I am feverish and lying under a blanket watching television. I was home from school. My father returned much earlier from work than he normally did and surprised me with a can of ginger ale, the first pop I ever tasted. Who remembers their first soft drink, that explosive sugary fizz? He sat on the edge of the couch and slipped the white straw he’d taken from his shirt pocket into the can and told me to take a sip. He smelled of wood shavings and still might’ve had sawdust caught in his eyebrows. He was the handsomest man I knew. On that afternoon he took his carpenter’s pencil out from behind his ear and stuck it in the can with my straw and pretended to drink.

  The cemetery grounds on the day of the funeral were covered in a light dusting of snow. There was no birdsong in the air, and the trees were bare and grey. Miles’s uncles and aunts and his mother’s friends all knew that his last night had been spent with me and Holly. I couldn’t help thinking that each and every one of them held the two of us responsible for his death. Though no one said anything of the sort, I just couldn’t shake the feeling. After we each let a small shovelful of soil fall into the grave, Holly and I walked to the gravel road we would follow back to the cars. Miles’s mother approached us as we stood there waiting for our ride. Her face looked washed out and pale; she had dark circles under her eyes. We’d already spoken about the night Miles died. I didn’t know then that she’d never have the answer as to whether her son had jumped or fallen, but at the time she needed to believe his death was an accident, as I myself did. I didn’t lie when Mrs. Esler asked me what I knew. I told her what I could, that we’d been celebrating and had gotten very drunk and that he’d left the apartment after I fell asleep. She asked if he’d been depressed or had said anything that might indicate something was wrong. I told her that he’d been the Miles I had always known and loved.

  Now at the edge of the cemetery she told me and Holly that we were the two people her son had loved most in the world and that it was our job to carry his memory with us forever. I promised her I would. Holly cried and put her hand over her mouth, and Mrs. Esler touched my face with the tips of her fingers, then turned and walked down the path, back in the direction of the grave.

  We drove Miles’s mother from Toronto to Montreal two days later. She sat in the passenger seat holding his high school graduation portrait the whole time. I was driving, but it was her car—the blue Impala he and I had driven around the city, listening to music and hoping to meet girls. Holly was staring out the side window from the backseat. I tried to make eye contact with her in the rearview, though she never once looked up. We drove for six straight hours without saying a word, and when we got into Montreal, we packed his clothes and books and papers into boxes. Still, to me it felt like he might walk through the door at any minute. His mother left his furniture and his records. “He would’ve wanted you to have them,” she said.

  One afternoon a week later I was approached by two strangers in the street. It took me a moment to understand that they weren’t from here and that I had no clue either as to where I was. Only when they asked for directions to Schwartz’s Deli did I snap out of the spell I’d been walking under. They wore the expectant and pleased look of people on vacation in a place they’ve never been before. After I got my bearings, I pointed them in the right direction, and that’s when it occurred to me that I was supposed to be somewhere else. My plane had left for Greece without me, carrying with it my dream of a wider world.

  These meandering walks quickly became a daily ritual. I’d leave the apartment before sunup and walk for eight or nine hours. Half the time I didn’t have any destinations in mind. I usually found a café or restaurant to break up these long and exhausting days. But more often than not I found it best to keep walking; it was a much better distraction, with the mind focused outward on the next street ahead or the shops I passed or the people I saw. Sometimes I saw Miles waiting at an intersection or standing in the window of a dépanneur, then I’d look again and he was gone.

  I discovered that the city hadn’t changed after my friend’s death and offered no outward sign of this great loss. No one seemed to care. The streetlights still burned pleasantly that winter. People with expectant smiles passed me in the street. The falling snow glittered in the storefront lights along the Rue Saint-Hubert. I had nowhere to go now. I barely saw Holly the rest of that winter, though I slept on her couch every night.

  Then, a few days after watching the Challenger disaster on television, I knew something had to change. I went out and found a job teaching ESL with the continuing-education program of the Montreal District School Board. It was
volunteer work, but that didn’t matter. I needed to do something with myself. Seeing those astronauts die on live TV served to confuse me even more than I already was. I was alone in a universe of random chaos and didn’t know which way to turn. If something didn’t change soon, I knew the hopelessness I was sinking into deeper and deeper was going to end up becoming a permanent state of being.

  Holly was usually gone when I got up in the morning, and when I got home in the evening, her bedroom door was shut tight. I had no idea if she was in there or not. On the rare occasion I saw her, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, we didn’t speak. She couldn’t even look at me. An invisible wall had been put up between us, for reasons I couldn’t grasp or ask her about.

  One rainy spring day I walked out to the footbridge and leaned over the handrail. It spanned a one-lane road that carried traffic to a thickly treed neighborhood farther along. A car approached and passed beneath me, then everything was silent again. The bridge seemed to emerge organically from the sides of the valley it spanned. The ironwork was painted green, and the rust spots, long red teardrops staining the horizontal girders, pointed down like arrows. Miles and I had crossed it many times together, and now I tried to recall if he’d said anything I should’ve taken some deeper meaning from.

  One morning I lay on the pullout couch, head buried under a pillow, listening to Holly get ready for her day. She walked back and forth through the small apartment much as she had that first weekend I’d stayed there. I didn’t think about her slipping into bed with me now. That was gone. I fantasized about her simply acknowledging me, taking notice, offering a simple gesture, a smile. I couldn’t understand the anger she felt. It all seemed directed toward me, almost as if I’d pushed him to his death. I listened to her naked feet treading the floor and dreamed about going away and starting my life over far away from the cold that had settled between us. When the door closed behind her, I stood by the window looking down over the street and drew a face in the condensation on the window. The face had no mouth. I found a scrap of paper and drew a rough image of the footbridge Miles had fallen from. I scratched it out and turned the page and sketched another face. I put on some music, brewed a pot of coffee and filled the rest of the notebook. I started drawing every morning after Holly left for class. I only worked a few hours in the afternoon three days a week, so free time was one of my problems. I’d put on one of Miles’s records, flip open one of those pads and disappear into my imagination. I didn’t have the concentration to read, however hard I tried. My mind was all over the place. But drawing I could do. It helped me focus on something outside myself. I listened to every record he owned, ones I’d never seen or heard before. It was a way of keeping him close. I found a record of Romanian folk dances buried at the back of the crate one morning. I had no idea where it could’ve come from, but the music was strange and beautiful and full of mournful Gypsy wailings and rhythms that made me think I was listening to coded messages from beyond.

  Two months later I started dating one of the other teachers in the volunteer program. She was older, twenty-nine, from La Plata, Argentina, and taught Spanish. Marina had short red hair and enjoyed a reputation around the department as being a pleasant and dedicated teacher. I’d been interested in her from the moment we met. She had a pretty face and smile and always moved her hips with a lovely feminine rolling motion when I saw her walking between the staff room and her class. I’d catch up with her and flirt, making it clear I was interested but not desperate. We’d been on friendly terms since I started volunteering, but it took me a while to decide if her pleasant nature was natural and unprompted or had something to do with me or if she’d made some conscious decision that a winning attitude would serve her well in a new city.

  After we started sleeping together, she asked if I’d ever lost anyone close to me. I didn’t tell her about my parents, only about Miles. We were in bed, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Your best friend?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t say if she’d lost anyone herself, though I suspected she had. Sometimes she’d curl into me and talk in Spanish—a language I didn’t understand then—for as long as an hour. Maybe she wanted to introduce me to the sound of it, or to express things to herself that she couldn’t in English, despite her fluency in it. I had no idea what she was saying to me, of course. For all I knew she could have been talking about afternoon picnics with her family back in La Plata. There might have been a more sinister bent to these stories, I couldn’t tell. The disappearances, death squads, a family with a military secret, perhaps. I was beginning to read about these terrible histories in the newspapers. But if such stories touched her directly, I never knew. I felt like I’d stepped outside of my world for a short time when I was with her, though, and the sadness felt different, still there but somehow altered, and I was almost happy.

  I spent many hours at her apartment that spring. She shared a flat with a roommate just twenty minutes from where Holly lived. On Fridays I met her at the high school after work and walked her home. I found out later she had more than one lover, that her kind nature was not reserved strictly for me. This thought didn’t bother me. We spent most of our time together in her bed. But one afternoon I brought her back to my pullout couch.

  “These are very strange,” she said, leafing through one of my sketch pads naked, her knees raised against her chest. “What do you call these things in English?”

  “Doodles.”

  “You doodle. I like your doodles. English is a funny language.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  One evening I went down to the basement and piled my books of drawings into the furnace, then sat with the superintendent and watched them burn. He was an old Italian fellow with a big, round head and thin arms. He wore a white muscle shirt while he tinkered away at the building’s pipes and mysterious inner workings. I had a vague understanding that his wife had died some years before Holly and Miles arrived here and that he’d taken over from the previous super, who according to tenant lore had experienced some trouble with the law and was forcefully removed from his flat on the fourth floor. He was broad-shouldered and didn’t say much, this new man, and sat peacefully on a small paint-splattered chair beside his workbench, his platter-sized hands resting in his lap, while my graphite cartoon drawings went up in smoke.

  The outdoor terraces on Saint-Denis opened again, and on a fine night sometime in early summer I stepped out onto the fire escape to enjoy the first pleasant evening after a week of rain. I climbed up to the roof of our building and found Holly alone, scooping soil into a five-gallon pail from a large burlap sack. I hadn’t seen her in days. At least twenty of these pails were gathered around her like a brood of children, and in each was a small circular garden. I took this in for a moment, my heart sinking, then started back down the stairs. But when she called my name I stopped, took a deep breath and turned around. “You’re busy,” I said, walking toward her over the flat tarry surface. Her hands were stained the color of the soil she’d been turning.

  “It’s quiet up here,” she said. “It helps me think.”

  “You’ve got a nice view, anyway.”

  “We’ll eventually be able to do something with these tomatoes, once they come up,” she said. “The super grows them. You’ve met him, right? He’s from Verona or somewhere like that. I’ve been helping out a bit up here.”

  I watched her for a moment without saying anything.

  Then she said, “You really like her, don’t you?”

  “Marina? Yes.”

  There was another silence.

  “I miss him,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ve been horrible to you. I know that now. I’ve been horrible. I guess I got lost.”

  “It hasn’t been the greatest year,” I said.

  “Don’t ever let me do that to you again, okay?”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like crying. I felt like calling her a se
lfish fucking cunt. But I knew as I stood there that I’d been as bad or worse. The city lay before us under a blue dome of sky, and over the rooftops and the distant cap of trees a great cloud the size of a mountain rolled upward and split into fractals of brilliant color.

  “It’s been harder than I ever could’ve imagined,” she said.

  I felt my heart bursting in two directions. This was the first time we’d mentioned Miles since he’d died, so now the emotions came rushing in. I felt like screaming or jumping off the roof, but I was also jubilant. This was the sort of acknowledgment I’d been waiting to hear for years from my brother, that he’d been wounded, as I had been, or that he felt something true and deep about our parents. He still hadn’t said anything of the sort, but here was a glimpse into Holly’s heart. It was as simple as that—the softness in her voice, this small sign of contrition and connection. Suddenly our grief was pulling us together, not tearing us apart.

  “There’s going to be lots of tomatoes this year,” she said, wiping her hands. “They won’t be ready till the end of the summer, though.”

  “I don’t know anything about tomatoes,” I said, stepping forward and kissing her on the mouth.

  She just stared at me, speechless.

  “You don’t need to be in love with me,” I said. “You don’t need to say anything.”

  She turned and walked to the far side of the roof, where the evening was being swallowed and burned up by the city lights. I went back downstairs, thinking I’d just ruined everything, and when she entered the apartment an hour later, she pretended nothing had happened.

  In August we picked and ate those tomatoes and felt their sun-warmed juices running down our forearms. We started spending time together. We carried a hibachi and two lawn chairs up there and often opened a bottle of wine and ate something and sat and talked for hours and watched the light change over the city. It’s difficult now to recall the conversations we had, or how much time we actually spent talking, but the weather was good, and I remember watching the flickering lights and believing that our lives had finally been allowed to begin. I hadn’t kissed her a second time, nor had she responded one way or another to my declaration that she didn’t have to love me back. In the months that passed we never spoke about it. Each night after we came back downstairs, I pulled out the couch, stretched out and waited for the sound of the bedroom door to creak and the footsteps and the rush of pleasure as she slipped into my bed. But her door never opened.