Table Of ContentTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Bock
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Simultaneously published in Canada by HarperCollins Canada.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bock, Dennis, [date]
Going home again / by Dennis Bock. — First edition
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-38534969-7
1. Divorced men—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction.
3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.B559G65 2013
813’.54—dc23 2012050903
Jacket image © Imagestopshop/Alamy
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
v3.1
first loves
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Move on, move on, as we are directed to
do at the scene of an accident, or a crime.
—John Banville
Prologue
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 carry-on 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.
Ava liked to trot out riddles and tongue twisters and brainteasers as
often as she could. I’d decided it was her way of focusing the mind on
the solvable mysteries in life rather than dwelling on the
incomprehensibles, like the annoying head-scratcher that her parents’
marriage presented.
“This one will take you at least the weekend to figure out.”
“Hold tight,” I said, grabbing two corners of the table for emphasis.
“Okay, here goes,” she said, looking at her mother, then me. “What’s
the difference between a cat and a comma?”
Isabel and I traded glances. We both put on an expression that showed
our daughter we were really thinking.
“No idea,” Isabel said.
“I can see a lot of ways they’re different,” I said, “but none of them is
very clever.”
“Wait. A cat and a coma?” Isabel said.
Ava swiped the air with an imaginary pencil. “Comma! Comma!”
“This one’s a killer,” I said.
“Just how I like them,” she said.
“Good thing we have the whole weekend to stew over it.”
A troubled look swallowed Ava’s pretty smile when I said that. She
began working her lips over the braces on her teeth. They still bothered
her, I could see, though she wasn’t much of a complainer about things
like this.
“But we might not last through the whole weekend,” she said. “What
about that? People are dying all over Europe. Fifty people in France
alone!”
“You just said it was forty-one,” I told her.
“That was yesterday. By now it’s fifty.”
“What a tragedy,” her mother said.
“You better not be giving up,” Ava said. “Mom always says you give
up too fast. In everything.”
Isabel’s cheeks filled with color.
