Going Home Again (14 page)

I called ahead the next morning and booked a flight, then left a message telling Hilary what was going on. I got Nate on the phone as I rode in the back of the airport limo.

“Hey, brother. What’s with you?” he said.

I filled him in on the situation.

“Go get ’em, tiger,” he said.

I arrived at check-in buoyed by the thought of my resilience. I was dogged. I’d make it clear that I wouldn’t be played or pushed around or back down. It was my right to see my daughter on Christmas Day. After I checked in, I emptied my pockets and passed through the scanner. Because I was traveling with carry-on only, I saw the agent who’d let me through the first layer of security make eye contact with the two manning the scanner. I slipped off my belt, whose buckle was a modest stainless-steel rectangle that might hardly have beeped, and passed without consequence through the X-ray. Nor did I beep when the agent on the other side traced the contours of my arms and legs and chest with his handheld metal detector. But the world had changed, it seemed, and no longer accommodated the father who decided on an impulse to visit his daughter in another country. Nor did it trust men traveling with a single handbag on a ticket purchased that morning. I slipped my belt back on, gathered up the contents of
my pockets and moved along, but two agents met me before I hit the escalator and led me back in the direction I’d come from. In a moment I was sitting in a box of a room facing two men who looked just as unhappy to be working on Christmas Eve as I was to be pinned down here, minutes from missing my flight.

“Okay, then. Let’s see,” the first man said, thumbing through my passport. “Looks like you do a lot of traveling.”

The other guy standing to his right obviously took less pleasure in harassing passengers than his partner did.

I told him I owned and operated five international language schools and that travel was an integral part of my business.

“Is that right?” he said.

“Can you tell me what the issue is here?”

He didn’t seem interested in answering this question.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” I said. “I need to get this plane.”

“What’s in Paris? Is it a problem if I ask you that?”

“My daughter,” I said. “No, it’s not a problem.”

“Family visit, then?”

“Yes.”

He continued flipping the pages. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Ava Bellerose,” I said.

“She lives in Paris, does she?”

“Just visiting. She lives in Madrid with her mother.”

“And these are last-minute travel plans? Spur-of-the-moment sort of thing?”

“Her mother and I don’t live together,” I said. “I’m adapting to circumstances.”

He looked up and smiled. “Good,” he said. “I like that. You were in Istanbul last year.”

“Yes.”

“Why would that be the case?”

“I run five language schools. I told you—three in Spain, one each in Dublin and Toronto. I travel for my business.”

“And do you associate with known terrorists, Mr. Bellerose, and are you now or have you ever been involved with any terrorist dealings?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Just my ex-wife,” I said.

He smiled again. “I see,” he said, tilting his head slightly.

“No. Never.”

“Nothing beyond your domestic situation, Mr. Bellerose?”

“This is ridiculous. You know it is.”

“You understand our concern here.”

“I’m answering your questions. I fly twenty times a year and probably have for the past fifteen years. Why all of a sudden do I want to blow up a plane to Paris?”

I was aware that this wasn’t helping my case any.

“No one said anything about blowing up planes,” he said. He didn’t look amused. He never had to begin with, but he looked worse now. He left the room with my passport. The other man stayed with me, his arms crossed over his chest. I watched the hands on the clock on the wall angle closer and closer to the time
they’d shut down boarding on my flight. I smiled at my guard and imagined him shuffling me off to some black site where desperate cries from the next cell were the only human communication I’d ever hear again.

The other agent returned with my passport, and he handed it to me and held the door. “Christmas in Paris,” he said. “You’re one lucky man.”

I walked back into the teeming concourse, armpits soaked, knees trembling, and arrived at my gate with two minutes to spare.

It was still dark when I landed at Charles de Gaulle on Christmas morning. I’d slept for an hour or two sometime in the middle of the flight. My heart was racing in my chest, my eyes were burning, and in the distance I saw the red blinking lights of airport support vehicles crisscrossing the tarmac. It looked cold and miserable outside. When I switched on my phone and called Isabel, it rang through to her service. After customs I tried again, then took a taxi to Boulevard Saint-Michel as the morning sun came up through a cloud bank that covered the city. It cast a silver light over the road and against the grey buildings, and as the cab rolled ever closer to my destination, I began to doubt that Ava would be there waiting for me. This hadn’t occurred to me before now. What if they’d left for the countryside, maybe even gone back to Madrid? There was no guarantee she’d be anywhere I’d know to look. For a moment the terrifying scenario that I’d never see her again gripped my imagination. Had they kidnapped
her for real, I wondered, taken her away to some strange place to start life all over again?

I had the driver wait while I leaned on the intercom with my eyes closed, almost reduced to a state of prayer. I didn’t know if I could handle a rejection the size of the one that was shaping up before me. As the tinny buzzing of the intercom ran up through the building’s innards, the absurdity of my situation grew obvious in all its grey dimensions. I’d almost turned and started back to the cab when a familiar voice called out.

“Daddy? That’s not really you, is it?” she said in Spanish. “Look up. Look up. At the camera!”

The IV drip of Ava’s voice flowed into my veins.

“You bet it is, peanut,” I said, looking up and giving her a big smile.

“Oh my God. Are you coming up? Come, come. Pablo’s smiling at me now.”

Of course I had no interest in meeting the man who’d whisked my estranged wife and daughter off to the City of Light. “I’m here to see you, though. I can meet him some other time, all right? Come on down. Tell your mother I’m here and that I want to take you out somewhere. I want to show you off to Paris.”

Hands in my pockets, I smiled at the old lady sitting on the red sofa pushed up against the far wall. She held a grey cat in her lap, the snakelike tail the only moving part of this portrait.
“Joyeux Noël,”
I said. She shrugged her narrow shoulders and returned her attention to the cat.

When my daughter appeared a moment later, I picked her up and turned her once in the air the way
I used to when she was little, a greeting we’d perfected over the years. It was a graceful spin involving three steps, my hands gripping at her armpits.

Isabel stood to the side with her arms folded over her chest. She was surprised, first and foremost. She was also furious that I’d discovered their Christmas hideaway in Paris. She was equally impressed, though, it seemed to me at the time, that I’d cared enough to get on a plane and fly through the night to claim some part of this day with my daughter. I was hopped up on adrenaline and caffeine and pleased with myself. The heavy sky outside the lobby window was promising at least a flurry or two, and I had, through this flying visit, trumped any gift or gesture likely to emerge from her mother’s new pairing with this celebrated Spaniard.

“We’ll talk about this later,” she said.

I put my arm around Ava’s head in a play headlock. “I’m looking forward to it. Right now this one needs a monster plate of foie. I’m going to fatten up this goose.”

Isabel stood at the door of the building and watched us leave. In a moment we got back in the cab and were driving through Paris. I felt like I’d just raided the enemy’s storehouse and was escaping with the crown jewels. I asked the driver to take us to Notre-Dame.

“I bet you’d like him,” Ava said. “He can talk about lots of things.”

“Your mom’s new boyfriend, you mean?”

“Pablo. Yes.”

“I’m happy to hear that. Mom deserves a nice guy.”

“She chose you once upon a time.”

“She did, didn’t she?”

“He’s jealous of you, Daddy.”

“I guess that means he and I have a little something in common,” I said.

“You’re jealous of him?”

“Hey, your mother’s a catch, right?” I said. “He’s a lucky guy to have her.”

Ava turned away and watched the city go by. “I don’t think you mean that,” she said, still facing the window.

“Why wouldn’t I mean that? Of course I do.”

“You wouldn’t be living in
Canada
if you meant that.”

“Of course I would. I’ve got that new school over there, remember? That takes a lot of my time.
All
my time.”

“You think I’m stupid,” she said, turning to look at me now. “You think I’m just some stupid kid you can lie to, and I’ll just believe whatever you tell me.”

The adrenaline high I’d ridden into town on had bottomed out in less time than she needed to finish the thought.

“That’s not true,” I said.

She made a cutting face, then turned back to the window and watched the beautiful city roll by as she considered the sad reality that had placed us in this cab on a lonely Christmas Day in a foreign place. It all came crashing down on me like the weight of the world because she was right, and now the incomprehensible brainteaser that was our life seemed from this
new angle even cloudier than it had just a day before. I reached for my carry-on bag at my feet, zipped it open and pulled out a present.

“I almost forgot,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Your timing’s impeccable,” she said, acidly, taking it from me and placing it in her lap without opening it.

“It’s a promise from me to you.”

“I’ve had a few of those before,” she said.

“Please, open it.”

Careful not to demonstrate any enthusiasm, she hooked a finger under the wrapper and tore. “Oh, wow. A book,” she said.

“It’s a book of promises. Things we’ll see and do together when you come over next summer. Go on. Open it to where that bookmark is.”

It was the coffee-table book I’d flipped through at Nate’s house the day I arrived in Canada six months earlier. She flipped ahead and found the photograph of my brother’s cottage.

“There, see?”

“It’s a building,” she said.

“It’s a building, okay. But it’s the future, too. It’s what you’re going to see when you visit me next summer. That’s your uncle’s cottage. We’ll all go up there.”

Shot at dusk from the lake, the photograph showed the log cabin, its windows blaring with golden light, framed by a stand of jack pines. In the foreground there was a small white dock with a canoe pulled up alongside.

“Is he rich or something?”

“He must be a little bit, anyway. And you see that tire tied to the tree on the left there?”

“You swing on it, right? I’ve seen that in movies.”

“That’ll be you,” I said.

The streets of Paris were all but empty this morning. Wreaths were strung from lampposts. A scooter chugged by carrying the driver and his passenger off to some seasonal rendezvous.

“You can swim and read all day there. They have a Jet Ski, too, and a motorboat. But maybe you’re more of the canoe type. Let me look at you. Oh, yeah. You’re definitely a canoe girl. You won’t believe this, but all that water you see in the picture—it was frozen solid when I was there last week.”

“You were there last week?”

“It was all white. Snow up to your knees.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

“This is Canada we’re talking about.”

“Did you see any polar bears?”

“No bears. But we could order some.”

“Was the ice thick?” she said, smiling now.

“Thick? We skated on it!”

For a kid raised in Madrid I knew this would sound as fantastic as camels in the desert might have seemed to me at that age.

“I guess that’s pretty cool,” she said.

“You’ll love it. That’s another promise.”

“You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Mom would never let me go. I’m just twelve. And
she’s
never going to want to go over there.”

“No, probably not. But you’re thirteen next summer, and that’s official teenager status. That’s when
you
start telling
us
what to do.”

“As if,” she said.

“You’ll see.”

“Anyway, in case you’ve forgotten, my birthday’s at the
end
of the summer.”

We got out at the next intersection and walked up into Saint-Germain a few blocks, my carry-on slung over my shoulder. As we waited for a traffic light, Ava slipped her arm in mine, and I pulled her in close to me and kissed the top of her head.

After we got a pastry and some hot chocolate at a little café, we leaned against the balustrade of the Pont Notre-Dame and watched the sightseeing boats passing beneath us.

“You’re going to meet someone over there and marry her and have a new family,” she said. “And then you’re going to just forget about us.”

“Is that what you really think?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It happens all the time.”

“Not with me it doesn’t. Not in a million years. That boat coming now?” I said, nodding.

“What about it?”

“I’m like that boat,” I said.

“Leave it to you to compare yourself to a
boat
.”

“Why would you want to sail anywhere else in the world once you’ve sailed through the heart of Paris? That’s what I’m thinking.”

 Eight