The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  “BOOM!! BOOM!! WHOOSH!! WHOOSH!!” Aunt Abigail shouted, simulating what she imagined were the sounds of depth charges exploding underwater and sending gushers of bomb-roiled water skyward. “And everybody cheered! Arty saved them all!”

  Sometimes, in my own mind’s movie, I am my father basking in the warm glow of the cheering until I suddenly notice all the bodies flying out of, and then falling back into the sea. In other variations of the same dream, it is the next morning, and I stand on the deck staring into a sea filled with bobbing dead bodies. I know these are the bodies of young Germans the same age as my father was then, but all the dead faces that stare back at me are Dad’s bloated, mottled, and blue-ish face, covered with a light dusting of snow.

  “Arty couldn’t stop crying after that,” Abigail explained to Mariela, who looked stricken. I reached over, placed my hand on hers. She looked at Abigail, then at me, then at her lap. What was she thinking? I had no clue then how painful this story must have been for her. Abigail continued, relentlessly. “He kept repeating he’d killed them all, that he was a murderer. Everybody told him it wasn’t his fault, that if it hadn’t been for him, they’d be the ones floating dead in the water. But it didn’t help. I think it became worse for him because the war ended right after that. It made their deaths even more pointless.”

  Abigail is looking at me now. “Your mother and I were invited to the ceremony where they gave him his medal, you know. There was a navy band. Some admiral came from Ottawa, made a big speech about what a hero Arty was. I was so proud of him. I remember seeing the tears rolling down Arty’s cheeks, but I didn’t understand why he was crying. The next day, he applied for a discharge, and sent the medal back. And that was the end of it.”

  Noticing Mariela’s unease, I made a show of looking at my watch. “We have to go,” I announced to Mariela’s relief. “My daughter and her son are due at our house at any moment.”

  “You sure you can’t stay?” Aunt Abigail suddenly seemed desperate, and desperately lonely. “It’s Friday and we’re having fish sticks for dinner. They’re very good.”

  I needed to visit her more often. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow,” I said.

  I stood up then, reached deep into my pocket, felt for the metal disk, rubbed it between my fingers.

  ****

  Kim’s pre-gathering visit went much better—and much worse.

  In the months since we’d discovered our own disconnected connection, Kim and I had spent hours on the phone—I finally bought a new cordless model with its own answering machine—spilling out our life’s stories to each other. I told her truths I rarely told myself. That I’d lied to everyone when I claimed I was supposed to be in the car with Donnie, for instance, and that that inadvertently (perhaps advertently) enabled me to insinuate myself into Eleanor’s life. I told her about the pregnancy and Eleanor’s sudden disappearance and my failure to figure out where she’d gone or to find her. I even confessed my decades-long obsession with the Illusion of Eleanor and how I had allowed that to affect my own life and my lack of love life. The most embarrassing, painful-to-acknowledge reality was that I had actually thought very little (to nothing) about the fact there might be a real child until the night I picked up the phone and heard her voice. Luckily, Kim seemed happier to finally hear my stories than to judge them—or me.

  Of course, I’d told her about Mariela too, and about my hopes and new-found dreams. She listened more like the psychologist she’d studied to be—“and how did that make you feel?”—than the daughter of the mother whose long shadow I was finally abandoning. “You’ve waited too long,” she said. “You deserve happiness. I hope you will find it.” I did too.

  In the months since Mariela and I had had our last disagreement, and our makeup moment, I had tried to be a better husband, a more social, giving, trusting person. I’d begun inviting Mariela to Steve’s Friday Frivols. She was, as I knew she would be, the star attraction—beautiful, exotic, mysterious. No one questioned—not to my face at any rate—how such a woman could end up with me. The women especially—Steve’s staff consisted mostly of young women in their late twenties or early thirties—seemed drawn to Mariela. They invited her to join them for their regular girls’ night out, which gave Mariela a semi-independent social life and me the opportunity to practise not being jealous. I mostly succeeded.

  Now we—me, Mariela, Sarah, Kim, her little boy—were together at last. While Kim and Sarah made so-pleased-to-meet-you small talk over drinks, Mariela ignored all of us, got down on the floor of our living room, and played with Little Eli. His full name was Donald Elijah. Kim called him Donnie. I was the only one—and only in my head—who referred to him as Little Eli.

  Mariela had made a big production of presenting her step-grandchild with a gift she’d bought, a small stuffed doll. She lay down on her stomach on the floor, held the doll in one hand and made it dance in the air in front of the baby. He would reach for it. Mariela would snatch it away. Reach, snatch, reach, repeat. He laughed with giddy open-mouthed excitement. After a while, Mariela sat up, opened up her arms, and Eli melted into them. She held him close, savoured the sweet baby smell of him. She seemed transformed, transported.

  I thought I understood. Mariela was still young enough to want a child of her own. We had never discussed having children. She had never brought it up, and I had avoided even thinking about such a possibility. I was pushing past my middle fifties. I couldn’t picture myself as a doting father, couldn’t imagine changing diapers, surviving the terrible twos, navigating the teenage tortures, attending various graduations in my walker, the wedding in a wheelchair, greeting my first grandchild on my way to the grave.

  I assumed this floor play was all for my benefit, and that it was all about Mariela’s desire to have a child. I was wrong about that. As I would soon discover.

  4

  “To family,” Sarah declared, raising her champagne flute. “To family,” we all chanted back, raising our flutes in response. We had gathered at Jane’s on the Common—again—and sat together around a large table in the restaurant’s small, semi-private anteroom.

  On this occasion, our “family” consisted of me and Mariela, Sarah (Saul was long gone if not forgotten or forgiven), Sarah’s two grown children, Jacob and Amy, Amy’s lover, Jane Gerstein (who had the modest plus for Sarah of being Jewish to offset her major minus of being more than thirty years older than Amy, which, of course, made her more OK with me), Aunt Abigail, and my daughter, Kimberly, and grandson, Little Eli.

  There was much to celebrate, including my marriage, my newly discovered multi-generational family, even what Sarah now decorously referred to as Amy’s “new life direction.” And, of course, being together as one happy family, now and forever more. Amen.

  There had been remembrance too. Sarah had borrowed her friend Arthur the Architect’s cabin cruiser for the day so we could motor out to just beyond the harbour mouth and scatter my father’s ashes into the sea. “I promise not to get in the way,” Arthur had said, though he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time commiserating with, or perhaps chatting up, Sarah as he stood at the wheel, maneuvering his way from his yacht club mooring to the open ocean. Or perhaps it was Sarah who chose to spend an inordinate amount of time with Arthur. Who was I to judge?

  I still wasn’t sure I’d come to terms with who my father was and what his life had meant to me. I had only recently begun to acknowledge how alike we were, and not just physically, although there was that too. I’d be shaving and glance at the mirror, only to see my father’s eyes staring back at me or hear some long-ago memory of him in my own laughter. Then too there was the fact of how insular and solitary, how closed off from the world, we both were. Had there been some Eleanor at some point in my father’s life? Was she among the unidentified in the old photos in our family album, perhaps that “fucking cunt” of “We’ll Meet Again” fame? Had my mother been his Mariela, saving him from his fi
rst-love obsession? I was probably imposing too much personal parallelism on his life story. It seemed more likely his wartime experiences had pushed him over the edge and into his own abyss without the need for a woman to do the job. Or—and this was more to the frightening point for me—maybe my father’s aloneness was congenital, passed down through the generations from him to me.

  Arthur finally cut the engine and retreated to the cabin below “so you folks can have your time together.” To do what? We had not thought this through, or at least I hadn’t. Was there some sort of formal ceremony involved? Sarah, as she so often did, took charge. She stood on the deck near one side of the vessel, holding the urn with our father’s ashes in her hands, beckoning us to gather round. The boat bobbed in the waves, silent except for the light slapping of water on hull. An intense, Havana-like midsummer sun bounced off the water, glared back at us, stung my eyes.

  “Not all of you knew our father when he was alive,” Sarah began, “but we are all part of him now. By birth, by marriage, by lineage, by love…” she said, casting a meaningful glance at Amy and Jane, who held hands. “He was not always an easy man to know.” She smiled. “As Eli can attest.” I nodded. “But I believe he loved us, especially Eli who cared for him when he could no longer look after himself…. Thank you, Eli.” Mariela wrapped her arm around my back, hugged me closer. “We chose this location, here beyond the mouth of the harbour, to scatter our father’s ashes, because this was an important place for him, an important moment in his life.” Was it? “As a young man, he left the safety of his home to sail across the ocean to serve his country. As some of you know—” she looked at her children, to whom she must have told at least some version of this story—“he was a hero during World War Two, saving the lives of many of his comrades. It wasn’t easy for him. He saw things a young man should not see. It is probably fair to say he never recovered.” Sarah stopped then, trying to recover herself. She looked over at Aunt Abigail, whose perpetually watery eyes seemed even wetter than usual and whose hands were cupped over her mouth, as if to stifle a scream. Sarah finally found her voice again. “We cannot change the past. We cannot undo what has been done. But we, all of us, have a chance now to shape our future, the future of our family. Together. Building on the past, on the lives of those who went before us. So…thank you…Daddy…I miss you.” She wiped a tear from her face. “Let us take a moment, a moment of silence, to remember.”

  Finally, Sarah spoke again, her voice lighter, as if grateful she’d made it this far. “Thank you, everyone,” she said, opening the top of the urn. “Before we say our last goodbyes to our father, I wanted to recite a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It’s about dying, about the sea. I hope you like it, Daddy.” I was astonished. Another revealing, previously unrevealed side of my sister. She spoke clearly, and with conviction.

  Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea.

  Sarah finished, paused, a second moment of silence none of us seemed ready to break until Sarah herself did so. “Now it’s time for us to scatter Arthur Cooper’s ashes.” She reached in, grabbed a handful. “I hope you will each join me by taking some of his ashes and scattering them in the sea.” She passed me the urn. I scooped out some of the ashes in my right hand. His bits were coarser than I’d expected, grainier. I handed the urn to Mariela, who spilled some in her hand, and passed it on.

  Finally, when we each held our handful, Sarah spoke again. “I’d like us to scatter the ashes together. Think a beautiful thought and then, on the count of three, let us join my father with the ocean. One…two…three!”

  We all tossed my father into the air. It did not go as planned. There was a sudden gust of wind and my father’s million little pieces flew back toward the boat and into us. He was in my mouth, my hair, my eyes. Perhaps there was symbolism in that. I had not experienced any beautiful thoughts. But I did manage to surreptitiously reach into my pants pocket and retrieve that small round disk while Sarah counted down. As I tossed my father’s ashes into the air with my right hand, I furtively dropped the object in my left over the side of Arthur’s boat and into the water, where I watched it disappear forever, swallowed up by the sea. It was my father’s Distinguished Service Medal. Gone.

  “Rest in peace,” I whispered.

  ****

  Dinner was finally over, the toasts had all been toasted. Jacob had commandeered Sarah’s rented car to ferry Aunt Abigail back to her nursing home and take Kim and her baby to the downtown hotel where Sarah had booked rooms for all the out-of-town guests. Amy and Jane announced they would walk back to the hotel. Mariela and I sat with Sarah while she settled the bill.

  “I think that went well,” Sarah said, handing the credit card reader back to our server, who smiled in surprise at the size of the tip. “Worth every penny,” Sarah told her as she put the receipt in her purse. “Worth every penny.”

  “So,” she mused after our server had departed, “is this an ending, or a new beginning? So many crossroads to be crossed. For all of us.” She took a sip of her decaf cappuccino. “I’m meeting with my divorce lawyer on Monday. He says Saul will have no choice but to offer up a big guilt-settlement, big enough for a fresh start.” She paused, as if lost in a thought she’d already fully formed. “There’s a teaching job opening up at the law school here. What would you two think if I moved back to Halifax?”

  “That would be lovely,” Mariela chimed in, “to have my sister-in-law in the same city as me.”

  “Yes,” I added, less certainly, “that would be…lovely.”

  “Arthur and I have been talking about spending more time together, just to see what happens between us. Perhaps we will go into the renovation business together, perhaps…something more.”

  She put her cup down, looked directly at me. “You’re now officially my inspiration,” she said.

  “I am?”

  “You are. When Saul left, I was sure my life was over. But then I thought about you. And how you’d found happiness after so many years. And I thought, ‘Why not me too?’ Why not?”

  Sarah stopped for a few moments then, burrowing back again inside her own head. None of us spoke, and then Sarah reached out, put her hands over Mariela’s on the table, held them tight. “I saw you with the baby yesterday, Mariela, saw how you looked,” Sarah said. “You want to be a mother, Mariela. I can see that.” Mariela flushed. Then Sarah turned to me. “I think you’d be an amazing father, Eli. Even now, at your age. I know you would.” My turn to redden. “You could have a baby and I could be the aunty who spoils him. And we’d all live happily ever after.”

  Part of me wanted to believe in Sarah’s happily ever after. Amen. And part of me did believe. All of the tumblers of my existence—my new life with Mariela, my discovery of Kim and my grandson, my new and improved relationship to Sarah—had all magically clicked into place, unlocking the possibility of a future I could not have imagined before. Today’s family gathering had seemed like a turning point, steering us into that future. And yet, there was that other part of me, the part that knew nothing good could come of anything that seemed so good.

  5

  A few weeks after the family party ended and everyone had gone their separate ways, this letter sat, lying in wait for me on the kitchen table when I came down for breakfast.

  My darling Eli,

  You see, I can call you by your right name! Without spelling it all out, or reducing you to just tu apellido, though I am still very fond of that name, Cooper, my love. I am finally learning your Canadian ways, my very darling Eli.

  I wish I could continue in this vein, make light of everything. But I can’t. There are things I must tell you. I hope you will understand. I know I should tell you in person but, as I have explained, I find it easier to express my thoughts in English by writing them out.

  By t
he time you read this, I will be gone. You should not try to find me.

  I have not lied to you, but I have not told you the truth either, not all of it. I need to go back, tell you now, without all my dangling threads—what you once called my hiccups—so you will understand how the threads come together, even if you cannot forgive me when you know.

  I told you about Alex and me, and all of that is true, but it isn’t all. Alex and I have a child, a son who was born on March 2, 2001. His name is Antonio. I call him Tonito. When he was three, Alex took him on the raft to Florida.

  You will think you know what that means—that he must be dead. Everyone tells me that. Everyone says I must get on with my life. But he is my life.

  I have dreams. You know about my crazy dreams, but you don’t know, not really. I told you I could not remember what my dreams were about. They are about Tonito. They are signs. I was am certain Tonito is still alive. I believe he is with a family, a Cuban American family, a good Cuban American family, somewhere in Florida. They rescued him at sea, or maybe on a beach, and took him into their home and raised him as their own until they could find a way to return him to me. They did not tell anyone because they knew what happened with Elián. They want to return him quietly to his family in Cuba, but they don’t know how.