‘Ana, it’s hard to explain,’ I cut in, ‘but I don’t pretend. I swear.’
‘The Night Watchman isn’t the same person as Dad,’ Nati told her. ‘When he comes, Dad disappears.’
‘I’ve heard enough!’ Ana hollered. She swirled her hand towards Jorge, as if she were reeling him in. ‘Come here, you’re going back to bed with me.’
‘He needs both of us right now,’ I told Ana in a pleading voice, but I really meant, We need our kids with us or our marriage might not survive this.
‘Just put him down, Hank.’
I did as she asked but the little boy clung to my leg.
‘Jorge,’ she hollered, ‘get over here right now!’
He looked up at me and grimaced like Roger the alien.
‘We’ll talk later, baby,’ I told him. ‘Everything will be okay.’
The boy took a deep breath and started singing the theme song from American Dad as he stepped to Ana. He didn’t make it to the chorus because she snatched his hand like it might fly off.
‘Ow!’ he yelled.
‘Yeah, ow!’ she snarled. ‘And you,’ she said, glaring at Nati, ‘go to your room!’
‘I just assumed you knew all about the Night Watchman,’ he told her, shrugging.
‘I would have if you’d told me!’
‘Don’t make this about me, Mom! That’s not fair!’
‘Nati, please,’ I said, ‘just go to your room. We’ll talk later.’
‘But I’m hungry,’ he whined. ‘I wasn’t kidding about that.’
‘Then go to the kitchen and stay there until your mother and I are done.’
Before heading downstairs, my son gave me a withering look that meant he’d never understand adults. There was amusement in his glance, as well; he was delighted with himself for keeping his calm when his parents were out of control. Was that a sign of hard-won maturity, or his way of pretending that our quarrel wasn’t important?
After Ana led Jorge off to our bedroom, she came back to me with my trousers and shoes. She put them on the floor and took two steps back, as if they might explode.
‘Get dressed,’ she said. She faced me like a prison guard, cold and impenetrable. I’d have never believed it possible.
My thoughts scattered, and I somehow latched on to the idea that she was testing me – trying to force me to tell her the truth about myself and my childhood. And testing me, too, for whether I loved her more than anything or anyone.
At length, I said, ‘I’d choose you. You and the kids.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.
‘You’ve always wanted to know if I’d pick Ernie over you.’
‘Jesus, Hank, I’d never make you choose,’ she said in a frustrated voice. Her words hung in the air, as if I’d misunderstood all that was essential about her. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because making a person choose between the people he loves is the surest way to destroy him.’
‘Maybe that’s true,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know. But in any case, I can’t get back into bed with you tonight, so . . . so put on your clothes.’
‘I don’t have anywhere to go,’ I told her. ‘And I’m going to fall a very long way.’
‘Hank, you hurt me!’ she hollered. Her eyes gushed with tears.
I stepped towards her, slowly, my hands open. I sensed our future teetering just in front of me. My body ached with the need to embrace her. ‘Ana . . .’
She backed away. ‘Don’t come near me. I don’t know who you are! After thirteen years of marriage, I just realized I don’t know who you are!’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I promise.’
‘You meant to hurt me! “Just shut up and take it!” How could you say that to me?’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Oh, Christ, not again!’
Contempt creased her face. And I realized something that seemed nearly impossible: that I’d failed to notice the steady accumulation of grievances inside her heart. Layers of ice . . . Thirteen years of telling her lies had created this freeze between us.
‘Can we start over?’ I asked.
‘That doesn’t work with me like it does for you and Ernie and Aunt Olivia.’
‘Ana, listen. I don’t think he meant to hurt you. I don’t know all that much about him, but I’m sure he doesn’t know how to behave with other people. I call him Gabriel. I’ve called him that since I was little. I think he may never have been with a woman before. He must have seen this as his one chance to . . .’ I stopped speaking because her impatient expression showed me how ridiculous I sounded. But I had to say it. ‘Try to imagine that you have just one chance to be intimate with another person. Maybe you’d risk everything for it?’
She heaved a sigh. ‘Hank, do you think I’m a total idiot?’
‘Of course not. I’m trying to tell you that it wasn’t what you think, that he—’
‘Don’t make me shout at you again,’ she cut in. ‘It’ll upset the kids.’
I started making a list in my head of all the things I couldn’t let happen. At the top was that I couldn’t let Jorge and Nati grow up without my protection.
‘But I want to be with you and the kids,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
‘Right now, I don’t care what you want. I may care a lot tomorrow – I probably will, but not right now.’ She showed me a disappointed look.
Something more than shame made me turn away – something born of the hundred scars that Ernie carried on his body, and the hundred others that I carried inside me.
‘Stay with Ernie,’ Ana said more gently. ‘He’ll take care of you while I figure out what to do.’
I put my trousers on. The compressed urgency in her face told me she wanted to cry but wouldn’t. I sensed an opening, yet my thoughts seemed to be scattering around me. My one chance at a good life was turning around this moment and I couldn’t put a single coherent sentence together.
‘If you give me just fifteen minutes,’ I told her, ‘I’ll explain everything. I’m trying to handle way too much right now, Ana. It’s this case. It seems like it chose me. And I see myself in Sandi. I don’t—’
‘Why should I believe you?’ she interrupted.
Time was ticking down loudly inside my head. If I could only make it stop, I might figure out the incantation that would permit me to stay.
I patted the air between us. It was an awkward gesture, but I was hoping she’d understand that I meant that if we took this very slowly, I might yet be able to make her understand. ‘Because I’m backed up to the wall of everything I’ve done wrong,’ I told her. I took another step towards her but she held up her hands to block me. When I realized she’d become frightened of me, all my hopes collapsed inside me.
A man watches his feet meet the pavement of a Lisbon street, listening to each step as though it might be a clue about his future. Cobbling together the fate of his adopted homeland with his own, he thinks, We’ve been undone by our lies.
I crouched around the corner from headquarters, as though I were a criminal in a B-movie waiting to give myself up at daybreak. For a time, I watched a pigeon ripping at a crust of pizza. When my phone rang, I knew it would be Ana, and my heart leapt, but it was Ernie’s name that appeared on my screen.
‘Nati called me,’ he said breathlessly. ‘He told me what happened. He was very upset.’
My son must have reconsidered his amusement or faked it in order to convince us not to move our argument behind closed doors.
I answered all of Ernie’s questions about what had taken place between Ana and me, though I wasn’t able to explain the quarrel in anything resembling a coherent order.
‘Look, just come to my house,’ he finally interrupted.
‘I’ve got to stay in Lisbon. That’s where Ana and my kids are.’
‘But you shouldn’t be alone,’ Ernie said.
I lowered my phone to my side; there seemed no point in speaking if I couldn�
�t be with Ana when I most needed her.
Ernie shouted my name and, when I didn’t reply, continued hollering it until I had no choice but to lift up my phone again. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him.
‘You won’t be! Drive here. Please, Rico!’
‘I’ve been trained to cope, so just go back to sleep.’
‘Okay, listen, Rico. Go to your office and call me from there. I need to know you’re somewhere safe.’
‘Ernie,’ I said, ‘where I am on your GPS won’t change anything.’
‘Christ, Rico, do what I tell you for once in your life!’
I could see no point in quarrelling. ‘I’ll call you when I get to my office,’ I told him.
That was a lie when I said it, but for lack of anywhere else to go, I ended up at headquarters a few minutes later. Filipe, our night guard, always brought apples to work as a snack. I caught the big Granny Smith he tossed me in one hand, which gave him a respectful grin.
At my desk, I sent Ernie an SMS saying I was in my office. He didn’t call back, which was a relief. With any luck, he’d already drifted off to sleep again.
I watched the video of ‘Dog Days Are Over’ on YouTube over and over, studying the singer’s hands as she danced, trying to catch the hidden messages she’d given to Sandi, but all I could think of was how stupid it was of me not to have realized that I needed Ana more even than I needed my secrets. Eager to escape the corner I’d backed myself into, I shifted over to Google Maps and looked at images of Black Canyon.
I pictured myself sitting between the canyon walls, listening to the Gunnison River rushing by in torrents, then gazing up to the blue scratch of sky two thousand feet above me. I held my Walther semi-automatic pistol in my hand. It seemed the perfect partner for a last magic act – silver and black, and absolutely certain of its own expertise.
For the second time in my life, I counted to ten with a gun barrel in my mouth. Dad had put it there the first time. He’d pulled the trigger, too, but surprise of surprises, he hadn’t loaded it. Back then, I’d passed out before finding out that I wasn’t going to die. And when I came to, Ernie was lying next to me. We were under an overheated clump of blankets. I didn’t understand why, until he told me that I’d turned to ice after passing out. What neither of us yet knew was that a part of me would never completely thaw.
This time, an important realization surged through me while I was counting down towards death: that Mom’s killing herself meant that I’d never do to my kids what she did to me and Ernie; I could never do to Jorge and Nati what she had done to my brother and me when she crashed Dad’s Plymouth into a tree on the road to Crawford on a warm spring day in 1981.
More than thirty years after her death, Mom had saved me from putting a bullet in my head.
After I stopped counting, I realized a second thing that seemed even more important: that my mother hadn’t been scared of dying. Everything about that day must have felt just right to her. Foi canja, Hank, she’d have told me if she could have. Easy as pie.
Though maybe that was just what I wanted most to believe. With the dead, it seemed you could never get definitive answers.
Footsteps awakened me. Lifting my head off my desk, I saw a tall, slender silhouette in the doorway. The cowboy hat in his hand told me it was Ernie, and yet I knew he’d never travel this far from home.
‘Is that really you?’ I heard myself ask, and although it seemed impossible, I saw my voice flutter down from the ceiling and land on the floor. A butterfly of sound.
And then I was awake for sure, and Ernie was stepping into my office. His face was older than I remembered it, and his eyes a softer shade of green.
‘You’re way too far from home,’ I told him.
I didn’t stand up and go to him. I wanted to feel the urgent tension of needing to hug him before I let it go. Or maybe, for the first time in my life, I needed him to come to me. I put my head back down on the desk and closed my eyes.
By the time I’d counted to seven, I sensed him squatting beside me. At twelve, he put his hand atop my head. I lost count then, because the oatmeal smell of him became a deep well that I was tumbling into. Down there in the dark, sitting with my brother, he rubbed his cheek against mine, and the scratch of his whiskers convinced me that we had made it to adulthood – and that there was still hope for me.
‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ he whispered. It was our incantation of incantations, though by now we both knew it came with no guarantee.
He caressed my hair. My gratitude for that simple kindness was so wide that it held forty years of our shared past and still had room for the present moment. I sat up and let Ernie wrap his lean, strong arms around me because I was sure now I was made out of things I’d never wanted – broken things that I didn’t want to hold onto any longer.
‘I fucked up badly,’ I confessed.
‘We’ll make things right,’ he told me, and his voice sounded so confident that I was able to let myself go. When my tears finally ended, I leaned back in my chair, but he held onto my hand. Our entwined fingers were our bridge – and always had been.
He took two big, gulping breaths. Beads of sweat trailed down his cheek.
‘Is it bad?’ I asked.
‘It’s just that I left so quickly that I forgot to bring any medications with me. I may need to sit in the dark a while or . . . Do you have a spare Valium with you?’
‘You never take Valium.’
He held out his hand. ‘I do now.’
After he downed the pill, he sat on the chair in front of my desk and bent forward with his head between his legs. I turned off the lights and rubbed his back.
When he finally sat back up, he said, ‘Everything is okay. I’ll be fine now.’ His voice was strangely secure. ‘Maybe you should call Ana,’ he added.
He put his cowboy hat down between us. Its feather looked like a thick black arrow in the darkness.
‘Later,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t survive another quarrel right now.’
‘And Nati – you’ll need to speak to him,’ he added.
‘I’ll call him.’ I put Ernie’s cowboy hat on. He said I looked like Alan Ladd in Shane. ‘I’m feeling very odd,’ I said, just so he’d know.
‘Tell me.’
‘I feel like we’ve finally managed to escape from time. You and I . . . We’re living between ticks of a clock. It’s always going to be now.’
I realized I was no longer afraid of what would happen with me and Ana – not because everything would be all right but because I knew that nothing would ever be good again unless I risked everything to get her back.
Ernie gazed over my shoulder at the parking lot. ‘Your view really sucks,’ he said.
‘Thanks. How did you get past reception?’
‘I was here once before, years ago. Remember?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Well, anyway, the guy from Cape Verde at reception remembered I was your brother. He thinks we look alike.’
‘But we don’t.’
‘Our eyes are our Mom’s, even though they’re different colours.’
‘Yours are nicer.’
‘You think?’
I nodded. He picked up my apple. ‘You going to eat this?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Can we split it?’
‘Sure.’
He took a bite and handed it to me. It was good to pass it back and forth between us. After he’d nibbled down to the core, I held up my garbage can and he tossed it inside.
‘Thanks for crossing the Continental Divide,’ I said. That was what we called the imaginary line west of Évora that he hadn’t driven beyond since Aunt Olivia’s death in April of 2006.
‘I almost didn’t,’ he said. ‘My heart froze the moment I started visualizing the drive. But then I figured the worst that could happen is I’d have a heart attack and drop dead on the freeway. Which wasn’t so bad when compared to what not coming here would mean.’
‘What
would it mean?’
‘That my whole life was a failure.’
‘I don’t see how that could be true.’
‘Because I’ve prepared all my life for this – to help you when no one else could. If I didn’t come here now, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.’
‘You have no mirrors,’ I pointed out.
‘You can stop trying to be witty. It’s just the two of us.’
‘What if I don’t want to? Listen, Ernie, you don’t owe me anything. I want you to live your life anyway you want and not care what I think.’
The forced way he gazed down told me that something I said put Colorado on the horizon of his thoughts.
‘There are some things you can’t help me with,’ I added. ‘Nobody could.’
‘But at least I can take you home,’ he said.
‘No, I’ve got to stay in Lisbon. I’ve just started to understand that this case has a lot more to do with you and me than I thought. It’s like some sort of test.’
‘I meant I could take you to your home,’ he said.
I turned to face the doorway, because time would start up again the moment I left my office.
‘I’ll talk to Ana,’ my brother told me.
Ernie being assertive made me suspicious. ‘What’ll you tell her?’ I asked.
‘The truth.’
‘But you’ve always said that was the one thing we could never reveal!’ I said resentfully.
‘I was wrong. I realize that now – though I needed to have Évora in my rear-view mirror to realize it.’
‘Ernie, what’s going on?’
‘We know who we are now, Rico. When we arrived in Portugal, we were just kids. We were lost, we needed rules. Dad had just been killed, and I was—’
‘Killed?’ I pounced – because for thirty years I’d suspected that he knew more than me. ‘Ernie, what’s the truth about Dad?’
‘You know what I know, Rico – he vanished. And if he hasn’t shown up by now, he must be dead.’
‘You don’t know any more than that?’
‘No.’
I didn’t believe him. Maybe he’d heard from an investigator in Colorado. ‘Have the police finally found what was left of him?’ I asked.
The Night Watchman Page 30
