Chapter 30 Riley - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal
We ran the disappearing act like a job, and I enjoyed every single minute of it.
Separate cities. He went out of Boston in the afternoon, I went out of Pittsburgh in the morning through Newark, and the two of us landed in Lisbon four hours apart and did not so much as look down the same concourse.
Penelope ran quality control on the hats over group text, which she volunteered for and which nobody asked her to do.
Penelope: Send me both caps.
Riley: [photo: plain curved-brim ball cap]
Penelope: No. That's a team hat. That's a hat that says hello I play a sport.
Riley: it's plain
Penelope: It has a shape, Riley. It has a very specific curved brim and there are thousands of men in North America who wear that hat and every single one of them is a professional athlete. Buy a hat a farmer would wear.
Nate: [photo: sunglasses and a stiff-brim travel hat]
Penelope: That's worse. That's a man in disguise. You look like a hostage.
Astrid: he looks like a birdwatcher
Penelope: Astrid says birdwatcher. Astrid is being kind. Nathaniel, take the sunglasses off in the airport, nobody has ever recognized a man in an airport, they recognize a man who does not want to be recognized in an airport.
The last leg out of Lisbon was a propeller plane with about forty seats in it and a flight attendant who did the safety card twice because a man in row two asked her to.
I had the aisle. Nate had the aisle across from me, two rows up, and we had agreed to be strangers for one more hour.
The man next to me was maybe sixty, in a jacket, with a cardboard box in his lap, and somewhere over the water he opened the box and showed me a carburetor.
"For the tractor," he said. "There is nobody on the island who has this one."
"That's a clean rebuild. My dad's in maintenance. Twenty-two years. He'd want to hold that."
And then, because it was a small plane and because I have never in my life not talked to somebody, we did the better part of an hour on dairy.
He had eighty-some head and he wanted to know about American cows, which I know nothing about, and I told him what I did know, which is that there are a lot of them in Wisconsin and that the smell reaches the interstate.
"You are here for holiday?"
"Three weeks."
"You do what?"
"I play hockey," I said.
And he nodded the way a man nods at somebody who says he does accounts payable. "In Canada?"
"Sometimes."
"There is no ice here," he said. "You should see the caldera."
He had never heard of the league, or my team, or my name, or the other man's name, or the entire concept of a rivalry between the two of us, and he did not ask me one question about any of it, because none of it existed on that plane.
And two rows up and across the aisle, I watched Nate Sinclair listen to that whole conversation with his head against the window.
Somewhere over the Atlantic between Lisbon and there, the shoulders came down an inch.
It happened in stages, the way a thing settles.
And by the time we were standing at the taxi rank in the heat with our bags at our feet and nobody in that entire building looking at either of us, they had come down two.
I have spent seven years filing grievances. I filed that one somewhere else.
The farmhouse sat above the caldera behind two hedges of hydrangea, and it was whitewash and black volcanic stone and it had a kitchen older than both our franchises put together.
And it came with Rosalina. She was next door, which on that road meant a five minute walk, and she was seventy-something and about five foot nothing and she was in the house before our bags were, with a basket, and by the end of the first hour there was enough food in that pantry to survive a siege.
She had opinions about the bread. She had opinions about the bed linen, which she had already changed.
She had an opinion about the state of the shed, which was Michael's cousin's fault, and she conveyed all of this in Portuguese at speed while Nate stood in the middle of the kitchen with a phrasebook expression on his face, catching about one word in five.
Then she pointed at me, said a sentence, and went out to the car for the rest of it. Nate did not react, and then about two beats later he did. He stopped with his hand on the strap of his bag and went completely still, the way he did when a puck was coming from somewhere he had not planned for.
"What?"
"It's a construction." He was watching the door she had gone out of. "It's a possessive construction and I'm not certain of it."
"You did that app for six weeks and you tested out of three levels on a plane. Say the words, Sinclair."
"She said the shed key is with your husband." He put the bag down. "She was pointing at you. She said it to me, about you."
Rosalina came back in with a crate of oranges and put it on the table and said something else and went out again.
And neither of us corrected her.
It was the loudest thing that happened all week.
Two men who had spent seven years correcting the record, who had built an entire encrypted language for the specific purpose of never being described accurately by anybody, stood in a kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon and let a seventy-year-old woman call one of them the other one's husband, and said nothing.
She said it again on Thursday. She said it to the woman at the bakery, and once to a man delivering gas bottles. Standing policy, ratified by silence, and neither of us ever brought it up.
Then the island did the thing I had been starving for, and it did it fast, and I catalogued all of it.
We bought groceries in daylight. That was the first one. An open air market on a Wednesday morning with about a hundred people in it and both of us in shorts, and we had a genuine argument about tomatoes in front of a stall.
"Those are wrong."
"They're tomatoes."
"They're pale, Nate. Look at the shoulders on them. That one's been in a truck for two days and it's been lying about it ever since."
"You don't know anything about tomatoes. You put ketchup on a hotel steak in Tampa in front of four witnesses and one of them still talks about it."
"That steak had it coming, and I know what a tomato looks like when it's been driven somewhere," I said, and the woman behind the stall, who did not speak one word of English, pointed at a different crate and said something firm, and I bought those, and Nate told me all the way down the hill that she had agreed with him, and she absolutely had not.
The second one was the harbor.
We walked down through the town in the afternoon and out along the front where the boats are and the fish stalls, and there were maybe forty people on that whole waterfront, and I was talking about something, and my hand went into his.
I did not plan it. I have planned every single thing I have ever done around that man for seven years, and my hand went into his between two fish stalls in the middle of a sentence, and I felt him take the hit of it.
And nothing happened. Nobody stopped. Nobody looked up. A vendor with a bucket of clams told us at length that the clams were the thing to buy, and Nate said something to him in Portuguese that was maybe forty percent correct and the man laughed and we bought the clams.
And Nate's hand tightened in mine and stayed there for the entire length of that street.
Seven years of never. Seven years of thirty feet in a ballroom, and a service stairwell, and a strip of tape across a lobby carpet, and a man walking the length of a courtyard to a bus without looking up.
It went off in the space between two palms on a Wednesday afternoon and it did not make a sound.
The bylaw got drafted the first night at the terrace table.
There was no pen in that house. We looked.
So he wrote the whole thing on the back of a paper bag with a stub of carpenter's pencil out of the shed, and when it came to signing it there was nothing to sign with, so we both put our thumbs on the bread knife and cut nothing at all and pressed our thumbs on the paper, which produced two smudges and one very serious argument about whether that constituted execution.
Whereas the parties have observed that the world has, for seven years, had unrestricted access.
Now therefore: both telephones live in the kitchen drawer. The world is granted one supervised visit per twenty-four hours, not to exceed twenty minutes, to be taken in the morning at the table, in the presence of the other party.
"That's draconian," I said, "and I wrote it, and I'd like to object to my own clause. What if my mother calls?"
"Your mother goes in the drawer with everybody else and gets called back at nine in the morning, at this table, in the presence of the other party, per the document you have just drafted and are now litigating against."
"You've never met my mother."
He put the pencil down. "No. I haven't."
Neither of us said anything for a second.
"Sign the bag," he said.
And then the first night just ended. There was no extraction. There was no alarm on a phone set for four fifty. There was no protocol and no service stairwell and no bag by the door and no bus in a courtyard at six.
We went to bed with the windows open because there is no air conditioning in a two-hundred-year-old house and there does not need to be, and the whole Atlantic came in over the sill all night, and in the morning I woke up at seven with light on the wall and a man asleep on his stomach with one arm off the side of the bed.
And he did not leave, and I did not leave.
I lay there for about an hour without moving, and some part of me was waiting for the sound of a zip.
The nights on that island are the part I've thought about most since.