Chapter Twenty Three: Rodrigo
He remembered when Artie was in Kindergarten, maybe first grade. He would listen at the door to his son’s room and hear him perform scenes from stories he was making up as he went along, adopting all the voices and acting out all the movements. His plays were a mashup of reality and fantasy, the plots borrowed from movies he had recently watched, their characters replaced with the names of his classmates. So it wasn’t Woody and Buzz trying to chase down the moving van at the end of Toy Story, it was Artie and Claire desperately warning and encouraging each other, or Artie and Joaquin, or Artie and Lindsey.
The names Artie used were kids who didn’t really play with him, as far as Rod knew. He wasn’t around enough to monitor many playdates, but he heard about the patterns from Rita, and given the few kids who played with Artie, combined with the number of names he used in his one-man shows, it was mathematically unlikely that they were all friends in real life.
But his son admired them enough to write them into his fantasies. They were, after all, the princes and princesses of the valley, destined to inherit whatever money could be squeezed from it, so Artie’s admiration was understandable.
Rod surveyed the new slate of classmates at the boarding school as he and Rita visited on Parents Day, and he wondered what sorts of stories these rejects could be written into, if Artie was still so inclined.
Sending them to such a pricey hideaway seemed to be part of a scheme by the parents to spend all their money before the kids could grow up and blow it all. They reminded Rod of those infamous siblings of famous people when they were younger, already being trained to stay in the background and not embarrass the family. At the previous schools his kids had attended, Rod could at least imagine a harmless adulthood for most of the students, even if that future was dimly-lit rather than bright. But this group had a potentially fatal dose of money to go with the halting personalities that were so hard to watch.
He and Rita looked at one another frequently with no expressions. None were necessary. This was the way it would have to be until college.
Artie seemed happy enough. For the first time in his academic life he was not an oddity. Rod and Rita reminded themselves of his default rise in standing as they went to dinner afterwards and almost drank too much.
“So where does being the cream of this particular crop get you?” Rod asked after they decided not to order a second bottle of wine.
“Someplace where they use the word ‘eccentric’ in front of your accomplishments,” she leaned back and appeared to ponder her buzz as much as their son’s prospects. “Eccentric billionaire, eccentric owner, eccentric board member.”
“What if you end up with no accomplishments?” he enjoyed being able to cover their concern with laughter. “What if you’re just eccentric?”
Rita contemplated the possibilities.
“Then you’re reclusive,” she decided.
“A reclusive eccentric.”
“That’s redundant,” she chided him.
“An eccentric reclusive?”
“Recluse,” she corrected him, then giggled. “Remember what your English was like when we first met?”
Rod warmly nodded, but was still considering where the wealthy weird wound up.
“You need money to be a recluse,” he speculated.
“You do.”
“Otherwise you’re homeless, or a vagrant.”
“A hobo,” Rita added. “Or whatever the kids call them nowadays.”
“You don’t know? You spent all that time with them in the classroom.”
“It wasn’t a subject that came up.”
“Half their family members are homeless. They just don’t notice because they see them on the couch or the floor.”
“Maybe it’s too sad or scary for them to think about.”
“Nobody wants to face anything,” Rod shook his head and rummaged around the bread basket to see if there was one more piece hidden inside the napkin.
“Sorry,” Rita sneered. “I should have led a discussion while they were making those Q-tip skeletons for Halloween. ‘And speaking of scary thing, kids, how many of you had a drunk uncle on the couch this morning? Maybe a meth head aunt? Does she have teeth like a jack-o-lantern? Let’s use her as a model. But not as a model for your life! Say no to drugs!’”
“That’s about how it goes,” he muttered, not finding anything in the folds of the napkin. “It’s all talk. Woe is me. Poor me. And nothing happens.”
“We’re getting gloomy, Rigo.”
“Nobody does anything.”
“We should go.”
“And when someone does do something, people try to tear them down. That’s their idea of an accomplishment. Rip those who get things done.”
“I understand.”
“I had all of the above and more. I had drunk uncles. I had aunts and cousins with their own recipes for meth.”
“But you overcame.”
Rod spread his arms in acknowledgement.
“Why can’t everyone be like you, Rodrigo?” she said in lieu of applause, then waited for him to finish his curtain call.
“Why can’t they?” he let his arms drop.
Rita looked as though she had more to say, but buried her words with a sigh instead.
“We’ve got that breakfast reception tomorrow morning in the cafeteria,” she said at the conclusion of her exhale. “The ‘Bon Voyage Breakfast’. Let’s get plenty of rest and start fresh.”
He tried to recharge the fun they had been having while paying the check and helping Rita with her coat, but he was talking to himself. Her reminder and her advice were the last words she spoke for the night, and a sunrise was his only chance to be in good company again.
They did play nicely with the other parents the following morning, most of whom they had avoided the previous afternoon. They sat a table with a husband and wife who owned some assisted-living compounds in Costa Rica for American retirees, and a nanny who was attending Parents Day on behalf of her employers, who were on a Rhine River cruise.
“Who’s watching the other kids while you’re here, then?” Rita asked her.
“Colton is an only child,” she replied.
“Well, then, if you don’t mind me asking,” Rita prefaced, “why do they still need a nanny?”
“I guess I’m mostly a house sitter now,” she seemed to suddenly realize. “But when something like this comes up, or Colton’s in town for the holidays, I put my nanny hat back on.”
Meanwhile, the assisted living moguls didn’t take long to hand Rod a spiral-bound prospectus and try to convince him to invest in what they presented as their “growing empire.” Rod grinned and nodded his way from wariness to hostility that he concealed well enough to inspire a compliment from Rita.
“The only reason I didn’t stab him with my fork is that it took me so long to wrap my head around what he said,” Rod admitted. “People in Costa Rica are easy to screw over?”
“Maybe we don’t look Latin anymore,” Rita joked as they milled from the smell of eggs in the cafeteria to the campus courtyard, which barely concealed the scents and sounds of the city on the other side of the walls. “We’re bleached by success.”
“And that’s how white people talk to each other?”
“He could have been talking about the old Americans who move there.”
“If that’s the case, I’m in,” Rod snickered as he tossed the booklet into a trash can they passed.
“Aw,” Rita mocked. “I wanted to see if screwing people over was part of the literature.”
“You’re welcome to sift through the garbage if you’d like.”
The school bell rang, which sounded more like an alarm, and the students started to flood the courtyard, their bustle drowning out the traffic noise from the surrounding streets. Artie materialized from the horde and approached.
“This is the ‘bon voyage’ part, I take it?” asked Rita.
“I guess so,” Artie shrugg
ed. “The staff probably wants us all in one place so they can make sure nobody tries to kill their parents on school property.”
Rita raised her eyebrows at him.
Artie shifted into exaggerated cheer.
“Or they want to see all the warm, touching moments that take place.”
“All five of them,” Rod muttered.
“Not helping,” Rita glared.
“Five might be too high,” Artie fed off his father’s jab.
“I’ll bet the staff takes bets,” Rod reached into his pocket for a money clip full of cash. “See if you can get in on the action. Take the under.”
Rita smacked his hand with the money in it. He grinned and put it back.
Artie smiled, too.
But then his lip started to quiver.
“Honey,” Rita gave her son a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Artie said as he turned his head to the side so his words wouldn’t land in her coat.
“Don’t be,” she rubbed his back. “This is a new adventure.”
“A chance to see things we’ve never seen before,” Rod added.
Rita didn’t appreciate his contribution.
Rod lip-synced a disbelieving “What?”
“We’re proud of you,” she turned her attention back to her son, who had turned his face inward again to muffle his sobs. “You’ve been through a lot, and you’re stronger than we ever imagined.”
Rod put his hand on Artie’s shoulder, but it felt arbitrary, as though he was checking their temperature rather than joining the moment. He let his hand slide off and he watched them.
Artie unraveled himself from his Mom, inhaled some sniffles, and turned to hug his Dad.
“Oh,” Rod said. “Does this count as two moments?”
Artie giggled briefly. Rod looked at Rita to confirm that this time she enjoyed his joke as well. She seemed okay with it. Before he could cajole her into a more approving look, Artie’s voice rose between them.
“I’ll try to be more like you.”
Rod stood a bit more straight.
“Like me?” he stared down at his son.
Artie looked up at his father and nodded, then hugged him again.
Rod thought of the night before when he had wished for a world full of people like him, and remembered the silence from across the dinner table that greeted his solution.
He focused on the top of Artie’s head and avoided eye contact with Rita.
Artie stepped back and did his best impersonation of bravery, but was too young to pull it off convincingly. Rod was able to share the moment with his wife while still avoiding her gaze, as she reached for his hand and clutched it while their son blended back into the wash of boarders.
He continued to shy away from her sight all the way to the airport, pretending to look at what was outside the window. She may not have been looking at him, either, but he suspected she was. He imagined she was staring at him the whole time, waiting for her chance to pounce at the slightest glance with a facial or verbal expression that summarized what was wrong with the way he saw the world.
His son was never going to be like him, no matter how much he tried.
His other kids never even tried.
And as their plane climbed above the city, he considered the millions of others below, submerged in the skyline, who didn’t even know who he was, and never would.
Reaching the space above their homeland later on offered a chance to feel full of himself again. He had been involved with nearly every patch of the furrowed checkerboard that spread beneath them for hundreds of thousands of acres. Some he had worked, others he had managed, and still others he had owned. Reviewing his geographical work history from the air had always been a source of pleasure.
“Everything looks so small,” said Rita as they started their descent.
She said the very same thing at some point during every airplane ride they had ever taken, but this time he suspected it was supposed to mean something.
They flew over the most recent addition to his patches of familiarity, the slightest of them all, and it seemed to stare up at him with the same look he assumed Rita had been trying to give him.
Live Oak Charter Academy stood like a walled city that would not surrender. He had conquered all the surrounding land, but the center of ideas, the cradle of thought, would not yield.
Rod kept his eyes on the campus until it disappeared behind them as they drew closer to the ground.
He finally looked at her for the first time since Artie hugged him.
“I was thinking it all looks so vast,” he said.
She smiled at him as they touched down.
The landing was not very smooth. Her smile wavered during a couple of bumps, but it was still there when they slowed down and taxied to the little terminal where no one was waiting for them.