The Spanish Boy

The Clareys of Halifax, Nova Scotia are a loving, contented family, unprepared for the great changes that are about to envelop them.On a bright blue Saturday morning in July 1936, the teenaged Mel Clarey and his older sister Edie, along with their friend and neighbour Lawrie Shine, join others in the street to gaze skyward at the most wondrous thing they?ve ever seen. The great German airship, the Hindenburg, is flying overhead. This is the harbinger of what is coming; great change that will shape their world just as an intimate tragedy transforms their lives. ?One day I?ll go away? Edie says to Mel ?fly away on the Hindenburg maybe?, but he must keep her secret. Only if he promises not to tell anyone what she?s said, will she return to him. ?Promise? she says. Mel laughs at her, although he knows a world without his sister is not worth living in. He will keep her secret.The Spanish Boy is a novel of love and loss, memory and obsession. At the centre of the story is Edie, the wilful and spirited Clarey daughter who works at the family firm, Clarey Paint and Glass. There, the girl with the excitable imagination meets two young men: the company bookkeeper Raymond Gillis and Micah Gessen, an idealistic stranger on his way to fight for the republican cause in the Spanish civil war. These three form a triangle of obsession: Micah?s obsession to fulfil his need to be part of a great cause; Edie?s infatuation with Micah, the so-called ?Spanish boy?; and Raymond?s obsession with Edie as well as his hatred for Micah.One night, from his bedroom window, Mel sees his sister bicycle away from their house. He wants to call to her, ask her where she?s going at such an hour. What Mel does not know is that Edie is going to a Halifax wharf to meet Micah Gessen as he boards a ship. She believes she can convince him to take her with him to Spain. Mel watches her ride away, swallowed up by the dark of the night. He?ll ask her tomorrow where she was going. But Edie does not return. She has disappeared.Here is the main crisis, the turning point, of the novel: what happened to Edie Clarey? The mystery enthralls the city of Halifax and fills newspaper headlines for a time while the Clarey family is left to grapple with their grief. The novel then follows Mel throughout adulthood, in 1946 as a returning soldier and in 1957 as a married man and father, his days and nights haunted by the spectre of his missing sister and the toxic promise he made to her. His longing for simpler days, when he was part of a family united by love rather than fractured by grief, overwhelms him and poisons his relationship with his wife and children. Only the faithful friend of boyhood, Lawrie Shine, provides any semblance of consolation for him. Is it possible, one of the characters asks, for grief to last so long?The answer to the decades-long mystery of Edie Clarey?s disappearance is revealed in the concluding chapter of The Spanish Boy. The year is 2005. Mel has just died. His oldest child, Anne, finds a letter hidden among her father?s effects. It is the confession of a dying man, Raymond Gillis, the bookkeeper at the Clarey family business who was obsessed with Edie. In the letter, Raymond writes to Mel to confess to killing his sister in a fit of rage when he sees her waiting for Micah Gessen on the Halifax pier. He throws her body into the water. An item of her clothing catches on a part of the ship?s rusting hull. As the ship sails from the harbour, Edie?s body goes with it. Anne, in her years as a lawyer, has never read such an astonishing document. Her father didn?t like to talk about his sister. All she knew about Edie was that she was born, was loved, and one day was no longer there. Perhaps, she thinks, Lawrie Shine will remember the girl and be able to add detail to this story. Anne regrets that her father, the distant stoical man she knew, died alone in his bed. But Mel was not alone. Not really. On that final night, as he had done every night for sixty-seven years, he re-played in his mind the same story. He is a boy, looking out of his bedroom window and sees his sister on her bicycle. He calls to Edie to come inside and, without resistance, she does. He hears her enter the house, climb the stairs to her room and always, her final words to him: ??Night brother.? And he sleeps.

Sally Reardon is a multiple award-winning television producer at CBC in Toronto. During three decades with CBC, Sally worked in senior journalistic positions on programs including The Journal, Canada: A People?s History and the fifth estate. She currently resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.