“Yes, gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking you, now, would I?” my mother sniped.
If Grandpa G was anything like this conversation, he was heading south. Far south.
Poor Dad was obviously confused, and in his confusion, he wasn’t at his most politically correct. “Huh . . . How’d we let that happen?”
I saw the beginnings of my mother’s reaction to the poor choice of words even before she managed to open her mouth. Before the exchange could make any further southerly progress, I leapt to my feet and went over to pull Marcus to his. “Never mind, Mom. Marcus and I will pool our resources and find him. I’m sure he’s close by. He can’t exactly leave the premises.”
“Don’t be too sure about that,” she countered, but she did sit back in her chair, even if she did cross her arms over herself, a sure sign that her need for control was kicking up a fuss from within. “I blame your father—he’s the one who insisted on buying that godforsaken hoverchair for your grandfather.”
“He needed it to get around,” was all that Dad would say in his own defense. He reached for the newspaper again.
Shield’s up, Cap’n!
“He needs mobility like he needs a hole in the head,” my mom muttered. “You have no idea how many times I’ve had to chase that man’s trail up and down the street and all over town. I think he sees himself as the Mario Andretti of the senior set. And when he’s not zooming down the street, draining his battery, he’s stopping at Millicent Hargrove’s picket fence, admiring her... daisies. And when it’s not Millicent Hargrove—”
Obviously she was on a roll. Time for us to exit, stage left. “Okay, well, I have my cell with me. I’ll text you when we find him.”
“Text?” Mom’s lips pressed together. “Can’t you just call, Margaret? I can’t understand the need for all these new whatnots these days. Text messages. Email. I’ve barely got voice mail figured out.” She sighed. “Why can’t people just call or stop by, like they’ve always done?—”
Before she could go off on
that
tangent, I pulled on Marcus’s sleeve and backed toward the door. “I’ll call, I’ll call,” I told her. “Back soon.”
“Phew,” I said as the waiting room door closed behind us. “That was a close one.”
Marcus nodded, in full understanding. “Your mom is intense.”
“Tell me about it. She learned from my Grandma Cora. You should feel lucky you never met
her.
Trust me. Warm and fuzzy she was not. She could have made Al Capone wet his pants.”
He laughed at the visual. “Aw, she couldn’t have been that bad.”
He had no idea.
As I was turning away from him, I felt a ping against my right ear. “Ow,” I said, lifting my hand to cover my ear. “What’d you do that for?”
“Do what?” he asked, confusion furrowing his brow.
“You know what.”
“No,” he said, pretending to be even more confused, “I don’t. What are you talking about?”
Was he being playful? “Why did you flick my ear?” “Maggie, I didn’t do anything to your ear.”
He certainly seemed serious. I just looked at him. I wanted to believe him... but I could still feel the firm
thwap
of the fingernail against the cartilage of my ear. “Well, you tell me what I just felt, then.”
He was quiet a moment. “Could it have been just one of those things?” he asked. “You know, im—”
“I was not imagining it, Marcus. I—”
It happened again. Left ear this time. And Marcus standing there in front of me.
Frowning, I whirled around in a circle. There was no one behind me, either.
And then I heard it. The crackle of static, as though tuning in a faraway station on AM radio. Only it wasn’t in the air around us. It was inside my head.
I bit my lip, listening, then tilted my head to the right the way I might if I had gotten water in it ... even though I was hours beyond my morning shower. Nope. Didn’t help.
“What’s wrong?” Marcus asked, touching my shoulder.
I shook my head, and—thank goodness—the staticky sound stopped. I breathed a little easier and offered up a little smile. “Nothing. Just a little water in my ear or something. That’s all.”
He looked at me, unconvinced, but he didn’t say anything.
I didn’t know what it was or what it meant. I really didn’t want to know. A part of me still worried that I was putting two and two together to make ten.
“A mountain out of a molehill, ”
Now that time, I know I heard it in my ear. Right inside my ear. As though the person were standing right behind me, whispering over my shoulder.
Except the voice was that of my Grandma Cora. Which made that a distinct
im
possibility. Because Grandma C had been gone for years.
Which meant...
“It can’t be ...” I refused to believe it. I refused to even think it. I knew that God—if there was a God, or even a Goddess, or a Great Spirit in the Sky—had a sense of humor ... but he would never be that much of a joker. I hoped.
Shaking my head to rid myself of any further voices, real-time or otherwise, I motioned Marcus away from the hall.
“Which way?” he asked, looking around us in all directions for some sign of my grandfather’s mobile chair. He obviously hadn’t heard a thing.
“It doesn’t matter, really.”
“Aren’t we in a hurry to find your grandpa?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Where’s he going to go? It’s dark outside. Mom’s just a worrywart. He’s somewhere here in the hospital, probably making a general nuisance of himself with every young nurse he comes across.”
Marcus nodded. “I could see that. He’s pretty feisty for being in a wheelchair.” And then he laughed. “He’d be pretty feisty out of a wheelchair, for that matter.”
That was the truth.
He tilted his head this way and that, squinting at me. “That must be where you get it, then. It’s certainly not from your mom.” He leaned in to whisper, “I think she means to scare me, but I hate to tell her, I don’t scare that easily. I’m stubborn that way. It’s probably a character flaw.”
I shivered, in spite of myself. A character flaw, he called it. So why did I find it so attractive?
“Because you don’t listen to me, Margaret Mary-Catherine O’Neill. A man like that, he’s nothing but trouble with a capital T. Mark my words. Any man who looks like a cross between a Greek statue and that Harvey Stutz who used to deliver the milk and a whole lot more to the farm wives back in the day is not good husband material, And if he’s not good husband material, why are you wasting your time?”
If I was shivering now, it was because it was most definitely my grandmother’s voice, and it was most definitely not a lingering memory inside my head, come to life in a flood of guilt and self-recrimination. The sound of her voice was so real to me.
It was unnerving.
“Besides,” I told Marcus, ignoring the Grandma C voice, “poor Grandpa G rarely ever gets out from under my mother’s watchful eye. Better to let him have a bit of fun. How much havoc can he wreak from a wheelchair?”
A lot, as it turned out.
The pursuit of Grandpa G’s trail of cheer led us from one end of the hospital to the other, from floor to floor and back again. He always seemed to be one step ahead of us, as though he had us honed in on his radar and knew exactly when to push on in order to evade capture. We finally caught up with him in the cafeteria, holding court with a couple of young student nurses in cotton scrubs giddily festooned with teddy bears and hearts. I’m not sure when the nursing profession decided that little-girl graphics were the fashion wave of the future ... but then again, anything had to be better than white polyester pantsuits they were saddled with once upon a nightmare.
I would have recognized his cackle anywhere. I stopped short and put my hands on my hips.
“Grand-paaaaa!”
He nearly jumped out of his skin. “Sweet Jeebus, don’t do that to me, Magpie. I thought you were your mother.” He held his hand to his chest. “You prit-near gave me a coronary.”
Sometimes I forgot that he was not in the most pristine of health. Despite the fact he had been relegated to a wheelchair for most of my adult life, a can of oxygen strapped behind and his muscles weakening until his plaid shirts just hung on his thin body, I still saw him as he used to be (and perhaps still was in his mind)—a laughing, teasing jokester, a loving family man who refused to sugarcoat the truth, and an outrageous flirt who was all talk and no trousers ...
“A legend in his own mind, that man. ”
The voice again. I really wished it would stop that.
I decided then and there that just as soon as I had a quiet moment, my Guides and I were going to have a long chat about the unfairness of giving the voice of my conscience the chiding tones of my dead grandmother. I had been putting up with it for quite a while now, but enough was enough. It just wasn’t right. What if I had an attack of conscience when Marcus and I were... when we ... well, you know. What then?
But that was for later. Right now, top billing went to Grandpa G. I placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “Grandpa G, what are you doing down here? Mom’s going nuts over, well, just about everything right now, and you decide to disappear, too?”
He just waved at me with one gnarled hand toughened by a lifetime of hard work. “Aw, you know your mom. She’s just bent out of shape because she ain’t in control of anything at the moment and has to wait until things sort themselves out before she can dig her meat hooks in again. And as for me, a man’s gotta do his own thing every once in a while. Ain’t that right, young man?” he said, prodding Marcus with that one-for-all-and-all-for-one attitude that had kept men sticking together for millennium against whatever woman stood against them.
I was neither with him nor against him in this case. I just didn’t want to be the next “to do” on my mother’s checklist.
“Come on, Grandpa. Back to the salt mines. I promise, I’ll try to keep you away from Mom’s whip cracking as much as possible.”
Grandpa G waved sadly to the young women, who had been watching our exchange with amusement, as I kept my hand on his thin shoulder to prevent another quick getaway. “See ya later, chickies. Don’t be strangers, now. Any time you need a few pointers on gardening, you come see me. I’ll set you straight.”
“Gardening, huh?” I asked with a snort as I waited for him to pull around once the student nurses had headed for the elevators. “They’re a little young for you, Gramps, don’t you think?”
“No one’s too young for a little gardening,” he insisted, trying to pull off the innocent look... but I knew better.
“Uh-huh.”
Grandpa G leaned back to gaze up at Marcus, who had been standing by the whole time, trying not to grin. “She talk to you this way?”
Marcus held up his hands and laughed. “I’m not getting into the middle of things, sir.”
Grandpa G’s mouth pursed sourly. “Coward. That means she’s got you on a string.” He sighed. “They all do that.”
My cell phone buzzed—I had set it to vibrate, just in case my mom decided to harangue and harass. I was actually surprised she’d lasted this long.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Did you find him?”
“Yes, he’s right here. We found him at the cafeteria. He had a case of the munchies,” I fibbed. No sense in getting Grandpa G in more trouble than he already was.
“Hm. So he didn’t notice the vending machines right here in the waiting room, is that what you’re telling me?”
Oops. “I think he wanted something hot.” Well, that much was the truth. So to speak.
“Oh. Well, tell him he can have soup, but only if it’s low sodium.”
Had my “something hot” actually worked? Wow, normally she was much faster on the draw. I must have underestimated her worry for Mel. I almost felt guilty for that—maybe I should be worried more, too. “Gotcha. Listen, Mom, don’t worry,” I told her. “Grandpa’s okay, and Mel’s going to be fine. Any more news?”
“No, nothing yet.” If I didn’t know her as well as I did, I would have heard only the calm in her voice. But my mother was rarely this drama free. To me that meant her worry had graduated into real fear. When it came to my mother, quieter was not necessarily better.
“Well, don’t worry. Mel’s good—I know it.” And I did. Somehow I knew, deep inside me, that all was going to be fine. More than fine. But I also knew Mom wouldn’t listen to me, no matter what I said. “Have you and Dad eaten anything?”
“Hm? Oh. Well, no, I guess we didn’t. We came straight here when Mel and Greg called to let us know they were on the way in and to come as soon as we could.”
I glanced over to where the cafeteria workers were wiping down the area and clearing equipment. “Let me see if I can get you something from down here. They’re cleaning up, but maybe they can scrounge something together.”
Hanging up with Mom, I turned to Marcus and Grandpa. “Why don’t the two of you head on up? I have to get Grandpa his soup, and Mom and Dad could use a little something, too.”
“I’m not hungry,” Grandpa G told me, a petulant scowl pinching his grizzled brow and mouth.
“Well, you’re getting soup and you’re going to like it, too,” I told him right back, “since I had to cover for you with Mom.”
“I’ve covered for you many a time, girly, and don’t you be forgettin’ it.”
“Come on, Grandpa G,” Marcus interrupted, not even trying to hide his smile. “Let’s get you back upstairs.”
Marcus stood aside for Grandpa G, but I could tell he wasn’t about to let him out of his sight. Not with a meltdown from my mother threatening if my grandfather flew the coop again. The two of them headed for the hall, amiably trading jokes, while I made my way to the long cafeteria counters. It took a while to attract the attention of one of the uniformed, hairnet-sporting ladies who were in the kitchens, scrubbing lazily at the stainless steel appliances and counters and calling back and forth to each other. One of them took pity on me after hearing my explanatory tale of the baby wait and crazy family antics—“because I had a grandfather just as mischievous as yours, and I wish he was still around to make me crazy,” she told me as she dished up still-warm tomato soup into two foam cups. I knew Grandpa would fuss about it being plain tomato, but beggars cannot be choosers... especially those who force their poor, overworked granddaughters to shield them from the all-seeing eye devoted to keeping said beggar on the straight and narrow. My dad, I suspected, would appreciate more hearty fixin’s, so I opted for the last bits of a steak and snow pea stir-fry that had been mashed unattractively but I’m certain still tastily into a generous helping of yellow rice. Marcus and I hadn’t eaten yet, either, but I was holding on to hopes of forgoing hospital cafeteria food completely once Mel got her show on the road, and making up for it with the tasty evening Marcus had been planning for the two of us back at his place.