“If your father was kidnapped, the FBI and State Department wouldn’t be bogged down in political testosterone.”
He fell silent, then replied in a noticeably softer tone. “I wish I had better news for you. I mean that sincerely.”
“Just what my father needs. Sincerity.”
He bade me a hollow “Best of luck,” and with the click in my ear, I had the unsettling sense that the whole FBI had just hung up on me.
Me and my father.
5
It was my job to tell Grandma everything. Or not. Mom left it up to me to decide what a seventy-eight-year-old woman could stand to hear about her only child.
I left the house at 9:00 A.M. It was an hour’s drive, so I phoned Duncan on my cellular with an update. He was as baffled as I about the FBI’s declination of the State Department’s invitation to intervene in the case.
“Those twits,” he groused. “Let me make another phone call.”
“Who are you going to call this time?”
“Whoever it takes. I’ve been concentrating only on the State Department so far, but sounds like it’s time for a full-court press. I’m sure we know someone who can get right to the FBI director.”
I loved it when Duncan was fired up about something I needed done. I thanked him several times before hanging up.
By ten o’clock I was in the Upper Keys, having driven slowly. I wasn’t sure how to put a positive spin on this for Grandma, and part of me kept hoping that the whole conversation would be preempted by a sudden phone call from Mom, a miraculous message that Dad had somehow found his way to the U.S. embassy unharmed. He’d been missing for almost thirty-six hours, however, and the possibility of his successful escape seemed less likely with each passing minute. Abduction was the only logical inference.
Unless he was dead.
Not in a million years would Grandma believe that her son had fallen at the hands of some deadbeat Colombian guerrillas. Her son was a fighter, a survivor, like her. Grandma was a “Conch,” a native of the Florida Keys. When she was twelve years old, her house was destroyed by the monster hurricane of 1935 that killed more than four hundred people. The Upper Keys were ravaged, entire families were lost, a rescue train was washed into the sea. At least one fool braved the storm trying to save his fishing boat. Grandma found her father’s body naked in the mangroves, his clothes ripped away by two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Nine months later she and her mother moved into one of twenty-nine houses built by the Red Cross for the survivors who’d insisted on staying put and rebuilding their shattered lives. They were built for fishermen and farmers, plain folk who had lost everything. They were built to last. The frame, the walls, the roof were all poured concrete, two hundred fifty tons of it, reinforced by another hundred and fifty thousand pounds of steel rods-all for a two-bedroom house that was a mere six hundred square feet of living space. It was a bunker, virtually indestructible, symbolic of the Conch spirit. Grandma inherited the house when her mother died and made it her home as a young bride. That was the house my father had grown up in.
It wasn’t an easy life. I remembered seeing an old photo of my father as a young boy seated in the kitchen, each leg of the table resting in a tin can of kerosene to keep the cockroaches from climbing up and walking off with the family meal. Not that there was ever much food around the house. At the age of six my father became the man of the house. He loved the ocean, but hunger had really inspired him to fish. He caught them, Grandma cooked them. It was all they had and all they needed, each other and their Red Cross house. Together they’d survived the occasional hurricane and anything else the world could throw at them.
Now it was up to me to tell Grandma that her son was missing.
“Get out!” she shouted.
I was standing just inside the front door, hadn’t even set foot inside the living room. It wasn’t a case of killing the messenger. It was just one of her bad days. Grandma had Alzheimer’s disease.
She was seated on the couch watching Judge Judy on the tube, dressed casually in a cotton blouse and plaid Bermuda shorts. Her hair was done the way she’d always worn it, neatly cut with a hint of reddish tint. She looked just fine, and it pained me to see her act this way. For months my parents had been trying to persuade her to move in with them, but she wouldn’t budge from her concrete bungalow. A home-care nurse helped her get by from day to day.
“It’s okay, it’s only me, your-”
“Don’t you dare set foot in this house!”
The nurse interceded. “Now, don’t be rude, Marion. It’s family.”
I tried to make eye contact from across the room, hoping to establish a connection. Her expression was cold, though it wasn’t an unknowing blank stare. She seemed to know me all right. She just didn’t seem to like me very much.
“I stopped by for a visit,” I said.
“You pop in once a year, that’s supposed to make everything okay?”
“It’s okay if you don’t remember, but I was here last month.”
“Just go!” she shouted, this time flinging an ashtray across the room.
I ducked as it flew over my head, then shattered on the wall behind me. The nurse pulled me into the hall, out of Grandma’s line of fire. “It’s not a good day for her.”
“I didn’t mean to bring this on.”
“You didn’t. Just try again some other time.”
“Would it really make a difference?”
“You’d be amazed. The earlier in the day, the better. Before breakfast is best.”
“I can come back tomorrow.”
“I’ll call and let you know how she’s doing before you drive all the way down.”
I thanked her and started out the door.
“You bastard, Matthew! What kind of a son are you anyway?”
I looked at the nurse, almost speaking to myself. “She thinks I’m my father?”
“She’s terribly confused today. But truthfully, you two do look a lot alike. You even sound alike.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that, but usually it was intended as a compliment. I had my dad’s smile, my dad’s good heart, whatever. No one-least of all his own mother-had ever mistaken me for my father the bastard.
Again I thanked the home-care nurse, then closed the door on my way out. As I cut across the front lawn to the pebble driveway, I tried to dismiss the outburst as irrational, knowing that the anger expressed by Alzheimer’s patients toward loved ones was often baseless and imaginary. But it made me realize how windows to the past could close forever, whether by the slow onset of a disease or a sudden abduction. There were so many questions that I might never have the chance to ask my father now, not just about family matters but about the separate life he’d built for himself in another part of the world-all those trips to Central and South America that had finally gotten him abducted. Or worse.
I got in my Jeep and drove away, fearful that I’d forever feel the weight of conversations we’d never had.
The drive up to Miami ended the same way the drive down had started, with a phone call to Duncan. His secretary said he was meeting with a new client and couldn’t be interrupted.
“Do you know if he spoke to anyone at the FBI or State Department this morning?”
“I’m sure he hasn’t,” she said. “This meeting has been going nonstop since you called.”
A more encouraging end to the conversation would have been nice, but at Cool Cash, paying clients always came first. I was sure that Duncan would eventually make a few phone calls to try to break the deadlock that was keeping the FBI out of my father’s case, but time was slipping away. I decided to call the embassy myself, my contact person at American citizen services in the consular section, William Ebersoll.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Nothing I’m aware of.”
“I got an interesting call from the FBI last night. They tell me that the State Department invited them to work the case but they declined.”