I walk to the red-painted door. I reach for the handle, and I find it open. I enter.
Vince sits in a deep, upholstered recliner in his living room. There is a book across his lap. The Human Asparagus doesn’t look surprised to see me.
He is surprised, however, when I bullrush him. Without a word, I hurl myself toward the chair as he reaches for the telephone sitting next to him.
I smack the phone out of his hand and reach for his throat, then pull back, gulping for air, standing over him. I have the upper hand, physically. He cannot match my anger or drive.
“If you hurt me, you won’t find your grandmother,” Vince says, trying to stay cool.
“You took her.”
“I protect my residents.”
“Where is she, Vince?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. You just said…”
“Plausible deniability. I helped take her. To protect her. but I don’t know where they put her.”
“Who?”
I’m asking the question, but I already know who Vince is referring to.
A voice confirms my suspicions.
“She’s safe,” the gravelly bass voice says. It comes from behind me.
I turn and am struck by the interloper’s lean face, serious, with thoughtful eyes, like you’d imagine from a troop commander whose squad took a few too many casualties.
I look down at his feet. I see the toes turned just a tad inward.
“Hello, Pigeon,” I say.
“I haven’t been called that in many years.”
“I have a strange question for you.”
“Your grandmother is okay. She’s fine.”
“I know that, Harry.”
“I can take you to her.”
“No,” Vince says.
“It’s okay, Vince,” Harry responds. Harry has clearly led men.
He looks at me. “What’s your question?”
I clear my throat.
“Are you my grandfather?”
A tear wells in the corner of Pigeon’s eye.
Chapter 49
It’s a wonder I haven’t had my membership card in the Northern California Press Club revoked. For the last day, Grandma hasn’t been very hard to find. She’s been back at the home, in her own bed.
I stand at its foot, watching her sleep. Next to me stands Harry. His agitation is evident only from the rhythmic grinding of his teeth. Betty Lou stands nearby in a terry-cloth robe, rocking on her feet.
“It would be better if you’d wait outside,” Harry says to Vince.
“I don’t trust him,” Vince says.
“Trust me,” Harry responds. “If there’s a problem, you can always call the police.”
Vince glowers at me. He walks out the door. He’s limping, but I let the observation go for the moment — along with a lot of other unanswered questions.
Harry and I walked here in silence. So I still don’t know the crucial particulars. Right now, I feel mostly immense relief.
I turn to Betty Lou. “I don’t blame you,” I say.
“You’d have no right to. Laney needed to be safe,” she says, then takes the edge off with her addendum: “Friday night is crappy mac-and-cheese night at the Manor. You can’t deprive her of that.”
She smiles thinly.
I sit on the bed. Grandma lies on her side, her cheek against the pillow, face seemingly relaxed, her breathing regular, and then she lets out an audible exhale, a demi-snore. Her eyes open, she blinks, and falls back asleep.
I put my hand on the hump of her body.
Tears stream down my cheeks and I do nothing to try to stop them.
I sit this way for more than a minute, when I feel Betty Lou put a hand on my shoulder. “She’s lucky to have you,” Betty Lou whispers. We remain like this for another minute until the extent of my relief passes through me. Until I am convinced Grandma is really here — intact, safe and sound.
On Grandma’s nightstand is a cell phone. Betty Lou sees me looking at it. “It’s mine,” she says. “Go ahead.”
I nod. I take a deep breath, pick it up the phone, and dial. My heart thumps. The phone rings four times, then goes to voice mail. I call again. After the second ring, Polly answers.
“Don’t say anything,” I say. “Just hear these words: I want to take you to dinner.”
“Where are you?”
“With my grandmother?”
“Are you okay?”
“More or less.”
“Can you come see me?”
“Yes. Soon.”
“Tonight soon?”
“Yes.”
I hope I’m going to be able to be true to my word.
We hang up.
I turn to face Betty Lou and Harry.
“It’s not very complicated, is it?” I say.
When I’d first absconded with Lane, it made her friends nervous. This seems natural, given that I haven’t been so attentive in the past, but, more fundamentally, because they didn’t like to see Grandma away from her comfortable confines. Then I prompted further concern when I asked Betty Lou to steal Grandma’s care file.
“You were acting strange, talking about conspiracies,” Betty Lou says. “It was like The X-Files, or the Nixon administration.”
“But the sprinklers destroyed the recreation room,” I say, referring to the convenient deployment of fire sprinklers that destroyed the computers for the Human Memory Crusade.
They don’t have an answer to this.
“You trust Vince,” I say.
Harry clears his throat. “We had a grunt in our platoon who did everything by the book,” he says. “A lot of guys razzed him for cleaning his weapon all the time and telling us to clean ours. He was a pain in the rear, if you want to know the truth. But in a beachside foxhole on some hot-as-hell island, he had the last working rifle.”
“So you went to Vince and asked his help getting back Lane?” I ask.
“He was livid that you’d taken her,” Betty Lou says. “He feared you were involved in this strange computer project, maybe experimenting with the residents so you could write an article. He thinks you love a great drama.”
“So he’s not involved with the Human Memory Crusade?”
She shrugs. “You’ll have to ask him.”
I fall silent for a moment, then continue theorizing aloud. When Grandma’s friends came to Vince for help, he suggested that they essentially kidnap Grandma. It was Vince’s idea to use chloroform to drug me.
“It was mine,” Harry says.
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t have given her up. Rightfully so. I wouldn’t have given her up. I wouldn’t have… if I had to do it over again.”
I’m not sure what to say to this, if he’s ready to bring up the elephant in the room.
“We thought that if we took Grandma, you’d be inspired to figure out what is going on — with all this computer nonsense,” Betty Lou offers. “We just didn’t want you to do it with Grandma by your side. She’s not your sidekick. She’s a woman deserving of peace.”
“But by drugging me, you scared the hell out of me,” I pause. “You took my grandmother from me.”
I’m surprised myself by my raw emotion. I have hit a place of undiluted truth: Hello, my name is Nat Idle, and I love my grandmother. I care about someone as much as I care about myself.
Harry looks down.
“Your grandmother put up a fight on her behalf,” Betty Lou says. “She gave Vince a fierce karate kick to the leg.”
Hence the limp.
Again, I fall silent.
Finally, Harry speaks: “Betty Lou, can you leave me alone with the young man? We have a few things to talk about.”
Chapter 50
From his back pocket, he pulls a piece of paper.
“She has beautiful penmanship. But when the ink started to fade, I typed this up. That was probably 1954. I’ve retyped it a few times since.”