by Madelyn Alt
When she turned back to me, her tone was noticeably muted. “Your dad is going to need that coffee you brought with you. Grandpa, on the other hand, might be better served with warm milk.”
“Warm milk!” Grandpa G sputtered. “You trying to kill me, woman?”
“Quite the contrary,” Mom countered. “I’m trying to keep you alive to see a few more of your great-grandchildren.” With a meaningful sidelong glance in my direction, she continued. “Maybe they’ll be a little bit easier on my nerves.”
Evidently she hadn’t been apprised of Jenna and Courtney’s experiences with their imaginary friends ... which of course weren’t imaginary at all, as I had only recently discovered. My little nieces had been chatting with spirits from the Other Side. I wondered what my mother would say if she knew perfect Mel had been keeping secrets from her, too.
Somehow that thought made me feel a little better.
“Say,” I heard Grandpa G exclaim, “that a tattoo I see there?”
I turned my attention back toward Grandpa G, who had wheeled his motorized hoverchair around and had settled into place beside Marcus. He was now poking at Marcus’s bicep, where through the thin white cotton of his button-down, the dark blue outline of the stylized Celtic knot could clearly be seen. Marcus wasn’t some muscle-bound he-hunk, but he had really—really—nice muscles where it counted and just enough definition to make any woman under the age of, oh, ninety stop and take notice. The tattoo only added to the mesmerization effect. Greatly.
“Yes, sir, it is,” Marcus answered honestly, unfazed by my grandfather’s bluntness.
“Got one of them myself,” Grandpa G confided. “From my stint in the navy. I know what you’re thinking, a land-locked old farmer like myself, in the navy? Well, that’s exactly why I did it. You only get a chance to be young and foolish once in yer life. A man’s gotta make the most of it.” He began prying at his buttons and pulling his flannel shirt apart, ready to expose heaven only knows what.
My mother sat down beside my father and glared over at the two of them, judgment written all over her face. “Young and foolish sounds about right, but Mama always said that ugly tattoo was from when you were sowing your wild oats all over the county.” I could see her eyes zooming in on Marcus’s sleeve, trying to discern the dark shape beneath.
Grandpa G’s face took on a decidedly impish demeanor. “Well, yeah, this one. But if I was to show you the one I got in the navy, those nurses up the way would be calling for security.” And with the shocked horror that parted Mom’s lips, he proudly peeled the flannel back to show Marcus a nondescript anchor, heavily inked, on the loose chicken skin of his shoulder. Ruefully he gazed down at the wrinkled display. “It looked a lot better back then, o’course. Jeebus, getting old is the pits. Used to be solid as a rock. Now the damn thing looks as sad as a schoolgirl trying to fill out her first bra.”
Mom rose to her feet, her shoulders held stiff, and went to the wall of windows to gaze out at the deepening twilight. Though I knew I’d probably regret it, I leaned over and whispered, “So, Gramps. What’s the other tat?”
He leaned in, too, but never bothered to lower his voice. “A little Polynesian girl in a grass skirt. I could make her hula and everything. The Polynesian girl, o‘course. Not yer grandma.” And then he cackled and smacked his knee. “Though it did used to make yer grandma get an itch, too, in her younger days, darned if it didn’t!” And he laughed again, not seeming to mind a bit that my face had just gone crimson and I was furiously blinking away the images that his words had just burned into my mind.
And that was Grandpa G for you. Completely devoid of a PC filter, but somehow you still had to love him for it.
Mom’s shoulders were held stiffer than ever when she turned back from the window. “Really, Dad,” she admonished. “Aren’t you a little old for throwing things out just for shock value?”
Grandpa G shrugged. “At my age, a little shock value might be the only thing keeping the old ticker going that day. You learn not to look down yer nose at it.”
An excuse if I ever heard one. Grandpa G had never been the kind of guy to turn away from a shock-’n-awe approach to life.
Mom apparently agreed with my assessment. She crossed her arms and glared at him. “Mrs. Henderson down the street just might disagree. You scared the pants off her the other day, bursting out from behind the sheets she had on the line.”
“If I’d scared the pants off of her, I‘da had another reason for the old ticker to keep goin’,” he quipped saucily. “And I wouldn’t be lookin’ down my nose at that, either.”
Marcus choked, coughed, and had to pound on his chest a couple of times. “Sorry,” he wheezed when he could draw breath again. “Coffee went down the wrong way.”
I didn’t dare catch his eye for fear of sending him into another fit of the choke-backs, but I, for one, was glad that my mom hadn’t noticed that his cup of coffee was still in the carrying tray.
My mother paced over to the door to peer out into the hall. “Greg is still there with her,” she fussed.
“That’s a good thing. Isn’t it?” My brother-in-law, family lawyer extraordinaire Greg Craven, had been known to, shall we say, let Mel handle things at the most crucial of times, so I thought it a valid question.
“Well, of course it is! But he hasn’t come out to let us know how things are going, either.” With nothing to see out the door, she came and sat beside my father with a restless sigh. But I couldn’t help noticing that she’d left the door propped wide open. An attempt to usher in news, ASAP, perhaps?
“Well . . . they’re busy in there, Mom.”
“But couldn’t he do at least that much? How long would it take? A minute, tops?”
Obviously she was delusional. If Greg had stepped one foot out of the labor and delivery room, my mom would have latched onto him like a leech, sucking him dry of all information until he had given his all.
“And where are the girls tonight?” I asked, again attempting to sway my mom’s attention into gentler waters. The well-being of my nieces, Jenna and Courtney, ought to suffice.
“Mel’s friends, Margo and Jane, are watching them,” Mom said vaguely, waving away my concern. She had more important things on her mind.
Ugh. Jane Churchill I could tolerate, though I was far from convinced about the dependability of her avowals of friendship. Margo Dickerson-Craig, emphasis on the hyphen, was quite another story. One with an evil queen who liked to think the whole world revolved around her. Too bad the man in the magic mirror couldn’t grow a pair and tell it like it was. If he had, that particular fairy tale could have had a happier ending.
But (and this was the important part), if the two of them had stepped up to the plate to offer their assistance at such a crucial time, more power to them. Despite our differences, especially with Margo, I would not fault them.
I just wished it could have been me. I love the girls. I do. They are sticky-sweet and wonderful, and I still felt a little guilty that Mel had decided to go the home nurse route for the last months of her problematic pregnancy rather than keep me on as her—okay, somewhat-reluctant-at-the-time, that was my fault—after-hours solution.
Especially after I had discovered the girls’ ... gifts. They were going to need an auntie-in-the-know to help guide their way through the murk and confusion of the otherworldly. Heaven knows Mel wasn’t going to be able to help. Honestly? She was about as sensitive as a brick wall. And that was on a good day. Intuition? Mel’s only demonstrated gift toward intuition seemed to be in ferreting out the secrets her friends and frenemies desperately wanted to keep hidden. At that, she was tops.
I was about to ask Mom if perhaps I should consider leaving her to the hospital vigil and heading over to Mel’s to spell Margo and Jane when Mom’s chin jerked up and her gaze darted left and right. She twisted in her chair. “Now where did that man go?”
Chapter 4
That man being, you guessed it, my wily grandfather, who has more tric
ky maneuvers than Houdini. Somehow he had managed to slip away with neither me nor my mother noticing.
“Marcus, did you see where Grandpa went?”
Marcus, who had been absorbed in trying to read the lips on the muted television mounted high on the wall, snapped to attention. “Your grandfather?” He looked first left, then right, blankly. “Well, he was right here. Um ...”
No help whatsoever. Definitely not going to be scoring brownie points with my mom anytime this evening. She was already at the end of her rope.
“Glenn,” she said, taking the newspaper out of my father’s hands. “Glenn!” She rapped on the wooden arm of the chair.
“A-whuh?” My father snuffled and snorted himself into awareness. “What is it? What’s wrong? Did I fall asleep?”
“You know you did,” Mom accused. “Dad’s gone.”
My dad was still knuckling the sleep out of his eyes from underneath his old-school plastic aviator glasses. The movement knocked the glasses slightly askew, but he didn’t seem to notice. It gave him a goofy appearance, like some absent-minded professor. Well, he was a long-time accountant, so maybe that wasn’t far off the mark. “Gone?” he asked, just as blank as Marcus.
“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 impossibility. 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 l
ingering 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 ...
