Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Good,’ growled Dr Roach, still giving off the impression of being fireworks about to explode. ‘I have work to do. Get yourself a lawyer,’ he instructed me, handing me the paperwork. Then he strutted away, leaving me on my own.

  ‘Am I free to go?’ I asked Head Bedpan.

  ‘Not until the judge—’

  ‘I’ll take care of that, ma’am!’ piped a voice behind me. ‘I’m an attorney.’

  I swung around to see an eager lad in a suit, hair freshly cut and slicked, who looked all of sixteen years old.

  ‘Ambulance chaser,’ muttered Dr Bedpan as he strode away.

  ‘Scott Clayton,’ the youngster introduced himself, offering me his hand, which I accepted and shook with warmth and without hesitation. I had no doubt he was just out of law school, had heard about me on the police scanner and had come to my rescue more for a fee than for the sake of mercy. But I didn’t care if he was a toddler in diapers as long as he got me out of there.

  ‘Could I see the paperwork?’

  Of course he could. I handed it over.

  He took one look, handed it back and deployed his cell phone and his thumbs, texting. ‘Less intrusive, easier on everybody,’ he explained to me. ‘Now we just wait to hear back … boom.’ He pulled an InkJoy pen and a card from his shirt pocket, wrote on the latter and handed it to me. ‘See you there!’ He hustled away. I wondered where he was going in such a hurry, then realized: he’d heard the siren call of, well, sirens outside the ER.

  I looked at the card. It was Attorney Scott Clayton’s business card, with a phone number but no address. On its back were noted the date and time, the next week, of my hearing.

  Finding it hard to comprehend anything that was happening, I must have stood there like a pillar of salt in the middle of the hospital hallway, and why salt, let alone a pillar, of all things? But finally my mental ducks began to arrange themselves, thus: it did not appear that Deputy Crickens was going to drive me back to my home, nor was Dr Roach or Dr Bedpan or my so-called lawyer or anyone else. I needed a ride. I needed to phone Cassie.

  I found an orderly and asked to use a phone. He looked at me as if this request alone were proof of mental incompetence, then passed me off to a nurse, after which I was volleyed from nursing station to nursing station to front desk to administration. There was a pay phone in the lobby, but it was out of order – why were they always and forever out of order when needed? And no, I was not allowed to use the one sitting right there on the secretary’s desk. Shuffled hither and yon like a refugee, finally I realized I was asking the wrong people, so I approached a humble, scruffy man in work clothes who was mopping a floor, his olive-drab sleeves rolled up. He said, ‘A’course, ma’am,’ and handed me a cell phone he carried clipped to his belt.

  First I called myself, at home, hoping Cassie would pick up. A moment later, it occurred to me that, duh, I should have used her cell phone number, but by then it didn’t matter because I was talking with her.

  ‘Mom!’ She sounded vastly relieved to hear my voice.

  ‘How are you, sweetie?’

  ‘Mom, if we were standing on the deck of the sinking Titanic, you would be asking me how I was. I’m worrying about you, that’s how I am! What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing. The redoubtable Roach rescued me, at least for the time being. All I need right now is for you to come pick me up.’

  ‘All right! Where are the keys to the Vo?’

  ‘They’re …’ I groped myself. ‘Oh, shit. They’re in my pants pocket.’

  I suppose the expletive clarified that they were in the pants I had on. Cassie asked, ‘Spare keys?’

  ‘Of course I have some, but I’m not sure where … try under the bananas.’

  Rather blankly for such an intelligent person, my daughter echoed, ‘Under the bananas?’

  ‘You know, in the basket on the kitchen table.’ Which was not actually located in the kitchen, as the kitchen was too small, but between the kitchen and the studio, in what was rather grandiloquently known as the Florida room. Bananas resided in one of the baskets on that table, but other objects tended to collect around and beneath them, as if they were yellow dragons lying in a nest of treasures. ‘Try the everything drawer in the kitchen, too. And the everything basket on the coffee table in the front room. And the everything box on top of my dresser.’

  ‘Hold the phone, Mom.’

  I did so, following its owner down a corridor. His life seemed to consist of slop, wring, mop, trundle the wringer forward on its tiny wheels, repeat. Brown, grizzled, bent, his arm muscles like thick ropes under his brown skin, he took time to smile at me, and I asked him, ‘Have you worked here long?’

  ‘Close to forty years.’

  ‘That’s a long time. Do you live close by?’

  ‘Not too far. Up Esto way.’

  ‘Esto!’ As usual, I remembered something but didn’t know what. ‘Somebody was telling me not long ago …’

  The friendly custodian knew a senior moment when he saw one happening. ‘Two-Toed Tom Festival’s coming up soon,’ he diagnosed.

  ‘That’s it! Esto’s the place with the giant alligator.’ Gesticulating, I pointed his own cell phone at him. ‘Have you ever seen it?’

  ‘Seed it? Heck, no, ma’am.’ Growing animated, he took a break from his work and stood up to talk with me, leaning on his mop. ‘Ol’ Tom don’t let nobody see him, not in my lifetime. What a person gets to see is the carcass laying dead an’ all ripped up, the cow or the colt or whatever it was, and the big ol’ drag marks where that gator done come and went, and the tracks of that foot ain’t got but only two toes on it. Years go by. Just when you think he gone it happen again. How he live so long nobody know. Maybe he a ghost now. He don’t stay in no swamp like a regular gator. He—’

  ‘Mom?’ spoke a voice from the phone in my hand.

  I gave a startled jump before I put the phone to my ear. ‘Cassie! I forgot about you.’

  She laughed, sounding both frustrated and relieved. ‘Nice to know you’re functioning like your normal self.’

  ‘Did you find the car keys?’

  ‘Yes, finally, in your craft room in a basket full of stickers. So where exactly in Cooter Spring is the hospital?’

  I gave her directions, clicked off and handed the phone back to the janitor. ‘Thank you so much.’

  He nodded, smiled and lifted his mop, ready to get on with his work.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I asked him. ‘Alligator or otherwise?’

  He paused to think, eyes wide; the whites showed, making his eyes look like hollow moons in a dark, dusky sky. ‘Now you ask, ma’am, I don’t rightly know. I always figured them was just stories.’

  I smiled, nodded, walked away and sighed.

  TWELVE

  Fifteen very long minutes later, Cassie pulled up in front of the hospital, where I was waiting, sweating in the sun, but, damn, I was not going back inside that place, air conditioning notwithstanding. As I got into the Vo, which remained loaded with towels, chairs, rainbow kite and so on, I said, ‘We still have time to go to the beach for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Are you crazy, Mom? No, forget I said that; just tell me how you engineered your great escape.’

  ‘We can talk while I drive. Move, please.’

  ‘Sheesh!’ But, relinquishing the driver’s seat, Cassie looked relieved that I was acting so normally annoying. Truth was, I needed the feeling of taking charge and being in control, although I found myself being especially careful to drive sanely.

  ‘Doctor Roach engineered my great escape,’ I told Cassie, keeping my tone very matter-of-fact as I described the clash of the Great Ones in White Coats and explained how it had been resolved: I was to show up at a court hearing the following Monday.

  ‘So you’re not out of the woods yet.’ She did not sound matter-of-fact at all; her voice rose with each word. ‘I can’t believe Maurie is doing this to you.’

  ‘Maurie?’
I screeched, as did the brakes; I slammed them on. We were passing through a small town with no traffic lights, one grocery, no houses larger than a shack and not a soul on the sun-baked sidewalks, but I reacted as if a child had darted in front of me. ‘It couldn’t have been Maurie!’

  ‘It has to be Maurie.’ Cassie sounded almost as upset as I now felt. ‘Wilma Lou didn’t know all that stuff about you. She says some woman phoned and told her.’

  This shook me more than being taken away in a police car, the fact of the psych hold and the confrontation with Dr Bedpan combined. I swerved to the curb, stopped the car, put it in park and turned up the air conditioning because, for some reason, I felt hot. ‘It could not have been Maurie,’ I repeated, as if saying it louder would help.

  Cassie spoke softly, sensibly. ‘I don’t like it either, Mom, but try to calm down and think—’

  I hated being reasoned with, and I interrupted most rudely. ‘Call Maurie,’ I ordered Cassie.

  ‘I already did and left a message. She hasn’t returned—’

  ‘Call her again.’

  Rolling her eyes only slightly, Cassie pulled out a high-tech (to me, anyway) phone, hit a preset button, then speaker. I could hear for myself that the phone rang and rang and no voicemail picked up.

  Cassie poked, swiped and started to put the phone away.

  ‘Call Rob,’ I ordered.

  ‘This time of day he’d be at work, Mom.’

  ‘Then call him at work.’ Even to myself I sounded a bit shrill, so I took a deep breath, made my voice calm and explained, ‘I want to get this thing settled.’

  ‘You’re pissed off, you mean.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ I truly wasn’t, not after the first shock. Already I had made up my mind. ‘Maurie might be rigid, sweetie, but no way does she want to get me committed. Have some faith in your sister. Maybe Rob knows what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t have his work number.’

  ‘Then call information! Loomis, Badcock and Madison, Attorneys at Law, Syracuse, New York.’

  Sighing, Cassie humored me, leaving her phone on speaker so I would suffer martyrdom with her as she was passed from operator to New York operator to office receptionist to aide to secretary to executive secretary to paralegal assistant before Rob finally picked up. ‘Madison.’

  But speaking with Cassie, it only took him a moment to transform himself from lawyer to brother-in-law. ‘I only saw her for ten minutes, Cass. She stopped by the office to tell me she was on her way to the cabin to do some primal screaming.’

  Good for Maurie. I loved the isolated cabin in the Adirondacks, which had been in my husband’s family for generations without much change. Not only was it safe from any cell phone reception, but there was no electricity, only a wood stove, and bathing meant skinny-dipping in a frigid, glacial lake. To me, Maurie’s going to the cabin showed that she knew exactly how to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous relativity.

  ‘She said your mother hadn’t completely lost her marbles, but there was definitely a hole in the bag,’ Rob added. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I am an old bag with only the usual orifices,’ I hollered into the phone.

  ‘Oh my God, Beverly, I didn’t know you were there! I’m sorry! I—’

  ‘It’s OK, Rob! I’m just joking around. What’s happening is I got pulled in this morning on a psych hold.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A Baker Act,’ I clarified, as Rob was a lawyer and maybe would know what that was.

  But he didn’t. ‘Pulled in? What are you talking about?’

  I tried to explain but Cassie took over, concluding, ‘So they let Mom go, but she has a court hearing next week. Mom’s OK for the time being, but I am seriously pissed at Maurie if she had anything to do with this.’ With her tone getting edgier by the moment, Cassie ended the call hastily. ‘So we need to talk with her, that’s all, Rob. When she gets back, could you tell her to call? Gotta go. Thanks.’

  Snuffing the phone, Cassie told me, ‘Your sense of humor sucks, Mom.’

  ‘Always has,’ I acknowledged. ‘What the heck is that thing we’re parked in front of?’ I’d been eyeing it and trying to figure it out for the past several minutes.

  Rolling her eyes, Cassie sat back, looked out her side window, and stiffened. ‘No way! Has that been there all the time?’

  ‘Presumably. It’s a solid stone statue. They don’t move around much.’

  ‘Of a possum?’

  My view cleared since her head was no longer in my way, I was able to say, ‘Several possums, actually.’ The monument, at least six feet tall, enclosed by iron railings, stars and stripes waving overhead, featured a bas-relief sculpture of daddy possum climbing a tree trunk to mommy possum, identified as such by baby possums riding on her back.

  ‘But – but why?’ Cassie bleated.

  Trying to find an answer for her, I scanned the text carved into the stone below the bas-relief:

  Erected in grateful recognition of the role the North American possum, a magnificent survivor of the marsupial family pre-dating the ages of the mastodon and the dinosaur, has played in furnishing both food and fur for the early settlers and their successors. Their presence here has provided a source of nutritious and flavorful food in normal times and has been an important aid to human survival in times of distress and critical need. The 1982 Session of the Florida Legislature further recognized the possum by passing a Joint Resolution proclaiming the First Saturday in August as Possum Day in the Great State of Florida.

  ‘Cassie,’ I said, ‘do me a favor and take a picture with that magic phone of yours?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘So I can show it to the judge next week, as proof that other people, including the Florida Legislature, are crazier than I am.’

  She stared, then cracked up laughing. I tried not to smile, not to show how glad I was to help her laugh.

  When we got to Panama City Beach, we first checked what was waving atop the flagpoles all up and down the coast, and we sighed with relief: yellow flags, meaning only slight surf hazard, not red for dangerous rip tides or purple for jellyfish, sharks, Nile crocodiles or whatever. Yellow meant mellow. Thus reassured, we found an outdoors-in-back table at one of the little seafood shacks that squeezed between all the towering hotels and condos. Given those obstacles, sitting on an open-air plank deck to eat was our only immediate way to access a view of the ocean.

  OK, technically it was not the ocean but only the Gulf of Mexico, with waves no surfer coveted, but with beach sand as white as powdered cane sugar and turquoise water shading to a vast bottle-green horizon. We sat on cast-iron chairs, the briny breeze messing with our hair, the seagulls swooping and keening, and neither of us minded how slow the service was. I know this because Cassie looked as entranced as I felt, both of us watching waves dancing their free-form minuet, an old man with a metal detector snailing along the shore, a parasailer billowing by in the sky. And I knew it because she ordered beer to go with her catch-of-the-day platter.

  By the time we had finished our lunch, fetched our gear from the car, claimed a spot on the beach (it wasn’t terribly crowded) and changed clothes in a grungy public locker room, I felt so in the moment that I had nearly forgotten about psych holds, Dr Bedpan, my instant lawyer and all the weirdness of the morning. I put sunscreen on Cassie’s back, and she did the same for me, deploring my swimsuit. ‘Mom, how many years have you been wearing that old thing?’

  ‘Who’s counting?’ The one-piece old thing had a ruffled skirt that started just below the bust to conceal my potbelly, not to speak of everything else that needed to be hidden. I headed for the door. ‘Last one in the water is an old thing!’

  I did not actually intend to race, but the sand was so burning hot that it forced me into a jog, and I waded into the surf not much behind Cassie.

  ‘Do the sting ray shuffle!’ I hollered at her.

  Bounding ahead, she paid no attention. I stood in a foamy wash of water up to my kn
ees, then my ankles, then my knees again, and watched Cassie give the waves a frontal assault, then expertly dive beneath the curl of a big one. Well, no reason she shouldn’t. The flags were yellow, which was almost as good as green, Cassie was a strong swimmer, and her bikini, while quite attractive, was substantial enough not to fall off her.

  Smiling, listening to the siren song of the surf, I waded in a little deeper …

  Sploosh, and a rude, crude, saltwatery assault knocked me head over teakettle, as my mother used to say, although I never knew exactly what ‘teakettle’ signified. Nor, with my head submerged and water invading my nose, did I care. I tried to stand up, but the water seemed to grab me by the ankles and tug me deeper. Sploosh again, inverted again, first sand in my face and then water and then sand once more; I felt myself being tumbled like washing in the dryer. I no longer knew which way was up, but I knew that sometime when I wasn’t watching I had become too much of a wobbly old woman to stand up to waves, and realized with dreadful clarity that I was about to drown in ridiculously shallow water. My lungs screamed. I needed to breathe or die.

  I dug my toes into the sand, then my fingers, and on hands and knees I crawled uphill – only by the slope of the sand could I tell which direction to aim myself. The water whammed me first one way and then the other, swooshing the sand out of my clutch; I dug in deeper and kept on keeping on. Even when the saltwater finally swirled away from my head and allowed me a gasp of air, I knew better than to try standing up. Submerged again as the next wave came in, I held on, then crawled some more. Inch by inch, between waves, gradually I emerged, like some sort of primeval life form, from the briny deep. I crawled until I reached dry sand, where I thought I could stand up. Ha! I wobbled halfway to my feet but found myself sitting right down again, facing my enemies, the waves. Shaking, coughing and gasping, I looked over both shoulders. Nobody on the beach seemed to have noticed me at all. Nor had Cassie, who was swimming about twenty feet out from shore, bobbing in the waves and grinning like a kid.

  I sat on my big butt (aka teakettle?) in the sand, blew salty residue from my nose, caught my breath, stopped shaking and decided there was no need to tell Cassie what had just happened, because what was the point? I had found a skeleton in my backyard, a dead person was visiting my house, a shadow of doubt had been cast upon my mental stability and I couldn’t seem to keep my balance in the water either? Nearly drowning was just another reminder of transience and mortality. It was just another tap on the shoulder.