Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (3 page)

UP, UP, AND
reluctantly away four hours later, I sat mid-cabin in my Aer Lingus flight’s Airbus A330 feeling pretty darn sorry for myself.

Forgoing the movie on the little TV in the seat back in front of me, I leaned my forehead against the cold plastic window, staring at the rags of dirty clouds and the gray North Atlantic sailing away beneath the long, slender wing.

What I had said to Mary Catherine still held very much true. I did not want to be on this plane. Not without her. Not after the previous week. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the wind in her hair atop that white-rock cliff. The moonlight on the curve of her back in those cold farmhouse rooms night after night.

I mean, was my brain broken? No matter the complications, parting just didn’t make sense. You flew toward a woman like that. Not away.

This plane is heading in the wrong damn direction, I thought, shaking my head as I squinted down at the gray sea and sky.

I was going into my pocket for some gum I’d bought at the Shannon duty-free shop to ease the ratcheting pressure in my ears when I found the folded note.

MICHAEL
it said on the outside in Mary Catherine’s perfect script.

She must have slipped it in my jeans pocket before she chucked the pants out the window. I quickly unfolded it.

Dear Michael
,

From the very moment our eyes met in your apartment foyer all those years ago, I felt it in my heart. That you were mine. And I was yours. Which makes no sense. And yet it is the truest thing I know. I saw you and suddenly knew. That I was somehow finally done with all my silly wanderings. I saw you, Michael, and I was suddenly home. This last week with you has been the best week of my life. You will always be my home.

MC

“Dear God, woman,” I whispered as I reread the note.

Dear God, I thought as I turned and looked out at the world rushing by through my tears.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING
was gray as we made our final approach to New York City. The city skyline, the raining sky, the depths of my soul. I mean, I guess it was possible that things could have been more depressing as the plane touched down on the puddled tarmac.

But I doubt it.

I hadn’t slept a wink, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mary Catherine still wasn’t with me. What else was there to say? Or think? Or do? Not much. In fact, nothing at all.

“Jet lag and a broken heart,” I mumbled as the flight attendant spouted some peppy “Welcome to New York” crap over the plane’s intercom. “Winning combination.”

Half an hour later, finally having escaped from the happy people over at customs, I was at a grim JFK-concourse fast-food joint trying to keep down a lukewarm burrito when I remembered to power my phone back on.

I yawned as the message bell went off like a slot-machine win. Then I stopped yawning. There were six text messages and five missed calls, all from
HOME
.

A dark swirl of panic ripped immediately through my jet lag. Because of the egregious cell-phone charges, I’d left explicit instructions for my family to call only if there was a true emergency. Something was up. I thumbed the Return Call button. Whatever the hell it was, it couldn’t be good.

“Hello?!” came Juliana’s panicked voice on the first ring.

“Juliana, it’s Dad. I just got off the plane at JFK. What is it?”

“Thank God you’re home. It’s Gramps, Dad. He’s missing. He was supposed to come over here last night to babysit around ten, but when we called the rectory at eleven, they said he’d left at nine thirty. He never made it back last night, Dad. Seamus is missing. We don’t know where he is!”

“Is the rectory housekeeper, Anita, still with you?” I said, grabbing my bag and hustling immediately back onto the concourse.

“No. I told her to go home last night, Dad. Don’t worry: I’m watching everybody.”

“I know you are, Juliana. You’re a good girl,” I said as calmly as I could as I tried to read the impossible terminal signs to find the exit. “What am I saying? I mean young woman. Don’t worry about Gramps. I’m sure he’s okay. Probably met an old friend and stayed over with him. I’m going to find him right now. I’ll call you the first I hear from him.”

“Okay, good. I’m so glad you and Mary Catherine are home,” she said.

I decided to leave out the fact that Mary Catherine was still stuck in Ireland for the time being. One catastrophe at a time.

“And don’t worry. Things are under control on this end. I love you so much, Dad,” Juliana said.

“I love you, too,” I said before I hung up.

My next call, as I finally spotted an actual exit sign, was to my buddies at the Ombudsman Outreach Squad on 125th Street.

“Brooklyn, hi. It’s Mike Bennett,” I said when Detective Kale answered. “I need a favor. You ever do a missing persons case?”

“Sure, plenty of them. Why? What’s up?”

“I just got off a plane out at Kennedy. My grandfather, Seamus Bennett, has been missing since around ten last night. He’s eighty-one, white male, white hair, five seven, around a hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably wearing black priest’s clothes. He left the Holy Name rectory on West Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam last night around nine thirty, probably heading west for my building on West End and Ninety-Fifth. We’re especially worried about him because he recently had a stroke.”

“Seamus?” Brooklyn said. “Oh, no. I remember meeting him at Naomi Chast’s wake. I’m on it, Mike. I’ll check all the local hospitals and precincts.”

I finally went through some sliding doors into the cold, grim predawn street. Above the curbside taxi stand, rain pelted off a fading rusted sign from maybe the eighties-era Koch administration.

WELCOME TO NY. HOW YA DOIN
’? it said.

Luckily, I didn’t have my service weapon with me because I might have emptied a magazine into it in reply.

“I’m stressed-out, New York,” I mumbled. “As usual. Fuhgeddaboudit!”

I WAS STUCK
in my taxi on the 59th Street Bridge staring at the towers of Manhattan in the honking suicide evening rush-hour traffic when Brooklyn called me back.

The good news was that she thought she’d found Seamus, but the bad news was where she’d found him. I had the cabbie take me straight to West 106th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Brooklyn was actually waiting for me on the sidewalk twenty-five minutes later, when my cab finally made it to the Jewish Home Lifecare facility.

“He’s fine, Mike. I was just in there. He’s up on eight, and he’s fine,” Brooklyn said in greeting as I flew from the taxi to the facility’s front door.

“He’s in a nursing home, Brooklyn!” I snapped at her as I went inside and showed the security guard my shield. “I don’t call this fine. What the hell happened?”

“Twenty-Fourth Precinct was called at around ten fifteen,” Brooklyn said as we maneuvered around an old lady in a wheelchair and another one lying on a bed in the hallway. “Somebody reported a confused old man on the uptown platform of the Ninety-Sixth Street number one subway line.”

I shook my head picturing it. Seamus helpless on a subway platform, wandering around as the trains blew past. Dear Lord, did that hurt. No, please, I thought, not wanting it to be true.

“He wasn’t wearing his priest’s clothes, Mike. He was in sweats, and he didn’t have any ID on him. When police questioned him, he got emotional, so they brought him here. It’s the biggest old-age home in the area, so they thought he might have wandered away from here. They also have an Alzheimer’s special care unit, so it was actually a smart move,” she said as we arrived at the elevator.

“Alzheimer’s?” I said, panicking some more as I pushed the elevator’s call button about eighty-six times. “Seamus does not have Alzheimer’s.”

“I know, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “I just spoke to him. He just woke up. They sedated him when he came in, but he’s lucid now. You’ll see.”

Brooklyn surprised me by squeezing my hand.

“Listen, Mike. My grandmother is ninety-one. She’s usually fine, but every once in a while, she forgets things. Stuff like this is going to happen going forward. It’s natural.”

“Dad?” called a voice.

I turned around and saw Juliana coming in through the doorway of the facility with her siblings in their school uniforms. Behind her were Ricky, Eddie, Trent, Jane, Fiona, and Bridget, holding Chrissy and Shawna’s hands.

“Look! Daddy really is home!” Chrissy said, grabbing Shawna as she jumped up and down.

“Juliana, what are you doing?” I said as I hurried toward the children and convinced the utterly confused guard that they were all with me.

“I thought everybody was supposed to be in school,” I said to Juliana.

“They are, but then when you texted me about Seamus being here, I went and got everyone out. Brian just left from Fordham Prep, too. He’s on the train now. We all need to be here for Gramps. Is he sick?”

“Is Gramps going to die?” Shawna said, tears springing up in her eyes.

“No, no. He’s okay, honey. He just got a little confused, and they brought him here. He’s upstairs on eight,” I said as I lifted up Shawna and gave her a kiss.

“Where’s Mary Catherine? Upstairs with Gramps?” Juliana said after I thanked Brooklyn profusely and convinced her that I had things under control so she could go back to work.

“Wait,” I said, changing the subject. “How did you get everybody out of school?”

“I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I had to forge a note with your signature. Well, actually two of them. One for me and one for all the munchkins. You have to call Sister Sheilah, by the way. She didn’t want to release them to me, but I was kind of pushy, I guess, and she finally relented.”

Under normal circumstances such chicanery would, of course, be a no-no, but this was a four-alarm Bennett family emergency. Juliana knew as we all did that rule-bending was allowable when it came to being there for a family member in need. Especially Seamus.

I gave my oldest daughter a hug and a quick fist bump as we walked toward the elevator.

“Forgery
and
lying to nuns?” I whispered to her. “Right out of the old Bennett playbook. I admire your technique.”

“MICHAEL SEAN ALOYSIUS
Bennett!” Seamus said as we came through his eighth-floor room’s open doorway to find him sitting in a chair laughing with a pretty young black woman in Tiffany-blue hospital scrubs.

“And the whole squad! The Lord save us all, you’re all a sight for sore eyes! You’ll not believe what’s happened to me, gang. I headed to your apartment house yesterday evening and lost my way, and now here I’ve woken up Jewish!”

We all laughed as we surrounded him in a group hug.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, too, Father. Believe me,” I said, choking back tears as I hugged this old man whom I loved as dearly as anyone on earth. I could admit to myself now that I was convinced that he was dead. Bonked on the head by a mugger or fallen down into a Con Edison manhole. To see him in one piece was truly a miracle.

“I hope everyone wasn’t worried. I must have given you all quite a scare. I tried to call the house when I woke up, but it just kept kicking into voice mail.”

“It’s fine, Seamus. It’s all going to be fine. First let’s get you out of here, okay?”

“Mr. Bennett?” the nice young black woman said to me. “I’m Dr. Blair Greenhalgh, head of the special care unit. Can I speak to you in the hall?”

“Sure,” I said. “Kids, keep Seamus company while I talk to the doctor.”

“Mike, wait. Come here,” Seamus said, embracing me again. “I knew you’d come and get me.”

A scared look came over his face. I hated seeing it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened to me. I just got confused. It won’t happen again. Please don’t stick me in this place or any other place, okay? I’m fine.”

“I’ve got you covered, Gramps,” I said, giving him another hug. “I promise.”

I finally got out into the hallway with the doc.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett. I know this all must be quite a shock,” Dr. Greenhalgh said. “I saw from your grandfather’s preliminary medical history that he recently had a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “About three weeks ago.”

“Stroke survivors often experience multiple types of memory loss—verbal, visual, informational. They sometimes wander and get lost even in familiar places. Is Mr. Bennett on any medications?”

“Just cholesterol stuff.”

“Okay,” Dr. Greenhalgh said, nodding. “This could have been an anomaly. Sometimes memory problems just go away as part of the healing process, but in the meantime, you should try to really help your grandfather with establishing routines. Perhaps you could draw up a small notebook with emergency numbers in it to keep on his person in case he gets confused again. Exercise is great, as is keeping him engaged. That’s about it. I’ll get the nurse to give you my contact info and get you guys out of here.”

Oh, he’s engaged, all right, I thought, watching him through the glass in the door after the kind doctor left. He and all the kids were standing in a circle holding hands, heads down, their lips moving in prayer. I smiled as I stood there watching them. You can’t keep a good man down.

Thank you, God, I prayed along with them as I closed my own eyes. For all of us being safe and back together again.

Almost all of us, I thought, patting the note in my pocket.

That’s when it happened. Right then and there in the corridor, jet-lagged out of my mind.

I opened my eyes and was suddenly home.