The Silver Glove (2 page)

“No, what?” I said, clutching the phone receiver in a spasm of relief.

“Oh, goodness, don't tell me I forgot to—” she muttered irritably. “Yes, I did, here it is in my own coat pocket! There now, it's on its way. Keep it with you, you may well need it.”

The mouthpiece got suddenly warm against my cheek. I jerked the receiver away from me and almost dropped the thing. Through the little holes of the speaker came this pale gray mist, hanging in the bedroom air like your breath on a cold day.

If you didn't know my Gran, you might have to be peeled off the ceiling over something like this. I knew her, and I was kind of jangled by it myself.

Before my eyes, the mist solidified into the fingers of a long, soft silver leather glove that I grabbed and drew slowly out till it lay limply in my palm. Then I heard Gran hang up,
bam
.

As I've said, my Gran had powers.

I recognized this particular glove right away. It came from the flea market they hold on Saturdays in the yard of a neighborhood school on Columbus Avenue. My mom and I sometimes go there to look for priceless antiques, which we hadn't found any of yet. I'd bought the glove for my Gran's birthday two years ago. Even though there was only the one glove (for the left hand), it was so long and soft and pretty that I'd wanted Gran to have it. Also, it was something I could afford on my allowance.

I put the glove in my pocket and went back to reading
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which was the only thing that could keep my mind off everything else.

Mom came in late. I sat with her while she had a glass of wine to calm her nerves before bed. I had already decided what kind of approach to take about Gran's call: the effort of not just blurting out the good news was fraying my brain. The trick was to present the news properly.

I said, “Mom, does Alzheimer's disease make you think people are after you? You know, make you paranoid?”

“I don't think so,” Mom said, sipping her drink. “Don't you remember that program we saw on TV? God, I never thought it would come so close to home! Alzheimer's is forgetting, worse and worse forgetting, until you don't remember your own children or how to feed yourself. In the end your body forgets how to live and that's that.”

This sounded pretty horrible, but Gran (thank goodness) was clearly in some other kind of danger.
Who
wasn't going to “nobble” her? “Does Gran have any enemies?” I asked casually.

“What do you mean?” Mom said. “How could a little old lady in a retirement home have enemies?”

“Um, well,” I said, continuing my indirect approach, “it's not
impossible
, you know. What if she was a secret agent once, so secret that even you never knew about it; and now somebody's after her from back then.”

To me, this didn't seem too bad for spur-of-the-moment.

Mom actually smiled a little. “Your grandmother was never anybody's secret agent. You see too many movies, my girl—
Granny Gran and the Temple of Doom
.”

“I don't see as many as my friends do,” I said. I couldn't even talk to some of the kids at school if I hadn't seen certain movies, but Mom has never been sympathetic about this.

True to form, even in the midst of her worries about Gran (one thing about mothers is how
predictable
they are about certain things), Mom said, “Let's not get off on that.”

“Or maybe,” I said, closing in on the forbidden subject, “it's something to do with, you know, Gran's, um, special talents.”

Presto, Mom began to yell. “Look, Valentine, don't throw TV plots at me, all right? This is real life. Old people don't have enemies, and ‘special talents' are not part of real problems! We live in the same world that everybody else does, dull as that may sometimes seem, and we have to cope like everybody else, too.”

She sighed and looked at me sadly. She had big dark rings under her eyes. If only she would let me relieve her mind!

She said gently, “If you've got some idea that there's a dastardly plot to lock up Gran on the pretext that she's got Alzheimer's, please, please give it up. This is going to be tough enough as it is. I know it's a rotten deal, honey, believe me; this is my own mother we're talking about. I appreciate your sympathy and I know you're trying to help, but it's a matter of facing grim reality, not trying to sneak out from under it. Now I'm going to bed, and so are you, young lady. It's been some day. All we need is for one of us to come down with something from being overtired.”

No choice but the direct one was left. I said, “Mom, wait. Gran's really all right, she told me—I spoke to her on the phone today.”

“
What
?” said Mom. “What did she say? Where is she?”

“We never got around to that,” I had to admit.

Mom jumped up and paced around the living room. “Valli, why didn't you tell me?”

“I'm trying to,” I said. “The thing is, there's nothing wrong with her.”

“Oh, a chat on the phone and you know more about her condition than the doctors do?” Mom flared. “So she was having a lucid period, that's all, it happens, but it doesn't mean anything!”

“Mom,” I said. “It does mean something. I know you're not going to like this, but you have to listen. Whatever's going on, and she told me she wasn't sure what it was herself yet, it's something to do with magic.”

“Magic.” Mom put her wine glass down on the stereo and closed her eyes wearily. “No,” she said. “It's something to do with a horrible disease that kills your brain, cell by cell. Valli, you've got to face it—”

“Look, Mom. She put this through the phone when I talked to her.” I pulled out the glove.

“Oh, Val,” she said, “come on. That must have been in with all the other stuff of hers that I just brought home.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn't.”

Mom said firmly, “Then you must have picked it up in her room the last time you visited her at the home.”

“Mom,” I said, “you know Gran can do things.”

Mom held out her hand. “Let me see that.”

She took the glove and held it between two fingers as if it was poisonous. Then she whirled, opened the window behind her, and threw the glove out.

“Hey!” I yelped.

Mom banged the window shut. “Go to bed, Valli,” she said. “NOW.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”

Mom went into her bedroom and slammed the door. After a second, I heard her crying quietly behind it.

I tiptoed to the living room window and eased it open, hoping to spot the silver glove down in the courtyard for later retrieval. It wasn't there. It was hovering in the air outside the window, fingers spread. Floating.

I snatched the glove out of the air and rolled it up and stuffed it back into my pocket.
Then
I went to bed.

 

2
Brightner

 

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I stayed in bed until I heard Mom leave, even though that meant I would have to rush like crazy to get to school on time. Mom didn't come and roust me out, either. One of the things that happened when she came around to calling me Val or Valli instead of Tina is that she began to insist on my being responsible for running more of my own life, which was actually not so bad.

The thing was, I really did not want to face her that morning. Her trying to throw away Gran's glove had been a pretty good indication that she was too upset to even talk to. I thought it wouldn't hurt to avoid more talk for a while.

In fact Mom had been moody and irritable a lot lately, ever since she'd quit her editor job and turned herself into a literary agent. What with checkbook struggles and friendships changing and the hassles in getting used to the new people at the office where Mom now rented space, we had both been under a lot of extra strain before the problem of Gran's disappearance ever came up.

I had developed certain strategies for avoiding the worst of the fallout, one of them being hanging out in bed until Mom was gone instead of having breakfast with her. That's the one I used today.

So when I heard the locks click, I leaped out of bed and made record time for school, which turned out not to be necessary at all. We had an assembly first thing, which was welcome only because it was possible to slip in a little late, as I did that morning, in all the bustle and fuss of a whole school settling into the auditorium seats.

The assembly started out the same boring way they all do. To keep my mind off my troubles, I read more of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, the big, fat, unabridged edition which is good for weeks even if you are a fast reader.

My friend Barbara, who sat next to me, jogged my elbow to let me know that Mr. Rudd was getting set to launch. If he noticed you weren't paying attention, he tended to take it personally. Mr. Rudd proceeded to present the new school psychologist (the old one had married some kind of therapist and moved to California).

The replacement shrink made an entrance. He walked out of the wings and stood next to Rudd, looking down at us all. And right then I knew I was in for something, though I didn't have a clue as to what.

Mr. Rudd was an ordinary-sized person who wore dull clothes and bright-colored ties and a nervous, plastic smile to fool people into thinking he was dumb, which he was not. Nobody liked him much but he was okay, and he usually looked like a regular, boring, old grown-up person.

Usually. Next to this psychologist, whose name was Dr. Brightner, Mr. Rudd looked like a jerky little wooden puppet, a sort of bad try at Pinocchio.

Dr. Brightner was big, and sort of smooth and strong-looking. He had a thick paunch and broad shoulders, and he was a little bowlegged but stood very easily, as if he could move fast if he had to. He had a blobby nose, jowls hanging over his collar, and a pouty sort of mouth with a droopy lower lip. At first glance his face reminded me of Snoopy's.

Not the eyes, though. His eyes were small, bright, and quick. He kept his hands folded in front of him, and I had a funny feeling that he held them that way to keep the fingers from getting him in trouble by doing something clever and full of mischief while he wasn't looking.

“Well, boys and girls,” he drawled in this husky, juicy voice, “here I am, take a good look. I'm older than some of your parents, and in some ways a lot more experienced. I come from a family of truckers, not a family of doctors or professors. In fact I used to be a cop.”

That got him some buzzing all right.

He smiled, and it was amazing how wide and toothy that pursed-up, droopy mouth got. “Now you know the worst, right? It gets better. I didn't like being a cop, I got bored being a cop. So I went back to school to make myself into something else: a sort of minor-league shrink. My job is to be around when you need to talk to somebody besides the kid sitting next to you, somebody who hasn't spent his whole life in school. I've been outside, I know a few things. Try me.”

My friend Barb jogged me again and whispered, “Better than old Matthews, anyway.”

To tell the truth, Dr. Brightner did seem pretty okay. Interesting, at least. But this alarm kept dinging way back in my head someplace, warning me. Of something.

“I'm going to start out,” he said, “by asking a few of you to come by my office and spend a little of your free time talking to me so I can get a feel for this place. I need to know the kinds of things that are on people's minds. And I'd like something to do until somebody flips out and really needs my attention.”

He took a piece of yellow paper out of his pocket. “I've got a list here,” he said, “which I will not read out loud. The people I've selected to be my first contacts on this planet—” Laughs. “—will get a note from me in the next day or two, inviting them to drop by.”

Clang
. I knew I was going to be one of those kids.

Sure enough, after lunch I got a printed form delivered to me in French class. It read, “Please come to my office at for a talk at
      
today. Brightner.” He had filled in the hour that my free period started that afternoon.

Phooey, I thought; that's all I need, a friendly chat with a nosy stranger. I only had one thing on my mind, naturally, but you don't go and discuss your magic grandmother with anybody at school. I hadn't said anything to Barb, even.

My friend Lennie came drifting over as I left the classroom, and I put the summons in my pocket.

He said, “Hey, Val, could you do me a favor?”

“Sure, what?” I said.

He lowered his voice and moved a little closer to me, looking down at his shoes in embarrassment. “You know that thing I wrote for English? Petterick wants me to read it out loud to the class. I hate reading out loud. Could you read it for me?”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “you're not
that
shy!”

He was, though. Lennie grew up with Spanish as his first language, and he had a little bit of an accent and would sometimes even stammer in English.

So I ended up reading his “Letters from Another World” (we were doing a unit on great travel-writing) for him in English. It was about some creatures called the wigpeople, and here's a sample: “ ‘They sent her home from work because she said she was a wigman or wigwoman. There had been quite a problem in these parts about the wigpeople, did I ever tell you? Huge, huge wigs wandering under the copper beeches, and, Mabel, you can just see the funny toes in the striped socks sticking out through the ends of the hair.' ”

The reading got started late, but it was a huge success and it actually took my mind off Gran and Mom. I really got into it and started clowning around and leaving room for the laughter, and what with one thing and another, I only got through about half of it.