Devil's Plaything (7 page)

“Who did? Who made it so Adrianna can't breathe?”

Before she can answer, I hear a knock on the door, and it opens. In the entrance stand Vince and an obese guard. The guard has his hand on a wood baton cradled on his belt he certainly hasn't had cause to use for a decade.

“Vince, I already asked you to leave,” I say.

“And now I'm asking you to leave.”

“Get out.”

“Under state law, I have the right to bar anyone from the premises who presents a disruption to a resident, even family.”

The fat guard's breathing is labored to the point of wheezing. He drums his fingers on the baton.

“T
hank you for your concern, Vince. Lane is doing okay,” I say, suppressing more confrontational urges. “She got a little frightened.”

“Nevertheless, I feel it would be best for you to go. She needs a calm environment, maybe a sedative. You seem to be exacerbating whatever is troubling her.”

What pops into my mind is, No way that I'm leaving Grandma. I don't like or trust Vince. I don't understand the keen interest he's suddenly taking in us. I'm also struck that I've no idea what are my legal rights.

“Give me a few minutes to say goodbye to her,” I say, adding after a pause, “in private.”

He looks at the guard and back at me.

“We'll wait outside. Five minutes.”

They leave and shut the door.

“Grandma, you said you trust me, right?” I whisper.

“I have since you appeared on this earth and I started changing your diapers. And do you want to know something?”

“What, Grandma?”

“You were a big pooper. Explosive. Oh goodness you could go through diapers.”

She smiles. I pat her hand, and smile back.

Grandma has a semi-private bathroom. It connects through a locked doorway to the room of Victoria Xavier. She's a guileless former romance novelist, five years Grandma's junior, whose family lost most of her money in the dot-com bust. Over the last two years, she and Grandma have become good friends, sufficiently so that they have exchanged keys so that they can get into each other's rooms late at night to chat.

In Grandma's nightstand I find the key to Victoria's room.

“Mr. Idle,” Vince says through the door.

“I'm settling her down,” I declare. “A couple of more minutes.”

I quietly walk to Grandma's closet. I open it, loosing the smell of mothballs and cheap detergent. Inside, I find a wheelchair. I unfold it, roll it to the bed, and lower Grandma into it. From the closet, I pull out her knee-length wool jacket and drape it over her legs.

I put my finger to my lips.

“I'd like the thingy,” Grandma says. “Please.”

I'm bewildered by this request. Again, I put my finger to my lips. “Please, Grandma.”

She swivels her head around, looking for something. She pauses and I follow her gaze to the dresser. On it sits the phone Grandma uses to play video games.

“Your thingy,” I whisper, handing her the phone. I stuff the charger into my pocket and grab my backpack.

“Mr. Idle,” Vince says from beyond the door.

“Just changing her shoes,” I say.

Grandma cradles her video game as I wheel her into the bathroom. I put the key into the lock of the door to Victoria's room; I turn the key. The door opens.

Victoria sits in bed. She faces in our direction. She's watching a soap opera on a flat-panel television that is a few feet to our left, volume up high. She looks surprised, then smiles widely.

“Idles!” she exclaims. Thanks to her ongoing Botox treatments, her forehead remains relatively placid, despite her enthusiasm. She's still handsome, long hair flowing over her shoulders scrubbed of gray and tinted brown. It's mid-morning but she hasn't changed from her flower-patterned nightgown.

Grandma waves.

I put my finger to my lips. “Shh. Please, Victoria. I'll explain in a second.”

“Are you okay?” she responds, just above a whisper. “Can you believe how much nonsense there is on television?”

“May I ask a favor?”

I hear the guard knock his baton loudly on Grandma's door. Apparently, he and Vince didn't hear Victoria's initial outburst over the TV. I return to Grandma's room, shout, “Just another minute. Please!”

I return to Victoria, and close the bathroom door behind me.

“What's going on?” Victoria asks.

Victoria's royalties pay for a nicer room than Lane's, and it has a sliding glass door that leads to a patio and the property's lawn.

“Can Grandma and I go out that way?” I ask, pointing at the patio door.

“Sure, but . . .”

I interrupt her. “When Vince comes in here, tell them that we left through the door to the hallway.”

It is unlikely this gambit will work, or that Victoria will be able to pull it off.

“Is Lane okay?”

“Fine,” I say, pushing Grandma to the patio doors.

I pull out a business card and hand it to Victoria. “Call my cell phone and I'll explain.”

“You're scaring me, Nathaniel,” Victoria says.

“If her other friends ask, just tell them I took Grandma to a family reunion. Vince is being nosy.”

“Where are you taking her?”

Then I hear the shouts—coming from Grandma's room.

“To a family reunion.”

“Oh,” she says, then adds almost as an afterthought. “Speaking of family, I was just thinking about my first husband, Clinton. You should have seen him at our wedding. He wore a crisp blue suit. Pinstriped. Stop me if I've told you this story before.”

“You haven't and I'd love to hear it. How about next time I visit?” I say.

I feel the cloak of Victoria's loneliness as Grandma and I exit through the glass doors, and I slide them closed. I roll Lane through a gate on the patio and onto a cement path that winds through the gardens in back.

Minutes later, I've piled her into the car. I push the wheelchair behind a small bush in the median of the parking lot.

Twenty minutes later, we're sitting outside a nondescript office building. Inside, is Grandma's neurologist, Dr. Laramer.

I don't know if I've broken any law by absconding with Grandma. But it's another question whether I'm defying common sense. I've been shot at twice in the last twenty-four hours, gotten a home visit from G.I. Chuck, and have a meeting in a few hours with someone who sent me a mysterious thumb drive warning me of danger.

“Grandma Lane?”

“Nathaniel.”

“Let's get inside that head of yours.”

Dr. Laramer may prove a useful guide, even if getting his help entails provoking a few of my own demons.

I
n Dr. Laramer's office, a receptionist tells us the doctor has agreed to squeeze us in during his lunch hour. The receptionist has a hitch in his gaze that takes a second to identify as amblyopia, a subtle case of lazy eye that probably went undetected through his early childhood.

I take a seat next to Grandma.

“Lane, I wonder about the road not taken.”

“I used to do that, Nathaniel.”

“What?”

“Brood about the past.”

“You did?”

“You should try forgetting. It can be better.”

“How very lucid, Lane.” I smile at her.

“If you say so.”

“Can we talk about the man in blue?”

“Live in the present, Nathaniel.”

It's a platitude. She's gone again. I sigh.

“My untaken road went through a utility closet on the third floor of San Francisco General Hospital,” I say to Grandma in a low voice.

It was there I had spontaneous sex with Kristina Babcock, my bombshell medical-school mate.

In my second year, we were rotating through the psych ward. Our attention was consumed with “the Acrobat.” That was the moniker of Frederica Calhoun, a schizophrenic who believed she was the reincarnation of a 16th-century French acrobat. We'd walk into Frederica's room and find her standing in some impossible position, or balancing a toothbrush on her head.

The question facing the attending physician was whether to force Frederica to take medications under court order. Weeks earlier, when off her medication, Frederica did a handstand on the ledge of an eighteen-story building, bringing a crowd and the fire brigade. But in our frequent conversations, she also was lucid, functional, thoughtful. She implored Kristina and me to argue for her freedom from meds that she said made her a “Gap-wearing, 21st-century automaton.”

The attending physician didn't spend nearly as much time with Frederica. He recommended to a court she be forced to take medication.

“Is there a halfway house, or some alternative living situation that would give her a chance to live drug free?” I asked the doctor during our consultation outside the Acrobat's room.

“She's not capable,” he said. “Anything else?”

“It seems like she deserves a shot to be herself,” I pushed back.

“You do seem to really enjoy this rotation, Mr. Idle,” he responded. “I'm recommending you repeat it.”

On the way out, Kristina grabbed my hand and pulled me into a utility closet. “You're the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century romantic,” she said. “You always side with the freaks.”

“I'm not cut out to play God or any other powerful administrator,” I said.

For the next two months, we fell towards love—great conversation, laughter, the real stuff. Then I turned on her. One night, I came to Kristina's apartment for our first weekend away—Santa Cruz, a Van Morrison concert, a cheap motel, sex near—and possibly on—the beach. Seemingly, uncomplicated fun. To me, a demarcation line I wouldn't cross. In fact, I wouldn't even cross into her house. I stood in her doorway and, without prompting, coldly poured out my resolve. I told her I didn't love her and never would.

It might not have been true. But Kristina was the embodiment of medical school, of a path towards a clear future. Rules, bureaucracy, checking off boxes and filling out paperwork, passion and patient care overwhelmed by monotony. A few months later, I broke up with my career, too.

I'd lucked into a prestigious summer job at the forensic clinic at Stanford. The day I was supposed to report, I was on a sleeper train in Rumania, having spontaneously decided to spend the summer traveling instead. When I returned to school for my last year, I was student non grata.

Meantime, Kristina started dating a studious and ambitious classmate named Pete Laramer. The pair were married by the time they graduated, and soon had three beautiful daughters.

Then, a year ago, I was walking with Grandma in Golden Gate Park when I ran into Kristina, Pete—Dr. Laramer—and the family. We had an awkward interaction in which Grandma, who in retrospect may have been suffering the very early stages of dementia, referred to me as Irving. As we parted, Dr. Laramer gave me his card.

“And that's the story of how you got your neurologist,” I tell Grandma.

“I don't understand what you're saying.”

“As the kids say: I have commitment issues.”

“Oh.”

She's silent for a second and says: “If you stay in one place, with one person, you will age no less quickly.”

I laugh. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“What?”

“Never mind, guru.” I lean in close. “Lane, I wish you'd tell me your secrets.”

“I'll tell you a secret.”

“Let's hear it.”

“Remember to burp the baby.”

She's looking at the coffee table. A copy of
Family Circle
magazine shows a picture of a mom holding a baby over her shoulder.

“I don't have a baby yet, Grandma.”

She shrugs and picks up the magazine.

I fidget and find myself conspicuously avoiding the glance of an eighty-something woman lovingly cradling the hand of her oxygenated husband who suffers a nasty case of wildly overgrown ear hair.

I extract my phone. There are six missed calls—from the retirement home. Vince must be frantic and pissed. But he hasn't left a message.

I call Pauline. “Mystery man,” she answers.

“What?”

“So what's in your mystery package?”

“Mystery instructions.”

She doesn't respond for a second.

“Pauline?”

“Hold on.”

She puts her hand over the phone but I can still hear her coughing to the extent it sounds like she might be sick.

“Upset stomach,” she says when she's finished. “Late night followed by quintuple espresso. I've got to cut down my caffeine intake.”

Or her stress.

“Have you ever considered slowing down, maybe just in the middle of the night?”

“Right back at you. Now tell me about the package.”

I describe how I opened the thumb drive, and the instructions I found. I glance at the clock on my phone. It's noon. I've got three hours before the mystery meeting.

“Sounds cloak and dagger. Are you going to wear a trench coat?” Pauline asks.

True to her word, Pauline has tried to remain light, fun, and flirty. She says she's not going to change her approach to the world just because I don't want to date.

“Something very strange is going on,” I say.

“With the memory stick?”

I hesitate. I'd love her help figuring out what's going on but right now she presents as many complications and entanglements as she does resources and insights.

“It's already been a long day. I don't know, just strange,” I finally say.

“So are you going to go to the meeting?”

I look at Grandma. Does the thumb drive have anything to do with the attack in the park, and Grandma's recent ramblings? Or is it coincidental, unrelated, some kind of joke?

“Wearing a trench coat and matching socks.”

“Socks and dagger,” she says. “Can I come?”

I tell her that I'd prefer to go alone.

“Be careful. Socks aren't much defense against sharp objects,” she says. After a pause, she adds, “I'd love to see you later.”

I'm silent.

“I should go,” she says.

“Wait. Could you spare me another minute?”

“What's up?” She suddenly sounds rushed.

“Tell me about Chuck. Your investor.”

There is a moment of silence, then she says: “What makes you ask?”

“He seemed interesting when we met last night. I'm just curious about him.”

Another pause.

“I think he's curious about you, too.”

“Meaning?”

“I think he thinks you're cute. You're his type.”

I'm not sure if she means that he likes my journalistic temperament or, perhaps, that he's gay. Now that I think about it, it had crossed my mind.

“You should work that angle,” she continues. “Maybe you can get him up to sixty-five dollars per blog post. You'll be a rich man by the year 2075.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Look, Nat, can we talk about this later today, or tonight? I'm staying in the city.”

Pauline has a gorgeous house in Marin, overlooking the water. But she keeps a three-story loft downtown, near the ballpark.

“Come by tonight and we'll make good on the drinks we missed, and I'll tell you about Chuck.”

Before I can tell her that's not going to happen, she adds, “I really gotta go. I'm on Internet time.”

She hangs up.

From my backpack, I pull out my laptop. I find a weak signal in the waiting room. I call up a browser and I search for “Adrianna.” It is a fool's errand. There are several million of references.

Is Adrianna a resident of Magnolia Manor? That makes no sense in that Vince seemed baffled that Grandma had mentioned the name Adrianna.

From my pocket, I pull one of the shell casings I found on the ground outside my flat after this morning's drive-by shooting. The brass housing looks to measure less than an inch in length, the width of a ring finger.

Into Google, I type: “identify shell casing.” I get countless hits—about collections of artillery shells, lamps made from old casings, and on and on—but not the clearinghouse site I'd imagined would let me precisely identify my bullet, or the gun that fired it.

“All that surfing can rewire your brain,” a voice says.

I look up to see Dr. Laramer.

“You're looking well, Mrs. Idle,” he says to my companion on my right.

I close my laptop.

“Hello, Doc,” I say. He wears blue scrubs and flip-flops. “Is it casual footware Friday?”

“It's Thursday,” Grandma says.

She's right.

He looks at her and cocks his head.

“Interesting,” he mutters.