Twice a Child Read online

  “Who’s this?”

  “Oh, thank God, Grandpa! Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

  “What do you mean you’ll come get me? My car’s working just fine. What’s going on, are you all right? Is the kid all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I told you, Grandpa, I was going to pick Joshua up and get you some groceries, and when I got back to your apartment you were gone. I mean, I didn’t think you’d be gone so long, but when I’d waited more than an hour I got worried. I thought maybe you’d really be trying to get to California and then I saw you didn’t pack anything, the luggage was still in the sitting room—”

  I went around and opened the trunk. Damn. I did forget to pack. I patted my back pocket. At least I remembered to take my wallet.

  “I told you where I was going, honey. Did you call the cops on me?”

  “Grandpa, are you at the truck stop? Are you at the Burger King there?”

  That’s what the sign says. “Yeah, that’s it. I thought some punk was robbing the place, there’s three cop cars here.”

  “You just stay there, okay? I’ll come get you.”

  “Why? I can drive. I’m going as far as Pittsburgh and then I planned to stop there and take a rest. I know what I’m doing, girlie. You didn’t have to put a manhunt out on me.”

  “Grandpa, let me talk with the officer.”

  I hand him his phone. “She wants to talk with you now.” I got to pee. I walk away from the big guy, but his hand stops me.

  “Hold on, sir.”

  He’s telling her they’ll escort me back to Lebanon.

  “No! You tell her I’ll call her from California when I get to Eddie’s.”

  “Sir, your granddaughter is under the impression that you shouldn’t be driving by yourself, taking such a long trip.”

  “Look, officer, I want to see my son. He’s out in California.”

  “Sir, your granddaughter insisted you be brought back to Lebanon. Perhaps the two of you could work out another arrangement, maybe take a flight—”

  “You got the money for that?” My bladder’s aching by now, and I’m getting hungry. And cold. I forgot my warm jacket.

  “Sir, we don’t want to have to arrest you.”

  “Arrest me? For what? For wanting to visit my son?”

  “Have you gone for a license renewal lately? Looks like you’re due.”

  “What’s this all about, officer?”

  He looks at his partner like I’m some kind of a lunatic. Since when is it a crime for a man to get into his own car, that he paid for, kept up the maintenance and insurance payments on, to go see his own son? This is ridiculous.

  “Mr. Lillo, you need to get back into your car. Officer Lang here will be joining you. We’ll follow and make sure you get back home safely.”

  “What are you talking about? I just need to take a leak and now you’re telling me I have to go back home.” Damn, if my voice were stronger I’d scare the hell out of them.

  They let me go inside and relieve my bladder, but “Officer Lang” follows me, makes sure I do what I say I’m going to do. When I leave, he puts his hand on my elbow and escorts me back to my car. People are still gawking.

  The officer’s opening the passenger door. I get inside. I don’t want them taking the car away from me. I’ll cooperate, get a good night’s sleep and head back out in the morning.

  Wait till I get hold of Tina. I’m going to tell her to mind her own damn business.

  The officer was nice enough, respectful. He made sure I got into the apartment, talked with Tina for a while. I figured I might as well go to bed and get an early jump on the morning. This time I remember to pack. The officer is still talking with Tina when I go to find my suitcase, what could he be talking about this long? They’re smiling at me. I wave and take the suitcase back to the bedroom. It’s warm in California, I’ll like that. Never did much like the cold.

  Tina’s baby watches me, perched on his mother’s hip. He’s going to be a killer, all us Lillo’s are. No problem with the ladies.

  There’s Mamie’s bed, still made up nice and neat. She’s not sitting on it though. I thought she was, just a minute ago. The room smells like her perfume.

  “It’s warm there now, isn’t it?”

  “If you mean California,” Tina says, “it’s warm there all the time, at least in the southern part.” She puts the baby down, lets him crawl around the bedroom. Nothing for him to get into. Over the years, Mamie has pared everything down to the minimum. Easier to clean, she says.

  “Grandpa, you’re serious about going out there, aren’t you?”

  “What do you think?” I pack a stack of underwear. Nice, folded, clean. She’s a good wife, that Mamie.

  “The officer that was here, Officer Lang, he says you have to be retested. He’s revoking your driver’s license until you do.”

  Revoking my license? I’m surprising myself here, I’m calm.

  “Let me get this straight, little girl. The license in my wallet, it’s no good?”

  “Not until you get retested.”

  I open another drawer, pull out a stack of blue jeans. I step over Joshua, who’s occupying himself with a golf ball I found in one of the drawers and had rolled to him. I keep filling up the suitcase.

  “How about this then . . . how about you come with me? You haven’t seen your dad in a long time. He’s never met his own grandson. It would be a nice family reunion.”

  “I don’t want to see him.”

  “I didn’t hear that, what?”

  “I said I don’t want to see him.”

  She’s had a rough time of it. I understand why she wouldn’t want to see her dad. He left her and her mom, abandoned them, took off when she wasn’t even out of high school. Like the rest of us Lillos, he’s after a better way of life, wants to hit the jackpot. I knew all along he was doing it for his family, just like I did, but I stayed married and here, in the hometown. Things were easier then, you could get a decent job, get the loans to start a company. The country was full of manufacturing. When I realized art wasn’t going to support a family, I taught myself drafting. It’s the same thing, I used to tell myself, just not as expressive. Besides, people have to walk stairways and work in buildings; they don’t have to stare at a scene they may have seen painted a thousand different ways by a thousand different artists. Would have had to move Mamie and the baby to New York just like Charlie did when he was going after the newspaper business. Mamie wouldn’t stand for it: she wanted to be here, close to her mom and brother. She wanted to stay in the hometown. So I taught myself how to draft, got a job in steel.

  Now, Eddie, he had a different dream. He’s an artist, too, better than me. But he likes money more than he likes art. That’s why when he asked me for one of those little moving picture cameras—a Super 8 I think it was called—I caved. He filmed everything: Mamie in the kitchen, me at the drafting table in the basement. He’d take stuffed animals and make skits with them. When he said he wanted to go to college for film Mamie and I were surprised. We thought he’d get it out of his system by then, take up something steady like accounting or maybe pre-med.

  “Pop,” he said, “I want to be a filmmaker. I want to write my own films and then shoot them. Why would I want to be a doctor?”

  Well, he made his point. We sent him to Pittsburgh, the Art Institute. He married his high school sweetheart in his junior year. She went there, too, something neither Mamie nor I thought was a good idea, but how do you stop kids from doing what they damn well please?

  He called us one day, crying. Told us his wife was pregnant and he had no job other than the part-time teaching he was doing until he could graduate. I knew what to do: bring him back home into the business. That way we could all be together. A family.

  When Tina came along, he tried working with me. Hell, I even gave him a VP position, but he didn’t show up to work too much. “Scouting clients,” he’d tell me. And I believed him even when no new clients ever came through the do
or. He ordered computers, said it would update our operations, improve efficiency. When he did come in, he’d sit and read trade magazines all day long. Once in a while, he’d go out into the shop and take his camera along, filming the guys in the shop, but they didn’t take to him.

  “College boy,” they’d call him.

  I was in there when I heard one of them say “pussy” behind his back. I figured it was just the way they are, hard working guys that didn’t get the chance to go to college.

  “It was supposed to work out.”

  “What was?” Tina says.

  “Your dad coming back home, joining me in the business.”

  “He hated it.”

  “I knew it wasn’t what he wanted, but I figured he had responsibilities now, he had to make it work.”

  Tina leaves the room. She hates talking about Eddie.

  “Maybe it’s time your dad sees his grandson, girlie. And maybe it’s time you see your dad,” I say, as loud as I can muster.

  “He left us, remember?” she shouts from the other room.

  I walk closer to the bedroom, where she took the baby. “Sometimes a man’s got his reasons. And whether or not you agree with him, at least give him the chance to explain himself.”

  “That’s not why you want to go to California—ouch!”

  “Baby’s getting teeth, isn’t he?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I figure even if I don’t find Eddie, I’ll have one helluva trip, always did want to go cross-country.

  “Grandpa, I have a job at the hospital. I just can’t leave.”

  “Why not? Don’t you have vacation time? Take a—what do you call that—a sabbatini?”

  She giggles. “Sabbatical.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “You are really serious about this.”

  “Leaving in the morning. You with me?”

  I haven’t felt this cocky in a long time, like there’s something to look forward to.

  She’s jiggling the baby up and down on her lap. “So, Mr. Joshua, what do we do here? Do we go meet your grandpa?” Joshua’s squeal sends a shot right through the ears. “Is that your final answer?” He kicks, trying to get traction, lift himself up.

  “Can you wait until I can wrap a few things up before I leave? About a week? Besides, it’ll give you the time to get retested.”

  “You’ll come with me then?”

  “I guess I have to. Who else is going to help you drive?”

  six

  The last week in the ER was hell week for Tina. They had put her on the middle shift—three to eleven—as punishment for leaving them short staffed with the holidays coming up. And while she didn’t mind working that shift, the amount of gunshot wounds, kids coming in wasted out of their minds on the new “bath salts” craze, and the usual assortment of sore throats and sinus infections overwhelmed the already overworked nurses and technicians.

  One patient—a woman in her eighties found walking down the main street in her nightgown and nothing else—had died of hypothermia before they could get her out of the hallway into a bed. Tina shut herself into the bathroom, and put her head between her legs to stave off nausea and hyperventilation. The woman had been her patient.

  All she could think of as she was trying to warm her, knowing her life was slipping away with each ragged breath, was that she could be Grandpa, stranded somewhere in the country with no one there, no cell phone, no one to help him when he became confused.

  “Why are you doing this, Tina? Are you crazy?” her mother said one evening, cornering her as she buckled Joshua into his car seat. She had agreed to watch the baby when Tina changed shifts, but she never failed to try to talk her daughter out of going cross- country with her former father-in-law.

  “You’ll have two babies to take care of on the way out. You know how he depended on your grandmother. And when you finally do meet up with your father you’ll have three!”

  Early November was getting brisk. Tina didn’t want to leave Joshua in a cold car while she explained herself to her mother who had her own issues and reasons for her not to make the trip.

  “Mom, if you would have seen Grandpa’s face when he realized that dad didn’t come to the funeral, and then how it looked when he decided to go find him—like there was still a chance to reclaim his family—” she looked at Joshua who watched the two of them through the window and her heart sank at the thought of never seeing him again when he grew up and left her.

  “Honey, you can’t fix your father. You know that. He’s just as irresponsible now as he ever was.” Her mother wrapped her robe tightly around herself.

  “How do you know that? When was the last time you talked with him, huh?”

  “I’m just trying to save you from—”

  “From what? From getting hurt all over again? I’m not doing this for me, Mom. I’m doing this for Grandpa. He cannot go out there by himself, and you know how determined he can be.”

  “Convince me you’re not doing this for yourself,” her mother said. “You’ve wanted that man’s attention all your life. Look how you drove yourself to get a black belt—”

  “Because he paid for the lessons, Mom! I wanted to show him it wasn’t a waste of money.”

  “No you didn’t. You wanted him to show up at your ceremony.”

  Tina bit her lower lip at the memory of breaking through a brick column with her bare hands, no father in sight.

  “And what you don’t realize is that he’ll see you as a giant walking reminder that he’s all grown up with a grown up daughter, and now—” her laugh was bitter—“he’ll find out he’s a grandpa! He’ll turn tail and run as far away from you as he can get.”

  Tears stung Tina’s eyes, though she’d heard this all before.

  “Good night, Mom. I’ll call you along the way.” She relaxed her fists when she got into the car and saw Joshua smile at her.

  She knew she should be getting a good night’s sleep, but Tina tossed and turned, running various scenarios through her mind. Eddie would welcome them all with open arms, so happy to see his father and daughter again. So happy to see his little grandson.

  Right.

  Eddie would ignore their attempts to try and track him, not return phone calls, or slam the door in their face.

  More likely.

  And what about Grandpa? She could not remember a day of her life when Grandpa and Grandma were not part of it. When her dad left, it was Grandpa who waited for her at the bus stop to drive the two blocks home. It was Grandpa who cheered at her baseball games and gave her a dozen roses when she graduated as the salutatorian from high school. When she graduated from nursing school they were in the front row, Grandma crying, Grandpa beaming. And it was Grandpa and Grandma who waited, along with her mother, in the nursery as she gave birth to Joshua.

  How could she not accompany him on probably the most important trip of his life?

  Besides, she was a nurse. Any medical situation that would come up she could handle, or know how to get help.

  She turned to see that the clock read three fifty-two. She promised Grandpa she would be at his apartment by seven. And she still had to nurse Joshua. She closed her eyes, hoping for at least an hour of sleep before starting this bizarre ride.

  seven

  The crunch of gravel woke Tina from a fitful nap in the passenger seat. She shook off the fog of sleep and shot a quick glance toward Joshua, who snoozed soundly in his car seat behind her. But why were they so close to the guardrail? Grandpa hunched over the steering wheel like a madman hell-bent on destroying everything in his path, the wipers flinging wildly across the windshield with cascades of water pouring down and over the Cutlass. He was going thirty-five miles an hour.

  “Grandpa, how about pulling over and letting me take the wheel now?” His glasses looked thick, like magnifiers. “Can you see?”

  “Shh. I have to concentrate.”

  Her pulse quickened when she realized cars in the right hand lane were passing th
em. They were so far over that had she opened her window and reached out her hand she could have touched the rail.

  “Grandpa. Please slow down and stop.” She tried to keep her voice calm so Joshua wouldn’t pick up on her growing anxiety, but just the sound of it forced his eyes open and he began to whimper.

  “I know I’m driving slow, hon, but that’s because it’s raining like the bejesus out here—”

  “All the more reason to pull over, please Grandpa.” She reached behind and tickled the baby’s belly, praying he’d stay in his usual pleasant mood and go back to sleep. “Right here would be a good place.”

  The road blistered out into a small rest area and Grandpa pulled the car over, coming to a stop in a pile of gravel. He laid his head back and exhaled. “With the rain and the dark, I could hardly see out there.”

  Tina was lifting the baby from his car seat, bringing him around to the front so she could nurse him when she noticed Grandpa’s glasses.

  “Are those your distance glasses, Grandpa?”

  “I guess so.”

  The baby fussed as she unhooked her bra. He latched on like it was his last meal. “Let me see.”

  Grandpa took them off, rubbing the weariness from his eyes. “I think I can see better without them.”

  “Where is your other pair, Grandpa?”

  “What other pair?”

  “The pair you used for your driving test. You have two, one for reading and one for distance.”

  “I do?”

  Bad enough she allowed him to drive at all, but she had no choice. She was exhausted from driving nearly twelve hours a day for the past three days with overnight stops barely giving her a good, satisfying rest. When she had turned the driving over to him, she told herself it would be only for a quick catnap, but she should have known better: rain had begun to fall and neither one of them was familiar with the terrain. She hadn’t given a thought to the glasses he had put on.

  The baby finished his snack and was now peacefully back to sleep in her arms, his lips smeared in a thin coating of pearl white. Rain pelted the car, and she had half a mind to pull out the blankets they had thrown in the trunk and hunker down right there. But she was wide awake, so she decided to push on through Illinois, especially before the morning’s rush hour traffic. She didn’t want to repeat the Ohio debacle where, impatient with the bumper-to-bumper congestion on I-70, Grandpa decided to fling open his door. A cold shiver crawled up her spine as she remembered the incident.