“How are you Marcia?” Greta asked, and she softly rubbed the old woman’s back as she crouched down next to the bed.
“Is that you Greta?” Marcia asked, her voice a rising lilt, a chirrup of optimism.
“Yes,” Greta said. “I’m here with John. Do you want him to read to you?”
“I don’t think I can listen to any books today,” Marcia said.
“That’s okay,” Greta said gently. “We can just sit here with you.”
Greta took a seat on the bed and motioned for John to do the same. They sat in silence for a few minutes, the lack of sound broken only by an occasional bird chirping, the prattle of water from the toilet, which every so often jetted for no reason.
Twenty minutes passed, and then Greta placed a hand on Marcia’s shoulder and leaned forward. “We’re going to head out now,” Greta whispered.
“I’m so…alone,” Marcia responded. “Griffin, he never comes to see me. I never talk to my son. He moved me from Winnetka to his backyard and he never stops by. Why do you think that is?”
Greta shrugged. “I don’t know.” When it came to Griffin’s behavior, there was a long list of actions that Greta had given up trying to understand.
“I wish I could call you,” Marcia said. “Sometimes I just want to hear my grandson’s voice. When I’m trying to go to sleep sometimes, I imagine that he’s reading to me.”
“I’m sure that helps.”
“I’m still tired,” Marcia said. “I’m just so tired.”
“Get some sleep,” Greta responded. She wanted to leave for Marcia’s sake as well as John’s – to blunt the sights and sounds of a dying grandmother. John was now an adult, but Greta still wanted to protect him. She wanted his memories of Marcia to be culled from the first seventeen years of his life – when Marcia was a robust, intelligent, strong-willed woman – not now, when she was wilting away.
But John was not one to stew in his grandmother’s grievances. The next time he visited, he brought with him a burner phone.
Marcia was still immobilized and morose, a hooked figure lying on her bed and looking out into darkness. John ran her fingers across the buttons.
“This is how you dial us, okay?” he said. “The phone is prepaid so you don’t have to worry about a calling plan or any of that. Anytime you want to hear my voice or talk to my mom, you give us a call. Okay?”
“Okay,” Marcia agreed, and she hugged the phone towards her body. “Thank you Johnny.”
When John left that afternoon, he was certain that he’d solved at least one of Marcia’s problems. She would no longer be as separated from them as she’d been before. His voice could be as close as she wanted it to be, with a device he had instructed her how to use – a device she kept close to her body.
This is why John was surprised that she never used the phone. Instead, he was the only one to use it – almost three months later.
Chapter Thirty
September 4, 2017
Grandparents were supposed to die. John knew this to be true even though he’d never had any experience with an ailing grandparent before. The problem was that he felt cheated by the whole thing. With two remarried parents, he was supposed to be swimming in grandparents – and yet he was about to go from one to zero.
There was no living grandfather on either side of the family, not that he knew of. His new stepmom’s parents ignored him, as he was basically an adult when they came into his life. His stepfather Tuck had no parents. And then there was Johanna Wagner – a woman whose virtues were extolled in all of Greta’s stories, the woman for whom he was named. And yet, much like other fabled legends, this woman had never materialized, nor did John know anything about her that had taken place in the last twenty years. Johanna was flawless simply because of her lack of existence – her perfection about as realistic as that of a storybook character. It was only pigheadedness and pride that kept John from meeting his grandmother, Greta always insisted. It was not the older woman’s fault.
This left Marcia Brock. Marcia was John’s only link to the older generation…and now she was dying. For the first seventeen years of his life, John observed Marcia from a distance. They saw each other infrequently, and when they spoke on the phone, Marcia talked about hobbies that held no interest for him at all – bird watching, gardening and book clubs. It had taken a medical catastrophe and a move for Marcia to fully come into his life, for them to see their common ground and enjoy time together.
Now their time was getting more and more shallow; John could see it every time he visited. Some days Marcia was fully engaged and some days she just lay on her bed and stared out the window while he read to her – the occasional nod or smile her only gesture.
The end was coming soon for Marcia, and they both knew it, and this unavoidable truth made John alternatively morose and enraged. He had always pictured death as a sudden clap – a flicker to black – the way it always seemed to go in the movies.
Instead, for Marcia it was a gradual decay – the glaringly tedious fading away – during which time her skin became alabaster and her pain was only muted by the regular intake of pills.
Every time John visited her throughout the month of August and into September, he wondered, is this going to be the day? And the constant questioning and wondering about the inevitable also drove him a little crazy.
Hours at the auto shop were the worst. John had too much time inside his head, too much time to attend to his thoughts. He wasn’t even surprised when Mitchell Davis called him into his office and questioned him about his attitude of late.
“What is it?” Mitchell asked. “What’s going on? Can you tell me? The guys think you’re going to blow your brains out.”
“I’m not going to blow my brains out,” John said as he stared down at the floor. It was too personal to explain to someone like Mitchell and not a conversation he wanted to have anyway. He ran his finger across the spongy orange cushion of his chair.
“Is it girl trouble?” Mitchell asked.
“Huh?”
“What’s troubling you? Is it over a girl?”
“Oh…um, no.”
“School work?”
John shook his head.
“Family issues then?”
John didn’t say anything.
“John, is the matter that’s troubling you about your family?” Mitchell insisted.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.” John could feel the tears well up and he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He didn’t want to let go in Mitchell’s office, not in front of this man that he barely knew on a personal level, not with the line of cars and customers waiting just outside for him.
Mitchell leaned back, grabbed a tissue box and tossed it over his desk to John. John looked at the box but refrained from taking a tissue. He was able to stem the tide, to keep the tears from falling.
“What’s going on with your family?” Mitchell asked.
“Just…there’s something bad that’s going to happen…and I guess I’m just waiting for it to happen,” John said.
“Oh. Huh. This…thing you mention…is it illegal?”
“No.”
“Is it something you want to talk to me about?”
“No.”
“Do you want to take some time off of work to deal with it?”
“No.”
“Well, great talking with you John. I wish you weren’t such a chatterbox but…you know…we can work on that.”
Mitchell smiled but John kept his focus on the floor – nervous that if he looked up, he wouldn’t be able to control whatever muscle was preventing a stream of tears.
“Can I go back to work now?” John asked. “I was working on a car that needed new brakes and the customer is hanging out in the waiting room until I finish.”
“Sure, John. Go right ahead.”
John stood up and tried to walk out of there as normally as possible. He didn’t want to brood, to languish, to make a display out of his emotions. Apparently he h
ad been doing enough of that at work.
As John sauntered back to his workstation he thought he could hear Mitchell yell out: “Let me know if you need anything!” but the cacophony of sounds made it impossible to be sure.
Chapter Thirty-One
September 7, 2017
There was nothing particularly unusual about the morning the Carpenter family disappeared. Greta woke up early, cooked breakfast for the family and sat at the table in jeans and a sweatshirt while she drank coffee and read emails on her phone. Olivia emerged first – her fine blonde hair matted against her head, her Minnie Mouse pajamas billowing out from her tiny frame.
“Is Daddy awake?” Olivia asked as she claimed a seat at the table.
Greta shook her head but Tuck soon proved her wrong. “I’m awake,” a deep voice grunted from behind the doorway and then Tuck stumbled into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. Greta could feel the kitchen floor shudder beneath his tread as he grabbed a plate of eggs and then sat down with them.
Breakfast lasted about ten minutes – its usual length of time. Tuck wolfed down his food and hastened out the door to work. Greta and Olivia lingered a short while longer but there were errands to run, appointments to keep. Greta was just about to clear the table and start the day when the phone rang.
***
John Brock’s hollow, broken voice was on the other end. “It’s me,” he said. “Grandmother’s gone.”
Greta swallowed hard and thought about the right words to say to him. It surprised her that she was trembling a little – as though she hadn’t spent he past several months anticipating this call. Maybe because she had expected the news would come from Elizabeth or one of the caretakers at the assisted living home – not John. Maybe because there were recent days where Marcia seemed okay, almost jaunty and energized, and it had fooled Greta into thinking there was more time.
“I’m so sorry John,” Greta said.
“She passed away this morning,” John continued, providing details Greta had forgotten to ask. “I was here with her. Dad too. She must have known. As she was lying there, she was saying all kinds of things.”
“Really? Like what?” Greta asked.
“She told me she was sorry,” John said, his voice breaking.
“Sorry for what?”
“For one thing, she said she should have given me the money for The Jefferson School years ago. And she apologized to Dad too – said she was too strict when he was younger and should have been nicer to him. And she said we’re her two favorite people and she can’t choose between the two of us, and she’s sorry she did it this way. We kept asking, ‘Sorry you did what this way?’ And then she’d say in this weird voice that she was sorry she made it a race, that she never wanted it to be a race. And she said there was a sailboat. She kept talking about a sailboat. Sometimes it was us on the sailboat, sometimes it was Dad and his new family and sometimes it was the characters from Treasure Island. Dad said she was having hallucinations.”
Greta leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. There was a lump in the back of her throat large enough to taste.
“Mom? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here,” Greta said. “What do you think she meant by all of that?”
“I have no idea. Oh and also…she gave us both a picture – a drawing – said she had spent the last week working on it, that it had to be perfect, and that it was hard to do. She said she finally finished and her caretaker made a photocopy – one for me and one for Dad. She said she was sad that she couldn’t see it; she could only imagine it.”
Greta kept her eyes closed and thought about the afternoon on Marcia’s portico when the older woman had given John a drawing. It would have been seven years ago – maybe more. Greta remembered how John had regarded that drawing – the promise of a gift, more valuable to him than the gift itself. She remembered how John had solved a puzzle that Greta wasn’t even aware existed. And finally, she remembered how the sun shined down that day – blanketing their skin in slatted shades, the older woman hurling demands at her butlers.
“Mom?”
Greta cleared her throat and brought herself back. “What’s the drawing of?” she asked.
Greta felt like she could sense John grinning. “Well, Grandmother drew a picture of her house. The lake is behind it, and there’s a gazebo and the house has all these columns and there are all these gardens. The one she actually drew was in color. Dad got that version. They gave me the photocopy.”
Greta thought about the woman’s house. It would have been impossible for her to recreate such an image in a two-dimensional way, even with fully functioning eyesight. There were too many details, too many floors, too much granite, marble and ivory, and too much color.
“That’s very nice,” Greta said, because she couldn’t think of what else to say.
“But here’s the thing about having the photocopy…” John continued. “I can see it. It’s almost easier for me, I think. I can see what she wanted us to see.”
“What she wanted you to see?” Greta asked. “What do you mean?”
“There’s numbers in the picture, four of them, and she overlaid them with the portrait of Alden Brock that hangs in the drawing room. And then, at the bottom of the portrait, she wrote the word safe.”
Greta could feel her heart beating faster. “What do you mean, numbers? What are you saying?”
“Numbers: 39, 20, 53, 76. I can see them, just as clearly as I saw my birthday in the drawing she made for me years ago. And below the numbers is the word safe.”
“Listen…listen to me…” Greta took several labored breaths between her words. It was all becoming clear to her as her heart beat furiously, and her legs felt rubbery, like they could no longer support her body.
Those numbers etched on a depiction of a painting in her home, talk of a sailboat whose occupants could have been John’s family or Griffin’s family, a race between John and Griffin, a puzzle that both of them could solve. Greta wasn’t sure if she was deciphering or inventing, if she was lucid or delirious.
As her thoughts churned, she felt like she was creating a portrait of a fable, or perhaps a television drama – a life foreign to Greta’s. But then again, hadn’t Marcia’s life always been unfamiliar to Greta? The excessiveness of it all, the extreme luxury…was there anything that Marcia’s money couldn’t buy? Greta felt her throat constrict.
“Mom?” John asked.
“Yes,” Greta said, but her voice sounded foreign. “Did you say your father got the same drawing?”
In her mind, she heard the older woman’s voice – shrill and singsong, sweeping across the patio. Your father used to love these kind of puzzles she had said to John. He could always find all the hidden pieces.
“Yeah,” John said. “Actually, he got the original and I got the photocopy.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty or thirty minutes.”
“Okay, let’s go. We need to move. Now! John, stay there and we’ll pick you up.” Greta stayed on the phone a second longer and waited. She waited for John to ask her why they had to hurry or where they were headed, but he did neither. He said a quick good-bye and they hung up the phone.
***
The drive up I-55 North felt surreal to Greta. There wasn’t much to look at outside her window – farms and cornfields mostly, with occasional rest stops dotted along the way. In the back seat, John dozed while Olivia massaged the white-blonde hair of a doll that she kept in the car.
Typically, their car conversations were lively affairs, with everyone talking over everyone else, competing for airtime. But this morning was different, since the weight of uncertainly hung above them.
They had packed up and left as though their entire lives before were just a prologue. And the aspect that bothered Greta the most was that it could all have been fiction – a dream shaped by her vast imagination, fed to her through her son via his grandmother, who had lost all of her facul
ties in quick succession and was on the brink of her own demise.
Just as Greta could imagine the de-masking of a wall, the opening of a safe, the discovery of cash and maybe directions to a sailboat, she could also imagine a different outcome: a safe that didn’t want to open or that didn’t exist in the first place, or an angry ex-husband who had raced past her to the holy grail and emphatically laid claim. She could imagine a return to their home on Avery – forlorn faces and demoralized spirits. And in this, possibly more realistic version of the tale, she would emerge as the cheerleader like she always did. At least Grandmother knew the love they felt for her. At least the old woman had tried to right some wrongs in the end. Wasn’t that more important than the fulfillment of a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?
It was this moment of looking out the car window and imagining the pep talk Greta would possibly have to give to her family when John spoke up from the back seat.
“I…uh…left my cell phone at home,” he said. “I forgot to bring it to Grandmother’s and I’m guessing you guys didn’t pack it for me.”
“I threw a bunch of your clothes into a bag for you,” Tuck said. “But I didn’t come across your cell phone.”
“Great,” John said.
Tuck then chuckled and started patting his pockets with his left hand while still steering the car with his right. Eventually he switched which hand was doing the patting and which was steering. After a minute or so, he turned his head to the right and glanced at Greta. “I left mine at the house too,” he said. “I always seem to forget it when I need it the most, don’t I?”
Greta pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and stared down. Her phone was old – seven years at least – and its age gave way to its inability to keep battery power. That particular morning, even after an all-night charging session, the phone’s battery had expired sometime earlier on the drive.
“I think we are officially off the grid,” Greta said.
“Mom, people survived for years without cell phones,” John offered from the back seat.
All The Hidden Pieces Page 24