The Forgotten Hours(80)
David, his black leather jacket like a carapace, zipped to his chin, stood up and cracked his knuckles. A young Japanese family made their way through the room, the little boy trailing a piece of string with paper tied to the end. They all watched until the family was out of sight. “To help you do what?” David asked.
“Get evidence to present to Charlie. So she could see what she was dealing with.”
“You mean, evidence on, uh—against Lulu?” Katie asked.
“Goodness,” Grumpy said, gesturing emphatically, as though she were too stupid for words. “About all the other things, dear. Now take me home, will you please. We’ve had quite enough excitement for one day.”
She and David exchanged a glance. He seemed pale and bothered, sorry he’d brought up their father in the first place. But maybe he’d been stirring the pot on purpose; it wasn’t clear. On the streets, the sun shone on the speckled sidewalks, but the chill of the museum stayed with her, as if she’d been standing too long in a windy corridor and hadn’t noticed that her fingers had started to go numb.
36
In the next few days, they met with Grumpy’s physician, Dr. Abad, a small, round Persian whose hairline cut across the apex of his skull in an almost straight line. In precise, accented English he relayed that Grumpy’s blood pressure was still extremely low, but the infection was waning; he was a remarkably healthy man given his advanced years. Katie and David had tea with the home’s head nurse, Henrietta, a Miami Dolphins fan, and gave her a turquoise jersey.
They spent an entire day helping Grumpy sort out his tattered photo albums from when he’d lived in Kenya as a young boy. Later, she tried to ask him about the evidence he’d mentioned when they were at the museum, but he held up his hand, trembling ever so slightly, and she retreated. That night, Katie opted out of seeing Mamma Mia! at the Novello Theatre with David and a friend of his who was studying at Richmond. Grumpy and Katie ate a lukewarm roast-beef dinner at the cafeteria in Ravenswood, and afterward, as she helped him maneuver his massive frame onto the bed, he pointed her to his dresser, where a battered manila folder lay.
“I was thinking,” he said. “Silence isn’t always empty, is it? It can drive a person quite mad. Give me that, would you?”
She brought the folder over to him on the bed and looked at him helplessly. He was frail and yet at the same time imposing, with his broad shoulders and implacable eyes. He opened the file and grabbed a tidy bundle of typed reports held together with a paper clip, a plastic bag containing photographs, and another one that appeared to contain receipts, fanning them out on the bed.
“What’s all this, then?” she asked.
“About your father, dear. You asked, and, well, you’ve never asked before, have you? It bothered me for years, this whole damn thing.” He coughed harshly into a soft cotton handkerchief. “Your mother, poor dear. It wasn’t clear what she really wanted back then, but I think that die has long been cast.”
Her grandfather kept talking as she picked up one item after another. The heading of one sheet read, Surveillance Report, Insight Investigators. The language was straightforward; there were dates and times and lists of phone numbers, interviews that had been typed up, and surveillance log sheets. There was a letter of termination from a RE/MAX Realty in Pennsylvania and a copy of a police report dated July 19, 1991, and another from November 22, 2002.
Names and dates and facts were visible to her, but even stitched together in this way, they didn’t assume a significance larger than themselves. As she shuffled some papers between her fingers, her head started clouding over. She wasn’t sure what all this was supposed to mean. Grumpy sensed her growing alarm and began talking more quickly, picking up first one document and then another.
There was so much she hadn’t known. She had not known that her father never actually graduated from Harvard (wasn’t there a diploma that used to hang in the master bathroom in West Mills?). She had not known that Grumpy bailed him out of jail when he got his first DUI and that the year he took town cars to work was not because he’d been given a raise, as she and David had thought, but because his driver’s license had been suspended. Her father had been laid off three times: Grumpy’s investigator had unearthed complaints from coworkers at his places of business. He’d been fired from a job selling insurance, back when he first met Charlie.
“But nobody’s perfect, Grumpy. Haven’t you ever done something you’re embarrassed about or made a mistake?” Katie asked. She felt almost panicked, as though she were being told to jump from a plane. It seemed very important to defend her father, to put this into context. This cataloging and piling on of his minor misdemeanors was mean spirited, petty, even. “This isn’t really playing fair.”
“My dear, you’re entirely missing the point. What I’m saying is we reap what we sow. Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.”
As they continued, her grandfather’s fingers became steadier and his voice stronger. She had not known that when she was three years old and her mother had her second miscarriage, her father was having an affair with a young woman named Dana Huntington, whose father was the CEO of Ulster Bank. At this last piece of information Katie turned away from him abruptly and searched for a glass she could use to get herself some water from the sink in the corner. She could not swallow properly. The brown linoleum shifted under her feet, and she steadied herself with one hand on the edge of the porcelain.