The Last True Love Story Page 5

  “Does it have to be a girl with two first names?”

  “Yes. And preferably a reference to a song.”

  “I’m no good with songs.”

  “No you’re not. Fine.” She cocked her head and looked at the sky. “Blue Bomber,” she said.

  “Is that a girl’s name?”

  “Hell yes!” she said, jumping into the driver’s seat.

  I climbed in too and the light glinting off the bay window was so bright it almost hid the house behind it.

  Corrina gunned the engine and rubbed the dashboard. “Okay, Blue Bomber. Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BUSTING OUT

  When we got to Calypso, Corrina parked as close to the front door as possible. She turned the car off and sat with her hands on the wheel, staring straight across the lot, to the tall row of bushes and trees that marked the edge of Calypso’s garden.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Try to get him out of there with as few questions as possible.”

  “You can’t sneak him out in a food cart? Hide him under a tablecloth?”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad,” Corrina said, shaking her head. “That’d be pretty badass.”

  Of course I wanted to be more badass, but if Gpa was suddenly missing from Calypso, they’d have to report it, and if twenty-four hours passed and he hadn’t turned up, the police would have to issue the Silver Alert, and we’d have every agency in the country looking for us, not to mention a very pissed-off Mom getting a blizzard of e-mails and texts and phone calls letting her know. None of that, clearly, was badass. If we were stopped somewhere in the Rockies, trapped, caught, knowing we’d failed before we’d even come down from the mountains, that wouldn’t be badass at all.

  I found Gpa sitting alone on the low stone wall by the edge of the patio behind the bistro, gazing out over the man-made pond with the chlorine-neon waterfall cascading over plaster rocks. The palm trees behind the rocks were real, but the air by the pond smelled rinsed with bleach. He was in his usual light pants and guayabera shirt, and he had his hand up over his eyes, shielding them from the sun.

  “How you doing today, Gpa?”

  “Another day in paradise.”

  I sat down beside him and gave him a hug. He put his arm around me.

  “I need a favor, Gpa.”

  He waved his hand out over the paradise in front of us. “Oh, yeah,” he said sarcastically. “Anything from my kingdom. Take it. It’s yours.”

  “No, I’m serious, Gpa.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. He forced a sad smile. “I used to take care of you all the time. Now look at us.”

  “Seems like a fair trade.”

  “Only from where you’re standing, boy. It doesn’t seem fair to me.” He walked away to the far end of the patio. He pointed through the window to the bistro. “Look! The Gin Rummy Club! Now, there’s a reason to get out of bed!”

  He laughed bitterly and I followed him to the side of the patio. “Well, can we talk about it more in your room?”

  As soon as I heard myself make the mistake, he frowned. “It’s an apartment, Teddy. If it’s a goddamn room, it sounds like your mother has stuffed me in the hospital. It’s an apartment. I’m not a patient. I’m a resident.”

  “Yes, I know. Your apartment.”

  “Don’t you dare say you forgot.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I said. “But come on. Back to your apartment.”

  When we got there, I went straight to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “Already had the morning dose,” he said. I ignored him as I emptied the cabinet into his leather shaving kit. He stood in the doorway and watched me as I grabbed his toothbrush and other toiletries and threw them and his medicines into the overnight bag he kept in the cupboard under the sink. “Am I going somewhere?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, but now came the hardest part. Lying to the Calypso staff was one thing, but lying to Gpa was another. I wouldn’t.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  He shook his head, and I walked past him into the bedroom. I found another bag and started filling it with clothes as fast as I could.

  “No,” he said. “Teddy, please. I know you miss me. I miss you, too. But your mother is right. I hate this place, but I can’t live with you two. What happens when you leave and go to college? She’ll stick me right back in here.”

  “No, Gpa,” I said. “I’m talking about home-home. I’m talking about Ithaca.”

  He came into the bedroom and sat down on the corner of the bed. “Stop. Stop, Teddy,” he said softly.

  “We’re in a rush here, Gpa. Come on, please.”

  But as I kept at it, he grew louder. “Stop!” he shouted. I froze and looked at the front door of his apartment, because the last thing we needed was Julio and Frank coming to see what was the problem and Gpa making a fuss. “I’m confused,” he said, more quietly again. “Please. What’s going on?”

  I dropped the bag, knelt by his feet, and held his hand. “Do you remember telling me you wanted to see Ithaca again? That you wanted to see your old church, see the old house? That you wanted to walk along the same old paths you used to walk with Grandma every day after dinner? Remember? Your church? St. Helen’s? Where you stood with the priest.”

  “Father Ferraro.”

  “Yes!”

  “With the bad breath.”

  “Yes! Father Ferraro with the bad breath, and you stood there with him, waiting, wondering if Gma was late or if she’d had second thoughts, because you were waiting there so long.”

  He smiled. “Her sister had brought the wrong shoes. The high heels. She didn’t want to be taller than me in front of all those people. That’s your grandmother, of course, always thinking of everyone else first.”

  “That’s where we’re going. I’m taking you there. But we have to get moving, Gpa. Please.” I stood up and grabbed his shoulders. “Just stay with me, stay focused, and don’t say anything to anybody on the way out. Corrina’s waiting outside and we have to hurry.”

  “Who?”

  “Corrina, my friend.”

  “Where’d you meet her? This friend.” He rolled his eyes.

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Well, tell me again, goddamnit!”

  I’d told him all this before, but as he once quipped, the great thing about a person with Alzheimer’s is that you can tell them the same joke over and over, because they’ll never remember the punch line. He’d smiled when he’d told me that, but I hadn’t. It was part of the awfulness of Alzheimer’s. Once it starts, there’s no going back, it proceeds with terrifying power, and it pulls you out of the narrative of your life one moment at a time until it makes you disappear altogether.

  “Corrina’s the girl from class. The one I see on the boardwalk some nights. We’re only friends. Barely. Or, I don’t know. Point is—she’s way out of my league.”

  “Way out of my league. That’s a silly way to think of another person. Don’t put people on pedestals like that. What if I’d thought that about your grandmother? Look how it turned out. We were just right for each other.”

  “I know.”

  Gpa sat on the bed. “Ithaca,” he said. “Are you really taking me home?”

  “Not until you get your shoes on.”

  He glanced around the room. He looked relaxed, as if the knot of confusion usually cinched in his face had come undone. His shoes were on the floor beside him, but he remained motionless. “Come on,” I urged him. He kept staring past me, so I put the shoes on for him, tied the laces. I stuffed his slippers in the bag and slung it up on my shoulder. I pulled him to his feet, and he followed me out into the hall. Then he paused.

  “Wait.” He turned and shuffled into his room.

  “Gpa!”

  He came back out to the hall holding the newly framed photo of Gma and baby Dead Dad. “She’s coming with us,” he said.

  I nodded and began to walk him back toward recepti
on so we could sign him out.

  No one greeted us in the hall, and we got nearly all the way to the lobby before Gpa broke from his dreamy gaze.

  “I was just thinking about the frozen custard stand,” he said. “The one up on Meadow and Cascadilla. What was the name of that place?”

  “Don’t worry about it right now, Gpa. We’ll figure it out later.”

  “We used to go there after dinner,” he said, ignoring me. “What the hell is the name of that place? It’s like charity, or it has a name that makes you think of church.”

  “Shhh. Stay with me here, Gpa.”

  He shook his head. “Finally,” he said. “Home.” He smiled like a child, but I wondered if he’d had that same expression as he’d boarded his final plane out of Saigon. A survivor’s grin, a grin of gratitude, but shadowed with fear. Would it still look like home, if the custard shop was no longer there? Would it still be home? Could he call it that?

  “Home!” he shouted when we were back in the hall.

  “Please, Gpa,” I whispered. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

  “I’m going home!” he said again and again as we signed out.

  I tried to look the receptionist in the eye. “Family reunion.”

  “Family reunion?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She saw Gpa holding the photo and smiled. “It’ll be good for him. You three have fun together.”

  “We will,” I said, playing along all happy-faced, but feeling a little guilty on the inside because I knew she was thinking it’d be me, Mom, and Gpa hanging out less than two miles away at the Great Empty Blue—not the two of us flooring it across the country with Corrina. But the lie worked. She sent us along with a warm wave good-bye.

  As I got Gpa down the stairs and into the parking lot, I humored him and talked more about the frozen custard stand that I’d never heard of but that was suddenly the most important half-eroded memory Gpa was trying to recall, and I hoped and hoped and hoped he wouldn’t slip and suddenly think Gma Betty was going to be there waiting for him. If he went there in his mind, and I told him No, she’s dead, he’d be in that weird limbo, that place like he was hearing about her death for the first time. A joke was a joke, but hearing about the death of someone you love again and again, hearing it each time with the pain of the first time—no one deserved that kind of torture.

  But he didn’t go there. And even better: what I saw ahead of me. Old Humper danced in front of the car. Corrina waved. She sat on the hood with her cell phone in one hand and the leash in the other. She leaned back, too, face bent up, the sun coming down and glowing in the twists of her dark hair and in her skin. A field of pinwheels whirred within me.

  “This is my friend, Corrina,” I said to Gpa.

  She stuck out her hand and he took it, but I could see the wheels turning more slowly behind his eyes. I’d rushed him outside, I was introducing him to someone new. He turned back to the front door of Calypso. A flash of fear trembled in the folds of his cheeks, but he swallowed it.

  “Your friend,” he said quietly.

  “We’re just friends, Gpa,” I said.

  Corrina squinted at me. “Yeah. Of course,” she said, and she was about to say more, but I held up my hand.

  “My friend who’s helping us get to Ithaca,” I said to Gpa.

  He nodded. “Ithaca.”

  Corrina got us out of there and back onto the 10, and when we started picking up speed, she scrolled through her phone and found a song she wanted. “Great road song!” she shouted in the roar of wind coming in through the open windows. “A classic. The ex-hippies love it.”

  “Turn it down,” I told her.

  “Don’t ruin it, Hendrix!” she shouted back.

  But I was worried all the rushing and the commotion and the stimulus were going to send Gpa into a terrified fit any minute. I turned back to try to calm him, but he didn’t need me. He was nodding his head slightly to the song—the urgent, charging rhythm guitar and drums, the lead guitar snaking low and deep, and grounding it all, a powerful woman’s voice, as clear and heavy as a warm, polished stone. It did feel like a road song, something that surged and rolled, surged and rolled just like the Blue Bomber picking up speed as Corrina weaved it through light traffic on the highway.

  “I know this song,” Gpa said from the back.

  “Yeah?” Corrina said. “ ‘Somebody to Love’? Jefferson Airplane. Surrealistic Pillow, 1967.”

  Gpa sat up. “That’s right. My God! ‘Somebody to Love.’ Exactly. That song. Betty loved that song.”

  “She did?” I said, looking back at him. He nodded and smiled. He stuck his finger in the air and wiggled it, just as the woman’s voice cracked on a note and the lead guitar warbled through a short riff. A wave of relief swept over me.

  He leaned forward and poked his head into the front seat.

  “I know where I am,” he said to me softly. “I know where we’re going.” He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled as we busted out of town with the sunlight in our eyes.

  CHAPTER 7

  FINDING THE MOOD RIGHT NOW

  I had this soda-fizz feeling like I was going to puke while Corrina steered the Blue Bomber in a quick, fierce shot out of West LA, taking the 10 east, putting the sunlight at our backs and gliding through the easy midday traffic. But after we passed San Bernardino, Mt. Baldy, and Cedarpines and cut north toward Vegas, I felt a ridiculous burst of goofy energy, relieved we’d managed to get beyond the city limits, beyond the metropolitan ring, out into the dry desert hills, where the land opened up and the road bent east again into the vast, smogless, blue-sky expanse of the valley, because Corrina shouted into the dry, clear California air, “We did it! We’re doing it, Hendrix!”

  And the dam finally broke within me. “Yes!” I screamed.

  “All right,” Gpa said from the back. “I’m still here too. Try to get me there in one piece, okay?” He frowned and looked out the window toward the flatland around Victorville. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “What?” I glanced at him over my shoulder, because he’d been chatting with us the whole way so far and I didn’t think he’d lost his sense of things.

  “I know we’re going to Ithaca, Teddy. I mean how are we getting there?”

  I held up my phone. “Google Maps.”

  “No,” Gpa said. “What route? How are we getting across the country? Which way are we going?”

  The map on the phone was zoomed in, so all I knew was that we were heading west on the 15 until I was told otherwise. I zoomed out, checked the directions, looked at the two routes offered. One north, one south. The northern route was exactly thirty-three miles shorter, and it suggested it would take two hours less to drive than the southern route.

  Corrina saw me fiddling and laughed. “Hendrix, the Great Navigator.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’re going north. Next stop, Denver.”

  “That’s the route I’d take,” Gpa agreed. “I’ve taken it before.”

  The plan: We’d take the 15 through Vegas to the mountains of Utah where it met up with the 70, and then we’d take that rugged mountain highway to Denver, where we’d hitch up with the 76, drop down into the Nebraska farms and take the 80 clear across the enormous stretch of plains through Omaha and Des Moines, and brush the southern wash of Lake Michigan, and then cut straight beneath the hemline of the old Catcher’s Mitt to Toledo, where we’d pick up the 90 to Cleveland and Erie and knife across New York State to those delicate little Finger Lakes via the 86 until we sailed safely into Ithaca, down there at the tip of Cayuga Lake.

  As Gpa and I discussed all this, Corrina played with her phone, scrolling through it for music she liked. She’d listen to one song, then switch to another band, sometimes listen to only half a song, scroll to another. I began to worry she was paying attention to the music much more than the road.

  “Hey,” I said. “Let’s just choose one and stick with it.”

  “Nope,” Corrina shot back. �
�I gotta find something to fit the mood right now.”

  “What’s the mood right now?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll know it when I hear it.”

  Eventually she found what she was looking for. Some band called the Electric Warts. They were an all-girl band originally from LA, but they’d moved out to New York. She knew one of the girls in the band. Aiko. The keyboardist. They’d met one night at the Dragonfly.

  “They seriously rock,” Corrina said, turning up the volume. “Not shredders, just old-school rockers. I love them. Edgy and doomy like Advaeta, but with this pop sound like Dum Dum Girls.”

  I stared at her blankly.

  Corrina rolled her eyes. “One time,” she explained, “Aiko brought me down to the Troubadour in the off-hours, which is cool, just an empty club and stage and the time and space to jam, but I didn’t really expect to play. Except, when we got there, their guitarist was MIA, so they asked me to join! Can you believe it?”

  Her face was lit up with the memory and she spoke so quickly and excitedly, even Gpa was listening to the story.

  “So I play. Granted, not my own guitar, I’m better with my own, but still, I’m jamming with the Electric Warts, right?”

  “Wow,” I said. “I guess that would be pretty cool.”

  Corrina glanced at me with pitched eyebrows and a fake smile, because I obviously hadn’t responded with enough enthusiasm. “I could have played all day, but then their guitarist eventually showed up and I had to let her take over. But later . . .” Corrina nodded along and smiled. The car picked up speed. “Later Aiko told me she thought I was awesome, like seriously awesome, like I could be in their band awesome!”

  “Why didn’t you join their band?” I asked.

  “They moved to New York two weeks later. Just when you’re about to get a break—poof. It’s gone. Like always.”

  “Yeah,” I said. We were quiet for a moment, and I was nervous I wasn’t saying anything. “Well,” I finally said. “Who wants to be in a band called the Electric Warts, anyway?”

  Corrina pushed a big breath past her lips. “It never ceases to amaze me, Hendrix, that for a guy named Hendrix, you know shit-all about music.”