Michael Ledwidge: Alert

“Hello?!” came Juliana’s panicked voice on the first ring.

“Juliana, it’s Dad. I just got off the plane at JFK. What is it?”

“Thank God you’re home. It’s Gramps, Dad. He’s missing. He was supposed to come over here last night to babysit around ten, but when we called the rectory at eleven, they said he’d left at nine thirty. He never made it back last night, Dad. Seamus is missing. We don’t know where he is!”

“Is the rectory housekeeper, Anita, still with you?” I said, grabbing my bag and hustling immediately back onto the concourse.

“No. I told her to go home last night, Dad. Don’t worry: I’m watching everybody.”

“I know you are, Juliana. You’re a good girl,” I said as calmly as I could as I tried to read the impossible terminal signs to find the exit. “What am I saying? I mean young woman. Don’t worry about Gramps. I’m sure he’s okay. Probably met an old friend and stayed over with him. I’m going to find him right now. I’ll call you the first I hear from him.”

“Okay, good. I’m so glad you and Mary Catherine are home,” she said.

I decided to leave out the fact that Mary Catherine was still stuck in Ireland for the time being. One catastrophe at a time.

“And don’t worry. Things are under control on this end. I love you so much, Dad,” Juliana said.

“I love you, too,” I said before I hung up.

My next call, as I finally spotted an actual exit sign, was to my buddies at the Ombudsman Outreach Squad on 125th Street.

“Brooklyn, hi. It’s Mike Bennett,” I said when Detective Kale answered. “I need a favor. You ever do a missing persons case?”

“Sure, plenty of them. Why? What’s up?”

“I just got off a plane out at Kennedy. My grandfather, Seamus Bennett, has been missing since around ten last night. He’s eighty-one, white male, white hair, five seven, around a hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably wearing black priest’s clothes. He left the Holy Name rectory on West Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam last night around nine thirty, probably heading west for my building on West End and Ninety-Fifth. We’re especially worried about him because he recently had a stroke.”

“Seamus?” Brooklyn said. “Oh, no. I remember meeting him at Naomi Chast’s wake. I’m on it, Mike. I’ll check all the local hospitals and precincts.”

I finally went through some sliding doors into the cold, grim predawn street. Above the curbside taxi stand, rain pelted off a fading rusted sign from maybe the eighties-era Koch administration.

WELCOME TO NY. HOW YA DOIN’? it said.

Luckily, I didn’t have my service weapon with me because I might have emptied a magazine into it in reply.

“I’m stressed-out, New York,” I mumbled. “As usual. Fuhgeddaboudit!”

I was stuck in my taxi on the 59th Street Bridge staring at the towers of Manhattan in the honking suicide evening rush-hour traffic when Brooklyn called me back.

The good news was that she thought she’d found Seamus, but the bad news was where she’d found him. I had the cabbie take me straight to West 106th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Brooklyn was actually waiting for me on the sidewalk twenty-five minutes later, when my cab finally made it to the Jewish Home Lifecare facility.

“He’s fine, Mike. I was just in there. He’s up on eight, and he’s fine,” Brooklyn said in greeting as I flew from the taxi to the facility’s front door.

“He’s in a nursing home, Brooklyn!” I snapped at her as I went inside and showed the security guard my shield. “I don’t call this fine. What the hell happened?”

“Twenty-Fourth Precinct was called at around ten fifteen,” Brooklyn said as we maneuvered around an old lady in a wheelchair and another one lying on a bed in the hallway. “Somebody reported a confused old man on the uptown platform of the Ninety-Sixth Street number one subway line.”

I shook my head picturing it. Seamus helpless on a subway platform, wandering around as the trains blew past. Dear Lord, did that hurt. No, please, I thought, not wanting it to be true.

“He wasn’t wearing his priest’s clothes, Mike. He was in sweats, and he didn’t have any ID on him. When police questioned him, he got emotional, so they brought him here. It’s the biggest old-age home in the area, so they thought he might have wandered away from here. They also have an Alzheimer’s special care unit, so it was actually a smart move,” she said as we arrived at the elevator.

“Alzheimer’s?” I said, panicking some more as I pushed the elevator’s call button about eighty-six times. “Seamus does not have Alzheimer’s.”

“I know, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “I just spoke to him. He just woke up. They sedated him when he came in, but he’s lucid now. You’ll see.”

Brooklyn surprised me by squeezing my hand.

“Listen, Mike. My grandmother is ninety-one. She’s usually fine, but every once in a while, she forgets things. Stuff like this is going to happen going forward. It’s natural.”

“Dad?” called a voice.

I turned around and saw Juliana coming in through the doorway of the facility with her siblings in their school uniforms. Behind her were Ricky, Eddie, Trent, Jane, Fiona, and Bridget, holding Chrissy and Shawna’s hands.

“Look! Daddy really is home!” Chrissy said, grabbing Shawna as she jumped up and down.

“Juliana, what are you doing?” I said as I hurried toward the children and convinced the utterly confused guard that they were all with me.

“I thought everybody was supposed to be in school,” I said to Juliana.

“They are, but then when you texted me about Seamus being here, I went and got everyone out. Brian just left from Fordham Prep, too. He’s on the train now. We all need to be here for Gramps. Is he sick?”

“Is Gramps going to die?” Shawna said, tears springing up in her eyes.

“No, no. He’s okay, honey. He just got a little confused, and they brought him here. He’s upstairs on eight,” I said as I lifted up Shawna and gave her a kiss.

“Where’s Mary Catherine? Upstairs with Gramps?” Juliana said after I thanked Brooklyn profusely and convinced her that I had things under control so she could go back to work.

“Wait,” I said, changing the subject. “How did you get everybody out of school?”

“I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I had to forge a note with your signature. Well, actually two of them. One for me and one for all the munchkins. You have to call Sister Sheilah, by the way. She didn’t want to release them to me, but I was kind of pushy, I guess, and she finally relented.”

Under normal circumstances such chicanery would, of course, be a no-no, but this was a four-alarm Bennett family emergency. Juliana knew as we all did that rule-bending was allowable when it came to being there for a family member in need. Especially Seamus.

I gave my oldest daughter a hug and a quick fist bump as we walked toward the elevator.

“Forgery and lying to nuns?” I whispered to her. “Right out of the old Bennett playbook. I admire your technique.”

“Michael Sean Aloysius Bennett!” Seamus said as we came through his eighth-floor room’s open doorway to find him sitting in a chair laughing with a pretty young black woman in Tiffany-blue hospital scrubs.

“And the whole squad! The Lord save us all, you’re all a sight for sore eyes! You’ll not believe what’s happened to me, gang. I headed to your apartment house yesterday evening and lost my way, and now here I’ve woken up Jewish!”

We all laughed as we surrounded him in a group hug.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, too, Father. Believe me,” I said, choking back tears as I hugged this old man whom I loved as dearly as anyone on earth. I could admit to myself now that I was convinced that he was dead. Bonked on the head by a mugger or fallen down into a Con Edison manhole. To see him in one piece was truly a miracle.