The Last Cadillac (28 page)

I ran back into the house and frantically raked through all the keys in the basket, looking for the ring with a large crest that held the keys to the Cadillac. Gone. I ran for my purse, to the kitchen counter, drawers, anywhere I might have put the keys, including the refrigerator and the waste-basket (where I'd found them on two occasions). I was making no sense of it. The car was gone, and a key would do no good. But the adrenalin kept pushing me, so I ran around looking until I ran out of places to look. Whoever took the car also took the keys, I was sure of it. I thought of Tick, but Tick was in Orlando at a soccer game.

I hoped that Tick had come back and taken the car out. I even hoped that Little Sunshine had decided on an outing, and all the while these crazy fantasies went through my head, I knew none of that had happened. I walked through the house toward Dad's room and pushed the door open slowly and the hump of pillows in his bed gave me a start of relief. I poked at the mound of linen on the bed.

Of course, I came up empty.

I checked the bathroom. Nothing. The house was empty, except for Little Sunshine snoring away in her burrow. She would have heard nothing.

The sinking feeling took over. I ran around the house, calling for Dad. Dad wasn't there. The neighbors probably could've heard me up and down the canal. The canal! For years I worried about the kids falling in the pool, or
drowning in the Gulf, and now I ran out the back door to see if my father was floating in the canal. Two ducks rode the breezy rills on the surface, and they flapped away when they heard me clunking over the dock. He could still be in there, I thought. But I would surely have heard a two-hundred-pound man fall into the canal. My bedroom was thirty feet away. The older I got, the more exacerbated became my fears about everything, but I simply told myself he was not in the canal.

My mind went back to the trail of Kleenex on the walkway, and the missing car. I couldn't shake the clues.

I called the police and told them to be on the lookout for a late-model Cadillac. Then I said the unthinkable: “Be sure to look for a white-haired man driving it.”

“Ma'am, do you know that's about every other driver, in every other car on the road, hereabouts?” said the dispatcher.

“Yes, I know, but you don't understand. He doesn't have any idea where he's going.”

“None of 'em do, ma'am. I notice they seem to be driving around helpless.”

“Please. Just look. He's got white hair, his name is Mike, and the car's mocha.”

After I hung up, I realized he probably had his khaki hat on, and that car wasn't mocha—mocha was coffee brown, not purplish-gray. This was not turning out well.

I kept searching the house. No windows or doors were open or broken. He could have been kidnapped, but that would be a stretch, wrestling my hefty Dad out the door. It would have been like lifting a whale from a tank.

The fact was, he was gone.

I can't find my father!

He was alone somewhere, and at some point, he would be
confused, crying, and helpless, which is exactly where I was headed, too.

I stood on the porch, my arms folded around me, and looked out at the black surface of the canal, thinking horrible thoughts. But it did no good to sit there, making up even worse scenarios: of Dad and the Cadillac wrapped around a fence or telephone pole, of Dad running over a young biker or racing off the road and into a playground full of kids practicing baseball.

And it would be all my fault. Not his. I so blithely asked for this responsibility, and now look at what I've done.

I got up and paced around the kitchen. I could hear ball practice start up, and it wasn't even nine yet. I should call the police again. The possibilities of this whimsical adventure seemed endless, and I began to get angry, except that he couldn't possibly know the consequences of what he was doing. Would he know enough to come home? Here? In Florida? In his mind, he was probably back in Hammond, Indiana, on his way to United Boiler Heating and Foundry for a day's work in his office and with the men in the plant. He hardly ever found himself in the present. He loved his life and all the times and people that had been; the present was too painful, and the future was something he didn't like to talk about.

I went out the front door again, and this time I paid close attention to the Kleenex on the walk. They hadn't blown away, but it was a still morning. The cat brushed up against me again, agitated and meowing loudly. What about the cat? Yes, the cat had been outside when I opened the door. She was a house cat, and she'd not gone far. She never stayed out long, and she had not been at the window mewing to come in, which was her usual way of getting our attention almost
as soon as she went out the door. If Dad had taken the car, he had probably let the cat out when he left. It had to have been recently.

I started walking down Willow Avenue toward Gulf Drive, more out of nervous energy than anything else. Then I picked up the pace, sandals flapping loudly on the broken shell that skittered over the asphalt. Not a soul, nor a car was on the street, and not a sound, except for the doves cooing in the bushes. I had three blocks to go to get to the main drive, and then I saw something, a dot turning off Gulf Drive toward me. I stopped and peered down the street. The dot was definitely a shade of mocha, moving slowly and growing larger and larger, the sunlight beaming off glass. I started to run. I ran fast toward the dot, as fast as my flip-flops would take me.

I ran all the way down Willow Avenue. When I was within ten feet of the Cadillac, I screamed, “Stop!”

But the driver was already stopped, right in the middle of the street.

Dad was hunched far down in the driver's seat, his white knuckles gripping the wheel and his hat pulled down so low I couldn't see his face. I yanked the door open and grabbed him around the neck with joy and relief. He was stiff as a tree trunk. He didn't even turn to look at me; he just stared straight ahead.

“Ow,” he said, flinching inside the circle of my arms.

I remembered the bad neck and the arthritis, so I let him go, reluctantly.

“You're killing me,” he yelped.

“I'd like to.” But I was laughing. “Dad, where have you been?”

“Oh, I don't know. Just down to see Leonard at the shop. Had a feeling things weren't going too well down there.”

“Dad, Leonard's in Indiana.” This information had no effect on him whatsoever. He was lost in another world. He hadn't seen Leonard, his beloved foreman and right-hand man, since he retired and left town for Florida. I thanked God he hadn't been looking for Leonard in south Chicago traffic on a Saturday morning. The traffic on Anna Maria Island was thin and slow, and when a car went by, it was clocking about twenty. It was still no place for my father to be driving around. He could hardly manage his two-hundred-pound frame, much less a two-thousand-pound car.

Dad looked back down the road and kept his hands on the wheel.

“Dad, I've been worried to death about you. Please, don't do this again.”

“Do what again?”

He looked up at me, the confusion deep and impenetrable in those sea-blue eyes. It wouldn't do any good to try and untangle the morning's crazy adventure. His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn't grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all. Some days were just like that, most of the time now. No one had told me the depth and breadth of that senility and—especially—how it could come and go. I would get frustrated when he couldn't remember something, but in that moment, he couldn't. Later on, on another day, he could. It was the progression of the disease; the dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could. That would have been the pill to die for, one that leveled out and rebuilt or, at least, stabilized the senile brain, one that gave comfort to the demented—and, as a result, to the supposedly sane.

It wouldn't do any good to ask him where he'd gone, because he usually didn't remember details. Details were confusing, unless they happened fifty years ago. Standing in the street, sizing him up, it looked to me like he'd already spent what lucidity he woke up with. I had no idea how long he'd been up, but it had to have been a strenuous, tiring morning for him. I had to deal with The Now to get through to him and figure out a way to budge him away from the wheel, permanently.

With the car door open, we took up the width of the road, and thankfully, the place was deserted. I put my hand on his arm, afraid he would resist, but he stayed rooted to the wheel. Sometimes he was docile as a child, and other times, he grunted and rumbled like an old bull. I'd never been able to manage if he started flailing around or became violent. It was still something to watch for. The therapists and nurses warned me about that, too, but I was getting used to Dad's change of moods, from confused to lucid, but mostly cooperative. Every day I had a different dad.

“Dad, why don't you scoot over and let me drive for a bit?” I tried for a light tone, like I was offering him a bowl of spumoni, his favorite ice cream.

He began to give it up. His fingers relaxed slightly on the steering wheel, and he slumped a little in the seat. Then the moment froze and clicked into my brain, to stay there forever in memory, of Dad and me and the Cadillac, in the middle of a sunny bright morning with a single bird looping overhead. The air was so full of promise for a day of boating and picnics, sunbathing and walking on the beach, but instead I felt that other events were ahead for us. I was going to another level of taking care of Dad, of protecting him from himself, and I was scared.

His grip tightened.

I waited, and then I ran my hand up and down his arm, gently, but he didn't move. He kept holding on to the steering wheel like it was the only tangible thing in a permanent state of fog. He acted the same way when I drove him around, or when he got into the shower, or entered a stairwell, or into any situation where he didn't have control anymore. He hung on to the handlebars for dear life. He was afraid, too.

At least we were in it together.

He looked away, and I couldn't see his eyes except for the straight white lashes under the brim of that hat. I waited for him to mentally get his bearings. He'd gone out for a spin, not really knowing what he was doing, and now, he'd finally come back to us, and we were all safe. I was just glad he was safe.

We were at a crossing where the tie between us was about to pull tighter, and for once, I waited patiently for him to respond. I had to move slowly to get through this, to build whatever understanding we could—even if the reality was that he might forget the whole thing in a minute. I didn't want to think about that. I always held on to the belief that some of my dad was always in there somewhere, and would stay in there until the end of him. We needed a new understanding, mostly for safety's sake, and I didn't want to reach out and take it, so I waited for Dad.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” He lifted his face and he fixed his eyes steadily, surely, without taking them off me, and I let that gaze be a strong link between us. His expression changed from a blank stare to one of sweetness and peace, and I saw a lot of the old dad come back.

“I'm so tired. Let's go home,” he said. “You drive. It's your turn.”

I hadn't yelled at him. I'd waited patiently for him to get a grip on the moment and respond. In the words of my grandmother, he was a poor soulie lamb. And he admitted that he was tired.

He was slipping further and further away. Into dementia.

I hated that word. Dementia. It was a black hole; it was taking my dad, the smartest and strongest man in the world, a fact I had to accept even as I watched, and hoped for good days, while his mind drifted away.

We made it step by step back into the house. I steered him to the breakfast table, half coaxing, half dragging, and when I fixed him a bowl of frosty flakes with a banana on top, he perked up. He started to put globs of sugar on the cereal before I caught him, and then he began wolfing it down. Sometimes I let him get after the sugar bowl; it wouldn't kill him, like the booze and cigarettes. I kept a parental eye on him and the kids. But I had definitely let my guard down this morning, I thought, staring out at the canal. I needed to tighten the controls, lock the doors and hide the keys, because I couldn't afford to slack off. Dad finished the last lick of milk, like the cat.

Just then, Marilyn's car crunched over the shells in the drive, and two seconds later, she appeared in the doorway. “The Commando's already up?” she said, as she plopped a large canvas bag on the kitchen floor. I was wiping up the counter, and Dad was talking to the cat at the breakfast table.

“The Commando's been up and out already,” I said. I told her how we started out our day. Both hands went up to her cheeks so fast I thought she'd lift herself off the ground.

“He what?”

She skipped out of the kitchen and over to his side at the table in the family room. She began poking around at
his back and arms. He looked up at her, with a blank, tired expression. I noticed for the first time what a good job he'd done of dressing himself. He'd managed to get his nightshirt tucked into his khakis, his jacket on, and his boat-shoes—sans socks—on to his feet, but he looked mighty tired.

“Commando? You out driving your tank this morning?” Marilyn squeaked. “You leave that to the generals, you hear?”

“Sure, sure.” He was agreeable when attention was lathered on. “But, you know, I'm awfully tired. I think I'll take a little nap.”

We tucked him into bed and stood in the bedroom doorway, shaking our heads at him. Dad was already snoring. “He'll get a ‘showa' and good head wash when he gets up,” she said. She ran off to the laundry room, talking to herself and getting into a lather about the misadventures of The Commando.

I went out to the patio and sat at the table drinking coffee, in a daze of relief that we had survived until 10:00a.