My head begins to pound until I nearly scream. It’s like I’m being activated all over—
“Faith! Faith! Wake up.” Miss Ella shakes my shoulder as she hustles past me to the door.
The door! I jump up, shedding my blanket, and push past Miss Ella to answer the door.
And there she is. Grandma Lou in her housecoat and slippers, flanked by two officers, a man and a woman, with sympathetic expressions on their faces.
“Faith?” Grandma Lou says.
She knows me. I don’t know what version of me she sees, but it doesn’t matter. The officers guide her inside and I pull her close to me, squeezing her as I realize for the first time how petite she is compared to me. In my arms, she feels so frail and small.
“Is this your grandmother?” asks the female officer, whose hair is slicked back into a low ponytail.
I pull back from Grandma Lou and Miss Ella guides her to the kitchen, wrapping her in a blanket.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes, she is.”
The other officer nods toward the kitchen. “Is this the first time something like this has happened to her?”
I swallow, but my throat’s too dry. Something about admitting this to two police officers makes it too real. “She’s been more and more forgetful lately. Just not really herself.”
Officer Ponytail motions to the living room. “Mind if we sit down for a moment?”
“Not at all,” I tell them, offering them the couch while I take Grandma Lou’s recliner.
“I’m Officer Grundy and this is Officer Florez,” says the woman.
“My name is Faith.”
“Faith,” says Officer Grundy, “we got a call about a woman at Parkway Grocery on Eighth.”
“That’s m-miles from here,” I stutter, thinking about her flimsy little slippers and housecoat.
“They were getting ready to close up and there was a woman pacing the baking aisle, looking for some kind of mix. She couldn’t tell them what it was. So finally they called us and she didn’t have any kind of ID on her, so we took her down to the station. We heard someone mention a potentially missing elderly woman matching her description,” Officer Florez explains.
“Why didn’t you call?” I manage to ask.
“We did.”
“I—I must have fallen asleep.”
“It’s okay,” Officer Grundy tells me. “But when she’s had some rest, someone needs to talk to your grandmother about going to see someone about all this. We’ll need to send senior services out for a welfare check.”
Miss Ella hovers in the doorframe. “We’ll take care of her, officers.”
“And you are?” asks Officer Grundy.
She hikes her thumb back toward the kitchen. “That woman’s neighbor of forty years. We’ve survived children, husbands, and a dozen deaths together.”
“Faith,” Officer Grundy says, “I’m going to give you my card in case you need to talk to anyone else about this. I went through something similar with my mother this year.”
She stands, but Officer Florez isn’t so quick to move. “I’m assuming you’re a minor, Faith,” he says.
“Well, just barely,” I tell them. “I’m a senior. In high school.”
Miss Ella comes to stand beside me as though she can sense where the conversation is headed. “I told ya both we’d take her to the doctor. The woman just got a little confused, is all. Maybe if they wouldn’t keep reorganizing the damn grocery store, she could’ve found what she was looking for.”
And with that, Officer Grundy and Officer Florez stand to leave. They each hand me a card on their way out.
Miss Ella helps me guide Grandma Lou upstairs. She is aware of us, but still foggy.
“I wouldn’t normally condone such a thing,” says Miss Ella before she opens the front door to leave. “But I think it might be best if you thought about staying home from school tomorrow. I can come over in the morning and we can talk to Lou together.”
I nod. “Thanks for everything tonight.” Miss Ella isn’t really a person I get along with very well, but she’s definitely the kind of person who doesn’t run away from the hard stuff. I can see why she and Grandma Lou have been friends for all these years despite their differences.
“You did good tonight, girl.”
With all the doors locked and the heat turned up a little higher than normal, I lie in bed with my eyes wide open. This whole time I’ve thought I was some kind of superhero-in-waiting and that if I just tried hard enough, I could save everyone. The animals, the homeless, Gretchen, Colleen. But whatever’s wrong with Grandma Lou . . . that’s not anything I can save her from. No amount of sleuthing or flying or useless blog posts will fix this. Whatever’s happening to Grandma Lou is an evil I can’t defeat and I’m foolish for even trying.
20
I stay home from school the next morning, and the only thing that wakes me up is the incessant ringing of my phone.
I throw my hand over the phone on my nightstand, dragging it to my ear, and I swear it feels as heavy as a brick.
“Hello?” I say, my voice muffled by my pillow and blankets.
“She’s alive!” Matt says.
Annoyance riles up inside of me. Where was he when I needed him? He didn’t even try calling me after his movie.
“Where are you?” Matt asks. “It sounds like you’re under water. And you’re missing school. I didn’t even know you could physically bring yourself to miss school.”
“I’m home,” I tell him, searching for a way to pluck the details of my memory of last night and put them into a nice, bite-size sentence that won’t make him totally freak out.
And then, as every detail of last night rushes back, a slow panic balloons in my chest, because today is the really hard part. Today I have to talk to Grandma Lou.
“And OH MY GOD. I swear, barista boy and I saw a UFO as we were walking out of the movie theater. He’s really sweet, by the way, and is a freshman at the community college. But like this UFO thing was WAY too big to be a plane. Or maybe it was, like, Mothman. Do you remember that movie about Mothman that Ches made us watch?”
My head is spinning and I can’t bring myself to compute whatever he’s just said into anything meaningful. “Is Ches with you?”
“I’m here!” Ches says.
I nearly ask Ches what she was doing with Grant, but it doesn’t really seem like the time. I lower my voice so Grandma Lou can’t hear me. “Grandma Lou went missing last night.”
“Oh my God!” Matt says.
“Is she okay?” asks Ches. “Did you find her?”
“Why didn’t you call us?” asks Matt.
“I did,” I say quietly. “You were at a movie—”
“Faith,” Ches says, “that’s like a 911-leave-the-movie-early kind of situation. And you didn’t even try—wait, is she okay? You never said.”
I sigh into the phone. “She’s fine. Mostly. She’s been forgetful lately, and it sounds like she was just really disoriented.” The floorboards outside my bedroom creak. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but I’ll tell you both more later.”