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garde sculpture and wrote long, angsty e-mails to her cousin overseas.
“And you’re certain Aunt Alice’s overreacting? There’s no chance she might be on to something?”
“There’s always a chance. That’s how my mom operates—within the realm of possibility. She thinks Granddad is losing it. Everybody knows brain tumors make people do crazy things. When can you get to New York?” asked Ivy. “We really need you, Ross. Granddad needs you. You’re the only one he listens to. Where the hell are you, anyway?”
Ross looked around the foreign airport, jammed with soldiers in desert fatigues, trading stories of firefights, suicide bombers, roadside ambushes. Transport here had been his last movement on the ground. He remembered thinking, please don’t let anything happen now. He didn’t want to be one of those depressing items you read about in hometown newspapers—On his last day of deployment, he died in a convoy attack…
He pictured Ivy in her bohemian guest house on the bluffs above Hendry’s Beach. He could hear a Cream album playing in the background. She was probably making coffee in her French press and watching the surfers paddle to the beach-break for an early morning ride.
“I’m on my way,” he said. The homeward-bound soldiers had all been sitting at KAIA for hours. Time dragged at the pace of a glacier. Originally their flight was supposed to leave at 1400, but that had been delayed to 2145. They’d been ordered back to the departure tent and subjected to mandatory lockdown, which meant sitting in an airless tent with nothing to do until it was time to board: 2145 had come and gone, the delay surprising no one.
“Ross?” His cousin’s voice prodded him. “How much longer before you’re home?”
“Working on it,” he said to her. At the moment, he might as well be on a different planet; he felt that far away. “What’s going on with Granddad?”
“Here’s what I know. He’s been in treatment at the Mayo Clinic. I guess they told him then…” She paused, and a sob pulsed through the phone. “They told him it was the worst possible news.”
“Ivy—”
“It’s inoperable. I don’t think even my mother would exaggerate that. He’s going to die, Ross.”
Ross felt sucker-punched by the words. For a few seconds, he couldn’t breathe or see straight. There had to be some mistake. A month ago, Ross had received the usual communiqué from his grandfather. George Bellamy had a curiously old-fashioned style of writing, even with e-mail, starting each message with a proper heading and salutation. He had mentioned the Mayo Clinic—"nothing to worry about.” Ross had failed to read between the lines. He hadn’t let himself go there, even though he knew damn well a guy didn’t go to the Mayo Clinic for a hangnail. He hadn’t let himself think about…sweet Jesus…a terminal prognosis.
Granddad’s sign-off was always the same: Keep Calm and Carry On.
And that, in essence, was the way George Bellamy lived. Apparently it was the way he was going to die.
“He finally told my dad,” Ivy was saying. There was still a catch in her voice. “He said he wasn’t going to pursue further treatment.”
“Is he scared?” Ross asked. “Is he in pain?”
“He’s just…Granddad. He claimed he had to go to some little town in the Catskills to see his brother. That was the first I’d heard of any brother. Did you know anything about that?”
“Wait a minute, what? Granddad has a brother?”
The connection crackled ominously, and he missed the first part of her reply. “…anyway, when my mother heard what he was planning, she went, like, totally ballistic.”
Fighting the poor connection and the ambient din of the airport, Ross listened as his cousin filled him in further. Their grandfather had called each of his three sons—Trevor, Gerard and Louis—and he’d calmly informed them of the diagnosis. Then, like a follow-up punch, George had announced his intention to leave his Manhattan penthouse and head for a backwater town upstate to see his brother, some guy named Charles Bellamy. Like Ivy and Ross, most people in the family didn’t even know he had a long-lost brother. How could he have a brother nobody knew about? Was he some guy hidden away in an asylum somewhere, like in the movie Rain Man? Or was he a figment of Granddad’s increasingly unreliable imagination?
“So you are telling me he’s headed upstate with some sketchy woman who is…who, again?” he asked.
“Her name is Claire Turner. Claims to be some kind of nurse or home health worker. My mom—and yours, too, I’m sure—thinks she’s after his money.”
That would always be the first concern of Aunt Alice and of his mother, Ross reflected. Though Bellamys only by marriage, they claimed to love George like a father. And maybe they did, but Ross suspected Alice’s tantrum was less about losing her father-in-law than it was about splitting her inheritance. He also had no doubt his mother felt the same way. But that was a whole other conversation.
“And they called the police to stop her,” Ivy added.
“The police?” Ross shoved a hand through his close-cropped hair. He realized he’d raised his voice again and turned away. “They called the police?” Holy crap. Apparently his mother and aunt had managed to persuade the local authorities that George was with a stranger who meant him harm.
“They didn’t know what else to do,” said Ivy. “Listen, Ross. I’m so worried about Granddad. I’m scared. I don’t want him to suffer. I don’t want him to die. Please come home, Ross. Please—”
“I requested an expedited discharge,” he assured her. So far, the promised out-processing hadn’t given him much of a head start.
His cousin acted as though his homecoming was going to bring about a miraculous cure for their grandfather. Ross already knew miracles weren’t reliable. “When are you flying to New York?” he asked, but by then he was speaking to empty air; the connection had been lost. He shut the mobile phone and brought it over to Manny Shiraz, a fellow chief warrant officer who had lent it to him when Ross’s phone had failed.
“Trouble at home?” Manny asked. It was the kind of question that came up for guys on deployment, again and again.
Ross nodded. “God forbid I should go home and find everything is fine.”
“Welcome to the club, Chief.”
The idyllic homefront was usually a myth, yet everybody in the waiting area was amped up about going back. There were men and women who hadn’t seen their families in a year, some even longer than that. Babies had been born, toddlers had taken their first steps, marriages had crumbled, holidays had passed, loved ones had died, birthdays had been celebrated. Everyone was eager to get back to their lives.
Ross was eager, too—but he didn’t have much of a life. No wife and kids counting the hours to his return. Just his mother, Winifred, a flighty and self-absorbed woman…and Granddad.
George Bellamy had been the touchstone of Ross’s life since the moment a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer had knocked at the door, arriving in person to tell Winifred Bellamy and her son that Pierce Bellamy had been killed during Operation Desert Storm in 1994.
Granddad had flown to New York from Paris on the Concorde, which was still operating in those days. He had traveled faster than the speed of sound to be with Ross. He’d pulled his grandson into his arms, and the two of them had cried together, and Granddad had made a promise that day: I will always be here for you.
They had clung to each other like survivors of a tsunami. Ross’s mother all but disappeared into a whirlwind of panicked grief that culminated in a feverish round of dating. Winifred recovered from her loss quickly and decisively, sealing the deal by remarrying and adopting two stepkids, Donnie and Denise. Ross had been shipped off to school in Switzerland because he had difficulty “accepting” his stepfather and his charming stepbrother and stepsister.