Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [115]
The Boss follows my gaze to the propane tank.
“Don’t,” he says.
I pull the trigger.
The boat explodes.
Chapter 64
“I always knew, Grandma.”
“Of course you did.”
“I did?”
“Of course. That’s why you threw up on the snake. You knew that Harry was watching us. You knew that you had a secret inside of you and you wanted to get rid of it.”
“By throwing up?”
Grandma laughs. “You know the truth now. You can die in peace.”
“I don’t want to die. Polly needs a maple donut.”
“Dying is part of life. Vince is right. Aging is a beautiful thing if you can see it in the right light.”
“I’m not aging. I’m dying!”
“Oh, good point,” she laughs. “Then you’d better swim.”
“What?”
“Up. Toward the oxygen.”
Epilogue
“If it’s Halloween, I’d like a Milky Way.”
“Halloween was a few weeks ago,” I say.
“You’ve got a bandage on your head. You’re dressed up like you got wounded in the Pacific,” Grandma responds.
I laugh. I do have a head wound.
I’m laughing anyway because Grandma Lane just exchanged a few sentences with me that seemed somewhat connected with one another. Grandma’s brain is eroding. But less quickly than it was two months earlier. The effects of the heavy interaction with the Human Memory Crusade have started to wear off. Partly because the document I discovered on the boat suggested one basic healing method: cut down on computer use. Or, at least, less multitasking.
We’re strengthening her organic memory by keeping her stimulated through conversation, human interaction, rest, and a course of antibiotics.
It’s not fancy alchemy. It’s the reasoned response to a hippocampus that was attacked by a virus, like a computer virus, or wildfire, loosed inside her brain.
Health-wise, I’m recovering myself, from a condition that I think might be clinically called “mostly dead.”
I’d like to say that my grandmother saved my life. I’d like to say that she reached me in a telepathic dream state and urged me to swim to safety while I was dying in the wreckage of the exploded and sinking Surface to Air. I did hallucinate that she was talking to me. But I didn’t act on it and save my own life. The truth is some kindly Samaritan dragged me to safety, pumped my lungs, and then waited for the emergency medical folks to show up and do the rest of the lifesaving.
More good news: the cops seemed to feel that the wayward journalist has suffered enough.
When I got home from the hospital a few days later, I discovered a Porta Potti on the street outside my flat. It was intact; not burned to the ground. I received an anonymous phone call a few days later. The caller explained that the cops had planned to burn it to the ground but had called a truce in light of my larger medical issues and the fact that it appeared I was for once pursuing some actual, meaningful journalism.
They left the Porta Potti as a reminder to “stop writing crap about your local community.”
Clever as ever.
Now I’m sitting with Lane at her nursing home and I’m about to make an introduction.
“Grandma, I’d like you to meet someone.”
“That would be nice.”
I look up at Polly. She’s wearing a sundress as befits both the uncharacteristic warmth of this November day and the fact she’s uncharacteristically sensitive about the changes to her body. She’s not yet showing the baked bean in her oven but she’s being cautious anyway.
She walks to Grandma’s bedside.
“I’d like you to meet the newest Idle,” I say.
“You’re married?” Lane responds.
“No,” Polly says. “Not even if he wanted to.”
We haven’t even discussed it.
Polly looks at me and smiles. “Who said his last name would be ‘Idle’?”
“I don’t understand,” Grandma says.
I take her hand and put it on Pauline’s belly.
Grandma holds it there. I’m watching her eyes. Her pupils widen. She looks at Polly’s stomach, then at me and back at the belly. She pulls her hand back and then puts it back down again. She looks at me and I see her eyes start to glisten.
“Grandma?”
Her lips wrinkle into a slight smile even as her eyes fill with more tears.
“You’re going to be