This time he wasn’t taking any chances. He gave a cheery wave to the nice desk clerk as she drove off. Too bad she’s stuck with a lousy Isuzu, he thought. Crappy vehicle. By the time he walked into Shady Pines he’d decided that they would be more likely to let him in if he became Cleo’s long lost cousin.
“Oh… I thought the family were not able to arrive until tomorrow,” the newest front desk clerk said, checking her notes after he’d made his request. Her name tag gleamed under the fluorescent lights: Mrs. Beadle.
“That would be her daughter,” Logan said, with a smile. “But I was in town today so I thought I’d take the opportunity…”
Mrs. Beadle nodded, her head at a sorrowful tilt. “It’s well you have come today,” she said quietly, and he was surprised to see her eyes fill with tears. Maybe this was more than just a job after all.
“The whole town knows Mrs. Jones,” she said as she led Logan down the hall. “We will all miss her terribly. She’s a wonderful woman.”
Mrs. Beadle stopped at the last door in the hall, her hand on the knob. “Don’t be alarmed if a nurse pops her head in,” she said. “We’ve been checking every half hour or so. It won’t be long now, I’m afraid.”
She swung open the door and gave a little gasp of shock. Cleo was sitting, her head bowed at the side of the bed, holding her Nona’s hand.
“Why… who are you?” asked Mrs. Beadle, clearly startled.
“She’s my cousin. Sophia’s granddaughter,” blurted Logan, praying Cleo would play along.
But when she spoke, Cleo’s voice was filled with an indescribable sadness. “I’m Cleo Jones. I just slipped in the back door,” she said quietly. “This is… was… my Nona.”
“Oh my dear,” said Mrs. Beadle. “Let me call the nurse.”
But Cleo shook her head, her eyes on Logan. She stood up and placed Nona’s hand gently on the bedspread.
“I think maybe we’d like a moment alone with Nona,” said Logan, his voice cracking only a little. He felt a bit dizzy but was not about to admit it to anyone.
Mrs. Beadle nodded immediately. “Please take all the time you need. We have everything set as soon as you are ready.”
She patted Logan gently on the back and quietly withdrew, closing the door behind her.
“How did you find me?” asked Cleo, sitting back down in the chair beside the bed.
Logan couldn’t tear his eyes away from Sophia. This was the first dead person he had ever shared a room with and she most definitely did not look like she was sleeping. He tried to pull himself together for Cleo’s sake.
“I just figured you’d need to see your grandmother since she was… uh …,” he said. His mouth felt strangely dry. He tried again. “And this is a small town. Everyone knows her. She wasn’t hard to find.”
“Logan, you don’t look so well,” Cleo said. She stood up and turned towards him just in time to bear the full weight of the former rugby player as he fell into her arms.
“You sure you’re all right young man?” Mrs. Beadle gave a final wipe to Logan’s forehead with a damp towel.
He nodded, more embarrassed than he could ever remember being in his life. “I’m fine, really. It’s just been a long couple of days and I didn’t sleep very well last night,” he said.
“Thank you for all your help, Mrs. Beadle,” said Cleo, her voice muffled by the wad of cloth she still held to her own face. “We’ll be fine now.” The clerk smiled again, but left the door open this time. “Just call if you need me,” she said.
“Please tell me I haven’t broken your nose,” said Logan, eyeing the bloody rag in Cleo’s hand.
“It’s pretty sore, but I don’t think it’s actually broken,” she said, examining the rag critically. “Lots of blood, though.” She raised a sarcastic eyebrow at him. “I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ve come to help out.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that,” he said.
“I’m just kidding, Logan, you know that. I can’t really think of anyone I’d rather have here right now.”
They sat together quietly for a moment. “Did you get a chance to talk with her at all?” he asked at last
“A bit, I guess,” said Cleo, setting the cloth aside. The blood flow had finally stopped. “But she wasn’t herself, really. I think she was mostly gone, to tell you the truth. She wasn’t coherent — not the way she always used to be.”
Cleo looked at him and for the first time her eyes showed the traces of tears. “I wanted to tell her about everything that has happened and to confess about losing the astrolabe. But she left me before I could even apologize.”
The astrolabe. Logan opened his mouth to speak, but just then Mrs. Beadle put her head through the door and looked from Logan to Cleo and back again. “The funeral home director is here. Would you like to speak with him now?”
Cleo shook her head. “Perhaps a little later,” she said. “I need to talk a little with my… my cousin first.”
“Whatever you’d like, dear,” said Mrs. Beadle. Cleo nodded at the clerk as she left the room and turned away from the bed.
“Let’s go home,” she said, and she took Logan firmly by the hand.
“Home?”
“Nona’s place, of course.”
Cleo smiled a little and gestured to the body of her grandmother. “That’s not her anymore. She’s gone — and I want to see her place before she’s gone from there, too.” She picked up her own coat and stuffed Logan’s things into his hands.
Logan felt puzzled, but keeping his eyes carefully averted from the bed, he followed Cleo out the back door. “No need to run into the staff again,” she said by way of explanation, “and it’s a shorter walk this way.” She pulled her hat right down to her eyes and pushed her hands into red mittens as she started off down the street. Logan shrugged into his coat and followed her, jogging a little to catch up.
The snow had stopped and the air was quiet. A single set of tire tracks marked the way along the silent road where they walked.
It took a moment before Logan noticed the small black bag dangling from Cleo’s wrist.
“It’s Nona’s purse,” she said when he asked. “It was the only thing she was clear about when she spoke to me. She made me take it, so I hid it in the sleeve of my sweater so the staff wouldn’t think I was stealing from my dead grandmother.”
Logan was feeling a momentary rush of admiration for Cleo’s felonious behaviour when he nearly tripped over her. She had stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk and he realized she was crying. Full out — not just leaking a little around the eyes. In seconds it progressed to heavy sobs, tears pouring down her face, hiccupping breath — the whole package. A moment after that her legs started to wobble so much he feared she might fall onto the frozen ground.
He put an arm around her to steady her and looked desperately about for somewhere to take her. They were only a few strides from a bus shelter, so he pulled her inside and helped her down onto the bench before she could fall.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he took one of her red mittens in his hands and waited.
She leaned against his shoulder and cried.
The snow had almost stopped and the cold had lost some of its sharpness — somehow muted a little. The girl beside him cried on. Logan just sat there and looked out at the day.
A bus pulled up, but he waved it away. The bus driver gave him a cheery wave back.
Cleo kept crying.
Logan wondered how long one person could continue to produce tears at this rate. He’d never seen anything like it.
After what felt like hours, she started to hiccup. He passed her a crumpled napkin covered in banana bread crumbs to clean her face. It was all he had in his pocket.
“Thank you,” she said, and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why that happened. I guess I’ve just never thought of Nona as my dead grandmother before.”
Logan nodded. He wasn’t sure that there was anything he could safely say, so for once he kept his mouth closed.
It was the right thing to do.
Ten minutes later, Cleo led them up the front walk of a neat bungalow on Front Street. Only a thin skim of snow lined the walk.
“The neighbours keep the sidewalks clear,” Cleo said. She opened Nona’s purse and drew out the house key, attached to a little chain with a house dangling from it.
“Are you really okay?” Logan asked as she opened the front door. He was feeling a little worried about the possibility of another crying jag.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” she said. And in they walked.
“Wouldja look at this place? It’s like some kind of museum.”
Logan saw Cleo smile a little at that, though her eyes and nose were still bright red. It was good to see some colour in her face, if only from crying.
“I told you she was special,” she said, running her fingers through a thin film of dust on the tabletop. “Didn’t you read my essay?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I just forgot, that’s all.”
“You totally did not read it. Too bad. It was an amazing piece of writing. Abbie gave me an A. It’s probably still there, in your stolen goods.” She pointed to Abbie’s notebook, the one corner of the cover that stuck out from the plastic looking considerably worse for its journey.
“Look, I only stole Abbie’s notebook so I could use it to find you. Maybe I didn’t have time to read the whole thing.”
For the first time, she peered at him closely. “You’re lying,” she said after a moment. “I think you really did read it after all. You’re only saying you didn’t read it because you think cool guys don’t read.”
“Not true.”
“It is so. And that’s where you’re wrong, bucko. Cool guys do read. And write, too. Look at Holden Caulfield.”
“Holden Caulfield was a figment of J.D. Salinger’s imagination,” Logan snapped. “He wasn’t a real person.”
“Ha!” Cleo’s face registered something other than pain for the first time that day. “I knew you’d get that. Means you had to have read the book, moron.”
Logan rolled his eyes. There was no arguing with the female of the species. She was like a dog with a bone in its teeth — might as well just give up now. “Yeah, well, I only read that because Abbie told me I might like it. That and a book of poetry by Robert Frost. And she took away my Xbox, so I had nothing better to do.”
“Anyway,” Cleo continued, still smug from her small victory. “Since you read my essay, you should remember that Nona collected antiques.”
Logan looked around again. “My grandmother collects antiques, too,” he admitted, “but this house looks nothing like hers. Her house is huge and old and filled with pieces of smelly furniture, and each one weighs seven tons.”
Cleo shook her head. “Nona may have been an astronomer, but she was all about fun. She only collected old things that she thought were extremely cool.” She reached down and picked up a strange looking instrument from a side table. “This sextant, for example. Nona told me she found it in the garbage at one of the observatories she worked in. Guess somebody thought that new technology was better, but Nona liked it, so she kept it.”
A thought suddenly struck Logan and he leapt to his feet. He returned from the front hall with the contents of his inner jacket pocket.
“Here’s something you might want back,” he said, ducking his head a little as he handed her the astrolabe. “I meant to give it back earlier, but —”
“Logan!” she said, clearly ecstatic. “Where did you find it?”
He was tempted to make something up — like maybe he’d found it under her bed in the hospital room — but in the end, he just told the truth. “You threw it at me the night I got mad at you for hiding the laxative wrappers in my recycling,” he said.
She laughed a little. “Author of my own misfortune, I guess. I was past rational thinking at that point — just throwing anything to get you to stop talking. To stop reminding me of the things I do wrong.”
“But I…”
“I know. You were just saying what you thought was right. And it was right. But I was so sick of always being handled, Logan. Blood pressure cuff. Temperature. Heart rate monitor. Gastric tube. Intravenous drip. You must know what I mean, you’ve been there, too. I just wanted them to leave me alone. When the feeding tube came out I thought I would be free of them for at least part of the time. But Medusa was measuring my food output. Do you know what that means?”
Logan was silent a moment, watching Cleo running her fingers over the small metal astrolabe. “I guess it means you thought she deserved to find a little dog shit in the toilet.”
Cleo grinned. “Exactly.”