The flight home was horrible. Oh, it was as smooth as sitting on a pillow, no turbulence. That wasn’t the problem. It was me. I kept thinking about us plummeting to the ocean far below, our faces distorted as we dropped at gut-wrenching speed, our tragedy a huge story on the news. When was I going to get over this sensitivity thing? It really ticked me off.
The mighty David McLean noticed my unease. I know he did. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there as calm as a monk, reading crime novels and news stories in a series of papers.
“Grandpa, what do you really do on these trips?”
He raised an eye. “Really do? What do you mean by that?”
“All that time you spent away from me in the morning, what were you doing? You never once told me anything about it, no details.”
He laughed. “Adam, you are twelve years old. What do you think I should do, give you my business itinerary? You know I love to travel, always have, and luckily, I have friends everywhere. I’m blessed. I still like to fly, I like to see old acquaintances, and I still do a few deals.” He gave me a wry smile.
“Deals?”
“Business deals. There’s still some fight in the old fart, you know.” Grandpa was like that, a little salty-mouthed sometimes. Mom had had to rein him in around the cousins more than once, but we all loved it. He was pretty cool.
“You, uh, you seemed awfully calm about me getting lost.” That had actually bothered me, even though I hadn’t said anything. I wished he’d run up to me and slapped me or something when I turned up at the hotel. Instead, he was just calm and together David McLean, as usual. As I thought more about it, I kind of wanted to scream at him.
“Lean forward,” he said to me in a quiet voice. He looked awfully serious. I moved my ear right up to his mouth. “I had my people following you,” he whispered. “They were right on your trail the whole time, and there was nothing to be worried about.”
I knew it! I hadn’t imagined that I was being followed! I pulled back and stared at him. He motioned for me to lean in again.
“And if you believe that, I’ve got an elephant in my luggage, a real live one, which I caught on Sveavägen when he escaped from a circus, and I’m bringing him home for you to ride up and down the streets of Buffalo and then bring into school for show-and-tell.” He turned back and started reading his novel again
I felt like an idiot. Well, not a total idiot, because it was my grandpa who’d just put me on and he never made me feel like I was anything but wonderful. All my cousins felt that way around him too. Who else would take us on a trip like he’d just treated me to? But I did feel a bit silly. And I still wasn’t happy about him being so calm about losing me. It was still ticking me off.
“But you were awfully calm, Grandpa… it kind of…kind of upset me.”
He stopped reading and looked at me, a big grin on his face. “Good for you,” he said. “Give me a shot.”
“What?”
“Give me a shot right on the shoulder, your best shot. I deserve it.”
My grandfather was asking me to punch him.
“Go ahead.”
I let him have one, though I held back a little. After all, he’s really old. He took it well, didn’t utter a sound, though I think he felt it a bit. He grinned again.
“I was actually pretty upset, Adam—very upset. I looked all over for you in the arena and had the police searching for you and let everyone at the Globe know where we were staying and came rushing back to the hotel and gave them a description of you and started searching around the Grand and out into Stockholm. I was so—what’s the word you use?—freaked-out that I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
“The guy at the desk didn’t seem to get the message.”
“Well, I don’t think he was looking for a kid with grime on his face and a bloody knee and smelling of alcohol and, uh, poop. That wasn’t exactly the description I gave them.”
“But you were calm when you finally saw me!”
“I had just been outside, coming back from searching, and was thinking about putting out an alert for you in the city…when I saw you walking back into the hotel, looking kind of dazed, talking to yourself, actually. I sneaked into the lobby behind you and pretended to be reading the newspaper.”
“You did? How come you didn’t tell me that until now?”
“Tell you all this before? Where is the fun in that?”
I stared at him for a second and then we both broke into a laugh.
“All’s well that ends well,” he said, quoting somebody, and he gave me a big hug.
We crossed the Atlantic and landed in Buffalo. Mom and Dad were there to meet me, and neither Grandpa nor I said a word about what had happened. It was our secret.
But I had an even bigger secret, one that even David McLean didn’t know about—a girl named Greta, real or not.
* * *
Before we parted the next day at our house, Grandpa and I had a farewell hug.
“You really had me going back there in Sweden,” I said. “I really thought you hadn’t cared that much about me getting lost.”
“Well, I did. But in the end, it was good for you. Remember what I told you about growing up. It’s time for you to do that. Some troubles aren’t a bad thing, even some big troubles, even being in danger and being really afraid. You’ll experience it all in life, and how you react to it will determine the kind of man you will become.” Then he paused for a second, just before he walked away. “In fact,” he said, “it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if I’d abandoned you on purpose for a while. Someday, you know, Adam, I’ll be gone.”
He gave me a very strange grin, clapped me on the back and walked away.