andrewlenza

    You only glance at your smart phone screen for an instant, the time it takes to say “Happy Birthday” in your head. The same lapse of time for a pizza-sized patch of ice to slide under your front tire and send your car into an uncontrollable spin.

    You spend seven days in a coma and on the eighth day God created consciousness. The doctors inform you of the injury to your pre-frontal cortex, that your brain’s ability to fashion connections to simultaneous, complex ideas is now impaired. Like a light bulb powered by intermittent current, sometimes burning too bright but -- more often than not -- dimming.

    You’re sent home. You eat your meals but remembering them is a challenge. Your family talks too fast. You talk in church.

    One day the TV remote control stops working so you replace the batteries. You find occupation behind two tiny screws and a hinge of Korean-made plastic. Soon you're opening up the back panels of most of the appliances. Your family forbids you to put a screwdriver to any machine that plugs into an outlet. Afraid you’ll shock yourself; lest you coax the spitting Black Mamba out of the hidden Serengeti that hums on the other side of the wall.

    “Why not take up gardening?” your husband suggests.

    Your son falls off his bike and scuffs his elbow. He runs to you and says, “Kiss it.”

    “Why?” you ask. “There are germs in my mouth.”

    Instead you fetch a cotton ball the size of a tennis ball soaked with menthol rubbing alcohol and apply the stinging liquid to his abrasion.

    Liberally.

    Often.

    The fluid runs down the leg until the cotton sock is stained forest green. He looks up to you with tear-filled eyes like a small boy in London must have looked up into the shadow and belly of a German bomber sixty years ago.

    After dinner your family convenes around the television but you don’t understand why they’re laughing. You prefer Scrabble or Connect Four or Clue, games that require deduction and strategy.

    You go to sleep. You wake up. You’re interrupted from those pursuits you fall into and you’re pushed into those deadfalls you try to run from.  You’re lucky to be alive. You would count your blessings, if you knew what that meant. You have autism.

“Did you know my father earned his living as a printer?” asked Nan to the police officer, a young clean-shaven Irish boy of twenty odd years.

“Pop set up a press in the basement. Type-founding, moveable type, wood-block. At thirteen I published my first newspaper,” the elderly woman recounted. “Unheard of in the late forties for a teenage girl to be trained in a man’s profession.”

Nan smoothed her napkin over her waist and motioned towards the steeping pot on the kitchen table.

“You sure you don’t want a cup of Echinacea? Best tonic for cold weather. Winter’s come early.”

The youngest patrolman on the Mendleton police force declined.

Officer Dehare’s shoulder walkie-talkie squawked. The old lady stared into the backyard. Her eyes glassed over. A single wisp of gray hair fell in front of her bifocals. Her eyes, once a chocolate brown, faded to a cloudy sepia. She looked down at the pudge of her lap. 

“Yes sir. I notified her daughter. This is the third time in a month. Mrs. Clarence is a Realtor,” Dehare clicked into the radio.  “Appears she uses her lock box key. Homeowners come home to find her sleeping or doing laundry.  Last week over on Yearling she was giving a strange dog a bath.”

He lowered his voice so Nan couldn’t hear, “She's cold and confused and she could use a bath.” A stiff rank of body odor rose above the sheen of Vicks Nan lathered under her nose.  The young officer forced a swallow and pushed the stench out of his nose.

“But Pop's true passion was cartography,” she muttered to herself, rubbing the jowls below her chin line. “He could walk a tract of land, hold a three dimensional image of it in his head and put it down on paper.”

A week later Nan’s daughter Chloe committed her mother to the Pavilion on Freemont Avenue while the real estate agency of Lynch Copper terminated Nan’s real estate license.

Her independence and sales career ended on the same day.

Nan settled into a routine and slowly her fog lifted, a thirty year fog that brewed and bubbled about her.

She volunteered in the Hospitality office, helping new residents with their transition to assisted living.  The other ladies assigned to her dining group rolled their eyes when Nan explained in tedious detail the mundane issues of her pending “deals,” deals everyone but Nan knew to be fabrications of a fraying mind.

The longer she stayed at the Pavilion, the higher her numbers.  In one week she sold an oceanfront condo for $300,000, a three-family for $400,000 and a mixed-used building in the town square for $500,000.

She never missed the Tuesday afternoon outing to the Gillepsie Library on Tuckerton.  The staff even allowed her to teach the children how to print their names on a 50’s Heidelberg Windmill press that occupied a forgotten corner in the basement.

Weeks turned to months in the Pavilion. 

Nan assumed the unwanted task of bundling the personal effects of any resident who passed to the other side. She washed and pressed each garment, lined the cardboard boxes with tissue paper and bubble-wrapped the picture frames for the grieving family to reclaim.  The Pavilion housed two hundred and fifty men and women.  Death visited at least once a week. That scared Nan so she used the Nautilus equipment before breakfast and walked two miles a day on the treadmill.

Once a week she’d don her MLS pin, trendy gabardine pants that Chloe tailored for Christmas and hail a cab to meet Chloe for lunch or shopping over in Jasper Hills. Most women wore sweat pants or house dresses to the day room for television or Arts-and-Crafts.

On her dress-up Realtor days they gossiped about Nan and her “phony airs.”  Nan always returned on time, however, nursing a frappucino with a ruby red lipstick kiss on the rim of her white travel cup.

One April morning Nan made a startling offer at the breakfast table.

“Will you girls come away with me once I close this two million dollar deal?”

Gigi, a diabetic who hid packets of Splenda in the pages of her Harlequin romance, smiled and nudged Roberta next to her. “Sure, Nan, but only if you fly us first class.”

“Of course,” agreed Nan, “I’m a Gibbs girl. Received my Associate’s degree in Office Management. We’ll travel like educated folk. Coach is for grave diggers.”  Gigi and Roberta twittered at Nan’s haughty ways.

One overcast June afternoon the young Officer Dehare and Lieutenant Silva arrived at the Pavilion. A smaller gentleman with the consternation of a constipated accountant followed them in through the automatic double-glass doors.

They came for Nan Clarence. Her room was empty.  She could not be located on the grounds. The staff alerted her daughter Chloe who -- along with the two officers and the bloated little man -- canvassed all of Nan’s usual haunts without success.

They searched the shopping mall at Jasper Hills, the Tweenie Beanie coffee shop, the Gillepsie.  All for naught.  Nan had vanished.

They returned to the Pavilion and Chloe, a wisp of a woman weighed by dragging a three year divorce, bit her lip while she took a seat on the yellow plastic furniture in the lobby.

“Did anyone call the hospitals or ...” her voice trailed off and she bent her head between her legs and sobbed “the morgue?”

“Miss, we don’t think your mother is dead,” said Lieutenant Silva, a squared-off ex-Marine who served a tour in Afghanistan.

“You don’t?” Chloe asked.

“No,”  said Lieutenant Silva, turning to the ballooned-cheeked stranger, “tell her." The stranger hesitated. Silva pressed again.  "Tell her everything.”

The roundish man pinched his nose as if jumping into a cold, deepwater quarry and blurted out his reason for standing and sweating in this most unlikely place.

“At two forty five this afternoon we wired your mother two million dollars.”

Chloe pushed the blonde bangs off her forehead and widened her eyes.

“Say what?” Chloe inflected, the audacity of the statement raised her ire.

Chloe's words appeared to bounce across the vestibule, ricocheted off the bulletin board advertising free glucose screening, bus trips to Atlantic City and a 30% discount for orthotics at Beegler's Shoes and landed back at her feet.

“Keep going,” implored the lieutenant to the man.

“This January we entered into a prolonged and secret negotiation to purchase the fifteen acre Monroe farmstead listed by Lynch Cooper. Due to the identity of our clients we only wanted to deal directly with the listing agent,” explained the stranger. "Nor did we want to invite competition."

“But my mother doesn’t work at Lynch Cooper anymore,” Chloe said.

The man blushed.

“So we learned today.”

“Didn’t the Monroes’ sell the development rights of the farm back to the state nearly a hundred years ago?” asked Chloe.

“Yes,” Lieutenant Silva said, stifling a smirk.

“Your mother approached us with certain historical documents proving that the state’s development rights were about to expire and that she could, for a fee, negotiate a private sale between our clients and the remaining members of the Monroe family,” finished the man, who, the more he talked the paler he grew.

The meak, little man added, "we estimated the value of the land as ten times what we were paying."

“What would possess you to give an old lady two million dollars?” asked Chloe incredulously.  “And who are your clients that they're dumb enough to buy land that's not for sale?” 

The little man turned translucent. Now Lieutenant Silva’s thin lips curled into his rutty cheeks.

“These boys run a Wall Street hedge fund. We think your mother sent out dozens of confidence letters to money men until these boys bit on the hook. She produced a complete dossier of deeds, affidavits, surveys and maps all circa the early nineteenth century.”

The little man removed his hands from his trouser pockets and pleaded, as if addressing his Board of Directors: "All of the evidence Mrs. Clarence provided looked authentic. We even paid a bibliographer from Yale for his expert opinion. The parchment, the watermarks, inverted type typical of the day. She forwarded astounding forgeries."

“We think your mother acted alone,” chimed in Officer Dehare, wanting desperately to participate. “Cartography and printing. Mrs. Clarence's father taught her.”

Chloe smiled at the young man.  “Yes, Pop did.” 

“So just reverse the bank wire and get your money back,” suggested Chloe.

The three men looked at each other.

“Say,” started Chloe, wrapping her slender arms around her polka dotted blouse, “you’re not thinking of prosecuting my elderly mother over this delusion are you?”

“No,” assured Lieutenant Silva, “but we’ll have to wait until morning to contact the bank.”

“Morning?”

“We thought we were closing today and settling with the sellers. We wired the money to Lichtenstein,” confessed the little man, “to a numbered account. ”

“A violation of the 2008 Bank Secrecy Act,” muttered Dehare as he turned his chin into his starched collar.

Chloe’s jaw dropped. “Lichtenstein? The country?”

Lieutenant Silva raised his hands, “Relax, Miss. We put a hold on your mother’s identity and notified the FBI. There’s no way she’s going to board an international flight. I promise you. She’s still in the area. Her little ruse has run its course. She’ll come back or even call you.  Dehare here is going to stay with you and keep looking.”

Night descended upon Mendelton; and although Chloe and the young Dehare spent the long hours driving the neighborhood, they found no sign of Nan.

Over four thousand two hundred and thirty miles away a cab stopped on a cobblestone street to let out a fare.

Five minutes after the Austrian Bank of Vaduz opened, a woman wearing olive gabardine pants and a frilly white blouse entered the brass-lined lobby. Sunlight glinted from the gilted ceiling. The marbled tile shone like a mirror. A faint whiff of lilac filled the air, the scent emitted from a vase full of Zois' Bellflower -- a cluster of blue bells that grow amidst the hills.

Forty minutes later the bank’s manager curtsied a bow as the woman plucked a chocolate mint out of a crystal dish and tucked it under her tongue, as neatly as she tucked a certified check for two million dollars into her small handbag. 

Her body toned.

Her posture impeccable.

Only her shoulder length silver hair belied her advanced years.

The bank’s guard opened the heavy, filigreed door for her while the German patrons tried to guess Beverly Hills or South Beach.

Loretta Piccini stepped back onto the Stadtle, the city of Vaduz’s main avenue, in search of an Austrian brewed cup of Echinacea and a freshly-baked Linzer Torte. She looked both ways before crossing, a crossing she made quite lively under the lecherous ogle of a man in his fifties.

No small feat considering that Loretta, a spinster without heirs, died peacefully in her sleep nine weeks earlier while a resident at Pavilion Assisted Living in Mendleton, New Jersey.