The man who answered the telephone number I recited from memory was my brother in law, Jerry Mazur, who had been the brother of my late husband Walt and who had not spoken a word to me in nine years. I stood at the gate desk at the Allentown airport, holding a plastic phone to my ear, and listened to the old Marine bark, “Hello? Who is this?” I said, “Jerry. It is Fran. I need help.” There was a long silence on the line.
Then I heard a chair scrape. “Where are you?” he said. “Stay right there. I am coming.”
The officer, a young man with a mustache named Delgado, listened to my side of the story with serious eyes. I told him about the gate, the voice in the restroom, the van to the Desert Bloom, the word NONE on my ticket. I told him that my son, Paul, had been telling me for two years that I was forgetting things, and that I had begun to believe it. Officer Delgado asked if I would be willing to speak to a doctor. I said I would be glad to. I wanted to know, myself, whether I was losing my mind.
Jerry arrived forty minutes later in a pickup truck with a Marine Corps sticker on the bumper. He was eighty one, bent but fierce, and he strode through the terminal as though he were storming a beach. When he saw me sitting on the plastic chair by the gate with my carry on bag in my lap, he stopped. His eyes filled. He knelt on one knee in front of me, right there in the airport, and said, “Frannie, I should never have stayed away. Paul told me you did not want to see me.”
When a family is divided by one person lying to both sides, the shortest road home is often a single telephone call that nobody thought to make.
The doctor was a geriatric specialist at the hospital in Allentown, a kind man with a silver beard who spent two hours testing my memory and my reasoning. At the end, he sat across from me and Jerry and said, “Mrs. Mazur, you are as sharp as a woman of fifty. You have some normal forgetfulness at your age, nothing more.” He wrote it up in a letter. He said that whoever had suggested otherwise had done a great wrong. Jerry took the letter and folded it into his wallet like a medal.
We saw an elder law attorney that same week, a young woman named Ms. Okafor, who listened to the whole account and began to type. The power of attorney that Paul had used was dated in November, two weeks after a hospital stay when I had been given strong medicine for pneumonia. A nurse witnessed that I had been confused that day. The document was invalid. Ms. Okafor filed to revoke it, froze the sale of the house, and opened a report with the county. She said there would be consequences.
Paul was contacted at his home in Bethlehem. He denied everything for three days. Then Jerry, who had known his nephew from the cradle, drove over alone one evening and sat in his driveway until Paul came out to the car. They spoke for an hour. I do not know what was said. But the next morning, Paul called me, in tears, and asked if he could come. He said he had been drowning in debt from his business. He said he had never meant for me to be hurt.
I let him come. He sat on the couch in my little row house on Gordon Street, which still smelled of lavender and bread, and told me the whole truth, with his head in his hands. He had signed me up for the facility, put down a deposit, and listed the house with an agent. Helen, my sister, had been dead for five years, and he had used her name because I would believe it. I said, “Paul, you used the dead against the living.” He nodded, because there was nothing to say.
The prosecutor was willing to be merciful, because I asked her to be. Paul pleaded to a misdemeanor, repaid the deposit, and agreed to take counseling and work with a financial adviser. He lost his business. He sold his boat. Jerry moved into my spare room, and for two years we lived like an old married couple, bickering over the television and the thermostat. He said he had a good deal to atone for himself, and I said that we could start with the dishes.
Last March, on the day the case was finally closed, Jerry and I flew to Arizona. A round trip. We sat in the window seats, side by side, with the sun in our eyes, and held hands over the armrest as the plane lifted off the runway. We landed in Phoenix and took a cab to a cemetery with a church and tall cactus. I laid a bunch of white carnations on the grave of Helen. And I told her that I had finally come, on my own two feet, with a ticket home.