corner struggling to maintain his balance. Suddenly, he went down. I jumped out of the car and ran to help him up. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
“‘I dunno,’ he says in an Italian kind of New York accent. ‘I just kind of lost my balance.’
“‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
“‘I dunno,’ he says. Now I’m thinking he’s either disoriented or he has other problems. I check him over, ask him how he’s feeling. ‘Fine,’ he says but he’s still holding onto me. So I get him in the car. I ask him his name and I try to look up his phone number on my phone. Nothing. I’m not exactly sure what to do—he remembered his name but he had no idea where he lived—so I asked him on a hunch what his telephone number was. He rattled it right off. Amazing.
“Anyway, I called the number and his wife answered. She told me he had Alzheimer’s and the whole family had been looking for him for hours. He lived about two miles away so I drove him home. She was out there waiting for him when I arrived.
“‘That’s my wife, Rosemarie,’ he beamed as we pulled up to the house. ‘She’s my heart. Everybody has to have a heart. Rosie is mine.’
“Rosemarie thanked me profusely and then she gently led him into the house. Why am I telling you this story? Oh yeah, I was telling you why I almost missed the plane.”
“That’s not the reason.” Henry almost whispered the words.
“Maybe not,” Danni said. “Maybe it affected me so much I wanted to share it. I mean, what a tragedy to see the love of your life walking around in a stupor. And yet, how beautiful it is to see two people who love each other so much.”
“There’s beauty in seeing a stranger help another human being too, Mom.”
“There you go,” Henry said. “A person to model yourself after.”
Danni immediately changed the subject.
“So, Henry, you said we needed to make a plan. Do you have any ideas?”
“I do.”
“Do you want to share them with us?”
“I thought maybe I’d listen to your thoughts first,” Henry replied.
“I don’t have any. I mean nothing concrete. So I’d rather hear from you.”
“Okay,” Henry began. He leaned in toward them, his arms resting on the table, his enormous hands surrounding his coffee cup so that it almost disappeared. “Hannah, you’re not going to like this part. I know it’s close to the end of the semester, but I think you’re going to have to leave school. He knows you’re here and there’s too much open space here even if we moved your living quarters and tried to watch you all the time. It’s too dangerous.”
Henry paused to let his words sink in and to wait for a reaction.
“I already figured that,” Hannah said, a slight look of disappointment on her face.
Danni didn’t have a reaction to that part.
“Go on,” she said.
“After that, there’s a lot of options,” Henry continued. “Danni, you could take Hannah to Europe or she could even go herself. The likelihood of Felton getting out of the country at this point in time is pretty low. It’s not impossible but I think Hannah would be safe out of the country.”
Danni wasn’t buying it. Henry was holding back and she had an idea why.
“What would you do if Hannah was your daughter, Henry?”
“She’s not my daughter,” Henry persisted.
“What would you do if I entrusted her to your care?”
Henry didn’t answer right away. He looked at Danni as if trying to read her thoughts. Danni nodded slightly to let him know that this was her wish if he wanted to do it.
“I’d take her to New York,” Henry continued. “I have family there, my aunt in particular who lives in Harlem. It’s a city of over eight million people. We’d drive up so there would be no flight record or anything. She’d be a needle in a haystack, assuming Felton even thought to look there. I can get her a new ID, if necessary, and I have people to watch her at all times when I’m not available, which will be a rare occasion, I assure you.
“It’s a short-term solution. I can’t see keeping it up for more than a month, two at the max, but I think Felton will be caught by that time.”
“I agree with you for the most part,” Danni answered. “He may not be caught, but he’ll be dealt with in that time period.”