The woman in charge handed them tissues. Then she turned to me and did the same. I took mine but I didn’t have any use for them. She knew it too. I guess she felt like she had to do something and this was something. The tissues were paper-thin and grandma would have never liked them. She was always a cloth person. If she had to wipe her brow or her eyes, a cloth came out of her bag. The cloth had a rose stitched on the corner, the red fading as the years had gone by.
Are these the things you think about when a person is gone? Would grandma be reduced to a series of random echoes in my brain? We had many good things to think about from this trip but would I ever be able to recall this trip and not think of this moment right here? And nothing else.
The camper van was dad’s idea. It was cheap and easy to travel across Europe. And because we were not taking planes and trains, grandma could join us and make the one trip she longed to do. For two weeks, dad, mom, me and grandma were going to cut across Europe all the way to the land where grandma had come from. She had left when she was so young. She had left in the middle of the night and had not said bye.
“I had to go before the men came. They would take us,” she told us years later.
“But what about your parents?” I had asked. “They must have been worried.”
“I guess they thought that I had become one of the ‘lost’ ones,” she said. “People got lost all the time when he was in power.” He could not be named. He had made their lives hell. Lots of people had been lost during those days.
Our trip went so well. Roads, fields and towns went by and the look of the land changed. We crossed borders every few days and we would often not even notice.
So it was odd when we got stuck in the queue. It was morning and we were going to be in grandma's town by lunch time. We were ready to cross the border. Grandma was going to step into her home land. I jumped out to go see what the issue was. In the car ahead, a man said “passport checking.” Odd, I thought. Was that supposed to happen? I thought we could drive through. As we inched closer to the guards, mom set out to the back of the van to gather all our papers. This was when we found out that grandma didn’t have a passport. Why would she? She’d never had to go anywhere far.
We had come far and grandma was so close. And we were going to make it happen even if we had to plead, beg or bribe. But the border guard was not having any of it. He was clear - even a ninety-year-old lady needed a passport. He pointed to the side road which we could use to turn our van around and walked away.
Mom had the idea as we were heading back to the town from where we had started the morning. There was a second border crossing not very far away. Maybe it would be a less busy one. A post where they might wave through a van with an old lady trying to see her childhood town one last time. After we had turned towards the other border crossing, dad slowed down and pulled over. “Let’s be sure we cross,” he said. That’s when we decided that grandma should hide in the bathroom. Why take any chances? There were no other border posts left. They were not going to check in the bathroom. It was going to be for just a few minutes.
We had all tried to hide our smiles as the guard had waved us through. It had worked. We sat back with a smug sense of what we had pulled off and told grandma to come out. It was only after a few minutes that we knew that Grandma had never come out of the bathroom. When we called for her, there was no answer. I pulled open the door to see a still lady. She was gone. Somewhere on the road of her homeland, she had died. The shock set in and we all stood there. I don’t know who spoke first and who moved first but we were soon headed in search of a doctor. Somewhere near a small town we noticed the red cross and a sign that ended in ‘clinic’. We pulled up on the side of a building and rushed out. Had one of us locked the van? Had we taken the keys?
The nurses tried hard to figure out what we wanted. Why were we shouting and pointing to the gate of the clinic? We pleaded for someone who might speak English.
“I am in charge here and I do speak English,” said a nurse as she sized us up. “What is going on here?”
We rushed her out to the parked van as dad tried to explain why his mother was still in the van. We turned the corner towards the parking lot and that is when we saw the empty spot. The spot where our van had been. It was gone. Grandma was gone. Grandma was lost like she had been so many years ago.
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Vinoy Vijayan is a trained biologist working to empower patients in the healthcare field and always trying to live an examined life.
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Windowpane showcases the writing of the Clear Writing Community. Click here to learn more.
This story was written in response to the following prompt:
Random Sentence: Pick up the nearest book of fiction. Go to page 124. Read the fourth complete sentence on that page. Make that the first line of your story.
The book closest to Vinoy was The Testaments by Margaret Atwood.
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Art by Simahina.
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