Jack

by Paul Illidge (March 2025)

–
–

Shouting into the phone over the sound of alarm bells, Diana Margeson, director of the Taylor-Massey Alzheimer’s Care Centre where my father Jack had been a patient for the last three years, left an urgent message asking me to come to the care centre as soon as possible regarding an incident that had just occurred.

Fifteen minutes ago, three gentlemen had come in, stormed up to the reception counter, the gentleman who seemed to be in charge demanding my father be brought to reception as they were taking him out to lunch. The nurse in charge explained that outings required the permission of a patient’s guarantor, this was Taylor-Massey’s legal policy. Since I was guarantor for my father, I would have to be present at the care centre to approve the request.

At which point the gentleman in charge exploded, threatening Diana, who had come out of her office to see what the commotion was all about, that if she didn’t produce Jack immediately, she would be extremely sorry. Diana, repeating she just couldn’t do that as it was contrary to procedure, stood her ground—whereupon the two men accompanying the man in charge drew guns and charged through the security barrier to go and find my father, the man in charge following quickly behind, the three of them bellowing my father’s name over the sound of the security alarms which had begun ringing throughout the building when the reception barrier arm had been breached.

The man in charge stopped suddenly, grabbed a gun from one of the other men, lifted it, aimed and fired first at the security camera trained down on one end of the reception counter, then shot at the camera trained down on the other end, the gunshots creating such pandemonium when the three of them charged toward the patient corridors shouting my father’s name that everyone in the vicinity began screaming and fell to the floor.

Diana paused, wiping away tears by the sound of it, taking several deep breaths to regain her composure before continuing. The police had been called, the three men appeared to have left the building after about five minutes or so through one or other of the fire exits—with or without my father, Diane was afraid she couldn’t say, as the men during their search had pulled many of the fire alarms and shot out numerous corridor security cameras. The care centre was in complete chaos, the police had just arrived, she wondered if I could come in, look at the security tapes and possibly identify or offer any information about these three men. She was sorry to call with such dreadful news, sorry that she was hysterical, but the whole thing had been traumatizing to everyone. She was afraid she would have to go.

While waiting for a cab to take me to the care centre, I phoned a friend of mine, Gary Donovan, a police lieutenant who had helped me deal with similar violent incidents in the past involving my younger brother John, released a month earlier from a  stint in penitentiary for Ponzi scheme fraud. Gary said he’d meet me at Taylor-Massey, agreeing with me that only John could have been behind the kidnap attempt, his plan, pretty clearly, to hold my father hostage until I turned over the seven-hundred thousand dollars over which he knew I held power of attorney for my father.

Order had been restored by the time I arrived at the care centre. Gary was talking with a couple of police officers. He brought me through the reception area into a room where two more officers had cued up footage from the only two security cameras that hadn’t been destroyed by the two men accompanying my brother, for whom an all-points bulletin had been issued.

The officer sitting down at the control board played the first tape for me, explaining it was from a fire exit camera at the rear of the building. It showed the backs of four elderly men in pyjamas and housecoats hurrying out of the building, high-tailing it into the woods beyond, none of them, as far as I could see, my father. The other tape, from a camera on the east side of the building, showed three women making a similar getaway through a parking lot, two nurses in pursuit.

Cameras monitoring the rest of the fire exits, on the north and south sides of the building had been shot out. The officer standing beside me apologized: my father and the three suspects didn’t appear in any of the backup security footage they’d retrieved. And a search for my father in his room and throughout the care center turned up no trace of him. He’d clearly left the premises, whether in the suspects’ custody, or on his own, the officers couldn’t say.

The one said: “Diana mentioned that your father’s quite the wanderer. That he takes off any chance he can get. Actually, that’s a good thing in this case. It improves the odds of us picking him up. We’ve already put out an all-points bulletin within a ten mile radius. If he’s gone farther than that by now,” the officer said lightly, “he’s in better shape than the rest of us. Let’s keep our hopes up.”

The other officer asked if I had any idea who the potential abductors could have been. Of course I did, however off a frown from Gary, I said I had no idea, but if something came to mind I would get in touch, holding up the business cards they’d given me.

Gary left to attend to another call, instructing the two officers to contact him the moment there was any information. He would relay it to me.

There was nothing I could do in the meantime but wait, in hopes that he’d taken advantage of the commotion and wandered off, as he had so many times before, his ingenuity and determination leaving the caregivers at Taylor-Massey baffled at his uncanny ability to escape with such apparent ease then be on the move for three or four hours until he was rounded up safe and sound. In excellent physical shape for a 73 year-old, he could cover a lot of ground while on the lam, though there was usually a familiar pattern to the movements of rovers like my father.

Guided by an inner compass of some sort, Jack most often headed toward the house in the city’s south end where he had grown up, or the house in the east end our family lived in when my brother and I were growing up. It was uncanny how successful he was during his escapes. He would make his way on foot, by bus, by taxi (he always kept ample cash locked in a Gladstone suitcase, the key hidden somewhere in his room), sometimes he even hitch-hiked. People wondered how it was possible for a septuagenarian with Alzheimer’s to travel across town back to houses he’d lived in forty, fifty, sixty years ago. One of the first things doctors explain about the syndrome is that it primarily affects short term memory. Patients have been known to remember people, places and events from their childhood, especially, so studies show, if the memories are positive ones.

Over the previous three years I had come to know the owners of both the south and east end houses on a first-name basis. We had worked out a routine. They had my phone number and, when my father showed up and tried breaking into their cars (the first thing he would do, thinking the vehicles were the ones he had owned years ago), they would open up, sit him in the front passenger seat for ten minutes or so until he calmed down, then invite him inside for a cup of coffee, phoning to let me know “Jack” had stopped by, at which point I would notify the police to call off their search, and call the care facility to report that he had been found.

During his “visit” he would ask how everything was going, whether there was any new or exciting news on the street, and engage in general chit-chat. If my brother couldn’t drive over and pick him up, the owners were only too happy to return him to the facility where he happened to be in residence as he referred to it. I would meet them there.

My dad would politely thank the kind owners for the lift, for their hospitality, and with no resistance let me take him inside, always calm, compliant, and in such good spirits that it sometimes saddened me leaving him there. You would never have guessed he suffered from dementia. Sometimes I myself had a hard time believing it. It seemed to me that many years of tuning out my mentally ill mother’s verbal abuse, plus the shame of my brother’s financial crimes, which shattered my church-going father’s spirit to the core, drove him to retreat from the world at large into one of his own where there was peace, quiet, regular meals, and he could get back to enjoying his own company, which he told me often as a boy that he believed was the root of all happiness and I should never forget that. I never have.

I arrived back at Victoria Keating’s designer beach house on Lake Ontario in the city’s east end shortly before 3:00, Victoria the architect supervising the book I’d been commissioned to write for her firm. When my landlord’s drug addict son burnt down his father’s house in North Toronto a month earlier, leaving me homeless, Victoria, recently separated from her abusive husband, invited me to move in. Having a man in the house at night would give her some peace of mind since her creepy ex was known to prowl around the property at all hours leaving torn, smashed and burnt mementos of their time together.

I called and alerted both owners that my father was on the loose and might be stopping by. I fixed myself a sandwich, brewed coffee and went upstairs to the bedroom Victoria had given me in the rear of the house, a large, bright space with a king-size bed, well-stocked bookshelves, a top of the line sound system, two original swimming pool paintings by David Hockney, an en suite bathroom that had its own sauna, floor-to-ceiling windows along with two sets of sliding-glass doors that opened onto a south-facing cedar deck with a 180-degree view of the beach and Lake Ontario.

In the taxi ride home from Taylor-Massey, an idea had come to me for the architecture book which I wanted to flesh out so that I could pass it by Victoria later that night to see what she thought.

This was a habit we’d got into when I moved in. After all, she was the main character in the nonfiction story. I needed her perspective and ultimately her support so that she could help defend my ideas when it came time to pass them by the other partners. We were a team. Her insights always had me reminding myself of their triple context: she was an architect, a woman in a field dominated by men, and the lead character in a story that was part fiction, and part fact. We needed to get the balance right.

I took my sandwich and coffee out to the deck, put them on the patio table then went back inside to grab a pen and my writing pad from my desk.

As I headed back out to the deck my phone started ringing in the kitchen. I raced downstairs and took the call.

It was Betsy, owner of the home where I had grown up.

“Turn on CITY-TV news right away!” she shouted into the phone. “I’ll call back in ten.”

I ran to the den, flicked the television on, punched in CITY-TV 24-hour news.

The news chopper was hovering over the six-lane Don Valley expressway into and out of the city, the camera going close up on cars in the three southbound lanes into the city moving, though more slowly than usual, while traffic in the three northbound lanes had stopped altogether because there was no room for vehicles in the centre lane to move left or right, what with the heavy volume at this time of day. People had got out of their cars, some standing on their front hoods, some on their roofs, many holding up their phones to capture the scene up ahead, others further back walking forward for a look at what was causing the delay.

The chopper lowered, swung around so the camera showed the mile-long line of stopped northbound traffic, then turned back, moving forward, the camera zooming in for a closer look beyond the growing crowd of people, some with puzzled looks on their faces that were quickly changing to amused smiles, many beginning to laugh, more and more cheering for a handsome white-haired man who looked to be in his early 70s, wearing emerald green corduroy pants, an untucked yellow button-down shirt and beige desert boots, striding merrily southward in the centre of the clogged northbound lanes, head held high, a bright smile on his face, waving like the celebrity in tonight’s top news story he had just become.

This continued for several minutes until a police cruiser, red and blue roof lights flashing, stopped at the guardrail in the outside southbound lane, two officers jumping out—the pair I had talked with at the care facility. They hopped over the median barrier, made their way quickly through the crowd to reach the walking man who, when he saw them, realized the jig was up, smiled, turned to the crowd and waved, acknowledging their applause as the officers each took an arm, guided him back through the clapping crowd, helped him over the median barrier and into the back seat of the patrol car which sped off, red and blue lights flashing.

 Table of Contents