The night of September second, the police came for him.
I've thought a great deal about how to tell this part, because it's the part I'm least able to be calm about, even now. I'll tell it plainly.
My father wakes early. He always has; the mail doesn't sort itself. Most mornings he's up by four-thirty and he sits in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the radio on low. But on bad nights, the confusion that comes with the evening doesn't always lift by morning, and on September second, he woke at four-fifteen, got dressed in his cardigan and his good shoes, took his walker, and went out the back door and down the new ramp and around the side of the house to the front walk, because, he told me later, he had to get to the post office before the trucks came in.
He didn't get far. He got to the sidewalk and stood there in the dark under the streetlight, an old Black man in a brown cardigan, leaning on a walker, looking up and down a street he didn't recognize.
At four-twenty-six, according to the dispatch log that I would later read many, many times, a call came in to the Fernhill Police Department's non-emergency line. It was not routed to dispatch the usual way. It came in on a number that forwarded directly to the cell phone of Sergeant Cyrus Dobrowski, community liaison, and Sergeant Dobrowski, who was not on duty, called it in to the overnight dispatcher and asked her to send a car. The caller described "a suspicious unknown Black male, elderly, possibly intoxicated, loitering in front of 212 Plover, which is a property with prior issues." The caller was Marcella Vasbinder.
I woke at four-forty to the sound of a car door and a radio. By the time I got my robe on and got to the front window, there was a Fernhill patrol car at the curb with its overhead lights going, blue and red smearing across the haint-blue porch ceiling, and a young officer was standing about eight feet from my father with his hand resting on his belt. Not on his weapon. I want to be fair. On his belt. My father had let go of the walker with one hand and was holding that hand up, palm out, the way he'd seen people do on television, and he was trembling so hard I could see it from the window.
I have a tone of voice that I've used maybe a dozen times in my career. I used it when I came out the door.
"Officer. That's my father. He has dementia. He lives here. I'm coming down the steps now, and I'm going to walk over to him slowly, and you're going to let me."
The young officer turned. He was maybe twenty-four, Latino, with a buzz cut and the kind of earnest, worried face that I've learned to be grateful for at four in the morning. His name tag said ARREDONDO.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "Go ahead, ma'am. I'm just, he's not hurt, ma'am. Nobody's touching him."