by Cylin Busby
“We won’t have to have so many guards all the time,” Dad wrote.
“When are you coming home?” I asked him.
“Maybe one week?” he wrote, and looked over at Mom.
“A week or two, that’s it, then he’ll be back,” she said.
The next morning, a truck packed with lumber and workmen showed up in our yard. They were already putting the posts up for the fence by the time we left for school. The weather was so cold that the ground was frozen, and they were using a special tool to dig deep round holes for the posts. One of the guys showed me how they would put the post in, then pour concrete around it to hold it in place. “Nothing’s gonna move this sucker,” he told me, and patted me on the head.
When we got home from school that day, all the posts were in the ground with concrete slopped around them. There was sawdust and blobs of concrete all over our yard. I touched one of the concrete blobs and it was icy cold but not yet solid. It felt like gritty Play-Doh. “You shouldn’t be playing with that,” one of the cops on duty told me.
I scowled at him. “It’s my yard, I can do what I want,” I told him, and marched into the house and slammed the door. I was so tired of these guys always being around, telling us what to do and where we could go. I hated them all, even my dad’s friends. I went into my room and noticed that there was a big pole planted in the ground right outside my window. The fence was going to run straight through the bamboo patch that separated our house from the church next door. It was going to ruin our tree house, as we called it. Not that we had played out there in months, but it still made me sad. Kelly came into the room behind me with some laundry that she started to put away. “What’s up, buttercup?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I sulked. I climbed up the ladder to my top bunk and laid on my stomach, looking out the window.
“What’s on your mind?” Kelly asked, looking at me. “Are you thinking about that guy you saw in the ski mask?”
“No,” I said. But once she mentioned it, I remembered that night and felt sick to my stomach. “Why would I be thinking about that?”
“Because it was awful, and I’m sure you must think about it sometimes.” She hung a shirt up in the closet. “You know, that’s why they’re putting up the fence, so that things like that don’t happen ever again.” She put some pants into my drawers, then turned to leave the room. “If you ever want to talk to me about anything, I’m around,” she said.
I didn’t say anything and just waited for her to leave.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I don’t want to talk about anything!” I yelled. She walked out and closed the door behind her.
There was a night, a couple of weeks after we had gotten back from Boston, when I saw something outside my window. My dad was still in the hospital, Mom was at a night class, and we were at home with Kelly. Whenever we were alone with Kelly at night, it made me think of the night Dad was shot, and how we had hidden in the attic. I could hear her watching TV while I lay in bed, trying to sleep. I rolled over on my stomach and looked out my window, watching the occasional car go down Sandwich Road, the headlights crawling across the ceiling and walls of my room.
Then I heard something outside, like a branch breaking or something snapping, and I tensed up. I breathed very quietly for a few minutes, my ears straining to hear something else, but all I heard was the TV. I climbed down the ladder of my bunk bed and crossed the dark room over to the window. The shutters that covered the bottom half of the window were closed and I wasn’t tall enough to see over them, so I carefully opened one side just enough to look out. I saw nothing but darkness and leaves and was about to get back into bed when a car came around the corner on Sandwich Road and lit up our yard, just for an instant, like a flash of lightning. I saw a man standing in my yard. He was wearing a black ski mask. He was looking right at my window, standing very still. He wasn’t wearing a police uniform. Suddenly the light was gone, and it was dark again.
I slammed the shutters closed and ran into the living room. “Kelly, Kelly!” I whispered frantically. “There’s a man, there’s a man in the yard!”
“What?” Kelly jumped up from the couch. “Slow down, what are you talking about?”
When I told her what I had seen, she went to the back door and flashed the outside porch light twice. In a second, one of the cops on duty—Dad’s friend, Terry Hinds—was at the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Cylin thinks she saw someone outside her window,” Kelly told him. I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t really believe me.
Terry asked where I had seen the guy, and I explained. “You two just sit tight. When I blink my headlights once, you throw the switch to the floodlight on that side of the house, okay?” he told Kelly. She nodded.
We stood by the back door, Kelly’s hand on the light switch, and watched the undercover cop car for what seemed like forever until finally Terry flashed his headlights. Kelly hit the switch for the floodlight on the other side of the house, and suddenly lights came on from everywhere, through almost every window of the house. The cops had called in for backup cruisers that were now parked at the church and on the street in front of our house, all shining their floodlights on our windows.
“What’s going on?” Shawn said. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d woken up and come downstairs.
“What are all the lights for?” Eric asked, coming in behind him.
Kelly opened the door to see what was going on. “Oh my God,” she said. She turned to me and I saw, just for a second, a man in handcuffs being pushed into the back of a police car in our driveway.
“Who’s that?” Shawn said nervously, looking out the window. The guy’s ski mask had been rolled up on his head like a hat and I saw his face, just for a second. He looked like a regular person. Was that the guy who shot my dad?
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. “You really did see someone in the yard!”
One of the officers—another friend of Dad’s, named Craig Clarkson—came to the door a few minutes later to make sure we were okay. “We’re just going to do one more search around the property,” Craig explained.
“Who is he?” Kelly asked. “What was he doing here?”
“Don’t know. He doesn’t have any weapons on him. We’re going to take him in and book him,” Craig said. “You’ll have a bunch of guards outside until we figure out what’s going on, so you have nothing to worry about. You can all go back to sleep.”
It was almost time for Mom to get home, so we sat in the living room and waited for her. When her car pulled into the driveway, I saw Craig get out of his cruiser and talk to her. She ran into the house and found us all watching TV with Kelly. “Everyone okay?” she asked. She sat beside me and brushed my hair back from my face.
As we started to tell her the story, two of Dad’s friends, Terry Hinds and Rick Smith, knocked at the door.
“Well, you’re not going to believe this guy’s story,” Terry said, shaking his head. “He said he noticed the big bamboo patch that you have on the other side of the house. He’s a horticulturist and wanted to grab a sample, but he didn’t want to bother you guys, so he thought he’d just come by at night and get it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Kelly said.
“Nope, and his story checks out,” Rick added. “He really is a horticulturist. He’s got an alibi for the night of the shooting. Only thing we’ve got him on is trespassing.”
“And destruction of personal property,” Terry pointed out. “He dug up some bamboo.”
“Why was he wearing a ski mask?” Mom asked.
Terry shrugged. “Beats me. The guy is obviously a wacko, but he’s no big-time criminal.”
Mom just shook her head. “This is insane,” she said. “Kids, you all need to head back to bed; you have school tomorrow.”
I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I had big purple half moons under my eyes from being so tired, but I liked it; the dark circ
les made me look older. I was so proud that I had seen that guy and the cops caught him. I could hardly wait until Dad heard the story. I could hear Mom and Kelly still talking to Dad’s friends. They were laughing and that made me feel better. Everything must be okay if they were able to joke about it.
I finally fell asleep and dreamed about a scary clown that I had seen at the county fair a few years back. In the dream, he was at my window, looking in at me, tapping on the glass. He had a big red smile drawn around his mouth, but it was raining, so the paint was running down his cheeks, dripping off his face like blood. “Cylin, Cylin, I can see you.” He was whispering, but I could hear him clearly, even through the glass. Tap, tap, tap.”I can seeeeee you.”
I woke up screaming, and Kelly jumped out of the lower bunk. It was still night, and dark in our room.
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Kelly asked. “Did you see something else?” She ran to the window and opened the shutters.
I jerked up in the bed. “Keep the shutters closed!” I yelled at her. I realized that I could hardly move my head. “Something’s wrong with my neck.”
Mom came in and turned on the light. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you have a nightmare?”
“Mom, I can’t move my head,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said, climbing up the ladder. She took a look at my neck and had me try to turn my head. “You must have pulled something. Come on, I’ll get you the heating pad.”
I carefully climbed down the ladder, but I could barely lift my arms because my neck hurt so badly. Mom set me up on the couch with the heating pad. It was really early in the morning, still dark out, but she put on the TV for me and let me watch cartoons while she sat with me. Kelly went back to bed. Sesame Street was the only show on this early, and I was way too old for it, but we sat there together and watched it for an hour, until the sun started to rise and my brothers came downstairs. They didn’t ask what we were doing or why I had the heating pad on my neck; they just got ready for school and I didn’t.
I spent the rest of the day on the couch with the heating pad and a new library book. I napped in the afternoon until my brothers came home, then they wanted to watch a show on TV I didn’t like, so I grabbed my blankets and went into my room.
In my pile of stuffed animals, I had a long-legged clown doll that someone had given me. I picked it up and looked at its smiling face. It had these long skinny arms and legs made of red and white striped fabric and a white plastic face. I took a black Magic Marker from my art supplies and started rubbing it all over the clown’s big white teeth. Then I covered its eyes with black too. But it looked even scarier like that, so I decided to just color its whole face black. Then I took a shoe box out of my closet and stuffed the clown inside, facedown. It didn’t really fit, so I had to get some tape to keep the lid down. I ran the tape around and around the box, until the roll was almost gone. When the box was done, I took one long piece of tape and stuck it on the shutters over my windows. Then I taped the other side shut. I used piece after piece of tape until the roll was empty.
I shoved the shoe box far under my bed and stuffed the empty tape roll under there too, so Mom wouldn’t find out that I had used it all and get mad.
chapter 26
JOHN
THE day after Christmas, I checked into Mass General to have my second major surgery. This time they wanted to remove the pellet from the sinus cavity under my eye—something that had been lodged there since I was shot but was too difficult to remove earlier. They would also insert a thin steel rod to replace my jawbone and transplant bone cells from my hip—called osteoblasts—into the space where the bone was missing.
The surgeons basically drilled a hole into the area of my pelvis called the iliac crest, removed a section of marrow, and transferred it up into my face, where it would hopefully grow and replace the missing pieces of bone. I was prepared for the surgery to be extremely painful, but the marrow extraction from my pelvis hurt almost more than being shot did.
When I woke up after the surgery, my right hip hurt like hell and an area on my right thigh—over a foot long and at least half a foot wide—had gone numb. I called it the Dead Zone. Collateral damage of the surgery and couldn’t be helped, I guess. My head also started hurting—not just my jaw where they had gone in with the steel bars and the marrow, but my whole skull. All in all, I was in for a good three days of unreal pain. The medication they were giving me usually wore off about an hour before I was due for more, making for miserable in-between time.
I ended up on a different floor of the hospital this visit, and for some reason—maybe because of the holidays—the place was overbooked and understaffed. Overnight, there was just one RN and two LPNs for fourteen patients. I was in a four-bed ward with my guards standing outside the door—Jack Coughlin, Charlie Day, Mitch Morgan, Paul Stone, and Jim Fagan; one guard at a time around the clock from December 26 to January 4.
Mitch Morgan was on guard duty on New Year’s Eve, and we watched the Boston fireworks go off from the roof of the hospital. Ironically, it was the best seat I’d ever had for those fireworks, and I saw the city of Boston in a whole new light. That night, I got some pain meds around 1:00 a.m. and went to sleep. I was awake when the meds wore off around 4:00 a.m., waiting for that long hour to pass until I’d get my next dose of happy juice and go back to la-la land. During that hour, I got to thinking about Job in the Bible and all the things that God put him through. Job went through a living hell, but no one ever shot him, so by my reasoning he got off pretty easy.
Right around the time I woke up, the nurses brought in an old man. He was a dermatology patient, but the hospital didn’t have any rooms left on that floor, so we got blessed with him. He had a skin rash, and no matter what the nurses tried he was uncomfortable. He was moaning and groaning that everything hurt. “No, no, I can’t lie on my side. No, not on my back. Oh no, my stomach hurts too much. I can’t sit in the chair, my ass is killing me. Oh, now my elbows hurt, the bottoms of my feet, my legs, my legs.” After about forty-five minutes of hearing this guy complain, I waved over one of the LPNs and wrote her a note: “Please bring a sleeping pill.” When she got back with the pill, I wrote: “Please shove it down his throat—NOW” and pointed at the rash man. Around 5:00 a.m. they took him off somewhere, right around the time I got my next dose of painkillers. I was in la-la land already and couldn’t care less. Good-bye rash man, good-bye pain . . . for now.
Before the surgery, I had graduated to blender living and feeding myself with my syringe and a big bowl full of whatever. It wasn’t a pretty sight and one I didn’t particularly want to do in front of the kids or company. It was Polly who convinced me that since this was the way I’d be eating for the next few years, I should treat it as my normal life and get on with it. So I started sitting at the kitchen table at mealtimes with my blender full of whatever the others were having and tried to get over the awkwardness. My favorite meal was lunch, when everyone was out. I’d whip up a milkshake with lots of ice cream, eggs, and fruit. I’d consume the forty or so ounces and feel quite satiated. I wasn’t gaining anything, but at least I wasn’t losing—I was still about twenty-five pounds underweight. In the hospital, I wanted to stay on a blended diet to avoid having the feeding tube reinserted, but they kept bringing me soft foods that they thought I could eat with the syringe. I kept trying to tell them that I just wanted them to take a meal, throw it into the blender, and bring me what was left—that’s what I ate at home. But the nurses didn’t have a blender, and they didn’t seem to think it was a good idea to grind up the Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes that everyone else was eating and bring it to me in liquid form. Instead, I got by on Cream of Wheat and vanilla ice cream dissolved in milk for the week, but I lost about ten pounds that I really couldn’t afford to lose.
During this hospital stay I met a young man from Dennis, on the Cape, seventeen years old. He had a severe case of Crohn’s disease. He had a TNA (total nutrient admixture) given through a c
entral line into his superior vena cava to keep him fed. He’d heard about what happened to me and had a case of hero worship. Wanted to spend all his time with me and the guys guarding me. A nice youngster. We were both quietly starving—me because they wouldn’t give me the right type of foods and him because they couldn’t give him enough. I was able to leave Mass General a day early to avoid a predicted snowstorm, and I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to him. I’ve no idea how he made out. On the way home, thinking about him and hoping that he’d have some kind of a life, it hit me that he was the same age as Jeff Flanagan—the kid whose body was found in the bogs across from Meyer’s house. The one who had been shot execution style with a shotgun. This kid in the hospital seemed so young and naive, not quite a man yet. Christ, seventeen years old—both of them had their whole lives ahead of them. It bothered me to make the connection.
When I got home, it was a brand-new year. Nearly four months had passed since I’d been shot. There was an eight-foot-tall, stockade-style fence up around the house that would be wired with an alarm system. This was for our protection, but it was also to save the town money. Falmouth was going into debt trying to keep me safe; it couldn’t afford to have two cops on duty guarding our house around the clock. A fund had been started in my name, and local businesses and residents alike had been sending in money and their well wishes. This money was collected under the guise of “helping” the Busby family, but it would eventually be pooled and used to relocate us from Falmouth to an undisclosed location—a cheaper alternative to the constant protective services.
As soon as I was well enough, Polly and I were taken to a kennel where specialty dogs were trained—police dogs, seeing-eye, search hounds, etc. The first one they showed us was a Rottweiler. As we walked by the cage, the dog charged at us in his pen, and I saw the bar that held his door shut actually start to bend. He was like a bad nightmare. “There is no way that dog is coming anywhere near my children,” Polly said.