by Cylin Busby
“Yeah,” Shawn agreed. He had a sour look on his face.
I was done pushing the food around my plate. “Mom, can I be excused?” I wanted to go to my room and pick out the perfect outfit to wear for my playdate at Amelia’s.
I heard Mom on the phone later talking to Amelia’s mom, and they worked out when I would get off the bus at Amelia’s house and stay over there for dinner. There wouldn’t be any guards watching me—Amelia’s mom said they weren’t worried about that.
The next day, Mom walked me out to the bus to let the driver know that I would be getting off the bus at Amelia’s house after school. And everything was set. This would be my first playdate in eight months. All day at school I couldn’t focus, but around Amelia I tried to play it cool. I sat with her at lunch and casually said, “So what’s up for this afternoon?”
When she didn’t answer for a second, I was terrified that she had forgotten all about it. “Oh right, you’re coming over!” she said. “You haven’t ever been to my house, right?”
I shook my head.
“Then my mom has to make you a banana milkshake after school—it’s the best!”
When we got off the bus that afternoon at Amelia’s, her mom met us at the door. She was tall and pretty and blond, just like Amelia. And their house was big, with lots of extra rooms. “Who would like a snack?” her mom asked us, and took us into the living room, where two small plates were set up on the coffee table. We ate sliced fruit and graham crackers, and I was happier than I had been in weeks. Amelia’s mom came in to check on us after a few minutes. “Everything okay in here?” she asked.
I nodded. “We don’t get to eat in the living room at home,” I told her. I was worried about dropping any crumbs on their couch or carpet.
Amelia laughed. “We don’t either!”
“Well, today you do because it’s a special day, your best friend is over,” Amelia’s mom said. I was Amelia’s best friend? I felt my throat tighten up.
Amelia and I decided to play dress up and ran around in princess outfits until it was dinnertime. After that, we wore the princess dresses on the swing set outside, pumping our legs to get up high on the swings and make our skirts billow out like airy parachutes. “I’m flying!” I yelled, swinging higher. I looked over at Amelia, in a pink princess gown, her long blond hair tumbling out of her braid. Her cheeks were red from the cold—she looked beautiful. Last year, I would have taken our friendship for granted—it was no big deal to play at someone else’s house. But now it meant everything to me. Instead of being in our small house with Dad’s friends, their cigarettes and guns, I was outside. Instead of hiding in my room, waiting for the hours to pass until I could go to bed, I was having fun. And I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t scared, not about anything, for the first time in a very long time.
Amelia’s mom came out and took some pictures of us. Before it was time to go home, we made a banana milkshake—Amelia’s favorite. I didn’t like it, it was too milky, too sweet, and made me think of the blended stuff Dad had to eat, but I pretended it was amazing. I wanted everything to be perfect.
When it was time to go home we got into their car, which was nice and smelled new inside, and drove down the road to my house. The minute our big, stark fence came into view, I got embarrassed. “How will you get in? Where’s the best place for me to park?” Amelia’s mom asked. I told her to pull up to the gate and that I would ring the buzzer. I didn’t want to have to ask Dad to come out and hold the dog so my brothers could open the big driveway gate. “You can just drop me off,” I told her.
“No, no, I want to make sure you’re inside first,” Amelia’s mom said, pulling up alongside the gate. I got out and rang the buzzer. “It’s me,” I said. There was silence on the other end. “I don’t have any homework,” I added quietly so that Amelia and her mom wouldn’t overhear.
“Coming,” Eric mumbled over the intercom.
I turned back to Amelia’s mom in the car. “They’re coming,” I told her.
“That’s okay. We’re not in a hurry, are we, Amelia?” Amelia just shook her head. She looked scared. I could tell my house, the big fence, creeped her out. Suddenly I wasn’t just her best friend Cylin, as I had been all afternoon. Now I was back to being that girl whose father was shot, the girl everyone was afraid of. Finally my brother came and opened the gate. Through the open gate, in the dusk, I could see Dad holding Max by the back stairs.
“Hurry up, I don’t have shoes on,” Eric sighed as I leaned into the car to give Amelia a hug.
“Thanks so much,” I told her. “I had the best time.”
“You tell your mom to call me and set up another day. You can come over anytime you want.” Amelia’s mom gave me a big smile as I turned to go inside.
“God,” Eric said under his breath as we walked back into the house. He was acting like I was annoying him and taking too long, but really I think he was just mad that I had a friend and a playdate while he had been stuck at home.
It was getting dark out, and the inside of the house smelled like whatever Mom had made for dinner. “How was it?” Mom asked me from the kitchen. I went over to where she was standing in front of the sink doing dishes.
“Their house is so nice!” I told her. “And we got to eat in the living room, but Amelia’s mom said they never get to do that. It was special just because I was there.”
“Sounds nice,” Mom said, but I could tell she was only half listening.
“We dressed up like princesses and then made a banana milkshake.”
“Uh-huh,” Mom murmured. I watched as she used the special pipe-cleaner brush by the sink to scrub the inside of one of Dad’s syringes, forcing the soapy water out of the rubber tube to make sure it was really clean. Then she scrubbed the plunger part of the syringe and put it in the drying rack beside a couple of other syringes and the glass container from the blender. The drying rack was full of Dad’s stuff—his syringes and rubber tubes, plungers, the sharp paring knives he used to cut up his food before blending it, the parts of the blender.
“What else happened?” Mom said, turning to me. She was holding another soapy syringe in her hands. She looked really tired.
“Nothing,” I said, and walked away. I hated the way we lived now. The fence, the dog, the guns, the cops, the alarm system, the tape recorder on the phone, the constant fear that someone was going to hurt Dad or one of us. I hated the gross syringes and the blender. I hated the horrible sounds Dad made when he sat at the table with us, almost choking every night with the tube down his throat, trying to eat. I would never be able to have Amelia or anyone else over to my house ever again.
A few weeks later, Mom graduated from nursing school. She had sent out résumés to a few hospitals in states that were far away from Falmouth—jobs she’d seen listed in a nursing magazine. She had been offered a couple of interviews, but we had to make sure each location was a good match, a safe choice, before she traveled anywhere.
“You can’t be too close to any family, that’s a dead giveaway,” Rick Smith pointed out. He and Don Price came over one night after dinner to talk to my parents about our relocation.
“Not in the same town, but what about the same state?” Mom asked.
“I don’t think so,” Don said. They were looking at a big map of the United States that Dad had spread out on the kitchen table.
“I sent my résumé to a place here,” Mom said, pointing to North Carolina. “They’re interested in me, called me yesterday.”
Don shook his head. “Your sister lives in North Carolina, that’s easy to figure out. Even if you moved to another town in the same state, it’s one of the first places they’d look.”
“Right, I didn’t think about that,” Mom said quietly.
I looked over Dad’s shoulder at the map. There were a few places I’d like to move to. “How about Florida?” I asked. That’s where Disney World was.
Mom looked over at Dad. He wrote in his notebook: “Too humid.”
“Yo
u also shouldn’t pick a place that’s on the water—another dead giveaway. Anyone looking for you will figure that you’d want to go to a place that feels like home, a beach town,” Don said.
“Okay, no ocean, no relatives, so what are we left with?” Mom asked.
There were three towns. One in Virginia, one in South Carolina, and one in Tennessee.
“Well, let’s see what they each have to offer, how safe the town feels, what housing is like,” Rick started to say.
Mom laughed. “Let’s draw the names from a hat!”
Dad shrugged.
“Really, one town is the same as the next, right?”
Don and Rick didn’t disagree. They all kept talking about different ways that we could stay safe after we moved, how our mail would be forwarded, and our phone calls could still be traced and recorded. After the guys left, Mom got the map back out and put it on the table.
She went to the stairs and yelled up to Eric and Shawn. “Hey, one of you bring me a hat.”
Shawn came down in his pajamas with his woolen winter toque. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing the map on the table.
“We’re figuring out where we’re going to be living for the next five years,” Mom said.
She wrote down the names of the three places on little pieces of paper and put them into the hat, then shook them around. “Go ahead,” she said to Shawn. “Pull one out.” He looked scared as he reached into the hat. “Tennessee?” he read off the piece of paper.
“Grand Ole Opry!” Mom said loudly. “What do you think of that, John?”
Dad just shrugged and shook his head. “Sounds good,” he wrote down.
“We’ll be sort of close to Jackie,” Mom said, mentioning her sister. “And you’ll have all the country music you can take.” She smiled at Dad.
Dad looked at the map for a second, tracing a line between the town in Tennessee and North Carolina. “About a six-hour drive to Jackie’s,” he wrote down.
“Still, that’s a lot closer than we are now,” Mom said. She looked pretty happy. My parents were acting like this was the best place ever. Maybe they knew something I didn’t know.
chapter 32
JOHN
SHAWN picked the state of Tennessee out of the hat. We knew where we were going now, a small town called Cookeville. Didn’t know the population, but it was small, about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville. The town’s claim to fame was that it was basically the perfect stopping point off the highway for a break if you were driving between those two cities. The money from the Busby fund would help us to relocate—it was enough for a down payment on a farm with some left over to rent a moving van.
The town of Falmouth offered to sell our house after we were gone—a hard sell; it was the infamous Busby house now and had an enormous fence around it. Not the most attractive piece of property on the Cape. Our phone number would be transferred over to Rick Smith’s house, and he would keep the recorder on it, on a separate line, to screen any unusual activity.Our identities would not be changed, but we would have to cover our tracks pretty thoroughly. Polly had to tell the personnel department at the hospital in Cookeville that if they wanted to hire her, they could not reveal that she worked there unless they ran the inquiry by her first. She told them the whole story of what had happened to us in the past year, and they were most understanding.
Our mail would be forwarded first to the police department, then, in large bundles, to Polly’s sister in North Carolina, who would in turn send it to us. I wished we could have told a few guys on the force where we were going, but for everyone’s safety it was best to keep it a secret, even from our closest friends. I knew there were a handful of fellow cops that I could trust with my life, but even they had to be kept in the dark. No slipups, no turncoats. Once the information was out, you couldn’t know where it was going to end up.
Polly graduated at the top of her nursing class, with honors. How she did it, I’ll never understand. She had only been halfway through the two-year program when I was shot. She missed a lot of school and study time, but she still managed to ace her tests and outsmart everyone else in the program. She graduated summa cum laude and was awarded a scholarship that she could use toward tuition at Northeastern University for two more years of nursing school and a BSN, but she had to turn it down because we were leaving for God knows where. Her instructors told her to stay in touch, and that if she ever wanted to continue medical school, they would all write references for her. That’s probably why, when Eric and Shawn brought home their not-so-stellar report cards at the end of the year, Polly wasn’t having it.
“Don’t try to use what happened to your dad as an excuse,” she said to Shawn, shaking the report card in his face. “If I managed to get all A’s on my tests, you guys should be able to do just as well. You have to apply yourself, no matter what else is going on in our lives. School comes first.”
Cylin was too young to have a real report card yet, but from what we were hearing, she also wasn’t doing that well in school. She loved to read but was way behind in math—the second and third graders in her open classroom were doing better than her. The teacher told us it was something to keep an eye on.
The day of Polly’s graduation, we packed the whole family into the van. It was probably the second time we’d been out of the house together as a family in almost a year. I went armed with my shoulder holster, and so did my friend and fellow officer, Dave Cusolito. His wife, Ethel, was a graduate in the same class. Fortunately, the ceremony went off without any problems.
By now, I had a pretty good beard growth over most of my lower face and no bandages. To the unknowing eye, I looked almost normal, but inside I was still tightly wired shut and had steel rods in my face. I had been back in to Mass General in March for another round of the osteoblast transplants, this time to the other side of my face, but they went into the same site on my pelvis to harvest them, which was extremely painful. For the hospital stay and recovery time, I bought an electronic chess game, ordered from the back of a chess magazine. It had the dubious name of “the Chess Challenger,” but it sometimes took eight minutes to make a move—not too challenging. I could beat it even during my worst pain days. A newspaper reporter who came to see me in the hospital after this round of surgery had an unusual question for me.
“I see that your constant companion is this chess computer,” he pointed out. “You don’t have to talk to it, is that why?” He looked at me very sympathetically. I could tell he wanted to pull some heartstrings with his story in the paper, make it a little melodramatic. Readers loved a sob story.
“What did you name it?” he asked me, looking at the computer.
I’d never thought to give it any special name other than what it was called by the game makers. But I understood what the reporter was getting at: I was unfit for company, unable to talk and constantly under protection, I had become so isolated that this machine was my only friend. The only one I could really trust. Maybe that’s how he saw it, but I didn’t. I still had a life; a different life, but I still had friends, my family. The chess computer was just something to take my mind off of everything else: the pain, the present, and the future. And that’s all it was.
As soon as the kids were out of school, we put Max into a kennel for a month and headed up to Maine and my sister Bee’s cabin on the Belgrade lakes. Polly still had to pass her national nursing boards, so we weren’t going anywhere until that was done—then she would officially be a nurse and could take the new job in Cookeville. But we didn’t want to sit in our fortress on the Cape for a month, unable to go to the beach—or anywhere for that matter. Better to spend the time in a cabin in the woods where no one knew us, and no one in Falmouth knew where we were. I told the detectives and my friends on the force that if they needed to reach us, they could contact my sister and she’d get the message to me. The cabin had no TV and no contact with the outside world. It was a wonderful escape.
Polly was able to study in peace, I played a lot of
chess and swam in the lake when the temperature got over seventy (which wasn’t that often this early in the summer), and the kids got tan and bug-bitten. It was great to see them outdoors and playing with other kids—kids who didn’t know anything about us, or have a reason to be scared of us. Polly had warned the kids on the ride up not to say anything to anyone about us, and I could tell by the way they were making fast friends that they had taken her advice.
In the evenings we’d all make dinner together, then wash up and tackle a giant puzzle on the big kitchen table, or play cards—long games of Bastard Bridge and “thirty-one” with my sister Bee and her husband, Dale, on nights when they joined us. Their house was only about a twenty-minute drive away, so they spent a lot of time with us. I could tell by the way I sometimes caught Bee staring at me that she could hardly believe what had happened to my face, but she never said anything about how I looked, and I was happy to avoid it. I didn’t need comments from someone I had grown up with about how different my appearance was, or how handsome I used to be. This was how I looked now, and everyone just needed to get used to it.
At night, after the kids had gone to bed, I usually sat out on the screened-in porch and listened to the loons on the lake, their sad, haunting calls ringing out over the water. It should have been a serene way to pass the evening, but not for me. I’d sit with my pistol in my hand, just waiting for someone to approach. All those years of working the midnight shift, all I wanted to do was sleep. Instead I sat up every night with a paranoid insomnia I couldn’t shake. If a drunk had stumbled by, walking on the shore path, lost his way, I would probably have shot him first and asked questions later.
Polly came out late one night to see why I was still awake. I heard the screen door open behind me but didn’t have time to put the gun away, so she saw it on my lap. “No one even knows we’re here,” she whispered to me, leaning over to give me a hug. “You have to stop now, okay? Please come to bed.”