by Cylin Busby
She went back in the cabin and left me out on the porch with my demons. I knew she was right, but for some reason I just couldn’t turn off that part of my brain. No matter where we were,I wasn’t able to feel safe. And I was beginning to wonder if blowing Meyer away was really the answer. Even if I did manage to kill him—and I knew that I could—there was still his brother, his sons, his other “partners.” Who knows how far his reach extended. I had heard rumors that he was connected to a big crime family in Boston. I didn’t know if any of that was true, but Meyer certainly hadn’t done anything to dispel the rumors. True or not, that was a whole different can of worms, and one I didn’t especially want to open.
I had been so angry about what had happened to me for so long, I hadn’t thought about my exit strategy. I wanted to kill Meyer, but then what? I would go to jail, my family would be left God knows where without me to protect them. That wouldn’t work. So I told myself I wouldn’t get caught. Even then, we would have to live in hiding for the rest of our lives, all of us. It would start a revenge game, tit for tat. Did I really want to play that game? The only other option was to scuttle away, hide out somewhere, and keep quiet forever. Leave our old life behind. Stop fighting and give up. That would mean that Meyer had won. Or would it?
I went into the cabin and checked on Polly. She was sound asleep in the queen-sized bed downstairs, still a young woman—just thirty-six years old, the fate of our family’s financial future on her shoulders. I crept up the spiral staircase to the loft and looked at the kids in their beds. All asleep, tired from the day of swimming and playing with their new friends. I watched them for a few minutes, listened to their quiet breathing, then went back to my watch on the porch. I would do whatever I needed to do to keep them safe. That had to be my priority now—not revenge, not my personal anger, no matter how much it would kill me every day to let Meyer live.
chapter 33
CYLIN
MY mom was graduating from nursing school, and we all got to attend the graduation ceremony. I was so excited to go—finally a chance to wear the silk Chinese dress that my cousin had given me ages ago. But when I went to try it on, I couldn’t get the shoulder snaps done. It was suddenly too tight—and too short. “MOM!” I yelled from my room.
“What’s wrong?” she said, opening the door. “Oh.” She looked at the dress. “Well, that didn’t take long.”
“I never even got to wear it!” I cried. “Now I don’t have a dress to wear to your graduation!”
“You’re growing,” Mom pointed out. “Actually, I noticed that your pants looked a little too short too,” she said. “It might be time for a shopping trip.” I hadn’t really noticed, but now that Mom had mentioned it, most of my clothes were too small. I hadn’t gotten anything new since we went shopping for back-to school clothes before the shooting.
“Let’s take a trip to the mall,” Mom said. “Without your brothers or your dad. For your birthday.”
“No guards?” I asked.
Mom shook her head. “Just us girls.”
So that Saturday we went to the mall. It was the first time Mom and I had done something, just the two of us, since Dad was shot. We tried on a bunch of stuff—I got some new shorts for the summer, a new bathing suit for our trip to Maine, some sandals that actually fit, and, of course, a dress for Mom’s graduation. It was knee length and beige, with a print of tiny blue flowers, a lacy trim, and a little white belt that came with it. “You look very grown up!” Mom said when I came out of the dressing room. “Look how tall you’re getting.” She stood behind me in the mirror. “You’re going to be taller than me pretty soon.” She sighed.
We went and had some pizza at our favorite restaurant, Papa Gino’s, and I got to have a soda too. It was nice to eat out somewhere, with just Mom. I was thinking about what a great day it was when someone approached our table. “Hello, girls, having a nice shopping trip?”
It was Don Price. Even though he wasn’t in uniform, I could tell that he had a gun under his jacket. Now I remembered seeing him in one of the stores, too, where we were trying on clothes.He had looked familiar, but I was having so much fun, I hadn’t really registered it.
“Oh hi,” Mom said, looking up like she was totally surprised to see him. “How are you?”
Mom looked over at me and I scowled at her.
“That pizza sure looks good,” Don said.
“Sit with us,” Mom said. “There’s plenty.”
I moved over to make room, and he scooted into the booth beside me. “You should see the new dress we just got for Cee, it’s beautiful,” Mom said, lifting up the bag next to her on the seat. “Want to show him?”
I put my pizza down on my plate and shook my head. They talked for a couple of minutes, while I sat there silently seething. I couldn’t believe that Mom would have a cop follow us around the mall in secret, and then just “show up” at the pizza place. I was so angry with her. It was supposed to be our day. Now it was ruined.
When we got into the car to go home, I stayed silent. “Is something wrong?” Mom asked me.
“No,” I said, looking out the window. I hated this town and I just couldn’t wait to leave.
On the day of Mom’s graduation, Dad wore his old suit, the one he used to always wear to court, and I wore my new dress. Eric and Shawn wore their old Easter suits from last year—Shawn’s wrists sticking out a few inches too many where he had outgrown the jacket, Eric barely able to button his.
Dad, on the other hand, looked like a skeleton in his suit and tie. The neck of the shirt didn’t even fit right, a few inches bigger than it should have been. And under the jacket, he had both his shoulder holster and a gun in his belt. Another cop was coming with us to the graduation, and he also had a couple of guns on him. Dad had been growing a beard to cover his face since his last surgery, and it looked all right. It was spotty in patches, and you could still see that his face didn’t look totally normal, but the beard was a lot better than the bandages. He fluffed it out so that it filled in the spaces where his bones were still missing.
Right after the graduation, we went back to our house and packed up our summer clothes, then got into the van and headed up to Aunt Bee’s cabin in Maine. “You guys can do whatever you want all day, go wherever you want, and there won’t be any cops around,” Mom told us on the ride up. “We want you to have fun, but you have to remember: don’t tell anyone anything about us.”
“What if someone asks what’s wrong with Dad?” Eric asked. “Like why he can’t talk?”
Mom was driving, so she didn’t turn around to look at us. “Just say that he was in an accident,” she said quickly. “That’s not a lie.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I heard Shawn say quietly, looking out the window from the backseat of the van.
“What’d you say?” I asked him loudly. I wanted to see if he would repeat it for my parents to hear.
“Nothing,” Shawn glared at me.
“I heard you,” I told him. I gave him a cocky smile. “I’m telling.”
“I hate you,” he said under his breath.
“I hate you back,” I said.
“Kids!” Mom yelled from the front. “Knock it off right now or we aren’t going to Aunt Bee’s at all.”
The weeks spent at the cabin that year were the best ever. We got to see Tigger again, and she had missed us so much she jumped all over us, then peed all over the floor, she was so excited. We met some neighbor kids, a few cabins down from ours, and hung out with them every day. We could swim in the lake, canoe to Little Island, fish off the dock, go wherever we wanted to. We just had to be back by 5:00 p.m. for dinner. That was the only rule. It felt great to be free—no fence, no dog, no cops. We could almost forget that anything was wrong, that we were different, at least until dinnertime. That’s when Dad would get out his blender and whip up whatever we were having into a liquid that he could eat. Usually, the mixture would turn out a light shade of brown, and he would sit at the dinner table with us
and draw it out of the blender with his syringe. He would sometimes write goofy notes to us while at the table. “Liquid hamburger—yum! Delicious, want to try some?” I was happy that he could joke around about it, but the stuff he had to eat was truly disgusting. No wonder he couldn’t keep any weight on.
When the month was up and Mom was ready to take her big test in Boston, we drove back down the coast and went straight to Uncle Joe’s house. It was the first time we had been there in almost a year. Lauren was taller, and she’d had her hair cut in the feathered style that was really popular that year. Cassie was growing up too. They were both pretty, and I felt little and boyish next to them, with my old clothes and my same boring hair.
“Here, I just got this and it’s already too small,” Lauren said, handing me a bright blue and red bathing suit. “You want it?” I tried on the suit in her room and it fit me perfectly.
“I’m getting breasts,” Lauren said, standing next to me in the mirror. “I have to wear a bathing suit with a built-in bra now, see?” She pulled another bathing suit out of her drawer, a beautiful black and cobalt blue one. She turned the top inside out so that I could see the white shelf bra inside. “You’ll probably have to get one of these next year,” she told me, looking at my flat chest. I looked at myself in her full-length mirror and turned sideways. Then I turned the other way.
Nothing.
It would be great to start at my new school in the fall wearing a bra with something to put in it, but so far things didn’t look too promising. At least I would be going to a school where no one knew anything about us. That was almost better than having boobs anyhow.
chapter 34
JOHN
WE headed back to the Cape once Polly was done with her boards, but our days at home were numbered. We would stay just long enough to pack up. The kids didn’t really grasp the situation—they knew that we were moving and had seen the Polaroids of the farm, but they didn’t really get it. Didn’t understand that we wouldn’t be at the beach all summer or living in a pretty resort town anymore. We would be out in the middle of nowhere, on a country road where neighbors were sometimes a mile apart. Where it would take them an hour on the bus to get to school, and another hour to get back home. Where the school year was dictated by the seasonal harvesting of tobacco crops and not by the calendar.
As a last good-bye, we decided one night to go out to the dunes—the miles of rolling sand protected by the National Seashore Park. The kids loved it out there and so did Polly and I.You could take off your shoes and walk forever; all you’d see was sand and more sand and then, finally, the ocean. It was an amazing place.
I was packing as always, my .357 security blanket, and Polly also had her gun, but we didn’t bring anyone else. It was just us. She and I sat in the sand and watched the kids run around with a kite, the sun going down behind the dunes.
“I never thought we’d live anywhere but here,” Polly said sadly, looking out over the sand and, in the distance, at the big rollers coming in with the tide. Neither did I.
When I’d first applied to be a cop in Massachusetts, I could specify where I preferred to live, and Polly and I had agreed that we wanted to live on the Cape and Islands. After the application process, which included being interviewed by two cops, filling out various forms, and lots of fingerprints, I had to pass a strength and agility test. While I was still working at Hamilton Standard I was notified that the test was going to be held one weekend in Boston at some armory. So we packed up the boys and went to stay in Natick with Joe and Kate, who at that time had just one daughter, Lauren. Joe took me into the city and dropped me off at the designated place, where I had to fill out still more forms and be fingerprinted yet again. This was so no one else could come in and take the physical part of the test for me—something I guess a few guys had tried to get away with, and I would soon see why.
About fifty guys dressed in gym shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers were all patiently standing around to take the test. There were a couple of guys from the Lowell and Lawrence area with Greek names who were built like Greek gods, and a huge guy from Roxbury who looked like he could lift the whole building, not just the weights they’d put out. They walked us through the first round—getting over a four- foot-high barrier without making body contact. A guy from Sandwich had three tries at it and kept getting his legs or ass or belly on it. Everyone else did fine. We did a standing broad jump, with a minimum distance to make. Sandwich guy failed again. Then it was the rope climb. Sandwich guy couldn’t make it, and he was out. If you failed three events, you were out of the running. After he left, we all agreed that the guy was a loser—all you had to do was listen to the explanation of how to do the event and anyone who was halfway fit could do it. I’d prepared for the test by running sprints and miles and lots of pull-ups in the pit at Hamilton Standard, using the stainless steel water lines running to the space simulator for chinning.
After the rope climb, we had to lift weights and run a quarter mile. My sprints came in handy for the run: I had the best time of the day. Running scared can do that for you. I was pushing for all I could at each task in case I failed any, which fortunately I didn’t.
Everyone made it to the last event—the fifty-yard swim. Twenty-five yards out; twenty-five yards back in. This was called the “easy” test—there was no time limit, no particular stroke, just show them you can do it, down the pool and back. But this one was the third rail; fail it and you were automatically disqualified. Eight guys went in the pool at a time, and I was in the third group. First group did okay. But in the second group, the guy from Roxbury jumped and went straight to the bottom and stayed there. The lifeguards had to go in and haul him out. Turned out he’d never swum in his life, but he wanted to be a cop so badly he thought it was worth attempting. He was out, even though he’d passed everything else and put up more weight than the rest of us combined. I was in the next group and swam easily; it was over in a few minutes. Then more fingerprints and forms and we were on our way.
After a couple of months, a notice came in the mail about a job opening with the Chatham Police Force. We didn’t want to live down Cape, it seemed so far away then, so I ignored that one. Then I got a notice of an opening in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. We’d never been to the Vineyard before and had heard it was really nice. We set out from Connecticut to Woods Hole one Saturday, only to discover that a ferry trip over and back for the four of us would be twenty-six dollars. But with no credit cards and less than twenty dollars between us, we thought maybe I should just head over alone and check it out; Polly could stay in the car with the boys and keep warm while I was gone. But it was February, and we’d heard on the radio that a blizzard was coming. Polly was pregnant, due in a few months, and with snow on the way, I didn’t want to take a chance.
The next month, there was a notice that Falmouth had a job opening, so I went to interview with Captain Martin. “The pay is one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, overtime in the summer. When can you start?” That was about all he said to me.
I explained that Polly was due to have a baby any day and I didn’t want to change my insurance until then. He handed me some police shirts and told me to call him when I was ready to start. Cylin was born May 1, and I went to work right after that, looking for housing while Polly stayed up in Connecticut with the boys and new baby. I found our little red house on Sandwich Road, the only one we could afford a down payment on, and we moved in that summer. Strangers in a strange land.
I couldn’t help but wonder what might have been if we’d had the money for the Martha’s Vineyard ferry that day, or if the weather had been different that weekend. Maybe we would have been living in Edgartown—maybe we would still be there. Somehow I felt that Falmouth was the place we were meant to be—what happened had happened; there was nothing we could do about it now. Looking out at the dunes, at our kids playing, it was hard to believe that we were meant to live in some tiny farming town in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, but that’s right where
we were headed.
chapter 35
CYLIN
WHEN we got back to Falmouth from the cabin in Maine, the sight of our house was depressing. We would be here just long enough to pack up our things; then we would be on our way. The phone rang the next morning while we were helping Mom pack some boxes in the kitchen.
I heard Mom talking to someone; then she came into the room. “It’s for you,” she said, and I grabbed the phone.
“Hi!” It was Amelia. “My mom thought you might want to come over one last time before you guys leave. Want to? We can come and pick you up. And we’ll go in the sprinkler!”
I looked over at Mom, sweating in her shorts and tank top, an old bandanna tied over her hair. “Mom...,” I started to say.
“It’s okay,” Mom said, standing up and wiping her hands on a rag. “You can go over. Be home for dinner.”
An hour later, Amelia’s mom picked me up outside our gate.Amelia and I were wearing almost the exact same outfits: shorts, sandals, and string halter tops. I was glad to see that Amelia hadn’t gotten any boobs while I was gone. “Did you bring your bathing suit?” she asked me. I nodded. I brought the new one that Lauren had given me. I felt a little bad going over to Amelia’s nice house while my mom and brothers were stuck at home packing boxes, but once we got there and starting running around in the sprinkler, I forgot.
“When you girls are done out there, I have some pictures to show you,” Amelia’s mom called outside. We came in, still dripping wet. “Let’s go put your things into the dryer,” her mom said, bringing us into the laundry room. As our suits dried, we stood in our towels while Amelia’s mom showed me the pictures.
“Remember that day?” she asked. I looked at the photo she was holding up—it was Amelia and me on the swings in the backyard, in our princess dresses. We looked beautiful and happy. There was another one of us with lip gloss on, posing in front of a mirror with princess crowns on our heads.