Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

A twelve-pack of Dr Pepper sat in the front. Whenever in Texas, I lived by Dr Pepper’s 1920s slogan: “Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2, and 4.” It was inspired by a long-dead Columbia University scientist who determined we had a natural drop in energy at those times of the day. I added a Pepper between the a.m. hours of six and eight whenever necessary. It was 7:08 a.m. according to the rooster clock above the old gas stove, which used to crow on the hour until Daddy figured out a way to shut him up.

  I popped the top of a can and drank an icy, luscious, sweet sip, my legal alternative to crack cocaine. The thirty-nine grams of sugar ran straight to my bloodstream, respectable only if you compared it with the fifty grams in a can of Orange Crush. Maddie shared these numbers in a born-again manner during a brief stint when she drank only water at the behest of one of her TV pop-star princesses. A true McCloud girl, she returned to the Dr Pepper fold in two weeks.

  As my blood pressure dropped to an acceptable level, I pulled my purse off the floor and dug out my phone. Three messages waited on my voicemail.

  The first, from the Fort Worth police. Jack Smith’s arm was not broken, just sprained. His attackers had made bail. The two men explained the encounter as a case of road rage, claimed that Jack had cut them off on I-35, then flipped them off. They’d followed him to the parking garage for “a conversation” and Jack had made the first move.

  I didn’t believe it for a second but it was a pretty good story because we lived in Texas, where the rules weren’t always clear to people. I made a mental note to call the police and get the real names of Jack Smith’s attackers. In Texas, Bubba wasn’t derogatory. It was affectionate. It could be a nickname for anything.

  I didn’t like that I’d pissed off two violent strangers who carried around a picture of me and were now free.

  The second voicemail, from Sadie, was short: “Call me after your Dr Pepper.” The rooster said it was still a little early for that.

  The third was Jack Smith himself. He asked whether I’d mind dropping by his hotel sometime this morning. No explanation.

  Sorry, Jack, I have other plans today.

  As an afterthought, I checked my email, which I was stuck doing on my phone until wireless internet and cable were set up at the ranch. I didn’t much like reading email on a tiny screen; I’d meant to go through it on Sadie’s laptop last night but forgot because, as Granny would say, things took a turn.

  I glanced at fifteen new messages with familiar addresses. Chicksaddlery, Equineglobe, Texaslonghorns, Potterybarn, Amazon, iTunes. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.

  Eventually I’d weeded out all but five emails. Four were from staff at Halo asking how I was doing. Kind, concerned. I would miss these people.

  The last email fell into neither category. Not obvious spam, not personal. The address was madddog12296@yahoo.com.

  Subject line: Don’t let this happen to your loved one.

  If an exclamation point had been tagged at the end, I would have immediately dismissed it as an ad for drunk driving or Lap-Band surgery.

  But there wasn’t, and I opened it.

  The message was a yawning square of empty white. No words. No picture of a smiling, size 12, Lap-Band surgery graduate holding up a pair of circus-tent jeans.

  My finger hovered for a second before I clicked the attachment. My phone screen filled with a pixelated blur. I closed out the screen and tried again. I got the same garbled mosaic of tiny tiles.

  Nothing, I told myself. Nausea began a dance in my gut. An email lost in space, meant for someone else.

  Still.

  How easy would it be to trace the email or to sharpen the focus? I could email the image to my laptop, but I didn’t have the necessary software. Or the skills, for that matter. I didn’t want to involve a commercial photo lab.

  Or the police. Not yet.

  If it was nothing, I could look foolish. If it was something, I lost control.

  Once you went official, the game changed forever. Not always a good thing, Grandaddy said.

  How clearly I heard his voice in my head these last few days.

  The panic was awake again, stretching and yawning and curling inside me like a predatory eel.

  I’m a psychologist, I reassured myself. Not a frightened girl.

  I once won a collegiate prize for a thesis on Alfred Hitchcock and the cinematic techniques of the modern-day stalker.

  I could play this game and win.

  I knew the rules.

  Even in my head, it sounded hollow.

  I glanced at my watch, flexing the fingers on my left hand, an involuntary habit ever since the cast was removed all those years ago.

  I needed to pull myself together.

  Mama was waiting.

  CHAPTER 8

  I turned in to a parking spot in front of the Good Samaritan Center, my mind entangled in the past, suddenly bothered about Mama’s desk, about the day she caught me trying to unlock the middle drawer with a bobby pin.

  I was nine and had just spent a weekend in bed with Encyclopedia Brown and the flu. Mama’s usually gentle fingers left red marks on my arm and a dime-sized bruise that took a week to fade.

  Later that day, she apologized with a package of Hostess cupcakes and a Coke with crushed ice. Her eyes were bloodshot, like she’d been crying. She apologized, but she also made it clear I was not to do this again. Ever.

  In my rearview mirror, I watched a man in a cowboy hat emerge from a black pickup. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but I waited until he entered the nursing home before I got out of my truck.

  Jesus, I couldn’t start living like this, afraid of every tall man in Texas with a cowboy hat and a black truck. I’d be certifiably nuts in a few hours.

  For the last year, Mama had lived in this building among a sad cast of people. The outside looked like an adult Disneyland, with a grandiose arched entrance and golf-course coifing of flowers and trees. Fake lily pads danced on the surface of scattered ponds. Wrought-iron benches waited for company that rarely came.

  All of it cleverly disguised the reality of the place once you hit the door: another L-shaped hospital ward where people came as a last resort. Expensive wallpaper, nice furniture, and pretty paintings on the walls didn’t make a bit of difference when there was only one way out.

  Once Mama really started to lose her mind, Daddy hired a live-in nurse at the ranch, but the property was too vast and Mama liked to roam. After one final midnight search for her on horses and four-wheelers, he gave in.

  The rancid perfume of Lysol and urine rushed at me as the glass door slid open, an odor that couldn’t be covered up no matter how much money you threw at it. Specifically, $82,000 a year—the cost of keeping Mama snug with skilled nurses and therapists who specialized in dementia.

  Our family’s money was like a nice warm blanket folded at the end of the bed, dependable, always there, but not something to be used unless you really needed it. Unless it was really, really cold. Daddy hammered that into us at a young age. Our ancestors broke their backs to work the land we inherited, he’d remind Sadie and me.

  Every time I walked in here, I said a grateful little prayer to those ancestors. Today, I was also praying that the man from the pickup was already ensconced in a room with a favorite aunt, reminding her patiently for the hundredth time who he was.

  Instead, his towering form leaned against the reception desk, his back to me. He was genially chatting up a white-haired volunteer with a freshly coiled perm. His body language was languid, but I’d seen plenty of languid men throw a fast punch. I changed direction and strolled toward a familiar female figure sitting in a wheelchair in the center of the reception area.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hathaway,” I said brightly, kneeling in front of her. I had a new angle on the man, but he’d moved. I didn’t think he was one of the goons from the garage, but I needed to get a good look. Could there be a whole posse of rednecks after me?

  I turned back to Mrs. Hathaway, who, after seeing me, had paused her se
lf-imposed daily eight-hour shift chirping back at the reception room aviary, a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner fluttering with tiny canaries.

  She wore a bright yellow robe, looking like something of a canary herself. Mrs. Hathaway’s daughter told me that her mother had been a lounge singer; now she never made a sound except when she was with those birds. I hoped she imagined herself flying away or bowing to generous applause. She wrapped me in a hug that transferred a smear of Olay lotion to my cheek and then went back to the business of chirping. Mama and Mrs. Hathaway hung out together sometimes when the odd little planets where they lived aligned.

  “See you later, sweetie,” I told her.

  As I turned down the hall that led off reception, the man’s head was down and shaded by the brim of his hat. He laughed. Maybe he was just a flirt providing an old lady with the high point of her week and a story to make her Bridge Club widows jealous. Because aren’t we all still sixteen inside?

  At room 125, I knocked three times. Mama didn’t answer, so I turned my spare key in the lock. I closed the door, wishing it had a deadbolt. I had never trusted flirts and was pretty sure I was born thirty when it came to men.

  She rocked back and forth by the window, staring at the slice of garden view that cost four hundred dollars extra a month. The room was like dusk, shadowy and depressing, because Mama didn’t like the lights on in the daytime anymore. You could turn them on all day and she’d go behind you turning them off.

  She showed no signs of recognizing me. I stopped being disappointed a long time ago. During Wade’s eulogy at Daddy’s funeral, she’d placed her hand on my arm and leaned closer to ask, “Who died?”

  “Can I brush your hair?” She didn’t respond but she let me guide her up and over to the chair in front of the dressing-table mirror. I stood behind her, gently taking out the bobby pins holding up her hair. It fell like a snowy waterfall, still silky and long.

  I picked up the brush and slowly began to count every stroke just as she did for me when I was a child and had a bad day. My scalp used to tingle for an hour afterward. My counting was often the only sound that broke the silence between us during this ritual and one of the few things that seemed to relax her.

  Today I was angry. Today I felt like time was running out for good, maybe for all of us.

  “Mama, am I your daughter?” I asked. “Was I stolen?” My voice crept higher. “Did you adopt me?” If Rosalina wasn’t lying, this was the next best option. Mama and Daddy had adopted me not knowing I’d been kidnapped.

  “Baby,” she said.

  “Don’t ‘baby’ me,” I said, so sharply that she flinched. “Look at this.”

  I held the picture of a young Rosalina Marchetti cradling a baby, possibly me, in front of her eyes. She turned her head away from it, and her hands began an agitated dance in her lap.

  “Who is this woman? Do you know her? She wrote me this letter.” I laid the single piece of pink stationery in her lap. She brushed it to the floor. I bent to pick it up, pushing down anger, knowing it would not help. I took a shaky breath.

  “She says you lied to me. That she is my real mother.” I spoke gently. “Her name is Rosalina Marchetti, Mama. She is married to a killer.”

  “She’s a pretty girl.” Mama’s voice was like brittle paper. “You’re a pretty girl, too.”

  She reached up with a hand cruelly resculpted by arthritis. One more body part that didn’t cooperate. Those once elegant fingers had dipped and sailed across the grand piano every afternoon of my childhood, teaching me the chemistry and magic of the great composers.

  Sometimes, she’d still my practicing fingers and tell me little stories: that Bach had at least twenty children; that Mozart was christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; that Vivaldi was nicknamed “The Red Priest” for his red hair and had been buried, broke and destitute, in an unmarked grave; that Rachmaninoff had giant hands with fingers that could stretch across the keys like rubber bands; that Chopin loved Poland so much he filled a small silver box with earth when he left the country and had it buried with him. That most of these men would never understand their genius before dying.

  On the very best days, she would scoot me aside on the piano bench and play a little Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday and sing in her clear high alto. Mournful, playful, intelligent. My mother was all those things. Was she also a liar?

  In October or November, when the embers of summer died down, we’d throw open the windows and Daddy heard the strains of our music all the way to the barn. He claimed that the horses stopped to listen. Mama said that she liked to believe the wind snatched up our notes and that they floated on the prairie, traveling forever.

  “Did you take me?” I pressed. “Do I belong to someone else?”

  Mama reached up. I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she pulled skillfully at the messy knot that held up my hair.

  She drew me down, turning my face to the mirror, and laid her cheek on mine.

  I studied our features—the delicate bone structures, the soft, straight hair, the sad expressions.

  “Mama, I need your help.” Pleading. “I’m afraid,” I whispered.

  It was the first time in my life I’d said those words out loud.

  Her face remained blank, unmoved.

  In the shadows of the mirror, I was the girl she used to be. There seemed no doubt.

  Before I left, I asked for the key she always wore on a silver chain.

  Without protesting, she let me unfasten it from her neck.

  By the time I made it back to my truck, there was an empty space where the man’s black pickup had been parked.

  I reminded myself that I needed to find out the names of the men who’d attacked Jack. Maybe I could get a restraining order. But that might just tick them off more, serve to remind them of my pesky existence.

  I wish I knew what the hell I was dealing with. One of those men had sought out and found a picture of me on the Halo Ranch website, for God’s sake. I should probably tell someone that. I felt under the seat for my faithful .45. Still there. Some people sought comfort in the warmth of a furry pet; I was growing fond of cold steel.

  The depression I always felt after seeing Mama was now compounded by the growing sense that something was very wrong, like invisible monsters were laying low, biding their time, traveling with me in the bed of the pickup. All I could do was keep moving forward, I told myself, and be alert. Don’t freak out Sadie and Maddie too much, certainly not yet.

  I’d asked Sadie to meet me back at the house by two, and she was already waiting in the driveway. Maddie sat cross-legged on the ground, sorting pebbles into piles of different colors, looking up as she heard my tires crunch the gravel. Her huge smile only swelled my apprehension.

  “I think this is the right thing to do,” Sadie assured me, as we walked toward the front door, but I sensed that she felt guilty, too. Mama had worn the tiny key around her neck as long as we could remember. She never took it off, even to shower or swim, and always brushed away our questions about its history. As little girls, we were enthralled by the flea-sized red jewel embedded in it, certain it held some magic powers. We were convinced that the key belonged to a hidden treasure chest, and one restless summer afternoon we even dug holes around the property looking for it.

  Mama grounded us for a week and made us pack up the holes. Didn’t we know the horses and cows could break their legs in one of them? Later that night, when tucking us in, Daddy told us the key belonged to her mother’s jewelry box. Mama, he said, had found it in the ashes of the house fire that killed her parents. At that time, Sadie and I had only a fuzzy understanding of Mama’s past. Still, neither of us really believed Daddy’s explanation. Why would she wear a reminder of something that hurt so much?

  I was struck by a pungent fragrance the second we stepped inside the house.

  Familiar.

  Unsettling.

  “Do you smell that?” I asked.

  Sadie turned. �
�What? Good smell or something-is-dead-in-the-walls smell?”

  “Lavender. It smells like lavender. The bouquets that Mama used to place around the house. And I don’t remember opening those blinds this morning.”

  “Tommie, are you sure you’re OK?” Sadie studied my face. “We can do this later. Or tomorrow.”

  “I don’t smell anything, Aunt Tommie.” Maddie was giving every corner of the room a vigorous sniff.

  “Here, give me the key,” Sadie said, deciding. “Let’s get this over with, Tommie.” Her hand rested on my arm. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s do it.”

  Maddie grasped my hand with her small sweaty one, still gritty from playing in the gravel. When we reached the desk, she broke away and ran her fingers over the see-no-evil monkey carved into the drawer, the one that had so fascinated Sadie and me as kids.

  “Is that monkey peeking?” Sadie teased, hoping to lighten things up, as she turned the key. Maddie rolled her eyes, too old for the game.

  But nothing happened.

  “It’s stuck,” Sadie reported. “Maddie, get the WD-40 under the kitchen sink.”

  That or a little spit had been my Daddy’s answer to fixing most of the things that were injured on the ranch. But WD-40 didn’t help. Neither did Maddie spitting into the lock. This wasn’t the right key. I let out my breath. It couldn’t be simple.

  “A sign that Daddy wasn’t lying about the key,” Sadie said, “which is almost worse.”

  In the end, it wasn’t Encyclopedia Brown but Grandaddy who taught me to pick locks. I’d never had much occasion to use the skill, except for once or twice. Or maybe five times.

  I pulled a pin from my hair and went to work. The lock sprung easily and I tugged on the small, shallow drawer, which fell neatly into my hand. I saw what it held and my heart dropped.

  “It’s just an old deck of cards,” Maddie said with disappointment. A deck of cards imprinted with two faded swans, snapped together with a pink rubber band, the kind that used to wrap around rolled newspapers that landed on the stoop.