Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Would we like Mama to stay in a comfort room in the hospital morgue for the night (translation, on a steel table covered with a sheet) or had we already picked a funeral home?

  He shoved a permission form across the desk. The hospital sometimes conducted autopsies in cases like this when the cause of death was uncertain. Would we please sign off? The hospital would pay, of course, although it could take up to a month for the results from UT Southwestern. I tried to turn off the mental picture of medical students cutting away on our mother, trading sick jokes to make it seem like a less awful way to learn.

  “It’s not CSI, where cases are solved in forty-five minutes,” the administrator said, a line he probably used five times a week.

  My head throbbed under the fluorescent lights. I let my attention wander to his name tag. “Martin Van Buren, senior afterlife counselor,” a title surely tried out first on some stupid focus group.

  I’d bet Mr. Van Buren was one of the last kids picked for games in elementary school and things hadn’t improved much for him since. His dark suit hung on a thin frame that held no hint of muscle. Fuzzy red hair sprouted out of his balding head. He wore smudged wire-frame glasses. No wedding ring. A brutal analysis, but I needed a target for my anger.

  “How did this happen?” I demanded, making him jump. “Who had access to her room? To her IV?”

  My fury bounced off. I would have to do better than that to ruffle Mr. Van Buren, whose plaque on the wall boasted fifteen years of counseling to unreasonable, grief-stricken customers like me.

  In a practiced gesture, he took one hand and flipped out his polyester tie, a colorful bouquet of hot air balloons.

  “Ma’am, you will need to speak to the authorities about that. The hospital is not admitting to any fault or culpability. Her doctor believes she suffered a stroke, a risk of one of her medications. The autopsy is just a matter of routine.”

  A visibly upset Sadie put her hand on my knee. “Tommie—let’s talk in the hall for a second.

  “Don’t do this, please,” she pleaded, outside the door. Thirty feet away, Hudson and two of his bodyguard friends stood like gladiators in a protective semicircle around a teary Maddie. Our cousin Nanette had brought her back from Marfa an hour ago.

  “Mama’s dead, Tommie. Let’s bury her peacefully. Send her off with good karma.”

  “Good karma?” I looked at her in disbelief. “This isn’t about karma. This is about what’s real. About whether our mother was murdered.” I spit out this last part as quietly as I could, but Maddie captured the tone and planted her face in her protector’s chest, a man with the ridiculous name of Bat whom we hadn’t even known yesterday.

  I couldn’t stop myself, hurtful words rolling out of my mouth way too easily. “Why do you just accept things as fate?” And then, with a disgust that surprised me: “Grow up, Sadie.”

  From the corner of my eye, I watched Hudson urge Maddie and the rest of the group down the hall, away from my explosion, a good decision because Sadie immediately fired back with dead-on arrows. She’d always been a good shot.

  “You’re kidding, right? Look at yourself, Tommie. You rescue those kids. But you won’t lift a finger to rescue yourself. Your personal life is a sea of denial. Maybe you’re not dependent on alcohol now, but if you keep going this way, in ten years you will be. And where’s a lasting relationship? For that matter, where’s mine?”

  I started to interject, but Sadie was just warming up.

  “Did you really just figure out now that our childhood was a little odd? That Mama was depressed? That Daddy wanted a better marriage than he got? That we lived in a state of paranoia? How many grandfathers do you know who place their elementary school granddaughters in the trunks of their cars, close the lids, and tell them to kick out the taillights while lying there in the dark, then wave their hands out of the holes like a white flag? Remember how Daddy used to make us get in on the passenger side of our car in a parking lot if a van had parked next to the driver’s side? You know, a safety precaution so the bad guys couldn’t toss us in.”

  Her voice had begun to shake. “I still do that with Maddie today even though he always said it was a game. A game!”

  The tiny white cross on her forehead, usually invisible, flared red, a warning sign to anyone who knew my sister well. The scar resulted from Sadie refusing to wear a seatbelt on the way home from a dance lesson. Almost as soon as Mama hit the gas, a car pulled out in front of us and Sadie hit the dashboard.

  When Sadie arrived home with a pink balloon and a neat cross of black stitches on her forehead, Granny said that it was a sign that God had personally stamped Sadie with the Gift. Mama had disappeared for the rest of the night.

  Mr. Van Buren poked his head out the door. “Ladies? It’s closing in on five p.m. Decisions should be made.”

  I swallowed hard. My anger was about something else entirely. The person I wanted to talk to most in the world, who could shed light into all the dark places, was gone, forever. No more living with the hope of a new drug or the fantasy that Mama would just snap out of it.

  No more music.

  “We’re ready,” I told Van Buren.

  Sadie, surprised, raised her eyes. Her face was splotchy and pale.

  “You’re right,” I said quietly, squeezing her hand. “You’re right about everything. We need to say goodbye to Mama. I’ll leave it alone. Turn it over to the police.” I didn’t know yet if this was a lie.

  Sadie and I had survived bitter fights like this as teenagers because every hormonal word we spoke melted away by morning. But I couldn’t count on that now. I couldn’t be sure of anything, except that I couldn’t lose Sadie, too.

  CHAPTER 28

  I sat alone on the front porch swing at the ranch, lulled by the gentle clanking sounds of dishes being washed by hand. Three former high school basketball teammates I’d barely seen in the last ten years carried on an easy conversation about their kids that floated out the cranked-out kitchen window, over the stretch of burned-out lawn and into a fiery summer sunset.

  They’d shown up every morning for the last three days with something in their hands. One of them had even paid the gravedigger, driving the money I gave her to the old frame house over the tracks where Ronald “Gippy” Gillespie had lived with his mother since dropping out of Ponder High School’s special ed classes. Gippy’s mother, a horse-faced woman who preferred flowered sundresses, took care of the financial end. She stopped playing online poker only long enough to collect it, and you usually had to knock five minutes before she’d open the door. A crude system, but in Ponder it worked.

  Ingrid McCloud was a name in the small towns around Ponder, so there was a good turnout. She taught piano. She slipped people cash when they were hard up. She and Daddy owned a hell of a lot of land.

  Lyle wore the first collared shirt and tie I’d ever seen on him. Wade wandered the background in boots and a vintage jacket with western lapels, attending to pallbearers and a thousand other details. Sweet old ladies patted our hands and told us the funeral went “real fine.” That Lonnie Harbin had done a terrific job with Mama’s hair, which had always been so beautiful.

  They gossiped, of course, but well out of our earshot. How could they not? At this point every person in town had heard wild tales about Mama’s last strange days, and the First Baptist Church of Ponder literally rolled out a red carpet for the gawkers, possible souls to save.

  W. A. Masters, Mama’s counsel for thirty years, took a day off from lawyering to deliver a eulogy to a house packed to the rafters of the balcony. The only other time I’d seen the church that full was on Christmas Eve, with the lights out, everybody holding a candle sparked by a single flame.

  W.A.’s eulogy made me weep and laugh, but later I couldn’t remember a single word of it. He finished by reciting an Emily Dickinson poem Mama loved, threaded with exquisite pain, although W.A.’s twang made it bearable.

  Last night, Hudson showed up at the visitation dressed in a beautiful bl
ack suit, a modern knight. He told me that the nursing staff swore up and down that no one had entered Mama’s room but hospital personnel.

  “My guys are on the case,” he had told me, lowering his voice. “Contacting FBI sources. Tracing Smith. Trying to figure out … with your mother’s death … if this is over.”

  I had nodded and continued shaking hands, carrying on my hosting obligations well away from the casket, trying to avoid the sliver of Mama’s face, like the top of a white mask. Trying to reconcile an electric buzz for Hudson with my grief and numbness and duty.

  I stared out now from my perch on the swing to the orange horizon casting its glow over our land. I could hear one of my friends in the kitchen asking someone for one of the casserole recipes.

  The sun was slipping down, closing out this awful day.

  My mind was spinning back.

  To another shiny coffin.

  When I ventured into the house, only a few stragglers remained, most of them strangers to each other, hanging out in the sprawling living room in that twilight moment before anyone thinks to turn on the lights.

  Despite his rotten father, cousin Bobby of the tall tales had grown up into a decent, hardworking truck driver with two kids and a sweet-faced wife who’d brought a large pot of homemade chicken and noodles that she sat in her lap for the hour and a half drive it took to get here.

  “Bobby, honey, we should head out to the Best Western soon and put the kids to bed,” she said while her hands scooped up used paper plates and cups scattered around the room.

  At the visitation, it took several seconds for me to recognize Bobby White when he arrived with his small parade. We’d lost touch years ago when he’d moved to a town ninety miles east.

  “Your ma was always real nice to me,” he said, ambling over with his cowboy hat in hand, after a moment with his head bowed at the casket. “She used to write me a note on the first of every month, like clockwork, with a ten-dollar bill inside. I saved for the glove that I used for years, even at the state 2A championship. It always brought me luck. She was about the only person to make a point to compliment me on a regular basis.”

  He grinned. “I know I was ornery.”

  He shifted his feet, probably composing what he wanted to say next. His physical awkwardness in that moment took me back to one of the purest athletic sights I’d ever seen, of Bobby flying through our fields. Granny told Sadie and me he was running off his demons.

  “She was the best person I ever knew,” he said, patting my shoulder awkwardly. “Once, she gave me a lecture on Daddy and adversity. Said I could either let it break me or turn me strong. She said there was no other person on earth more proud of me than my Daddy but that he couldn’t show it.”

  I had a sudden picture of that boy berated and humiliated on the pitcher’s mound by the man who was supposed to support him most. I fought back emotion, unprepared for Bobby White tearing into my armor today the way no one else had.

  “Does your son play sports?” I asked, wiping my eyes. “Maybe I could drive out to a game sometime.”

  “Naw.” He shook his head. “I don’t make him. He likes to paint. He’s real good at it.”

  I thought about those words now as I saw Bobby stretched back on our old couch, his youngest son, Nate, spread-eagle on top of him, asleep, mouth open, as if there were no safer place on earth.

  Bobby had flinched every time his father walked in a room.

  “Here.” Sadie jarred me back to the present. “Drink this.” She touched my bare arm with a sweaty, chilled can of Coke. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  Sadie gestured behind me, toward the door.

  “There’s a man here to see you. Says he used to work on the ranch for Daddy and Mama. I don’t remember him.” She waved and smiled to a group making their exit before turning back to me. “After that, when people clear out, W.A. wants to give us the gist of Mama’s will. He says there’s a surprise. Like we need another surprise.”

  She rolled her eyes and chugged wine from a plastic cup. She had tapped it directly from the spout of a box of Franzia Cabernet on the kitchen counter, dropped off anonymously on our doorstep last night along with three cases of Bud Light, a common gesture of sympathy here in Ponder.

  “Where’s Maddie?” I asked.

  “Back at our place, trying to beat Bat at a game of chess.” Bat, Hudson’s friend who’d been at the hospital. Someone with a gun.

  “Do you think that Mama’s dying is the end of this mess?” Sadie asked me.

  “Maybe.” I stared at the man moving confidently toward us. Dark suit. Official.

  “That’s him. The guy who said he worked for Daddy. Kind of hard to picture him getting his hands dirty. Have a good chat.” Sadie slid back into the crowd.

  It took a couple of beats to recognize him. He was older, heavier, a solid block of muscle with an overlay of fat from sitting behind a desk.

  Federal marshal Angel Martinez, former agent of WITSEC.

  The “migrant worker” who protected Mama that long-ago summer. Who flirted with her a little too much when Daddy wasn’t around. My crush.

  Another liar.

  He put his hand out genially. “Tommie, I’m not sure you’ll remember—”

  “I remember,” I interrupted. “The jack of clubs. Deceit.”

  “What?”

  “You showed up in Granny’s cards.” I knew that I wasn’t making sense to him, but I didn’t care. “You lied to me. All of you lied to me. I need to know why. Right now.”

  My voice traveled up, enough that Sadie turned her head sharply across the room.

  “I’m not here in an official capacity,” Martinez said. “I came to express my condolences.”

  “Tell me why,” I insisted, shaking off his grip on my elbow.

  “Tommie, there’s no reason to dredge it up. Let it go with your mother. I didn’t know everything myself. I was just brought in to do a job.”

  “You liked my mother so much all those years ago that you showed up at her funeral.” My voice was ugly with sarcasm.

  “Yes. Also out of respect for your grandfather, who trained me.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it, hearing Granny’s warning.

  The jack of clubs.

  “You know more than you’re saying.” I kept my voice steady. “I don’t think my family is safe. Can your marshals offer us protection?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m no longer involved.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  “There’s no reason—”

  “For you to be here,” I finished. “Show yourself out, Agent Martinez.”

  I sat, spent, in one of the rawhide easy chairs facing the fieldstone fireplace. The living room that once hosted our birthday parties and Christmas mornings felt as if its soul had drained away.

  Sadie lit the kerosene lamp on top of the mantel while W.A. got papers together in the other room. Then she poured out three glasses of Merlot from a good bottle someone working in the kitchen tonight had thoughtfully tucked away for us.

  My eyes were drawn to the flame.

  I saw Tuck’s face.

  It was my fault.

  I had faked a sore throat to get out of school that day.

  Because of my lie, Mama and Granny took me with them to the funeral home before visitation to write down the names on the cards pinned to the floral arrangements. I sat in a corner, cross-legged, forgotten. The casket was closed and would stay that way.

  When they slipped out without me, I stood up, running my hand over the shellacked, gleaming maple box. In that instant, I realized Tuck wasn’t dead. That it was all a big mistake.

  And I’d prove it.

  I pushed up on the top half of the coffin lid as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. Determined, I dug my heels into the carpet and tried again. On the fourth try, I raised the coffin lid for six inches before losing my grip. It slammed shut with a deafening bang that brought Granny and Mama running. Granny said it was a miracle of
God that I’d pulled my small fingers out of the way before they were crushed.

  What I found inside that casket would layer the fabric of my dreams.

  Rivers of white gauze wrapped around and around Tuck’s head like a mummy, smothering him, covering his burns. A baseball in his left hand. His baseball jersey, red and gold. I knew that a black 9 on his back was pressed into the white satin.

  Mama and Granny carried me out of the funeral home screaming that he couldn’t breathe.

  Tuck couldn’t breathe.

  “Tommie.”

  Thank God for Sadie’s voice, always bringing me back.

  My gaze moved from the lamp to my sister. She gestured to W.A., who was spreading documents on the oak coffee table. I had to return Tuck to his black coffin.

  I vaguely wondered if it was true that W.A. shot the rattlesnakes whose skin graced his briefcase, if we’d eaten some of the insides of those nasty reptiles years ago at his legendary rattlesnake fries. It had tasted like tough chicken.

  “First, each of you gets a letter from your mother,” he said, sounding officious, unlike himself. “They were sealed when I got them. I suggest you read them in private, when you can take some time.”

  He handed each of us a vanilla-colored envelope. Our first and middle names were scrawled across the front. Tommie Anne. Sadie Louisa. An unbroken wax seal on the back. I thought of the pink envelope from Rosalina, the piece of paper that had ignited everything.

  “Second, I’d like to do a brief overview of the will. I’ll be direct. You girls get the ranch and every inch of the land, about five thousand acres, most of which includes the oil and gas rights. In addition, there’s about forty million dollars in the investment portfolio.”

  He waited a second for this to sink in, but neither Sadie nor I cared much about money, maybe because we always knew it was there. Daddy had been open about our inheritance and how he expected us to handle it. Spend a little, give a lot.