Playing Dead (2 page)

But home is also endless rolling land, shimmering heat, sweet memories that thrum in the air with the cicadas. Home pulls at me like a magnet. Even when my body is hundreds of miles away, my soul stays behind, clinging to the live oak by the cement pond where I learned to dog paddle.

They say that Lyndon Johnson’s shoulders rolled back and he relaxed as soon as he could see his ranchland stretching out below Air Force One. My Granny called LBJ an egotistical lunatic, but that profound connection he had with a patch of earth makes him OK in my book. I’ve tried to leave for good, to beat a new path, but I have been safest and happiest on Elizabeth Ranch, where my great-great-grandfather was born, where I grew up.

Less kind people would say I never grew up. They call me a runaway.

If anyone asked, I would describe myself as temporarily off-course ever since eight hundred pounds of steer stomped on my wrist fourteen years ago in a rodeo arena in Lubbock, Texas, knocking me from the pedestal of my saddle into mortality. It took two seconds for Black Diablo to crush twelve bones in my hand and wrist, and any wispy thoughts in my mother’s head of tearing me away from the rodeo and turning me into a concert pianist. My fingers never worked the same again.

Goodbye to getting a master’s at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. Goodbye to my collegiate rodeo competitions, because a year of physical therapy later, I couldn’t swing a rope. I had the yips, like a catcher who suddenly can’t throw a ball straight back to the mound after doing it thousands of times.

What else did I know besides Bach and rodeo? When the shattered bones healed, I left home, raw and angry, not sure whose dreams I’d been living. I spent a year in Europe as a backpacking, hostel-living cliché. Four years at the University of Texas getting a degree in child psychology, three more working toward my Ph.D. at Rice. Five years in Wyoming at Halo Ranch, a nonprofit that uses horses to coax sick and emotionally distraught kids back to life, lured by an internship and an irresistible fellow Ph.D. candidate. Somewhere in there, I fell out of infatuation with him and back in love with horses.

Then, two weeks ago, Daddy died, and I came home to Ponder for good. I hadn’t said it out loud, but I knew I wouldn’t leave again.

My eyes close for a second and I can picture every word on the perfumed pink page in front of me, the spidery scrawl that is setting everything in motion.

Dear Tommie
, it begins.
Have you ever wondered about who you are?

Always, I tell myself. Always. But not in the way you think.

I’m looking for my daughter who was kidnapped July 15, 1981, when she was only one
.

I do the simple math one more time. She was kidnapped thirty-one years ago and I am thirty-two years old.

Her name is Adriana Marchetti
.

She’s Italian, I think. I am pale. I freckle in the sun. My hair is untouched blond.

I’ve spent most of my life searching for you. I believe you are my daughter
.

I want to shout at this invisible woman. My mother never lies. Never. It was the one thing that disappointed her the most, if her girls lied to her. And my father? Even less likely.

But I cannot lie to myself now. There was another letter to consider. This one had shown up at the ranch in Wyoming. An official one, with my name, Tommie Anne McCloud, behind the envelope’s waxy window.

The envelope contained a Social Security card with a brand-new number and a letter informing me that an extensive internal review of the past fifty years of Social Security numbers unearthed hundreds of clerking errors. The first three digits of my number did not reflect where my birth certificate said I was born.

Take this number instead.

No big deal. To
them
. But that number had been a part of me
all my life. I was attached to it, like I was to my hair, my childhood cat Clyde, and the date of my birth. It was one of the few numbers I could spit out automatically, packed in my brain with all of the other passwords and security codes required for membership in the twenty-first century. It had been a nightmare to change it on my passport, insurance cards, credit cards.

But I’d never called to ask any questions. Why would I?

That letter was somewhere in a landfill by now. Daddy’s Mac in front of me glowed, encouraging. I typed “Social Security Administration” into Google, found an 800 number, punched it into my cell, and spent ten minutes bouncing around telephone menus that had no options for grieving, emotionally distraught daughters possibly kidnapped more than thirty years ago. I yelled “Representative” into the phone until the fake voice gave up and transferred me to a live woman, who introduced herself as Crystal.

“I got a Social Security card with a new number in the mail a couple of years ago,” I told Crystal. “My name is Tommie McCloud.”

“Uh-huh. Hundreds of people did. Is there a problem?”

“I just wondered … why? Where did the first three digits indicate I was born?” As I asked this, it occurred to me that I probably could have Googled this kind of information and saved a lot of time.

“You’re just asking now? Never mind. Give me the first three digits of the old number and the new number.” I recited them obediently and she came back on the line a few seconds later. She had probably Googled it.

“Chicago, Illinois.”

“I was born at a hospital in Fort Worth.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Her tone was overly patient. “That is why you got a new card.”

“This has been a huge hassle,” I said, irritated with her patronizing air, wanting to be distracted from the reason I called her in the first place.

“Ma’am, do you have any issues I can specifically help you with
now
? This is in response to our nation’s heightened vulnerability to security threats and identity fraud. Do you not want a safe nation?”

Ah, the twenty-first-century tactic: Switch the blame right back to the consumer. Yesterday, a representative for the phone company told me it would take a month to set up phone and internet service at the Ponder ranch. When I sputtered a protest, he asked whether I really thought I deserved to be put ahead of other consumers in line. And was I not aware of Texas flooding? I couldn’t dignify that with an answer. The black earth in Daddy’s fields was cracking from the heat. I pictured the phone rep shutting his eyes and stabbing his finger pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey style at a list titled
Natural disasters: Excuses they might fall for
.

“You’re attacking my patriotism?” I asked Crystal, thinking that wasn’t her real name or accent, that her own dry, un-American ass was probably sitting in India. “Are you reading from a script? Because I’d recommend you get a new script.”

“I’m going to put you down as a customer hang-up,” she said.

“What?”

Silence on the other end. Crystal was gone.

It didn’t matter. I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

Rosalina Marchetti’s letter was clear on this fact. Her daughter, Adriana, had been kidnapped in Chicago, Illinois. Rosalina wanted me to travel there sometime in the next few weeks, all on her dime.

Did she know that my father had just died? Wasn’t that how these scammers worked, with a cold eye on the obituaries, one of the few places where unusual names are usually spelled correctly?
Because that’s the thing: Rarely did anyone spell my name right who wasn’t a blood relation, and half of them didn’t, either.

I read the letter for the forty-third time and it’s like I’m twelve years old again sitting in the corner of a horse stall with a flashlight and a terrifying book, frantic to warn the heroine of terrible peril but secretly knowing I can protect her for a day, for months, for years, forever, by simply slamming the book shut. Ending her story in the middle.

I stare at Rosalina Marchetti’s signature. It sweeps arrogantly across the right bottom half of the page, tall and loopy. Under her name, like an afterthought, she had scribbled:

And the angels cried
.

“A
re you OK, Tommie?”

A familiar gravelly voice. A voice like my father’s, worn raw by smoke and sawdust. I lifted my head from the pile of papers. If I squinted, I could pretend he was Daddy. Tall, angular lines, a fifteen-dollar haircut from Joe, jeans and boots that had met some cows, a face like the Texas earth, wrecked by sun and drought and cigarettes. The damn cigarettes. I pushed away the image of Daddy at the end, with his oxygen tank at his side like a loyal pet.

“Wade. Hi.” I finished pulling my uncooperative hair through an old rubber band I’d found in the drawer and flipped it down my back. “I’m awake. Just unsure where to begin with Daddy’s papers.” I wanted to say that the whole room made me physically ache.

Instead, I spread my arms to encompass the scarred oak desk in front of me, slotted and pegged together like a master puzzle by a cowboy more than two hundred years ago. Not a single metal nail. I took naps on top when I was three. Daddy bragged that it required five men to get the desk through the door.

The oversized leather couch in the corner still held the deep imprint of my father’s lean body. A plastic hanging bag of dry
cleaning, Wrangler jeans and lightly starched pressed western shirts, was hooked over one of the closet doors; a case of Corona Light and two cases of Dr Pepper sat by a small refrigerator on the plank floor, vices as hereditary as the cigarettes that killed him. I quit smoking at sixteen, the day Daddy slapped the first one out of my hand behind the barn, the only time he hit me. I stuck with the Dr Pepper.

My eyes lingered on the photo behind Wade’s head, from another lifetime, a blown-up print of Daddy and Wade in federal marshals’ gear. Arms around each other, cigars drooping out of their grinning mouths. A good day, Daddy always said. A bad guy went down.

This refurbished 1800s building in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards was once a place where bad guys went down every week, usually with a chunk of lead in the back. Sometimes in the saloon below, sometimes surprised in this very room while stuck in a woman spreading her legs for a few pieces of change.

Over the last thirty years, among these violent ghosts, my father turned his family’s legacy of land into a multimillion-dollar oil and gas business, with the assistance of a secretary, seven lawyers, two investment advisers, and the man slouched in front of me the way only cowboys in jeans can get away with, a Tony Lama hat that had seen better days held with one giant hand over his crotch.

Wade Mitchell, ten years younger than Daddy, was the heir to the big job, so specified in my father’s will, unless I wanted to step up. My sister, Sadie, had eliminated herself as a candidate years ago.

“I hate to ask, Tommie, but have you made a decision?” At first, I wasn’t sure what Wade meant. Was he talking about his job? About Rosalina Marchetti? How would he know about that? I fingered the pink stationery nervously. Then I remembered, at Aunt Rebecca’s house, at the wake, his urgent whisper.

“You mean about the wind farm?” I ask him.

“Yes. It’s the one thing that we need to sign off on this week. BT Power wants to put up a hundred more turbines in Stephenville. If we don’t, they’re choosing another site. They’ve also got their eye on our Big Dipper property near Boerne.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly.

“Tommie, you need to leave some of these early decisions to me. We’ve got a good lease going with them.”

“Is there any controversy over the farm so far? The seventy-five turbines already in place?” I’d stood on our land just once since the turbines had been erected. I’d had mixed feelings. Nestled near an old farmhouse, they had a strange beauty about them, rising higher than the Statue of Liberty, gently whirring and spinning with the wind, turning the plains into an eerie, alien landscape when night fell, their red eyes blinking.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I asked. A year ago Daddy put in seventy-five turbines on this land with an option for more. Do you think it has gone smoothly?”

Wade looked surprised that I had this much information. Or maybe surprised that I cared at all.

I’d never liked Wade much. He was brusque, always around, quick to shoo us away from Daddy when we were little. But Wade and Daddy once walked into bad situations with nothing but each other and a gun. Shared violence is like human superglue.

He decided to answer my question. “The rancher to the north makes a lot of noise to the media about the way it looks,” he drawled. “Says the turbines destroy his view. The town’s happy about the taxes improving their school system. They got a turf field out of the deal.”

“I told Daddy a few months ago that the turbines are bothering the kids,” I said. “And the horses.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They put up a wind farm near the rehabilitative ranch where I work. We can’t see the turbines, but they’re close enough for the kids to hear. They call them the whispering monsters. The horses don’t sleep as well. Some of the kids deal with constant nausea since they went full power. Wind turbine syndrome, they call it.”