The Year We Disappeared (11 page)

We all came to count on Father Mark for a lot. Then one day, he just wasn’t there. Everyone in the congregation was whispering about him. “Where’s Father Mark?” I asked Dad.

“He’s sick,” Dad said. But when we got home, he told Mom a different story. Father Mark had had a “nervous breakdown,” and according to some folks in the church, it wasn’t the first time. There was something wrong with him, and he had to go away to get better. I asked about him every Sunday for a few weeks after that. The old priest who took his place was crusty and dull, and
he quickly did away with the coffee and doughnuts, saying that it was too expensive. After a while, we just stopped going to church.

The next morning when we got up, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table and she looked fine. She had taken a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans that she borrowed from Aunt Kate. She hadn’t had a nervous breakdown! I couldn’t wait for the chance to tell Lauren that she had been wrong.

I went into the den while everyone else was still eating breakfast and got out some art supplies to make another card for Dad. I pictured the man lying in the hospital bed and how he had written “I love you.” I drew a big red heart, then put a happy face on it and arms and legs. Then I added some running shoes and some flowing hair. It was a jogging heart. I thought it was pretty creative, especially since Dad liked to go jogging. “I love you, too,” I wrote over the heart. “Get well soon,” I wrote under it.

THE kids came for a visit and were terrified of me. Eric was stone-faced the whole ten minutes, Cee cried, Shawn couldn’t even stay in the room and instead ran up and down the hallway until Joe grabbed him. I could tell from the look on Joe’s face that there was no way he would bring his daughters here to see me; he seemed to think the whole thing was a huge mistake. But Polly had been saying that the kids thought I was dead, or about to die, and she wanted them to see that wasn’t the case. I don’t know if her plan worked exactly; now the three of them were in shock after seeing their dear old dad hooked up like Frankenstein. I didn’t expect they’d be back anytime soon.

About five days after the shooting, the pain level dropped markedly. I was suddenly more aware, could stay awake for longer periods, understand what people were saying, and actually remember conversations. My blood oxygen level was returning
to normal after all the blood I’d lost, and that was helping me to get my bearings and feel more like myself.

Around this time I had a visit from Joe Urcini, a guy I went to high school with, who was working in the ballistics lab of the Mass State Police. He came in one afternoon and held up a small plastic bag that contained a shotgun round. “Dug this out of the house across the street from where you were shot,” Joe explained. The slugs went through me, out the passenger side of the car, and straight into the side of a house across the street.

“It’s double-O,” Joe went on. “Impossible to trace. I’m sorry, John.” He looked pretty glum, but I didn’t need ballistic evidence to know whose weapon of choice that was.

A few years back, I’d heard a story from a fellow officer—a good buddy of mine, someone I trusted. He was in the east on the four to one shift one night and had picked up a kid—around sixteen or seventeen years old—for loitering. He was talking to the kid in the cruiser when a truck from Ray’s garbage company rolled by. Suddenly, the kid hit the floor, hiding under the dash, scared shitless. My buddy wanted to know what was up. The kid told him that he was afraid of Ray and said that if Ray got his hands on him, he would be dead. “Did he threaten you?” my friend asked. The kid said yes, then said no, and generally looked terrified. He probably knew that Meyer had some guys on the police force under his sway, and wondered if this cop could even be trusted. Finally the kid admitted that he had just heard some stuff through the grapevine, innuendo, that Meyer didn’t like
him. My friend told the kid to either get things straightened out with Ray or split to somewhere else, somewhere he’d be safe. But the kid did neither and was found floating facedown in the cranberry bogs across the street from Meyer’s house not long after.

The kid’s name was Jeff Flanagan, and when his body was pulled out of the bogs, it appeared that he had been shot at point-blank range, execution-style. From the autopsy, it was clear that the bullets had entered his head at the right cheek and exited from his upper back, severing his spinal cord and killing him instantly. A 20-gauge shotgun had been used, the ammo untraceable.

In his final hours, Jeff had gone to a movie with some friends. He was last seen getting into a car with Raymond Meyer and Laverne Linton, who were giving him a ride home. According to Jeff’s mom, the boy had been dating Laverne. He had even given her his class ring. At the time of his death, Jeff was sixteen years old, just a few days away from his seventeenth birthday.

Meyer was obviously the chief suspect, but there were no witnesses, no evidence. The day police found Jeff’s body in the bogs, Raymond’s girlfriend, Laverne, had been seen in the yard thoroughly cleaning his Cadillac, inside and out.

About a week after my shooting, I noticed that people stopped referring to it as an “accident”—even the staff of the hospital. It had become clear to everyone there, especially with the heavy police presence, that something bad was up. The nurses and doctors treating me had caught up with the stories in the Boston and
Falmouth newspapers. The staff of the hospital had been put on notice to look out for any suspicious activity or unusual visitors. I had survived the shooting, and that was bad news for somebody—whoever had wanted me dead. The questions that remained were: How badly did they want to kill me? Would they be back? And when?

As I slowly stabilized, I was able to see more visitors. Friends and family alike stopped in as soon as they were approved by the two officers on security detail. It was tiring trying to converse by writing—I found myself just skipping a lot of details and cutting right to the point. And I couldn’t count the number of times someone took my pad and wrote their responses back to me. I had to constantly point out that while I couldn’t speak, I could hear just fine.

The note writing was also a pain in the ass for the hospital staff, I’m sure. All of my interaction with doctors and nurses had to take place in writing, even the small stuff like changing the sheets and bed pan—everything. This only became a major issue, though, during medical procedures, like when they changed my heparin locks. These were the IV locks that my meds were pushed through, and they would reach a point where the vein started to close up and they had to be changed. A pretty simple but still painful process—a new vein was selected and the IV lock was pushed in. It wasn’t fun for two reasons: one, getting a needle pulled out of one vein just meant it was going to be pushed into another one, and two, since the locks were held
down with adhesive tape, I lost lots of arm hair every time they ripped them off. I was getting my locks changed every couple of days at that point, and to say I didn’t look forward to it would be a massive understatement.

A member of the IV team came in at one point to put in a new series of locks. She put a rubber band around one upper arm and selected a candidate vein, then stuck the needle in. “Oops, went right through that one!” I heard her say as she pulled it back out. She tried again. And again. And again. She finally got it on the fifth try. “Thanks for being so patient with me,” she said when she was taping the new needle down. “Most people start bitching if you miss once or twice.” I guess she didn’t notice that I was a neck breather and couldn’t say shit if my life depended on it.

About ten days later, this same IV nurse was back again, looking to change my locks. I’d removed my hospital wristband ID because it was bothering me. ‘Are you Busby?” she asked me, looking at my arms for ID. She was about to rip the tape off my arm when I grabbed my pad and quickly wrote, “He died and was removed.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at her paperwork. “I’m here to see Busby, so let me find out what is going on.” She put down her Little Red Riding Hood basket of pain tools and went out to the nurses’ station. When I knew she was gone, I took her basket and hid it under the bed. A few minutes later, the head nurse came back in with her and ID’d me as Busby. So the Stabber started
looking around for her needle cart. “Now where did I put that?” she said to herself, wandering around. She went back to the nurses’ station to look for it. Then back into my room. Then down the hall into the room of the last patient she’d stuck. Then back into my room. Then back down to the nurses’ station.

While she was gone the last time, I reached down and pulled the basket back up and put it on the tray next to my bed, in plain view. When she came back in, she said, “How long has that been there?” I wrote her a note saying, “What?”

“The basket,” she told me as she began to prep my arm. I wrote back to her, “The whole time,” and gave her a shrug. Now she must have thought she was losing her mind. Or maybe from her viewpoint I was just a royal pain in the ass. In any event, I’d call us even.

About a week and a half after the shooting they let me get up and try to walk. The doctors thought I might need a little more time, but I thought I was ready and I was determined to try. The breathing and feeding tubes were disconnected, and I was given a wheeled IV pole that my meds could hang on. I stood and started shuffling with my entourage around me—a nurse who had made me her pet project and two guys from the police force who were on security detail. I was wobbly as soon as my feet touched the ground, but my mind was made up. I was gonna show the bastards who did this to me they couldn’t keep me down. I got about twenty feet and felt woozy. The room started to turn on its side and I felt myself sliding with it, but someone
had my arm and held me up. I turned around and made my way back to the bed, little black spots dancing into the corners of my eyes like I was going to hit the deck—that look boxers get right before they totally check out. When I got back in the horizontal position, I was sweating bullets. I’d gone from running seven miles a day to walking a few feet. Now I knew how much I had to recover. The team of surgeons who wanted to reconstruct my face wouldn’t even start on me until I was stable, until the tissue from the first surgery had time to heal. I had a long road in front of me. Very long. But I knew that I could make it. Tomorrow I would take a few more steps, and a few more after that. I had nothing but time. I would get there. On this, I was resolved.

The strange thing was, I wasn’t thinking about getting well so I could see my family, so I could go on with my life, so the surgeons could get to work on my new face. I had a singular mission: I wanted to get well enough to get out of there, to track down Meyer and kill him. I had to get well so I could get him.

It was as simple as that.

ABOUT a week after our first visit to the hospital to see Dad, Mom said we could go back. He was doing better now, she told us. He was able to walk around a little bit and didn’t need to be on oxygen all the time.

The night before the visit, we were all a little nervous about what he might look like, but not really scared. I got out my cousins’ art supplies and started making a card. I was in the den coloring when Lauren walked in. “What are you wearing to the hospital tomorrow?” she asked me. I was embarrassed to tell her that I hadn’t really thought about it.

“I have a dress that’s too small for me, maybe you’d want it,” Lauren said casually.

I looked up from my card. “Really?” Lauren had the most beautiful clothes I had ever seen—she and Aunt Kate both dressed really well and their things were expensive.

“Come upstairs, try it on.” Lauren smiled. We’d been having a hard time all living together, and I had honestly forgotten how nice she could be.

The dress was black silk and cut in a Chinese design, buttoning over one shoulder. It was long and sleek and beautifully embroidered. I looked like a princess in it. “It’s not quite right for the hospital,” Lauren said knowingly, “but you can still have it. Wear it when you get home, like to a party or something.” The way she said it, it sounded like she knew we would go home eventually—to our old lives where everything would be normal. It implied there would even be parties to go to, and that I could wear this dress like nothing bad had ever happened. It made me feel good.