The Year We Disappeared (12 page)

“Here, try this on.” Lauren handed me a pink shirt with a tiny alligator on the front. “This won’t fit Cassie for ages, so you should take it.”

I slid off the silky dress and put on the shirt. It was pretty and preppy, like stuff that the rich kids at school wore. “Wear your jeans with that tomorrow; your dad will say you look nice,” Lauren told me. I wanted to make Dad happy, so I decided to wear the shirt.

When we saw Dad the next day, I was disappointed that he looked the same. His face was still wrapped up in bandages, and there were lots of tubes and wires connected to him. I had pictured him really being better, like Mom had said, looking more
normal somehow. But he did seem more awake; he was sitting up and writing a lot of notes to us on his board. There were handmade cards all over the room, taped to every wall and surface, probably fifty or more—and they weren’t all from us. “Who made those?” I asked Mom, looking at the cards on Dad’s bedside table.

“The kids from your school,” Mom answered. “They all made cards and sent a big package. Actually, there were too many to hang up.” She showed me a huge envelope stuffed with construction-paper cards. There must have been more than a hundred. I looked at a few of them. “Get Better Soon, Officer Busby!” one read, signed by Matt. “Hope you feel better,” another one said, with a really good drawing on the front of a brown dog with round pink ears.

I didn’t even know these kids. They went to my school? I studied the envelope and looked at the careful handwriting on the outside, and all the stamps. They must have had every class at school make cards. For
my
dad. We had been in Boston so long I had almost forgotten that school had started back home a couple of weeks ago, that my friends were there, that they knew what had happened to us.

While I looked through the cards, my brothers stood close to the bed and watched as Dad wrote on his board. I saw Shawn studying Dad’s face, his eyes, as he wrote, and I knew he was trying to make sure this really was Dad. By the end of the visit, we
hadn’t seen him get up and walk, but I was pretty sure that it was him. His notes to us sounded like our old dad.

“You guys are going back home and going to school,” he wrote in his familiar block letters. “I’ll be home soon, too.”

Looking at what Dad had written, Mom nodded. “Next week, we’re going home. I have school, you guys have school. Your dad will stay here a little bit longer, but as soon as he can eat, they’ll let him come home too. Right, honey?” she said, pushing some hair back from Dad’s forehead. It still seemed weird that Dad couldn’t say anything. How could he come back and live in our house? Where would all his machines and tubes go? I couldn’t picture it.

On the way back to Uncle Joe’s house, Shawn asked how Dad was going to eat.

Without turning around in her seat, Mom said, “He’s going to have special food for a while.”

“Yeah, but
how
is he going to eat it?” Shawn asked again.

At first, I didn’t get what Shawn was asking. But then I did: Dad had no mouth. Where was the food going to go?

Uncle Joe laughed a little. “Good question,” he said.

“Well, he’s going to have a liquid diet. They’re going to show us how to insert it using a syringe,” Mom said.

“Insert it where?” Eric asked. “That tube in his stomach?”

“Yes, it’s called a GI tube,” Mom explained. “We’ll put a special type of liquid food in there.” Mom made it sound like this was all very normal, so we just nodded like we thought it was too.

When we got back to Uncle Joe’s house, I asked Mom when we would go back home. I liked the idea of going back to school and seeing my friends. Now that they all knew about what had happened to Dad, I was sure they would want to ask me questions, and I would feel very important. I also wanted a chance to wear the new clothes that Lauren had given me. I would be going back to school a whole new girl.

“A few more days,” Mom said, but she looked sad. “And then Dad will come as soon as he’s stable.”

That night, Mom and Uncle Joe made dinner for us because Aunt Kate was at work. I was happy to sit in the kitchen and help, especially since I knew we were having something normal, not gourmet food. “He might as well recover at home; I’m practically a nurse now anyhow,” Mom said as she cut up some vegetables for the spaghetti sauce. “After the trachea heals up, they can close his GI tube and then he should be fine until it’s time for his surgeries. He’ll do better at home.”

“I don’t think it’s his recovery they’re worried about,” Uncle Joe said. “It’s his safety—and yours.” They seemed to forget that I was sitting there. “At the hospital they’ve got him covered twentyfour hours a day, and no one knows where you guys are,” Uncle Joe pointed out.”If you’re all under one roof . . . I don’t know, Polly.” He looked over at her and stopped stirring the pot on the stove. “I just don’t know.”

Mom didn’t say anything, just kept chopping up the vegetables like she hadn’t heard him.

By the end of the week, we had packed up our stuff, rolled up our sleeping bags, and put everything into the back of the old brown Pinto that Uncle Joe had given Mom. Dad’s car was ruined, they said, and couldn’t be driven anyhow because the police detectives had it, so we needed something to drive. I had carefully packed the hand-me-downs that Lauren had given me—I couldn’t wait to show them off at school, especially the new Izod shirt and the silk dress.

“Here,” Lauren said, handing me a book as we stood in the driveway saying our good-byes. It was one of her Nancy Drews. I couldn’t believe it. They were numbered on the spine, a real series, she couldn’t just give one away!

“But it will be missing from the set,” I told her, looking at the cover. It was the one about the clock that I had wanted to read.

“Just bring it when you come back,” Lauren said, looking down. I could tell she was sad we were leaving. We hugged my aunt and uncle and climbed into the car to go. As we backed out of the driveway, waving, I realized that it was the first time we had been together, just us four, in almost a month. It felt good to be on our own, even though Dad wasn’t there. It felt normal. I looked down at the book in my lap and thought about my new clothes in the trunk, the fact that we would be home soon. When we got close to the Bourne Bridge, I held my breath—the way you do when you drive by a graveyard. I told myself if I could hold it until we reached the other side, everything would be okay.
Dad would come home soon, and he would be fine. As we crossed the bridge, I could see the cranberry bogs, the berries already getting fat and ripe in the fall sunshine.

“We’re home,” Mom said quietly. I took a deep breath and was happy for the first time in a long time.

POLLY and the kids went back to the Cape while I was still in the hospital. We both felt the kids had been through enough, missed enough school, and it was time for them to get back to a normal life. Though how normal things could be with a cop or two sitting in the yard all day and night and a police escort to school, I don’t know. I wanted to be updated about who was on duty at all times at the house, and the guys who were guarding me kept me informed about that.

Rick Smith was one of the guys on the force I was tight with. He was the one who went to the house to get Polly on the night I was shot, and he came to see me on a regular basis. After I’d been in the hospital about three weeks, I was able to sit up and play a little chess when he or Don Price dropped by. It was a way to kill some time without too much talking, and it felt good to use my mind again, just to reassure myself that even though I’d
been shot in the head, I was still all there. I’d been having some short-term memory problems—people’s names, stuff like that, but no major brain damage, which was a big relief for me.

Chess had been a hobby of mine since I was in the Air Force. Learned it while in the brig serving time for “inciting a riot”—that was the charge, anyway. If you didn’t know better, it might sound like I went from a life of crime on the streets of Boston to a life of crime in the service. But there are two sides to every story. This time I was going to fight one guy I had a problem with, but when he showed up at the appointed place and time, he had five other guys with him. So my guys got into it, and next thing you know, it was an all-out brawl. When we were finally pulled apart, I was thrown into the brig for a month, along with him and all five of his guys. This was the so-called “riot” that I incited; guilty as charged.

During our confinement, this guy and I started playing a lot of basketball and eventually became friends. One of his friends, another inmate, was a pretty damn good chess player and taught me the game. I’d never played anything like it, and I took to it. It was a long month, and we played a lot of chess and basketball. I lost two stripes (Airman Second Class) because of the fight but learned chess and made a couple of good friends out of former enemies. Later, I earned the stripes back, and had I managed to be a good boy, probably would have made sergeant before my discharge.

Chess wasn’t Polly’s game, but I did find a couple of guys on
the force who liked to play, so I usually carried a travel chess set in my cruiser. It was something to do to stay awake on slow nights, and I enjoyed the fact that I learned something new from every opponent—the more I played, the better I got.

When I was in the hospital, one of the guys brought me a chess set, remembering how much I liked to play. So when Rick dropped by one afternoon and found me awake and feeling pretty good, we started in on a game. As we were playing, he told me about the investigation into my shooting, what he had been hearing back at the department. It seemed that on the night I was shot, there was a group of cops in town on vacation from New York City. These guys got wind of what had happened and went into our local PD to report for duty. “They said they’d do whatever we needed, investigate, question people, even do street duty to reroute traffic from the scene,” Rick told me. “One of the guys even said he’d just hang around to get us coffee.”

At first, this story made me proud. Brothers in arms, indeed. I wanted to think I’d do the same if I was ever in a similar situation. I wrote a note on my board and showed it to Rick: “What happened?”

Rick looked down and shook his head. “I wasn’t there, but some of the guys told me that the chief turned them down, said we had it covered. Detective department was going to handle the investigation.” Rick gave me a knowing look.

I had also heard that the chief turned down an offer of assistance from the nearby Fall River Police Department and a couple
of other offers. He didn’t want anybody going through his garbage. Those NYC cops probably would have solved this thing in one night. They would have questioned Meyer, arrested his ass, and still had time to go out for a beer. State police, too, though there was talk that Meyer had some pull there as well.

None of this was a surprise to me, but it still pissed me off. I was lying there watching liquid nutrition get pumped through a tube into my gut, half my face was blown off, and the brass of the Falmouth Police Department was still running scared of Meyer.

After Rick left, I told my nurse that I wanted to try walking again. I’d been getting up a couple of times a day and wheeling myself through the hallways.
I’ve got to build up my stamina; it’s the only way I’m getting out of here
, I thought. I walked into the hallway with her help and made it a few steps farther before I had to rest against the wall, using my IV pole to hold me up.

“You’re doing great!” the nurse said, smiling. “I honestly can’t believe that you’re even out of bed already.” I would have said something back to her, but I didn’t have my board to write on, and besides, I needed my strength for walking.
It is amazing what you can do
, I wanted to tell her,
when you get angry enough
.

Don Price had told me years before that Meyer’s game was psychological. He didn’t threaten; he never said anything that could come back to haunt him. Instead, he’d use taunts, hints. The most famous of these was “I smell smoke.” Ray would say this to let you know you were on his shit list. Smelling smoke meant
that something, most likely your house or your car, was going to burn—maybe with you in it. And we knew from his past record that this wasn’t an idle threat. He would do it. And he would get away with it. Meyer had learned to be a wiser perp—probably something he picked up in prison. You can’t arrest someone for saying he smells smoke. But saying it was enough to get people to back off, and most of the time, Meyer didn’t actually have to do anything.

I had heard so many horror stories about Meyer that by the time I actually met the guy, I was in for a surprise. We had a shopping plaza in town anchored by a Stop & Shop grocery store. In 1972, when I’d been on the force a couple of years, the stores there started having problems with young punks gathering in large groups of vehicles in the parking lot. This usually happened in the evenings, on the weekends, but the kids were taking up most of the parking places and being obnoxious, loud, and general pains in the ass. The plaza manager wanted to hire an off-duty policeman to patrol the parking areas to the front and rear to prevent this accumulation of riffraff on Friday and Saturday nights. It was an outside detail but short hours, and once the word got out, it should have been a cakewalk. I volunteered for it and started rousting the personae non grata. I conducted a lot of vehicle inspections and issued expensive citations for any faults found. Anyone who got one, and the fine that went along with it, wouldn’t come back to this hangout spot anytime soon.