The Year We Disappeared (19 page)

The only way out of this mess that I could see was leaving town. I would have to move my family somewhere safe first, to get away from all this surveillance and the guards. By then I would be healthy and strong and able to arm myself with an untraceable weapon. I had walked the trails through the woods to the dump entrance and knew right where I could shoot from and leave without being seen. I would learn Meyer’s schedule, just like he
had learned mine, and then I would be there at just the right time. Every night, when I closed my eyes, I would walk that trail in my mind. I knew every inch of it. Where I would be, the gun I needed, how I would wait for just the right shot. I would do this when I knew my family was safe, out of Falmouth, somewhere else. When I didn’t have guards on my back all day and night. I just had to wait until the time was right. When he least expected it, when he thought we were gone for good. That would be the day for payback. And it was coming soon.

MONTHS after Dad got home, reporters would still sometimes come by the house, mostly to talk to Dad and to take pictures. One afternoon, a photographer came by after school and wanted us all to stand together out in the yard, so they got Mom and Dad lawn chairs and we stood behind them while they took some pictures. I was excited to see a picture of myself in the paper, but when it came out that weekend, it was a picture of Mom and Dad in the chairs, not one with us in it. “They decided it wasn’t a good idea to show you guys in the paper,” Mom explained, but I was still a little disappointed, especially since I had told Amelia and a couple of other girls at school that I was going to be in the newspaper.

One afternoon, the phone rang while Mom was at school and my brothers were watching TV, so I picked it up. “Is this where John Busby lives?” a man asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s doing good,” I said, thinking that the caller was one of Dad’s friends.

“Can he talk yet?”

“No, he can’t, but if you want to talk to him, he can write things down,” I explained.

“Do they know who did it yet?” the man asked.

“Did what?”

“Who did it, who shot him? Did they find the guy yet?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Do they have any idea who it might be?”

Suddenly I felt scared; who was this guy? Why was he asking so many questions? “Kelly!” I yelled to my cousin. She came in from the kitchen and took the phone from me. She could tell from my face that something had happened.

“Who’s this?” she demanded.

I couldn’t hear what the guy said, but Kelly looked angry. “Uh-huh, well let me tell you something, don’t ever call here again. You had a little kid on the phone; that was totally inappropriate. Don’t you think she’s been through enough? Don’t call here anymore. Leave us alone!” She slammed the phone down. “No more answering the phone,” she told me. Then she went in and told Eric and Shawn the same thing. “If the phone rings, let your mom or me answer it, got it?”

Then she went outside and called over the guards on duty. I
pushed back the curtains in the living room and watched her. She was pretty mad. One of the cops came into the house and picked up the phone. He called someone at the phone company and then radioed into the station. By that night, we had a black box and a tape recorder attached to our hallway phone with a bunch of wires. “It’s really important that you kids don’t pick up the phone anymore,” Mom explained to us at dinner. “If someone calls and says something about Dad, we need to record it. Kelly and I know how to use the tape recorder, so leave it for us.”

“What if nobody else is home?” Eric asked.

“Somebody will always be here with you guys; you’re not ever going to be alone in the house again, so don’t worry about that.”

That was true, we were never alone anymore. Before Dad was shot, we could play out in the yard or with the neighbors with no problem. We could walk down to the Zylinskis’ house. And when Mom had to go and run an errand or do something after school, Eric was in charge. He was thirteen and could run things pretty well. But since we’d come back from Boston, all of that had changed. We didn’t play outside. I couldn’t ride my bike anywhere; the cops outside wouldn’t let me. We weren’t allowed to have anyone over to play, and no one invited us to their house, either. Sometimes Eric and Shawn would play touch football or baseball with Dad’s cop friends when they were over on the weekends, but it was always in our small yard and under the watchful eye of at least two armed officers.

So the next time I heard that Eric and Shawn were going
shooting with Dad and his friends, I begged to come along. At first, Dad said no. But I knew if I whined a little, I could get what I wanted. “Please, I never get to go anywhere fun. It’s not fair!”

Mom was still in class, so Dad thought about it for a second. He wrote a note to Rick: “Maybe she can handle a .22?”

‘As long as you think Polly would be okay with it,” Rick said. He looked over at me, and I could tell he would rather I just stayed at home.

“Okay, Cee,” Dad wrote in his small notebook. He motioned to everyone:
Let’s go
.

“This might turn out to be a good idea,” Dad’s friend Roger Gonsalves said as we all went out to the cars. “You’ve got a lot of guns in the house; she should understand how to use them, for her own safety.”

Dad nodded.

We drove out to an area just off the town dump. It was a chilly late-fall day, so the garbage didn’t smell, plus most of it had been recently plowed under. Dad and his friends poked around in the trash nearby for bottles and cans to shoot, and Eric and Shawn helped. I just looked around for anything good, broken toys and that kind of thing, but found nothing.

When they had found a few bottles, they lined them up on the ground and had Eric and Shawn and I stand back about twenty feet away. Dad took out his revolver and handed it to Shawn. He wrote something in the small spiral notebook that he always carried and showed it to Shawn and Eric. “I remember,” Shawn said,
nodding. The revolver looked gigantic in his hands. He opened the chamber and spun it to look at the bullets inside, then clicked it shut. Eric held a gun that Don had handed him, and he did the same thing.

“Locked and loaded,” Don said. He had another gun, which he aimed at the bottles. He took a shot and the bottle in front of him, a green 7UP bottle, shattered instantly. The gunshot was loud, and I could still hear it after the bottle was broken on the ground, echoing in my ears. Shawn went next, holding the gun straight out in one hand and supporting his wrist with the other hand. When his gun went off, he missed the bottle and he also jumped back a little bit. His hands shook, not like Don’s, which didn’t move at all. Then it was Eric’s turn. He aimed the same way Shawn had but squinted down the barrel of the gun for a second. His gun went off, and the bottle in front of him broke in two. “That’s it!” Don boomed in his deep voice.

Dad came over and put a small gun into my hands. He showed me, without talking, a tiny button on the side of the handle. “That’s the safety,” Roger leaned over and said. “The gun won’t work unless you press that button in, like this.” He pressed it for me. Then Dad held my arms out like Eric and Shawn had held theirs, and put my finger on the trigger. With his hands on my arms, he nodded to me and I knew he meant that I should pull back on the trigger. I pulled my finger back, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried harder, but I still couldn’t move the trigger. Rick just laughed and watched us while Dad put his index finger over
mine and pushed down. I felt the trigger snap back quickly and the gun went off, but we missed the bottle. “Ow!” I cried out. Something on the top of the gun had kicked back and pinched the top of my hand. I had a red mark that looked like a little blood blister forming.

“That .22 has a bite,” Don explained. “Got to keep your hand down here.” He showed me with his big hands how to hold the gun the right way. The gun looked like a toy when he held it. “That there is the same kind of gun that your mom has,” he pointed out, “and she had the same problem with it at first.”

When Don said that, I suddenly remembered one afternoon, shortly after Dad got out of the hospital, when Mom and Dad went gun shopping with some friends. Dad had a couple of police- issued firearms, but Mom didn’t have a gun and it had been recommended that she get one. She picked out a pretty gun, small with a pearl handle. She had a license to carry it, and the picture on the license was kind of silly because it had been taken while she was wearing her nursing uniform. She looked like some kind of superhero—the nurse lady with a gun. She even had a little leather holster for it that she wore to school or whenever she left the house.

“I think Polly got the semiautomatic, didn’t she?” Rick said, taking aim. He shot at a bottle and shattered it.

“Oh yeah, maybe you’re right,” Don agreed.

“Ready?” Dave said to Shawn, who nodded nervously. He took aim again, doing a little better this time. He actually hit the
top of the bottle, but it just fell over, broken on the top. Eric took a turn and hit a can with a loud ping.

It was my turn again, but when Dad went to put the gun into my hand, I just shook my head. “I don’t want to,” I said.

“Let me see your hand there,” Don said, looking at where the gun had pinched me. I had a tiny blood blister in the web between my thumb and index finger. It hurt, but not too much. “Don’t you want to try one more time?” Don asked quietly, and I shook my head and turned away. I wandered off, poking through the garbage with a stick, listening to the sounds of my brothers shooting. I could hear some of the things the cops were telling them. “If you need to shoot repeatedly, you cock the gun like this,” Don told Shawn. “No, no, you don’t bring it down and look at it. Hold it up like this, pull it back, and just fire again. If someone is coming at you, you don’t want to give him a second chance, right?”

“You want to aim here, not just at the head, because most people aim too high and miss,” I heard Rick explain to Eric. “The body is bigger, so look for the chest first. Second shot, go for the head.”

I dug around in the garbage pretending that maybe I would find a piece of jewelry—a necklace or a ring that someone had lost. I wondered if Eric and Shawn would ever really need to shoot someone in the chest first, then in the head second—an actual person. I looked over at Dad. Whoever shot him didn’t take Rick’s advice; they just went for the head. They probably
didn’t know much about guns. I already knew more than they did about guns and I was only nine.

I watched Dad take a shot. He looked good with the gun in his hands—strong and powerful. I hadn’t seen him look that way for a long time. His shoulders looked broad from the back when he held the gun out in front of him. He fired the revolver, hitting a bottle, then shot again, and again.
Bang, bang, bang
. All the bottles in a row cracked and shattered, one by one. No one said anything as Dad shook a box of ammo out of his pocket and quickly reloaded. His eyes were blank as he slid the bullets into the chamber and snapped it back. He stood for a moment, the gun in his palm, looking off into the distance, at the hills just beyond the town dump.

“Dad, can I have another turn?” Shawn asked, breaking his trance. Dad looked over at him as if he had forgotten who Shawn was.

I picked up some bottles I’d found and brought them over to the guys so they could break them. I searched around the rest of the dump and brought over cans and other stuff for them to shoot at too. It started to get pretty cold, and I was wearing just my light fall jacket, so I sat on the ground behind the guys and pulled my knees up to my chest, tucking them under my jacket, until it was time to go home.

“Look,” Shawn said in the car on the way back, “my hand is still shaking.” He held out his right hand and I touched it. I could
feel a little shiver running through him, like he was cold or scared. “That’s from shooting,” he said.

I looked down at my own hand, running my finger over the tiny red blister.
That’s from shooting too
, I thought. I never wanted to hold a gun ever again.

THE days got colder, shorter, and before we knew it, winter had arrived on the Cape. The cold made my face hurt so badly it was almost impossible to go outside. The pain was mind-blowing, like an intense ice cream headache that didn’t go away, so cold days were to be avoided whenever possible.

Sometime in November, I became aware that I wasn’t dreaming at night, or at least I wasn’t remembering any dreams. I also started having a hard time remembering people’s names, something that had never been a problem before.

“Everyone dreams,” Polly told me. She had learned in her nursing psych classes that people who don’t have dreams have something wrong with their brains—psychotic folks, schizoid. “Maybe you just don’t remember your dreams, but you must be dreaming. Right?” She looked a little worried. Next visit to Mass General, I mentioned this to Dr. Keith.

“You lost a great deal of blood after your shooting,” he pointed out. “There is a chance that your blood oxygen levels got so low, a part of your brain was damaged or affected.” I might make an interesting case study, he added, to see if there is a small portion of the brain that controls dream memory and is also linked to remembering names and faces. Overall, he didn’t seem concerned about it, so I wasn’t either.

Around this time I was also taken in for hypnosis, something the detectives had recommended. “We have some information that we believe is related to the car you described in your shooting,” Dimatto told me one day. “We have a witness who saw a similar car in that area, with Florida plates. It could be that the car was a rental.”

“Maybe these guys were hired out of Florida, and if that’s the case, we’re going to have a hard time tracking them down, or that car,” Reaves added.

I don’t know how much of what they were telling me was legitimate, but I went along with the hypnosis to see what I could come up with. They wanted me to try and remember the plate numbers, or if the plates were from out of state. Maybe I was wrong about Meyer pulling the trigger. If he was the one who wanted me dead, maybe he did hire someone to whack me. It would have been a smart move, considering that if I’d died he would have murdered a police officer, a serious offense, even for him. And Meyer, with his previous criminal experience, would know this.