The Year We Disappeared (27 page)

By now, I had a pretty good beard growth over most of my lower face and no bandages. To the unknowing eye, I looked almost normal, but inside I was still tightly wired shut and had steel rods in my face. I had been back in to Mass General in March for another round of the osteoblast transplants, this time to the other side of my face, but they went into the same site on my pelvis to harvest them, which was extremely painful. For the
hospital stay and recovery time, I bought an electronic chess game, ordered from the back of a chess magazine. It had the dubious name of “the Chess Challenger,” but it sometimes took eight minutes to make a move—not too challenging. I could beat it even during my worst pain days. A newspaper reporter who came to see me in the hospital after this round of surgery had an unusual question for me.

“I see that your constant companion is this chess computer,” he pointed out. “You don’t have to talk to it, is that why?” He looked at me very sympathetically. I could tell he wanted to pull some heartstrings with his story in the paper, make it a little melodramatic. Readers loved a sob story.

“What did you name it?” he asked me, looking at the computer.

I’d never thought to give it any special name other than what it was called by the game makers. But I understood what the reporter was getting at: I was unfit for company, unable to talk and constantly under protection, I had become so isolated that this machine was my only friend. The only one I could really trust. Maybe that’s how he saw it, but I didn’t. I still had a life; a different life, but I still had friends, my family. The chess computer was just something to take my mind off of everything else: the pain, the present, and the future. And that’s all it was.

As soon as the kids were out of school, we put Max into a kennel for a month and headed up to Maine and my sister Bee’s cabin on the Belgrade lakes. Polly still had to pass her national
nursing boards, so we weren’t going anywhere until that was done—then she would officially be a nurse and could take the new job in Cookeville. But we didn’t want to sit in our fortress on the Cape for a month, unable to go to the beach—or anywhere for that matter. Better to spend the time in a cabin in the woods where no one knew us, and no one in Falmouth knew where we were. I told the detectives and my friends on the force that if they needed to reach us, they could contact my sister and she’d get the message to me. The cabin had no TV and no contact with the outside world. It was a wonderful escape.

Polly was able to study in peace, I played a lot of chess and swam in the lake when the temperature got over seventy (which wasn’t that often this early in the summer), and the kids got tan and bug-bitten. It was great to see them outdoors and playing with other kids—kids who didn’t know anything about us, or have a reason to be scared of us. Polly had warned the kids on the ride up not to say anything to anyone about us, and I could tell by the way they were making fast friends that they had taken her advice.

In the evenings we’d all make dinner together, then wash up and tackle a giant puzzle on the big kitchen table, or play cards—long games of Bastard Bridge and “thirty-one” with my sister Bee and her husband, Dale, on nights when they joined us. Their house was only about a twenty-minute drive away, so they spent a lot of time with us. I could tell by the way I
sometimes caught Bee staring at me that she could hardly believe what had happened to my face, but she never said anything about how I looked, and I was happy to avoid it. I didn’t need comments from someone I had grown up with about how different my appearance was, or how handsome I used to be. This was how I looked now, and everyone just needed to get used to it.

At night, after the kids had gone to bed, I usually sat out on the screened-in porch and listened to the loons on the lake, their sad, haunting calls ringing out over the water. It should have been a serene way to pass the evening, but not for me. I’d sit with my pistol in my hand, just waiting for someone to approach. All those years of working the midnight shift, all I wanted to do was sleep. Instead I sat up every night with a paranoid insomnia I couldn’t shake. If a drunk had stumbled by, walking on the shore path, lost his way, I would probably have shot him first and asked questions later.

Polly came out late one night to see why I was still awake. I heard the screen door open behind me but didn’t have time to put the gun away, so she saw it on my lap. “No one even knows we’re here,” she whispered to me, leaning over to give me a hug. “You have to stop now, okay? Please come to bed.”

She went back in the cabin and left me out on the porch with my demons. I knew she was right, but for some reason I just couldn’t turn off that part of my brain. No matter where we were,
I wasn’t able to feel safe. And I was beginning to wonder if blowing Meyer away was really the answer. Even if I did manage to kill him—and I knew that I could—there was still his brother, his sons, his other “partners.” Who knows how far his reach extended. I had heard rumors that he was connected to a big crime family in Boston. I didn’t know if any of that was true, but Meyer certainly hadn’t done anything to dispel the rumors. True or not, that was a whole different can of worms, and one I didn’t especially want to open.

I had been so angry about what had happened to me for so long, I hadn’t thought about my exit strategy. I wanted to kill Meyer, but then what? I would go to jail, my family would be left God knows where without me to protect them. That wouldn’t work. So I told myself I wouldn’t get caught. Even then, we would have to live in hiding for the rest of our lives, all of us. It would start a revenge game, tit for tat. Did I really want to play that game? The only other option was to scuttle away, hide out somewhere, and keep quiet forever. Leave our old life behind. Stop fighting and give up. That would mean that Meyer had won. Or would it?

I went into the cabin and checked on Polly. She was sound asleep in the queen-sized bed downstairs, still a young woman—just thirty-six years old, the fate of our family’s financial future on her shoulders. I crept up the spiral staircase to the loft and looked at the kids in their beds. All asleep, tired from the day of swimming and playing with their new friends. I watched them
for a few minutes, listened to their quiet breathing, then went back to my watch on the porch. I would do whatever I needed to do to keep them safe. That had to be my priority now—not revenge, not my personal anger, no matter how much it would kill me every day to let Meyer live.

MY mom was graduating from nursing school, and we all got to attend the graduation ceremony. I was so excited to go—finally a chance to wear the silk Chinese dress that my cousin had given me ages ago. But when I went to try it on, I couldn’t get the shoulder snaps done. It was suddenly too tight—and too short. “MOM!” I yelled from my room.

“What’s wrong?” she said, opening the door. “Oh.” She looked at the dress. “Well, that didn’t take long.”

“I never even got to wear it!” I cried. “Now I don’t have a dress to wear to your graduation!”

“You’re growing,” Mom pointed out. “Actually, I noticed that your pants looked a little too short too,” she said. “It might be time for a shopping trip.” I hadn’t really noticed, but now that Mom had mentioned it, most of my clothes were too small. I
hadn’t gotten anything new since we went shopping for back-to school clothes before the shooting.

“Let’s take a trip to the mall,” Mom said. “Without your brothers or your dad. For your birthday.”

“No guards?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Just us girls.”

So that Saturday we went to the mall. It was the first time Mom and I had done something, just the two of us, since Dad was shot. We tried on a bunch of stuff—I got some new shorts for the summer, a new bathing suit for our trip to Maine, some sandals that actually fit, and, of course, a dress for Mom’s graduation. It was knee length and beige, with a print of tiny blue flowers, a lacy trim, and a little white belt that came with it. “You look very grown up!” Mom said when I came out of the dressing room. “Look how tall you’re getting.” She stood behind me in the mirror. “You’re going to be taller than me pretty soon.” She sighed.

We went and had some pizza at our favorite restaurant, Papa Gino’s, and I got to have a soda too. It was nice to eat out somewhere, with just Mom. I was thinking about what a great day it was when someone approached our table. “Hello, girls, having a nice shopping trip?”

It was Don Price. Even though he wasn’t in uniform, I could tell that he had a gun under his jacket. Now I remembered seeing him in one of the stores, too, where we were trying on clothes.
He had looked familiar, but I was having so much fun, I hadn’t really registered it.

“Oh hi,” Mom said, looking up like she was totally surprised to see him. “How are you?”

Mom looked over at me and I scowled at her.

“That pizza sure looks good,” Don said.

“Sit with us,” Mom said. “There’s plenty.”

I moved over to make room, and he scooted into the booth beside me. “You should see the new dress we just got for Cee, it’s beautiful,” Mom said, lifting up the bag next to her on the seat. “Want to show him?”

I put my pizza down on my plate and shook my head. They talked for a couple of minutes, while I sat there silently seething. I couldn’t believe that Mom would have a cop follow us around the mall in secret, and then just “show up” at the pizza place. I was so angry with her. It was supposed to be our day. Now it was ruined.

When we got into the car to go home, I stayed silent. “Is something wrong?” Mom asked me.

“No,” I said, looking out the window. I hated this town and I just couldn’t wait to leave.

On the day of Mom’s graduation, Dad wore his old suit, the one he used to always wear to court, and I wore my new dress. Eric and Shawn wore their old Easter suits from last year—Shawn’s wrists sticking out a few inches too many where he had outgrown the jacket, Eric barely able to button his.

Dad, on the other hand, looked like a skeleton in his suit and tie. The neck of the shirt didn’t even fit right, a few inches bigger than it should have been. And under the jacket, he had both his shoulder holster and a gun in his belt. Another cop was coming with us to the graduation, and he also had a couple of guns on him. Dad had been growing a beard to cover his face since his last surgery, and it looked all right. It was spotty in patches, and you could still see that his face didn’t look totally normal, but the beard was a lot better than the bandages. He fluffed it out so that it filled in the spaces where his bones were still missing.

Right after the graduation, we went back to our house and packed up our summer clothes, then got into the van and headed up to Aunt Bee’s cabin in Maine. “You guys can do whatever you want all day, go wherever you want, and there won’t be any cops around,” Mom told us on the ride up. “We want you to have fun, but you have to remember: don’t tell anyone anything about us.”

“What if someone asks what’s wrong with Dad?” Eric asked. “Like why he can’t talk?”

Mom was driving, so she didn’t turn around to look at us. “Just say that he was in an accident,” she said quickly. “That’s not a lie.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I heard Shawn say quietly, looking out the window from the backseat of the van.

“What’d you say?” I asked him loudly. I wanted to see if he would repeat it for my parents to hear.

“Nothing,” Shawn glared at me.

“I heard you,” I told him. I gave him a cocky smile. “I’m telling.”

“I hate you,” he said under his breath.

“I hate you back,” I said.

“Kids!” Mom yelled from the front. “Knock it off right now or we aren’t going to Aunt Bee’s at all.”

The weeks spent at the cabin that year were the best ever. We got to see Tigger again, and she had missed us so much she jumped all over us, then peed all over the floor, she was so excited. We met some neighbor kids, a few cabins down from ours, and hung out with them every day. We could swim in the lake, canoe to Little Island, fish off the dock, go wherever we wanted to. We just had to be back by 5:00 p.m. for dinner. That was the only rule. It felt great to be free—no fence, no dog, no cops. We could almost forget that anything was wrong, that we were different, at least until dinnertime. That’s when Dad would get out his blender and whip up whatever we were having into a liquid that he could eat. Usually, the mixture would turn out a light shade of brown, and he would sit at the dinner table with us and draw it out of the blender with his syringe. He would sometimes write goofy notes to us while at the table. “Liquid hamburger—yum! Delicious, want to try some?” I was happy that he could joke around about it, but the stuff he had to eat was truly disgusting. No wonder he couldn’t keep any weight on.

When the month was up and Mom was ready to take her big test in Boston, we drove back down the coast and went
straight to Uncle Joe’s house. It was the first time we had been there in almost a year. Lauren was taller, and she’d had her hair cut in the feathered style that was really popular that year. Cassie was growing up too. They were both pretty, and I felt little and boyish next to them, with my old clothes and my same boring hair.