Playing Dead (39 page)

S
ingle blow psychic trauma.

A profound violent act that, when witnessed by someone so young, can lead to structural abnormalities in a developing brain.

Drugs and therapy, even if started the day after little Jack watched his father die, might not have rewired his head. Healed him. And now? Now it would be like stitching up a wound with a thread of hair.

I walked Jack to the bathroom and pulled out a clean towel and washcloth. I dug in the drawer for a new toothbrush and a comb. His blue Polo was soaked with sweat stains and smelled like old cheese. I found one of Daddy’s shirts in the back of his closet and hung it on a hook on the bathroom door.

Then I closed the door for him, and waited.

Jack emerged with bloodshot eyes, slicked-back hair. Embarrassed.

“I’m sorry about that in there.” He gestured toward the living room. “That’s never happened before.”

I didn’t believe him.

“OK,” I said. “Hudson’s making coffee.”

He shrugged. The wall was up.

Hudson planted three steaming mugs in front of us at the kitchen table. I ran my finger in circles around a white imprint on the wood where Granny used to set her glass of iced tea every afternoon at three.

“You are madddog. You emailed me that slide show. You spread rumors about my mother to some very bad people.”
You put everyone I loved in danger
.

“I thought you deserved a little clarity. I wanted to piss off your father and find out the truth about who killed my family. Anthony Marchetti wasn’t there that night. But he confessed.” Blunt, unrepentant. No longer a child.

“Clarity? I have no clarity! Why didn’t you just tell somebody what you saw?”

Hudson nudged my foot under the table. But I knew what I was doing.

“Who believes a distraught four-year-old?” he shot back. “I read the psychiatrist’s report on me. She wrote that I was putting everything in the context of a fairy tale to make it more bearable. I invented the Hobbit. It represented me, blaming myself for my brother’s death. The tattoo was my broken heart. A bunch of psychobabble shit. I’m sure you’re familiar.”

He looked beat-up, exhausted. Skin bone-white. Dark smudges under his eyes. I wondered how far to push this outside the safety net of a clinic.

“My life has sucked since they pulled me from that cabinet and carried me out in a body bag,” he said. “They buried my family a week later. Five coffins. Mine was for show. Filled with a bag of sand, topped with a little headstone. They changed my name and stuck me in foster care instead of witness protection. None of my extended family wanted to take me. Too dangerous.”

“You said you were a reporter,” I said, steering him away. “That you went to Princeton.”

“I did go to Princeton. Scored 1590 on the SAT. Tragic childhood produces overachiever. How can you say I’m not a reporter? This is my story, Tommie.
You
are my story.”

He leaned in with a bitter grin.

“So many years and so many dead ends. Until I had a piece of luck a few months ago. Someone in the Stateville prison system told me that Marchetti had a special interest in some girl on the outside. Someone had sent photos of you.
For years
.”

The first thought that rushed at me: Would Mama do that? Send pictures of me while I was growing up, to a killer?

“I’m out of here,” Jack said suddenly.

“Don’t go yet,” I pleaded. “Talk to my … to Marchetti … I can get you help.”

“Are you not listening? After my last visit to your father, he sent those redneck freelancers to the garage to tell me to back off. I don’t need your help. I finally have their faces. Proof of the Hobbit and the Giant. It’s the first time in years I’ve been absolutely certain they weren’t a figment of my imagination. That I wasn’t crazy. That might be enough.”

Before I could react to this, the kitchen phone, the landline, began to ring on the wall by the refrigerator.

Once.

Twice.

Three times. The three of us sat there, no one making a move, the tension in the room holding us in place like dolls arranged for a tea party. The answering machine picked up with my father’s rough voice, like he’d been here listening all along. And then, another voice. Irritated.

“Tommie? Pick up. Are you there? Is this the right number? This is James. You know, the guy you FedExed a finger to?”

That broke the spell. I jumped from the chair, knocking it to the floor, and ran to grab the receiver.

“It’s me. I’m here.” I slid down the wall to a sitting position, holding one hand over my ear to hear better, to shut out Jack and Hudson, although the only sound in the room was the hum of the refrigerator.

“Want to know about your baby finger, the finger I put ahead of six other cases that I’m actually getting paid for?” James, a fellow UT grad who thought he should be curing cancer instead of figuring out the DNA tree of rich people’s dogs, was pretty much annoyed at the world all the time.

“Tell me,” I said. “Please.”

“It contains a high concentration of calcium sulfate hemihydrate. Or let me put it in layman’s terms. Your finger is plaster of Paris.”

I hung up the phone, my face hot and perspiring.

“A friend,” I said awkwardly.

Jack stretched and stood. Hudson gathered up the coffee cups and put them in the sink. We both followed Jack to the front door, Hudson casually holding his gun.

This couldn’t be over.

“Where’s your car?” I asked Jack suddenly.

“I parked it at the pond.” I wondered if he had considered driving it into the water, sinking away with everything inside it.

Jack turned at the door, a pitying look on his face.

“You and me,” he said, “we’re the same now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll never feel safe again.”

And then he was gone, striding toward the fields, melting into the trees.

It is a cancerous myth, that children are resilient.

For the next twenty-one hours, I slept.

I woke to the air conditioner thumping on, whispering a breeze across the half of my body uncovered by the sheets.

I glanced at the clock radio by the bed: 6:08 a.m.

Hudson was a long lump lying several feet away in Sadie’s twin bed, breathing in and out in a steady rhythm.

The first thought punched its way through.

I wondered whether Jack would chase down his monsters. Get rid of them for both of us. The picture of the Hobbit and the Giant had disappeared with him.

The second thought: I should read Mama’s letter.

I slid out of bed, shivering in my T-shirt and underwear, and wrapped the Peter Rabbit comforter tighter around me before heading down the stairs.

The kitchen was spotless. The three coffee cups from the other night were washed and draining on a dishtowel. An old mayonnaise jar filled with fresh yellow daisies and purple dianthus from Mama’s garden sat in the center of the table—cheery flowers victorious against the wicked heat, not a cloying refrigerated arrangement left over from the funeral.

Sadie’s work. A little purple Post-it in her artistic scrawl stuck to the side of the jar said:
I
♥
you. Call me if you ever get up
.

I pushed aside congealing casseroles to find a lone Dr Pepper, then ventured to the laundry room and opened the middle drawer in Mama’s desk. The letter was faceup, exactly the way I’d left it before taking Sadie home.

I stuck the envelope under my nose, hoping for a whiff of her perfume, or the garlic she planted every year or the wax she used like a religion on her grand piano. It smelled … 
anonymous. I ran my finger under the seal, pulled out a single page:

It figured. She wasn’t going to tie things up in a pretty little bow.

I stuck the letter back in the drawer and walked over to my cell phone, both plugged in and charging. Sweet of Hudson to do that.

Five messages on my phone.

I was a little leery of reconnecting to the world, but what the hell. Maybe Rosalina Marchetti had another fake body part for me.

W.A. wanted to know when Sadie and I could meet to talk over more details of the will.

Donna had a dermatologist appointment at 2 p.m. tomorrow. I’d been getting Donna’s messages for two years even though I wasn’t Donna.

Wade, pushing his agenda, asked if I’d like to take some horses out to the wind farm this week for a ride.

Halo Ranch wanted to know whether I’d picked a moving company to haul my stuff home. I’d resigned by phone the day
before Mama’s funeral for three good reasons: Sadie. Maddie. The weight of our inheritance.

Charla Polaski sounded the most desperate I’d heard her, with voices and clanking noises in the background almost drowning her squeak.

“I hate to leave this on a voicemail,”
she said,
“but, word is, your Daddy is planning to kill himself.”

M
y pickup spun down Highway 377, a hot wind blowing through the open windows like God had turned on his giant blow-dryer.

It had been four days since I ignored the last phone call from Charla, ten days since Mama had died, one month since I opened the letter that said I was someone else.

Hudson was sleeping with me every night at the ranch. The pony sheets often ended up tangled and sweaty on the floor. One of Hudson’s war buddies remained a constant at Sadie’s trailer, but something more than a professional relationship was developing there, too.

I didn’t like driving alone.
Being
alone.

Nothing about my life was resolved since Jack walked out the door.

I took a fast glance at the map on the seat beside me and turned left onto the next county road, stirring up a flock of grackles, a species of black birds invented by the devil. Not a thing to recommend them, Granny would say. They devoured crops, dropped bombs of poop, and were too damn noisy. Nature’s reality TV stars.