Playing Dead (7 page)

“Don’t tell Mama you took out that gun,” Sadie warned when
I’d finished, which was ridiculous because Mama didn’t even know who I was.

“And clean it tomorrow.” For someone who lived out in the ether, Sadie was remarkably practical. Cleaning guns had always been a religion in our family, with Grandaddy as the head preacher. “Do you have the letter?”

“Yes.” I gestured to my purse while peering into the depths of her Sub-Zero refrigerator. “There’s only one more Corona.”

“Go for it.” She reached across the booth to my purse on the seat, pulling out the pink envelope, bent and creased from all its encounters with my obsessed fingers.

I settled back into my seat with the beer, watching her eyes as they moved over words I’d memorized, reading along with her silently even though I couldn’t see the page, my stomach churning around the grease.

Have you ever wondered about who you are?

My mind finished the letter a few seconds ahead of her. I watched as she flipped over the front of the envelope, examined the return address and the postmark, then held it up to the light, illuminating a small square. She pulled out a tiny picture stuck inside the lining of the envelope. How had I missed that?

A lovely, dark-haired woman stood on ground powdered with snow, an austere building looming behind her. In her arms, she cradled a small child. Sadie’s next words brought back that prickly feeling on my neck and a dread I hadn’t felt since I was little.

“I want to tell you something, Tommie,” she said, and I felt the world I knew falling away.

Sadie slid out of the booth, found the sponge at the sink, and began to scrub and rescrub the bar counter nervously. Her eyes
landed everywhere but on me. I had never shared her fanatical need to clean. It seemed an odd characteristic for an artist.

“It was the night after you left for Wyoming. The first time, to do the internship. I surprised them.”

She stopped.

“Surprised who?” My voice was impatient. I thought we’d always told each other everything. Well, at least I’d thought she always told
me
everything.

“Mama and Daddy. Tommie, please don’t be mad at me.”

“Sadie, just tell me.”

“They were fighting in the kitchen. At the table. They didn’t know I’d come in the front door. It was late. Dark outside. I’d been with the horses in the barn. It was raining and I was filthy. I started up the stairs to the shower, but then I stopped. I’d never heard them so angry at each other before.”

I watched her pretty throat constrict as she swallowed, hard.

“Mama said it wasn’t safe for you to go to Wyoming, that it was too far away. That Daddy better stop you. Daddy told her that she needed to trust him. Hadn’t he protected us so far? He said it might be the safest place on earth for you to be, in a place backed up to wilderness. That they wouldn’t find you.”

Mama always worried we were too far away. In our mother’s perfect world, I would have attended the TCU school of music, become a teacher, married, built my own place on the ranch, and borne three children by now. After the bull crushed any future as a pianist, Mama imagined the most ordinary life possible for me.

But who were “they”?

Sadie glanced over at Maddie, who was glued to a black-and-white image of the irascible Scout, and her tone dropped lower.

“Daddy said … Oh, I don’t know if I can tell you this.”

She seemed close to tears.

“Daddy said what?”

“He said, ‘As long as I’m living and breathing, she’s safe. You’re safe …’ ” She faltered.

“Just say it, dammit.” My voice was urgent and angry. Something else was coming, something I didn’t want to hear.

“ ‘I love her like she was my own.’ That’s what Daddy said.”

There it was. My first certain step into an abyss of lies.

“Tommie, it doesn’t mean anything.”

We both knew it meant everything. But she kept up the pretense. “That’s why I never told you. The next morning, everything was normal. Mama made scrambled eggs with cheese and green chiles, my favorite. She was smiling, relaxed, like nothing had happened. It all seemed like a dream. Really, maybe it was.”

All that detail, down to the chiles in the eggs. Not a dream. Her next words confirmed that.

“It was selfish, keeping it a secret.” She hesitated. “I was just furious that you were going so far away. Not fair to you, I know. But nothing was fair. Maddie had been diagnosed by then and we’d moved back to the ranch. Daddy had taken over. I was a mess, a single mom with no plan. I wanted you to come home and fix it all.”

She didn’t need to tell me. I remembered. The need to carve out my own life, to be on my own, had overwhelmed everything else.

She slid back into the booth, reaching her hands across the table.

“Please say something,” she pleaded.

I ignored the gesture. I didn’t want her comfort. My mind was numb.

“What are y’all talking about?” Maddie’s warm body was suddenly pressing against me.

Neither of us answered.

“You know, you can turn those into jorts,” she said.

“What?” I asked. Maddie was dragging me back from the edge, one little girl tug at a time.

“Those jeans. We can cut them off into shorts. Jorts.”

I
left Sadie’s trailer after an animated round of chess with Maddie where so many salt and pepper shakers and lipstick tubes were standing in for pieces that it was a game just to remember what was what.

I was beginning to think she was losing pieces on purpose to make the challenge more interesting.

Maddie is the great love of my life.

Sweet, eager, daring, and very, very smart. When Sadie got pregnant at nineteen and the boyfriend skipped, none of us had any idea that it would be one of the best things that ever happened to our family and, early on, one of the most gut-wrenching.

Maddie has a tiny, uninvited peanut in her brain. One afternoon when she was three, she fell off a live animal, a rite of passage for McCloud girls. The scan in the emergency room revealed a disturbing shadow. Instantly, Daddy took over. Trips to the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, Boston Children’s, and several rounds of radiation later, the tumor didn’t budge, seemingly oblivious to all of the hubbub on the outside.

But it didn’t grow, either. For six years, Maddie has continued to outperform all her classmates in everything: running, reading, writing. Once a year, she endures an MRI and doctors on a Fort
Worth tumor board meet to reach the same conclusion. The neurologists say that with every month, it gets more possible Maddie will live a completely normal life. It makes me think that sometimes it’s better not to know what’s inside us.

Watching her little face, the furrowed, intense brow as she devised a game strategy to eradicate me from the planet, I promised myself, not for the first time, that I’d never let anything take her down. Not the invader in her brain. Not any malevolent forces in the wind.

Sadie observed our antics from the couch while updating her jewelry website on her MacBook. We didn’t say much to each other until I picked up my stuff to go.

This would be my first night out of Sadie’s cramped guest bedroom and in the family ranch house up the road, a departure planned before the events of this long day. Now I had another very good reason to set up elsewhere. I wanted to draw away the evil thing smoothing out its map and plotting a fresh path to me.

Sadie walked me to the pickup. She handed me an old Nordstrom shopping bag filled with her clothes and a blue drawstring Gap bag with shoes. A peace offering.

“To tide you over,” she said.

We wore almost the same size, everything just a little tighter on me. I’d been in such a hurry to catch my plane after hearing about Daddy that I’d packed minimal clothing and only the pair of scarred beige cowboy boots on my feet.

Now I was down a pair of jeans. But up a pair of jorts.

“You should let me wash your clothes, Tommie. I don’t mind. Who knows the last time someone has run that old Kenmore of Mama’s?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

She lingered outside the truck after I shut the door, her arms
crossed in the same defensive posture I’d seen since she was four and furious that Daddy wouldn’t let her drive the golf cart around the property. I rolled down the window.

“When are you leaving?” she asked. “Going back to Wyoming, I mean? Get back to those kids and your research? You could just forget all this stuff. Leave the ranch and everything else for Wade to watch over.”

Run away again, she meant.

“That’s the thing, Sadie. I’m not leaving. Not this time.”

In the dark, I couldn’t read the expression on her face.

“Please be careful,” I told her. “Lock everything up. Turn on that fancy alarm that Wade installed.”

“I’m well trained,” she replied. If the terseness in my voice worried her, she didn’t show it. “All of that is standard procedure around here.”

I shifted into first gear and sucked in a shaky breath. Everything I loved most in the world fit in this tin box on the prairie. I wasn’t going to allow anyone to take it away. Or, for that matter, let Rosalina Marchetti make it anything less than it was.

“We’re forever,” I said, the words we used to write together on the sidewalk at school, in the sand at the beach, in the glass fog on the car window.

Sadie watched me drive away, growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, until the blackness swallowed her.

The pickup crawled up the curved drive. The timed security lights from the sprawling ranch house glimmered through the trees. A cleaning crew showed up once a month to throw open the windows and dust, but the house had remained empty since Mama left it. I can’t say I was all that thrilled about walking into
it alone after the events of the last twenty-four hours, not knowing what hid in the dark beyond the reach of the security lights and a moon that flitted in and out of smoky night clouds.

Stepping out of the pickup, I slung my backpack over my shoulder, gripped the .45 in my right hand and the suitcase in the other, and moved toward the veranda. I groped under the cracked pot near the porch swing for the key. The family ghost, propelled by a gentle breeze, rode the swing back and forth. The air smelled wet and fresh, like a storm was coming. The door gave a familiar whine as I opened it, and I punched in the security code.

Sadie and I had yet to go through Mama’s things. Neither of us wanted to admit she would never return.

But I was thinking the time had come to admit a lot of things.

The house felt hollow, empty, a shell of what it used to be. I quickly flipped on lights to dispel the shadows, dropping my suitcase and backpack at the staircase, heading down the hall, not to Mama’s room in the newest addition, but toward the kitchen and the centerpiece of my childhood—a long oak farm table where we ate and laughed and learned algebraic equations that left their permanent imprint in the wood. Where Mama and Daddy had their fight.

I opened the louvered doors of the cozy utility room off the kitchen. This was Mama’s favorite space. Her small antique desk still faced the big window Daddy had cut out for her, once a view of lazy cows and inquisitive wildlife and little girls thinking up games that occasionally resulted in stitches.