The Year We Disappeared

by Cylin Busby

  ONCE the kids and Polly were back home on the Cape, I had even more reason to get well and get out of the hospital. It looked like it was going to be at least three months before the next stage of surgery; the muscle and tissue in my face needed time to heal completely. The jawbone on both sides of my face had been discontinued. I had temporomandibular joints (TMJs) and a piece of my chinbone left—all of this was wired shut to heal. Once the soft tissue had healed, the plan was to insert a steel bar to connect my TMJs to what was left of my chin. The experimental part of the reconstruction would come next. They would hang a micromesh stainless steel net from the steel bar and pack it with osteoblast cells—these are the marrow cells from which bone develops. The hope was that, in time, I would “grow” enough new bone in my face to have a working jaw again. To be able to eat and breathe, at least. Would I be able to talk? The doctors said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  I was facing months before they could go in and start the rebuilding work. But there was no way I could stay in the hospital until Christmas. I had to show them pronto that I could walk, use the bathroom, and feed myself if I wanted to go home.

  I’d lost about thirty pounds or so but was building up strength every day—walking the halls with my IV pole, keeping my mind sharp with chess and science fiction books. There were still days when I would get blinding headaches and couldn’t seem to keep a thought in my head. I just wanted the pain to stop. These were some kind of injury-related migraines that no medication could touch; they had to pass. When the pain finally went away I felt like I had a new lease on life. There was still discomfort, but it could be managed with meds—nothing like the pain of those headaches.

  It was especially hard to be an invalid since I’d spent so long on the force marking my place as a guy who could handle anything physically. I was confident, had done some boxing and enough karate to defend myself, and knew that I could take any call without needing to bring in backup from a big guy like Arthur the Bear or Monty. The sergeants felt the same way about me and sent me out one night to bring in a felon named Danny Mannis—an ex-con and ex-pro boxer on parole from a federal mental prison in St. Louis. A convicted bank robber, Danny had lost it while doing time and finished his sentence in the mental lockup. Who knows what happened to him in there, but he wasn’t a well man, obviously.

  Danny was living back in Falmouth and one night tore the locked door off of a Dunkin Donuts (never did figure out why—maybe he was pissed they were closed). Two federal marshals were there to get him but they needed local backup, and I was their guy. The marshals had heard that Danny was bad news—and one look at the door confirmed it. He’d torn it clean off—aluminum metal frame with the dead bolt and everything. He was a formidable physical specimen—a bit taller than me, he’d spent his time in the can running, lifting weights, and doing boxing workouts. He wore a World War II aviator’s cap and rode a bicycle when going anywhere in town. Nobody messed with him, with good reason. He was a deadly combination of really crazy and really strong. The marshals wanted nothing to do with him.

  When we got to the scene, I explained to Danny why he had to go with them, that he had to let them chain, cuff, and manacle him. “I don’t want to have to fight you,” I explained. “They don’t want to have to fight you either. But if push comes to shove, I will bundle you, and you will have to go with them anyway, so let’s do this the way you want to.” He went willingly. I don’t know if his choice had anything to do with the fact that I was ready to take him on physically, but it doesn’t really matter. The job got done, and it got done because I was ready to handle it any way I had to, which is why it was my call and no one else’s. I wasn’t exactly Dirty Harry, but not bad. After a few years on the force, karate training plus tactical squad training and good old common sense had turned me from a know-nothing rookie to a very competent officer of the law.

  I loved being a cop, but after my shooting I found myself wishing I had applied to the fire department like I wanted to when I was younger. Lord knows I had the opportunities, and I’d thought it through, too, even talked to Polly about it. The pay was the same, and with training I could have worked my way up to paramedic within a year. I was certainly exposed to the same risks on occasion. I’d spent a few calls crawling through houses as they burned, looking for occupants, and even sifting through ashes after fires, looking for victims, then loading them onto stretchers and transporting them. There was one guy who was burned so badly that when we picked up the stretcher, he flew up into the air. We were expecting him to weigh his living weight, which had been reduced drastically in the fire. Most embarrassing to have to reload his corpse and buckle it down.

  I spent a lot of time in the hospital thinking about what could have been, how things might have been different. It’s hard to believe the old saying that “things happen for a reason” when the things happening to you are god-awful and you just want them to be over with. No matter how I looked at it, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that this had happened for some reason that made any sense.

  My last week in the hospital was spent with Polly and me both learning how to care for my wounds and keep me fed and watered. Polly felt okay leaving the kids in Falmouth for the day with Kelly and the guards to come up for a couple of visits. I got the distinct feeling that the only reason the doctors were letting me go home was because of Polly’s nursing training, so thank God for that.

  Once I was ready to go, my trachea hole would be covered with gauze. I didn’t need the respirator anymore; I could breathe fine through my nose. But with what was left of my jaw fused shut with wires, there would be a lot of fluid in my throat that we’d need to remove, so they were giving us a suction machine. They’d been using suction on me in the hospital, but this was a portable device, a small metal box that you plugged in. It had a gauge on it to adjust the amount of suction you needed from the attachment on the end of the tube—kind of like a vacuum cleaner, only smaller. After they showed us how to use it, my favorite nurse on the floor explained that we’d need to do this at least three times a day, and I would need to try to cough up anything I could and suction that out as well.

  “I would recommend keeping these pieces of equipment away from the children, as it might scare them,” Nurse Kathy pointed out. Polly and I both nodded in agreement. Might also scare us a little, I thought, looking at the odd contraption plus all the gauze, ointments, extra tubing, and formula cans they were sending home with us.

  Feeding was a whole different process, but equally unpleasant. Every two to three hours, Polly or I would need to withdraw whatever liquid was in my stomach through the GI tube using a syringe. This was to measure how much residual was there to determine how much I needed for my next feeding. But then, so I didn’t remove the enzyme needed for digestion from my stomach, I had to return the contents of what I’d drawn out back in, then add more fresh stuff to level it off. The whole process was pretty bad, and the smell was truly horrible. How Polly could stand it, I don’t know. The stuff we had to draw out of my stomach was basically puke, and smelled like it. And then I had to put it back in. It’s a wonder I didn’t just vomit, but I tried to distract myself by mixing up the can of formula for my next meal and just getting on with it. When it was feeding time, I would hook the container up to my GI tube and sit there watching the fluid go in. When it was gone, I was done. We flushed the GI tube with water to keep it clean, clamped it to keep it from dripping, then used medical tape to secure it off to the side until my next feeding, and that was it. Bon appétit.

  I would also need a special bed, since I couldn’t lie flat until the trachea hole was healed, so a bed was ordered and shipped to the house from a medical supply store. It was a lounge bed chair that I could sit up in like a hospital bed. With two pillows or so propped under my head, I found that I could breathe just fine.

  Dr. Keith came in to see me before my discharge to explain the next steps. I could tell he wasn’t entirely comfortable with me leaving the hospital, m
aybe because I was his pet project and he didn’t want me getting more body parts blown off before he could try rebuilding my face. “You need to come back in three days for a checkup. If your health is satisfactory at that point, you can go home. But then you need to be back in three more days for another checkup,” he told me. “That’s a lot of driving,” he added, after a beat, eyeing me. I think he was waiting for me to say that I’d changed my mind and that I’d rather just stay in the hospital. Instead, I wrote on my pad. “Then what?”

  “Then you come back in a week. And eventually, when you’re stable, you can come in every two weeks for us to check on your progress.” He looked down at my file for a second. “If all goes well, we’ll do the next surgery on December twenty-sixth,” he finally said. “How does that sound?”

  “Great,” I wrote on my pad. ‘And Merry Christmas to you too.” I was just so happy to be going home, I would have agreed to almost anything.

  chapter 17

  CYLIN

  ONE afternoon when I got home from school, Kelly was sitting at our kitchen table, just like she had never left—like nothing had ever happened. Mom was back in nursing school full time, and with Dad gone, it was hard to do everything in the house by herself, so she’d asked Kelly to come back and help out. Kelly had brought our family pets back with her, too—our cat, Pyewacket, and dog, Tigger. She’d taken them up to Maine with her while we were gone in Boston. I was so glad to see Tigs and Pye that for the first few minutes, I didn’t even care that Kelly was back.

  My dad’s friend Don was there, drinking coffee with another cop named Stoney—his real name was Paul Stone. He and Dad were considered to be two of the most handsome cops on the force—both tall and blond, with classic good looks. Stoney was a bit taller than Dad, about six foot two or so, and had been a football player for Boston University before becoming a cop, and he and Dad both had the same broad shoulders and strong builds. Stoney had left the force and gone to work for the MDC, Metropolitan District Commission, a couple of years before Dad was shot, but he still hung out with all the Falmouth cops, especially Dad, and they played a lot of handball. I noticed that Kelly usually took a little extra time to look nice when he came around.

  My brothers and I suspected that Kelly might have a little crush on Stoney, so when I first got home from school that day, I thought for a second maybe she had come over because she’d heard he was going to be there. But it turned out that she was actually moving back in with us for good.

  Mom was home too, sorting laundry in the kitchen. She had just gotten home from one of her nursing classes. “We got another basket today, from the Cheese House,” she told me, pointing to a huge gift basket on the table. We had been getting a lot of these—local places sending over big baskets and boxes of goodies for us and for the officers guarding us. Every night for dinner we had a covered dish that someone had dropped off. Usually one of the officer’s wives would make us a lasagna or a casserole or two, enough for our whole family, visitors, and the guys guarding us outside.

  I dug into the basket, bypassing the pretty cellophane-wrapped apples and oranges for the good stuff that I knew was underneath. “Can I have this?” I asked Mom, holding up a giant chocolate bar.

  She gave me a look and I just smiled. “Please?” I begged, but she just shook her head. “Okay, how about this?” I held up a bag of some granola mix that had chocolate chips in it. “This is practically health food!”

  “Fine,” Mom said with a smile. “Not too much. Arthur and Cynthia sent over a whole turkey for dinner and . . .” I was busy opening the granola bag, so it took me a second to notice that mom had stopped talking. When I looked up, she was holding a dark blue shirt, one of my dad’s police uniform shirts. It must have been buried in the bottom of the clothes hamper, from before we left, before he was shot.

  Mom just stood there for a second looking at the shirt, then she held it to her face. Nobody said anything for the longest time, then she opened the cellar door that led to the washer in the basement and threw the shirt down the stairs. I could see that she was crying. Then she starting yelling. “Damn it, damn it, I can’t do this anymore! I’m done!” She went to go down the cellar stairs but ended up sitting on the top step, sobbing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there, holding the bag of granola. Eric and Shawn walked into the kitchen from the living room, where they had been watching TV. “What’s wrong?” Shawn asked. He looked nervous.

  Don went over to Mom and knelt beside her. “It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay, it’s already okay. He’s coming home. It’s all going to be fine,” I heard him telling her.

  “What’s the matter with Mom?” Eric whispered to Kelly.

  “Nothing, just go back into the other room,” Kelly said, getting up. She tried to scoot us down the hallway.

  “Look, you’re scaring the children,” I heard Don say quietly.

  “Oh, mustn’t scare the children!” Mom said. She started laughing in a very fake way, sounding like a crazy lady. “My God, someone only tried to kill their father, and probably wants to kill them. You’re telling me not to scare them?” she screamed. “Look at you!” She pointed at Don’s shoulder holster. “How many guns are in this house right now? In our yard? Don’t you tell me not to scare them!” She was angrier than I had ever seen her before. She stood and started picking up the clothes she had been sorting and threw them down the stairs in big armfuls.

  “Mommy’s fine.” She looked over at me and said in a singsong voice, “Just hate to do laundry, that’s all.” I could see tears on her face. She picked up another pile of the clothes she had carefully sorted and hurled them through the cellar doorway. When she had emptied the hamper, she turned and went down the stairs too, slamming the basement door behind her. After a few seconds of silence, Don opened the door and followed her.

  “Come on, you guys,” Kelly said, motioning us out of the kitchen and into the living room. “Your mom was at school all day, she just needs a break. Give her a minute and she’s going to be fine.”

  And Kelly was right. We went into the other room and I sat with Tigger on my lap and petted her soft, floppy ears while my brothers watched TV. After a while, Mom called us into the kitchen for dinner. She had heated up the turkey and the house smelled like Thanksgiving. Kelly was sitting next to Stoney at the table, blushing. Don and Stoney had pulled out the table extension to make it large enough for all of us to sit and have this feast, and they’d brought in the extra chairs from the den. Mom seemed okay again; you couldn’t even tell she had been crying. She fixed some plates of food for the cops who were on duty in the yard; she was smiling and looking like the picture of a perfect mom. No one would have guessed that she had had a meltdown just an hour before.

  The next morning, we got ready for school and Kelly made us breakfast. Everything was starting to settle into a pretty regular routine. We were walked to the bus stop by an officer. Two cops followed us to school in a cruiser. An armed officer guarded each of us at school. Then the procedure was reversed on the way home.

  One afternoon, Eric went to hang out with the kids at the Zylinskis’ house after school. I don’t know how he managed to get out of our house and cross the yard without one of the guards seeing him, but he did. When we noticed that he was missing, everyone started to freak out.

  “When did you last see your brother?” a cop asked me. I couldn’t remember; I’d been watching Little House on the Prairie.

  “I think he was going over to the Zylinskis’,” Shawn finally said, and the cop took off running down our street, holding his gun at his hip with one hand as he ran. A few minutes later, he was back with Eric, who looked like he’d been crying.

  “You can’t just go off without telling anyone!” Mom yelled at him. I knew Eric had no idea that what he’d done was wrong—none of us really did. Later, when everyone had calmed down, Eric told us how the cop had run into the Zylinskis’ yard and grabbed him and yelled, “You must always remain in my eyesight!” We kind of laughed
it off, like the guy was a little crazy. No harm done; it was forgotten. Until that night when I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. I could hear Mom and Kelly out in the living room, talking to a couple of cops who were visiting. They were discussing how the security would have to change when Dad came home. More guys on duty. A sniper on the roof with a long-range rifle, that kind of thing. I hadn’t really thought too much about when all of this would end. Somehow, I had convinced myself that once Dad was able to come home, things would be normal again.

  We had all been so caught up in the urgency of Dad’s injuries and his “accident” that I almost hadn’t thought about the reason behind all of this security. But in the dark, alone, Richie’s words that day in the lunchroom came back to haunt me: “Maybe they’ll come to school and shoot you, too.” Dad’s shooting hadn’t been an accident. Someone had wanted to kill him. I was just starting to understand this. Someone hated him. The thought made my chest ache. I just couldn’t imagine someone hating my dad that much, wanting to hurt him this way. And now I was starting to see that they hated me, too, and my brothers. They wanted to kill all of us—really kill us. We couldn’t go anywhere without the police. To the grocery store, to a friend’s house, to school. There was no safe place. You must always remain in my eyesight. I wanted to imagine a time when this would be over and we could go back to living the way we used to, but the more I thought about that, the more scared I got. There would be no going back to normal for us. There were only two choices now: live like this, or don’t live at all.

  chapter 18

  JOHN

  DON Price, two guards, and Polly and I made the trip back to the Cape with all my new equipment. I was due for checkups every three days in Boston, so although it would be a lot of traveling, it would be worth it just to get home.

  Don was cheerful on the trip, talking about how my security detail was the best job going, and everyone in the department wanted to sign up for it. “No traffic or pissed-off tourists to deal with. Time-and-a-half payscale.” I had a small pad with me and wrote, “Sounds like my shooting will fatten the wallets of a lot of cops/friends.” Polly read it off to him and they both laughed.