by Cylin Busby
Then they took us to meet a large-chested German shepherd named Max, who weighed in at about a hundred and twenty pounds. The woman who had trained him put him through his paces to show us what he could do. He could climb a ladder just as nimbly as a cat, walk a beam like a gymnast, then turn and attack a guy in a padded suit like he was going to eat him for lunch. This dog could go from sweet and eager to please to vicious attack dog in about two seconds flat. I liked him right away, and he seemed to like me. Best of all, he had been trained to follow hand signals, not just verbal commands, an important factor since I couldn’t talk.
I went to the training center every day for about a week to work with the dog trainer and Max. He would become my dog and listen only to me. The trainer reminded me constantly that he was not a pet; he could not come into my house or play with my children. During one training session, they put a steak down in front of Max, and he never took his eyes off of me. He wouldn’t so much as look at it until I signaled him that he could.
After a week of training, we brought Max home to live with us. A couple of fellow officers had built him a big doghouse outside, which Cylin had outfitted with some old blankets and pillows to keep him warm at night.
I continued to work with Max every day. He was an amazing dog—a true friend, smart as hell, and he never once faltered. But as soon as we got him home, it became clear that our family dog, a little old beagle named Tigger, didn’t really feel the same love for Max. She was terrified of him and didn’t even want to go outside anymore. She started peeing in the house, especially whenever she heard Max barking outside. One day Tig was looking out the back door when Max jumped up on the stairs, startling her. Tig turned to run in the other direction so fast she pulled something in her hip and could barely walk for days, dragging her hind legs. After about a week with both Max and Tigger, it became clear that we were giving our family pet a nervous breakdown. But getting rid of Max just wasn’t an option, so I called up my sister, Bernadette, in Maine to see if she could take Tig. Bee and her husband, Dale, were Kelly’s parents, and lived up in Belgrade, a beautiful town situated on a series of lakes—our favorite summer vacation spot. Bee was more than happy to take Tigger for us. This was also about the time that Polly and I decided that Kelly should leave us too. She had been a huge help, and it was nice to have her around, but it felt wrong to have my nineteen-year-old niece subjected to the prison we were now living in. An eight-foot fence, a vicious dog, no visitors besides cops, the constant threat that someone might want to do harm to us. Why would anyone want to live like that? We sat her down one night and explained that she needed to get on with her life. Her brother Lucky came to get her and also took Tigger with him. To say the kids were devastated by this double loss would be a great understatement.
While I was in the hospital right after Christmas, Polly had taken our friend Winny’s advice and brought the kids in to see the psychiatrist whom I had visited. They went in as a group, and Polly sat outside. After about an hour, he called Polly in and sent the kids out. What he told her was pretty disturbing. Their answer to every question was that things were “fine” and that everything was “okay.” They were not scared; they were not getting into trouble at school. They were not bothered by the police protection, the fence, the dog, the guns. “They’ve become very adept at deception,” the doctor pointed out. “I don’t know if they are just trying to deceive me, or if they have actually convinced themselves of this, but the picture they paint of your home life is not accurate; it just can’t be. As a rule, we don’t like to see children, especially this young, suppressing such strong emotions. Or becoming this good at deception. Either way, it’s not good for their mental health.”
Polly told him that we were thinking about moving to a safer place, to an undisclosed location where we could all live normally again. We were just waiting to see if there would be a break in the case, give it a few more months. “I would encourage you to relocate sooner rather than later,” the doctor said. “I don’t know how much more your family can take under these conditions.”
Polly was horrified. “Maybe we should just pack up and go, disappear,” she told me one night. But she was in the middle of her final year of nursing school, the kids were halfway through with school. Maybe we hadn’t given the investigation enough time. I didn’t have very high hopes, but it had been just four months. Maybe they would get some sort of lead and be able to arrest someone, make our lives safe again.
“If nothing happens by the time I graduate in May,” Polly said, “then we are gone.”
I agreed. I was still angry, especially hearing about how my shooting was now affecting the kids. But the urgency of my revenge was fading. There was no rush. If the detectives couldn’t do their job, then I would. It was as simple as that. I had no job to go back to, no life waiting for me. I had nothing but years and years of surgery stretching out in front of me. The way I was looking at it, I had nothing but time.
chapter 27
CYLIN
WHILE Dad was in the hospital having his jaw rebuilt, Mom took us to see his psychiatrist. He had a nice house up on Hatchville Road, the road that Dad used to take us on when he went running or when we rode our bikes. His office was in a building attached to his house, like a little studio office.
“Well, hello,” he said when we got there, like we were just visiting him at his house. “Come on in.” He was very friendly looking, bald on the top of his head, and he wore little round glasses like John Lennon’s. Eric, Shawn, and I all sat in his office together. It wasn’t like a doctor’s office, more like a small living room with a desk in it. We all sat down, right next to each other, facing his desk, and he started talking to us about how things were going at school and at home.
“Now we’re going to talk about your dad a little bit, if that’s okay,” he said finally, changing gears. “I know that your father was injured very seriously a few months ago. Are you ever afraid that someone is going to hurt him again?” he asked us. I knew what the answer should be, so I shook my head. I heard Eric say, “No,” as well.
“What about fear of someone hurting someone else in your family—your mother, perhaps, or one of you?”
He looked at us, waiting for us to say something, but we didn’t.
“And having the police around all the time, does that bother you? How do you feel about it?”
“It’s fine,” Shawn said. “They’re there to protect us.” I could hear Mom’s words, almost exactly, in his robotic answer.
“It doesn’t bother you?” he pointedly asked Eric.
“It’s okay.” Eric sort of laughed nervously.
I quickly understood that this was a test of some sort and that we were not supposed to tell this guy anything. Who was he anyhow? What was he writing down on that pad of paper on his desk?
“What about you,” he said, looking at me. “Your friends? Your mom says you’ve been having some problems with them.”
“No. Everyone is really nice to me,” I heard myself say. It sounded just right. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me about Ms. Williams or Cathy’s birthday party, and he didn’t.
“And trouble at school for you two,” he said to Eric and Shawn. “Fights, aggression...” He looked down at a piece of paper on his desk for a moment. “Your mom tells me that you’re angry a lot. Shawn? Eric?”
“Just regular school stuff,” Eric said. He sounded very grown up. “It’s seventh grade, you know.”
Eric and the doctor stared at each other for a moment. After a few more questions, the doctor said we could go. We stepped out into his little hallway and sat there waiting for Mom, who went into his office right after us.
We said nothing to each other, just sat silently, but I felt really good. My brothers and I knew what we had done, we didn’t have to discuss it beforehand to get our stories straight or afterward to congratulate ourselves. We were getting really good at telling adults exactly what they wanted to hear.
After Dad got home from his surgery, he h
ad to use a cane to walk. The doctors had operated on his hip to move some bone into his face—he said it was really painful. On days when it was cold, his hip seemed to hurt worse. This was the first time I heard Dad complaining about pain, and even though I’m sure it must have hurt him to be shot, for some reason the hip pain was worse. His face was shaved and all bandaged up again, and he was really skinny; it looked like his whole body was shrinking except for his big mummy head.
Before Dad was shot he spent his off hours wrestling with my brothers on the living room floor or running or fixing up his junk cars in our driveway. He loved taking us to the beach in the summer and to the dunes in the winter to fly kites. Every couple of weeks he’d take us all out to the movies—even if the film playing wasn’t for kids. And I was his little girl. Everyone liked to tease me about how spoiled I was, but I didn’t care. I was the baby of the family, and the only girl, and that made me feel special. “Cylin can’t do anything wrong,” Shawn hissed at me one night when we had been in a fight about something and Dad had taken my side. I knew I was Dad’s favorite, and I loved it.
That changed when Dad came home from the hospital. He wasn’t the same Dad we had known before. There weren’t any more fun wrestling matches or movies or runs. Instead, there was nothing.
Dad couldn’t talk, and he was angry all the time. He didn’t seem to notice when we were around or when we weren’t. I felt like he didn’t even like to look at me anymore. He and Mom both spent most of their time taking care of him and his feeding schedule and other medical needs. When they weren’t doing that, they were all sitting at the kitchen table with the cops who were over, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. I would watch him sometimes and think about how much I missed my old dad. I wondered if maybe after this surgery he would be more like he used to be. But he came home worse—thinner, more angry, hurting.
The doctors said that his jaw would be wired shut for six to eight more months; then he would go back in to see if the surgery had worked. Sometimes he got terrible headaches that would last for days. When this happened, he would go into the bedroom and lie in the dark for a long time. We couldn’t watch TV or do anything but be very, very quiet, or he would start throwing up. Mom had a set of wire cutters that she could use to open his jaw in an emergency, but she said, “God help us if that happens.”
A few weeks after Dad got home from the surgery, he picked up our new dog, the one Mom had told us about. Max was at the house when we got home from school one day, along with a new doghouse and a big dog chain. He was a giant dog. If I had wanted to, I could have climbed on his back and ridden him like a horse. But Dad reminded us that he was not a pet, and he was here to watch over us. He would only follow hand signals given by my dad, so we were not allowed to be in the yard unless Dad was holding him or he was chained to his doghouse. Max wouldn’t trust anyone except Dad, and would take food only from him. When Dad was with him, Max was the sweetest dog in the world. But the second Dad was out of sight, Max would bark at me and pull at his chain. His eyes were totally different, like he wanted to tear me apart. He was terrifying.
Dad would work with Max out in the yard some afternoons when it wasn’t too cold for his hip. One afternoon, I watched Dad give Max the “hit” signal, punching his fist into his open palm. Then he pointed at the fence. Max growled, and in about a second had crossed the yard and hit the fence at full speed, jumping up. He almost cleared the eight-foot fence—I couldn’t believe it. Then Dad clapped his hands twice, and Max ran back over to his side like a happy puppy, his tail wagging. Dad gave the “sit” signal, and Max sat right in front of him, watching Dad’s face the whole time. Dad then circled his hand and touched his hip and Max came around to sit next to Dad’s left hip. He petted Max on top of the head to let him know he did a good job and waved his arm out, which signaled the drill was over and he was free to go. I knew then that one signal could change this easygoing dog into a vicious attack dog. He loved Dad and would do anything for him, even if that meant killing someone at his command.
I didn’t really like Max; in fact, I was terrified of him. So was my little dog, Tigger. She knew that Max could eat her in one bite, and she refused to go outside, even to pee. It was really sad to watch her shake and hide every time Max barked in the yard, which was often. So, just a few days after Max moved in, Mom told us that Tig would have to move out. “She is going to be so much happier with Aunt Bee and Uncle Dale up in Maine,” Mom explained. ‘And you want her to be happy, right?” My brothers didn’t seem to care that much, but I cried. Kelly was also leaving, going home, and she took Tigger with her when she went.
When they left, the house felt dead and empty inside. Kelly had been sharing my room since the summer, and now I would have to sleep in there alone. I missed her, even though she got on my nerves sometimes, always asking me how I was feeling and wanting me to talk to her about stuff. And now we didn’t have Tigger either. I woke up at night sometimes and thought I heard her paws on the kitchen tiles, the way I used to when she would get up in the middle of the night for a drink. I would fall back asleep feeling so happy that Tigger was there again. But in the morning, I would remember that she was gone.
Once the fence was put up, it was so close to my window that it blocked out the sun, and my room stayed dark all day. The wood was new and white and reflected into the windows, making me think, for the first few mornings when I woke up, that it had snowed overnight—all that whiteness outside everywhere. From the inside, we were cut off. We couldn’t see the church next door or our other neighbors, and they couldn’t see us, the fence was so high. It looked strange from the outside, too, unrecognizable as our house, our yard.
When the construction was done, a security company came and installed an alarm system and an intercom, which Eric and Shawn and I loved. When someone came over, they had to push a button on the outside of the fence, and it would ring inside, like a phone. You could push a button in the house and talk to whoever was outside and decide if you wanted to “buzz” him or her in. This meant pressing a button to undo the lock on the gate outside. We never did buzz anyone in because of Max—if he wasn’t chained, Dad would have to hold him before we could let anyone in.
The large gate across the driveway always had to be opened manually, and this was a huge pain, especially in the winter months when it was cold and snow piled against it, making it hard to move. Now anytime we went outside, or anyone else came in, we had a series of steps to go through: turning off the alarm, securing the dog, swinging open the big driveway fence, then closing it and resecuring everything. Even to take the trash out, Dad had to be there, holding the dog, and the alarm system had to be disarmed.
The fence also had a motion detector that would go off if someone tried to climb over it. “If you hear that alarm at night,” Mom told me, “you go up into the attic with your brothers and stay there until we tell you that you can come out, okay?” After we were woken up one windy night, terrified that someone was trying to scale the fence, we realized that the motion detector was so sensitive that almost anything—even Max walking near it—could set it off, sending the shrill alarm cutting through the house and notifying the police department immediately. Dad decided to turn off the motion detector and just leave the gates armed.
Our bus driver and the school principal had to be notified right away if we weren’t going to school, because if we weren’t on the bus or in class, our teachers and the bus driver had been instructed to contact the police immediately. Mom sat us down with Dad and Don Price the night before school started back up after Christmas break. “You cannot be late for class, you cannot miss the bus,” Mom explained. “You understand that the police will be looking for you if you are late, even by a few minutes?”
Don told us that when we got home from school, we were to use a special code to be let into the fence. “You guys might be targets for someone trying to get to your dad,” he told us. “If someone comes over to you while you’re trying to get into the fence and puts a g
un to your head, you’re going to have a special code to let us know that.”
I had been so happy to lose my police escort that I forgot about the real reason a cop had been following me to school. Suddenly, I wanted Arthur the Bear to walk me to the bus again and stand outside my classroom. The embarrassment of dealing with the other kids at school was better than someone putting a gun to my head.
“This code needs to be easy for you guys to remember,” Mom said. “If everything is safe and you want to be let in, you ring the buzzer, then say over the intercom, ‘I don’t have any homework tonight,’ like that. If someone is with you, or something bad is happening, you say, ‘I have a lot of homework tonight.’ Okay? Can you remember that?” She was looking right at me. It made me mad. Just because I was the youngest, she thought I didn’t get it.
“I can remember it,” I told her. I just didn’t want to ever have to use it.
“So the cops won’t be at school anymore?” Shawn asked.
“They will sometimes, just not every day, and not right outside your classroom. They’ll still swing by to check on you guys a lot,” Mom said.
“You’ll never know we’re there, sweetheart,” Don told me. I think he was trying to make us feel better, like our lives would be more normal, but I was terrified. Having the fence up, the alarm system, this vicious dog, the code words—it just made everything more surreal. Things weren’t getting any better. They seemed to be getting worse.
A couple of nights after the security guys put in the alarm system, Eric and Shawn and I were sitting in the living room watching TV after dinner. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen with a couple of Dad’s friends from the force, John Ayoub and Craig Clarkson. I was lying on the rug in front of the TV doing my homework when suddenly the TV cut out and the whole house went black.
“Oh Jesus, Johnny,” Mom said in a high-pitched voice. She sounded scared.
