Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  The trailer gleamed, spotless, as usual. Maddie was already plopped on the floor in front of the TV, lifting the lid of the Styrofoam container. Sadie and I nestled into opposite sides of the red-leather booth in the corner of the kitchen and dug in.

  A granola friend, born somewhere north, once asked in disgust, “Why would any sane person want a greasy breaded crust around a slab of red meat?” If you had to ask, I told her, you’d never know.

  I bit into a perfectly fried piece of heaven and, keeping my voice low, gave Sadie an abbreviated five-minute version of Rosalina’s letter, my internet research into her brutal, mob-connected husband, the surprise visit at Daddy’s office from the man named Jack, the violent encounter in the garage. Once again, I left out the fact that Jack’s attackers knew who I was. There was only so much worry I thought I should dump on her.

  “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.”

  CHAPTER 7

  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.

  Here, I had curled up in a slice of sun on the pine floor, listening to the steady vibration of the dryer, watching Mama pay bills or write letters.

  It had always been my safe room. If there was anything to discover, I was certain it would be here.

  I set the gun on the top ledge of the desk, moving aside a Hummel figurine of a girl playing piano, a bowl of seashells, and a small blue-velvet-covered book of Emily Dickinson poetry.

  The gun looked ugly beside them, its character changed forever today, the first time I fired out of fear.

  Mama’s window loomed, a big black hole into the night. The security lights shone only on the front of the house and tonight’s schizophrenic moon was in hiding.

  I imagined a face emerging in the glass like a floater rising to the top of a lake.

  A man, an attacker, could be standing on the other side and I wouldn’t know until the shards shattered and rained all over me.

  Stop it, I told myself. Stop it!

  I yanked at the cord of the blinds, slamming them down.

  The desktop rolled up easily. Inside, the desk was riddled with cubbyholes and rows of tiny drawers.

  The middle drawer in the top row always held the most fascination for Sadie and me, with its miniature keyhole and a crudely carved monkey gargoyle, its hands over its eyes.

  The irony was not lost on me today. I pulled on the drawer, but it didn’t open. I closed and opened ten other drawers, but they revealed only the usual debris: paper clips, old car keys, a bundle of rubber bands, a handful of buttons that weren’t related.

  I saved the large right-hand drawer for last, giving it a solid yank. I knew what was inside: a plain white business envelope grimly labeled “Read After My Death.” As one of her last lucid acts, Mama made a specific point of showing me exactly where it was. Funeral arrangements, she said. I flipped over the envelope, tempted to break the seal. Instead, I slid it deliberately back into the drawer. There were other things to discover first.

  I heard a scratching sound. A rat running along the woodwork?

  No. At the window. Something outside.

  It’s nothing, I told myself. Just like all those times as teenagers when Sadie and I lay in our beds upstairs, egging each other on, imagining all sorts of things congregating in the dark.

  I cautiously pushed aside the blind because the nine-year-old version of Sadie wasn’t there to pay a dollar to do it.

  Not a face. The fingers of a tree danced on the glass.

  The wind was beginning to blow, the storm coming. The moon, gone. I dropped the blinds and checked the locks on every door and window in the house. I yanked every curtain closed, flipped on every light. When I was done, I felt marginally more secure.

  Rummaging around in the large cabinet over the washing machine, I found a feather pillow with the right degree of mushiness and a set of striped blue sheets, smelling like they’d just been pulled from the line outside the window.

  Halfway up the staircase, exhaustion overtook any paranoia about what lurked out there in the night. My bandaged knee ached. I turned on the light when I reached my room, taking in the bare twin mattresses, the bright yellow furniture, the red curtains running with black ponies.

  With what little energy I had left, I thought about Fate. I thought about it as I kicked off my boots, as I tugged on the fitted sheet, as I yanked my hair out of its sloppy pin-up job, as I tucked the gun under my pillow, a big McCloud no-no.

  I thought about my brother, Tuck, who used to sit on the edge of this bed and tell me stories before he died in a car wreck on his eighteenth birthday and left a bottomless hole in my childhood. I thought about Rosalina, still searching for her stolen daughter. I thought about Anthony Marchetti, a killer of children, and wondered again what in the hell he had
to do with me.

  The rain came as I shut my eyes.

  I never knew Roxy Martin, but I saw gauze from her prom dress hanging like a turquoise ghost from a hundred-year-old oak tree a half-hour after the breath left her body. It plays like a movie in my mind. The mangled Mercedes convertible in the ravine. The flashing lights of the police cars that blocked the road, their headlights pointed toward silhouettes of three men down by the river searching among the wreckage for pieces of a pretty girl. The loud drumming of the helicopter ambulance landing on the black road ahead of us.

  I read about Roxy in the paper the next day and the next: a sophomore, a star volleyball player, a daughter of a single mom, and the victim of a senior boy who drank straight vodka out of a plastic water bottle at the dance and survived the accident with a bruised spleen and two broken legs.

  That was four years ago. I had been in Wyoming, driving back to Halo Ranch on my day off after picking up a prescription for a sick horse. Sitting there in my pickup, the police lights strobing my face, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the scene. I couldn’t breathe. A psych major halfway to a Ph.D., I could identify my first panic attack.

  I could also draw a line to its source.

  Tuck.

  I’d never had a full-blown attack since. But this morning, after a brief, fitful night of sleep in my old bed, I sat at Mama’s kitchen table and my hand trembled while I pulled my gun apart to clean it.

  I could be the daughter of a monster. For the first time, I gave that realization the freedom to roam my brain. Sadie’s revelation about Daddy’s words had opened a dark chasm.

  I love her like she was my own.

  My childhood could be a complete fraud. My DNA, an especially sick, twisted double helix formed by a stripper and a hit man.

  Mama and Daddy could be champion liars. Kidnappers. Sadie might not be my real sister.

  When a sharp pain jabbed me in the chest, I stood up and sucked in some slow, ragged breaths, opening the refrigerator for something to do, for some way to avoid a trip to Panic City.