Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  W.A., a man who had defended murderers, drummed his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair.

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “The money in your parents’ investment portfolio will be divided into thirds,” W.A. said. “One third to Sadie, one third to Tommie. The other third goes into a trust to be divided between two undisclosed heirs.”

  “I don’t understand.” Confusion flickered over Sadie’s face. I said nothing.

  “I sure as hell don’t, either.” W.A. unwrapped a cigar from his pocket, more relaxed now that he’d delivered the news. “Your Mama and Daddy created an elaborate financial labyrinth with a financial adviser in New York. Didn’t include me.” He snapped open a silver lighter. “I’m not saying it’s a code that can’t be cracked. I just don’t think they wanted you to.” Three perfect smoke circles rose in the air between us, a magic act that used to delight us as kids. “She slipped once, though. Later on, when she wasn’t quite right. Indicated the heirs are children. Under eighteen.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. Just go, I screamed silently.

  “I asked her once, if she was so intent on being secret about it, why she just didn’t give the money away privately before her death so you girls wouldn’t have to know,” W.A. continued. “She thought that would be deceptive. She said you girls wouldn’t care about the money.”

  I laughed at this, an artificial sound in the room that once echoed with Mama’s music.

  You were right about one thing, Mama. It’s not about money.

  Hours ago, as they lowered her body into the red sandy earth, I’d been in the process of forgiving her.

  That was my mistake.

  CHAPTER 29

  While W.A. roared his old white Cadillac to life outside, Sadie blew out the kerosene lamp and we headed into the kitchen with the dirty wineglasses. It was better in here. The low light over the sink was on, casting friendly light. The room had been whipped into perfect order, with damp dishtowels hanging neatly on Mama’s wooden towel rack, and foil-wrapped cookies and half-eaten cakes lining the long table.

  “Whoa,” Sadie said, peering inside the refrigerator, crammed with Tupperware, Cool Whip fruit salads, and King Ranch casseroles. “Take me home and let’s deal with this tomorrow. Or never.”

  Ten minutes later, I dropped Sadie in front of the trailer, armed with a slab of Marjory Adams’s double fudge cake and a generous serving of Waynette Sanders’s homemade macaroni and cheese, very specific requests from a text sent by Maddie.

  Hudson appeared under her porch light as I started to pull out, tie loose and hanging around his neck, dress shirt wrinkled and untucked, a relaxed smile on his face. So this is where he’d disappeared to. To keep an eye on Maddie.

  I waited with the engine running while he walked over.

  “Scoot,” he said, opening my door and throwing his jacket across the bench seat. “I’m driving. I left my truck at the barn.”

  I thought about protesting, my conditioned response to Hudson. I thought about asking why his truck was at the barn. Instead, I scooted.

  “Are you going to forgive me?” I asked, my eyes straight ahead, following the headlights as they illuminated the deep tire treads in the dirt road.

  “Probably,” he said.

  I hadn’t really cried all day. Not like this. Embarrassing, hiccupy gasps. Hudson yanked the truck over to the side of the road and held on to me while I let out grief and fear and an unfortunate amount of snot.

  “She’s gone, and I don’t even know who I am,” I said, sobbing.

  Hudson pulled back, tilting up my chin.

  “I know who you are. You’re this scar.” He touched my wrist. “And this one.” He stroked the hair at my temple. “You’re kind. Beautiful. Brave. You save children.”

  The hug rolled into something carnal and primitive, nothing but sensation, hands and mouths roving, neither of us able to get enough fast enough.

  “Wait,” he said thickly. He pulled off the brake and hit the gas but I couldn’t stop touching him and he couldn’t stop kissing me and it was a bumpy, chaotic ride until he turned off on one of the flattened grass four-wheeler paths to the pond.

  If predators of any kind waited for us in the dark, so be it.

  Dying right now in Hudson’s arms, without the answers, in the fields where I grew up, would be OK.

  This is what always happened when I surrendered my body to Hudson. Every brain cell was suddenly drunk. I stood blithely on the edge of a cliff, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much when I fell but 100 percent sure that it would.

  We only made it about a third of the way to the pond before Hudson turned the truck crookedly into the field, jamming on the brake. He pushed me flat against the back of the seat, and I knew from experience that he had the bad end of this deal.

  “Ow,” he said, backing into the steering wheel. “I’m a little out of practice. In a pickup.”

  “You had to add that last part.” For a second I wondered about all the women he made love to after I let him go, if it was like this, fierce and fast, all-consuming, so intimate it hurt.

  My black nylon funeral dress was somewhere up around my waist, his hands busy, warm, stripping off my underwear, losing them on the floor. I’d done my part on the drive over, unzipping his pants, pulling at his new shirt until buttons clicked off the dashboard. This was only going to end one way.

  Hudson paused to kick open his door, letting in the dense, hot perfume of our land and the ghosts of my past summers. I adjusted my body underneath him. “Is that better?”

  “Much better.” Hudson leaned in and pushed back my hair, damp with sweat and tears.

  “I’ve heard about you McCloud girls. Isn’t now when I’m supposed to ask if you want me to stop?”

  “Shut up,” I answered, and for a little while everything bad disappeared.

  “Who’s still here?” Hudson asked, stopping short of the drive.

  I lifted my head from his shoulder, groggy, sated, ready to collapse in my bed.

  Through the windows of the darkened living room, shadow and light played a spooky game. A steady pulse, a single, timed beat between each movement like a blinking traffic light.

  Light, dark.

  Light, dark.

  “No one,” I said. “Everybody should be gone.”

  “Stay here,” he said brusquely, and I nodded, my heart knocking.

  Hudson, already halfway up the walk, had entered another zone and I wasn’t invited.

  I pulled the keys out of the ignition and threw open the pickup door, careful not to slam it behind me.

  “Wait!” I whispered loudly, running up the walk in my bare feet.

  “This one,” I said, one key poking out from the jumble on a tarnished key ring that declared me “World’s Best Aunt.”

  Hudson motioned me to back up and in one smooth gesture slipped in the key, pushed open the door. He took three cautious steps inside the entryway.

  “What the hell?” he muttered. I slipped beside him.

  Hudson’s gun pointed at a motionless form slumped in my father’s chair. Two framed landscapes were lying on the floor. We had stepped into the path of an eerie slide show projected on the wall behind us. Oversized, out-of-focus images stained our clothes and our faces with flickering light.

  I’d seen these pictures of Fred Bennett and his murdered family enough for twenty lifetimes.

  A gray blur hovered on my black dress and up my arm. Part of the image on the wall.

  The dead little girl’s face or a doll or the pattern in a couch. I slapped at it like a terrible insect I had to get off. My eyes frantically scanned for a projector and settled on a laptop computer propped up on a stack of books.

  I moved farther into the room, away from the wall. The man in the chair dangled an empty bottle from one hand. I didn’t think a dead person could dangle. He lifted his other arm and pointed to the photograph on the wall. A bloody kitchen countertop.

  “Get back, Tommie,” Hud
son said. “Now.”

  “It’s Jack,” I said softly, moving toward the chair.

  No visible weapon. I knelt beside him. Something was horribly wrong.

  “Jack, this is my friend Hudson. He isn’t going to hurt you. Let’s turn this off and we can talk.” No response. I shook Jack by the shoulder, and Hudson took three steps closer, his weapon aimed at Jack’s head.

  Jack had deteriorated. He smelled rancid. Stubble grew out of his chin. His hair, usually so perfect, was oily, wild.

  “How many glasses do you count up there?” Jack asked. He didn’t appear to care whether Hudson shot him or not.

  I glanced up against my will.

  “Three,” I said.

  “Good girl,” Jack mumbled. “Smart girl.”

  The bottle in his hand was one of those overpriced fancy designer waters. Not whiskey.

  Not drunk.

  Jack pressed the remote, sweeping us into the tornado after a child’s bath. Wet towels on the floor, the cap off the toothpaste, a pile of dirty clothes in the corner.

  He fast-forwarded. Images, melting into each other. “Here it is,” he said.

  It was like someone had dumped a can of red paint in the open dishwasher. Fred Bennett’s blood. His body, slumped on the floor.

  Jack wasn’t interested in the blood or the body. He zeroed in, blowing up the focus on the refrigerator and a two-door cabinet above it.

  One of the cabinet doors hung open.

  Jack stumbled over to the wall, Hudson’s gun tracking him. Jack’s shadow loomed across the image, the dates from a calendar on the refrigerator reflected on his forehead like a tattoo.

  “See that little white thing right there inside the cabinet? That’s my foot.”

  I didn’t process it right away. All of the Bennett children had died. Hadn’t they?

  I moved toward Jack and he staggered toward me, grabbing my hair, his whiskey breath heating my face.

  “Shhhhhhh,” he said, his eyes empty, one finger in front of his lips, the other hand gripping my hair and pulling me close. The stubble on his chin scratched my cheek.

  “Play dead. Do you hear me?”

  He twisted my hair harder when I didn’t reply.

  “My brother told me to do that. He told me to play dead when the Hobbit came to our window. He saved me.” He scrunched up his face.

  “It’s OK, Hudson,” I said. “Put the gun down. I’ve got this.”

  “Please don’t be mad,” Jack pleaded. “He shot us. My bubby wouldn’t wake up. I had to find Daddy. As soon as Daddy saw me, he stuck me in the cabinet. ‘Shhhh,’ he said. ‘Keep the door closed.’ But I couldn’t. I was afraid of the dark. I saw the Giant come out of the living room with a big stick. I thought Daddy would win. Good guys win.”

  Three children. Two died. One lived. A cabinet door cracked open three inches, not one, not two, meant a lifetime of Jack playing and replaying the murder of his father like a bloody video game in his head.

  A part of me was enraged by this man in front of me. But this wasn’t a man. This was a bewildered child.

  “The Hobbit is at the window.” Jack stared frantically at the shut blinds across the room, his mouth an open circle, an expression of pure terror on his face. Maddie’s face as a toddler, before a shot needle punctured her skin.

  The silent scream, I called it.

  The silence before a terrible wail.

  When it came, I wondered whether Jack or the house would implode first.

  Wait, I urged myself. Let it go. He needs to let it go.

  In less than a minute, he was crying quietly.

  I took a breath. “Jack, you’re in my living room. You’re safe. The bad things happened a long time ago. The Hobbit can’t hurt you anymore.”

  His eyes flicked back to the window, suspicious. “He’s out there somewhere. You’re lying.”

  “He’s not coming in here. Hudson won’t let him. You will be OK. You did the right thing. Hiding.”

  “Fuck that!” He pushed me roughly, throwing the remote hard against the stone of the fireplace, cracking it into pieces.

  “PTSD,” Hudson mumbled to me. “I’ve seen it enough.”

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Not textbook exactly. I have to go upstairs. Please talk to him.”

  I ran to my bedroom, flipping on lights as I went. I spilled everything out of my backpack until I found what I wanted. Downstairs, I could hear Hudson speaking quietly.

  Then I was back on my knees in front of Jack, forcing the piece of paper from Idabel, Oklahoma, into his hands.

  “Are these the men, Jack? This picture has been sitting in Jennifer Coogan’s police file in Idabel. Jack, do you remember Jennifer?”

  Do you remember where you really are? Come on, Jack, snap back.

  Something in his eyes flickered.

  “These two men were strangers in the area at the time of her death. No one ever tracked them down.”

  “I drew that heart tattoo,” he said softly, pointing to the giant’s shoulder. “I went through boxes of crayons. They took all my crayons away.”

  I felt a rush of anger that he’d been forced to leave those pictures inside his head.

  That adults—caretakers—felt the need for such destructive control.

  I placed my hand on his knee.

  “Jack, your family’s murders, Jennifer’s murder … were six years apart. A thousand miles away from each other. But they’re connected. Can you help me, Jack?”

  CHAPTER 30

  Single 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.