Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

He moved first.

  Once again, I found myself in the arms of a strange man in a strange place. Except he wasn’t a stranger.

  He was Tuck.

  “You look just like her,” my brother said into my ear, my wet face pressed against the scruffy fabric of his coat. He smelled clean and safe, like he’d showered with Ivory soap and then eaten an orange for breakfast. These are the silly things we remember. He used to smell like boy sweat and too much Drakkar cologne.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  The people in the café stopped gawking and went back to their coffee, figuring us for overwrought lovers. Tuck and I sat down in awkward silence. His hands fingered the yellowed newspaper articles, picking them up one at a time, hesitating the longest over the one about Jennifer’s murder.

  “Is this how you found me?” he wanted to know.

  “Not exactly. Some legal documents helped. But once I found you, I finally got a hint of what they meant.”

  “I mailed them to Mama. Every time they relocated me, I sent her a newspaper article so she’d know where I was. Nothing else. Just a clipping.”

  He reached a hand across the table, hesitant.

  “Let’s just sit here for a while.” I dropped my hands to my lap. “You don’t have to explain. I’ve figured out most of it.”

  It didn’t matter that a homeless man was probably buried in Tuck’s grave. Or that Tuck was once an OU student named Barry.

  What did anything matter when my dead brother sat across from me, pulsing with life, wanting to fill the space between us?

  “I was a left-handed pitcher,” he said. “A bookie for Cantini tracked every high school team with a left-handed pitcher my age. The Feds found out they were stalking two players in other states. William thought it was just a matter of time.”

  William. Daddy.

  Tuck picked up the clip with Jennifer’s photo, her smile forever frozen in newsprint, and in a sad little house in Oklahoma.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” he said. “I loved her. That summer, they tracked me down at OU through a leak in the field office. Found Jennifer first. Tortured her to get my address. I’m pretty sure she died without saying.”

  His voice faltered. “The marshals kept moving me. Eventually here.”

  Tuck leaned back and pushed his glasses up with the long, graceful fingers of a pianist. “I met Nora as a student at Eastman and she saved my life. We’ve been married twelve years. She teaches flute. We have two kids.”

  “I know.” I wondered whether I should confess to last night’s spying, to months of spying. I wasn’t sure he knew about the inheritance. The financial documents Marcia found said his kids wouldn’t be notified until they turned twenty-five.

  I studied his face. Up close, he looked older than forty-four. Wrinkles feathered out from the corners of his eyes. Two deep lines creased his forehead. Only his hands were smooth and young. The pale yellow shirt under his tweed coat was slightly wrinkled, unstarched. The jeans were worn to a pale blue, the hem a little ragged against white Nikes. Things he didn’t care about.

  I wondered what kind of man he was.

  I imagined that he was two kinds.

  The kind who sat patiently on a piano bench for hours with a struggling student.

  And the kind who shut himself away in a rehearsal room to forge thunderous compositions of terror and loss, angry notes slamming the walls, trapped in a tiny space, trying to get out. Like him.

  “Tommie, did you hear what I said? I saw Mama before she died. She called me. She was frantic. Asked me to clean out a safe deposit box. Gave me the name of a bank. I said no. Too risky to come home. Two days later, I dialed the number back. I told the nurse I was a distant relative just checking in. She said that Mrs. McCloud was being treated for dementia. That her husband had recently passed away. I flew down to Texas the next morning.”

  He tapped his finger nervously on the edge of his cup, still full, growing tepid. His eyes were expanding and contracting mirrors, a kaleidoscope of emotions I couldn’t identify. Shame, maybe? Grief for Daddy? Had he known and chosen not to come to the funeral? Before I could ask, maybe so I wouldn’t, he continued.

  “It was a mistake. A woman at the bank barely let me past the door. And Mama … she didn’t know me, of course. I sat there anyway and held her hand and talked about the kids. I left after about half an hour. She was screaming my name by the time I hit the front door. I didn’t go back.”

  I hadn’t guessed that. Tuck had been the visitor in Mama’s nursing home, not some goon of Cantini’s.

  “I’m sorry,” Tuck repeated. “About not being there for you. I know the lies bothered … Daddy. Even when you were young, before everything went to hell, he wanted to tell you.”

  “Anthony Marchetti is my father,” I said flatly.

  “William McCloud was your real father. He was my father. Genetics has nothing to do with it.”

  He had no right to say this.

  And every right.

  It stirred up things I was still desperate to bury.

  I ducked my head and brought my backpack up to my lap from under the table, unzipping a small compartment.

  “Do you remember this?”

  I laid a worn playing card, a joker, in front of him on the table and watched the recognition dawn on his face as he turned it over to reveal two pink swans entwined on the back.

  “Something wild.” He looked up at me with a wry grin I remembered. “Something unexpected. Granny was never wrong.”

  I laid down one more card. I’d pulled it out of the deck at random in the hotel room last night after compulsively shuffling the deck for hours. Granny’s fast and loose method of answering a single burning question.

  It was the reason I was sitting at this table and not in an airplane on the way home, leaving the past alone, turning my back on the unanswered questions.

  One card, one answer.

  The three of clubs.

  For Tuck and me, a second chance.

  EPILOGUE

  I am sitting on the floor of Tuck’s old room, a pile of treasure in front of me. A blue jay’s feather, a dried stem of lavender, a grocery store slip, a smooth pebble from the driveway, a fork, a photograph. I don’t know what these objects meant to my mother, but she hid them here under the mattress in the childhood room of the son she had to let go.

  It is a breezy, cloudy October day, almost a year since my brother and I sat together in that New York coffee shop. We are preparing the house for his first visit home to the ranch with my niece, nephew, and sister-in-law. I didn’t expect to find Mama’s collection while I cleaned, but I remember Daddy saying that, at the end, this had become her habit. To hide inconsequential things.

  “What’s that stuff?” Maddie asks, appearing beside me. Her face and hands are thick with dust, her tennis shoes caked with cow manure, all part of her ritual that she calls “cleaning the barn.”

  “Some things your grandmother kept in here.”

  “Cool,” she says. “Can I have the feather?”

  “Sure.”

  She grazes it across her cheek, then picks up the photograph on top of the pile.

  “Is this you?”

  I am startled that she can see it instantly when I could not.

  “No, that’s your grandmother. I think she must be holding your uncle Tuck’s hand. He looks about three.”

  “Are you still mad at her for lying?”

  “Not exactly mad, no.”

  She studies my face solemnly. “You know, Mama lies to me.”

  “Don’t say that, Maddie. You mother would never lie to you.”

  “She tells me that the tumor in my head is nothing to worry about.”

  I feel an ache all over. We didn’t use the word tumor with Maddie. Ever.

  “What do you think?” I ask, cautious.

  “I think Mama doesn’t know what will happen. Nobody knows.”

  “You can talk to me about it anytime.” I reach over, smoothing her
hair. “But it would be better if you talk to her.”

  “Mama feels better like this. Thinking I don’t know. Protecting me.” She bounces up, handing me the photograph, not ready yet for more. “Do you think my cousins will want to play croquet? I found an old set in the barn. I can put it up.”

  “I think they would love that,” I say, and Maddie skips out the door, unaware that she has opened the door to my prison.

  I stare at the picture of Mama, not begging her to speak like in my childhood game with Etta Place, but hoping she can hear.

  “I know who you are,” I say aloud, softly, repeating Hudson’s words. “You are kind. Beautiful. Brave. You save children.”

  Not one of us who loved Mama ever saw the whole, but the piece I have of her is jagged and beautiful. I can see the sun shining through it.

  The curtains at the open window dance and the photograph flutters out of my hand, skittering across the floor. The air fills the room with the intoxicating, earthy smell of our land. I close my eyes, drinking it in.

  I could swear I heard music in the wind.

  NOTE TO READERS

  In Playing Dead, I imagined a few places that do not exist and occasionally twitched a few of the places that do to serve the purposes of this story. However, the Ponder Steakhouse does, indeed, serve up fried bull testicles. I received some expert advice along the way on horses, guns, and child psychology, for which I am very grateful. If there are any mistakes on those subjects in this book, they are unintentional and mine alone.

  For Steve, who reads to me

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful thanks to:

  My agent, Pam Ahearn, blunt, dogged, fiercely loyal, for seeing something in a random manuscript in the mail before anyone else did, for her editorial input, and for her relentless efforts on my behalf. Everyone on earth should have one of you.

  My editor, Kate Miciak, for saying yes after saying no, for working so hard on this book, for encouraging me until a light broke over my head.

  My husband, Steve Kaskovich, for his infinite hope, for reading my writing ad nauseam, and for keeping the mystery going.

  My favorite lefty pitcher and son, Sam, for being an example of how persistence drives talent and for teaching me that writing is a lot like baseball. Also, for making sure I got up from the computer to make him dinner.

  My parents and fans, Chuck and Sue Heaberlin, for pushing James Thurber and Anna Karenina on me when I was trying to set the world’s record for reading Harlequin romances and for making sure the world looked pretty large to a small-town girl.

  My braither (sic), Doug, for that long-ago copy of Bird by Bird with the sweet inscription, for being the funniest email writer on the planet, and for all of the emergency technical rescues.

  My comrade in book writing, Christopher Kelly, for dreaming and wallowing with me at B.J.’s and for making me think harder than I would without him.

  All of my friends and relatives who made such a special point to encourage me along the path of this book. You know who you are.

  T. D. Taylor, hitting coach, “head” doctor, and father extraordinaire, for telling me to “just drill one” and for being a living example of how an adult should encourage children. Maddie is for you and Daimian.

  Mark Labbe, for teaching me a thing or two about guns over a barbecue sandwich, and the folks at the Fly Without Wings Equine Center in Sunset, Texas.

  A stranger, Nan Worthington, for performing a timely act of CPR on me at age twenty-seven, and Drs. Michael Lehmann, John Seger, and Jay Franklin for their brilliance and kindness.

  Sue Jean Cocanougher, my second mom. I hope you are reading this up there.

  And, finally, the real Tommie McLeod, my dear friend, a deeply Southern girl with wicked aim, beautiful hair, and a love and dedication to family that is unparalleled. The rest of her role in this book is fiction. Real Tommie prefers Scotch.

  JULIA S. HEABERLIN is an award-winning journalist who has worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Detroit News, and The Dallas Morning News. She grew up in Texas and lives near Dallas/Fort Worth with her husband and son. She is currently at work on her next thriller, Lie Still.