Playing Dead

CHAPTER 8

I turned in to a parking spot in front of the Good Samaritan Center, my mind entangled in the past, suddenly bothered about Mama’s desk, about the day she caught me trying to unlock the middle drawer with a bobby pin.

I was nine and had just spent a weekend in bed with Encyclopedia Brown and the flu. Mama’s usually gentle fingers left red marks on my arm and a dime-sized bruise that took a week to fade.

Later that day, she apologized with a package of Hostess cupcakes and a Coke with crushed ice. Her eyes were bloodshot, like she’d been crying. She apologized, but she also made it clear I was not to do this again. Ever.

In my rearview mirror, I watched a man in a cowboy hat emerge from a black pickup. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but I waited until he entered the nursing home before I got out of my truck.

Jesus, I couldn’t start living like this, afraid of every tall man in Texas with a cowboy hat and a black truck. I’d be certifiably nuts in a few hours.

For the last year, Mama had lived in this building among a sad cast of people. The outside looked like an adult Disneyland, with a grandiose arched entrance and golf-course coifing of flowers and trees. Fake lily pads danced on the surface of scattered ponds. Wrought-iron benches waited for company that rarely came.

All of it cleverly disguised the reality of the place once you hit the door: another L-shaped hospital ward where people came as a last resort. Expensive wallpaper, nice furniture, and pretty paintings on the walls didn’t make a bit of difference when there was only one way out.

Once Mama really started to lose her mind, Daddy hired a live-in nurse at the ranch, but the property was too vast and Mama liked to roam. After one final midnight search for her on horses and four-wheelers, he gave in.

The rancid perfume of Lysol and urine rushed at me as the glass door slid open, an odor that couldn’t be covered up no matter how much money you threw at it. Specifically, $82,000 a year-the cost of keeping Mama snug with skilled nurses and therapists who specialized in dementia.

Our family’s money was like a nice warm blanket folded at the end of the bed, dependable, always there, but not something to be used unless you really needed it. Unless it was really, really cold. Daddy hammered that into us at a young age. Our ancestors broke their backs to work the land we inherited, he’d remind Sadie and me.

Every time I walked in here, I said a grateful little prayer to those ancestors. Today, I was also praying that the man from the pickup was already ensconced in a room with a favorite aunt, reminding her patiently for the hundredth time who he was.

Instead, his towering form leaned against the reception desk, his back to me. He was genially chatting up a white-haired volunteer with a freshly coiled perm. His body language was languid, but I’d seen plenty of languid men throw a fast punch. I changed direction and strolled toward a familiar female figure sitting in a wheelchair in the center of the reception area.

“Hello, Mrs. Hathaway,” I said brightly, kneeling in front of her. I had a new angle on the man, but he’d moved. I didn’t think he was one of the goons from the garage, but I needed to get a good look. Could there be a whole posse of rednecks after me?

I turned back to Mrs. Hathaway, who, after seeing me, had paused her self-imposed daily eight-hour shift chirping back at the reception room aviary, a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner fluttering with tiny canaries.

She wore a bright yellow robe, looking like something of a canary herself. Mrs. Hathaway’s daughter told me that her mother had been a lounge singer; now she never made a sound except when she was with those birds. I hoped she imagined herself flying away or bowing to generous applause. She wrapped me in a hug that transferred a smear of Olay lotion to my cheek and then went back to the business of chirping. Mama and Mrs. Hathaway hung out together sometimes when the odd little planets where they lived aligned.

“See you later, sweetie,” I told her.

As I turned down the hall that led off reception, the man’s head was down and shaded by the brim of his hat. He laughed. Maybe he was just a flirt providing an old lady with the high point of her week and a story to make her Bridge Club widows jealous. Because aren’t we all still sixteen inside?

At room 125, I knocked three times. Mama didn’t answer, so I turned my spare key in the lock. I closed the door, wishing it had a deadbolt. I had never trusted flirts and was pretty sure I was born thirty when it came to men.

She rocked back and forth by the window, staring at the slice of garden view that cost four hundred dollars extra a month. The room was like dusk, shadowy and depressing, because Mama didn’t like the lights on in the daytime anymore. You could turn them on all day and she’d go behind you turning them off.

She showed no signs of recognizing me. I stopped being disappointed a long time ago. During Wade’s eulogy at Daddy’s funeral, she’d placed her hand on my arm and leaned closer to ask, “Who died?”

“Can I brush your hair?” She didn’t respond but she let me guide her up and over to the chair in front of the dressing-table mirror. I stood behind her, gently taking out the bobby pins holding up her hair. It fell like a snowy waterfall, still silky and long.

I picked up the brush and slowly began to count every stroke just as she did for me when I was a child and had a bad day. My scalp used to tingle for an hour afterward. My counting was often the only sound that broke the silence between us during this ritual and one of the few things that seemed to relax her.

Today I was angry. Today I felt like time was running out for good, maybe for all of us.

“Mama, am I your daughter?” I asked. “Was I stolen?” My voice crept higher. “Did you adopt me?” If Rosalina wasn’t lying, this was the next best option. Mama and Daddy had adopted me not knowing I’d been kidnapped.

“Baby,” she said.

“Don’t ‘baby’ me,” I said, so sharply that she flinched. “Look at this.”

I held the picture of a young Rosalina Marchetti cradling a baby, possibly me, in front of her eyes. She turned her head away from it, and her hands began an agitated dance in her lap.

“Who is this woman? Do you know her? She wrote me this letter.” I laid the single piece of pink stationery in her lap. She brushed it to the floor. I bent to pick it up, pushing down anger, knowing it would not help. I took a shaky breath.

“She says you lied to me. That she is my real mother.” I spoke gently. “Her name is Rosalina Marchetti, Mama. She is married to a killer.”

“She’s a pretty girl.” Mama’s voice was like brittle paper. “You’re a pretty girl, too.”

She reached up with a hand cruelly resculpted by arthritis. One more body part that didn’t cooperate. Those once elegant fingers had dipped and sailed across the grand piano every afternoon of my childhood, teaching me the chemistry and magic of the great composers.

Sometimes, she’d still my practicing fingers and tell me little stories: that Bach had at least twenty children; that Mozart was christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; that Vivaldi was nicknamed “The Red Priest” for his red hair and had been buried, broke and destitute, in an unmarked grave; that Rachmaninoff had giant hands with fingers that could stretch across the keys like rubber bands; that Chopin loved Poland so much he filled a small silver box with earth when he left the country and had it buried with him. That most of these men would never understand their genius before dying.

On the very best days, she would scoot me aside on the piano bench and play a little Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday and sing in her clear high alto. Mournful, playful, intelligent. My mother was all those things. Was she also a liar?

In October or November, when the embers of summer died down, we’d throw open the windows and Daddy heard the strains of our music all the way to the barn. He claimed that the horses stopped to listen. Mama said that she liked to believe the wind snatched up our notes and that they floated on the prairie, traveling forever.

“Did you take me?” I pressed. “Do I belong to someone else?”

Mama reached up. I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she pulled skillfully at the messy knot that held up my hair.

She drew me down, turning my face to the mirror, and laid her cheek on mine.

I studied our features-the delicate bone structures, the soft, straight hair, the sad expressions.

“Mama, I need your help.” Pleading. “I’m afraid,” I whispered.

It was the first time in my life I’d said those words out loud.

Her face remained blank, unmoved.

In the shadows of the mirror, I was the girl she used to be. There seemed no doubt.

Before I left, I asked for the key she always wore on a silver chain.

Without protesting, she let me unfasten it from her neck.

By the time I made it back to my truck, there was an empty space where the man’s black pickup had been parked.

I reminded myself that I needed to find out the names of the men who’d attacked Jack. Maybe I could get a restraining order. But that might just tick them off more, serve to remind them of my pesky existence.

I wish I knew what the hell I was dealing with. One of those men had sought out and found a picture of me on the Halo Ranch website, for God’s sake. I should probably tell someone that. I felt under the seat for my faithful.45. Still there. Some people sought comfort in the warmth of a furry pet; I was growing fond of cold steel.

The depression I always felt after seeing Mama was now compounded by the growing sense that something was very wrong, like invisible monsters were laying low, biding their time, traveling with me in the bed of the pickup. All I could do was keep moving forward, I told myself, and be alert. Don’t freak out Sadie and Maddie too much, certainly not yet.

I’d asked Sadie to meet me back at the house by two, and she was already waiting in the driveway. Maddie sat cross-legged on the ground, sorting pebbles into piles of different colors, looking up as she heard my tires crunch the gravel. Her huge smile only swelled my apprehension.

“I think this is the right thing to do,” Sadie assured me, as we walked toward the front door, but I sensed that she felt guilty, too. Mama had worn the tiny key around her neck as long as we could remember. She never took it off, even to shower or swim, and always brushed away our questions about its history. As little girls, we were enthralled by the flea-sized red jewel embedded in it, certain it held some magic powers. We were convinced that the key belonged to a hidden treasure chest, and one restless summer afternoon we even dug holes around the property looking for it.

Mama grounded us for a week and made us pack up the holes. Didn’t we know the horses and cows could break their legs in one of them? Later that night, when tucking us in, Daddy told us the key belonged to her mother’s jewelry box. Mama, he said, had found it in the ashes of the house fire that killed her parents. At that time, Sadie and I had only a fuzzy understanding of Mama’s past. Still, neither of us really believed Daddy’s explanation. Why would she wear a reminder of something that hurt so much?

I was struck by a pungent fragrance the second we stepped inside the house.

Familiar.

Unsettling.

“Do you smell that?” I asked.

Sadie turned. “What? Good smell or something-is-dead-in-the-walls smell?”

“Lavender. It smells like lavender. The bouquets that Mama used to place around the house. And I don’t remember opening those blinds this morning.”

“Tommie, are you sure you’re OK?” Sadie studied my face. “We can do this later. Or tomorrow.”

“I don’t smell anything, Aunt Tommie.” Maddie was giving every corner of the room a vigorous sniff.

“Here, give me the key,” Sadie said, deciding. “Let’s get this over with, Tommie.” Her hand rested on my arm. “Are you coming?”

“Yes,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s do it.”

Maddie grasped my hand with her small sweaty one, still gritty from playing in the gravel. When we reached the desk, she broke away and ran her fingers over the see-no-evil monkey carved into the drawer, the one that had so fascinated Sadie and me as kids.

“Is that monkey peeking?” Sadie teased, hoping to lighten things up, as she turned the key. Maddie rolled her eyes, too old for the game.

But nothing happened.

“It’s stuck,” Sadie reported. “Maddie, get the WD-40 under the kitchen sink.”

That or a little spit had been my Daddy’s answer to fixing most of the things that were injured on the ranch. But WD-40 didn’t help. Neither did Maddie spitting into the lock. This wasn’t the right key. I let out my breath. It couldn’t be simple.

“A sign that Daddy wasn’t lying about the key,” Sadie said, “which is almost worse.”

In the end, it wasn’t Encyclopedia Brown but Grandaddy who taught me to pick locks. I’d never had much occasion to use the skill, except for once or twice. Or maybe five times.

I pulled a pin from my hair and went to work. The lock sprung easily and I tugged on the small, shallow drawer, which fell neatly into my hand. I saw what it held and my heart dropped.

“It’s just an old deck of cards,” Maddie said with disappointment. A deck of cards imprinted with two faded swans, snapped together with a pink rubber band, the kind that used to wrap around rolled newspapers that landed on the stoop.

But Sadie and I knew these were not ordinary cards. Reluctantly, I picked them up. They seemed hot to my fingers, alive with their own heat. The cards weren’t a good sign. It was Maddie who saw it first, who said excitedly: “Look!”

Taped to the back of the deck, to the four of hearts, was another key, this one modern and efficient-looking, stamped with a number.

The key to a safe deposit box.

Sadie and I never really believed these cards still existed. Our second cousin Bobby had embellished their place in McCloud lore, along with a lot of other things.

As kids, Bobby persuaded Sadie and me that aliens left crop circles behind the barn (Bobby was van Gogh with a tractor), that an ancient monster lived in one of the creeks on the property (it turned out to be a pregnant beaver), and that Dr Pepper’s secret formula contained prune juice (that may be true). A boy of many strange talents, he walked around in the summer with a plastic Baggie full of dying flies, which he caught with his bare hand in mid-air.

Mama told us that didn’t mean he would grow up to be a serial killer and asked us to be patient because his Daddy was mean. She didn’t put it that way, but we knew. We’d seen the marks on Bobby’s legs, a telltale sign of parents who still thought it was OK to pull switches off trees and use them on little boys against the will of nature.

When someone asked me a few years ago why I chose to work with kids on a rough emotional path, I’d surprised myself and said, “Bobby.”

One Saturday afternoon when I was in middle school, Mama dragged us to watch Bobby pitch a Little League game in 110-degree heat, and for once, he couldn’t get the ball to fly over the plate. His dad yelled from the stands: “You piece of puke!” and stomped off, abandoning Bobby to gut it out on the mound with no ride home. Bobby struck out the next three batters. Later, his dad took the credit for firing him up.

But on the day Bobby talked about Tuck and those cards, the adults had exiled us to the orchards, ordering us to pick up at least seventy-five peaches apiece. If we threw even a single peach at each other, Granny warned we’d be forced into summer slavery making jam-hot, steamy work, and I never failed to burn myself on the sterilizing pan.

Bobby, however, provided all the entertainment Sadie and I needed by immediately falling face-first into a trail of fresh cow patties. He was about ten at the time, too cool to cry and desperate to save face.

“Hey, I heard a story about your brother the other day,” he said, as the three of us walked toward a cement pond where he could wash up.

“Don’t talk about our brother.” Sadie gave him a small punch in the arm. “It’s disrespectful to the dead. It’s not your business. God, you stink.”

“Don’t say ‘God’ like that,” I said automatically.

“I swear, I think you’ll want to hear this. It’s spooky. My mom told me. Come on. It’s firsthand.”

Sadie and I shrugged. Everything Bobby recounted was “firsthand.” But we yearned for any details about Tuck, whose face was dissolving like a photograph under water. He’d died when I was six and Sadie was two.

Mama was at fault for that. She never spoke of our brother. She had erased all signs of his existence, removing every picture from the house with Tuck in it.

We sat Bobby out to dry on a patch of dry ground a smell-proof distance from us.

“Go ahead,” I commanded.

“My mom says your Granny is a good Baptist, but she does a lot of battle with the spirits. They come to see her at night in her dreams. Even a psychic at the Texas State Fair told your Granny she was one of them, but even more powerful. Did you know your Granny could tell the future with cards? Mama said she can tell when a tornado is whippin’ up.”

Bobby watched for shock on our faces, but Sadie and I already knew this part of the story. We were familiar with Granny’s “feelings,” because they sometimes prevented us from leaving the house. We both knew she could do a lot more than predict the weather.

Because of that, we often begged her to read our fortunes, but Granny had to be in just the right mood. If she wasn’t, she’d usually shoo us away and say gently, “Life is meant to be a surprise.”

Bobby caught a fly in his hand, generously set it free, and continued. “Well, the night that your brother, um, died, it was his eighteenth birthday. And your Granny was going to give him a special birthday reading. So your Granny laid the cards, and all these dark cards began to turn up.”

Bobby was clearly enjoying himself, and he could tell he had us. His voice lowered an octave, and he crept closer. I still remember the stench of cow dung and rancid creek water that clung to both him and his words.

“So your Granny snaps up those cards in a rubber band and refuses to read them. Tuck just laughs, kisses everybody goodbye, and heads out to ride around and do some celebratin’. Around midnight, he dropped off a friend and headed home. He took a shortcut on some back roads. They say he was goin’ fast. That big eighteen-wheeler was sittin’ with the lights off smack in the middle of a farm road, the driver drunk off his butt and asleep. Tuck was under it before he even knew it.”

I could feel the warm rush of blood to my face and a pain in my gut as if Bobby had punched me with his pitching arm, hard. Sadie’s mouth was open in a perfect circle.

We’d never been provided details of the crash. In the years since, I’ve thought dozens of times about looking up the story in the Fort Worth newspaper archive to see whether the facts matched Bobby’s story. I never did.

“Shut up, Bobby,” I said furiously. “Just shut the hell up.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.” Sadie’s little body was dry heaving, bent over.

Bobby being Bobby, he couldn’t shut up, and I was too busy holding Sadie’s hair back to stop him.

“Your Granny never touched those cards again,” he persisted. “They had ducks on ’em, I think. I heard she burned ’em in a witch’s ceremony.”

I took a threatening step forward and Bobby did what he did best. He ran.

Granny turned the peaches Sadie and I gathered that day into twelve pretty jars of jam, but that batch always tasted bitter to me.