Playing Dead

CHAPTER 23

I promised the cabbie an extra fifty dollars to stop honking and for the use of a green-striped golf umbrella in his trunk that some passenger had left behind.

The rain pelted down insistently, but rather than tell our stories while an impatient cabdriver eavesdropped, Albert Adams and I walked toward a wrought-iron bench a few feet from his daughter’s grave.

It hadn’t been hard to convince him to show up, even though I was a stranger’s voice on the phone with an implausible story. I had given him a small truth and a small lie, saying that I’d recently found out that my Social Security number matched Susie’s in some kind of government screwup. I said I wondered if I’d been adopted and hoped he could help me find some answers.

He didn’t seem surprised. He said he’d been meaning to get up to the cemetery. He’d be happy to meet if he could be home by five for dinner with one of his daughters.

“I haven’t been here in years,” he confessed, wiping off the bench for me with a handkerchief. “It’s different. But just as painful. I think this will be my last trip.”

I sat down beside him, the wet wind tossing the pieces of hair coming loose around my face, briefly grateful that I’d taken the time to twist my hair into a long braid and wrap it around my head. Hudson had always said that this prairie-girl look of mine reminded him of his Catholic middle-school days. In other words, kind of hot.

Susie’s father introduced himself with a firm grip of bony hand and paper-thin skin. “Please call me Al,” he said.

He insisted on putting his old brown sweater around my bare shoulders, holding the umbrella over our heads.

“I’ve been waiting for this phone call for years,” he said.

“You knew about me?”

“I knew someone in witness protection had been given Susie’s number. But I always wanted confirmation, with my own eyes, that Susie’s life had gone on in someone else.”

“Well, here I am,” I said awkwardly. I didn’t pretend surprise when he mentioned witness protection and he didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes, here you are.” Al’s eyes were shining. “I like to think I can see people’s souls through their eyes. You’ve got a good one.”

The rain let up and he rested the umbrella on the ground. He opened up his wallet, bulging with bright-eyed school pictures of his thirteen grandchildren, so I could admire them. His faux Hush Puppies, probably from Walmart and not in the greatest shape to begin with, were soaked. He’d have to hurry, he said. He didn’t want to miss the 4:13 bus at Addison and Narragansett.

He appeared to be shrinking before my eyes. The rain was spitting again, and I didn’t want him to catch pneumonia. I insisted on taking a turn with the umbrella, worried that I’d waited too late for my questions.

Then the girl with the good soul pushed for just a little more.

“Before you go, can you tell me if you know… why I had to disappear?”

Al closed his eyes, transporting himself back to the freezing January day that he buried his daughter.

A man showed up a couple of hours after Susie’s funeral, he said. Slipping in among the neighbors loading up the kitchen table with chicken casseroles and red velvet cakes.

“He was a big man. Powerful-looking. He didn’t appear comfortable in his suit. I guess he wore it out of respect for Susie. I went over to introduce myself, to thank him for coming. I thought he was one of my wife’s co-workers.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“He asked if there was somewhere we could speak privately. It was a small house. We’ve built on since. Anyway, we put on our coats and stood on the back porch and he offered me a smoke. He told me he was working in witness protection. He said he was very sorry about Susie and the timing of all of this but that the government needed to take her Social Security number. It was going to be used for another child. His team didn’t want to go through formal government channels for a clean number. He didn’t say it, but I knew it had to be Mafia. He seemed real worried that government clerks could be bribed.”

The thunder was like bass rumbling through a loudspeaker, making it hard to hear. The rain shot needles at us sideways. I tilted the umbrella for more protection and leaned in.

“… he told me he was trying to save a little baby who wasn’t even born yet. That only a handful of people knew about you. It felt desperate to me, and also believable. You couldn’t pick up the paper back then without reading about a politician who’d been bribed or an unidentified body in the water. I’ll never forget Daniel Seifert, that fiberglass dealer in Bensenville ready to testify against the mob. They shot him right in front of his wife and kid. They didn’t get Joey the Clown for it until five years ago. Remember that trial?”

I nodded, but he didn’t seem to notice.

His face turned a shade paler. The small voice in my head urged me to stop, for decency’s sake, to let him go on to a cozy dinner with his daughter.

“I asked him, ‘Why did you come to me?’ He said that I was the right person at the right time. He said I was an honorable man. He knew I was a Vietnam vet.”

He cleared his throat. “I wanted to believe him. As angry as I was at his intrusion… our Susie was barely in the ground… I needed to do something to redeem myself. I had just killed my daughter.”

“You can’t blame yourself…” I began, a meaningless platitude, one I hardly ever used with patients.

But Mr. Adams was lost in his past, not even hearing.

“I didn’t want to hand over my daughter’s life but he was a hammer going at me. I had the feeling it was going to happen no matter what and if I didn’t cooperate I’d put everyone in more danger, including my wife.”

“So you agreed?”

“I would be lying if I didn’t say he clinched it when he held out an envelope with ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. He knew we were struggling. I’d gotten laid off from my job. My wife was six months pregnant. She started bleeding three days after Susie died. So much stress. The doctor told her to quit work or she could lose this baby, too.”

His daughter. Maybe the one who was making him supper. The one who would hang his wet clothes to dry when he got there, who would chide him for sitting in the cemetery in the rain with a strange woman. But, then, he would probably not tell her that part.

“He said we’d only get the money if we gave our complete cooperation. We needed to turn over a few things. He told me to talk to my wife. That night, she’s the one who convinced me. It was the lowest point in our marriage. We were fighting over whether we could afford four extra words on Susie’s gravestone. She told me, ‘We have to move on for this baby,’ and put my hand on her belly. Mary Elizabeth kicked. I’ll never forget that moment.”

“So the man came again? With the money?”

“Two days later. I called the number on his card. He showed up in an hour and we exchanged envelopes. I gave him everything he wanted. Susie’s birth certificate, Social Security card, anything official with her name on it. For the next fifteen years, a certified letter came to the house on the day she died with more cash. At least five thousand, sometimes more. No note. No explanation. More money wasn’t part of the deal. But we knew it was from him.”

“Do you remember the postmark?”

“Different places. Towns I hadn’t heard of. Once I called the number he gave me to thank him. It was disconnected. I was afraid to pursue it any more. We were being paid to keep a secret. I needed to protect my family, too.”

“Do your children know? Or anyone else?”

He shook his head. It stunned me that a man could keep so much inside for so long. He was a secret keeper, like my mother. Maybe they weren’t as rare as I thought.

“Susie came to me last night in a dream,” I blurted out. “I thought she was someone else but… it was her. She was happy.” I shifted uncomfortably on the bench, aware how crazy that sounded outside the safe perimeter of my family of believers.

Al Adams touched my cheek, just as jagged lightning lit his face and the headstones behind him. It occurred to me that I was holding a death pole over our heads.

“We better leave,” I said hurriedly. “My cab can take you home. Or we can still make the bus stop. Whatever you want. My treat.”

“I need to say goodbye,” he said, and I understood.

We walked to Susie’s grave and Mr. Adams stuck the metal prongs of the wreath I brought into the mushy ground in front of her headstone. I pushed the gold-angel-on-a-stick into the middle and stood back. Not so bad really. The wreath looked prettier, almost real, with raindrops glittering on its plastic leaves. The angel appeared happy to be on the job.

Before we dropped Al at the bus stop, he opened up the wallet stuffed with grandchildren and gave me a faded picture of Susie, a toddler with brown curls and chubby knees. My sad little collection of dead girls was growing.

“You can have this, too.” He handed me a dog-eared business card. “I’ve carried it with me since the day I met him. I don’t need it anymore.”

As the cab pulled away, I read the name on the card.

William T. McCloud. Federal marshal. Baseball fanatic. Rancher. Oilman. Father to a boy named Tuck and two girls named Tommie and Sadie.

William Travis McCloud, the man who raised me, had only one true name. It honored the infamous commander of the Battle of the Alamo.

Before Texas became a punch line, native Texans felt that kind of pride in their roots and most still do. Daddy took us to San Antonio one spring break and showed Sadie and me the approximate spot at the north wall of the Alamo where his namesake fell, shot in the head.

Commander William Travis, he told us, had drawn a line in the sand with his sword before the battle. Travis gave each of his men the choice to cross that line and fight against terrible odds or to retreat with honor. We didn’t have to ask which way Daddy would have gone. Retreat was not his nature.

Because of Daddy, I’ve always divided the world into two kinds of people: people who will jump off a boat into choppy water to save you, and people who won’t.

My father set that standard one summer afternoon at the lake when I was ten. We’d been waterskiing and tubing all day, when the wind started playing havoc with the water. Mama and I yanked Sadie and her inner tube from the water so Daddy could motor us back to the dock.

A boat of laughing teenagers blew by, spraying us and hitting the white caps with such force that I was sure their boat would flip. And then, only a hundred feet away, it did.

Before I could even process what I’d seen, Daddy hit the water with a clean, strong dive that seemed a physical impossibility for a 220-pound man. Mama had grabbed the wheel and yelled at us to get the cushions that doubled as life preservers. Three of them blew out of my hands as soon as I pulled them off, skipping across the waves uselessly. We could see two heads bobbing in the water, disappearing under the waves, bobbing up and disappearing again. Another kid was trying to hang on to the flipped boat. As we drew closer, Mama killed the motor, now afraid of running over someone in the water.

“The rope,” Daddy yelled at us. I threw the thick rope always tied to the back ring for just this purpose but it plopped into the water a pitiful three feet from the boat. Daddy reached it with monster strokes, then swam it out thirty yards to the two teenagers, now drifting dangerously away.

“Pull,” he yelled. The three of us pulled, while Daddy surged toward the boy holding on to the boat. As we helped the other boy and girl on board, Daddy was already swimming toward us, his arm around the third kid’s neck in a lifeguard grip.

“Lisa. My sister-” The girl barely choked out the words as Daddy reached the boat. He was spent, exhausted from fighting the angry water.

The girl could see this and was frantic. “There are four of us! You have to get Lisa!”

“Will…” I could hear the plea in Mama’s voice. She wanted him to stay.

But Daddy was already gone, disappearing under the waves. It was the longest three minutes of my life before his head broke the water, pulling Lisa with him. She was a smart girl. She found an air pocket under the flipped boat and prayed the Lord’s Prayer over and over. Most of the time Daddy spent out of our sight was in that air pocket, working up her courage to swim to the surface with him. Lisa’s mother sent Daddy a Thanksgiving card every year until she died of cancer. Lisa is now a neonatal nurse saving other children’s lives.

I followed a raindrop as it made a wiggly path down the cab window. I had wanted so much to believe that it was Daddy’s heroic blood flowing through my veins. Even as questions about his part in this rose up again and again, I had pushed them away. I’d let myself be consumed by Mama’s betrayal, because it was much easier to believe. But there was too much to ignore.

The argument Sadie overheard between Mama and Daddy. Jack Smith’s suspicion that I was born in witness protection. Charla’s bizarre phone calls from prison. Rosalina’s wild tale. The enigmatic Anthony Marchetti. Al Adams and the card I held in my hand. I ran my thumb over the embossed seal.

William Travis McCloud.

Your father says he is protecting you.

Right words. Wrong father.

Daddy would risk his life for a perfect stranger. I’d seen him do it. I now knew that once, that stranger was me.

The finger made it through the X-ray machine without a hitch, but I lost an $8 pair of cuticle scissors.

“You’re in a dark mood,” Hudson remarked, as he crammed my laptop bag into the overhead compartment. “You haven’t said two words since the hotel. Except ‘Dammit’ when you had to say goodbye to your toenail clippers.”

I didn’t tell Hudson I’d left the hotel to meet Albert Adams. I wanted to, but I knew he’d be furious. He described his own afternoon as a complete waste of time. He waited two hours for Louie’s lawyer to show up and tell Louie not to answer most of the questions in the interview.

“I’m just tired,” I said, standing on my tiptoes to pull down the blanket at the very back of the overhead bin.

Hudson gestured me toward the window seat, and I buckled myself in, closing my eyes. An extra-enthusiastic flight attendant began her show, reminding me of an old Saturday Night Live skit with Tina Fey. My thoughts drifted.

Memory is a funny thing.

Perspective is so much more.

Now I knew why Mama dressed us like boys and cut our hair short.

Why she named a girl Tommie.

Why she colored away her distinctive gray streak.

Why she built a hidden storm shelter in a bedroom closet.

Why she loved and married my father.

Why that man, whom I trusted more than anyone in the world, held on to her secrets until the day he died.

Hudson flipped the pages of a Sports Illustrated, and I turned my attention to a glorious orange and gold sunset putting on a private show for everyone on the left side of the plane. My knee felt a gentle squeeze, and I looked down to see Hudson’s big hand, offering comfort, taking a chance. I thought about confessing everything I knew while we floated above the earth. Instead, I put my hand on top of his and left it there.

Every “why” on that list hurt. I had to stop counting the deceptions, or I’d go crazy. I had to stop parsing every memory, knowing I could imagine things that weren’t there.

In college, I studied a civil case brought by a twenty-year-old woman who claimed to have “recovered” a memory about her childhood piano teacher. She said that the image of him standing behind her with his hands cupped over her breasts while she played “Für Elise” came to her in the shower ten years later. The case turned on the defense testimony of a middle-aged college professor who told the jury about a study of sixteen young adults who had witnessed the murder of a parent as a child.

The memory of the murder burned like a brand, imprinted forever in their brain matter.

Not one of them, no matter how young at the time it happened, ever forgot it. Many of them could still recount the horror in precise detail. Yet another reason, the defense lawyer argued, to believe that repressed memory is a crock. The moments we remember without exception, he insisted, are unfortunately the horrible ones.

As I saw it, my problem was that what I needed to remember was probably very small, a single grain in a sea of waving wheat. If I could take over this plane and fly back to my childhood, I’d find that tiny grain and know what to do with it. My head bumped along on an insufficient airplane pillow beside a man who I believed cared for me deeply, who wanted to keep me safe. That didn’t stop the dread curling up in my stomach. The airplane banked steeply, tipping me on edge so that for a few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I could fall right out my window and into one of the tiny sparkling blue swimming pools below. That might be a blessing.

Every mile we flew closer to the Texas border, my chest grew tighter and tighter like the screw of a vise.