Playing Dead

CHAPTER 27

The next morning, for a crisp hundred-dollar bill, Hudson talked the man behind the motel desk at the Charles Wesley Lodge into returning my rental car to a branch in Durant so we could ride home together in his company-owned, late-model black Ford F-350 with a high-end blinking GPS device wired to God knows how many satellites roving above our heads.

It was custom-built into the dash with an oversized screen and so many buttons and lights that I wondered if it also had the capabilities to shoot lasers and grill a hot dog. The tinted windows, Hudson told me, were bulletproof and the outside was armor-plated. The truck was a loaner, headed for Afghanistan in a month. As soon as we sped by the Idabel city limits sign, I closed my eyes and tucked myself into a corner of the passenger seat with a pillow I’d spied in a plastic bag under the truck bed cover, neatly stacked beside a built-in firearms safe and a first-aid kit.

But Hudson had other ideas. Like a conversation.

“You recognized those two men in the photo at the sheriff’s office.” It wasn’t a question.

“Not exactly. Jack mentioned them. At least I think he did.”

“Jack.”

“Yes, Jack. Before he passed out on my kitchen floor, he mumbled something about a hobbit and a giant. And Anthony Marchetti being a liar. The men in that picture fit the bill.”

“I can’t believe you went back to the house.”

I ignored his anger. “The Jeep was parked out front. Packed with documents. Lots about Marchetti. I found a picture of me in one of the folders from when I was still competing. Jack was too drunk to explain. You’re swerving.”

“You went in alone.”

“I think you’re missing the point.”

“According to you, I usually do.”

He stuck the cord of an iPod into an auxiliary plug, adjusted earbuds, and turned his attention to the road. It struck me that we were not a very good team. I wadded myself back into the corner and shut my eyes again.

Almost immediately, my cell phone sang out from the depths of my backpack. I pulled it out on the fourth ring. Private caller.

“Hello?” I asked hopefully. I’d left the phone on because I didn’t want to miss a call from Sadie. Hudson had wanted me to shut it off, worried that it could be tracked.

“I thought you were strung up somewhere! Like, dead.” I held the phone tightly against my ear so Hudson couldn’t listen in on Charla’s wailing. I shouldn’t have worried; his iPod was turned up so loud that I could hear Johnny Cash walking the line.

“No,” I told Charla. “Not strung up.” Not yet.

“It’s an emergency. An emergency. Your dad wants you to come to see him tomorrow during visiting hours. My lawyer called to say an anonymous donor is going to put ten thousand in my defense fund if I cooperate. If you don’t come, it will be big trouble for me.”

When did I become responsible for the fate of this squeaky death row inmate who had me on speed-dial?

I tried to speak calmly. “That’s not going to happen.”

“What? The trouble? I’m damn sure it is if you don’t show up.”

“I’m not coming.” My tone was not to be reckoned with. I didn’t care what Anthony Marchetti had to say, I would never believe a word of it. I glanced at Hudson. His head was bopping, eyes on the road.

“I’m supposed to tell you that you were lucky in Chicago,” Charla whined. “That you won’t be so lucky again.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No. Supposably, it’s a fact.” The word supposably always set my teeth on edge. It was a Texas colloquialism used by a quarter of the state. It’s probably in the dictionary now a few skips ahead of Sarah Palin’s refudiate.

“Are you listening to me? He says to tell you they’re following you all the time, even if you can’t see them. He says to trust no one.”

“I got that loud and clear the last time you called.”

I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder at the rear window. Summer wheat grass rippled on either side of a retreating ribbon of black highway, empty except for a rusted green pickup on the verge of passing us. I really ought to be driving. That pickup should not be taking us down.

I returned to Charla. “Are they threatening you?”

“Are you not hearing me? Lordy. Although the guard who’s my contact is not bad. He drops good stuff on me. Like a box of Whitman’s Samplers and that Dove lotion that turns you tan real gradual so nobody knows it’s fake. People just say you look healthy.”

Exasperated, I tried to get her back on point. “You know that if you take money, you are theirs forever. Did you ever wonder why Marchetti chose you? Because the guards think you are susceptible. I am probably not the last assignment they have in mind for you.”

“Mmmmhhmmmm,” Charla said, noncommittally. “I don’t know what septi-whatever means. Here comes my keeper. I don’t want to scare you or nothing. At this point, you’re like my dear third cousin and I’m thinking you’d be a good character witness for me at my appeal. But I’m supposed to tell you one last thing.” I heard the muffled sound of voices before she came back on the line.

“You’re currently ten or so miles outside of Melissa, Texas. Going about fifty-five. Why so slow?” Then, wistfully, “I wonder who Melissa was. I bet she was pretty. A natural blonde. She was probably so beautiful that her Daddy named a town after her. I wished my Daddy had named a town after me. Instead, he was just a shitty, lying drunk.”

A slight commotion, and then a click.

“Who was that?” Hudson asked, a full ten minutes after I hung up.

I debated where to start. Maybe with the truth.

“Charla Polaski.”

Hudson turned his head sharply.

“The woman on death row who shot off her husband’s genitals in a middle-school shower?” Was everyone in my life a virtual Wikipedia of crime information?

“The one and only. Currently in the same prison as Anthony Marchetti. She’s been turned into a messenger. Calling me. I figure Marchetti is bribing the guards to make it happen.” I hesitated. “There’s a tracer on this car or those guys behind us aren’t on our side because she just told me our exact location.”

“Or they tracked us by the signal in your damn phone, which you left on even though I asked you nicely not to.”

“Well, there’s that possibility, too.”

“How many times has she called?”

“Three in the last seven days if you don’t count the ten times I didn’t answer.” I was making this sound perfectly logical, the sudden liaison of a Texas murderess and a Chicago mobster legend with me, the magnet in the middle. “Charla says Marchetti wants me to come see him tomorrow during visiting hours.”

I stole a look at Hudson’s face. Redder. About five or so on the volcano scale.

“I’ll go,” he said stiffly. “You won’t.”

“I think she needs protection.” I didn’t mention that he’d announced last night that he was done with me. “Maybe to be moved to another facility. Also-”

“I can’t even express how angry I am with you.”

“She told me to trust no one.”

“Hell, you didn’t need her to tell you that. You’ve been operating that way for years.”

“Hudson…”

“Just shut up and turn off that phone,” he said, his eyes on our tail in the rear-view mirror. “I need to think.”

When I was small, I pictured God sticking His finger down through the clouds into the dust of the earth and drawing all the roads in lines and loops, circles and zigzags, so that we could go wherever we wanted but always end up back in the same place.

I never expected Tuck to die violently on one of those roads while I slept on my favorite pony sheets. Tuck left and I never got to say goodbye and the little girl in me won’t forgive God for not bringing him home.

I never knew Roxy Martin in life, but it was her car wreck on a moonless Wyoming night twenty-two years after Tuck’s death that gave birth to the panic attacks buried inside me.

I was only a hundred yards away shortly after Roxy’s spirit abandoned her body in the ravine. I felt a connection, as if she’d swept by and tried to help me catch my breath before she flew off for good. Sometimes I imagine she still visits me, her ghost as gauzy as the dress she died in. Tuck visits, too, but his energy is dense and thick, like the air before a thunderstorm.

For a week after Roxy’s death, I became her primary voyeur. I walked in a dream through my job at Halo Ranch and devoured every newspaper article about the investigation into the crash, every word of her obituary. She was the best setter on her high school volleyball team, a part-time worker at Burger King, her single mother’s best friend. Ordinary and not, like most of us.

I attended her funeral even though she was a complete stranger, even though the thought of a funeral overwhelms me with dread, like when the bar clamps down before the roller coaster takes off.

I knew, of course, that Roxy broke something loose in me, that my brief obsession with her was rooted in pent-up grief for my brother, who died the same way, a teenager on a night of celebration.

My larger fixation with death is more complicated. The therapist in my head says it is because I was left alone with Tuck’s closed casket when I was six and looked inside.

I don’t know why I am thinking about this now, in the middle of Texas nowhere, whizzing by fields fried gold by the heat, as Hudson gives me the silent treatment.

Granny would call it a premonition.

I had my finger poised to power off my phone when it began to vibrate.

Private caller. Please, not Charla.

One press of a button, and my world hurtled out of control again.

Sadie’s voice. Two words, the last ones I expected.

“Mama’s dead.”

The next twenty-four hours were a blur of tears, anger, denial, and the tedious business of death.

I learned that Hudson was, in fact, extremely good at speeding. It turns out that his team in Afghanistan drove a “controlled” hundred miles an hour everywhere they went to avoid getting ambushed. With warning lights flashing and the speedometer pushing ninety, he scooted every vehicle to the side of the road like an obedient row of ants. He stopped only when we reached the hospital, where Sadie and I sat numbly in the office of a suited nerd who’d been through this routine way too many times to still successfully fake sympathy. I almost appreciated that.

Would we like Mama to stay in a comfort room in the hospital morgue for the night (translation, on a steel table covered with a sheet) or had we already picked a funeral home?

He shoved a permission form across the desk. The hospital sometimes conducted autopsies in cases like this when the cause of death was uncertain. Would we please sign off? The hospital would pay, of course, although it could take up to a month for the results from UT Southwestern. I tried to turn off the mental picture of medical students cutting away on our mother, trading sick jokes to make it seem like a less awful way to learn.

“It’s not CSI, where cases are solved in forty-five minutes,” the administrator said, a line he probably used five times a week.

My head throbbed under the fluorescent lights. I let my attention wander to his name tag. “Martin Van Buren, senior afterlife counselor,” a title surely tried out first on some stupid focus group.

I’d bet Mr. Van Buren was one of the last kids picked for games in elementary school and things hadn’t improved much for him since. His dark suit hung on a thin frame that held no hint of muscle. Fuzzy red hair sprouted out of his balding head. He wore smudged wire-frame glasses. No wedding ring. A brutal analysis, but I needed a target for my anger.

“How did this happen?” I demanded, making him jump. “Who had access to her room? To her IV?”

My fury bounced off. I would have to do better than that to ruffle Mr. Van Buren, whose plaque on the wall boasted fifteen years of counseling to unreasonable, grief-stricken customers like me.

In a practiced gesture, he took one hand and flipped out his polyester tie, a colorful bouquet of hot air balloons.

“Ma’am, you will need to speak to the authorities about that. The hospital is not admitting to any fault or culpability. Her doctor believes she suffered a stroke, a risk of one of her medications. The autopsy is just a matter of routine.”

A visibly upset Sadie put her hand on my knee. “Tommie-let’s talk in the hall for a second.

“Don’t do this, please,” she pleaded, outside the door. Thirty feet away, Hudson and two of his bodyguard friends stood like gladiators in a protective semicircle around a teary Maddie. Our cousin Nanette had brought her back from Marfa an hour ago.

“Mama’s dead, Tommie. Let’s bury her peacefully. Send her off with good karma.”

“Good karma?” I looked at her in disbelief. “This isn’t about karma. This is about what’s real. About whether our mother was murdered.” I spit out this last part as quietly as I could, but Maddie captured the tone and planted her face in her protector’s chest, a man with the ridiculous name of Bat whom we hadn’t even known yesterday.

I couldn’t stop myself, hurtful words rolling out of my mouth way too easily. “Why do you just accept things as fate?” And then, with a disgust that surprised me: “Grow up, Sadie.”

From the corner of my eye, I watched Hudson urge Maddie and the rest of the group down the hall, away from my explosion, a good decision because Sadie immediately fired back with dead-on arrows. She’d always been a good shot.

“You’re kidding, right? Look at yourself, Tommie. You rescue those kids. But you won’t lift a finger to rescue yourself. Your personal life is a sea of denial. Maybe you’re not dependent on alcohol now, but if you keep going this way, in ten years you will be. And where’s a lasting relationship? For that matter, where’s mine?”

I started to interject, but Sadie was just warming up.

“Did you really just figure out now that our childhood was a little odd? That Mama was depressed? That Daddy wanted a better marriage than he got? That we lived in a state of paranoia? How many grandfathers do you know who place their elementary school granddaughters in the trunks of their cars, close the lids, and tell them to kick out the taillights while lying there in the dark, then wave their hands out of the holes like a white flag? Remember how Daddy used to make us get in on the passenger side of our car in a parking lot if a van had parked next to the driver’s side? You know, a safety precaution so the bad guys couldn’t toss us in.”

Her voice had begun to shake. “I still do that with Maddie today even though he always said it was a game. A game!”

The tiny white cross on her forehead, usually invisible, flared red, a warning sign to anyone who knew my sister well. The scar resulted from Sadie refusing to wear a seatbelt on the way home from a dance lesson. Almost as soon as Mama hit the gas, a car pulled out in front of us and Sadie hit the dashboard.

When Sadie arrived home with a pink balloon and a neat cross of black stitches on her forehead, Granny said that it was a sign that God had personally stamped Sadie with the Gift. Mama had disappeared for the rest of the night.

Mr. Van Buren poked his head out the door. “Ladies? It’s closing in on five p.m. Decisions should be made.”

I swallowed hard. My anger was about something else entirely. The person I wanted to talk to most in the world, who could shed light into all the dark places, was gone, forever. No more living with the hope of a new drug or the fantasy that Mama would just snap out of it.

No more music.

“We’re ready,” I told Van Buren.

Sadie, surprised, raised her eyes. Her face was splotchy and pale.

“You’re right,” I said quietly, squeezing her hand. “You’re right about everything. We need to say goodbye to Mama. I’ll leave it alone. Turn it over to the police.” I didn’t know yet if this was a lie.

Sadie and I had survived bitter fights like this as teenagers because every hormonal word we spoke melted away by morning. But I couldn’t count on that now. I couldn’t be sure of anything, except that I couldn’t lose Sadie, too.