Playing Dead

CHAPTER 32

I heard a voice from far away, up at the top of the well, and I tried pushing through the blackness to reach it, but I was so tired and someone had placed a large rock on my chest.

Get this rock off of me. I tried to scream it but there was no sound. Maybe it wasn’t a rock. Maybe my soul was stuck, a grackle in my chest, pressing, unable to get out.

No white light. Did I not make it to heaven? Could I try again?

My eyes flickered at shadows. I worked my lids harder, opening and shutting, until all the lines and colors filled in. The rock floated off.

Not heaven. I was lying on a gold and red plaid couch that smelled of wet dog. An unshaven man on crutches hovered, peering down, perplexed about what to do with me. He held a rifle. Oddly, I could picture exactly where I was. An old farmhouse with a tin roof and a yard littered with abandoned farm equipment. A rusty basketball hoop attached to the garage, a wheelchair sitting under it. At least, that’s how it used to be. I reached back for his name.

Arless. A Vietnam veteran with two Purple Hearts. Twenty years ago, Daddy and Arless shook on a long-term rental agreement that he would live free on our Stephenville property until he died.

“He just dropped you off,” Arless told me. “Kicked in the door with you in his arms. I nearly shot him.”

“Maddie…” I said, suddenly remembering, wishing I hadn’t, tears stinging.

“Don’t say nothin’. You don’t look too good. They’re comin’ for you.”

I woke up in the hospital, and Daddy was there. The smell of cigarette smoke embedded in the fibers of his work shirt, the rank and delicious fragrance of the barn. His hand like an oven mitt covering mine, one of the few parts of my body that didn’t cry out.

When I opened my eyes to greet him, I saw Wade, and grief choked me, my mind suddenly locked on Daddy in the casket, shrunken and delicate, a wax doll in a neatly pressed blue suit. In life, Daddy was never neatly pressed.

“I was just filling in,” Wade said, pulling away, embarrassed. “Sadie’s down the way with Maddie. Maddie’s doing real good. She’s going home in the morning. Your boyfri-Hudson is getting some coffee.” He hesitated, brushing his hand over his head, smoothing back the few hairs left on it. “The police are all over this.”

He put a finger to his lips. “Uh-uh, don’t talk. The doc doesn’t want you to.” I figured it was more likely that Wade was the one who wanted to stunt any conversation but I was struggling to move my lips. They felt enormous and tingly, as if they were triple-loaded with collagen. Wade glanced at the closed door, edgy.

The thought floated up like a dead fish. Was he going to smother me? His hand dug into the tight front pocket of his Levi’s. Maybe a knife.

He removed a familiar object and held it in front of my eyes. I could see the letters. BOWW. Bank of the Wild West. How did he get the key to the safe deposit box?

“Your Mama gave me this, Tommie. Said to burn everything in the box it goes to when she died. I was going to give it to you yesterday out at the wind farm.” I was still staring at the key and registering the numbers. New numbers.

Another key. A second key. Another box?

I struggled to push away the haze settled around my brain like mosquito netting.

It was Mama that Wade was protecting. Not Daddy.

Something delicious was streaming through my IV.

“If it’s OK with you, I’m going to reach into your purse right here and put this on your key chain. For when you’re up to it.” While he threaded it on my key chain, he focused his eyes down on his task, away from me. “I think you know where to use it. This is the first time I’ve ever gone against your Mama’s wishes. I don’t like the feeling.”

Wade tossed the keys back in my purse, stood up stiffly, and reached for his cowboy hat upright on the chair next to him.

“I know you never liked me,” he said, “but I always liked you, and I’ll tell you why. You never once looked down on my son even when you were a brat.”

He smiled.

A few things hit me right then.

The time Wade found me and a friend hitchhiking from a nearby town in our high school track uniforms, how he pulled over and yanked us into his truck and yelled until I thought the windows in the cab would explode. How he never told on me to Daddy.

How he taught me to shatter skeet in the sky and to stick a hook into a wriggling minnow and to bank a tough shot on a pool table. How I thought he was mean because he never offered anything but criticism, but when I stepped outside the perimeter of the ranch I could beat a boy at anything Wade had taught me.

When Rusty, his son, erupted in a seizure in the barn two days after I turned ten, I knew to cushion his head with a horse blanket, not to restrain him, just reassure him, that he’d take his cues from me like any other animal, all because Wade hammered it in my head. I used the lesson of that experience to treat the little people who’d streamed into my life since, broken and flailing, terrified about what to expect.

“We don’t get to pick things the way we want them,” Wade said now. “I didn’t want Rusty to be autistic. But he’s the best thing in my life. I guess you know that.”

I didn’t know that at all. I’d never heard Wade talk like this before, to bare a single emotion. A minute ago, I thought he was going to smother me.

“We don’t get to pick things,” he said again.

He reached the door, and turned back.

“I don’t know if the answers in that box will hurt you more or set you free, Tommie. But I figure it’s your decision to make.”

I tried to get comfortable in the passenger seat of Hudson’s truck, but the sling on my arm got in the way. Any movement to adjust positions either shot fire up my chest, taped like a corset to hold together three bruised ribs, or through my shoulder, which, it turned out, just needed one faint-inducing pop back into place by a qualified medical professional. My head ached steadily.

“You were lucky,” the emergency room doctor told me, after a short torture session. “It’s just a mild concussion.”

In the backward way that life operates, Maddie’s tumor had helped save her life. If she hadn’t been wearing the helmet, if the shooter’s aim had been better, the bullet would have pierced her brain. Instead, it ricocheted and dug into our land, a trinket to be discovered by post-apocalypse hunters and gatherers thousands of years from now. Maddie was scratched up, but the brain scan deemed her no worse for wear.

Both of us stayed the night in the hospital for observation. Sadie and Maddie were now headed back to the ranch, while I remained stubbornly fettered to a course of possible self-destruction. The key clutched between my fingers felt weighted, full of portent.

“Could you maybe slow down a little?” I asked Hudson. “And try not to hit big holes like that one?”

“Sorry. But this is stupid. You should be going home to bed, not to the bank.” His mouth was set in a grim line. He leaned over me to flip down the mirrored visor. “Have you taken a good look at yourself lately?”

I barely recognized the wild being reflected back. I looked worse today than yesterday, like a rotting piece of fruit. Half of my face was tie-dyed a mottled purple and blue, and a tire track of a scab was forming. My hair stuck out in oily straggles. I leaned the mirror forward and took in the sling, which stretched across my body. I snapped the mirror up.

“Perfectly normal from the waist down,” I said, although Hudson hadn’t seen the stream of bruises down my right side or watched my excruciating effort to slide into these jeans. Just speaking sent an avalanche of hurt down my body, each word like a little punch.

I reached for the bottle of pain pills in my purse and swallowed one dry, closing my eyes, replaying the last two days.

Only an hour or so had passed from the time the first shot was fired at Maddie until the police and emergency crew barreled into Arless’s home. They had wasted a little time at the site of the Jeep after discovering a man on the driver’s side with his head taken off by a nasty hollow point. Then they got Arless’s 911 call.

A bullet from the same gun was found in the man in the field. He’d been shot in the back. I readily confessed to the splattered mess at the bottom of the turbine. All three men were identified as worker bees for the Cantini crime family, two cousins and a brother of the man who had dragged me from the library in Chicago.

When the police asked, I described the anonymous gentleman who had carried me off in his arms like John Wayne as “beige.” Arless just kept his mouth shut.

Hudson interrupted my thoughts, grumpy, pulling the truck to a halt in front of the discreet glass door of the Bank of the Wild West. I wasn’t sure how to deal with this Hudson, overprotective, loaded with guilt for not being there.

“You know, Wade is a closemouthed bastard,” he said. “I don’t trust him. He couldn’t have waited until you were better to hand over the key?” Hudson didn’t seem to be expecting a response from me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“No, go on to the meeting. You’ve put it off twice because of me. Pick me up in about two hours.” I winced as I reached for the door handle.

“I’m having lunch with the guy at Reata. Two blocks away. I can cut it short if I need to. He just wants a tail on his daughter’s ex-boyfriend.”

And maybe a warning from a guy who could snap his neck. Once upon a time, like a month ago, this would have bothered me. I would have held Hudson’s willingness to cross the line against him, as a reason not to get close.

Not anymore. Snap away.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Stop this. None of this is your fault. I won’t move an inch outside the bank until you come back.” I reached for the door handle again.

“Wait,” Hudson said, leaning over me to open the glove compartment.

“You’re double-parked,” I protested. “I don’t need a gun. It will set off the bank alarm.”

“It’s not a gun.” Whatever it was, it was very small. He turned over his hand and opened his palm like a magician, revealing a lovely band of gold filigree lit by tiny rubies.

“Your grandmother’s ring,” I said, my heart flipping.

“You wore it once. Fourteen years ago. For forty-one days. This time I’m hoping you won’t give it back.”

He slipped the delicate band onto the ring finger of my left hand.

“It’s a promise,” he said.

Hudson waited until I disappeared behind the opaque door before pulling away from the curb. Ms. Billington appeared at my side instantly, invisible antennae wiggling, her face contorting into a series of comical expressions as she took in my appearance. I’m pretty sure the last one said, “Serves you right.”

“Your lawyer has it all set up,” she said briskly, recovering, guiding me back to her spotless desk. I avoided my reflection in the glass. Once was enough for today.

“ID, please. You are not listed as an agent to get into the box in case of emergency. Your lawyer cut through a few layers of protocol with my boss.” Clearly, Sue Billington did not approve of such favors tossed over a cell phone line.

“Can you tell me something, please?” I kept my voice neutral, pushing my driver’s license across the desk. “Did my Daddy know about this second box?”

“Signature here at the X, please,” she said briskly, separating one of the papers from the pile in front of her. “And initial here. And here. Pretty ring, by the way. Unusual.”

“Please help me.”

Sue Billington popped up her head and connected with my eyes, now pooling with tears. As she whipped out a Kleenex from under the desk, her face melted into an expression probably reserved for her beloved cat, and she leaned in conspiratorially.

“No. I do not believe your father ever knew about this box. This is pure speculation based on twenty-five years of loyal bank service and observation of human behavior. The paperwork indicates that your mother opened this box alone. There is no joint renter or appointed agent for emergency access. If I’ve learned anything in this business, it’s that people, especially people who sit all shiny in church every Sunday morning, are quite deceitful to their spouses. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve never married.”

It’s also because no one in his right mind has asked you, you nosy little fruitcake.

We repeated the Bank of the Wild West security rigmarole: keycard, palm scan, spy cameras, a greeting from Rex and his unholstered gun, and I was back in a room I had hoped to never step foot in again. Today, without Sadie, the room seemed even more claustrophobic. I imagined tiny dead bodies stored behind each metal door.

We inserted our keys and Ms. Billington slid Mama’s box out of its place from a lower corner nowhere near the other one. She placed it almost tenderly on the table, reminded me to push the red button when I was finished so she could retrieve me, and left.

I dropped into one of the giant chairs and let it swallow me up like a leather womb.

The box contained two envelopes. One big, one small. It wasn’t too late to let Wade burn them. My heart, for a change, felt perfectly still; my hands, ice cold.

My fingers reached for the larger manila envelope. No markings of any kind. I ran my nail under the flap and pulled out the few sheets inside.

The police report of Tuck’s accident.

I jumped, dropping it from my fingers like it was flaming, my chair swerving backward on its rollers, sending me off balance. The report floated to the floor along with a series of stark black-and-white photographs.

There were photographs.

How cruel was Wade to send me here?

I don’t know if the answers will hurt you or set you free, Tommie.

I reached over and picked up the pictures first, one by one, and examined the smoking black skeleton of Tuck’s car.

A panic attack was banging in my chest, screaming. Let me out, let me out.

The police report was stuck under one of the chair’s rollers. I extracted it, careful not to rip it. The words blurred, until my eyes halted abruptly like the Ouija mouse, settling over two words.

Explosive device.

Not an accident.

Tuck had been blown away.