Playing Dead

CHAPTER 4

My breath came in short, quick gasps. I could see nothing but blackness and tiny fragments of light, glitter falling in a dark galaxy. My aching arms reached up and my palms pushed against the satin-lined lid of the coffin. I was getting weak. I’d been at this for hours.

A phone trilled, muffled but close. Someone was out there, six feet of packed dirt and red clay and crawling earthworms above my grave. They could help me. I began to scream so loudly I woke myself up.

This is how it always ended. The dream haunted me at least a dozen times a year, and the worst part was not knowing which night it would strike, when I’d wake up soaked in sweat, choking on my own spit, gasping for breath. There was only one night-the anniversary, September 3, when I always pulled an all-nighter with the horses, never letting my eyes shut-when I was free of it. On most every other night of the year, I fell asleep to the canned laughter of late-night reruns.

My dreams, since I was a kid, always had a physical consequence. If I fell off a horse, I’d hit the ground with enough force to wake me up, and my butt would be sore for an hour afterward. Two nights ago, I woke up from a sex dream so close to orgasm that my fingers took me there in seconds. Of course, that could be because my sex life had been a little lacking lately.

It took a few beats for me to cross over the gray divide from dreamland to the deluxe king room at the Worthington. My body was slick with sweat, my hair damp at the base of my neck. My heart slowed at the sight of a gently starched white top sheet, the carved antique wardrobe, the cherry-red throw still folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

Victor from El Salvador had been only too happy to drive up to the door of Daddy’s building last night in his Yellow Cab, pop me inside, regale me with tales of his own hopeless love life, then drop me into the waiting arms of a hotel doorman. Victor’s card has been a fixture in every McCloud’s wallet for the last decade, ever since the Christmas Day he slept near a DFW luggage carousel waiting on my long-delayed flight from Cheyenne that didn’t arrive until 3 a.m. He drove the forty-five miles to the ranch as dawn broke and charged only a standard fare. All the McClouds had a stomach virus that year, buckets at every bedside, some pulled from the horse stalls. Still, Daddy crawled out of his sickbed in his pajamas and slippers to hand Victor a crisp $100 bill as a tip.

My niece, Maddie, is the artist behind the sign pasted on the back of his cab’s passenger seat. “Best Cabbie on Earth!” it shouts, accompanied by a vibrant drawing of a taxi with a friendly brown man waving behind the steering wheel while driving atop a misshapen green and blue planet.

I hoped that in some small way Maddie’s art negated some of the prejudice that flowed Victor’s way since 9/11. I hated that he felt the need to paste three American flag stickers inside the cab for added passenger reassurance.

The phone shrilled two more times before I made a supreme effort to try to find it, lost somewhere in the puffy clouds of the comforter.

“Where the hell are you?” Sadie demanded as I pressed it to my ear.

“What time is it?” I asked groggily.

“It’s eleven a.m. You’re not at the ranch. I’m standing on the porch, so don’t lie about it. You told me you were spending the night here.” Her tone, accusing, was justified.

“Oh, Sadie, I’m sorry! I was at the office late…” I wondered whether to tell her first about Wade or the obnoxious reporter or the woman claiming I was not Sadie’s biological sister.

I chose none of the above.

“I decided to pull a Daddy and take a room at the Worthington. I thought I’d be up at seven and home before you got there.” Sadie and my niece, Maddie, lived two miles from the ranch in a doublewide trailer they dubbed the Can of Dreams. It overlooked a sweet spot of the property that Sadie hadn’t committed to building on yet.

“Uh-huh, right. Like you were going to pull yourself off of a million-count feather pillow-top mattress at the crack of dawn. Very optimistic. Well, at least you finally got some sleep.”

She changed the subject abruptly.

“Tommie, yesterday afternoon after you left, Mama had a little spell.”

I sat up, fully awake now, taking in the three tiny empty bottles of vodka on the dresser and the fact that I was completely naked except for a pair of purple striped bikini underwear.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I didn’t want to bother you while you were trying to get a handle on Daddy’s stuff because, Lord, we really need to do that. By the time I got there, she was calm. She said she just had another headache and asked why everybody was all bothered. Meanwhile, an orderly was picking up the lunch dishes she’d tossed across the room. She got a little V for that.”

V is for Valium. At some point, I think every single word in the English language will be abbreviated or eliminated if it cannot conform to one to four letters. Sadie, an iPhone addict, is on board with this; me, not so much. A hundred years from now, I believe linguists will study our language and write (brief) papers on how inefficient we were with our brains. Why use a complicated word when a shorter one will do? Why store fifteen words in your head that mean essentially the same thing? The poetry, the nuance, the rhythm will no longer matter.

“Did she recognize you?” I asked my sister.

“No. Well, yes, eventually. After we got to Irene’s.” She paused. “We took a little field trip.”

I slid back down in the bed. No wonder Sadie was so eager to forgive me.

“And what did Irene have to say?”

“I can hear your tone, Tommie.”

There are words for people like my sister. Kook was harsh. I preferred free spirit. Sadie is both my polar opposite and my favorite person on earth.

There are words in my head for Irene not nearly as kind.

“She laid her out on her table. She thinks Mama stores too much energy in her head and that’s causing some of her headaches and memory problems.” Sadie took a breath. “I swear, Tommie, I think I saw something rise out of her like a fog. Mama kind of shuddered. And then we had a nice lunch at Catfish King. You know how she loves Catfish King. She called me Sadie Louisa. She hasn’t called me that in ages.”

I stopped myself from saying that Sadie should be thanking a piece of fried fish for triggering Mama’s memory instead of a lapsed-Catholic/psychic/yoga instructor with an occasional marijuana habit.

Two years ago, doctors diagnosed our mother with early dementia. Eleven months ago, Daddy gave in and moved her to a nursing facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s and its many unnamed cousins.

No cure, just drugs that could help but often didn’t. All of us took it hard, but Sadie still passionately sought the supernatural miracle that would bring Mama back to us.

“That’s great,” I said carefully.

“Really?”

“Really. Good job.” I wasn’t lying. It probably did Mama a world of good to get out of that place for a while. And who was I, the runaway, to criticize how Sadie took care of Mama when I was usually hundreds of miles north?

We hung up, agreeing that I’d be at the ranch by mid-afternoon, with CFS in hand as a peace offering. That would be text-speak for Chicken Fried Steak.

I spent twenty glorious minutes with my back to the shower’s luxury hot water massager, the equivalent of a generous man giving me a back rub without expecting anything in return.

While I toweled off, my brain, still relentlessly processing, conjured up another picture. Mama pulling weeds in the garden, singing to herself, a mournful, bluesy song at odds with a bright day, knee deep in cilantro and lemon mint, the most cheerful of herbs. Still, it was a beautiful sound. Haunting. I was about thirteen, several yards away, cutting lilac for the sachets Granny liked in her underwear drawer.

When I asked, Mama told me the song was an Ethel Waters classic from the twenties. She said her mother used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. She seldom mentioned her mother, so those few words, that tiny glimpse, were a rare gift.

An odd lullaby, I thought. More of a lament.

Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you.

Right after Mama was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I became obsessed with listening to every version of “Am I Blue” in digital existence. Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson. At the time I just thought I was missing the Mama who used to know the words, hoping to trap her inside a little machine and plug her voice back into my head.

Now I wondered if my subconscious had been bubbling up, telling me that even at thirteen, I already knew something was not quite right. That the song was a clue.

A finger of dread found its way under the thick cotton of the complimentary hotel robe. I shivered. I stared in the mirror and told myself to buck up, raking my fingers through wet, stringy hair that reached halfway down my back.

I’d never believed in layers or bangs or Chi irons. I washed my hair. I combed my hair. I let the air dry it.

I’d only seriously chopped it off once, three years ago, donating it to a little girl named Darcy. In her case, A was for alopecia. She’d arrived at the ranch with a bad synthetic wig and the kind of emotional scars that only other little twelve-year-old boys and girls can scratch out on your heart. Darcy loved the horses first and my hair second. When she left, a hairdresser in town cut off fifteen inches. I put it in a plastic bag as a goodbye present, which sounds creepy but wasn’t in the least.

Myra, a good friend and the psychologist who ran the therapy side of the ranch, pulled me in afterward.

“That wasn’t exactly protocol,” she said.

“Do you think it was the wrong thing to do?”

“I don’t know. It’s not Darcy I’m worried about, Tommie. Or any of the other kids. You have the highest degree of success of anybody here. I give you the most messed-up kids for a reason. The person I’m worried about is you. You get in too deep. I’m afraid the next body part you chop off will make you bleed.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or not.

“I don’t know any other way,” I protested. “And I always let them go.”

“Maybe you watch them walk away, Tommie. But you never let these kids go.”

I scooped my jeans up off the floor by the bed where I’d dropped them last night, smelled under the arms of the peach-colored Lucky Brand T-shirt I’d borrowed from Sadie because the clean clothes in my suitcase had run out, found my bra and one boot under the bed and another near the door.

I tugged it all on and checked my purse for the pistol.

A weapon didn’t seem like overkill even in the light of day. Then I called down and asked for a cab to take me back to Daddy’s pickup in the Stockyards. Victor, I knew, had a lunch date with a single mom he’d met online.