The Year We Disappeared (15 page)

ONE afternoon when I got home from school, Kelly was sitting at our kitchen table, just like she had never left—like nothing had ever happened. Mom was back in nursing school full time, and with Dad gone, it was hard to do everything in the house by herself, so she’d asked Kelly to come back and help out. Kelly had brought our family pets back with her, too—our cat, Pyewacket, and dog, Tigger. She’d taken them up to Maine with her while we were gone in Boston. I was so glad to see Tigs and Pye that for the first few minutes, I didn’t even care that Kelly was back.

My dad’s friend Don was there, drinking coffee with another cop named Stoney—his real name was Paul Stone. He and Dad were considered to be two of the most handsome cops on the force—both tall and blond, with classic good looks. Stoney was a bit taller than Dad, about six foot two or so, and had been a football player for Boston University before becoming
a cop, and he and Dad both had the same broad shoulders and strong builds. Stoney had left the force and gone to work for the MDC, Metropolitan District Commission, a couple of years before Dad was shot, but he still hung out with all the Falmouth cops, especially Dad, and they played a lot of handball. I noticed that Kelly usually took a little extra time to look nice when he came around.

My brothers and I suspected that Kelly might have a little crush on Stoney, so when I first got home from school that day, I thought for a second maybe she had come over because she’d heard he was going to be there. But it turned out that she was actually moving back in with us for good.

Mom was home too, sorting laundry in the kitchen. She had just gotten home from one of her nursing classes. “We got another basket today, from the Cheese House,” she told me, pointing to a huge gift basket on the table. We had been getting a lot of these—local places sending over big baskets and boxes of goodies for us and for the officers guarding us. Every night for dinner we had a covered dish that someone had dropped off. Usually one of the officer’s wives would make us a lasagna or a casserole or two, enough for our whole family, visitors, and the guys guarding us outside.

I dug into the basket, bypassing the pretty cellophane-wrapped apples and oranges for the good stuff that I knew was underneath. “Can I have this?” I asked Mom, holding up a giant chocolate bar.

She gave me a look and I just smiled. “Please?” I begged, but she just shook her head. “Okay, how about this?” I held up a bag of some granola mix that had chocolate chips in it. “This is practically health food!”

“Fine,” Mom said with a smile. “Not too much. Arthur and Cynthia sent over a whole turkey for dinner and . . .” I was busy opening the granola bag, so it took me a second to notice that mom had stopped talking. When I looked up, she was holding a dark blue shirt, one of my dad’s police uniform shirts. It must have been buried in the bottom of the clothes hamper, from before we left, before he was shot.

Mom just stood there for a second looking at the shirt, then she held it to her face. Nobody said anything for the longest time, then she opened the cellar door that led to the washer in the basement and threw the shirt down the stairs. I could see that she was crying. Then she starting yelling. “Damn it, damn it, I can’t do this anymore! I’m done!” She went to go down the cellar stairs but ended up sitting on the top step, sobbing. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there, holding the bag of granola. Eric and Shawn walked into the kitchen from the living room, where they had been watching TV. “What’s wrong?” Shawn asked. He looked nervous.

Don went over to Mom and knelt beside her. “It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay, it’s already okay. He’s coming home. It’s all going to be fine,” I heard him telling her.

“What’s the matter with Mom?” Eric whispered to Kelly.

“Nothing, just go back into the other room,” Kelly said, getting up. She tried to scoot us down the hallway.

“Look, you’re scaring the children,” I heard Don say quietly.

“Oh, mustn’t scare the children!” Mom said. She started laughing in a very fake way, sounding like a crazy lady. “My God, someone only tried to kill their father, and probably wants to kill them. You’re telling
me
not to scare them?” she screamed. “Look at you!” She pointed at Don’s shoulder holster. “How many guns are in this house right now? In our yard? Don’t you tell
me
not to scare them!” She was angrier than I had ever seen her before. She stood and started picking up the clothes she had been sorting and threw them down the stairs in big armfuls.

“Mommy’s fine.” She looked over at me and said in a singsong voice, “Just hate to do laundry, that’s all.” I could see tears on her face. She picked up another pile of the clothes she had carefully sorted and hurled them through the cellar doorway. When she had emptied the hamper, she turned and went down the stairs too, slamming the basement door behind her. After a few seconds of silence, Don opened the door and followed her.

“Come on, you guys,” Kelly said, motioning us out of the kitchen and into the living room. “Your mom was at school all day, she just needs a break. Give her a minute and she’s going to be fine.”

And Kelly was right. We went into the other room and I sat with Tigger on my lap and petted her soft, floppy ears while my brothers watched TV. After a while, Mom called us into the kitchen for dinner. She had heated up the turkey and the house
smelled like Thanksgiving. Kelly was sitting next to Stoney at the table, blushing. Don and Stoney had pulled out the table extension to make it large enough for all of us to sit and have this feast, and they’d brought in the extra chairs from the den. Mom seemed okay again; you couldn’t even tell she had been crying. She fixed some plates of food for the cops who were on duty in the yard; she was smiling and looking like the picture of a perfect mom. No one would have guessed that she had had a meltdown just an hour before.

The next morning, we got ready for school and Kelly made us breakfast. Everything was starting to settle into a pretty regular routine. We were walked to the bus stop by an officer. Two cops followed us to school in a cruiser. An armed officer guarded each of us at school. Then the procedure was reversed on the way home.

One afternoon, Eric went to hang out with the kids at the Zylinskis’ house after school. I don’t know how he managed to get out of our house and cross the yard without one of the guards seeing him, but he did. When we noticed that he was missing, everyone started to freak out.

“When did you last see your brother?” a cop asked me. I couldn’t remember; I’d been watching
Little House on the Prairie
.

“I think he was going over to the Zylinskis’,” Shawn finally said, and the cop took off running down our street, holding his gun at his hip with one hand as he ran. A few minutes later, he was back with Eric, who looked like he’d been crying.

“You can’t just go off without telling anyone!” Mom yelled at him. I knew Eric had no idea that what he’d done was wrong—none of us really did. Later, when everyone had calmed down, Eric told us how the cop had run into the Zylinskis’ yard and grabbed him and yelled, “You must always remain in my eyesight!” We kind of laughed it off, like the guy was a little crazy. No harm done; it was forgotten. Until that night when I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. I could hear Mom and Kelly out in the living room, talking to a couple of cops who were visiting. They were discussing how the security would have to change when Dad came home. More guys on duty. A sniper on the roof with a long-range rifle, that kind of thing. I hadn’t really thought too much about when all of this would end. Somehow, I had convinced myself that once Dad was able to come home, things would be normal again.

We had all been so caught up in the urgency of Dad’s injuries and his “accident” that I almost hadn’t thought about the reason behind all of this security. But in the dark, alone, Richie’s words that day in the lunchroom came back to haunt me: “Maybe they’ll come to school and shoot you, too.” Dad’s shooting hadn’t been an accident. Someone had wanted to
kill
him. I was just starting to understand this. Someone
hated
him. The thought made my chest ache. I just couldn’t imagine someone hating my dad that much, wanting to hurt him this way. And now I was starting to see that they hated me, too, and my brothers. They wanted to kill all of us—really kill us. We couldn’t go
anywhere without the police. To the grocery store, to a friend’s house, to school. There was no safe place.
You must always remain in my eyesight
. I wanted to imagine a time when this would be over and we could go back to living the way we used to, but the more I thought about that, the more scared I got. There would be no going back to normal for us. There were only two choices now: live like this, or don’t live at all.

DON Price, two guards, and Polly and I made the trip back to the Cape with all my new equipment. I was due for checkups every three days in Boston, so although it would be a lot of traveling, it would be worth it just to get home.

Don was cheerful on the trip, talking about how my security detail was the best job going, and everyone in the department wanted to sign up for it. “No traffic or pissed-off tourists to deal with. Time-and-a-half payscale.” I had a small pad with me and wrote, “Sounds like my shooting will fatten the wallets of a lot of cops/friends.” Polly read it off to him and they both laughed.

I looked out the window, watching the tranquil cranberry bogs pass by. As happy as I was to be going home, I could feel anger welling up inside me as we crossed the Bourne Bridge. I was returning a different man. I couldn’t escape it; there were too many reminders. The fact that I couldn’t talk. The tube sticking
out of my stomach, the hole in my throat. I didn’t want to see my face.
Look what they did to me
—that was all I could think when I saw my reflection.
I can’t wait to get those bastards
.

The kids were thrilled that I was home, though it meant tighter security for them. A sniper was added to the security detail, and he took up position on top of the house, right over the boys’ room. “No way,” Polly said. “Tell that guy to get down. If his gun goes off by mistake or something . . . “

I wanted to point out that the chances of him misfiring, of a shot going through the roof and somehow finding one of our sons was pretty slim, but she had been through a lot and it was the least I could do. We asked him to move to the other side of the roof.

Don was right about the guard detail—most of the guys watching the house were friends of mine, and those first few days it probably felt more like a party than a job. Everybody came by to visit and pay respects. One guy, I think it was Paul Carreiro, pointed out that while some cops on the force had been retired early due to physical ailments and injuries—bad backs and the like—no one had ever been shot like I was. “You’ll be the first Falmouth cop to retire with a gunshot wound,” he told me. The comment hit me hard. I hadn’t really thought too much about the future, but now it had become obvious that I couldn’t be a cop anymore. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have assumed that I would work again. Thirty-six seemed young to retire, for that part of my life to be over, but it was.

Friends kept things light; no one mentioned the investigation when I first got home. I didn’t realize how careful everyone was being around me until somebody slipped up and mentioned that Chief Ferreira had filed for early retirement due to some heart condition (news to me). He’d put in his paperwork the week after my shooting and would be gone by the end of the year. Clearly he wanted out, and pronto.

“Polly sure ripped him a new one when he came by here,” Rick Smith said, and several fellow officers clinked beer cans in agreement. “Good riddance,” someone said.

I wrote Rick a note: “He was here?”

“Polly didn’t tell you?” he asked. “He was here all right, and he probably won’t ever be back. I don’t know what she said to him, but we could hear her yelling all the way out the driveway.”

“John, he came out of your house so red, he didn’t say another word. Just got in his cruiser and took off,” Paul Carreiro added.

I would excuse myself every couple of hours to go into our back bedroom and use the suction machine, with Polly’s help. The machine was a little loud, but so far the kids hadn’t really noticed it. We kept it covered with a towel on the floor on the other side of the bed, out of sight. That afternoon, when Polly was helping me use the suction, I wrote her a note, asking her about the chief’s visit. “Chief F. came by? When? What happened?”

“I didn’t want to tell you when you were in the hospital,” Polly started, “but yeah, he came by one afternoon, after I
brought the kids home. Came in here telling me that he knew just how I felt, because he’d had a car go up in flames in his driveway years ago, and he knew it was Meyer who did it.” Polly stopped for a second and focused on the gauze and tape she was putting back over my trachea hole. “I told him that if he had the balls to suggest that having a car burn in your driveway is anything like having your husband get his face shot off, that he better goddamn rethink things,” she said.

I could tell she was getting mad. “And I told him what I thought of how he’s running that police department, and your investigation. I don’t remember what else I said.” She looked like she was going to cry. “I’m sorry, but that man just made me so mad! How dare he come by here with that sob story, with you still in the hospital. I mean, who does he think he is? What a bastard.”

If I could have smiled, I would have. I was so proud of her for standing up to him. We’d all been cowards for so long, doing what we were told, not writing tickets to certain connected people, backing down to Meyer and his city contracts, his connections, his threats. I was glad to see my wife fight back. Maybe I wasn’t so alone in this after all.

The local papers and even the Boston papers had been having a heyday with my story; a week didn’t go by without an update. An article had run in the local paper when Polly and the kids got home, announcing a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for any information about my shooting. So far a sixteen-man investigation unit made up of state and local cops hadn’t turned up
any leads—no one wanted to talk, and without any ballistic evidence, they had nothing legal to go on except for my word that Meyer wanted me dead.