The Year We Disappeared (31 page)

“The gun is our secret, nephew,” he told me quietly. “No one else knows it’s here. If the need arises...” He didn’t say more. He didn’t need to.

I went back into the hospital the next day for a follow-up and was cleared by Mass General to head home, so I packed up and started the drive back down south. I’d be back in six to eight months for another look at this transplant, to see if the marrow had taken this time, if bone was growing in my face. When I stopped at a hotel to spend the night, the look on the clerk’s face said it all. I was bandaged, swollen, couldn’t speak. I looked like someone who’d been in a terrible accident. I wrote him a note telling him that I needed a room for the night, and he filled out all the forms and took my money without ever taking his eyes off my face. It was clear that he was horrified but couldn’t look away. He was kind enough not to ask any questions.

In the room, I used my blender to make dinner, looking at my face in the mirror over the dresser. It was getting hard for me to see how I must appear to others; I’d already grown so used to this as my life.

When I arrived back in Tennessee, I was glad for the seclusion of our farm to rest and recuperate. Maybe the marrow in my jaw would do its trick and start making me whole again. The kids were happy to see me, as bandaged and strange as I must
have looked. They had grown used to this life too. And Polly had a surprise for me. She led me out to the barn to show me something—in the few weeks while I was gone, she’d bought a horse. A big chestnut with a white line down her nose, a Tennessee Walker. Polly had always loved horses and learned how to ride when she was young—she was an excellent horsewoman.

“I thought since we have a farm, why not, right?” she explained. A coworker at the hospital was selling her, and Polly jumped at the chance. “What do you think? She’s beautiful, huh?”

I nodded my approval. This was our life now. A barn, and a horse to go in it. There would be no going back. For a moment, the image of that gun in my uncle’s basement flashed into my mind—the .22 longs in their box, sitting there, waiting for me. “If the need arises, nephew...”His hand on my back.

“Here, pet her,” Polly said, guiding my hand. I ran it along the horse’s side, feeling her strong muscles ripple beneath. “I figure I’ll teach the kids to ride.” Polly smiled as she looked at her new horse. I watched her face. She looked happy, really happy. It was the first time I’d seen her look like that in a long, long time. And I was glad to be home.

IN TENNESSEE, WE LIVED IN THE open, never hiding, and we did not change our rather unique last name, although we had been advised it might be a good idea. My dad was confident that the Meyer family would be satisfied with the mere fact that we were out of town, out of the way. Their purpose had been served: my dad’s injuries had prevented him from testifying in the case against James Meyer, Ray Meyer’s brother.

Although Dad was not afraid, we were—my brothers, my mom, and I. Dad was the only man who had stood up to this crime family and managed to stay alive. Would they be back to finish the job? Now that we were no longer under round-the-clock police protection, would they find us and burn down our house? Murder us all? When my dad traveled back up to Boston for his surgeries he was gone for weeks at a time. They could find
him there in the hospital and pull the plug on him, put a pillow over his face, like I had seen in the movies.

As a family, we never spoke of these fears; my mom and dad did not mention the Meyer name. Dad had been in an “accident.” It was our secret, it was understood. And when a car pulled in too close behind him when he was driving, or went to pass him on the country roads where we now lived, I would always hold my breath, but I never saw him flinch.

Mom worked, my brothers and I went to school, Dad ran the farm, when he was able. The other kids at school said we talked funny with our New England accents, and that our clothes weren’t cool. It didn’t help that our schools back home had been a bit ahead of those in the South, and now we were called out for being smart. My mom bought Eric and Shawn the jeans that everyone else was wearing that year so they could blend in. I started wearing lip gloss like the other ten-year-old girls at school. I hid my glasses in my desk, cut my long hair, and affected a Southern accent. We became very good at our disguises, we made friends, and slowly, Dad started to heal, to become whole again. We pretended this was how it was all supposed to be, that we belonged here. Then something would happen to bring it all back. The phone would ring and no one would be there. A bank teller would be a little too curious, asking questions about the retirement checks from Massachusetts. A few years after the shooting, a reporter for the
Cape Cod Times
wondered about the family that had suddenly, one day, just disappeared. Through a connection
on the police force, he was able to secure an interview with Dad. When my brothers and I heard about this plan, we weren’t so sure. Was this really a reporter, or someone pretending to be a reporter? We were terrified. No one was supposed to know where we were; no one was to be trusted.

But he was a reporter. He spent a couple of days interviewing Dad, then began to write a huge front-page profile about the case, tying Dad’s shooting to the Meyer family. Before the article was even published the reporter started getting strange phone calls. Not threatening, just ominous. “We know you’ve been talking to Busby,” one caller said, then hung up. The calls came to his office at the newspaper and at his home. The reporter took his wife and infant child and quickly left town until the story, and speculation, blew over. Once the article was published and everyone knew what the reporter knew the calls stopped just as mysteriously as they had begun.

As these events happened less often, the day-to-day fears of our family turned into waiting. And after months and then years of nothing, the waiting gradually faded too. All that was left was anger. Dad didn’t talk about how he felt, but he was constantly on the verge of destroying things. The hammer that missed a nail and hit his finger was thrown into the neighbor’s field, a stream of expletives from his wired-shut jaw following its trajectory. A fence gate that wouldn’t close after the winter rains was slammed and kicked into submission one morning while my brothers and I stood and watched from the kitchen window. When we got
home from school, the gate had been hacked apart with a chain-saw and strewn across the barnyard; the wood would later be burned. When he was healthy, Dad would spend hours a day chopping wood for our small stove—much more than we would ever need for the average Southern winter. To this day, the sound of someone cutting logs with an ax makes my pulse quicken. Something bad is about to happen, someone is angry. The cut wood sat outside in huge piles—looming, stacked, and waiting to burn—a testament to Dad’s temper.

And Dad wasn’t alone in his anger; I felt it too, especially late at night as I lay in bed unable to sleep. I would think about all my old friends, the ones I wasn’t allowed to write to, the ones I didn’t even get to say good-bye to. I thought about our old house, my room with the multicolored carpeting mom had put in, the bunk bed with the Holly Hobbie blanket. I missed our days at the beach, I missed my school, my fourth-grade teacher, I even missed my long straight hair—everything I used to love, that I had always counted on, now gone. I would lie there seething, listening to the occasional car on our rural street. If the engine even slowed outside, I was ready. My hand would go to the place between my mattress and box spring, the place where I now hid my stolen steak knife, and I would hold the handle until the car passed.

In Tennessee, if you lived on a working farm or ranch, you could acquire what was called a “hardship” driver’s license when you
were fifteen years old. The point of a hardship license was to allow teens who l ived—and worked—on their family’s farm to operate farming equipment and also drive vehicles when needed. The license would also allow you to drive on the public roads, though that’s not what it was really intended for.

We lived on a rural route with kids who needed the license. These were the kids, like the boys across the street, who missed a month of school in the early fall to harvest and hang tobacco. Or the twins down by Hidden Hollow who needed to drive their dad’s pickup into town on a regular basis to pick up feed and seed from the farm-supply store. Since Dad did most of the work on our farm—and we had almost nothing by way of actual farming equipment—my brothers and I did not need a hardship license for any legitimate reason. Our farm was small, and not our main source of income. But my parents allowed us to get our license early because we could, because everyone else was doing it, and because our bus ride to and from the county school took almost an hour each way. Cutting down on a two-hour commute would mean more time for schoolwork—and more time at home doing chores on the farm too. So I guess it was a hardship license in some ways, especially during the seasons when there was a lot of work on the farm and when it got dark early.

My brothers learned how to drive pretty soon after we moved down to the farm from Cape Cod, and both had their licenses by age fifteen. When I was fourteen, my dad started in on the process with me. The spring before my fifteenth birthday, he
took me down to the end of our road—past the farms and the holler, out to where the street pretty much turned into packed dirt, and let me have a try behind the wheel. My coordination was never very good, and it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to pick up how a clutch worked in time to take my driver’s test.

One day when I got off the school bus, there was a new car parked in our cul-de-sac driveway—by “new” I mean new to us, but it was clearly old—maybe even older than me. It was a beat-up, faded orange VW bug, not quite as ugly as the one my dad had owned on the Cape, but pretty near. When I went into the house, I expected to see the driver of the car there, but it was just my dad in the kitchen playing chess against his computer.

“Whose car is that?” I asked him.

“Yours,” he said, not even looking up. “Saw an ad for it in the paper. It’s an automatic.”

“Dad! We can’t get a new car!”

“Five hundred dollars,” he said. “I figure you guys can all drive it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had my first car and I wasn’t even fifteen. I didn’t care that it was ugly as sin or that I would have to share it with my brothers. Dad and I got in, and he drove us down to the end of the street where I could practice. The car was pretty crappy and stalled out if you didn’t apply the gas just right—mastering this was almost as tricky as the delicate balance of a clutch. But I learned it. We went out to the grocery store parking lot and Dad taught me how to parallel park and
make a three-point turn. He drilled me on the driver’s manual—emphasizing certain points that he, as a former cop, thought were of extreme importance. Rolling stops, left-hand turns, right of way. By the time I turned fifteen, I was more than ready for the test.

We went down to the DMV, and I walked out of there with my driver’s license and drove Dad and myself home. When we got back to the house, I parked the car and raced inside to call my best friend, Eve. “Where are you going?” Dad asked me. “Don’t you want to take her out by yourself?”

I jumped back into the driver’s seat and waved as I (very carefully) pulled out of the driveway. I intended to just drive down to the holler and back, just to see how it felt. It was pretty strange being in the car by myself—no one there telling me what to do every second. I could hear my dad’s voice in my head. “Check your mirrors. Watch your speed here. That stop sign was for you. Both hands on the wheel …”

When I was about a half mile from the farm, I was no longer alone on the road—there was another car coming up behind me. It was blue. I hated blue cars, and every time I saw a blue four-door car, I would compulsively check for Florida plates. This was because of the last news we had heard—years earlier—about the investigation into Dad’s shooting. They could find no trace of the car Dad had described under hypnosis, but one resident on Sandwich Road had come forward to say that he had seen a blue car with Florida plates racing down the street minutes after my
dad was shot. The detectives said they suspected the shooters had been hired killers from Florida. This had been burned into my head: hired killers, blue car, Florida.

As the car closed in on me, I checked my rearview mirror for plates. But this car didn’t have plates on the front. Suddenly, I felt scared. What if they had been waiting for me? Watching the house. Waiting for just this moment, waiting to get me alone in the car on this lonely stretch of road. My speed—which was already a few miles below the limit—decreased more, and I felt my hands clench the wheel.

The car honked, twice, and flashed its headlights. I slowed more, unsure of what to do, powerless to stop the attack that I knew was coming. Then I heard the car behind me rev its engine and pull out into the opposite lane. And I forgot to breathe. I squeezed my eyes shut and yanked the wheel to the right—forcing the VW onto the dirt shoulder at an angle. I slammed on the brakes and pulled my head down low, by the passenger seat, as the other car roared by.