chapter 29

CYLIN

ONE cold, clear Saturday that winter, Mom decided that we should go and do something as a family—with no guards for once. Instead, she and Dad would wear their guns and we would bring Max for protection. “It’s time we started acting like a family again,” she said.

By this point, my brothers and I had overheard enough conversations to know what was going on. Mom was tired of the constant fear and anger, living in seclusion and under protection. She wanted to move away if there wasn’t a break in Dad’s case soon. “This is no way to live,” she had told Dad. “It’s not fair to any of us.” The town of Falmouth also wanted us to move; the selectmen had offered to pay to help us relocate, which really got Dad steaming mad. “They’ll spend money to send us somewhere else but they won’t spend money on the case,” he wrote in his notebook. “They want to make us disappear.” If we did want to move, the town had collected over fifteen thousand dollars—most of it donations from the townspeople—that would be ours for a down payment on a new house. The police department would sell our house for us after we left, and all tracks would be covered. No one would know where we had gone.

“Let’s go down to the pond and go ice-skating,” Mom suggested. My brothers and I raced to our rooms to get ready. Ice skating was something that we used to do all the time before the shooting. My dad used to play hockey, and he was a great skater. Shawn was also pretty good, and fast, but Eric and I were just so so. Mom had grown up in Houlton, Maine, on the border of Canada, where it gets really cold in the winters, and she had been skating for years.

We all packed into the van with our hats, mittens, skates, and thick socks, and Max. Mom drove while Dad held Max’s leash. When we reached the pond, Dad would usually find a big log or something heavy and throw it out onto the ice to make sure that it was solid enough to support us. It had been a cold winter, so testing the ice didn’t seem necessary, but Dad found an old tree trunk and went to lift it. He strained under the weight, and Eric and Shawn came over to help him. It was the first time I noticed how weak he had become. He looked emaciated and drawn, his face still covered with bandages and some patchy beard growth. His jeans were several sizes too big, belted to stay up, and his winter coat hung loosely from his thin shoulders. He barely lifted the trunk, then slammed it down onto the ice. It slid out to the middle of the pond and held firm.

“Okay, looks good!” Mom said happily. She didn’t seem to notice how tired and weak Dad was, or else she pretended not to. We headed out onto the ice while Mom stayed at the edge of the pond, holding Max. Before Dad came out, he gave the hand command for Max to stay, and Max did, never taking his eyes off of us.

It felt good to be out on the ice, free, skating, moving through the cold and not worrying about anything for once. I tried not to notice how thin Dad looked as he skated around us. He had brought a couple of hockey pucks and sticks and started a game with my brothers while I practiced my figure eights. I felt pretty, my long hair streaming out behind me, my breath floating up in white puffs as I twirled around and around. Our voices echoed off the ice and trees—laughter and loud talking. We were just like any other family.

I tried to do a pirouette and promptly fell on my butt—the ice was rock hard. “Nice!” Mom called over from the shoreline. “What do you call that move?” I looked over at her and grinned. Behind her, I noticed a woman in a red coat and two kids coming down the path; they were carrying skates over their shoulders. I was a little bummed that the ice would no longer be just ours, but the pond was big enough for everyone, so it wasn’t really a problem.

Suddenly, Max began to bark. I looked over and saw him lunge at one of the kids while my mom was doing everything she could to hold him back. Max strained against the leash—he weighed at least twenty pounds more than Mom did. He was growling and barking violently, and I knew we were about to see him tear someone to pieces. Dad quickly skated over and used hand signals to command Max to stop and sit, and he took the leash from Mom. But by then, the two kids had already run, crying, into the woods to hide, terrified of Max.

“What are you doing bringing a vicious dog like that down here?” the woman in the red ski coat yelled at my mom. “There are children here!”

“He’s our guard dog,” Mom started to explain. “We have to have him with us . . .”

“How dare you! That dog is violent and should be put to sleep! I should call the cops on you!” the woman shouted.

“We are the cops!” Mom yelled back, getting in her face. “My husband is a cop, and someone tried to kill him. That’s why we have this violent dog, for your information.”

Dad motioned to us to come in off the ice. I moved toward the shore, but my brothers both stood like statues. We had never seen Mom talk to someone like that.

We sat on the log by the pond and quickly pulled our skates off as the woman went over to console her kids. As we hurried back up the trail to our van, I heard her say, “Go on and take your horrible dog with you!”

“Bitch,” Mom said under her breath. We all got into the van without a word. Dad held Max, who was now happy as a puppy, his tongue out and tail wagging. He was content to be by my dad; his job was to protect us, and that’s what he had done. I was glad the woman hadn’t noticed that both of my parents were carrying guns. I wonder what she would have thought of us then.

When we got home, Mom took out the typewriter and put it on the kitchen table, got out some nice paper, and started typing. I came into the kitchen and stood behind her. “What are you writing?” I asked her.

“My résumé,” she said without looking up. “I’m going to find a nursing job somewhere far away from here, and we are going to move.”

I pulled out a chair and sat next to her, watching her fingers move quickly over the keys. “I don’t want to move.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. She stopped typing for a moment and looked at me. “You do, sweetie. We can’t stay here and live like this. It’s dangerous for your dad, and for us, and we can’t do it anymore. We have to leave.”

“What about my friends at school?” I asked her.

“Oh Cee, you hardly have any friends left. Haven’t you noticed that no one is allowed to play with you? No one can have you over at their house? You don’t get invited to anyone’s birthday parties anymore. The other kids are scared to even ride the bus with you.” Mom laughed a little, then stopped herself and looked at me. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Just Meg can’t ride the bus, nobody else ever said that,” I pointed out. Suddenly I was sorry I had ever shared that story with her. “Besides, now that the cops aren’t at school all the time, I think my old friends are going to like me again.”

Mom let out a sad sigh and stopped typing for a second. “Cee, go watch TV with your brothers, okay? I have a lot of work to do.”

The next week, I tried to act like everything was great so Mom would change her mind. I was even nice to Erin at school, hoping that maybe she would be the one person who would finally invite me over to her house to play. One afternoon when we got home from school, I rang the buzzer and said the code: “I don’t have any homework tonight.” When Dad came out to hold Max, I asked if we could play with him in the yard a little bit. You could throw him a ball, and no matter how high or far you tried to throw it, Max would catch it before it hit the ground. He moved so fast, he was like a blur of brown and black. Eric and Shawn came home and we all started playing with Max, while Dad and his friend Craig Clarkson stood by and watched us.

“I’ll get it,” Eric said, racing over to retrieve the ball that Max had dropped. Max saw Eric reach for the ball and turned to snap at him, lunging so fast it caught us all off guard. Dad moved to restrain him, and Eric tripped over himself running to get away. Dad got Max secured and pulled back on his collar until the dog’s front legs came up off the ground. He was almost choking Max. “My ankle hurts,” Eric said, standing up and limping. Dad motioned for us to go into the house; playtime was over. I watched from the kitchen window as Dad dragged Max back over to his doghouse and chained him roughly. Then he turned and came in the house, leaving Max whining and heartbroken. The dog knew he had disappointed Dad, and he was visibly crushed.

That night when Mom came home, Eric’s ankle had ballooned to three times its normal size. She moved it around while Eric winced in pain. “It’s sprained, not broken,” she sighed. She got out an ice pack and an Ace bandage and wrapped it tightly. Dad brought up an old pair of crutches from the basement and adjusted them to Eric’s height.

“No more playing with that dog,” I overheard Mom say to Dad as they were making supper. “We’re very lucky it was just a sprain. That dog is trained to kill—don’t ever forget that.”

I felt horrible. My brother was hurt. Dad was angry at Max. Mom was mad at Dad. And Max was crushed. He lay in his doghouse whining for attention until Dad finally went out that night and petted him and told him he was still a good dog. I had wanted to show everyone that we could be happy, that things were returning to normal, but my plan backfired horribly, only making it more obvious that this could never work.

That night the sounds of the house kept spooking me and I couldn’t sleep. Every time the furnace kicked on, I felt under my mattress for the steak knife that I had hidden there and wrapped my hand around the wooden handle. I was tired of always being afraid. Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones who had given up; now I had too. If we did move, I was never going to tell anyone about what had happened here in Falmouth. I would make up a whole new story, about a whole new girl, leaving in only the good stuff and pretending that was still me. I fell asleep thinking up new names for myself and stories that I would tell.