chapter 3

CYLIN

WE lived on a cul-de-sac called Decosta Circle, which was just off of Sandwich Road, on the border of Falmouth and a town called Hatchville. On our left were the Sullivans. They had only one kid, a daughter named Erin, who was in my grade at school. Erin was okay to play with when I was at home, but at school I thought hanging out with my neighbor just wasn’t cool. I had other friends at school and I ignored Erin from the moment we got on the bus.

Mom was aware of this silent rule I had made and tried to talk to me about it, but I had my mind made up. Erin’s parents were also aware of the way I treated their daughter, and they didn’t like me very much. In fact, with their perfectly kept yard and prim white house, I don’t think they were very fond of the big, loud Busby family next door, with all the cars rotting in the driveway, the unmowed lawn, and the barking beagle tied up outside. I saw the inside of their house twice, and it was perfect and clean, not anything like ours. Erin’s mom was a bit older than my mom, and she stayed home all day, making Erin tuna-fish sandwiches with the crust cut off. My mom was a teacher, and she was in nursing school at night, so we mostly made our own sandwiches.

When my brothers and I tried to cut through the Sullivan yard to get over to our other friends’ house, the Zylinskis, Mr. Sullivan would come out and yell at us. He was a big Irishman, with white hair and a high round belly that would have made him look like Santa Claus, except for the fact that he was always yelling. Mom told us that he had already had one heart attack and was “headed for another one,” the way he got so worked up. “You’re cutting a path through my grass! You’re killing my yard, you Busby kids. Get out of my yard!” Never mind the fact that we really weren’t cutting a path—we would walk along the fence at the edge of his property, where grass didn’t grow anyhow. What really bothered him was the fact that we were cutting over to see the Zylinskis and we didn’t invite Erin to come with us. But Mom would kill us if we walked down on Sandwich Road, so the only way to get there was by cutting through Mr. Sullivan’s yard.

To our right, we didn’t have neighbors, we had a church. It wasn’t the kind of church that people went to on Sundays; in fact, we saw it open only a handful of times in the ten years that we lived in Falmouth. This church was rumored to have been built by descendants of the Pilgrims in the mid- to late 1700s, and it was known as the East End Meeting House. A big, three-story boxy Cape Cod building, its shingles had weathered to a dark, dry gray, and the windows were trimmed in white paint. On top sat a huge steeple, with a weathervane that you could barely see from the ground. There had once been a bell in the steeple, but it had been removed a hundred years ago and hung from a wooden post near the front door. The front of the building was not ornate. It had a barn-style door, white and flat, and no steps, just a slim granite slab to step up on, worn down in the center from the footsteps of hundreds of Pilgrims, or at least that’s what I liked to imagine. And in back of the church was one of the oldest graveyards in New England. The gravestones—at least, the ones you could still read—dated back to the 1700s. This graveyard spanned an acre or so in back of the church, so while the building was our “neighbor,” we really lived next door to a cemetery.

Our property was separated from the sloping green lawn of the church by a row of tall shrubs, intermixed with bamboo, about five feet wide. We called that area our “tree house” because of how dense the trees and bamboo had grown. It was dark and shady, a nice place to dig and build stuff on a hot summer day. When I was about six or seven, I was digging a hole in there and came across a long, flat stone. My brothers and I dug all around it, outlining the shape. It took us all afternoon.

When we showed it to Dad, he swore under his breath and got the shovel from the basement. He put the dirt we had dug up back over the stone and added some more for good measure, pounding it all down with the back of the shovel and pushing some fallen bamboo leaves over it. “Don’t dig over here anymore,” he told us. “Not ever.” Though the border of the graveyard was a few feet away from our yard, some old stones had been forgotten when they drew the property lines, or they had been lost over the years in the trees that bordered the graveyard. After that, whenever we felt like being bad, we would creep to the back of the tree house, at the very end corner of our property, and dig, looking for more stones, bones, and whatever else we might find.

The graveyard and the graves in it were not scary to us. In our minds, this was our playground, with wide green lawns and old oak, pine, and weeping willow trees to climb. You had to go down to the very back of the graveyard to even see any headstones that had legible markings on them. The ones up toward the front of the graveyard were old and weathered to the point of being mere markers. But some still had amazing engravings—swirling lines cut across the ornate tops into beautiful curlicues, ancient writing that had As and Es linked together as one letter. Mom would go to the graveyard with us around Halloween every year and we would do gravestone rubbings with her art supplies. The lines and letters on the stones that were invisible to the naked eye would come to life under paper with the help of a charcoal pencil. We would use the rubbings to decorate our house for Halloween, but still the spookiness of living next door to a graveyard never really got to us. It was just how we lived, and since we had never known anyone who had died, the concept of death, of ghosts or the afterlife, wasn’t anything we had to grapple with.

One late-summer afternoon, as we played in the graveyard with the Zylinski kids, one of the older boys went to climb into an old oak and used a headstone near the base of the tree to get his footing. He pushed too hard, or maybe the stone wasn’t firmly planted anymore. It slipped out from under his foot as he pushed up into the tree, and fell forward, hitting the ground with a loud, resonating thump. All of us tried to lift it back up, but it was surprisingly heavy, and we couldn’t budge it. We knew we had done something wrong, and we told my mom later that night. Dad and one of his friends went over the next day and righted the stone, but we were in trouble.

“You cannot disrespect the people who are buried over there,” Mom pointed out. “I’m sure they don’t mind you playing and enjoying yourselves, but please remember to leave the stones alone, and let me know if you ever see anyone doing otherwise.” I didn’t really get what Mom was talking about, the “people” over there. Dad had told us that anyone buried in that graveyard was long gone. “Not even dust anymore,” he’d say. I had seen the far back of the graveyard, a section that was still being used as the town cemetery. We had walked down that far a few times with Mom and Dad. One time we saw a pile of dirt and a little red plastic flag on a thin metal pole marking the spot. There were lots of wilted flowers and silky ribbons around. “This is a fresh one,” Dad pointed out to my mom. I asked Mom about it, and she explained to me the basics about how people were buried, in a casket. Then she reminded my brothers and me that we should never disturb a grave with fresh dirt piled on top, and that we shouldn’t be playing this far down in the graveyard anyhow.

That night, we went to bed late. Mom felt sorry that our movie plans had been canceled, so she let us watch TV until it was almost time for her to wake up Dad for his shift. I was asleep fast and didn’t hear Dad leave, like I did on some nights if I was still awake.

I woke up in my dark room, hearing my mom crying and screaming. At first I thought she was just watching something loud on TV. But then I heard Kelly, my cousin, and I heard some men, too, talking low. Kelly was living with us that summer, before she started college. She and Mom were more like sisters than niece and aunt. They dieted together, sharing a grapefruit in the morning and watching each other’s cottage cheese and Tab intake throughout the day. They’d lay on their towels and talk about the guys at the beach or the cute cops on the force. Kelly taught Mom some tanning tricks (add some iodine to your baby oil for a nice fake bake until you could build your own tan; lemon juice on your hair brought out highlights). Kelly was eighteen that summer, with sun-kissed auburn hair, light green eyes, and a killer tan. The younger cops on the force had definitely taken notice, and the ones who were single, or just there for the summer, probably would have asked her out more if it weren’t for her overprotective uncle—my dad.

I knew something was wrong, but I was hoping that the voices were just some friends of Kelly’s. She had been out to the movies that night—did her date come home with her? But why was Mom crying? I opened the door just a crack and saw Rick Smith, a big redheaded guy who was one of Dad’s best friends on the force, standing in our living room. He was in his uniform, and I could hear the static sounds from the black walkie-talkie on his hip, the same kind that Dad carried, with the tinny voice of the dispatcher cutting through, saying something in a mysterious code of numbers and words I didn’t understand.

Rick was holding Mom’s arms down by her side, talking to her really quietly, and she was crying, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over. I stepped out into the room. “Mom?” I asked, just as she shook her body free of Rick’s hold. “Don’t!” she yelled at him as he tried again to hold her, and she paced the floor a few times, walking into the kitchen. He stayed close behind her, saying, “It’s okay, Polly, he’s alive, he’s alive.”

I followed them into the kitchen, in my bare feet. I was wearing my summer nightgown, the white one with small pink flowers, and ruffles at the neck where the buttons were. I was glad I was wearing it that night and not my more babyish Winnie the Pooh pajamas, because I would have been embarrassed to have Rick and my dad’s other friend see me in those. My mom was slumped down on the floor, like she had slid down the wall, and she was crying hard. “What happened to Dad?” I asked, and no one answered. Mom acted like I wasn’t even there. “Are his eyes okay?” she asked. Rick crouched down beside her. “I think so,” he said. Then Rick and the other cop, a guy I’d never seen before, looked over at me, then at my brothers, who had come in from their shared bedroom.

“It was like a BB gun, some kid shooting out streetlights or something. He’s going to be fine, Polly,” Rick said. He leaned in close to my mom and spoke quietly. “We need to go,” he said, helping Mom up from the floor. “Let’s go.” Mom told Kelly to stay by the phone and that she would call from the hospital as soon as she knew more, and then she was gone, leaving me and my brothers with Kelly.

“Did Dad get shot?” Eric asked as Kelly locked the door behind them. He was standing very straight, with his hands clenched into tight fists down at his sides.

“I think your dad just had an accident,” Kelly said. “You know how tired he’s been, and he just drove off the road into a ditch, but he’s fine. He’s going to be okay.”

“Rick said he got shot, I heard him,” Shawn said.

“Maybe his car got shot or something. You guys, he’s going to be fine,” Kelly said, but we could all tell she had no idea what was really going on. “Let’s go in the living room and wait for your mom to call.” Kelly had us sit on the couch and she put on a record that she was into that summer. It was a James Taylor album, in a brightly colored jacket that reminded me of a flag I’d seen on a boat in the Falmouth Harbor. As we listened to James sing his cover of “Day Tripper,” I was thinking about what would happen if Dad died. I didn’t want him to be buried and for other kids to use his gravestone to climb trees. I decided then that I would sit at his grave all day, guarding it so that other kids wouldn’t play there. I would bring rocks and I would sharpen sticks to keep them away.

While I was busy making my silent plans, Kelly was on the phone, calling my uncle Joe in Boston to tell him that Dad had been in an accident. That’s when we heard a car pull into the cul-de-sac and saw the car lights swing around into our driveway. Kelly put the phone back into the cradle on the wall and told us to go into the kitchen, where it was dark. My brother Shawn and I peeked through the shutters of the kitchen window at the car, which was sitting in our driveway with its lights on, still running. It wasn’t a police cruiser, but an old hot rod–style car. I’d never seen it before.

Eric started to say something, and Kelly said, “Be quiet, you guys,” and she watched through the shutters. After what seemed like a long time, the car turned off and the door opened. We could see in the streetlight as a guy got out. He was not in a uniform. Then he reached back in the car and pulled something out. It was a long gun—a rifle.

“Jesus Christ!” Kelly yelled. “Into the back. Get in there.” We ran to my parents’ bedroom at the other side of the house, and Kelly turned off all the lights in the living room. She slammed the door to my parents’ room behind us. “In the closet, now,” she ordered. The closet wasn’t quite big enough for all three of us, but I crouched down, trying to keep my balance while standing on my mom’s shoes. We weren’t allowed to play in here, and Mom was going to be pissed that we had crushed her shoes and knocked down some dresses. The clothes smelled like Mom and her Givenchy perfume. That smell always made me think of when she went out with Dad and we would be left with a babysitter. On those nights, I would lie in my bed half-awake until I heard them come home, and only then could I really fall asleep. When were they coming back tonight? How long would they be gone? Eric tried to close the closet door, but it wouldn’t work with all three of us in there, so we just crouched like that, in my parents’ clothes and shoes, barely breathing, with Kelly sitting on the floor just beside the door.

There was a hard knock on the back door. “Oh my God,” Kelly whispered. “Oh Jesus, okay. You guys just don’t move, be quiet.” We were all silent. I could still hear James Taylor singing in the living room. Even though Kelly had turned off all the lights, she had forgotten the album and left it playing. The knocking came again, over the soft sounds of “Up on the Roof.” Whoever was out there knew we were here.

“Oh my God,” Kelly kept whispering over and over again. She was sitting on the floor beside the closet, her back to the wall. She had her hands over her mouth, and I think she was crying because she was sniffling quietly. The knocking stopped for a few minutes. I started to think that whoever it was had left, although we didn’t hear a car start up. The song ended and a new one came on. The phone rang a few times, then stopped. Another song started. Eric and Shawn were whispering. They had a plan. “You stay in the closet,” Eric said to me, then he turned to Shawn. “I have a big rock in our room. We’ll tackle this guy and hit him in the head with it. Then we all climb out the window and run through the graveyard.”

I didn’t want to go into the graveyard at night, and I didn’t have my shoes. Shawn said we should run up Hatchville Road, the route he and Dad did when they went jogging. “I can do seven miles, and I’ll get help,” he explained. That seemed like a good idea; I knew Shawn was a fast runner. Then the knocking started again, harder this time. Then it stopped. Someone was at the front door now, right by my parents’ room, and ringing the doorbell.

Kelly took a deep breath. She whispered, “Okay, you guys, listen to me. I need you to go upstairs.” Only my brothers’ room was upstairs, and the attic.

“When you’re up there, I’m going to open the door. If you hear anyone come into the house, you go into the crawlspace up there, hide, and do not make a sound. Not a sound. And don’t come out until your mom comes home or it’s morning.” I could barely see her eyes in the dark room, but I could see enough to tell that her face was deadly serious. This wasn’t like Kelly at all. I thought about telling her not to open the door, to come with us to the attic, but I knew, all three of us knew, she had made up her mind.

We tumbled out of the closet and ran to the stairs, glad to be doing something, taking action. We crossed through the dark house, afraid to stop and look out the windows, and scrambled up the steep ladder. We didn’t hide in my brothers’ room or wait to hear what happened to Kelly when she opened the door. Without talking, without making a plan, Eric opened the small door that led into the crawl space. We made our way across the rafters in our pajamas on prickly sharp insulation, and we hid, silently, in the pitch black.