I studied his face. Up close, he looked older than forty-four. Wrinkles feathered out from the corners of his eyes. Two deep lines creased his forehead. Only his hands were smooth and young. The pale yellow shirt under his tweed coat was slightly wrinkled, unstarched. The jeans were worn to a pale blue, the hem a little ragged against white Nikes. Things he didn’t care about.
I wondered what kind of man he was.
I imagined that he was two kinds.
The kind who sat patiently on a piano bench for hours with a struggling student.
And the kind who shut himself away in a rehearsal room to forge thunderous compositions of terror and loss, angry notes slamming the walls, trapped in a tiny space, trying to get out. Like him.
“Tommie, did you hear what I said? I saw Mama before she died. She called me. She was frantic. Asked me to clean out a safe deposit box. Gave me the name of a bank. I said no. Too risky to come home. Two days later, I dialed the number back. I told the nurse I was a distant relative just checking in. She said that Mrs. McCloud was being treated for dementia. That her husband had recently passed away. I flew down to Texas the next morning.”
He tapped his finger nervously on the edge of his cup, still full, growing tepid. His eyes were expanding and contracting mirrors, a kaleidoscope of emotions I couldn’t identify. Shame, maybe? Grief for Daddy? Had he known and chosen not to come to the funeral? Before I could ask, maybe so I wouldn’t, he continued.
“It was a mistake. A woman at the bank barely let me past the door. And Mama… she didn’t know me, of course. I sat there anyway and held her hand and talked about the kids. I left after about half an hour. She was screaming my name by the time I hit the front door. I didn’t go back.”
I hadn’t guessed that. Tuck had been the visitor in Mama’s nursing home, not some goon of Cantini’s.
“I’m sorry,” Tuck repeated. “About not being there for you. I know the lies bothered… Daddy. Even when you were young, before everything went to hell, he wanted to tell you.”
“Anthony Marchetti is my father,” I said flatly.
“William McCloud was your real father. He was my father. Genetics has nothing to do with it.”
He had no right to say this.
And every right.
It stirred up things I was still desperate to bury.
I ducked my head and brought my backpack up to my lap from under the table, unzipping a small compartment.
“Do you remember this?”
I laid a worn playing card, a joker, in front of him on the table and watched the recognition dawn on his face as he turned it over to reveal two pink swans entwined on the back.
“Something wild.” He looked up at me with a wry grin I remembered. “Something unexpected. Granny was never wrong.”
I laid down one more card. I’d pulled it out of the deck at random in the hotel room last night after compulsively shuffling the deck for hours. Granny’s fast and loose method of answering a single burning question.
It was the reason I was sitting at this table and not in an airplane on the way home, leaving the past alone, turning my back on the unanswered questions.
One card, one answer.
The three of clubs.
For Tuck and me, a second chance.
EPILOGUE
I am sitting on the floor of Tuck’s old room, a pile of treasure in front of me. A blue jay’s feather, a dried stem of lavender, a grocery store slip, a smooth pebble from the driveway, a fork, a photograph. I don’t know what these objects meant to my mother, but she hid them here under the mattress in the childhood room of the son she had to let go.
It is a breezy, cloudy October day, almost a year since my brother and I sat together in that New York coffee shop. We are preparing the house for his first visit home to the ranch with my niece, nephew, and sister-in-law. I didn’t expect to find Mama’s collection while I cleaned, but I remember Daddy saying that, at the end, this had become her habit. To hide inconsequential things.
“What’s that stuff?” Maddie asks, appearing beside me. Her face and hands are thick with dust, her tennis shoes caked with cow manure, all part of her ritual that she calls “cleaning the barn.”
“Some things your grandmother kept in here.”
“Cool,” she says. “Can I have the feather?”
“Sure.”
She grazes it across her cheek, then picks up the photograph on top of the pile.
“Is this you?”
I am startled that she can see it instantly when I could not.
“No, that’s your grandmother. I think she must be holding your uncle Tuck’s hand. He looks about three.”
“Are you still mad at her for lying?”
“Not exactly mad, no.”
She studies my face solemnly. “You know, Mama lies to me.”
“Don’t say that, Maddie. You mother would never lie to you.”
“She tells me that the tumor in my head is nothing to worry about.”
I feel an ache all over. We didn’t use the word tumor with Maddie. Ever.
“What do you think?” I ask, cautious.
“I think Mama doesn’t know what will happen. Nobody knows.”
“You can talk to me about it anytime.” I reach over, smoothing her hair. “But it would be better if you talk to her.”
“Mama feels better like this. Thinking I don’t know. Protecting me.” She bounces up, handing me the photograph, not ready yet for more. “Do you think my cousins will want to play croquet? I found an old set in the barn. I can put it up.”
“I think they would love that,” I say, and Maddie skips out the door, unaware that she has opened the door to my prison.
I stare at the picture of Mama, not begging her to speak like in my childhood game with Etta Place, but hoping she can hear.
“I know who you are,” I say aloud, softly, repeating Hudson’s words. “You are kind. Beautiful. Brave. You save children.”
Not one of us who loved Mama ever saw the whole, but the piece I have of her is jagged and beautiful. I can see the sun shining through it.
The curtains at the open window dance and the photograph flutters out of my hand, skittering across the floor. The air fills the room with the intoxicating, earthy smell of our land. I close my eyes, drinking it in.
I could swear I heard music in the wind.
NOTE TO READERS
In Playing Dead, I imagined a few places that do not exist and occasionally twitched a few of the places that do to serve the purposes of this story. However, the Ponder Steakhouse does, indeed, serve up fried bull testicles. I received some expert advice along the way on horses, guns, and child psychology, for which I am very grateful. If there are any mistakes on those subjects in this book, they are unintentional and mine alone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks to:
My agent, Pam Ahearn, blunt, dogged, fiercely loyal, for seeing something in a random manuscript in the mail before anyone else did, for her editorial input, and for her relentless efforts on my behalf. Everyone on earth should have one of you.
My editor, Kate Miciak, for saying yes after saying no, for working so hard on this book, for encouraging me until a light broke over my head.
My husband, Steve Kaskovich, for his infinite hope, for reading my writing ad nauseam, and for keeping the mystery going.
My favorite lefty pitcher and son, Sam, for being an example of how persistence drives talent and for teaching me that writing is a lot like baseball. Also, for making sure I got up from the computer to make him dinner.
My parents and fans, Chuck and Sue Heaberlin, for pushing James Thurber and Anna Karenina on me when I was trying to set the world’s record for reading Harlequin romances and for making sure the world looked pretty large to a small-town girl.