Free The Year We Disappeared by Cylin Busby Page B

hospital. Then it dawned on me that he wasn’t going to. He didn’t want to see me, to have to face me. He didn’t want to answer my questions. There was a big difference between looking the other way when a town selectman is caught driving drunk and looking the other way when an attempt is made on a police officer’s life.
    While I was figuring this out, Mickey was still talking, all heated up about the force, about who was connected to whom, and how pissed he was. But I was only half listening. In my head, I was already making plans. I didn’t have the time to wait for the police detectives to botch the investigation like I knew they would. Even if they did their jobs and linked my shooting to Meyer, I had a sinking feeling that he would never pay a high enough price for it.
    Since the shooting, I’d been focused on survival. My survival, my family’s survival. But now I was mad—beyond that, I was consumed with hatred for this guy. It was clear to me that as soon as I was well enough to leave the hospital, I needed to get a gun, one that couldn’t be traced, and go after Meyer myself.
    Mickey asked me if I knew who I could trust on the force. He asked who was watching my family, who did they have on detail guarding my room. He was trying to ease me into someharsh facts: someone on the force knew my work schedule; someone told Meyer where I lived and exactly when I would be driving to work. Mickey was a smart guy. He was thinking like I was thinking. Meyer wasn’t the only one involved. This wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

CYLIN
     
    ON Tuesday morning, Lauren and Cassie went back to school. My brothers and I went swimming and watched TV and hung out. Aunt Kate had taken time off from work to be at home with us, and when she wasn’t there, Uncle Joe was.
    In the afternoon, we got out our cousins’ art supplies and made a few more cards for Dad. We had been making cards every day for Mom to take to him in the hospital. I used crayons to draw a picture of our house on Cape Cod, the little red house with a big yellow sun over it, and I added some colorful flowers in our front yard that weren’t really there but I thought they looked nice.
    Eric drew a mini comic book of an imaginary superhero he had invented years ago called “Super Hippo.” Super Hippo was wearing a red cape with the letters “SH” on it and doing feats with his super strength. The drawings were pretty good.
    Shawn was the real artist, though. Like Mom, he could drawanything. So he did a picture of Spider-Man, using a comic book to get it just right. It looked like a store-bought card when he was done with it. We left the cards for Mom so she could take them to Dad the next day.
    Around the time that Lauren and Cassie came home from school, my grammie showed up at the house along with our uncle Brian, my mom’s other brother. They had been to the hospital to visit my dad. Uncle Brian sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands like he had a bad headache. It seemed like Grammie couldn’t stop crying. Uncle Joe helped her to sit down, and she asked me to sit next to her so she could put her arm around me. I’d never seen her cry, so it was a little scary. I didn’t know what to do to make her feel better, so I just sat there. “You’re so young,” she kept saying, hugging me tighter. She took off her glasses and wiped the tears off them. “You’re just a little girl, nine years old. You’re the same age your mother was when my Floyd died.”
    I knew that she was talking about my grandfather, Floyd, my mom’s father, who had died a long time ago in a canoe accident in Maine. After diving in to help rescue a drowning friend, he struck his head on a rock and never came back up—they didn’t find his body until days later, miles downriver. Grammie always said that he was the love of her life, and I guess it was true because she never even went on so much as a date with another man after he died. “Your poor mother, to