“I asked him, ‘Why did you come to me?’ He said that I was the right person at the right time. He said I was an honorable man. He knew I was a Vietnam vet.”
He cleared his throat. “I wanted to believe him. As angry as I was at his intrusion… our Susie was barely in the ground… I needed to do something to redeem myself. I had just killed my daughter.”
“You can’t blame yourself…” I began, a meaningless platitude, one I hardly ever used with patients.
But Mr. Adams was lost in his past, not even hearing.
“I didn’t want to hand over my daughter’s life but he was a hammer going at me. I had the feeling it was going to happen no matter what and if I didn’t cooperate I’d put everyone in more danger, including my wife.”
“So you agreed?”
“I would be lying if I didn’t say he clinched it when he held out an envelope with ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. He knew we were struggling. I’d gotten laid off from my job. My wife was six months pregnant. She started bleeding three days after Susie died. So much stress. The doctor told her to quit work or she could lose this baby, too.”
His daughter. Maybe the one who was making him supper. The one who would hang his wet clothes to dry when he got there, who would chide him for sitting in the cemetery in the rain with a strange woman. But, then, he would probably not tell her that part.
“He said we’d only get the money if we gave our complete cooperation. We needed to turn over a few things. He told me to talk to my wife. That night, she’s the one who convinced me. It was the lowest point in our marriage. We were fighting over whether we could afford four extra words on Susie’s gravestone. She told me, ‘We have to move on for this baby,’ and put my hand on her belly. Mary Elizabeth kicked. I’ll never forget that moment.”
“So the man came again? With the money?”
“Two days later. I called the number on his card. He showed up in an hour and we exchanged envelopes. I gave him everything he wanted. Susie’s birth certificate, Social Security card, anything official with her name on it. For the next fifteen years, a certified letter came to the house on the day she died with more cash. At least five thousand, sometimes more. No note. No explanation. More money wasn’t part of the deal. But we knew it was from him.”
“Do you remember the postmark?”
“Different places. Towns I hadn’t heard of. Once I called the number he gave me to thank him. It was disconnected. I was afraid to pursue it any more. We were being paid to keep a secret. I needed to protect my family, too.”
“Do your children know? Or anyone else?”
He shook his head. It stunned me that a man could keep so much inside for so long. He was a secret keeper, like my mother. Maybe they weren’t as rare as I thought.
“Susie came to me last night in a dream,” I blurted out. “I thought she was someone else but… it was her. She was happy.” I shifted uncomfortably on the bench, aware how crazy that sounded outside the safe perimeter of my family of believers.
Al Adams touched my cheek, just as jagged lightning lit his face and the headstones behind him. It occurred to me that I was holding a death pole over our heads.
“We better leave,” I said hurriedly. “My cab can take you home. Or we can still make the bus stop. Whatever you want. My treat.”
“I need to say goodbye,” he said, and I understood.
We walked to Susie’s grave and Mr. Adams stuck the metal prongs of the wreath I brought into the mushy ground in front of her headstone. I pushed the gold-angel-on-a-stick into the middle and stood back. Not so bad really. The wreath looked prettier, almost real, with raindrops glittering on its plastic leaves. The angel appeared happy to be on the job.
Before we dropped Al at the bus stop, he opened up the wallet stuffed with grandchildren and gave me a faded picture of Susie, a toddler with brown curls and chubby knees. My sad little collection of dead girls was growing.
“You can have this, too.” He handed me a dog-eared business card. “I’ve carried it with me since the day I met him. I don’t need it anymore.”
As the cab pulled away, I read the name on the card.
William T. McCloud. Federal marshal. Baseball fanatic. Rancher. Oilman. Father to a boy named Tuck and two girls named Tommie and Sadie.
William Travis McCloud, the man who raised me, had only one true name. It honored the infamous commander of the Battle of the Alamo.
Before Texas became a punch line, native Texans felt that kind of pride in their roots and most still do. Daddy took us to San Antonio one spring break and showed Sadie and me the approximate spot at the north wall of the Alamo where his namesake fell, shot in the head.
Commander William Travis, he told us, had drawn a line in the sand with his sword before the battle. Travis gave each of his men the choice to cross that line and fight against terrible odds or to retreat with honor. We didn’t have to ask which way Daddy would have gone. Retreat was not his nature.
Because of Daddy, I’ve always divided the world into two kinds of people: people who will jump off a boat into choppy water to save you, and people who won’t.
My father set that standard one summer afternoon at the lake when I was ten. We’d been waterskiing and tubing all day, when the wind started playing havoc with the water. Mama and I yanked Sadie and her inner tube from the water so Daddy could motor us back to the dock.
A boat of laughing teenagers blew by, spraying us and hitting the white caps with such force that I was sure their boat would flip. And then, only a hundred feet away, it did.
Before I could even process what I’d seen, Daddy hit the water with a clean, strong dive that seemed a physical impossibility for a 220-pound man. Mama had grabbed the wheel and yelled at us to get the cushions that doubled as life preservers. Three of them blew out of my hands as soon as I pulled them off, skipping across the waves uselessly. We could see two heads bobbing in the water, disappearing under the waves, bobbing up and disappearing again. Another kid was trying to hang on to the flipped boat. As we drew closer, Mama killed the motor, now afraid of running over someone in the water.
“The rope,” Daddy yelled at us. I threw the thick rope always tied to the back ring for just this purpose but it plopped into the water a pitiful three feet from the boat. Daddy reached it with monster strokes, then swam it out thirty yards to the two teenagers, now drifting dangerously away.
“Pull,” he yelled. The three of us pulled, while Daddy surged toward the boy holding on to the boat. As we helped the other boy and girl on board, Daddy was already swimming toward us, his arm around the third kid’s neck in a lifeguard grip.
“Lisa. My sister-” The girl barely choked out the words as Daddy reached the boat. He was spent, exhausted from fighting the angry water.
The girl could see this and was frantic. “There are four of us! You have to get Lisa!”
“Will…” I could hear the plea in Mama’s voice. She wanted him to stay.
But Daddy was already gone, disappearing under the waves. It was the longest three minutes of my life before his head broke the water, pulling Lisa with him. She was a smart girl. She found an air pocket under the flipped boat and prayed the Lord’s Prayer over and over. Most of the time Daddy spent out of our sight was in that air pocket, working up her courage to swim to the surface with him. Lisa’s mother sent Daddy a Thanksgiving card every year until she died of cancer. Lisa is now a neonatal nurse saving other children’s lives.
I followed a raindrop as it made a wiggly path down the cab window. I had wanted so much to believe that it was Daddy’s heroic blood flowing through my veins. Even as questions about his part in this rose up again and again, I had pushed them away. I’d let myself be consumed by Mama’s betrayal, because it was much easier to believe. But there was too much to ignore.