chapter 25

CYLIN

ONE night, just before school closed for Christmas break, Mom asked us all to sit down in the living room for a family meeting. “Your dad is going back into the hospital after Christmas for more surgery,” she explained. “Before he goes, the police are going to build a fence around our house with an alarm system.”

Dad wrote something in his notebook and showed it to her. “Tell them about the dog.”

“Oh, and we’re getting another dog. This is not going to be a family dog, like Tigger, it’s a trained dog to help keep us safe.”

“What kind of dog?” Eric asked.

“We haven’t picked one out yet, but it will be an attack dog, so it’s not going to be our pet.”

“What do you mean, an attack dog?” Shawn asked.

“It’s a dog that’s trained to keep you safe. If anyone is bothering us, the dog will . . .” Mom stopped herself.

“Can it come in the house?” I asked.

“No, it’s not that kind of dog.” Mom sounded exasperated with us. “It’s going to have a doghouse outside, and it will be trained to be your father’s dog. We’re going to get the dog when Dad comes home from the hospital.”

“We won’t have to have so many guards all the time,” Dad wrote.

“When are you coming home?” I asked him.

“Maybe one week?” he wrote, and looked over at Mom.

“A week or two, that’s it, then he’ll be back,” she said.

The next morning, a truck packed with lumber and workmen showed up in our yard. They were already putting the posts up for the fence by the time we left for school. The weather was so cold that the ground was frozen, and they were using a special tool to dig deep round holes for the posts. One of the guys showed me how they would put the post in, then pour concrete around it to hold it in place. “Nothing’s gonna move this sucker,” he told me, and patted me on the head.

When we got home from school that day, all the posts were in the ground with concrete slopped around them. There was sawdust and blobs of concrete all over our yard. I touched one of the concrete blobs and it was icy cold but not yet solid. It felt like gritty Play-Doh. “You shouldn’t be playing with that,” one of the cops on duty told me.

I scowled at him. “It’s my yard, I can do what I want,” I told him, and marched into the house and slammed the door. I was so tired of these guys always being around, telling us what to do and where we could go. I hated them all, even my dad’s friends. I went into my room and noticed that there was a big pole planted in the ground right outside my window. The fence was going to run straight through the bamboo patch that separated our house from the church next door. It was going to ruin our tree house, as we called it. Not that we had played out there in months, but it still made me sad. Kelly came into the room behind me with some laundry that she started to put away. “What’s up, buttercup?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I sulked. I climbed up the ladder to my top bunk and laid on my stomach, looking out the window.

“What’s on your mind?” Kelly asked, looking at me. “Are you thinking about that guy you saw in the ski mask?”

“No,” I said. But once she mentioned it, I remembered that night and felt sick to my stomach. “Why would I be thinking about that?”

“Because it was awful, and I’m sure you must think about it sometimes.” She hung a shirt up in the closet. “You know, that’s why they’re putting up the fence, so that things like that don’t happen ever again.” She put some pants into my drawers, then turned to leave the room. “If you ever want to talk to me about anything, I’m around,” she said.

I didn’t say anything and just waited for her to leave.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I don’t want to talk about anything!” I yelled. She walked out and closed the door behind her.

There was a night, a couple of weeks after we had gotten back from Boston, when I saw something outside my window. My dad was still in the hospital, Mom was at a night class, and we were at home with Kelly. Whenever we were alone with Kelly at night, it made me think of the night Dad was shot, and how we had hidden in the attic. I could hear her watching TV while I lay in bed, trying to sleep. I rolled over on my stomach and looked out my window, watching the occasional car go down Sandwich Road, the headlights crawling across the ceiling and walls of my room.

Then I heard something outside, like a branch breaking or something snapping, and I tensed up. I breathed very quietly for a few minutes, my ears straining to hear something else, but all I heard was the TV. I climbed down the ladder of my bunk bed and crossed the dark room over to the window. The shutters that covered the bottom half of the window were closed and I wasn’t tall enough to see over them, so I carefully opened one side just enough to look out. I saw nothing but darkness and leaves and was about to get back into bed when a car came around the corner on Sandwich Road and lit up our yard, just for an instant, like a flash of lightning. I saw a man standing in my yard. He was wearing a black ski mask. He was looking right at my window, standing very still. He wasn’t wearing a police uniform. Suddenly the light was gone, and it was dark again.

I slammed the shutters closed and ran into the living room. “Kelly, Kelly!” I whispered frantically. “There’s a man, there’s a man in the yard!”

“What?” Kelly jumped up from the couch. “Slow down, what are you talking about?”

When I told her what I had seen, she went to the back door and flashed the outside porch light twice. In a second, one of the cops on duty—Dad’s friend, Terry Hinds—was at the door. “What’s wrong?”

“Cylin thinks she saw someone outside her window,” Kelly told him. I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t really believe me.

Terry asked where I had seen the guy, and I explained. “You two just sit tight. When I blink my headlights once, you throw the switch to the floodlight on that side of the house, okay?” he told Kelly. She nodded.

We stood by the back door, Kelly’s hand on the light switch, and watched the undercover cop car for what seemed like forever until finally Terry flashed his headlights. Kelly hit the switch for the floodlight on the other side of the house, and suddenly lights came on from everywhere, through almost every window of the house. The cops had called in for backup cruisers that were now parked at the church and on the street in front of our house, all shining their floodlights on our windows.

“What’s going on?” Shawn said. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d woken up and come downstairs.

“What are all the lights for?” Eric asked, coming in behind him.

Kelly opened the door to see what was going on. “Oh my God,” she said. She turned to me and I saw, just for a second, a man in handcuffs being pushed into the back of a police car in our driveway.

“Who’s that?” Shawn said nervously, looking out the window. The guy’s ski mask had been rolled up on his head like a hat and I saw his face, just for a second. He looked like a regular person. Was that the guy who shot my dad?

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kelly said. “You really did see someone in the yard!”

One of the officers—another friend of Dad’s, named Craig Clarkson—came to the door a few minutes later to make sure we were okay. “We’re just going to do one more search around the property,” Craig explained.

“Who is he?” Kelly asked. “What was he doing here?”

“Don’t know. He doesn’t have any weapons on him. We’re going to take him in and book him,” Craig said. “You’ll have a bunch of guards outside until we figure out what’s going on, so you have nothing to worry about. You can all go back to sleep.”

It was almost time for Mom to get home, so we sat in the living room and waited for her. When her car pulled into the driveway, I saw Craig get out of his cruiser and talk to her. She ran into the house and found us all watching TV with Kelly. “Everyone okay?” she asked. She sat beside me and brushed my hair back from my face.

As we started to tell her the story, two of Dad’s friends, Terry Hinds and Rick Smith, knocked at the door.

“Well, you’re not going to believe this guy’s story,” Terry said, shaking his head. “He said he noticed the big bamboo patch that you have on the other side of the house. He’s a horticulturist and wanted to grab a sample, but he didn’t want to bother you guys, so he thought he’d just come by at night and get it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Kelly said.

“Nope, and his story checks out,” Rick added. “He really is a horticulturist. He’s got an alibi for the night of the shooting. Only thing we’ve got him on is trespassing.”

“And destruction of personal property,” Terry pointed out. “He dug up some bamboo.”

“Why was he wearing a ski mask?” Mom asked.

Terry shrugged. “Beats me. The guy is obviously a wacko, but he’s no big-time criminal.”

Mom just shook her head. “This is insane,” she said. “Kids, you all need to head back to bed; you have school tomorrow.”

I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I had big purple half moons under my eyes from being so tired, but I liked it; the dark circles made me look older. I was so proud that I had seen that guy and the cops caught him. I could hardly wait until Dad heard the story. I could hear Mom and Kelly still talking to Dad’s friends. They were laughing and that made me feel better. Everything must be okay if they were able to joke about it.

I finally fell asleep and dreamed about a scary clown that I had seen at the county fair a few years back. In the dream, he was at my window, looking in at me, tapping on the glass. He had a big red smile drawn around his mouth, but it was raining, so the paint was running down his cheeks, dripping off his face like blood. “Cylin, Cylin, I can see you.” He was whispering, but I could hear him clearly, even through the glass. Tap, tap, tap.”I can seeeeee you.”

I woke up screaming, and Kelly jumped out of the lower bunk. It was still night, and dark in our room.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Kelly asked. “Did you see something else?” She ran to the window and opened the shutters.

I jerked up in the bed. “Keep the shutters closed!” I yelled at her. I realized that I could hardly move my head. “Something’s wrong with my neck.”

Mom came in and turned on the light. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“Mom, I can’t move my head,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said, climbing up the ladder. She took a look at my neck and had me try to turn my head. “You must have pulled something. Come on, I’ll get you the heating pad.”

I carefully climbed down the ladder, but I could barely lift my arms because my neck hurt so badly. Mom set me up on the couch with the heating pad. It was really early in the morning, still dark out, but she put on the TV for me and let me watch cartoons while she sat with me. Kelly went back to bed. Sesame Street was the only show on this early, and I was way too old for it, but we sat there together and watched it for an hour, until the sun started to rise and my brothers came downstairs. They didn’t ask what we were doing or why I had the heating pad on my neck; they just got ready for school and I didn’t.

I spent the rest of the day on the couch with the heating pad and a new library book. I napped in the afternoon until my brothers came home, then they wanted to watch a show on TV I didn’t like, so I grabbed my blankets and went into my room.

In my pile of stuffed animals, I had a long-legged clown doll that someone had given me. I picked it up and looked at its smiling face. It had these long skinny arms and legs made of red and white striped fabric and a white plastic face. I took a black Magic Marker from my art supplies and started rubbing it all over the clown’s big white teeth. Then I covered its eyes with black too. But it looked even scarier like that, so I decided to just color its whole face black. Then I took a shoe box out of my closet and stuffed the clown inside, facedown. It didn’t really fit, so I had to get some tape to keep the lid down. I ran the tape around and around the box, until the roll was almost gone. When the box was done, I took one long piece of tape and stuck it on the shutters over my windows. Then I taped the other side shut. I used piece after piece of tape until the roll was empty.

I shoved the shoe box far under my bed and stuffed the empty tape roll under there too, so Mom wouldn’t find out that I had used it all and get mad.