The Year We Disappeared

Shortly before Christmas, John is scheduled for another surgery. While he’s gone, the police plan to build a security fence around the house and keep an attack dog in the yard. Cylin sees the fence as yet another intrusion on her life. She confesses she “hates” all the cops that constantly tell her what to do, even snapping at Kellie when she tries to lend a sympathetic ear.

Cylin recalls an incident a few weeks after the shooting when she sees a masked man outside her bedroom window. She tells Kellie, who alerts the officer on duty, and they arrest the intruder. He has no connection to the shooting, however (he’s looking for plant samples from the bamboo patch in their yard), but the intrusion sets everyone on edge. Later that evening, she has a nightmare about a clown tapping at her window. She wakes up screaming. The next day, she stuffs her clown doll in a shoebox, tapes it shut and hides it under her bed. 

After Christmas, John returns to Massachusetts General Hospital for his second surgery. The doctors plan to remove additional shrapnel from his face and begin the reconstruction of his jaw. The surgery goes well, but the post-surgery pain is intense, and the medication isn’t enough to keep it at bay. Nevertheless, he soldiers on despite losing an additional 10 pounds in the hospital (he is already twenty-five pounds under his normal weight). When he returns from the hospital, the house is surrounded by a fence and an alarm system, a cheaper alternative to round-the-clock police security. Eventually, a fund is started to help the Busby family relocate.

When John is recovered enough from surgery, he and Polly go to a kennel to check out guard dogs. They decide on a German shepherd named Max, and John attends a week of training so Max will respond to his hand commands and no one else’s. However, Max is not a gentle dog, and their pet beagle, Tig, is terrified of him. They decide to give Tig to John’s sister and husband in Maine (Kellie’s parents). They also send Kellie back home, reasoning that it’s not fair to keep her trapped in this environment of fences, attack dogs, and bodyguards.

During John’s hospital stay, Polly takes the kids to the psychiatrist John has been seeing. After an interview with them, he reports to Polly that either they are “suppressing […] strong emotions” or “becoming […] good at deception” (224). Neither one, he informs Polly, is good for their mental health. Polly and John find reasons to postpone their relocation—Polly’s nursing school, the kids’ school, a potential lead in the investigation—but the psychiatrist argues the sooner the better. They agree that, unless the investigation turns up something solid by the time Polly graduates in May, “then we are gone” (225). 

Cylin recalls her visit to the psychiatrist. She and her brothers tell him everything’s fine because they assume it’s what he wants to hear. They feel proud that they’ve gotten their “stories straight.” Once John returns from the hospital, Cylin laments the changes in him: his “mummy head,” his weight loss, his anger. She hopes a full recovery will bring back the father she once knew. The addition of Max is another unwelcome change. Watching her father with him, she is unsettled by how the dog transitions from sweet to ferocious with a single hand gesture. No one can go outside—even to throw out the trash—unless John is holding Max’s leash. Cylin feels she is losing everything: Kellie, Tig, her father, and her old life.

Other safety protocols are in place: Cylin and her brothers must never be late for school or for the bus, otherwise the police will immediately begin to search for them; they need a special code to disarm the gate, one that will notify the police in the event that “someone comes over to you while you’re trying to get into the fence and puts a gun to your head” (234). Despite the cutback in police escorts, Cylin despairs that the situation is getting worse, not better.

One night, the power goes off in the house. Polly and the kids scramble up to the attic while John and two fellow officers surveil the property. Cylin considers the possibility that she might have to use her mother’s gun, and she runs through a mental checklist of the process. It’s a false alarm, however; the power is out across the whole neighborhood. Still, Cylin realizes that, in case of a real intrusion, she has no weapon of her own. During the night, she takes a steak knife from the kitchen and hides it under her mattress. 

John’s frustration at living like a prisoner intensifies. He is not only angry at Meyer, but at the inept investigation and the entire town of Falmouth who, he feels, should be doing more to safeguard his family. He suspects fellow officer Larry Mitchell of slipping Meyer his work schedule so Meyer will know John’s exact time and place to ambush him. John recalls an elaborate subterfuge set up by Mitchell and Meyer presumably to ensure that no officers are anywhere near the crime scene on the night of the shooting. Investigators ask Mitchell to take a lie detector test, but he refuses.

John then recalls the night, six months prior to the shooting, when Meyer threatened his life. Meyer’s son, Paul Cena, after refusing to pull over for speeding (and later, endangering the life of an officer), is arrested in the driveway of Meyer’s home. John makes the arrest, and Meyer, waving a baseball bat, shouts, “Your head is gonna be in your lap, Busby” (246). John realizes he has a pattern of antagonizing Meyer: citing his nephew (and others close to him) and arresting his son. He has become “a real thorn in his side” (247).

One Saturday, the Busbys decide to go ice skating away from the police bodyguards and the constant surveillance. They drive to a nearby pond with only their guns and Max for protection. As John struggles to throw a large log onto the ice to test the ice’s thickness, Cylin is reminded once again of his weakened state. As they skate and play hockey, Cylin feels free, like a normal family, for the first time in months. When another family approaches the pond, Max barks and lunges at them, Polly barely able to restrain him. This leads to a shouting match between Polly and the other mother whose children are terrified. Cylin is stunned to see her mother getting so angry.

That night, Polly types up a resume, determined to find a job away from Falmouth. Cylin doesn’t want to move, so she tries to pretend that everything at school is perfectly normal. One day after school, Cylin and her brothers play catch with Max while John watches. Suddenly, Max lunges at Eric, and John drags the dog roughly back to his doghouse and chains him up. The incident finally confirms for Cylin that things can never be normal again. As Cylin ponders life in a new city, she fantasizes about constructing a new identity using only the best parts of her life.