Year We Disappeared: A Father - Daughter Memoir by Cylin Busby, John Busby

From the Publisher

When Cylin Busby was nine years old, she was obsessed with Izod clothing, the Muppets, and a box turtle she kept in a shoebox. Then everything changed overnight. Her police officer father, John, was driving to his shift when someone leveled a shotgun at his window. The blasts that followed left John’s jaw on the passenger seat of his car—literally. While clinging to life, he managed to write down the name of the only person he thought could have pulled the trigger. The suspect? A local ex-con with rumored mob connections. The motive? Officer Busby was scheduled to testify against the suspect’s family in an upcoming trial. Overnight, the Busbys went from being the “family next door” to one under 24-hour armed guard, with police escorts to school, and no contact with friends. Worse, the shooter was still on the loose, and it seemed only a matter of time before he’d come after John—or someone else in the family—again. With few choices left to them, the Busby family went into hiding, severing all ties to the only life they had known.

Publishers Weekly

No one with even a marginal interest in true crime writing should miss this page-turner, by turns shocking and almost unbearably sad. In 1979, in an underworld-style hit, a gunman shot John Busby, a policeman in Cape Cod; a fluke saved John's life, but he was permanently disfigured and disabled, and the family placed under 24-hour protection. Eventually the family went into hiding in Tennessee, but arguably their "disappearance" takes place long before they move-as John and his daughter, Cylin, alternately narrate, readers can see how the shooting erased the family's sense of themselves. John is consumed with anger at the police's refusal to pursue the likeliest suspects ("and [I] planned to stay angry until I got back at the bastards who did this to me"); Cylin, then nine, is baffled as she and her two older brothers attract unwelcome attention ("Everyone thinks your dad is going to die," a cousin tells her. "But you're lucky-you don't have to go to school") and are later forsaken as classmates' parents deem friendship with them too risky. Where John's chapters provide the grim facts, it is Cylin's authentically childlike perspective that, in revealing the cost to her innocence, renders the tragic experience most searingly. Ages 14-up. (Sept.)

Children's Literature

The Year We Disappeared is a compelling tale: The fact that it is true only adds to its breathtaking appeal. When Cylin Busby was nine years old, her father John Busby was a police officer in Falmouth, Massachusetts, a seemingly quiet community on Cape Cod. In one night, the Busby family's life turned inside out: John was shot in the face, the victim of retaliation by a gangster whom he had sent to jail. The assassination attempt failed, but John was left horribly disfigured and the family was no longer safe on Cape Cod. The Year We Disappeared recounts the story of the Busby family's dissolution and reconstruction (as well as that of John's face), narrated in alternating chapters by father and daughter. Writing as a teenager, Cylin recalls the feelings of her pre-pubescent self as her quiet world of Izod shorts, the Muppets, and her pet turtle changes into a world of round-the-clock security, a guard dog, and ostracization at school. John recalls his physical and emotional struggles, the damage done to his family, and his slow realization that he had been betrayed by a member of his own police force. Ultimately, the Busby family disappeared from Falmouth, and from themselves, long before they were relocated into the witness protection program. Their new home and the joys it returned to their life end the book with the sense that the family has reappeared. When so many stories are about families falling apart, The Year We Disappeared is a refreshing tale of a real family faced with unimaginable difficulties sticking it out and growing stronger. Reviewer: Ilene S. Goldman

VOYA

Cylin Busby was nine in 1979, the year her police officer father, John, was shot in their Massachusetts resort town. He spent several months in a Boston hospital, where he was stabilized, and began a long course of reconstructive surgeries on his face. Cylin and her two brothers stayed with relatives in Boston for awhile, not privy to the extent of their father's injuries and seeing their mother only occasionally, during the rare times when she left their father's bedside for short breaks. Eventually the family returned home, living with round-the-clock guards, police escorts to school, a guard dog, and a barricade surrounding their house. City politics interfered with the investigation of John's shooting, and realizing that their miserable lifestyle was not going to change, the family relocated to the South, carefully covering their tracks. The book alternates between the perspectives of Cylin and John, providing great insight into the difficulties they faced individually and as a family. John is angry, frustrated with his physical condition, and concerned for his family's safety. Cylin becomes a social outcast at school and is frightened for her father. Confined to their house and limited to the company of each other, the family members become irritable. Throughout Cylin's mother tends to her father, takes care of the household duties, and most amazingly, finishes nursing school, graduating at the top of her class. This true-crime story manages to be suspenseful and reflective at the same time, and it will draw both leisure and reluctant readers. Reviewer: Jenny Ingram

VOYA

Cylin's colorful descriptions and John's emotional struggle will capture readers as they delve into the compelling story of the Busby family. Cylin finds a strong voice in her narration of the life-changing event through the eyes of her nine-year-old self. The book flows seamlessly back and forth from father's to daughter's perspective, each jump between narrators providing further explanation and insight and pulling readers deeper into the story. Older teens will be able to more fully understand and appreciate this book, but younger teens may be equally drawn to the gripping story line. Reviewer: Kristen Moreland, Teen Reviewer

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up

On August 31, 1979, tough cop John Busby was shot at close range while driving to work on Cape Cod. Bleeding profusely with the lower half of his face blown off, he realized that somebody wanted him dead, and identified a brazen local bully as the culprit, an arsonist with whose family Busby had clashed on the job. John and his daughter, Cylin, who was nine at the time of the shooting, recount the year that followed in alternating chapters, incorporating candid commentary and sometimes-disturbing detail about a crime that never resulted in arrests. With the entire Busby family under 24-hour police protection, John began the reconstructive surgeries that would stretch for years, while Cylin and her two brothers tried to cope with guards accompanying them to school and the resulting social isolation. John Busby is frank about the corruption in the local police department that let his attacker intimidate anyone he chose, and bluntly describes his frustration and need for revenge in the months following the attack. Cylin speaks with a voice of innocence shattered as she struggles to comprehend what happened to her family and why her friends have abandoned her. When the town balked at the continuing expense of providing personal protection and the constant fear brought the family to the breaking point, the Busbys went into hiding, seeking a return to some semblance of normalcy. The page-turner pace is frequently interrupted by awkwardly placed flashbacks to moments in John's police work, but, ultimately, this is a story of survival and triumph.-Joyce Adams Burner, Hillcrest Library, Prairie Village, KS

Kirkus Reviews

In 1979, John Busby, a Falmouth, Mass., cop was shot in the face while driving to work. This alternating father-daughter memoir provides a graphic account of the event and its yearlong aftermath-both directly attributable to a corruption-riddled municipal government. Readers should know that the book depicts Busby's shooting, injuries and reconstructive surgeries in unrelenting detail. Until the family was secretly relocated, Cylin, nine, and her brothers struggled to manage an intolerable burden of fear, even under 24-hour police protection. The account ends before readers learn how (or if) they made it to adulthood in one piece. Beyond recounting a fascinating, if lurid, tabloid story, neither author offers any analysis or reflection that would allow readers to place the events in a larger context. At once competitive, stubborn and aggressive, Busby's personality seems to have both prompted the shooting and helped him survive it. The implications of governmental corruption go unnoted, including the official response to the shooting itself-protecting the family with taxpayer-funded firearms and police surveillance, rather than institutional reform. (Memoir. 14 & up)

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 1599901412
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Pub. Date: August 2008
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: Hardcover Fine Great like new condition. WE ship quickly.

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

ON August 31, 1979, we were supposed to go see The Muppet Movie. Dad had promised us that when he woke up, he'd take us to the movie before he went in to work the night shift. He was a police officer on Cape Cod, in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He worked the 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift, then slept during the day for a few hours.

Usually, he'd come home from work right around the time I was sitting down with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Sometimes he'd hang out with me and my brothers until it was time for us to catch the bus, eating a piece of toast with raspberry jam, his favorite breakfast, or telling Mom about his night. But other days he'd go straight into the bedroom and change into his good suit, the dark brown one with the big lapels. He'd wear a cream-colored print shirt underneath, and a tie, too. I thought he looked like a movie star in his suit, with his strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and broad shoulders-like Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood. But as good as he looked in it, that suit always meant Dad was going to court to testify in a case. It also meant that he wasn't going to get much sleep, so we should be sure to stay out of his way when we got home from school in the afternoon.

During the summers when we didn't have school, Mom made sure to have us out of the house by 8:30 or 9:00 a.m., rain or shine. We'd go to the beach and have swim lessons in the morning. Then we'd spend the rest of the day there, eating bologna sandwiches that were a little too warm from sitting out in the sun and begging Mom for quarters so we could cross the hot sand to the ice-cream stand for a Nutty Buddy or some chocolate chip cookies. Mom usually brought a big bottle of something to drink and a few Styrofoam cups to keep us from asking for soda money, too. But on days when she was feeling generous, we could get a real soda in a cold can from the ice-cream guy. I loved the feeling of a freshly opened Orange Crush, so cold and fizzy it hurt my mouth to drink it fast.

As the afternoon wore on and my skin started to feel tight and hot from the salt and the sun, I would take my favorite towel, a white one with a bright rainbow arching across it, and wrap it around me, even covering my head. Then I'd lie in the sand by Mom and watch the sunlight filter through the stitches in the towel, transformed into my own private rainbow. Sometimes I'd fall asleep cocooned like that until it was time to go home.

On days when it rained, we still went to the beach for our swim lessons, and we'd stay for as long as we could take it. If it was a light rain, Mom would bring an umbrella and tell us to get out in the water. "What difference does a little rain matter, since you'll be getting wet anyhow?" she'd reason. She'd plant the umbrella in the sand, take out whatever paperback she was reading, and plunk down in a beach chair.

My two older brothers and I would come out of the ocean hours later, lips blue and shaking, only to wrap up in towels that were wet from being left on the beach in the rain. It's not like my mom or my family loved the beach-we weren't trying to break any records for being the biggest sand bums on the Cape. But Dad had to sleep, and when we were stuck at home there was no way that could happen.

Snow days were Mom's worst nightmare. We'd be sent out to go sledding for hours at a time, just to keep the house quiet. We'd come back in, soaked to the skin, and shuck off our snow-covered coats and boots with Mom whispering, "Your dad is sleeping, so keep it down." But we'd always want to watch TV or play records. And then the fighting would inevitably start. Maybe Eric, who was thirteen that year and totally into sci-fi, wanted to watch Star Trek while I wanted Little House on the Prairie. We'd end up yelling and chasing each other around the house, throwing Atari game cassettes at each other, Mom reminding us that Dad was sleeping, only to see him appear, bleary-eyed, groggy, and in his underwear, at the bedroom door. "Keep it down to a dull roar," he'd growl in his heavy Boston accent. Then he'd disappear back into the bedroom, and we'd try to be good for at least a half hour or so.

That summer I was nine years old-just turned nine that May. I loved the Muppets. I adored Kermit and Miss Piggy especially. The whole family watched the show religiously on Sunday nights, with my parents on the couch and the three of us on the rug right in front of the television. So that day at the beach, all I had been thinking about was how we were going to the movies that night, finally seeing the Muppets on the big screen. Dad would sneak in a big bag of peanut M&M'S for us all to share, and we'd get a huge tub of popcorn. But when we came back that Friday afternoon and found Dad at home, still in his suit, I knew that he had just gotten home from spending the day in court after working all night, and he hadn't had any sleep yet. We weren't going to the movies. I was crushed. While Mom went to make dinner, I laid on the bunk bed in my room, still in my sandy blue bathing suit, and cried.

The evening was a disaster in the making. Dad had to sleep, Mom was stuck in our two-bedroom house with three grouchy, hot, tired kids who couldn't face the disappointment of a canceled movie date. To cheer us up-and probably to get us out of the house for a few hours-Mom came up with a plan and pretended that it was something great. "We're painting Dad's car," she announced, and headed to the basement for paint and brushes.

Mom was really tired of Dad's car-a multicolored Frankenstein of a Volkswagen Beetle put together from spare parts. She was pretty tired of all Dad's other car "projects," too. We always had one or two VW Beetles sitting in our L-shaped driveway, either parked off to the side or up on blocks. Dad would buy them cheap and keep them around for spare parts for the one Bug that he actually kept running-most of the time. That summer, he had a white MG parked in the yard too. The body of the car still looked good, but it didn't run. He had plans to fix it up when he had the time. Meanwhile, it made a great place for my brothers and me to play-messing with the radio knobs and jerking the stick shift around like we were driving. We weren't allowed to touch the emergency brake, after my brother Shawn accidentally sent the MG rolling backward down the driveway one day. But even with that off-limits, the cars in the driveway were the best toys we could have asked for.

The VW Bug that Dad was using as his main car that summer had an okay engine and it ran, but it didn't look too pretty doing it. He had pieced together the body from three or four other VWs, so it had a red front fender and a blue front fender mismatched on either side of a faded red hood, along with a blue door on one side and a gray door on the other. The seats were split open in some spots, with rusty springs and tufts of coarse horsehair sticking out. This made riding in Dad's car a summer nightmare-sitting on the split seats, especially in the back, in shorts, or worse, a bathing suit, was torture unless you stuck a towel under you. Mom was on Dad's case about the car and how it looked. "It's embarrassing," she'd say. "Can't we at least paint it one color?" Dad would shrug. "Sure, knock yourself out."

I don't know why Mom picked that night to start in on her project, other than the need to get our butts out of the house for a few hours, but she did. She got out the only big paint can she could find in the basement-green paint-and a few extra paintbrushes. "We'll surprise your dad by painting his car while he's sleeping," she explained, and everyone joined in. It didn't take long to realize that painting a car with a paintbrush wasn't such a great idea. The brush left sticky lines on the car, and as the dusk rolled in, so did the gnats and mosquitoes, leaving streaks and spots where they landed in the gooey mess. Mom didn't want to give up, so she just kept on painting the door and one fender with the too-thick paint-paint that I think was actually for wood, not cars-until it grew too dark to see what she was doing.

I grew bored of the painting quickly, and opted to play with our new box turtle instead, while Mom and my brothers tackled the job. Dad had found the turtle on one of his runs up Hatchville Road-a sweet country street that wound its way around the corner from our house. Though it didn't run along the coast, Hatchville was one of the prettiest roads on the Cape; it cut through fields, past big houses, horse barns, and a famous organic farm. Sometimes, in the summer, Dad would take us running with him on the route, the three of us puffing behind him, trying to keep up. Shawn was the only one who had the steam to make it the full five miles, while Eric and I usually dropped out of the race around three. On evenings when I knew I couldn't keep up, I'd take my bike and race circles around Dad and my brothers. "Come on, slowpokes!" I'd shout, standing up on my pedals to push my bike faster than they could run.

With his better-than-20/20 vision and the instincts of a cop forever looking for clues, Dad always seemed to find stuff on the side of the road: a mangled pair of sunglasses or a beach hat. A piece of jewelry, cheap to start with and now run over a few times. A mangled baseball, rotted and brown. Usually the stuff Dad found was worthless, but one evening, he came home with a good-sized box turtle, about as big as my shoe. He didn't have any marks on him, except for a scuffed up shell; Dad thought he had probably been hit by a car since he couldn't seem to walk very well.

We put the turtle in a cardboard box and set him up against the house, in the shade. I brought him water in a little bowl, and some iceberg lettuce to eat. But he never even took a bite; the lettuce just turned brown and droopy. I tried flesh grass trimmings and leaves, too, but he just wasn't interested in eating. Late in the day, I would take him out of his box to give him some free time. If you waited a really long time, and you were very quiet, sometimes he would take a step or two in the driveway. But mostly he just sat there, blinking his big shutterbug eyelids and not doing much else.

When Mom was ready to put down her paintbrush for the night, she was so proud of the gooey half-painted car, she went inside to get the camera to record it, so we have a couple of pictures from that evening. In one photo, Mom is posing by her paint job. She looks petite and trim in shorts and a summer top. Her skin is tanned a honey brown, her dark hair in a pixie cut; she's smiling big. Another picture shows me, sitting in the drive-way by the cardboard box with the turtle beside me. I'm painfully thin, all knees and elbows, and too shy to actually look into the camera, so I'm looking down instead, smiling a little. My long straight hair, parted in the middle, falls like curtains on either side of my freckled face.

There's one more picture, of my two brothers standing with their backs against our red-shingled house, squinting into the setting summer sun. Shawn, thin and darkly tanned like Mom, his brown hair cut in thick bangs over his eyes, his new braces crowding his mouth; Eric, big and broad like Dad, with the same strawberry blond hair and a splash of freckles over his nose. I'm glad we have this picture of them, taken on that night, before everything changed. I'm glad to have the picture of Mom, looking so happy and young. I'm even glad to have a picture of the turtle, though I don't know what happened to him-forgotten in his little cardboard box by our house while we were gone in Boston, where Dad was undergoing the emergency surgeries that would ultimately save his life.

But most of all, I'm happy to have the picture of Dad's car. Because the next time I saw that car, it was in a black-and-white photo on the front page of the Cape Cod Times, shot full of holes. The front window was shattered, the driver-side window completely knocked out. And the driver-side door, freshly painted green, was riddled with shotgun pellets.

Chapter Two JOHN

AUGUST 31, 1979, was a Friday, the start of Labor Day week-end on the Cape. I'd worked the previous 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift, and then spent until late afternoon in court. After sitting around all day I didn't even get to testify, having only a minor backup role in the case. It was a major waste of time. I got home around five in the afternoon with no sleep, exhausted, and was supposed to take the kids to the movie theater.

I thought about calling in sick, spending some time with the kids before school started back up in a few days. But this was Labor Day weekend, and on the Cape that meant parties, drunk drivers, tourists having their last hurrah before heading back to New York and Boston and wherever else they came from. We needed extra cops on duty to handle this weekend-more of the real guys on the force, not just the "rent-a-cops" as we year-rounders called the summer guys. It would be an asshole move not to show up for my shift. So I told Polly I had to hit the sack and to wake me at 9:45 for work.

The kids were disappointed about the movie, but I told them we'd go tomorrow night instead. Polly got me up, I showered and trimmed my beard and had some coffee. I'd been wearing a beard for several years at this point. Came about as a result of a week-long vacation and fast-growing whiskers. We were working five days on and three days off, so right before my vacation, I skipped the shave for my last shift. That gave me twelve days to grow a beard, and it looked pretty good. So I went to work with it, and since there wasn't any official policy about facial hair, my sergeant said he'd talk with the chief. Next morning, Sergeant and I met with the "Grand Fubar"-our private name for the chief, "Fubar" meaning "fucked up beyond all reality." The chief approved beards as long as they were neat and trim. Within a month, a dozen bearded cops were saving copious bucks on razor blades.

Polly told me shortly after she woke me up that-surprise!-she'd painted half the car green. I took a look. She'd used a four-inch paintbrush and, under the circumstances, had done a credible job. But I was grumpy, still tired from getting only three hours of sleep, so I didn't give her any compliments. Instead, I pointed out that now I'd have to get a new registration due to the color change, just nit-picking. It was looking like it was going to be a tough night on the public indeed.

At about twenty of eleven, I fired up the newly painted Bug and headed in to work. As I drove down Sandwich Road, I noticed another Bug, a white VW, facing into Pinecrest Beach Drive and a full-sized light blue sedan facing out. The people seemed to be talking to each other. About half a mile south, a vehicle closed on me rapidly from the rear, hit high beams, and pulled out to pass. The speed limit on this stretch of road was thirty-five, and we were already doing a bit more than that.

But the car didn't pass. Instead, I heard this incredible roar and felt this tremendous punch in my nose. My head and upper body were thrown down, across the passenger seat. There was a second booming roar, and I started to sit back up. I noticed in the light from the radio that there was a pool of blood, bone, teeth, and hair lying in the passenger seat. Somehow I knew it was parts of me lying there, and I thought quite calmly, Shit, now I'm going to bare to go to the dentist. I knew I'd been shot, that's what the booming sounds were. I'd probably been hit in the nose and mouth.

I sat up and stomped on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt. A third boom went off and the passenger side of the front windshield filled with half-inch round holes. I could see the light blue sedan now, stopped about fifty feet in front of me, and I was thinking how easy it would be to shoot back through the windshield at it-the thing was already full of holes; it wouldn't do any more damage. But since I had kids at home, my stainless steel (to resist rusting in the salty Cape air) .357 revolver with its six-inch barrel was hanging in my locker and not in the shoulder harness that fellow officer Pauly Gonsalves had advised me to start wearing years earlier.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from the year we disappeared by CYLIN BUSBY JOHN BUSBY
Copyright © 2008 by Busby Ross, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
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