My Sister, Myself

by Tara Taylor Quinn

“It was his drinking that killed him,” she said, speaking in the authoritative voice she’d learned to use in her classroom. The voice that said she knew what she was talking about.

  In this case, she did.

  “The fact remains, if I’d kept him home as I usually did…”

  “Then he might have lived through that night,” Tory allowed. “But you couldn’t be with him every night for the rest of his life, Ben. There was bound to be a time when he was going to drink and drive.”

  The muscles in his jaw were working. Tory wished she dared look into his eyes, to see what he was thinking.

  “And if it’d been a later time, a different time, there might have been other people involved in his accident, as well. He might have killed innocent people, along with himself.”

  Besides, why blame yourself when a rotten man dies? Tory asked silently. No need for blame when the world is done a favor.

  “You can’t be responsible for another man’s choices,” she said.

  He shifted to look at her, his hand on the back of her neck. “Neither can you.”

  Bowing her head, Tory leaned forward, away from his touch. His hand was too heavy suddenly, a weight she couldn’t hold.

  “I know,” she said, because she had to. Any other response would raise more questions. Questions she wasn’t willing to answer.

  But Tory knew she couldn’t escape the guilt so easily. Because she was to blame. Christine was dead because of decisions Tory had made. It was that simple, that inescapable—from the day she married Bruce to the day she agreed to come west with Christine. She’d convinced herself to believe that she’d be safe because she’d wanted it so badly. But she’d known Bruce would find her. He always did.

  Christine was the one who’d made all the right decisions. She’d died making a right decision. She’d chosen to be honorable and true and to take care of her baby sister, as she’d promised their dying mother. Christine was the Evans girl with a future, with a reason for living, the Evans girl worthy of life.

  Other than loving her sister, Tory hadn’t done much of anything worthy in her life. She hadn’t done much of anything, period.

  Except run.

  “I’VE LOST EIGHT POUNDS!” Phyllis announced the next morning.

  Looking up from the Robert Frost anthology she was studying, Tory smiled at Phyllis.

  “I’m proud of you!” Her friend was wearing a pair of Guess jeans that were no longer tight at the waist. “And you didn’t have to starve yourself.”

  Parading around the living room in front of Tory, Phyllis grinned. “Who’d have thought just leaving that last bite on my plate would make such a difference?”

  “The one bite by itself probably doesn’t, but leaving it there makes a statement,” Tory said, pulling her legs up beside her on the couch. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, but she’d forgotten her socks, and her feet were cold. “That last bite says you’re done, and it’s proof that you believe it, and you don’t eat anymore.”

  “Is that how you’ve always stayed so slim?”

  Tory shrugged. The game was something her mother had invented. One of the few memories she had of the woman she’d adored.

  Tory had never needed it, though. Life curtailed her appetite.

  “I’ve still got a long way to go….”

  “And you’ll get there,” Tory said with certainty. Phyllis was one of those women with unending strength. She’d do whatever she set her mind to.

  “What do you mean?” Phyllis asked, frowning.

  “You’re still with me on this, aren’t you? You’ll still coach me?”

  “Of course.” As long as Phyllis thought she needed her.

  “Okay.” Phyllis glanced down at the book on Tory’s lap. “After you finish learning far more about next week’s class than any teacher needs to know, you want to hit some of those exclusive shops in Scottsdale and get me some new clothes?”

  “Sure!” Tory might even splurge and buy something for herself.

  Phyllis sat on the other end of the couch. “So how was your date last night?”

  Frost’s The Freedom of the Moon suddenly filled Tory’s vision. “It wasn’t a date.” She stared fiercely at the page.

  It wasn’t her favorite poem, either. So much ethereal beauty it hurt. She flipped through the book, knowing she’d have to come back. She had to teach an overview of Frost. She couldn’t just include the poems she liked.

  “Call it what you want,” Phyllis said, her elbow resting on the arm of the couch. “Did you have a good time with Ben?”

  “I wasn’t with Ben. I was with Becca and Will, and yes, dinner was very nice. Becca’s a good cook.” And Will wasn’t quite as intimidating when he was gushing all over his baby daughter.

  “Was Bethany awake?”

  Tory nodded. She’d found the poem she wanted.

  “The Road Not Taken.” The one about two roads diverging.

  “Did you hold her?”

  She’d been afraid to. Afraid that tiny innocent and defenseless body would make her cry. Or that she’d make the baby cry. “There was only a minute or two before Becca had to feed her, and Ben got to her first.”

  “He held the baby?”

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back, Tory read silently.

  The sight of that baby held so tenderly in those big arms had almost made her cry, too. “He just picked her up and started crooning to her,” she told Phyllis, looking up from the book for a second.

  Phyllis slid down and swung her feet onto the couch. “Ben seems special. He’s kind—look how he humored Becca, giving up a Friday night to share his family history. Considerate. Gentle—handling a baby that way. And gorgeous, too!”

  Tory knew where this was going—and where it couldn’t go. “He’s my student.”

  “He’s as old as you are.”

  “Did you read your Montford-faculty manual?” Tory asked, studying the poem again. “Teachers are expressly forbidden to fraternize with their students.”

  “They’re forbidden to have sexual relations with them,” Phyllis specified, making Tory even more uncomfortable. “And correct me if I’m off the mark, but your having sex isn’t something we need to be worrying about anytime soon.”

  “He’s my student.” Tory barely got the words past the constriction in her throat.

  “Only for another six weeks. The rules only apply when he’s in your class, not when he’s in someone else’s. Besides, you and I both know that in your case, the rules don’t really apply at all.”

  Tory went back to her roads. She’d definitely taken the one less traveled.

  And that made all the difference.

  “…COLLECT CALL. Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes, of course.” Bolting upright in bed, Ben wiped the sleep from his eyes, coming fully awake with the phone in his hand. He barely remembered answering it.

  “Daddy?”

  “Alex? What’s the matter?” he asked, trying to keep his voice soft and calm. His baby girl was crying. And Alex wasn’t a crier.

  “We were wrong, Daddy,” Alex said, and then ruined her attempt to sound brave with a hiccup.

  Ben glanced at the clock—and then looked again. It was one o’clock in the morning. A Tuesday morning.

  “What did we do wrong, Al?” What was she doing up at this hour? And where in hell was Mary that Alex was able to get to a phone to call him?

  “About the lying again,” she said, sniffled, then added, “I can, too, do it again, when I didn’t do it in the first place.”

  Scrambling to his feet, Ben paced the length of his room in nothing but the briefs he’d worn to bed. “Lied about what?”

  Alex sniffled. “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know you lied?” Ben asked, raking the hair back from his eyes while he tried to make sense of the call. The tension in the back of his neck moved down his spine. Something was very wrong.

  “Pete said so,”
Alex said, her voice little more than a whine.

  Ben rubbed his neck. “What exactly did he say?”

  “That I lied.”

  “About what, Al?” He could hardly keep the frustration from his voice. What the hell was going on? He and Alex had never had problems communicating before.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he say you lied about?” Ben stared out his bedroom window to the quiet street below.

  “He didn’t say about anything. He just keeps saying I lied.” She started to cry again. “Help me, Daddy.”

  He was trying, dammit. “What were you doing when he told you not to lie?” he asked.

  “Hugging the wall.”

  “Hugging the wall?” What in hell did that mean?

  “Why were you doing that?”

  “I was just doing like you said, Daddy. I was being brave.”

  “And hugging the wall is brave?”

  “Uh-huh.” The words turned into a tiny wail. Followed by another hiccup.

  “What was Pete doing?” Ben asked. God help him, he couldn’t refer to the man as Alex’s father.

  “Spanking me.”

  “What?” Ben’s whole body went rigid, and his voice was stronger than he’d intended.

  “Daaadddyyy,” Alex wailed, crying harder. “I’m s-s-sorry.”

  “No, Al,” Ben said, forcing himself to be calm.

  “I’m the one who’s sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled.”

  All he could hear were sniffles and hiccups.

  “Can you tell Daddy more, Al?” he asked. “Like how can you hug a wall and be spanked at the same time?”

  “H-h-he spanks yucky, Daddy.”

  Temples throbbing, Ben took a deep breath.

  “How is it yucky, baby?”

  And dear God, was she safe right now? What if someone walked in and found her talking to him? Would she be “spanked” again?

  “H-h-he s-spanks my back, and I j-just hug the wall and be brave l-like you told me.”

  He was going to be sick.

  “Does he spank you more than once?” Ben practically choked on the words.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How many times?” He was going to kill the bastard.

  “I don’t know, but sometimes, Daddy, I couldn’t hug the wall anymore and then I cried. Are you mad at me, too, Daddy?”

  “No!” Ben took another deep breath, softened his voice. “I love you, Al. Always. You know that.”

  “Okay.” She was crying quietly.

  “Where’s Mommy and Pete now?”

  “’Cross the street. I’m s’posed to be sleeping, only, I rolled over and my back hurts and it woke me up.”

  Damn them to hell. Beyond hell.

  Swallowing bile, Ben tried to think, to find the most helpful thing to say. “Listen to me, Al,” he began, hoping the words would come. “First, you did right by calling me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean that, Alex. You are always to call me when things don’t seem right to you. Understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Okay.

  “Now, I want you to climb back into bed before Mommy gets home so she’s not mad that you’re out of bed, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you aren’t a bad girl, baby, no matter who tells you differently. You and me, we know what a good girl you are, don’t we?”

  She started to cry again. “Yeaaahh.”

  Damn.

  “I’m going to take care of this, Al,” he swore to her, and to himself. He had no idea how, but he would protect Alex with his life, if it came to that.

  “Can you come live in the extra room?” she asked, her little voice weak.

  “I don’t think that’s the answer,” he told her, then wondered if he should’ve let her hold on to that particular illusion, since it seemed to give her some hope. “It might take me a little while, but I’ll fix this, Alex, I promise.”

  She hiccuped.

  “I’ve never broken a promise to you, have I, Al?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Just know that I’ll be working to make things better, and in the meantime, you call me every chance you get.”

  He had to hear from her. To know what was happening. But dear God, was he, by asking her to call, encouraging her to take a chance on getting caught? And beaten for that, as well?

  “Okay.”

  “And stay away from Pete as much as you can, you hear me, baby? Not if he calls you, of course—you don’t want to make him mad—but otherwise, play in your room as much as you can. Will you do that for me, sweetie? Or maybe play next door?”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you, Al.”

  “I love you, too, Daddy.” She sounded defeated, the complete antithesis of the vivacious, precocious little girl he’d raised.

  “You’re being very brave, and I’m proud of you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You go to bed now, Al.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.” He couldn’t bear to put down the phone. To sever his only connection to her.

  “Daddy?” she said, and he wondered if she was feeling the same. His poor fragile, frightened baby girl.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hurry…”

  She hung up before he could make the promise that was on his lips. One he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep.

  BEN WAS DIFFERENT that whole first week of November. Tory couldn’t put her finger on anything in particular that was wrong. He still walked with her after class. Still participated in discussions. She just didn’t feel surrounded by his warmth.

  Maybe she’d turned him off last Friday night, telling him about the car accident, about Christine’s death. She’d introduced too much reality. The kind of bitter reality that went hand in hand with her life. She could understand his having a problem with that.

  She found it overwhelming herself.

  “I probably shouldn’t ask, but do you think we could get a cup of coffee?” Ben met her after class the second Monday in November.

  If she hadn’t just been puzzling over his changed attitude, Tory would have refused immediately. “I g-guess,” she said, instead. It was less than a month before term ended. A cup of coffee couldn’t hurt.

  “The ice-cream shop downtown has a new espresso machine. Can we meet there at, say, three o’clock?”

  Her last class ended at two.

  “Sure,” she said tentatively.

  “Thanks.”

  She had several hours to reconsider. Half the day, at least. But she wasn’t going to. Not after that last glance Ben sent her way before striding off to his next class. He was really disturbed about something.

  IF SHE’D KNOWN she was going to the ice-cream shop after school, Tory might have worn something other than the navy skirt and short matching jacket she had on. Even in Christine’s low navy pumps, she felt horribly out of place.

  Ben, on the other hand, fit right in, she noticed as he stood up from the red leather and Formica booth he’d chosen at the back of the shop. He wore another pair of the tight-fitting jeans he seemed to live in and a long-sleeved forest-green shirt. Even in the loose shirt, his upper body looked massive enough to shoulder whatever burdens might land there.

  “What would you like?” he asked, meeting her at the counter. He already had a cup sitting in front of him at the booth.

  “You go ahead,” Tory said, waving toward the booth. “I’ll get mine.”

  He seemed about to argue, but changed his mind. With a nod, he returned to the booth which was as far away from the video-game machines as possible. It might be mid-November, but the ice-cream shop was doing a steady business. Shelter Valley had been teetering around eighty-five degrees all week, and this close to the end of term, the college students seemed even more high-spirited than usual. A crowd was gathered around the video machines.

  Tory ordered her coffee, said hello to one of
the students in her Tuesday and Thursday afternoon American literature class, and then joined Ben at his table.

  “So what’s up?” she asked right away. She’d been playing guessing games since he’d walked away from her that morning. Surely he didn’t have to drop out of school. Not when he was doing so well.

  She’d already made up her mind that if he was having financial problems, she’d find a way to help him. One thing Tory had plenty of was money. Bruce had granted her a generous allowance, and she’d been siphoning money off to Christine for years for the times Tory escaped from him and couldn’t access her own funds.

  “I think Alex’s new father is beating her.”

  Tory stared at him. “What makes you think so?”

  Raucous noises at the video machines, the sounds of ice-cream scoops being dropped in cleaning bins, parents asking children what they wanted—it all faded as Tory soaked up every word Ben was telling her. Soon the ice-cream shop didn’t even exist. Tory was there with little Alex, hugging that wall.

  “…I called Mary the next morning, but I had to be careful,” Ben was saying, running his fingers through his thick curls. “I don’t want to do or say anything that might come back on Alex.”

  “Do you think Mary knows Pete’s hitting her?”

  “I didn’t want to think so, but probably.” He sighed, pushed his nearly full cup of coffee away.

  “She defends the bastard, won’t hear anything negative. Says it’s just sour grapes and that I’m trying to make trouble for her. That I’m jealous and bitter and don’t want her to be happy.”

  Folding her hands in her lap to still their shaking, Tory applied herself one hundred percent to the problem. There had to be something they could do.

  “Have you called the authorities?” She couldn’t believe she was even asking. The authorities had become a standing joke to her and Christine. But unlike Tory, Alex had someone out there who loved her. Someone who’d back her when the adults in question used their positions, their rights as her parents, to knock holes in her story.

  Ben nodded, his face ashen. “They’re keeping an eye on things, but so far there’s no evidence. They checked Alex at school and there’s no sign of any bruises.”

  “They’ll keep checking, I hope?”

  “I don’t know how involved Child Welfare’s going to be, but the school nurse assured me she’d keep a close eye on Alex. She encouraged me to call her daily, which I’ve been doing. Apparently Al’s teacher has noticed a change in her behavior. Al’s not participating in class as much, doesn’t seem as focused.”