Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  He wasn’t a bad guy, though. I wouldn’t say he was morally corrupt, just morally inept. Lying was simply a part of his nature, like under-tipping.

  I don’t regret my time with him. He was generous to me and showed me the Caribbean. In return, I taught him how to check his car for cut brake lines for that inevitable day when his wife was going to try and kill him.

  I pull up to the curb at arrivals. I know exactly who I’m looking for even though I’ve never met the man.

  Kozlowski’s cell phone number on my caller ID had a Manhattan area code, so it’s doubtful he’ll express any dismay over the amount of money I’m going to charge him for this trip. He wants to hire a cab rather than rent a car, which would probably end up being cheaper in the long run and more convenient for him.

  I’ve gathered from all this that he’s a lifelong, non-driving New Yorker who has money but earned it by working for it because the way he speaks isn’t natural Snob-ese but something he learned. So I look for a man standing by himself dressed in black and looking casually uncomfortable.

  I spot him immediately.

  I’d put him in his mid-thirties. Short dark hair parted on the side. Eyes the color of weak tea. His individual features would be considered the ideal shape and size by most people. As a matter of fact, there might be laminated Polaroid snapshots of his nose, lips, eyebrows, ears, and chin in a plastic surgeon’s catalog of parts somewhere. The combination of all of them makes for a face no one can criticize or remember, the kind of face a police sketch artist could capture perfectly yet no one would ever be able to identify.

  He’s wearing glossy black leather loafers, black wrinkle-free pants with sharp pleats down the front of the legs, a braided black leather belt, and a black silk T-shirt. His black suit jacket is hooked to his finger and thrown over his shoulder. The shirt alone probably costs more than my monthly car payment.

  I try to make small talk with him during the drive but he won’t bite. He spends the two hours perusing papers from his briefcase and talking on his cell. It’s obvious from several of the conversations that he’s a lawyer who deals predominantly with contracts.

  Nothing I do gets a rise out of him. He doesn’t comment on any of the music I play: Sonny Rollins followed by AC/DC followed by the Broadway score from My Fair Lady. He doesn’t mind the windows open. He doesn’t object to my periodic, animated cursing of left-laners, the self-centered, oblivious assholes who get in the passing lane and don’t pass. He doesn’t respond at all when I ask him if he wants to hit a McDonald’s drive-thru and get an Egg McMuffin.

  “We’re almost there,” I tell him when we’re about ten miles south of Centresburg. “Do you want me to drop you somewhere in Jolly Mount or do you want me to take you straight to your motel?”

  I glance in my rearview mirror. He begins packing away papers in his briefcase.

  “What’s your name again?” he asks without looking up.

  “Shae-Lynn.”

  “Right. Shae-Lynn. You can take me to my hotel for now, but I was wondering if you’d be available if I need you during the next couple days to drive me around?”

  “I might be.”

  “I’d pay you well.”

  I make up my mind instantly to do it, not only because I need the money, but because I want to know what this guy is doing here.

  “I guess I can make myself available,” I tell him.

  “Good,” he says.

  He clicks the briefcase shut and finally looks up, but not at me. When he speaks again, he’s looking out the window.

  “I imagine you know a lot of people around here,” he says.

  “You could say that.”

  “Do you know a Shannon Penrose?”

  At the mention of the name, I temporarily forget where I am and what I’m doing and almost drive off the road. I glance in the rearview mirror, and he’s giving me a strange look.

  “I…,” I start to say, “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Do you know any other Penroses? I’ve checked phone listings for towns in the area, and I couldn’t find any. Although a lot of people are unlisted these days.”

  “Well,” I say, quickly, while gathering my wits again, “Penrose is a common name around here.”

  “I don’t think she’s lived around here for a long time, but I know Jolly Mount is her hometown.”

  “Is that why you’re here? You’re trying to find her?”

  “I have something very important to tell her. It’s good news, I assure you.”

  “Sorry.”

  I don’t trust him. That’s why I lie, even though the truth wouldn’t help him.

  I finish the drive to the Comfort Inn with my heart pounding heavily in my chest.

  Before he gets out of the car, he asks me if I’ll drive him to Jolly Mount tonight, maybe take him to a bar or someplace where he can meet some locals. His word: locals. He lowers his voice when he says it and uses a dramatic courtroom pause as if he were addressing a jury that’s nodding off.

  I agree. After he gets out of the car, I watch him walk into the Comfort Inn. Then I pull into the parking lot of the Ruby Tuesday next door and sit.

  I don’t fall apart and begin to cry. I don’t get angry. I don’t allow myself to feel guilt or pain. I understand that I will have to deal with all of these emotions eventually, but for now I close my eyes and take deep breaths while trying to find the safe place in my soul.

  It’s a small, cozy room full of plush, overstuffed furniture, with a fire blazing in a fireplace and a velvet-eared puppy asleep on a rug on the floor, twitching in his dreams. On the table is a deep blue china plate the color of a predawn sky as the sun’s glow from behind the mountains begins to lighten the black overhead. It’s heaped with some of my mom’s homemade cookies: chocolate chip, pecan tassies, and peanut butter thumbprints with Hershey’s kisses stuck in the middle. Beside it sits a cup of hot chocolate with mounds of whipped cream. Outside a storm rages, but I know it can’t touch me. The room is made of stone and has no doors. The more the wind blows and the thunder rumbles and the rain lashes the only window, the happier I am.

  It’s the place I always went to as a child whenever I missed my mom too much or when my dad’s eyes lost their human spark and began to harden into the red-rimmed, black marble stare of a mad dog straining at his chain.

  It’s the place I still go to during those rare moments when I allow myself to think of Shannon.

  My little sister, Shannon. If someone is looking for her, it must mean she’s alive.

  For the past eighteen years, I’ve believed my father killed her.

  Chapter Two

  JOLLY’S IS A BAR located on the edge of town in a three-story, peeling white clapboard house that used to be an inn. The building is unremarkable and probably never looked new even when it was built 150 years ago, but its age and scruffy simplicity give it a wistful, bygone elegance, like an old man wearing a red carnation in the buttonhole of his threadbare suit.

  Somewhere during the inn’s more recent history, it fell into the hands of Cam Jack—the owner of J&P Coal—just like everything else around town. He had no desire to modernize it or declare it a historic landmark and try and restore it to its original mediocre splendor, since both would require spending money.

  Instead, he closed off the two top floors, leaving only the bar and restaurant open. Eventually he closed the dining room, too, not wanting to deal with the hassles and expense of running a restaurant, although he did keep a deep fryer and grill for when the bar patrons got the munchies.

  The place is run by a large, friendly woman named Sandy Flock whose age is impossible to guess because of her size, but I think she’s getting close to fifty. She has a pretty face with gemstone blue eyes and has spent her entire life hearing how it’s such a shame for a girl with such a pretty face to be so fat when it was probably the pretty face that started her eating in the first place. Some women know what to do with beauty; other women are destroyed by it.

  The
double front doors are propped open. One side has a sign hanging on it that reads COME IN. WE’RE OPEN. The other side has a sign that reads: HOME OF THE JOLLY MOUNT FIVE. I think the sign is supposed to mean that the town of Jolly Mount is home to the Jolly Mount Five, not that the bar is their home, but they all spend enough time here that it could easily mean either.

  I push through the screen doors and let my eyes adjust to the perennial dusk. The place is practically empty. On a day like today, even drunks are enticed by the unexpected sunshine and want to do their drinking outside.

  Three burly men and one skinny one, all in ball caps and in need of a shave, are staggered about on stools hunched over beers. I recognize two, but not well enough to greet them.

  Sandy spies me and calls out, “Hey, Shae-Lynn. What are you doing here on a day like today?”

  “I need a drink,” I tell her honestly.

  I hold up a finger.

  “Just one,” I add.

  I walk quickly past the old, gouged pool table sitting on massive wooden paws with unfurled claws next to the front windows, which are hung with heavy red curtains coated in a soft gray dust. The walls are papered in tiny brown stagecoaches and hostile red Indians and covered with photos, magazine articles, and newspaper clippings about the Jolly Mount Mine Disaster, four nightmarish days two years ago when five miners were trapped inside Josephine, J&P Mine No. 12. The men who work inside her call her Jojo.

  The five miners were nicknamed the Jolly Mount Five by the press. E.J.’s one of them.

  I can’t help pausing by the collection of clippings and photos even though I’ve seen all of it a thousand times and I lived through it, too.

  There’s the Time magazine cover proclaiming in big red letters, “All Five Alive”; a copy of the congratulatory letter from the White House; the wire service photo of E.J., black-faced and strapped on an ambulance stretcher with his eyes tightly shut, that was seen all over the world; photos of the five of them posing with everyone from Senator Specter and Oprah Winfrey to Faith Hill and Mickey Mouse; and the newspaper article, “Miner’s Girlfriend Tells Governor to Shove It,” a recounting of the showdown I had with the governor three days into the rescue when I suspected the families weren’t being told the truth about what was going on.

  E.J. seemed pissed about the reference to us as a couple. I didn’t care. I am not now and never have been E.J.’s girlfriend, but I understood that the press had to find a one-word label to slap on me that their readers could comprehend. It was obvious to all the reporters that I was intimately involved with him, but we weren’t related and we weren’t sleeping together. What did that make me? A friend? A former schoolmate? A longtime acquaintance? My relationship with E.J. could never be summed up in a banner headline.

  I take a seat as far away from the others as I can.

  One of the men nods at me.

  I nod back.

  I never know if people acknowledge me out of gratitude and respect, or fear and loathing. It’s a hazard of my former profession.

  “What’ll you have? A beer?”

  “I don’t suppose you have any champagne?”

  She smiles and shakes her head.

  I got turned on to champagne when I dated this French professor at Georgetown. I had never had champagne or French wine before I met him. He was a real wine snob and equally picky about cheese. At first I thought he was a pretentious ass, but I was willing to overlook it because his accent alone was better foreplay than the physical stuff I’d had with most other men. He could practically talk me into an orgasm.

  It turned out that once I tasted the French wines and cheeses he recommended, I realized he was right. They were incredible. And when he complained about California wines and Kraft singles it wasn’t because he was a snob, it was because his culture produced something superior and he missed it. It would have been no different if I had gone to France and was depressed because I couldn’t find a big gun.

  He lived in this great old fixer-upper of a house with a terrible death trap of a furnace. He asked me to marry him one night when it broke down. We made a fire, dragged his mattress in front of the fireplace, drank champagne, and had sex under tons of blankets. The next day I found him a repairman who specialized in old furnaces, and I installed carbon monoxide detectors for him before I split for good.

  My men: I take a small part of each of their hearts and leave them with an important safety tip.

  “A beer will be fine,” I tell Sandy.

  She brings me one.

  I notice an empty mug a few stools down from me with no one sitting in front of it. Instead of whisking it away, she refills it.

  The men drink mechanically, absorbed by that empty spot in space about two feet ahead of them that they all seem to find so fascinating.

  Only one of them is watching the TV mounted in the corner.

  All my life I’ve been surrounded by heavy drinkers, and a few alcoholics, too. In my book, it’s not so much the amount they drink that distinguishes the two but the reason. An alcoholic drinks to avoid life; a heavy drinker avoids life by drinking.

  I’ve kept from becoming either by adhering to two basic rules: I only drink when I’m upset or happy and I never drink alone unless I’m surrounded by other people.

  My dad drank all the time, but I would have never called him an alcoholic. He didn’t try to avoid living. Despite his constant complaining about his bad luck and how fate had dealt him shitty cards, I think he valued his life; drinking gave him a reason to feel sorry for himself, which gave him a reason to be angry, which was the only time I ever saw him come alive.

  It was the job that made him drink. I’ve never known a miner who didn’t drink. They work long, grueling, underpaid hours at a difficult, dangerous, thankless profession that only gets attention when somebody dies. If they want to get a load on now and then, who can blame them?

  But my dad took it to a different level than the other miners and no matter how much I tried to make excuses for him by telling myself it was the job that made him drink, I couldn’t ignore the terrible reality that it must be his life outside the mines, his life with me and Shannon, that made him drink too much.

  I pick up my beer and notice my hand shaking.

  Ever since Kozlowski said Shannon’s name, I can’t stop thinking about her and Dad.

  In my mind I see him sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me to feed him before his predawn shift. I’d make him a huge plate of eggs, toast, sausage, bacon, and hash browns, and a pot of black coffee. He’d consume all this without uttering a single word to me, then he’d drink three shots of whiskey one right after the other, wipe his mouth on his sleeve, stoop to receive my daily kiss on his cheek, grab his dinner pail, and step outside into darkness to go work in darkness two miles beneath the frozen ground.

  He seemed inhuman to me, but I could never figure out if he was more than human or less. Was he a god or a beast?

  Either one could be excused for murder.

  Shannon was sixteen the last time I saw her. I had just graduated college and been offered a job in Washington, D.C. I was moving away with Clay and wanted her to come with me, but she wouldn’t leave Dad.

  I did everything possible to convince her to come with us. I even had a few insane moments when I considered throwing away everything I had worked so hard for and staying in this dead-end town for at least a couple more years so she wouldn’t have to be alone with Dad while she was still a kid and dependent on him.

  But then I would remind myself of what I had gone through to get my degree: the academic scholarship I had earned, which was a feat so rare in my high school that my guidance counselor never did get his facts straight and to this day thinks I went to college on a basketball scholarship; the loans I had to take out on top of my award that I feared I would be paying off for the rest of my life; my exhausting home life as mother to an infant son, sister to a difficult teen, and daughter to a bully, which wasn’t exactly conducive to studying for midterms; the hou
r-long commute to campus that I’d often have to drive at night over winding dark country roads when I was half asleep; the hollow fear that would jerk me awake after I’d fallen asleep over a textbook that I had failed and the only life I was going to be able to offer my son was one of deprivation and limitation.

  Ultimately, Shannon made me choose between her and Clay. Whether or not she knew she was doing this and that she did it on purpose as some sort of warped test of my loyalty to her, I’ll never know. I accepted that she was old enough to make her own decisions, and as she so often pointed out, I wasn’t her mother. Only her sister. I couldn’t tell her what to do. I couldn’t make her come with me.

  He was her father. The only parent she had. His abuse was irrelevant to her, and I was in no position to argue with her. I had lived with my father for twenty-two years. I had been his wife, as well as his daughter, as well as mother to his other daughter. I never complained. I never tried to leave. Up until I had a child of my own to protect, I never tried to stop him. I believed Shannon and I were obligated to endure his beatings because we were his children. It was part of our hereditary lot in life, no different than if we had been born with grotesque physical deformities. Our father’s treatment of us was an inoperable birth defect.

  For me to tell her she shouldn’t stay with him because I was afraid he might start hurting her again would have been as hypocritical as the speeches E.J.’s dad used to give him about how he should go to college and get a job in a clean, safe building somewhere instead of being a coal miner like he was. E.J. was always appalled at these talks but never loved his dad any less because of them. From the time we were kids, he wanted to be a miner. To be anything else would have been a betrayal.

  As for my feelings, Shannon was right; she was not my child, but I had raised her and I thought I had done a good job. I thought she loved me. When she disappeared six months after Clay and I moved, it never occurred to me that she could have run away with the intention of never seeing us again, even though that’s what my dad claimed and what everyone else believed.