Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  I haven’t told her that I know there’s a New York lawyer looking for her because he has something he wants to “give her,” and there’s also a rich woman from Connecticut here claiming she kidnapped her child, or that I’ve seen a photo taken of her about a week ago in New York City where she’s holding a bulging Macy’s shopping bag and wearing a pair of expensive-looking, handmade cowboy boots, or that I realize from all my years watching rich D.C. ladies come and go through my security checkpoints that the cut and texture and perfect copper highlights in her auburn hair come from an elite salon where an appointment probably costs more than a week’s paycheck working at a car rental agency, or that I’ve heard she sometimes goes by an alias, and it’s the name of a girl she used to hate.

  I have to give her credit. She’s done a good job of dressing the part of a poor, out-of-work, unwed mother: maternity jeans, a big tent-sized work shirt in pink denim that looks like it’s been washed a hundred times, and a pair of old white gym shoes. But she forgot about her purse; it’s a soft, brown leather Coach hobo bag. She left it sitting on the end of my couch.

  It’s not only the lying that’s bothering me. My emotions are twisted up in a way I can’t explain. Our reunion should fill me with so much relief and joy that I can’t feel anything else. Instead those feelings are taking a backseat to a slowly building anger and resentment.

  I suppose it’s no different than the way parents feel when a child is late coming home and can’t be tracked down and all kinds of terrible, panicked thoughts begin to invade their minds. When the child does finally appear unharmed, an immense love swells up inside them and they’re willing to forgive everything, then this is quickly followed by a desire to beat the child senseless for being stupid and selfish and worrying them.

  I’ve never experienced this firsthand. Clay was always home on time even though I wasn’t always there waiting for him.

  “Do you mind shelling these hardboiled eggs for me?” I ask her.

  “No problem.”

  I hand the bowl to her, pop some bread in the toaster, and go back to stirring the sauce.

  While I’m waiting for it to thicken, I listen to the crack of Shannon tapping the eggs against the table and the clink of each tiny piece of shattered shell as she tosses it back into the bowl.

  “This is really informal,” I apologize again.

  Gimp raises his muzzle and his tail slowly thumps against the floor at the sound of my voice and the sight of me walking to the table with food in my hands.

  I set the skillet and a plate of toast in front of Shannon.

  “I could have had something great for you if I’d have known you were coming.”

  I look her directly in the eyes as I say it. Our eyes are exactly the same: the same shape and the same shade of golden brown, like butter and brown sugar melting together. It’s the only feature we share. We shared it with Mom, too. I used to show Shannon photos of Mom and she’d take them and stand in front of the mirror holding them up next to her, comparing herself.

  I hold her stare for a moment, willing her to explain the abruptness and the true reason for her visit after all these lost years, but she doesn’t take the bait.

  “At least you have wine,” she says.

  She raises her glass to me, drains it, and reaches for the bottle.

  “Are you sure you should do that?” I ask her.

  She gives me a smile that borders on patronizing.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to start lecturing me on prenatal care. Save your breath. I know…”

  She stops and looks away from me.

  “I know all about it. I’ve read tons of books, and I had a good doctor up until I lost my health insurance,” she continues. “Two glasses of wine aren’t going to hurt anything.”

  “This will be your third.”

  “I didn’t realize. I guess I was all caught up in the celebration.”

  She takes her hand off the bottle.

  Instead she reaches for the toast and rips it into bite-sized pieces she drops on her plate, then takes an egg and dices it with a knife while holding it cupped in her hand.

  I take the bottle and fill my own glass.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about Dad?” I wonder aloud.

  She dumps the egg on the toast and starts heaping spoonfuls of dried beef on top of it.

  “He’s dead. What’s to ask?”

  The bluntness of her response catches me off guard, not to mention that she knew he was dead.

  The shock must be showing on my face because she goes on to explain, “It was on the news. The accident in Beverly. It didn’t get the kind of crazy coverage Jojo got, but that was because the Jojo miners survived. The media can’t dwell on dead miners for more than a day or two. You can’t put corpses on Jay Leno.”

  Her sudden flippancy makes her sound like an entirely different person than the one who was looking forward to creamed dried beef. She was the same way as a kid; she could be sweet and accommodating, then turn hostile and defensive for reasons I never understood.

  “So you knew about Jojo, too?”

  “How could I not know? It was on every channel, every magazine, every newspaper.”

  “So you knew Jimmy was one of the miners who was trapped? And E.J.?”

  She nods while she begins shoveling food into her mouth.

  I think about her sitting in a nice home somewhere eating a bowl of popcorn, watching the Jolly Mount Mine Disaster unfold on national news along with the rest of the country and never once feeling like she should get in touch with any of us, never once feeling like she should come home.

  It’s not the life I’d usually imagine for a former teen runaway. Usually when a girl runs away from home she heads for a big city like New York or L.A. She ends up becoming a hooker or a drug addict or both or something equally awful. She ends up dying young or in jail or with some sort of lifestyle that isn’t conducive to re-establishing family ties. She spends each day just trying to survive in a world where everyone she meets wants to use and abuse her.

  I watch Shannon eat. She’s relaxed, clean, sober, healthy, well fed, and carrying a $400 purse.

  “Where were you living when you heard about Jojo? New Mexico?” I ask her.

  “Yeah, I’ve been there for awhile. So how’s Clay?” she changes the subject.

  “He’s good. He’s here in Jolly Mount, too. He’s a Laurel County deputy.”

  “No kidding? He was just a little kid the last time I saw him.”

  “I know,” I say.

  I take a sip of wine and watch her, waiting to see if she has anything more to say on the subject, but the food on her plate holds her attention.

  “So I guess it runs in the family,” she says between bites. “Is Sheriff Jack still around? He’d have to be a hundred years old by now.”

  “He died about a year ago, and he was only sixty-five. Heart attack. You’ll never believe who’s the sheriff now.”

  “I give up.”

  “Do you remember Ivan Z, the hotshot football star at Centresburg High who went on to be the hotshot football star at Penn State and got drafted by the Bears?”

  “Of course. He was in the local paper all the time. He was hot.”

  “What would you know? You were only nine when he graduated from high school.”

  “I was as old as you were when you were mooning over Lib all the time and spending every waking moment doing God knows what with E.J.”

  “What are you talking about? I never mooned over Lib, and I definitely never did God knows what with E.J. Never.”

  “Too bad for you. He was cute, too. So Ivan’s the sheriff now?”

  I nod and drink.

  “He left town for a long time after he had that accident at Gertie and smashed up his knee and couldn’t play pro ball.”

  “I remember that. You would have thought the president died. Didn’t they even fly the flag at half mast at the high school?”

  I nod again and drink some more.


  Ivan was definitely a good-looking kid. He had a great body, too, and one of those magnetic personalities that drew people to him whether he wanted the attention or not, yet at the same time there was a kind of tortured haze clouding his baby blues from time to time. It was the same Doomed Adonis quality that JFK Jr. and James Dean had, only instead of being a Rebel Without a Cause, Ivan was more of a Conformist Without a Reason.

  Considering our individual promiscuity and our severely limited mating pool, the law of averages predicted we’d end up together one night, and we did.

  We had a good romp. Then we drank a few beers and had another one.

  Afterward, he said he’d ask me to marry him if he had any intention of ever settling down but he was planning on a lifetime of sleeping with beautiful girls. I told him it was okay: I was hoping for a lifetime of stimulating conversation.

  “He came back a couple years ago and Jack gave him a job as a deputy,” I finish telling Shannon.

  “Let me guess. Sheriff Jack was a Penn State alum.”

  She reaches for the skillet and helps herself to a second serving.

  We eat the rest of our dinner in silence. I easily finish the bottle of wine by myself.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to lie down. I’m really tired,” Shannon says to me as we start clearing off the table.

  “Sure. There’s a pullout bed in the guest room. I’ll get some sheets and fix it up for you.”

  I glance at her. She does look tired.

  “We should probably find you a local doctor, too,” I add.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of all that stuff,” she replies.

  I make up the bed for her and return to find her standing in front of one of my bookshelves.

  “You still have these stupid books?” she asks me.

  She pulls out the National Geographic volume on India and opens it to an aerial photo of a kaleidoscope of women milling around a crowded marketplace in their dazzling saris.

  A few years after my mom died, Isabel and Jimmy gave me a membership to the National Geographic Book Club for my birthday, and every month a slim, hardcover volume filled with glossy photos of exotic locales would arrive with the rest of our mail.

  Every night after washing the dishes and giving Shannon her bath, I’d sneak the latest book out from its hiding place in my closet and we’d sit on Mom’s rag rug and look at the pictures.

  I had to hide the books from my dad because he would never have been able to view them as a kind gesture. He would have seen them as an insult: Jimmy implying he was smarter than him.

  Jimmy was smarter than him, but Dad was bigger than Jimmy. Jimmy was funnier, too, and could walk on his hands, a feat that never failed to thrill anyone who saw him do it, but my dad could light a match on his teeth and could lift a couch all by himself. In my eyes, it all evened out.

  Shannon and I would look at the books and try to imagine what it would be like to live anywhere else, to live in a sophisticated European city, or an African mud hut, or a Japanese house on stilts with paper walls. We’d try to transport ourselves to one of the Mediterranean fishermen’s small white houses with green shutters covered in tangles of vines with orange trumpet-shaped blossoms, or to one of the brilliant green Irish hillsides crisscrossed with stone walls and dotted with puffs of black-faced sheep, where even the dust kicked up by an old man pedaling his bicycle down a dirt road looked pink and soft to me like a girl’s face powder, not anything like the stubborn black grime that came from the mines and made everything around here gray, even the petals of daisies and the fur on our big white tomcat.

  “Don’t call them stupid,” I tell her. “You used to love those books.”

  “You used to love them. I was afraid of them. Remember how you had to hide them from Dad? I hated having those books in the house. I was afraid he’d find them.”

  She closes the book and slides it back on the shelf.

  “But you used to love to look at them with me,” I remind her.

  “Yeah, I guess I used to like to hang out with you sometimes,” she says, “but I could’ve cared less about the stupid books Jimmy gave you.”

  “Do you remember how we used to sit on Mom’s rug?”

  She gives me a look of mild annoyance.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m gonna hit the sack.”

  It’s my opportunity to ask her what happened to the rug and what happened to her but something inside me won’t let me ask.

  I watch her leave the room, hoping she’s going to forget to take her purse with her. She does.

  I wait until I finish washing the dishes, then I go through it.

  There’s no wallet, no ID or credit cards, but she has close to $800 in twenties rolled up and held together with a rubber band. I mentally add up the value of the other contents: Sony cell phone, iPod mini, Ray-Ban sunglasses; probably $500 worth of stuff.

  I also find a small blue jewelry box. Inside it are a pair of diamond stud earrings, a silver bracelet hung with baby-related charms (a bottle, a rattle, a teddy bear, a stroller, a rocking horse), and a diamond-encrusted heart on a silver chain. The flip side is engraved: To our angel on earth. Love, Pam.

  I have a feeling this is Jamie Ruddock’s jewelry.

  In an inside zipped side pocket is a small spray bottle of Guerlain Paris perfume covered in delicate gold filigree. Very expensive. I take off the lid and spritz some on the underside of my wrist.

  It smells like lilacs: our mom’s favorite flower.

  I think back to the last time I could stand the scent of lilacs. The memory makes me think of the first time I held Shannon. I was scared to death to pick her up, but I had no choice because she wouldn’t stop crying.

  Mom had come home from the hospital the day before and some ladies from the church had come over to see us in the evening with a box of baby clothes and had effectually terrified me by lecturing endlessly on the proper way to hold Shannon’s head. They had me convinced she was as fragile as a snowflake, and I was surprised by her weight and the solid feel of her.

  The clothes they had brought were hand-me-downs, but I could tell by the way Mom smiled and praised each item that she was happy with them. She held up pairs of tiny pajamas and sundresses to show me and asked me what I thought while the ladies passed Shannon around, cooing and fussing over her. I thought the clothes were very nice.

  Dad came home in the middle of their visit. He made the ladies leave, and he made them take the clothes with them. Then he yelled at Mom and threatened to do terrible things if she ever tried to accept charity again.

  If I concentrate hard enough I swear I can still feel the silkiness of Shannon’s baby skin on my fingertips. She was the softest thing I had ever touched. Even softer than my mom’s velvet Christmas dress.

  I held her tiny, writhing body despite my fear. Her face was purple from the exertion of her screams, her eyes angry slits in her head, and her little fists looked like dark pink walnuts thrashing in the air. I took one of them between my fingers and started to talk to her. I brought it to my lips and kissed it and her eyes opened wide and looked into mine. Her crying stopped for the briefest of moments but it was long enough for each of us to establish the other’s existence. I see you, her expression seemed to say. I smiled so she’d know I saw her back.

  I crawled into Mom and Dad’s big bed with her and sat next to Mom.

  I didn’t know our mother was dead. I didn’t know what death looked like. I knew something was terribly wrong because I couldn’t wake her up, yet I knew she couldn’t be asleep because her eyes were open. I didn’t like the way they stared. They reminded me of the black unseeing eyes of the mangled blue jay our cat had left on our back porch as a gift last month.

  I also didn’t like the cold that was seeping into her skin.

  Dad was gone. It was Saturday morning. He had left the night before after his fight with Mom. He was on a bender that would last until Sunday.

  During the day and night before he returned I n
ever thought about going to get help or calling someone, even though we had a list of numbers posted next to the kitchen phone including the Bertollis (Lib and Teresa) and the Phyrsts (Jimmy and Isabel) and the fire department, the police, and Mom’s doctor.

  The phone rang from time to time, but I never thought of answering it.

  My dad’s rantings about how we didn’t need anybody’s help, we could do everything ourselves, we didn’t need charity kept echoing inside my head.

  I only left Shannon to get her a bottle or pick lilacs off the bush outside our kitchen and put them on Mom’s body when she started to smell funny.

  I was only six years old. I was a child, too, and no one could have blamed me if I let myself be a child, if I chose to sit in a corner and cry, or run out of the house and down the road in hysterics, or get myself a huge bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup I wouldn’t normally be allowed to have and watch tons of TV I wouldn’t normally be allowed to watch, or if I chose to ignore my baby sister altogether, if I chose to hate her, if I chose to blame her.

  I chose to take care of her and I never regretted my decision, even though I’ve ended up paying a price for it. But how could I have known that by taking care of someone so early in my life I was going to make it impossible to ever let anyone take care of me?

  I go back to the kitchen sink and wash the perfume off my wrist, then I put everything back in the purse and write Shannon a note with my cell number in case she wakes up and needs me.

  I don’t give her specifics. I don’t tell her I’ll be out introducing Gerald Kozlowski to some locals.

  Chapter Seven

  JOLIMONT, PENNSYLVANIA, BEGAN AS a small trading post where French trappers, Seneca Indians, British merchants, and enterprising colonists came to indulge in beaver and booze in the shadow of a rolling range of calm green mountains not far from a small, slowly snaking river that eventually leads to a branch of the Susquehanna.

  The town itself was never much to look at, just a few ramshackle buildings. No real businesses, not even a general store. No tradesmen except for a blacksmith and a tanner, who also served as a surgeon and dentist when needed and when threatened. And only one place to get a meal or a room or a drink: the Jolimont Inn.