Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  She falls silent when a couple of chattering women walk into the bathroom.

  “Don’t get freaked out,” I tell her. “This family probably doesn’t even exist. She’s just trying to get more money out of you.”

  “I’m sure it exists,” she shoots back. “You don’t know anything about the adoption market.”

  I only half listen to the rest of the conversation once she returns to the table.

  Shannon remains evasive on the question of where she’s staying and where she plans to have the baby, other than assuring Pamela that she knows what she’s doing.

  She agrees to meet with Pamela the following night for dinner.

  I can’t stop thinking about the amount of money Shannon just mentioned.

  What is the market value of a child these days? Apparently a lot more than a Subaru but less than a two-bedroom house with an eat-in kitchen.

  I have to admit that for the briefest of moments part of me considered running out and getting pregnant tonight.

  I know better, though. I’ve been through this myself and I know making a baby is not quite the same thing as baking a cake, either to sell at an upscale bakery or charitably donate to someone who can’t bake one of her own. For one thing, the cake doesn’t have feelings.

  I got pregnant when I was sixteen, and the last thing I wanted in the world was to have a baby. I had none of the ridiculous delusions that some girls have about a baby being fun and always being cute, or a baby loving them unconditionally and filling the void in them that their son-of-a-bitch fathers or their heartless mothers or their good-for-nothing boyfriends had failed to do, or that having a child didn’t really impact your life too much.

  I had already raised a child while I was still a child myself. I knew they were rarely fun, and although they could be extremely cute they could also be monstrous. I knew they were capable of hating your guts as well as loving you, and I knew they took up all your time. Even when you weren’t physically with them, you were thinking about them, worrying about them, anticipating their next meal, their next bath, their next tear.

  Plus my own mother had died from complications related to childbirth.

  I was terrified to have a baby.

  But I did it. Not because I was strong or decent or devout. I made the decisions I made because I was afraid and I was ignorant, which only seems appropriate since these are the exact same reasons that I ended up getting pregnant in the first place.

  I had no money. I had no one to help me. I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to go about getting an abortion, just as I had no idea how to go about putting up a baby for adoption. I might have done either if anyone had come forward to help me. But after Clay was born, once I held him and looked into his eyes, I knew nothing would ever keep me from him. There was already a pure and irrefutable knowledge glowing in their dark gray depths that hadn’t seen anything of the world yet except bright lights and sterile hospital walls. We connected without words or actions. He was only a few minutes old but he already knew I was his mom, and he already knew what that meant. I was the one person he could count on. I was the first concept he understood.

  That night, after I nursed him, I stared at him for the longest time and he stared back at me with his calm, steady, trusting eyes. A kind of perfect peace I can only describe as bliss swept over me, along with a devastating sadness when I thought of how little time my mom and Shannon had together.

  Screw the angels.

  Pamela comes walking toward the car looking as upset as her seamless face allows.

  I’m angry at her and I’m angry for her. I don’t know how I feel about Shannon.

  Flushing a pinhead’s worth of microscopic cells out of a woman’s uterus is a sin but a mother giving away her child is not. Standing outside a bar in the middle of the night without any pants on is a crime but selling a child to the highest bidder is not.

  I’m angry at the whole human race.

  I need to see my boy.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT ONLY TAKES TEN MINUTES to walk to the sheriff’s station from Eatn’Park. It’s a small, square, nondescript building of tan brick fronted by a concrete courtyard with nowhere to sit and very few places to lean if a person decided to loiter. The American flag flapping on a white pole is of average size: slightly bigger than the one at the post office but much smaller than the one at the Ford car dealership across the road.

  Sheriff Ivan Z is about to get into his cruiser. He hesitates with the driver’s side door open, trying to determine if I’m someone he wants to greet or speed away from.

  He chooses the first option and comes walking toward me as I approach the building holding a white paper bag with two coffees and two smiley-face cookies inside it.

  “Look at you,” I call out, smiling. “All dressed up. Full uniform. Even a hat. Where are you off to? A costume party?”

  Ivan has a notorious dislike of uniforms. It was an ongoing dispute between him and the former sheriff that Ivan usually won simply because Sheriff Jack wasn’t going to show up at his house and force him into polyester pants and a keystone-shaped belt buckle every morning. Now that Ivan has the top job, he can’t get out of dressing the part from time to time. His public requires it.

  He smiles back at me while wagging a warning finger.

  “Better be careful or I’ll write you up for hurting the sheriff’s feelings. That for me?” he asks, glancing at the bag.

  “Sorry,” I tell him. “For my kid. How have you been? It’s been awhile. How’s that hot doctor you were dating?”

  “She married that asshole lawyer she was dating.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Yeah. Well, we had some fun together but I’m not ready to settle down yet.”

  “Still have that lifetime of sleeping with beautiful girls ahead of you?”

  He nods.

  “How about you and your search for stimulating conversations?”

  “I know there’s one out there.”

  He continues smiling at me with his mouth, but the expression has left his eyes. They’ve become troubled. They’re still a striking blue, and I’m sure there are plenty of women eager to be seduced by them, but his years of hard drinking have taken their toll on the face they peer from and he looks older than he is.

  He stares past me to the road beyond and past that to something I can’t see. He always had this habit even when he was at the height of his glory days and shouldn’t have had a care in the world. He never seemed able to stay in the moment for long; he was always searching for something, whether it was on the horizon or deep inside himself I could never tell.

  Clay has the same look sometimes. I wonder fleetingly if it has something to do with the fact that both of them grew up without fathers.

  Ivan lost his dad in the massive explosion that ripped through Gertie, wiping out half the male population of his hometown of Coal Run in a single morning.

  I always felt a kinship with the Coal Run kids even though I had lost a mom instead of a dad and our grief was not entirely the same.

  A mom takes care of a child in a hands-on way; a dad’s care is more abstract. When I lost my mom, it was like being on a camping trip and coming back from a hike and finding all my supplies missing: my food, my warm sleeping bag, the first-aid kit. When all those fathers were taken away, an entire town lost its compass.

  The back to the station opens and Clay steps out. His uniform is pressed, his boots and badge rubbed clean, his dark hair cut short and neat, his body trim, his stride purposeful even when he has no purpose, his sunglasses in place so he can watch without giving away his own thoughts. Add to this his impeccable politeness, his unyielding belief in the necessity of rules, and what I call his “deputy voice,” and you have what appears to be, on the surface, the ideal cop.

  It’s what’s going on below the surface that causes problems for him. He can’t relax. He can’t stop worrying. In his baby book under the Baby’s First Sentences heading, I have recor
ded: “I want goose,” which was how he pronounced “juice,” “I love Mama,” and “Don’t drive fast.”

  One of his very first creative writing assignments in school was to describe his dream vacation. Other kids wrote about going to the beach, or Disney World, or the zoo, or even to their grandparents’ house. Clay wrote that he wanted to stay on the balcony outside our apartment with a cool drink and keep an eye on his mom’s parking space while she was at work.

  Even now, on the occasions when I’ve seen him at his job, I always feel like he’s holding his breath the entire time. He reminds me of a balloon that’s been filled with too much air, and as soon as the problem is resolved, I expect him to release his tension all at once and go whizzing crazily through the air until he suddenly settles to the ground and there’s nothing left of him except an empty brown polyester deputy uniform with a badge pinned to it.

  Ivan intercepts Clay and tells him something and Clay nods and nods again before continuing on his way toward me.

  “And Penrose,” Ivan calls over his shoulder as he climbs into his car. “You have my permission to take the stick out of your butt while you’re talking to your mom.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” Clay yells back.

  He takes off his shades, slides them in his shirt pocket, and turns to me.

  “That’s just the usual banter I have with the sheriff.”

  “Banter with the sheriff? You sound like you just stepped out of an episode of Gunsmoke.”

  I hand him his coffee and cookie.

  “You look tired,” I tell him. “Did you do something wild and crazy for your birthday?”

  “I spent the night babysitting Dusty at the Golden Pheasant.”

  “Is he getting worse?” I ask, peeling the lid off my own coffee and watching the steam drift away.

  “Brandi kicked him out,” Clay tells me. “He’s living at his restaurant until the end of the month when the bank takes it.”

  “Wow. That’s terrible.” I take a sip of my coffee and stare forlornly at the scuffed tips of my boots. “That doesn’t sound like Brandi. Especially with three little kids at home. They’ve been through so much. She even forgave him for the affair he had with that skinny little fake blond publicist. I could’ve snapped one of her spindly little arms in two as easily as I can break a pencil.”

  Clay frowns at me.

  “You’re the only person I know who categorizes people by how easily you think you can cause them bodily harm.”

  He slowly opens the bag and peers inside it like the cookie might be alive and eager to escape.

  “I guess he’s become pretty hard to live with,” he goes on. “It’s hard enough being his friend anymore.”

  He pulls out one of the cookies and hands it to me. He takes the other one for himself and leans back against the hood of a car after making sure that it’s not dirty.

  “He’s been acting strange since the accident, and I’m not just talking about the post-traumatic stress symptoms they all suffered from: the chronic insomnia, the nightmares when he does sleep, the panic attacks, the mood swings.”

  I’ve witnessed more than a few of E.J.’s panic attacks, but he gets them far less than he used to. Isabel says that Jimmy still has a bad nightmare now and then but for the most part the two of them, along with Lib and Ray, seem to be doing okay.

  Dusty, on the other hand, always looks drawn and skittish. Every word out of his mouth is a complaint, or tinged with bitterness.

  He’s become a far cry from the carefree little hell-raiser who used to sit at my kitchen table all innocent grins and dimples, eating a plate full of bacon and eggs after a sleepover with Clay while waiting for me to find the crayfish he put in my coffee mug.

  He and Clay complemented each other perfectly back then. I believe Dusty single-handedly kept Clay from becoming a hermit when he moved back to Jolly Mount during the fifth grade. He dragged Clay to pickup baseball games over at the township park, taught him how to ride a bike, and made him go to his first girl-boy party, while, for his part, Clay explained the importance of periodic bathing to Dusty, taught him the joys of wrapping coins and cashing the rolls in at the bank for paper money, and happened to have a tube of Neosporin ointment and a pack of gauze bandages in his windbreaker pocket the day Dusty ripped open the palm of his hand on a rusted screw while playing on an old abandoned tipple.

  Dusty had no fear. No hesitation. Everything he encountered was meant to be experienced physically. He never pondered or studied or wondered. A creek was meant to be splashed into. A road was meant to be crossed. A rock was meant to be thrown. A tree was meant to be climbed. A path was meant to be followed.

  He had an equally straightforward way of classifying people. Most of the men around here, including his dad, were meant to be coal miners because they were strong and they weren’t afraid of the dark. His mom was meant to be a mom because she had a soft lap and made good food. His pediatrician was meant to be a doctor because he knew what every kind of medicine was for and he wasn’t scared of blood. Cam Jack was meant to own everything because his dad owned everything before him. I was meant to be a cop because I liked to help people and then tell them what to do.

  To Dusty, everything had only one true purpose, and he didn’t like it when something was used in a way it wasn’t supposed to be used.

  It bothered him that Clay put maps on his wall to show him places he might not ever see instead of using them to get to the places right now.

  Those times when he saw me going out in a pretty dress and I didn’t come back with a husband upset him.

  All the problems he encountered in his young life he believed were caused by things and people being used in ways that went against their true natures.

  I can’t help being struck by the irony that this same boy who came from a family composed of four generations of miners suddenly decided after the rescue that his true calling in life was to run a restaurant.

  No one could fault him for no longer wanting to work in the mines after spending four days slowly suffocating to death trapped inside one, but we were all skeptical from the start about an actual sit-down restaurant’s chances of survival in a town that could barely support a Subway. Not to mention Dusty’s own capabilities as a businessman. But Dusty was pumped up at the time from his newfound celebrity and wealth and was easy prey for the fawning financial advisors who descended upon him when the money was rolling in.

  One was a guy from Pittsburgh who had advised Franco Harris and a few other retired Steelers from the glory-day teams of the seventies. He was the man responsible for getting Franco his own line of frozen pizzas.

  He told Dusty that a lot of athletes bought restaurants. It was an easy way to make money. They didn’t have to do any work. They simply loaned their names to the places and watched their investments triple and quadruple.

  He believed owning a restaurant would work for Dusty for the same reason it worked for athletes. He was a star now.

  It sounded good in theory, plus it also helped solve the problem of what Dusty was going to do for a living, so he went ahead and invested all his money in the project. But he soon found out there were two very important differences between him and a revered professional athlete when it came to bankrolling a business.

  First of all, professional athletes had enough money to hire people who knew how to run a restaurant to run the restaurant for them, and that’s why they were able to own a restaurant and not actually work in it. Dusty only had enough money to convince a bank to loan him more money so he would be able to lease a building, buy equipment, and insure the operation. He hired a few waitresses and a cook, but after six months was rarely able to pay them. A liquor license was financially out of the question, which meant none of his buddies ever came by.

  And secondly, people wanted to hang out with star athletes and would do just about anything in order to run into one; it turned out not so many people wanted to hang out with a man who had only been in the news for a couple of weeks, especiall
y a man most of them had known since he was in diapers.

  To the rest of the world he had become the epitome of a blue-collar hero, but he didn’t live with the rest of the world. He lived among coal miners and unemployed coal miners and retired coal miners, and to them he was no different than they were. This didn’t mean that they weren’t sympathetic toward him and that they weren’t glad that he had lived through his ordeal, but they didn’t feel that he had done anything that merited plunking down their hard-earned cash for a mediocre meal on the outside chance he might stop by their table for a chat. He hadn’t won any Super Bowls; he had merely survived a really bad day at work.

  Clay takes a bite from the perimeter of his cookie. He will eat all along the outside, saving the black icing eyeballs and smile in the center of the yellow icing face for the very end.

  “I can’t explain it. He’s changed. He’s not himself anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He thinks about what he’s going to say next before he says it.

  I watch his face. It’s hard for me to see myself there, although I’ve been told many times how much we resemble each other.

  He has my mother’s smile. He has Shannon’s chestnut hair and my father’s large powerful hands. He also has a lot of his own father in his face, but Clay will never know this and neither will anyone else.

  “Maybe there are some people in this world who can look at his job and look at his little house and look at him already having three kids when he’s barely twenty-four years old and think he’s stupid or he’s a loser. But he’s not. He was content with that life. It’s what he wanted and that’s all that matters.”

  “I thought he wanted to be an astronaut.”

  “When we were kids. Sure,” he laughs. “I wanted to be a cowboy.”

  I smile at him.

  “Until you realized horses shit wherever they want to.”

  “Didn’t you have a childhood dream?” he asks me.

  Surviving my childhood, I think to myself.

  “Sure. I wanted to be a rock star,” I throw out to appease him.