Blood Relations

by Rett MacPherson

  “And there’s a problem with that?”

  “Rudy!”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “I’m just saying that she should have gone to the teacher or the principal first, and then if he did it again, she could have taken more drastic actions, but we can’t just condone the violence. Because if we condone it enough, someday she’ll be the aggressor and we’ll be getting phone calls from the school telling us to come get our bully. Not to mention we’ll have to deal with the parents of all the wounded children. As it is, I’m not looking forward to seeing Davie’s parents anytime soon.”

  “I think you’re overreacting,” he said.

  “Probably. But, I just—” I took a deep breath. “One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more tolerant and accepting. And to be kinder, more forgiving. In this world where people shoot other people for having a soda bottle in their hands, we need to practice and teach tolerance and forgiveness.”

  “Okay, I hear you,” he said, putting his hands up in surrender. “Did you talk to her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I let her know that I was happy that she could take care of herself and that Davie was a jerk. But I also told her that if she ever busted a kid’s nose again for something like this, I would ground her until her wedding day. I mean really, Rudy, was his behavior that bad?”

  Rudy shrugged. “I used to do the same thing.” He blushed. “Sometimes worse.”

  “Exactly. Davie’s parents need to teach him to keep his hands to himself, and we need to teach Rachel not to take any crap. But not to go beating people up over every little thing. We’re lucky she didn’t get suspended. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she’s never been in trouble a day in her life, they probably would have suspended her.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I was just so proud of her.”

  I couldn’t help myself. The thought of my waiflike daughter hauling off and slugging Davie Roberts was just too surreal for me not to laugh. “Me, too,” I said. We laughed together a minute and then I straightened up. “But only for a moment.”

  My son, Matthew, came toddling into the kitchen with his sippy cup in one hand, a plastic velociraptor in the other. He wore his Batman pajamas, but the cape had come off somewhere in his bed. Rudy picked him up and gave him a big hug. “No flicking bra straps when you get older,” he said to him with a stern face.

  Right, like that was going to work.

  “I gotta go,” he said, giving me a kiss and handing off Matthew. “I’ll talk to her tonight.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  * * *

  I was late getting to my office. First, I had taken Matthew to my mother’s house for the day, then dropped Rachel and Mary off at school, where I’d had a talk with the principal about yesterday. I’d asked him to please stress to Davie’s parents that their son’s behavior wasn’t entirely acceptable, either.

  I had barely sat down, when there was a knock at my door. “Come in,” I said.

  “Hi,” a woman said. I stared at her for the longest time and then realized that she was the woman who had been on the tour yesterday. Stephanie … Connelly. Surely she didn’t think that I had her family tree finished already.

  “Ms. Connelly,” I said, and stood.

  “I was just wondering if you had a chance to look over the form I filled out.”

  Well, she was certainly a tenacious one, I’d give her that. She wore jeans and a pink sweater, no jewelry except a wedding band, very little makeup. “No,” I said. “I just got in. Ms. Connelly, I won’t be able to have anything for you to see for at least a week.”

  Her expression fell. “Oh, well, I know that. I just thought you’d at least have looked at the paperwork.”

  “No, not yet.”

  The phone rang then. I held a finger up to her as I answered it. It was my mother. “Hi, Mom,” I said. Mom’s voice was pleasant on the other end of the phone, asking me if we’d come to dinner later that evening. “Sure. I don’t think we have anything else going on. We’ll see you about six. Look, I have to go. There’s somebody in my office. Love you, too. Bye.”

  Stephanie Connelly just stood there, picking at her thumbnail with her fingernail and biting her lower lip. What was her problem? Her gaze fell to the photograph of my children that I had sitting on my desk. It was one I had taken just two weeks ago—all three of them out in the snow with the lopsided snowman they’d spent the whole day making. Rosy cheeks, red noses, glistening eyes. They looked the picture of happy, healthy children.

  “Are those your children?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She just smiled and leaned a little closer to get a better look.

  “Ms. Connelly—”

  “Could you just look at my paperwork?” she asked. “It took a lot for me to come here and actually do this, and … I want—no, I need for you to at least look at it.”

  I fished out the Advil from the top drawer in my desk and put two in the palm of my hand. It was going to be a long day. “Just a minute,” I said. I went to the soda machine and got a Dr Pepper, then chased down the Advil with one swallow. Back in the office, I seated myself, cleared my throat, and made a big production of retrieving her file from the top of my desk and opening it.

  Name: Stephanie Anne Webster Connelly.

  Birth: 26 June 1970, St. Louis, Missouri.

  Married: Michael Norman Connelly on 10 May 1995, St. Louis, Missouri.

  Children: Julia Victory Connelly, born 5 October 1996.

  Mother: Julia Anne Thatcher

  Father: Dwight Keith

  I read that last line again. Dwight Keith. I looked up at her sharply, and she flinched. Then I looked back at the paper and read her daughter’s name again. Julia Victory Connelly. My name. Victory is my real name; Torie is my nickname. Dwight Keith is my father’s name. A chill settled in my chest as I looked up at her once more.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” I asked. “I … don’t understand.”

  The phone rang again. I picked it up. It was Eleanore Murdoch. “Not now,” I said. “No, no, Eleanore, I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

  Tears welled in Ms. Connelly’s eyes as she shoved her hands as deep in her pockets as they could possibly go. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said, and turned to leave, but I didn’t let her go.

  “What is this all about? What’s the meaning of this?” I asked. What was she trying to say? What was she trying to accomplish by filling out her forms falsely?

  Taking a deep breath, she just blurted it out. “I’m your sister.”

  I took another two Advil.

  I didn’t know what to say to her. I mean, it was preposterous. My father …

  My father.

  No, it was silly. I would have known if I had a sister, for crying out loud. I just sat there, blinking, not really sure what to say to her. She obviously expected something from me, but I didn’t know what. And I’m sure my silence was not at all welcome.

  “I … I think there’s been a mistake,” I said finally.

  “No,” she said. “There is no mistake. I am Dwight’s daughter.”

  I am Dwight’s daughter.

  Her words echoed around in my head. My mind reeled and spun. A roaring in my ears blocked out all sound, so that I found myself in a vacuum, silent except for her words bouncing around. It was my turn to fight back tears. The familiarity in her eyes … They were my father’s eyes. She was looking at me with my father’s eyes. My eyes. But then, that could only mean …

  My parents hadn’t divorced until I was twelve. She was only five years younger than I was. The betrayal was like a bitter pill, too big for me to swallow. I felt as if a knife had been shoved in my heart.

  “You can call him and ask him,” she said.

  Call him and ask him? Then that would mean that he knew about her. The fact that he would know about her and not ever have told me hurt me even more. How could he keep this from me for thirty years? Knowing how I felt about
family, knowing I hated being an only child. When I was a kid, I would ask Santa for a sibling. Every single year. Wasn’t it just like him to keep something to himself that I had always wanted? It was as if somebody had just twisted the imaginary blade that had penetrated my flesh moments ago. Just call him and ask him. That simple. With one phone call, shatter my whole world.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Call him and ask him. Did she know his phone number?

  “But…” she began, unsure of what to say. “I…”

  “You what? What do you want exactly?” I asked, trying hard not to be too angry.

  “I want a relationship with my sister.” She shrugged.

  “Right,” I said, pushing my chair away from my desk and then standing. “Well … I’m not your sister.”

  Before I could ask her to leave my office, Elmer Kolbe came bursting through the door. He’s our fire chief, way past retirement age, and all-around good guy. “Torie, you gotta come see this.”

  “See what?”

  “You know how the river’s been down so low?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can see the wreck.”

  “The wreck.”

  “The Phantom,” he said. “The steamboat that sank back in 1919.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. But I found myself at odds with how I wanted to feel. Any other time, I would have jumped over my desk and taken off to the river like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. The legend of The Phantom is something told on every bar stool of every pub and diner in New Kassel. I’d grown up with the legend. I’d grown up, like everybody else, wondering if there would ever be a time that Old Man River would be low enough that we could actually view the wreckage. And it had finally happened. But now, with Ms. Connelly standing there with her news so fresh in the air, I was just sort of numb.

  I was happy for Elmer’s interruption, I decided. Because it saved me from any further discussion with Ms. Connelly. It saved me from having to kick her out of my office.

  “Come on,” he said, waving a hand at me. “Come and look.”

  Three

  Ms. Connelly excused herself, and I followed Elmer outside and down to the river. I tried to shake her from my mind. I tried to shake her and her words. But they just kept echoing over and over as I walked along the sidewalk.

  I am Dwight’s daughter.

  You can call him and ask him.

  On one hand, the whole thing seemed so preposterous that I felt I could just dismiss her and everything that she’d said. How could my father have known of her existence for thirty years and not told me? Or my mother? And I knew he hadn’t told my mother, or she would have told me. She wouldn’t have kept something like that from me. It was such a ridiculous notion that by the time I’d reached River Point Road, I had myself half-convinced that Ms. Connelly had been lying.

  But why would she lie? What reason would she have had to make up something like that? And then confront me with it? Maybe she didn’t have a father and she’d just fixated on me for some reason and wanted to be a part of my family. Yeah, right. I was beginning to sound like the scriptwriter for a soap opera. She had no reason to lie. But she could be mistaken. Maybe there was a different Dwight Keith. Maybe her mother didn’t know who her father was and so just gave her the name of an old boyfriend or something.

  My father certainly would have been capable of having an affair. I knew of at least two that he’d had, in fact. He was a musician, and, well, all that drinking and playing music to the lovely women who would sell their souls to be with a musician might have been a little overwhelming for somebody not so happy with his own marriage. Or somebody without a conscience. At least that was how my mother had explained it to me. She was allowed to be a little bitter over that one. So having an affair was something I could believe of him. Fathering a child and keeping it from me was an entirely different matter.

  And what was it about musicians, anyway? I mean, if Mick Jagger had been a shoe salesman, do you really think he would have had all the women, all the beautiful women, he’s had?

  So, maybe Ms. Connelly’s mother had had an affair with my father. Maybe she’d had many affairs and just didn’t know which man was the father of her child.

  But then I remembered Ms. Connelly’s eyes.

  Not possible, I told myself, and concentrated on the things around me.

  I have always loved my town, by the way. Most of the buildings on River Point Road are old, having been built prior to 1910 at least. Many are white clapboard with wraparound porches, some red brick with dark shutters and roofs. River Point Road is the center of commerce. This part of town, where all of our shops and restaurants are, attracts tourists from all around, who come to eat and sample the wares. Living in a historic tourist town can have its problems. Tourists park in our driveway because they can’t find a better place to park. And then there is always the threat of things like the riverboat-gambling issue, which we’ve managed to beat—so far. But the mayor won’t stop. He’ll bring back the issue of riverboat gambling again. But for the most part, I love everything about New Kassel life.

  As I came over the hill, I could see the Mississippi River in the distance. The Mississippi is everything. It allows the barges passage for supplies. For eons, it has provided food and water to the area. And when Mother Nature unleashes her fury, the river can wipe out everything in its valley. There was only one time in history that something else controlled the river, and that had been during the New Madrid earthquake in 1811. The earthquake had made such large waves upon the river that it looked as if the water were moving backward.

  But this year, there had been a drought. Not just a drought here but out west and up north, too, so that the tributaries that feed the river before it gets to St. Louis had nearly dried up as well. There are dunes in various places on the river now. Illinois seemed closer to us than usual. And on more than one occasion this winter, the river had actually been bumper-to-bumper with barges and tugboats. Because of the drought, the vessels had been forced to stay in the deepest part of the river, which had been reduced to an area half the size they were used to.

  In fact, the river and the surrounding area looked as if it had been the location of a recent battle. The sky was that dirty cotton-ball color that happens sometimes before a snow. Along the Illinois side of the river, the leaves had died long ago and fallen, so that the riverbank resembled a forest of tall switches. The grass was brown, the river gray and filled with more sludge than usual. It was as if the land had been stripped of life by some superior being who took its nourishment and then moved on to its next feast.

  Just as I made it to where the old Yates house used to stand, I could see a crowd of people pointing off to the right. I stepped through the tittering crowd and down over the railroad tracks, until I was standing on the bank of the river. Sheriff Colin Brooke, who also happens to be married to my mother, was standing almost in the water, his hands on his hips.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said as I saw the pilothouse of the steamboat sticking up out of the water. “It really is The Phantom.”

  “I know,” Sheriff Brooke said. A large, strapping man, he always has to look down at me, even if we are both sitting. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

  Elmer Kolbe finally stopped short behind me and gouged me in the arm. “Told ya,” he said. “Wish my dad had lived to see this.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that my father might not live to see it, if Ms. Connelly was telling the truth. “Do you think there are bodies in there?” I asked.

  The sheriff gave me a sideways glance.

  “Nah,” Elmer said. “Fish food a long time ago.”

  “You are both morbid,” Sheriff Brooke said.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a natural thing to wonder about. You know, twenty-four people died in that wreck. And seventeen bodies were never recovered.”

  “I know,” the sheriff said. “But I thought it was twenty-two who died.”

  “Twenty-four,” I insisted.

>   “Don’t argue with her,” Elmer said. “You know she’s always right about these kinds of things.”

  “Oh, yeah, if it involves a body count, Torie’s the expert.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  A sound came from the hill behind us. When I looked back, I saw a television crew pulling up and hauling its equipment out of a white van that had THE NEWS TO WATCH. CHANNEL 6 NEWS written on the side of it.

  “That didn’t take long,” Sheriff Brooke said as we looked back out at the ancient wreckage. The water lapped up on the side of what had been the pilothouse.

  “Never does,” Elmer said.

  “I wonder if anybody called that guy at the college,” I said.

  “What guy?” the sheriff asked.

  “A man came by a few years ago and asked to be called if the wreckage was ever exposed enough that somebody could get to it without too much trouble. Can’t remember his name. Jacob something.”

  “I don’t know,” Sheriff Brooke answered.

  “You know what I’m thinking,” a voice behind us said.

  We turned around to see Chuck Velasco standing there with his Doc Martens covered in river sludge and the edges of his jeans damp from the water. His parka was open enough to reveal the gold-and-black flannel shirt that he always seems to wear. He must have bought every one that Wal-Mart had and really wears a different one each day. It makes me feel better to think that way anyway, because he owns the pizza parlor in town. I love to eat there. The idea of him wearing the same shirt every day is not very appealing.

  “What’s that?” Sheriff Brooke asked.

  Chuck looked around and picked up a stick from the ground, then went about dislodging great globs of sludge from the bottom of his boots. “I’m wondering if we can get to the diamonds.”

  “You don’t really believe that there were diamonds on board,” the sheriff said, watching Chuck as he threw the stick down and smeared his boot on a rock. “Hey, you haven’t been down there already, have you? Chuck, you can’t go down there. It’s too dangerous.”