Sister Mine (10 page)

“And don't touch me,” I thought to add, then went to hide in the big protective shadow of my grieving widowed father. I was finally beginning to understand why he didn't like those ladies. Or the angels.

“Sure,” I say now, blithely. “Sometimes. Where'd the bacon come from?”

“I brought it with me.”

“It's travel bacon?”

She laughs.

“It's a craving. Remember how you used to crave blueberry Pop-Tarts when you were pregnant with Clay?”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“And remember how you used to hide them in your dresser drawers?”

“That's because if Dad found them, he'd eat them.”

“He paid for them,” she says, her voice turning defensive.

I watch her curiously.

“I realize that,” I reply simply and wait to see if she's going to continue to champion his behavior.

“You couldn't expect him to be sympathetic about stuff like you having cravings. He was never very happy about you being pregnant. You can't blame him for that.”

Saying he was not very happy about my pregnancy is a little bit of an understatement, but I don't correct her.

“No, I guess not.”

“Especially since you didn't even know who the father was. Although I suppose that was a lot harder on Clay than it was on Dad.”

I don't say anything to this.

I'm perfectly happy with the story I made up for Clay about the identity of his father. He thinks he was a truck driver who I allowed to seduce me with a hot meal followed by a night at the Red Roof Inn before he continued trucking on his merry way the next morning.

I chose a truck driver because I wanted the culprit to be someone passing through who Clay could never track down. I chose a one-night stand so I could claim to be ignorant of his full name and background. I chose to explain the act as a consensual, enjoyable, youthful indiscretion with no blame, shame, or regret attached to it by either party. I'd rather have my son think I was a slut than a victim.

I'd also rather have him think his father never knew about him and might have wanted him instead of having him know what really happened. Sometimes a good lie is better than a bad truth.

Shannon seems to think she's hurt my feelings when she hasn't. I'm impervious on this subject.

“I'm sorry,” she says, dropping her eyes to the open book on the table.

I realize it's one of the National Geographic books she was making fun of last night. It's the volume on Africa. I recognize the photo of a beautiful, bald, swan-necked girl swathed in scarlet and tangerine fabric whose face looks carved from coal.

She closes the book.

“I guess I have no right to talk, considering my kid isn't going to have a father either,” she says, and runs her hands over the impressive mound of her belly.

“I'm sorry he ran out on you.”

She shrugs.

“I'm going into Centresburg to pick up a few things.” She changes the subject.

“Why don't you wait until I get back and we'll go together?” I suggest.

“No. I don't want to bother you. It's stuff I can do by myself.”

“Okay. I'll see you later then.”

I give Gimp a pat and call him a traitor, then I place my hand on Shannon's shoulder and kiss the top of her head the way I've done a thousand times in our distant past.

All the love I had for her as my baby sister is still here inside me, but so is the same icy numbing certainty I've had for the past eighteen years that my baby sister was gone. I don't feel any differently since she's returned.

I think about Clay and the way he became his own man without discarding or damaging my little boy. Maybe Shannon hadn't been capable of this. Maybe she wasn't able to evolve. Maybe this grown woman in front of me has the remains of my Shannon inside her and she's been walking around all these years, a tomb.

I back away from her.

She doesn't turn in her chair to watch me leave but goes back to eating.

“Give my regards to God,” she calls after me.

Chapter Nine

I
FIND PAMELA JAMESON
waiting for me at the Holiday Inn, sitting stiffly on a brown- and orange-striped sofa, holding a Styrofoam cup with wisps of coffee steam crawling from its lip, watching hotel workers clean up the remnants of a wedding reception through a pair of propped-open ballroom doors.

The smell of chlorine is so strong, my eyes begin to sting within seconds of walking into the lobby. I hear splashing and shrieking coming from the pool area and the occasional bellow of a parent.

Pamela smiles at my approach, not because she's pleased to see me again or because she feels any further obligation to show signs of politeness now that our employer-employee relationship has been established. It is an expression of pure relief; I am the signal that her escape is imminent.

She stands to greet me.

Today she's wearing jeans that have been strategically, professionally weathered, and a blazer of pale green and white seersucker over a pale green shirt. Her leather shoes are flat and pointed and the same color as the shirt. I fleetingly wonder what would happen to her mental well-being if I were to suddenly force her to put on a pair of bright purple stilettos.

“Good morning,” she says.

“Hi,” I say back. “How was your evening? How did you sleep?”

“It was terrible,” she replies. “There was a wedding going on until all hours, and there's also a bar here in the hotel.”

“Yeah, I know. Houlihanigan's.” I nod my sympathy. “It gets pretty rowdy on weekends when they have live music.”

“I'd hardly call it music.” She begins kneading the space between her eyes with the pad of one index finger. “It was this horrible pounding beat and these screeching guitars.”

“Well, no one would know to look at you that you had a sleepless night. You look fine.”

I have a feeling nothing ever affects her face. I have a vision of her peeling it off at night and laying it flat on a bedside table, then getting up first thing in the morning and ironing it on a low heat before putting it back on again.

“That's nice of you to say,” she tells me.

She picks up her purse, a twin to the bag Shannon carries, and begins walking to the revolving door.

I realize that she and Shannon have the same hairstyle, too: straight and shiny, blunt cut, the ends grazing the shoulders. The only difference is the color: Shannon's is a mahogany brown; Pamela's is a metallic blonde that matches her SUV.

I imagine them sitting side by side in a Manhattan hair salon laughing and sipping champagne while a stylist stripes their heads with highlights. Then the two of them shouldering their matching handbags and going shopping for charm bracelets and red cowboy boots and pink maternity clothes.

The problem is I
can't
imagine it. The Shannon I used to know wouldn't have been able to spend five minutes around this woman's condescension. She would never have accepted a single gift or favor from her. To do so, according to our dad, would have been worse than accepting charity; it would have been admitting Pamela Jameson was better than us, and no one was better than us except him.

“Before we head on over to Eatn'Park, you have to be straight with me about what's going on,” I tell Pamela once we're outside. “You said something about this woman stealing your child. I need to know what you mean by that.”

She avoids my eyes and intently watches the marquee where a workman stands at the top of a ladder dismantling the words:
CONGRATULATIONS, NICOLE AND BRAD.

“The child isn't born yet,” she says without looking at me. “She's carrying our child. My husband's and mine.”

“You mean the baby's not hers?” I say with a little too much surprise and intimacy in my voice.

“Excuse me?” she says.

“What I meant to say was…do you mean she's a surrogate mother?”

“No,” she sighs and reaches into her purse for her sunglasses.

Once she has them on and I can't read her eyes, she looks at me while she talks.

“She's the mother, but it's our child. We paid for it.”

“What do you mean you paid for it?”

“An adoption,” she says, irritation beginning to rise in her voice. “It's all perfectly legal. Everything is being handled through an attorney.”

“Gerald Kozlowski?” I ask without thinking.

She studies me and answers slowly, “No, I don't know any Gerald Kozlowski. What would make you think you know the lawyer handling our adoption?”

“Nothing, really,” I reply quickly, trying to cover up another error. “It's just that I happen to know a lawyer in New York who handles adoptions, and I thought maybe he was handling yours. You know what they say: It's a small world.”

“It's not that small. Do you have any idea how many lawyers there are in New York handling adoptions?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

The sun ducks behind the clouds again and I pull my sweater tighter around me. The trees are bare, the grass is brown, and the few cars driving past still wear spatters of mud and a white coating of road salt left over from the recent icy winter.

We begin walking toward Pamela's SUV.

“So how did you end up here?” I urge her to continue.

“A couple of days ago, Jamie simply disappeared,” she confides in me. “I was frantic. The baby is due any day now. I had no idea where to look for her. Then I received a call from her telling me that she's beginning to have second thoughts about the adoption. She said she decided to take a trip and visit an old friend who lives in the country and think things over.

“I begged her to come back. I reminded her of everything we've done for her so far, how we've paid for her medical insurance, her apartment, food, clothing, entertainment, anything to keep her happy and healthy. And this is above and beyond the very substantial fee we're paying for the child.”

“Wow,” I state flatly, letting the reality of Shannon's situation sink in. “That's a pretty sweet arrangement. So you basically pay for her life while she sits around and grows a baby for you?”

“That is a very harsh way of putting it, and I don't appreciate what you're implying,” Pamela snaps at me.

I didn't realize I was implying anything, but the more I think about it I guess I was. My gut tells me there's something sickening in all this, but at the same time I can't help but admire Shannon's resourcefulness.

“I thought you said you had a legal agreement with her? Doesn't that prevent her from being able to skip out on you?”

“The adoption isn't final until after the baby is born and she signs the papers.”

“She can back out until the very end?”

“In theory, she shouldn't be able to, but for the time being the biological mother always wins in these cases. You can see why we have to stay in her good graces.”

“It sounds to me like she's been using you.”

“Oh, no. It's been worth every cent to be with her throughout the entire pregnancy and to be able to keep an eye on her lifestyle. If you adopt a child who's already born, you have no idea what kind of problems can develop down the road, since you don't know anything about the mother: if she did drugs during her pregnancy, or if she drank, or if she had some type of disease. Jamie's been tested for everything under the sun and given a clean bill of health. Not to mention that she's an attractive girl. The baby should be attractive.”

“How can you know that? What about the father?” I ask her. “What if she slept with an ugly guy? Or a really stupid one?”

She stares at me coldly. Even without being able to see her eyes, I can tell she's appalled that I would ask such a question.

“I'm sorry.” I hold up my hands in surrender. “I was just curious. No offense.”

A flatbed truck rumbles into the lumberyard across the road from the hotel. Next to the yard is the Mattress Warehouse advertising a half-off sale on waterbeds, and beside it is the triangular A-frame shell of one of the original Arby's restaurants in the area, rising out of the empty parking lot like a small, dirty, orange pyramid that houses the silent cash registers of a dead economy instead of the opulent riches of a dead king. It went out of business about fifteen years ago. The booths can still be seen behind the filthy glass along with a menu behind the front counter promising a roast beef sandwich, medium drink, and fries for a dollar-fifty.

“So maybe she wasn't using you before, but what about now? It sounds like she's blackmailing you.”

She doesn't comment.

“What's the plan for today?” I ask, changing the subject.

“I finally convinced Jamie over the phone to tell me where she is and to let me come and talk to her in person,” Pamela explains.

“That's what you're about to do right now?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me along because you think she could harm you in some way?”

“I really don't know what to think anymore. I thought I knew this girl. I thought I could trust her. And then she does something like this.”

We arrive at her car. She opens her purse and begins searching for her keys.

“Maybe she's just having cold feet like she told you. Maybe she just needs a little assurance and everything will be fine,” I suggest, still wanting to think the best of my sister. “It's not easy having a baby by yourself, even if someone is paying your expenses for you. She's the one who still has to go through the pregnancy and the birth and then part with her child. And on top of all that, it's her first baby. She's probably scared.”

Pamela pulls the keys from her purse and releases the automatic locks with the press of a button and a muted beep.

She opens the driver's side door.

“Should we take one car?”

“Yeah, I think that would be best.”

I settle into the creamy leather luxury of her front seat and wait for the car's engine to begin to purr.

She holds the key in front of her as if she's contemplating its purpose, then she turns her head to face me.

“How did you know it's her first baby?”

“I guess I just assumed,” I tell her, mentally kicking myself for allowing yet another slipup.

She lowers the hand holding the key and lets it rest against her thigh. She takes off her sunglasses with her other hand and fixes me with a searching stare.

She has pretty blue eyes, but they've been clouded by discontent and doubt like a clear stream that's been muddied by too many feet seeking relief on a hot day.

She's my age. We're both forty-something white American women. To some, we would be considered peers, equals. We seem the same. To others, we couldn't be more different. We represent the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots. We have nothing in common.

“Do you have any children?” she asks me.

“I have a son.”

She drops her eyes from mine as she pauses to consider my answer.

We're different. She has money; I don't. I'm a mother; she's not. But we're both thinking the same thing right now: She's lucky, but I'm blessed.

“I assumed that this was Jamie's first baby, too,” she goes on, returning to our previous topic, “especially since she told us she had never had a baby before. Then when she disappeared I called her doctor's office to see if they had heard from her. I talked to one of the nurses who always sees Jamie. I explained my concern that she might go into labor and that she would end up in a strange hospital with a strange doctor and no friends around her.

“The nurse laughed and said I shouldn't worry. She said she was sure Jamie would know what to do and would be fine during the delivery no matter where it took place, since this wasn't her first baby. I was stunned. I asked her point-blank: ‘Are you certain she's had a baby before?' And the nurse said that she'd guess from the internal exams that she's probably had several.”

She looks at me again.

I hope I'm keeping the shock off my face.

“Jamie lied to me. Why would she lie to me? Because she wants to portray herself differently than she really is. Why would she want to do that? Because she doesn't want me to know what she's capable of doing.”

Her voice drops to an angry whisper.

“Now is when the blackmail begins.”

She slips her glasses back on and starts the engine.

“Do you carry a gun?” she asks me.