Sister Mine (3 page)

My dad was lying. Why?

A memory gave me the answer: the day a social worker came to visit, the day my sixth-grade teacher reported a suspicious bruise on my face.

The social worker didn't find anything wrong. The house was spotless. Shannon was in perfect health. My dad was gruffly charming in his country-boy way, calling her ma'am, offering her coffee, and regaling her with poignant tales of how tough it was raising two daughters without a wife.

“Shae-Lynn is a bit of a tomboy,” my dad explained to her. “Ask anyone around here. She was roughhousing with those boys she hangs out with and things got out of hand. Came home with a shiner.”

I agreed that was what happened. Shannon didn't know what had happened but she could vouch that Daddy was always telling Shae-Lynn to be more like a lady.

That night he came to our room after I was in bed. He pulled me out from under my covers, holding my arm so tightly he left a band of purple fingerprints behind. While I tried to find my safe place, he shook me and explained to me if I ever embarrassed him like that again he'd have to punish me.

Then he tossed me across the room as effortlessly as he did empty beer cans at the sink from his post at the head of the kitchen table.

I crashed into the corner of the dresser and lay on the floor for a minute. Shannon pretended to be asleep like she always did, like I had taught her. The next morning when I woke up, I was dizzy and sick to my stomach. While I was picking out my clothes for school, I noticed the dark stain on the floor and found the hard clot of blood stuck to my hair on the back of my head.

There could have been a stain on the rug, but it would have been Shannon's blood and my dad would have been the one who threw it away. I was sure of it in my gut, but I had no way to prove it. No body had been found, and I knew the local cops would take my dad's word over mine. Plus I didn't want to have to explain to them where my suspicions came from. I didn't want anyone looking too closely at my life for fear they might tell me there was something wrong with it.

I finish my beer and take a few sips of my whiskey and Coke.

All those years I thought she was dead. All those years I thought he did it. Or did I? Was I only making myself believe it because in some sick, twisted way it was easier to believe she was dead than to believe she would leave me without a word?

The men's room door swings open and Choker Simms comes plodding out.

He sits four stools away from me in front of the unclaimed beer and takes a drink from it.

Choker only has one ear. He lost the other one in a roof fall ages ago when he worked briefly in the mines. It also left the right side of his face heavily scarred. I'm fortunate enough to be sitting on the side with an ear.

He turns his head slowly to look at me.

“Hey, Choker. How's life on the outside?”

He takes another drink while his eyes crawl from the tips of my boots, up my legs, over my breasts, and come to rest at a place above my head. There's no appreciation or even a detached fondness in his gaze.

His nickname comes from the advice he gives to men having difficulties with women. No matter how small the problem, he tells them to “choke her.”

“Do you know where your kids are?” I ask him.

“My kids? They're at home and if they ain't then they're somewhere else and if they figured out how to get there they can figure out how to get back home when they're done.”

“The two of them were hanging out in Snappy's parking lot a couple hours ago.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“I thought after all those years away from home, you'd want to spend some quality time with them,” I say. “Kenny wasn't even born yet when you were convicted. Shouldn't you be teaching him how to throw a football or how to steal people's TV sets while they're at work?”

The other men at the bar glance in Choker's direction.

He adjusts the bill of his Pennzoil ball cap.

“You're a real commodian,” he says, taking a long gulp of beer. “Flush, flush,” he adds with a belch.

“Oh, wait a minute. That's right.”

I pick up my drink and start walking toward him.

“You didn't steal anything. The way I hear it you were framed by a lady cop who had the hots for you but you spurned her advances. At least that's what your kids seem to think.”

“Stay away from my kids.”

“Oh, so now you care about your kids? Come on, Choker. Tell me.”

I set my drink down on the bar and move close enough to smell the sour mix of beer, chewing tobacco, and sweat coming out of his pores.

“Who's this lady cop? Who's the star of this asinine fantasy of yours?”

“You think you can harass me 'cause you used to be a cop?” he replies. “Well, you can't. I know my rights. You ain't shit anymore. You're nothing. I bet you can't even get fucked anymore. Your titties are starting to sag. Pretty soon you're gonna have nothing to do on Friday nights except hang out with fat girls like Sandy.”

I try not to look at Sandy, but I can't help myself. She's pretending to busy herself rearranging glasses beneath the bar.

My response is automatic and unthinking. I grab one of his arms and wrench it behind his back and grab a handful of his hair and slam his head into the bar. I've raised and smashed his face against the wood several times before I notice Sandy standing in front of us.

“Please don't wreck the bar, Shae-Lynn,” she says.

Choker's drunk and in shock, or he'd be fighting back already. I take advantage of the situation and pull him off his stool, usher him quickly out of the bar, and toss him down the stairs.

He rolls around in the fringe of grass between the bar and the sidewalk. His nose is bleeding and he's clutching his gut while cursing up a storm.

“Spurned? You told them you spurned me?” I shout, while circling around him waiting for him to get up.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he shouts back at me.

He finally manages to get to his feet.

“Come on, you lying worthless pile of shit,” I taunt him.

He rushes at me. I easily step aside. His momentum causes him to stumble and fall again.

The bar's other patrons and Sandy have all clustered outside on the porch at this point. A couple Subway customers have also come outside, one of them chewing on her sandwich as she watches. An old man on his way into the post office stops and stares. The sole teller working in the booth dispensing banking services through a tube actually leaves the booth to get a better look. A few cars slow down.

I notice a freshly washed sheriff's department cruiser parked at one of the pumps across the street. I immediately recognize the slim, polished figure of Laurel County's newest deputy pumping the gas. He's the only one I've ever encountered who keeps his boots spotless and his hat on at all times. He's watching everything from behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses that are cleaner than my dinner plates.

He doesn't seem in any hurry to interfere, but I know he will eventually.

The deputy and I are not strangers.

Choker comes at me again. He takes a couple wild swings that I avoid while I connect with a couple punches to his face. They startle the hell out of him and I'm sure they hurt, but they hurt me almost as much.

I shake out my fingers and can already feel my shoulder beginning to throb.

He tackles me this time, and I lose my hat. I manage to pull myself out of his grip far enough that I can knee him hard in the chin. He lets go and cries out.

I jump up and swing a kick at him, but he surprises me by grabbing my boot and pushing me backward with all his might. I hit the ground hard on my ass.

He comes at me, but by now he's blind with rage and the confidence that there's no way I can get up in time to escape him. He's right, so I don't even try. I draw back my legs and let them fly into his chest, and he goes reeling across the sidewalk into a tree.

“Okay. All right. That's enough,” I hear a familiar voice coming from above me.

The deputy comes into my line of vision. He's holding my hat in one hand. He reaches out the other one to help me up.

I realize as I'm getting to my feet that my skirt is pushed up around my hips. I'm wearing cotton bikinis with little yellow construction signs on them and the words
MEN AT WORK.

I yank my skirt down.

“Are you going to control yourself, ma'am, or am I going to have to cuff you?”

He knows my name, but he won't use it.

“I can control myself,” I promise, breathing heavily.

It's an easy promise to make. Now that the adrenaline is gone, the pain is sinking in.

He hands me my hat and leaves to tend to Choker.

“Is there a reason for this altercation?” he asks when he returns with Choker trailing behind him.

The shiny pink scar tissue striping Choker's cheek and the lump of puckered flesh where his ear should be has turned bright red from the exertion of our workout. His face is smeared with blood.

“She attacked me,” he screams, poking a finger in the air at me. “Violent bitch! I wasn't doing nothing. She came after me.”

“He abandoned his kids in a parking lot.” I'm trying to come up with a reasonable excuse.

“I never abandoned my kids,” Choker keeps screaming. “She's just mad at me cause I made fun of her tits.”

“I have great tits,” I yell back at him. “In your dreams do you get your hands on tits like these.”

I reach down to pull up my shirt and flash him, but the deputy places his hand on my arm.

“Walk it off, ma'am,” he tells me. “And go on home.”

“That's it?” Choker cries. “Ain't you gonna arrest her? If I'da been the one who started the fight, you'd damn sure arrest me.”

“Sir, you're an ex-con on parole; she's a former police officer. You're a two-hundred-pound man; she's a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman.”

“Hundred-and-twenty-six,” I correct him.

“Do you see where I'm going with this? Don't you think you've suffered enough humiliation for one day by being beaten up by a girl?” the deputy suggests calmly. “Do you really want to make it worse by pressing charges and having everyone know about it?”

Choker drops his gaze from the unreadable mirrored sunglasses to a spot of blood on one of his own work boots.

“Forget it,” he mutters, then he starts wagging his finger at me again.

“She's a fucking menace to society,” he shouts.

“Oooh. Big words, Choker,” I say back. “Menace to society. Have you been watching
Dragnet
reruns on TV Land?”

“I'm warning you, ma'am,” the deputy reminds me.

“I'm going to drive you home, Mr. Simms,” he says to Choker, “since you're obviously intoxicated.”

“What about my truck?”

“I'm sure you can find someone to give you a lift back here tomorrow to retrieve your vehicle.”

“What if I can't?”

“I'm sure you can. But whatever you do, I advise you not to call a cab. Now go back inside and settle your bill. I'll get my car.”

Choker spits a brown stream of tobacco flecked with blood into the grass. It comes perilously close to the tip of my boot. I make a move for him, but he steps out of range and heads back into the bar.

The deputy watches me for a moment from behind his shades.

“Apparently all that time spent in law enforcement was the only thing keeping you from becoming a criminal. Or a menace to society at the very least,” he comments. “This is the fifth brawl you've been involved in during the past year that I personally know about.”

“I…,” I start to explain.

“Feel the need to control every situation?” he finishes for me. “Even if it means resorting to violence?”

I can't come up with a better explanation off the top of my head.

He crosses his arms over his chest.

“Did you look into getting some health insurance?” he asks me.

“I can't afford it.”

“What are you going to do if you get sick?”

“Get better? Or die?”

He sighs, turns, and begins to walk across the street.

“Hey,” I suddenly remember and call after him, “Happy birthday, baby.”

He takes off his glasses for a second and glances over his shoulder at me, wearing the same squint of exasperation that's been puckering his forehead since he was a child.

“Thanks, Mom,” he says.

Chapter Three

I
'M NOT THE TYPE
of person who likes to talk about myself. I don't even like to think about myself.

I'm sure that's one of the reasons why I made a good cop and why I was drawn to the profession in the first place: I knew how to step outside my skin, leaving my emotions and my opinions behind, and be nothing but the job. It's what I did throughout my childhood, then I did it for seventeen years as a police officer. Both periods of my life were basically the same: I protected and I served.

Now I'm at the beginning of a new phase of my life where I do neither, where my thoughts and actions are supposed to be motivated solely by what's best for me.

It was my own decision. No one made me quit being a cop, despite some of the rumors.

Maybe my decision was partly due to the jolt of realizing my son was no longer dependent on me at all, not even to help him pay for college.

For the first time in my life I had no financial obligations other than funding my own existence. The major worries of motherhood were behind me. My child had survived to adulthood. He was gainfully employed, maybe too well adjusted, kept a cleaner house than me, and could cook better, too.

I taught him all those things. I was a single mom and a working mom, and he was my right-hand man. We were partners. I didn't raise him; we raised each other, only to find out that the reward for our success was going to be that we wouldn't need each other anymore. It doesn't always feel like such a prize to me, but other than that things have been pretty tolerable this past year until today when a stranger mentioned my sister's name.

Shannon might be alive. I might be able to find her. I should be happy, but I'm not. All I can think about is how sure I was of her death. I'm plagued with the same thoughts I used to have right after she disappeared, when the pain was so powerful it could double me over.

I thought I was going crazy back then. I couldn't stop reliving her final moments, even though I didn't know what they were and it didn't matter. All that mattered was that I knew she would have been afraid, and I wasn't there to save her.

Her life was over. She was gone. She would never grow up. She would never fall in love. She would never own the pair of red cowboy boots she always wanted. She would never come into my room again and touch all my stuff as she circled around my bed giving me her latest list of grievances against the world. She would never let me cheer her up by taking her to Eatn'Park for a piece of coconut cream pie. She would never bundle Clay into his snowsuit and pull him around the front yard on our old sled. She would never even learn to drive.

I wanted so desperately to believe in heaven. I wanted to picture her someplace beautiful with no cares or concerns, a place where she'd finally have Mom to take care of her, a place where that awful final fear would have been erased and replaced with bliss, but my thoughts kept returning to nothingness. An eternal black abyss.

I never talked to a shrink about any of this. A few of my buddies on the Capitol police force suggested I might want to talk to one when she first disappeared. My lieutenant came pretty close to insisting I see one, but since my job performance wasn't suffering he didn't have any right to push it.

I've always believed psychology is bullshit. I can still remember all the questions on the psych exam I had to pass in order to get my badge and gun. I couldn't figure out what the test was supposed to prove other than how well a candidate knew how to give the answers he knew the force wanted whether they were true for him or not.

I lied on a few questions because I knew I had to.

Have you ever been brutalized by a family member or someone close to you? No.

Do you love your father? Yes.

Do you get urges to physically harm others? No.

But everybody lies on a few.

I knew the Neanderthal from Georgia sitting next to me was answering “yes” to “Do you believe in the equality of the sexes?”

And I knew J.T., the ex-Marine sitting on my other side, had to be struggling like hell with the question “Do you like flowers?”

The only one that completely stumped me was “Do you masturbate?”

This was back in the eighties when women were still fairly rare in law enforcement. Especially in the Capitol police. I was the only woman in my rookie class.

We were an elite group. Our job was to protect the nation's government buildings and our illustrious lawmakers, which made us a federal law enforcement agency. Getting in was no easy feat. The background check alone took six months. They interviewed everyone I'd ever known, including my old elementary school principal, who was kind enough not to mention the Naughty Penis incident. There were eight weeks of intense boot camp. The classes and written exams were more difficult than anything I did in college.

I knew the question about masturbation was directed solely at men, since women weren't an issue when the test was designed. It was a simple question to determine truthfulness. Any man who answered no was a liar.

But for women it was different. We're not supposed to masturbate. Fortunately, this part of the exam wasn't standardized. I had a space where I could write my answer instead of filling in a bubble.

I wrote, “Only when I have to.”

I passed, so I guess they found me sane.

And I'm still sane but my sanity is wearing a little thin today.

I decide to go talk to E.J. He's much better than any shrink. He doesn't cost anything, he always provides me with beer, he doesn't ask any questions, and he doesn't offer unrealistic advice. His commentary at the end usually consists of “That sucks” and is always dispensed with more beer.

I brush myself off after my tussle with Choker and check my face in the rearview mirror. There's no damage but I'm going to have a honey of a bruise on my thigh. Probably one on my butt too, which is what I sit on all day to do my job.

I'm a couple miles from E.J.'s house when I come around a bend and find him walking down the side of the road.

I pull up behind him and slow down. He looks over his shoulder, startled at first, then cautious, his look no different than the one my dog gives me from underneath the kitchen table each time I return to the room. There's no suspicion in it, just an animal wariness based on the primal knowledge that everyone who is not you could be a potential problem.

His eyes are very blue in his pale face. Once summer arrives, he'll get to see a couple hours of light at the end of each day, but that amount of sun isn't enough to erase the effects of his subterranean existence. In winter, he doesn't see any daylight at all during the workweek.

Right now the sky is shouting summer; it's a flat, bright blue dotted with white clouds whipped into a motionless lather while the land seems to be barely awake.

“Hey,” I greet him.

“Hey,” he says back.

“What are you doing?”

“Walking.”

“I can see that. You walking anyplace in particular?”

I can't help noticing that I found him at the site of his rescue.

“Back home.”

“Where are you walking from?”

He stops. I stop my car.

“Home,” he says.

“In other words you're out for a walk.”

“That's what I said. Where are you going?”

“To see you.”

“I'm not home.”

“Get in the car,” I tell him.

He starts to walk around to the passenger side then stops and watches an SUV coming from the opposite direction. It slows to a stop and parks on the other side of the road about a hundred feet from us.

A woman gets out and closes the door behind her. She smooths out the front of her pleated tan shorts over her pot belly, puts a flattened hand to her eyebrows like a visor, and scans the empty field stretching toward a horizon of low green and gray mountains.

Two children climb slowly out of the backseat and a man gets out from behind the steering wheel, all three of them blinking suspiciously at the sky.

The woman turns and says something to them. The children respond with groans. Their heads loll back on their necks and their arms flop at their sides like they've been simultaneously struck dead. The man responds by spreading out a map on the hood of his car.

They're tourists.

“Shit,” I hear E.J. say.

He's been spotted by the woman, and she's identified him as a local. She starts heading toward him, smiling and waving wildly. I know his gut reaction is to run in the opposite direction, but he knows she knows he's seen her and he's not a rude man.

He stands his ground and lifts a hand in greeting but doesn't smile.

It's been awhile since I've seen any strangers out here. The initial swarms of visitors that jammed the road and snapped pictures of each other posing with backhoes and cranes tapered off fairly quickly into a small but steady stream that lasted for a couple months until it became a trickle then dried up to nothing. People no longer come here for the sole purpose of seeing where the rescue took place, but if they're in the area for some other reason, they sometimes stop by.

“Hello,” she calls out to him.

Her smile broadens as she gets close enough to read the J&P Coal Company logo stitched on his ball cap. She's definitely a tourist. He watches her approach in amazement. No matter how many he's dealt with, he still has a hard time believing in their existence. Up until a couple years ago, running into a talking dog out here would have been less surprising than running into someone like this woman.

“I was wondering if you could help me?” she asks him.

He sticks his hands into his jeans pockets and shifts his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“I can try,” he replies.

“Are you from around here?” she asks.

“Born and raised.”

She looks at his cap again.

Her facial expression changes from being pleased in general to being pleased with him. He has become more than a potential tour guide; he could turn out to be the tour.

“That's great,” she gushes.

I look over at her car and notice her family isn't in any hurry to join her.

“Then I'm sure you can help me. I'm looking for the place where the miners were rescued.”

“You found it,” he says and motions toward the field with a jerk of his head.

She turns her head expectantly, still smiling, and stares out at the field. Two years ago it was turned into a mud pit by tons of earthmoving equipment, drills, and cranes, all of it illuminated twenty-four hours a day by giant spotlights and flash photography, but now there's nothing exciting or frightening or even slightly unusual about it.

The flat, grassy land is bordered on the south by the road, the north by the hills, and the west by forest. To the east it slopes off into acres of gully. It's one of the best places to come at night to spot deer.

She turns back to him, obviously disappointed.

What do these people expect to see? I always wonder. What they want is a re-creation, like the rooms in wax museums that show different forms of medieval torture. They want to see the five miners, starving, wet, and shivering with cold, huddled together in a chamber no bigger than a bathroom and half its height, staring blindly and crazily into the impenetrable darkness.

They think they want to experience what those men experienced, even if only for a few moments, but they're wrong.

“Are you a miner?” she asks him.

“No, ma'am. I just like the cap.”

“Were you around when it happened?”

“No, I wasn't anywhere around. I don't know anything more about it than what you saw on TV and read in the newspapers.”

“Oh, I followed every minute of it. I still remember everything about them.”

She begins ticking off their vital statistics like someone reading from a baseball card. The only things missing are their heights and weights.

“There was Lib, 56, the boss of the crew. Married with two grown sons and four grandchildren. He was a Vietnam veteran and you could tell how much all the others respected him. Then there was Jimmy, 58, the oldest one on the crew. His wife was a lovely lady, a schoolteacher. He had that adorable accent and used all those quaint sayings. I'll always remember him saying to one of the reporters at their first press conference…”

Here she breaks into an attempt at an Irish brogue that sounds like a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and Desi Arnaz.

“…You wouldn't be trying to soft-soap me, now?” She giggles. “Who uses words like that?”

E.J. glances over his shoulder at me through the windshield and we smile at each other, thinking of some of the other words that only Jimmy uses that wouldn't have made it past the network censors.

“Then there was Dusty, the youngest one, early twenties, with the skinny wife with the big doe eyes and the newborn baby and those sweet little twin girls. He'd only been working in the mines for two years.

“And Ray. The talkative, friendly one. Late thirties. Married with two teenaged daughters.”

She lowers her voice confidentially.

“His wife was a piece of work. She managed to get herself into every interview. A big lady and always dressed to the nines. My husband said she looked like a drag queen going to a hoedown.”

She laughs.

“And last but not least Jimmy's son, E.J. Good-looking. Never been married. Strong, silent type. Hardly said a word.”

“Sounds like you collected the entire set of Trapped Miner Trading Cards,” E.J. comments.

“I never saw those,” she says seriously, then after a moment smiles knowingly at him. “You're joking with me, aren't you?”

He admits that he is with a nod of his head.

She puts her hand back up to her forehead like she did earlier and peers out at the field again.

“Is there a statue near the hole?”