Sister Mine (16 page)

I assume this mind-set served him well as a soldier. He spent two years in Vietnam, and from what I've heard and seen for myself he didn't come back home depressed or bitter or self-destructive or crazy.

He went right back into the mines upon his return. I imagine that after what he'd been through the world above ground would have lost much of its charm for him. He would always have been tensely waiting for something violent to happen: for silence to be shattered, for the ground beneath his feet to explode, for death to come rushing at him from a line of calm green trees, for a gush of blood to suddenly rupture from a ragged hole in the body of a man standing next to him.

Being deep in the earth, sheltered by mile-thick, cold, black solidity far from the hot, green, unreliable aliveness of a jungle, in his familiar darkness, surrounded by stoic, hardworking men, lulled by the constant sound of the machinery echoing in the tunnels, was probably one of the things that saved his sanity.

I take a deep breath of the mower's gasoline fumes mingled with the smell of mangled earth.

“Good thing you took care of that,” I comment on his handiwork. “It was getting a little high.”

He gives me a good-natured scowl.

“I'm fifty-eight and I'm retired. Hell, I've got to find something to do.”

“Lots of men would love to be retired at fifty-eight.”

“The same men who never did shit when they weren't retired,” he replies in a growl. “Teresa dragged me off to make a will. Did she tell you that?”

“Yeah, she told me. It's a good thing to have a will.”

“All those years I was in the mines. Every day I went to work I could've died and I never had a will. Now she wants me to have a will. You know why? She thinks I'm gonna die from smoking. She thinks I'm gonna die because I'm getting old.”

It's obvious from the look on his face that he considers this to be an insult.

“Just because she wanted you to get a will made doesn't mean she thinks you're going to die. People get wills made when they're in their twenties.”

“But why now?”

“I don't know. Have you bought her any nice jewelry lately?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Never mind.” I smile at him. “She said you weren't very nice to the lawyer.”

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and spits.

“Lawyers,” he says, turning his gaze back on his yard again and squinting with disgust. “We had to go to a different lawyer to get a will made from the one who's handling our lawsuit against J&P. And he's a different one from the one who represented us at the investigation. I hate that specialization bullshit. I expected every man on my crew to be able to use a bolter and drive a shuttle car and a scoop.”

“Yeah, but you didn't expect everyone to be able to run a miner the way E.J. does it.”

He puts the cigarette back in his mouth and nods his agreement.

“Fair enough,” he says with the butt jerking up and down between his lips.

“Speaking of your crew, have you seen Dusty lately?”

“Last week. The five of us got together to talk about the lawsuit.”

“How'd he seem?”

He slips on his shirt but leaves it unbuttoned.

“Not good.”

“Clay's worried about him.”

“Yeah, well…”

I look away from his face at the cluster of bullet wounds barely visible beneath the hair on his chest like a trio of small puckered pinkish-gray lips.

“I heard about what happened between you and Choker,” he comments, making no effort to subtly change the subject; just choosing to avoid it altogether. “What the hell were you thinking? Guy's sitting in a bar trying to have a drink—”

“He abandoned his kids,” I interrupt hotly.

“He left two of his kids in town and told them to go play,” he counters. “When we were kids, we ran all over the place. Our mothers never knew where we were half the time. And they sure as hell would've never asked our fathers to take care of us because they were too damn tired to do it themselves.”

“His wife left him.”

“And left the kids? What kind of woman does that?”

“Apparently the kind of woman who marries and reproduces with a man like Choker.”

“I'm not defending Choker. I'm just saying it's none of your business how he's raising his kids. They're his kids.”

Did Lib used to defend my dad the same way? I wonder. Was he ever heard to say, “Yeah, I know Penrose beats his little girl, but you should see him bolt a roof.”

Lib came from a good, solid family and created one of his own and has little tolerance or patience for men who don't do the same. I know he doesn't approve of Choker's kind of family—bullying drunks; weak, long-suffering women; skittish children with haunted eyes—yet he believes it's none of his business to interfere no matter how bad things get. At the same time he distrusts and dislikes all government and law enforcement agencies, so there's no one else to turn to for help.

Ostracism is the only way people around here deal with unsavory family situations, and if it doesn't cause the families to change, everyone washes their hands of them. The men are avoided, the women ignored, and the children are regarded as hapless victims, granted neither sympathy or scorn, because to feel the first implies they should be saved and to feel the second implies they've done something wrong. People wait to see how they turn out as adults before passing final judgment, no different than if the kids were handfuls of unidentified seeds planted in a questionable patch of dirt. Their acceptance is based on what grows there.

I've often wondered what they think I've grown into.

“I suppose you're right. It's none of my business.”

I'm suddenly very tired. I feel like I could lie down on his cold matted grass and sleep for days.

I should go home and talk to Shannon and give her the pajamas I got for the baby: yellow with pastel green turtles, since we don't know if it will be a boy or a girl. The blue set had rhinos and the pink set had bunnies. Apparently turtles are harmless to both genders.

“I should get going.”

“What did Clay say about Dusty?”

Lib's face rarely shows emotion anymore. When he was a young man he had a ready, hundred-watt smile that was a vital component of his Italian heartthrob good looks, along with his pompadour of black hair and his bedroom eyes.

Now the hair is thinner and shot through with strands of silver, and his face has begun to puff and sag with age and trauma, but I can still see traces of his former self there whenever something rouses his interest or his passion. Teresa has told me it's difficult to do either since the accident.

“Nothing really. Some vague stuff about him not being himself anymore. And I guess you've probably heard about him and Brandi.”

He nods and smokes while I watch and wait to see if he has anything helpful to say about Dusty. Instead he begins to tell me about a friend of his getting killed in Vietnam. I give him my full, startled attention. I've never heard Lib talk about the war. I've never even heard any secondhand stories about Lib's experiences.

The only thing I ever remember my dad saying on the subject was even though he knew Lib was glad to get the hell out of Vietnam, he never seemed happy to be home again.

“Sniper fire,” I hear him say. “The first shot might not have killed him, but he screamed and gave away his position, and they sprayed him with bullets.

“I watched the whole thing from about ten yards back. I knew I couldn't move or make a sound without giving away my own position so I had to lie there and watch while the bullets tore him up. I saw bits of shit flying up into this blinding blue sky”—he pauses and gestures above him with his cigarette—“bluer than this one—and I knew some of it was mud and leaves but some of it was pieces of him.

“We weren't able to get to his body for almost two days. By the time we did, it was worse than any road kill I'd ever seen back home. Bloated and rancid. His face was unrecognizable; it was this greasy, yellowish black color like a rotten banana peel.

“I remember staring down at him, thinking to myself, Are they really gonna send this thing home to his mother? What did she ever do to deserve that? What about my mom? Was she gonna see me like that someday?”

He's managed to keep his voice emotionless and his stare steady, but there's a slight tremble in his fingers when he brings the cigarette back to his mouth.

“So I'm standing there trying not to puke and I'm thinking about our moms and everyone we know back home and this thought hits me that his hometown and my hometown aren't just different places from where we are right now; they're different planets. I realized even if I made it home again with my body in one piece, I'd never be able to feel right in their world anymore”—he taps the side of his head with an index finger—“up here.”

Is he trying to explain himself to me? He gave me rides into town and candy bars and pats on the head. He asked me about school but not about my black eyes or my bruised cheek. I always thought no one could help because no one should help. Is he trying to tell me he didn't help because he understood the futility? Because he understood some things can't be unlearned?

He clears his throat and goes on.

“The loneliest moment of my life was spent in a room full of the happiest people I'd ever seen welcoming me home from a war half of them didn't support and half of them supported for the wrong reasons but a war all of them wanted to pretend never happened. These were people I'd known my whole life. People I loved. All of them clapping and smiling and singing.

“The only thing I could think as I stood there in the doorway watching them with a stupid grin on my face was from now on I'm gonna be a stranger to everyone I've ever known and everyone I'm ever gonna meet.”

He takes a deep drag off his cigarette.

“I think that's what happened to Dusty after the rescue. And he can't deal with it. Some people can't.”

“Deal with what exactly?”

“Realizing you're alone. Completely alone.”

I watch wisps of smoke crowd under the bill of his cap before escaping into the air.

I'm sure he's not talking about Vietnam or Dusty or being trapped in a mine anymore. I'm sure he's talking about my life.

Chapter Fourteen

I
STOP BY MY HOUSE
expecting to find Shannon, but there's no sign of her.

I had decided to invite her to come along with me to Jimmy and Isabel's house. I played the scene over and over in my mind during the drive. I even stumbled on Bette Midler singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings” on an easy-listening station to use as the sound track.

Instead of telling them about her return, I'd just spring her on them. There'd be a tearful, happy reunion and Shannon would confess all her current sins, repent, and promise to be a good mommy after explaining how she was abducted by aliens after her seventh-period geometry class eighteen years ago, which prevented her from contacting me until now and then apologizing profusely for any worry or grief it may have caused any of us.

Of the entire scenario, I found the existence of aliens to be the most plausible part of the plot.

I wrap the pajamas in some old Christmas wrapping paper since it's the only kind I have and set the package in the middle of the kitchen table with a note that says, “For Junior, from Aunt Shae-Lynn.”

E.J.'s truck is parked in his parents' driveway. I'm always initially glad to see it but then I have to stop and remember if I'm mad at him for any reason.

I remember how we left things last night at Jolly's. It wasn't particularly bad or particularly good.

The front door is open. The entire house smells like the rosemary and lemon Isabel stuffs in her chickens.

I walk in and call a hello to her in the kitchen. She's standing at the sink peeling potatoes in a simple blue sheath dress I'm sure she wore to church and a ruffled yellow apron. Her shoes are off but she still has on her pantyhose. She's wearing one of the innumerable pairs of white terrycloth slippers she brought home from the hospital after Jimmy's month-long stay.

Her slightly curling bobbed hair is almost as white as her slippers. She started going seriously gray a few years before the accident and was constantly arguing back and forth with herself over whether she should highlight or lowlight or dye it back to its original strawberry blond.

Within a week after Jimmy's rescue she was completely white and the dilemma was apparently solved for her. She hasn't touched a snowy hair on her head and wears the new shade with the brash boldness of a ship flying its country's colors in enemy waters.

She looks at me over her shoulder, smiling, her complexion a pearly pink from the heat of the kitchen and the exertion of preparing a meal.

“It's a good day,” she says.

I nod back at her.

She's referring to Jimmy. Some days he's almost like his old self, full of wit and vigor, joking around about selling all his left shoes to guys who have lost their right legs and calling the shop “Only Foot Forward,” or starting a dance studio for left amputees like himself called “No Left Feet.”

Other days he's too depressed to even get out of bed and Isabel leaves him upstairs buried under layers of blankets with only the top of his silver head showing, the curtains drawn tight, and the room smelling of stale, cheap whiskey.

I'm relieved to see him sitting in his favorite chair in the family room wearing long johns and an old brown cardigan. A red plaid blanket covers him from the waist down and I can tell from the way it falls flat on one side and the fact that I only see the tip of one scuffed brown slipper sticking out from under it that he isn't wearing his prosthetic today.

I can still remember walking into this room for the first time as a child and not having any idea how I should respond to the shelves and shelves of books. Jimmy and Isabel didn't seem embarrassed by them or act superior because of them, and those were the only two ways I had ever seen people behave around books.

He smiles when he sees me and rubs his hands together.

“Get the Bushmills,” he tells me.

We've always liked to play word games together. We started our latest one a couple months ago. Each time I come over for a visit we compete for a sacred shot of Bushmills by seeing who can come up with the best oxymoron.

Isabel has it hidden where he can't find it. Otherwise, the good stuff would disappear as quickly as the bad stuff he drinks the rest of the time.

I know the hiding place. I leave and come back with the bottle and one shot glass.

I'm feeling pretty confident. A good one occurred to me yesterday after my brawl with Choker.

“Small crowd,” I say.

He smiles slightly and tilts his head a little to one side.

There are two types of Irish faces: a hard, fierce one and a soft, tender one. Jimmy's is the former but his eyes belong to a shy boy who tends sheep and whistles pointless tunes in a hazy meadow somewhere.

They're hazel: more green on some days, more gray on others, almost blue on rare occasions. When I was a kid I was convinced they operated on the same principle as a mood ring.

They're startling in his suspicious, combative face, like finding a fragile pink flower poking out of spring snow.

“Clearly confused,” he counters.

We look at each other over the glass. It's a stalemate.

“A good beating,” I say and reach confidently for the glass.

He covers my hand with his own.

“Senate Intelligence Committee.”

I smile but shake my head at him.

“Too easy. The day grew shorter.”

“Lovely,” he says. “A stripper's dressing room.”

I reluctantly pull my hand away.

“Yours,” I tell him.

He throws back the shot and reaches for the bottle to pour another.

Isabel swoops in from out of nowhere, grabs it, and leaves again promising to return with coffee.

“Bring me something to put in it, would you, dear?” he calls after her.

She returns with three mugs on a small wooden tray painted with brightly colored birds.

“And here are two cubes of sugar and a spoon to put in it.”

He takes the cup from her in his scarred, battered hands, trying to conceal their trembling. He just turned sixty but the accident aged him by at least a decade. He almost died from the gangrene in his shattered leg, and his recovery was a slow one.

“That's not what I meant, love, and you know it.”

“It's too early for you to start drinking.”

“The time of day has no meaning to a man who has no way to spend any of it.”

“Your philosophizing doesn't impress me.”

“It's past noon.”

“Or your ability to tell time.”

Isabel takes a seat on the end of the couch just as E.J. comes walking into the room finishing a call on his cell phone.

He hangs up, sets the phone down on an end table, takes one look at the coffee, leaves, and returns with a beer for himself and his dad.

“There's a good lad,” Jimmy says.

“Eamon,” his mother scolds him.

I smile broadly.

“Yes, Eamon. You're a bad boy.”

He starts to say, “Fuck you,” then thinks better of it with his mom in the room.

“Go to hell,” he tells me.

Thirty years ago he would have knocked me flat on my ass for saying his name out loud. Now he has to content himself with verbal abuse.

He opens his beer and stands in front of a wall of books glaring at me.

“Who were you talking to?” Isabel asks him. “The future mother of my grandchildren?”

“Give it a rest, Mom. There aren't going to be any grandchildren.”

Isabel looks genuinely heartsick.

“Why not?”

“Because no woman will have him,” I tell her.

“Too many women will have him,” Jimmy counters. “That's the problem.”

He takes a few gulps from his beer and belches softly.

“What about you, Shae-Lynn?” Isabel asks me. “Do you ever think about Clay getting married and starting a family?”

E.J. snorts a laugh.

“Shae-Lynn a grandmother? I'd love to see that. Instead of baking cookies and knitting sweaters, she'll teach her grandkids how to throw left hooks and pee in a jar while they're on stakeouts.”

“Those are very practical skills.” Jimmy defends me. “Son, go get me something to warm up this coffee.”

“No,” Isabel says sternly. “Don't.”

“Fine. Make me grovel and beg. Make a legless man crawl on his belly. The breaking of the spirit. No one knows more about it than the Irish.”

“Oh, for the love of Pete.”

Irritation blazes in Isabel's bright blue eyes.

“No one is trying to break your spirit, but I might break your neck.”

Jimmy turns his attention to me.

“Did you know, Shae-Lynn, that long before the Catholic and Protestant churches came to Ireland we worshipped the gods and goddesses of nature?”

“Here we go,” E.J. groans as he grabs a copy of
Sports Illustrated
his mother keeps stocked for him and plunks down on the opposite end of the couch from her. “Irish history time.”

He sticks his stockinged feet in her lap. She swats them away. E.J. has always had mixed feelings about his Irishness. He's proud of his heritage but he gets tired of his dad constantly harping on the many virtues of the place and the race.

I remember in third grade we had to make leprechaun traps in school for a St. Patrick's Day project. Kids came up with some truly innovative ideas: devices made from jars and nets and shoeboxes baited with sweets and green foil shamrocks and pieces of counterfeit gold. E.J. came to class with a bottle of his dad's whiskey and a mallet.

“Long before the English put their stranglehold on our country and took our land and our language and our rights all in the name of civilizing us, we governed ourselves just fine with our chieftains.”

“When those same chieftains weren't busy slaughtering each other's tribes over cattle and women,” E.J. interjects from behind his magazine.

“I won't deny that we had our troubles. There was plenty of bloodshed and squabbling among ourselves. But it was still better.”

“You're such a pagan, James,” Isabel tells him.

“A pagan who never missed Mass until the good lord saw fit to take my leg.”

“So you're a confused pagan.”

“Or a confused Catholic,” E.J. mutters.

“The English called us barbaric, but they were the ones who hung men and cut off their heads and stuck them on pikes,” Jimmy continues.

“While the Irish would just quietly hack them to death with swords and battle-axes,” E.J. adds.

“They said we knew nothing about love but they were the ones who regarded unions between men and women to be business contracts, loveless and legally binding, unbreakable except by death. While an Irish woman could get rid of a bad husband just by kicking him out and her kinsmen would make sure he didn't bother her anymore.”

“By hacking him to death with swords and battle axes.”

“You're missing my point.” E.J. puts down the magazine.

“Which is?”

“I need a drink.” E.J. and Isabel exchange familiar exasperated smiles, although I've noticed recently that Isabel's smile is becoming more and more strained.

I don't give it a second thought. I've never paid much attention to what I consider their trivial family malfunctions because I've always been so overwhelmed by how well their family works.

Even now as an adult, every time I visit them I feel the same surreal awe I did as a child, the same sort of out-of-body experience a lowly peasant girl might have had if she had been invited to sup at the king's long table.

It's a combination of feeling happy and privileged to be included but also being full of resentment and shame.

My instinct has always been to hate them, to want to make fun of everything that was good about them so I could feel good about everything bad about me.

Each shared intimacy is like a slap in my face; every laugh, every affectionate touch, every conversation, every meal that isn't spent in stony silence and apprehension is a reminder of my own family's failure and our deprivation.

It wasn't that they had more money. Jimmy made the same salary as my father. They had something far more valuable than material possessions and they didn't even know it. I tried not to blame them. They could never understand how precious it is to be able to sit in a room with your family and not be afraid.

I stare at my hands circling my coffee mug. My knuckles are bruised from my fight with Choker.

“Shae-Lynn,” I hear Isabel say. “E.J.'s told us you have some news.”

“You told them?” I snap at him.

“What's the big deal?” he snaps back. “You said you were going to tell them.”

“It's wonderful news,” Isabel gushes, and Jimmy nods his agreement but their cheeriness seems forced.

“It is,” I say.

“We should have a toast,” Jimmy suggests.

“All those years of worry and grief,” Isabel goes on, ignoring her husband, “you can put them behind you now.”

“Right,” I concur.

“And have your sister back in your life again.”

“Right.”

“And we hear she's going to have a baby, too.”

“Right. She is. Except…”

“Except what, dear?”

“I don't think she's planning on keeping the baby.”

“You mean she's giving the baby up for adoption?”

“In exchange for a lot of cash.”

“She's selling her child?”

“I guess if you're going to give up your kid you might as well make some money from it.”

I say the words to defend Shannon but as I hear them come out of my mouth, they sicken me.

“I don't like the sound of that,” Jimmy says.

“What do you expect?” E.J. joins the conversation. He sits up on the couch and addresses me directly.

“She found an easy way to make some money so she's doing it. What does a kid go for on the open market these days?”