Sister Mine (31 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

T
HE HORRIBLE GIRL FLOWERS
and the animals feeding on them are gone. They're only here in summer and now it's fall.

The field has become a park and the crisp air is full of kaleidoscopic eddies of autumn leaves that break apart and scatter: Some are blown against benches and monuments, some get stuck to the damp pavement, others are forced into piles by men dressed in white uniforms wielding gold rakes, while others hover in the air like butterflies in front of my outstretched hand.

They are a riot of color: pumpkin orange and rain slicker yellow, eggplant purple and mushroom brown, pale ginger and dark crimson, tawny and pink and the red of a warning flag. Some covered in bright green veins or streaks of salmon or tiny yellow spots like a rash.

They're so beautiful, I want to take them home with me and keep them forever. I start collecting them and stuffing them into the pockets of the coat I'm wearing. I can't stop myself even after the pockets are full. I keep pushing them down deeper, crushing them, until I begin to hear muffled screams.

I pull my hands out of my pockets bristling with leaves and all of them have the wailing faces of infants.

I'm startled and frightened and even repulsed. My instinct is to throw them away and I do, flapping my hands to shake them off. They're swept away by an air current, somersaulting and swirling, all the while screaming. I start to chase after them even though I'm not sure I want them, but the wind picks up and soon all the leaves have been lifted off the ground into a gigantic colorful sobbing swarm.

         

I WAKE WITH
a start. My heart is thudding dully behind my eardrums. It sounds like it resides inside my head now instead of my chest.

My son is gone, is my first thought. It's a completely foreign one: one I've never faced before except in maternal nightmares where he swam out too far in a great gray sea and I couldn't get to him, or he ran out in front of a speeding car and I couldn't get to him, or he went to work in black tunnels of rock miles beneath my feet and I couldn't get to him.

My son is gone. It's true but it can't be.

I push the thought away and try to return to a time before I knew the truth, back to that slice of blissful ignorance between sleeping and waking before anything is clear.

I remember feeling this same brief sweet moment as a child where I wasn't conscious enough yet to know my mom was gone. I'd wake up and lie still in my bed with my eyes closed and know she was going to come to me as soon as I called, and as cold, awful reality began to seep into my thoughts I'd still cling to this hope the same way I'd try to fall back asleep on those rare mornings when I woke up from a good dream.

Nothing is clear anymore. My thoughts become more and more muddled.

My son is gone. My sister is here. My sister is gone. My sister is back. My son is gone. My sister was never gone because my sister was never here. I have a niece. My niece is gone. My son is gone. E.J. was gone. E.J. is back. E.J. is here and different. Cam Jack is back. My son is gone. Cam Jack was never here. Cam Jack has always been everywhere. My son is gone.

I open my eyes and roll over and find a warm male body in my bed.

My son is gone. My sister is gone. Her baby is gone. E.J. is here. E.J. is here in my bed.

His eyes fly open suddenly, like my stare is a physical presence that just poked him in the ribs.

We find ourselves staring stupidly at each other in the faint half-light of barely six in the morning. I can only hope I don't look half as goofy as he does.

He gives me a lazy, loyal, bad boy grin, the smile of a man who'd risk robbing a bank for me but could never be convinced to drive out of his way to find me an ATM without a service fee.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say back.

He reaches for me and pulls me on top of him. I stretch out over his body, placing my lips against the wiry roughness of the stubble on his chin, pressing my breasts against the hard flatness of his chest, rocking the softness of my belly over the tip of his erection, draping my smooth legs over his hairy ones: I'm a blanket of female.

His hands run up and down the length of me, lingering in the small of my back, sliding over my ass, pulling me up and positioning my hips so he can push inside me.

Afterward, I stay on top of him with my head against his chest listening to his heartbeat and feeling a ticklish solitary drop of juice from our coupling trickle down my inner thigh.

I'm drifting back into sleep when E.J. sits up suddenly.

“Shit. Look at the sky.”

I look over my shoulder at the window and see the pale gray sky and know immediately what he means.

I roll off him and he bolts out of bed.

“Are you going to be late?”

“Hell, yeah.”

He starts darting around my bedroom looking for his underwear.

“What about your lunch?” I ask him, the familiar panic from my childhood descending over me like a hood.

All my other thoughts are blocked out; I'm blind except for the image of my father's disappointed, disapproving face scowling down at me.

I jump out of bed, too.

“You have to have your lunch. I'll make you something. Don't worry.”

“It's okay, I have my dinner pail and my thermos in the truck. They're already packed.”

“You brought them with you last night already packed?”

He pauses with one foot in his jeans and smiles.

“Yeah, well, I was hopeful.”

I smile back.

“And prepared. You should get some kind of Boy Scout badge for that.”

“Which one? The looking-to-score badge?”

I hand him his shirt.

“What are you doing today?” he asks me.

“Working. Hopefully. It's been pretty slow lately.”

“I mean about Shannon and about Clay.”

“I'm not doing anything about Shannon. At least I know she's alive and well. I guess that's something. I'm not going to chase her. She knows where I am if she ever wants to see me again.”

“And Clay?”

I wasn't able to tell him everything about my troubles with Clay. I actually told him very little last night, only that I think I may have done something rotten and harmful all the while believing it was heroic and good.

I wasn't able to tell him about Cam Jack. The reopened wound is too fresh for me to be able to talk about it, plus this new phase of my relationship with E.J.—where I'm a human being and a piece of ass at the same time—is too new and experimental for me to risk jeopardizing it by telling this particular story. If the man were anyone else but Cam Jack, I might be able to do it.

“I'm not going to chase Clay either,” I say.

I follow E.J. to the door. We're in such a hurry I don't even take time to put on clothes or grab a robe.

He gives me a kiss in the doorway.

“I like this new phase of our relationship,” he says, grinning.

“The love phase?”

“The naked phase.”

He slaps my bare butt hard and runs off to his truck, whooping in triumph, the way he used to when we were kids after he'd just knocked me down and pinned me for the heck of it.

I dress quickly, feed Gimp, and head into Centresburg to take care of some unfinished business that has nothing to do with my cab. My night with E.J. aside, my house has a barren, depressing feel to it this morning and I'm eager to leave it. Shannon and the baby were in it for such a brief period of time, but even a few hours of a baby's presence is enough to make a lonely house come alive.

I gave Pamela a call last night to see if she had heard from Shannon, more specifically to find out if she was now the proud new mother of a bouncing baby girl.

I decided it was too exhausting to keep coming up with lies, so I leveled with her and told her Shannon was my sister and explained briefly why I didn't tell her all this in the first place.

She took it better than I thought she would. She was too preoccupied with the news about the baby to care much about anything else.

With Dmitri in the picture, I imagined Shannon would be eager to simply dump the baby for as much cash as possible and to do it as quickly as possible so she could pay him and get rid of him. But then again, I know nothing about her relationship with him and maybe she's not eager to get rid of him.

I also don't know to what extent Dmitri's loyalty to his employer stretches. He may insist Shannon sell the baby to this Mickey character with the crazy bimbo wife.

And I also don't know how far Kozlowski's legal powers extend, if he has some binding contract he can slap Shannon with, if he can only find her, and then the baby will go to the Larsons.

Pamela hadn't heard from her as of last night.

We promised to contact each other if either of us heard from Shannon. Otherwise, we planned to meet for breakfast at Eatn'Park.

I find her sitting alone at a booth by a window staring out at the parking lot.

She's wearing a raw silk blazer in pale orange. She'd probably call it crushed tangerine or maybe melon pearl. A camisole of the same color peeks out from beneath it.

I check under the table before I sit down to make sure her shoes match the jacket. They do.

I'm seated and have already ordered coffee before she bothers to glance my way.

Her face looks amazingly fresh and unlined for someone who should have had a sleepless night. I only detect the slightest lavender shadow of exhaustion beneath her eyes that her concealer was unable to completely cover.

It's the eyes themselves that give away her advancing age and the haggard condition of her inner self. The decisions she's made, the goals she's pursuing, the ongoing struggle to make ends justify means: All of it is reflected in their muddied blue depths and none of it can be quickly and easily erased. There's no Botox for the soul.

“I haven't heard anything from Jamie, I mean Shannon,” she tells me. “I'm sorry. I can't get used to calling her that.”

She picks up her coffee mug with one hand and lays the other hand flat on the table with her fingers splayed out, her flawless nails like an arc of candied almonds.

“I haven't heard from her either.”

“How do I know you're not lying?”

Her question surprises me: the content and her tone.

“Why would I lie? What would my motivation be? I'm only here at all because I feel bad for you.”

“You feel bad for me?” she says, offended. “I certainly don't need your pity.”

“I mean, I feel bad about what my sister did. Even though I haven't seen her for eighteen years I still feel somewhat responsible.”

“Why?”

“I raised her.”

“You raised her?”

“Our mother died when Shannon was only a few days old.”

“So Shannon didn't have a mother?”

She takes a sip of her coffee and ponders this.

“Maybe that's why she turned out to be so callous and awful.”

“I know plenty of people who have mothers who turned out to be callous and awful. I think maybe not having a mother is why she can't be a mother.”

“Then why get pregnant?”

“I think in some warped way she thinks it's her duty.”

“Her duty? I don't understand.”

I don't know what to say to her. I can't explain duty to her. I can't make her understand the way we think. I can't spell out an unwritten code of conduct that is never explained or taught to any of us but is simply lived: Whatever situation is put in front of you, you find a way to endure it; whenever you're told to do something, you try to do it well; wherever you end up, you remember where you began.

I can't make a sensible argument for whatever it is that makes E.J. go back into the mines every day after he almost lost his life there and has been treated so poorly by the man who employs him; or what made Lib go to a jungle halfway around the world to fight in a war he didn't understand instead of moving seven hundred miles north to a country similar to his own where he would have been safe; or what made me incapable of leaving or even hating my abusive father until I had a child of my own to protect.

We live life in a parallel universe to hers. We don't do what we want in order to get the kind of world we want; we do what we should in order to survive in the world we've been given.

I wasn't lying and I wasn't being condescending; I do feel bad for her.

“I guess it doesn't matter why she does it,” I say with a finality I hope will put the topic to rest.

The waitress comes back, pours my coffee, and hands me a big laminated menu.

I'm starving this morning and dive into the pages eagerly.

Pamela declines a menu with a wave of her hand and a pursing of her lips.

“What do you think she's going to do?” she asks me after the waitress departs.

I'm busy studying the pictures.

I don't look up as I tell her, “I'm not sure. It turns out I was right. There was another family she promised the baby to besides you. And there's another family that she promised an earlier baby to and backed out on the deal who also thinks they have a right to this baby.”

“I can't believe it.”

“She still might decide to give you the baby, but it's not going to happen here. I'm sure she's left again for good. The father's involved now, too.”

“The father? She told me there was no way the father could ever find out or would even remotely suspect she was pregnant with his child.”

“Hard to believe she'd lie. I know.”

The waitress returns. I order two scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, a buttermilk biscuit, and a side of hash browns, then call her back at the last minute and ask for a cinnamon bun to start it all off.

Pamela looks appalled.

“I don't usually eat like this. Great sex this morning. Great sex last night, too. Revs up the appetite. You know how it is.”