Blood Sisters

by Jo Barney

  Blood Sisters

  Jo Barney

  This edition published by

  Penner Publishing

  Post Office Box 57914

  Los Angeles, California 91413

  www.pennerpublishing.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Jo Barney

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

  Cover Designer: Christa Holland, Paper & Sage Designs

  eISBN: 978-1-944179-84-7

  ISBN: 978-1-944179-85-4

  Contents

  Also by Jo Barney

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jo Barney

  Also by Jo Barney

  Also by Jo Barney

  About Penner Publishing

  Also by Jo Barney

  Never Too Late

  Her Last Words

  The Runaway

  To my dear parents, Helen and Fred Terhark, who, in l946, bought a bungalow in a postwar development with savings from working at the New System laundry and the Kaiser shipyards. Mom, at 103, still remembers those mornings at the kitchen table, laughing and gossiping with her neighbors.

  1

  I close my eyes, my lips. Only my nostrils move as they take in what air is left. Soon, I think. Plastic film stretches taut against my cheeks. Now, I think.

  A scream slices through the fog, forces my eyes to open.

  “Mom! Mom!”

  I am rolled over. Cool air floods across my face. Not now. You were supposed to come home at dinnertime.

  I watch my son’s face crunch into its usual confusion. “We got finished early. Why are you lying down on the grass?” I feel his arm slip under my neck as I struggle to sit up. “Why did you put on that grocery bag?”

  My head on his shoulder, I smell the sweat his anxiety has stirred up. “It was just an accident.” Shreds of plastic dangle from my neck like a tired lei; red duct tape cuts into my chin. No sense in trying to tear off the tape. “Go inside and get the kitchen scissors. Be careful.”

  Jimmy releases me. I hear his heavy feet on the porch steps. In a moment he’s back, the tool’s sharp end pointing at my throat.

  “Slowly, Jimmy. Keep the scissors away from me and make little cuts in the tape until we can tear this off.”

  I watch as he fumbles with the wrinkled plastic and brings the blades inches away from my skin. “Careful, Jimmy.” I choke back a gurgle of unexpected laughter. I might want to die, but I don’t want to be murdered.

  I hear a click and then another. “I’m doing it, Mom!” I push the scissors away, grip at the tape on each side of his snips, and rip it in two. I am released from its chokehold.

  “You did good, Jimmy.” I sit up, pick up the remnants of my failed plan, and hand the torn plastic, the tape, and the note to my son. “Put these in the garbage can, please. I’ll fold up the blanket and then we’ll go inside and you can tell me about work today.”

  Nothing has changed. I am still the mother of a damaged son, the wife of a damaged man, living a life empty of hope.

  * * *

  Jimmy’s big hands tremble as he brings the bottle of Coke to his lips. He shakes a lot, it’s part of who he is, born with the cord around his neck. At least that’s what the doctor told me more than twenty years ago.

  “I forget what you said, about being on the grass.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Just don’t say anything to anyone about it. Promise? Dad especially.”

  He backwashes his drink into the bottle and tips it up again. “I like the way it tickles my tongue.”

  “Promise, Jimmy.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell.”

  But I know he will. I need a story. Hank does not like secrets. I’ll tell him I was trying to kill the aphids on the tomato plants, trying to smother them. With a plastic bag and duct tape? It’s partly true. The smothering part.

  “Stupid,” he’ll say.

  * * *

  And that’s the way it works out two hours later. One plan, at least, is successful in an unsuccessful day. Tonight, I lie in bed at night waiting for the rustling of the sheets, the moan, the thrusting fist aimed at me, the frightening roar. If I move fast enough, I will slide away from Hank’s nightmare and find shelter in the bathroom until he settles down, goes back to sleep, allows me to finally relax. He claims he doesn’t remember the dreams, the thrashing. Only the occasional bruise on my arm or cheek is evidence of the truth of them.

  The bad dream doesn’t arrive. I am awake anyway. I try to think of reasons to get up in the morning. To set out the cereal and milk. To make Hank’s lunch. To make sure Jimmy has bus fare to get to the Goodwill shop. I stretch my legs to derail the next thought, which will roll in, as it has for months: my guilt about failing at everything I have ever tried: raising a healthy son, creating a loving marriage, being popular in high school. For God’s sake. High school! There should be a statute of limitations on anxiety.

  I force my eyes to open, see that the clock reads 5:30, the edge of a day I don’t want to step into. I drop my feet to the floor, find my slippers, put on the coffee, take out the bread for sandwiches.

  2

  My neighbor Helen’s husband came home from Korea minus a leg, but without nightmares. We’ve talked about it over coffee, not sure which is worse. Our men are broken, we have agreed, and we console each other, or at least say, “I understand,” because we do. We don’t have much else in common, but it’s enough for us to call each other friend. When the house clears of lunches and bodies and clutter, I call her.

  She’s cheerful, in her usual role of happy wife, and says, “Coffee? Sure. I’ll bring some cookies. I have some gossip.” She arrives, her curly, wild hair slicked down with water, snickerdoodles on a paper plate, and a smile that seems to feed a secret. She raises her cup to her lips, grins, sips. “You know the woman on the next block with the twins? Joyce?”

  Helen waits until I nod. I don’t remember the woman, but it doesn’t matter. “She was shopping at the Eastside Mal
l and decided to have a sandwich at Willie’s, that little pub on Seventy-Eighth Street? She walked through the door, and there was Mildred sitting on a stool at the bar, a drink in front of her. All by herself! Mildred, you know, the one who never talks to anyone around here, lives in the ugly blue house?”

  Again, I am not sure whom she’s talking about. I don’t know many of my neighbors anymore. “Well, Mildred sat on that stool for the whole time Joyce ate her hamburger, and when she left, she heard Mildred order another drink.” Helen raises her eyebrows—can you believe it? —as she bites into a cookie.

  I am not as astonished. I have poured a glass of midafternoon vodka more than once lately. “She’s worried about something,” I offer. “Maybe she’s found out her husband is playing around, like that rumor that we heard last winter about Jerry Butler.”

  “But drinking alone?”

  “There’re worse things.” For a minute, I consider telling Helen about yesterday’s backyard scene, but I know I will be the next woman in the neighborhood to be gossiped about over coffee and cookies if I do. Helen doesn’t discriminate between her friends and others when it comes to gossip. My head aches.

  “Like what?” She leans forward, ready for a fresh rumor.

  “Like maybe drinking in a dark bar with a man who isn’t her husband.”

  Helen doesn’t see my unsmiling lips, and she giggles. “Not Mildred, no way.”

  I still can’t remember who Mildred-on-the-bar-stool is, and I wish I hadn’t called this friend who can’t tell the difference between gossip and intimacy. I don’t need her right now. I’m not sure what I need. I think about the vodka in the cabinet. First, I’ll take a nap and try not to think at all.

  But as usual, I can’t sleep. Thinking takes over. I wonder how I ever got to this place—that is, to this joyless life, not to this house, of course. No mystery about that.

  Many of us in this Portland neighborhood are married to veterans, Korea or Vietnam. A few graying grandmas are the original World War II owners of the postwar bungalows lining the five blocks that had been raspberry fields in the l930s. The government, fearing another invasion, this one on the mainland, moved the Japanese farmers and their families away from the Oregon coast to somewhere else. Their fields were left to be harvested by eager jam lovers for a year or so before the canes fell into shambles of thorny vines.

  When the men started coming home from Europe and the Pacific, they needed houses for their families. Local developers tore up the forsaken fields and built the Holgate Farms Development—seventy-three two-bedroom, one-bathroom homes, with large yards for the families that would soon come. They were cheap, cheap enough for veterans under the GI Bill to buy. After a few years, many of the original settlers moved to bigger houses, selling their bungalows to a second surge of families arriving at Holgate Farms at the end of the Korean War.

  Rooms were added on, basements finished, garages raised, fences built. But still, Army wives kept meeting around kitchen tables several mornings a week. “Kaffeeklatsches,” they called them.

  Hank came back from Korea within a year of leaving, wounded and dispirited. He and I lived in his parents’ house for a couple of years before we understood we would have to find a place of our own. The son we had produced upon his return became a problem, a fussy, worrisome child, one who didn’t walk when he was expected to or talk much except in monosyllabic grunts only I could make sense of.

  Jimmy was a little older than most of the other kids being born to this wave of veterans, and I was older than many of the other new mothers. I soon discovered, after a few morning coffees, that I wasn’t much interested in what these other women gossiped and grumbled about. Still, I went to the morning gatherings, bringing cookies and not much else. I knew that I needed whatever it was that the kaffeeklatsches offered.

  But time marched and many of these newer families moved away from Holgate Farms as soon as the husbands made enough money to change their addresses to homes in the hills. For a few years, the left-behind wives continued to drink coffee and smoke in the mornings once the kids were in school. If we bitched about our husbands, it was about not making enough money, not about the nightmares. And if we complained about children, it was about poor grades and terrible teachers in the nearby school, not about the inadequacy of the school’s special-ed department. None of the others had a child like Jimmy, and I suspected they were uncomfortable even thinking about that possibility.

  When Helen moved in next door, years later, lively, smiling, I invited her in for a cup of coffee. I had become silent, uneasy, at the dinette tables of women all trying to get a word in edgewise, but I found myself enjoying talking with her, this older mother of a kindergartener, a cheerful, kaffeeklatsch of two.

  Until today.

  * * *

  “Damn!” My eyes won’t close. I push my feet into my sandals, make my way to the kitchen. Dinner. Again. I pull the hamburger out of the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw out. Spaghetti tonight. Hank likes spaghetti, usually. Not that I have pasta or him in mind. I have something else to worry about. A phone call. Two phone calls, actually.

  The first comes as I am puncturing the lid of a bottle of Ragu with a knife because I have run out of patience trying to twist it open. I carefully put the knife back in its slot on the counter. My hand shakes. I croak into the mouthpiece, “I said I didn’t ever want to talk to you.” I cough, throat as tight as that lid had been. “Ever!” and I hang up.

  After all these years, why has Lloyd decided he needs to talk to me? After his first call, I found the plastic bag and the duct tape. And now he’s back and he’s not giving up. What’s next?

  3

  Hank stops the car in the driveway and waits a moment. It doesn’t arrive, the usual panic. Today will be a good day; at least it has been so far. He eases out of the car and brings his lunch box along with him. It opens, spilling bread crusts and a half-eaten apple on the grass. Not so bad, Hank thinks. I can do this. As he leans over to pick up the scraps, the car door swings shut, into his shoulder, sending a flash of pain up his arm.

  “Goddamn it, why can’t you get this thing fixed?” he yells as he pushes open the screen door, wax paper spilling out from the open lunchbox shoved under his arm. Eleanor doesn’t look up at him as she stirs something on the stove. “I have to do everything around here and now I have to make sure this stupid thing has a latch?” Hank tosses the box on the counter and turns away, fuming. He closes his eyes, backs away from the moment. He doesn’t want to get riled up. He’s never hit her. Not that he remembers. But he has wanted to.

  “I’ll take care of it.” Eleanor finally sends a sliver of a smile in his direction. “Have a shower, relax, read the newspaper. You’ll feel better.” She turns her back to him and reaches for a bunch of carrots on the drain board. “Spaghetti tonight.”

  With his lips tight over his teeth, he pulls himself into some sort of order, and goes into the bathroom to shower. Eleanor is right. The hot water on his back, the sound of the water splashing against the tile, the nothingness of hot steam blocking everything else out; it calms his breathing, his thoughts. Fifteen minutes later, he rests his fork on his plate and watches Jimmy shoveling spaghetti into his mouth, slurping in the noodles that dangle down his chin and smear sauce across his face.

  At moments like this, Hank wonders how this person could be part of his life, this passive, slow hunk of an almost-man who at twenty still speaks in one-syllable words and is only now learning his times tables. A familiar bitter cloud seeps through him, leaving a bad taste in his mouth. Hank pushes his empty plate away. No sense in regretting. Not about this son. Other regrets, maybe, but he will not think of them.

  Eleanor looks at Jimmy and smiles. “So, Jimmy. You came home early. How come?”

  “Because they did an inventory today. We got half a day off. I don’t know what that is, but Jennifer said I couldn’t help.”

  “You weren’t useful.” The criticism comes out even before Hank realizes
he’s thought it. “Inventory means counting things and writing them down.”

  “Hank.” The word stops whatever else he would have said. Eleanor fills in the silence that follows. “They probably didn’t need him because they weren’t sorting today. That’s Jimmy’s job. He’s lucky he got some hours off. Aren’t you, Jimmy?”

  “I guess.”

  Hank inhales his disgust. She babies him. She still makes sure he’s brushed his teeth. She lays out his clothes. She makes his lunches. She cleans his room. He’s twenty, for God’s sake. Luckily, he has the good sense not to say any of this out loud. Instead, he rubs his hands on his thighs and pushes himself away from the table. “Anything on TV?”

  Eleanor shrugs, says she will clean up and then she’ll read. “Not interested,” she adds.

  His hands tremble as usual as he carries his plate to the counter. She’s like that a lot lately. If it wasn’t for the kid, I’d be out of here. And maybe because of the kid, I will be out of here. But he is not sure this thought is true. He picks up the TV Guide, and after an hour of Monday Night Football, he goes to bed.