by Tawni O'Dell
None of it made sense to me. She didn’t take any of her belongings with her. I went through her room thoroughly, all her drawers and her closet. None of her clothes were missing or any of her jewelry or makeup. She didn’t take Bony, her favorite stuffed dog she’d been sleeping with since she was a baby.
E.J. and his folks argued with me that runaways don’t take their stuff with them. It’s not like going on a vacation, they said, and if you’re going to choose to leave a place, you’re probably not going to want to lug around any reminders of it, but I refused to believe this.
She was last seen at the high school but no one saw her get on the afternoon school bus. They argued that if she was going to run away, wouldn’t she want to start from town instead of from our house, which was in the middle of nowhere? But I knew Shannon missed the bus a lot. She could have gotten a ride home from a friend or even from Dad.
And then there was the question I never gave them a chance to explain away because I never asked it out loud: if she ran away, why didn’t she run to me?
I gulp down half my beer and motion to Sandy that I want a whiskey and Coke. Just one.
There were other explanations besides running away. She could have been abducted. She could have been murdered by some wandering psycho. No one in town had any reason to kill Shannon. But accidents happened. People panicked and tried to hide bodies.
The police searched for her. Nothing turned up.
I never told anyone about the most damning piece of evidence because I would have had to explain things I didn’t want them to know. When I was searching her room, I noticed the rag rug we kept between our beds was gone.
I asked Dad about it, and he told me Shannon got a stain on it and threw it away.
I knew this couldn’t be true. We loved that rug. My mom had made it out of hundreds of strips of different colored cloth. When Shannon was little, we used to sit on it and play with toys and read books together. We used to examine each individual strip of fabric and pick out our favorite ones. Shannon loved a piece striped in rainbow colors and a satiny shiny piece of regal purple. I loved a soft strip of pastel pink flannel and a scrap of red holiday material covered in tiny green holly leaves.
And regardless of our sentimental attachment to the rug, we were poor. We never threw anything away.
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.
