by Tawni O'Dell
The disdain on her face melts away and is replaced by the bored yet wholly alert gaze of a copper-eyed cat.
“Are you talking about yourself? You weren’t dumb. You knew where babies came from. How’d you end up pregnant?”
“Sometimes there are situations where you can’t be prepared.”
“What are you saying? Were you raped?”
“No,” I reply and immediately search for a way to change the subject. “How many babies have you had? Just out of curiosity.”
“This will be ten.”
“Ten?”
Ten: I can’t process this number.
I get up from my seat on the edge of the bathtub and begin to pace in the little room.
Suddenly I crave a cigarette, too, and I’ve never smoked.
“Ten,” I say again.
“I had my first when I was seventeen, just like you,” she starts to tell me. “And just like you I wasn’t dumb about sex. I knew you got pregnant from having it and I knew about condoms. I was there in health class when we learned how to put a rubber on a banana. But when you’re out on the streets and the only way you’re going to get a meal or maybe a bed to sleep in is to screw some guy who doesn’t necessarily have one or want to use one, sometimes you make exceptions.”
I start to feel sick to my stomach. I don’t want to hear these stories. This is exactly the kind of life I pictured her having during the times I allowed myself to picture her alive.
“Why didn’t you come to me? You didn’t have to live like that.”
“When I found out I was pregnant that first time I didn’t know what to do,” she continues, ignoring what I said. “I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t have paid for an abortion even if I wanted one. I ended up at a church, which is kind of weird if you think about it since you and Dad always hated churches.”
Screw the angels, I think to myself.
“They directed me to this church-sponsored home for pregnant teens. It was a great place. Clean. Good food. Your own bed. Hot showers. A doctor who came once a month and gave us checkups.
“After I’d been there a little while, ladies started coming to visit me. They were different than the women who worked there. These ladies were always nicely dressed and perfumed. They always came one at a time. At first they said they were just there to give me someone to talk to, that I should think of them as a sort of mother or an older sister. They’d bring me little things. A candy bar. A lip gloss. Then as time passed they started to talk more and more about the baby and what I was going to do with the baby and how they were so concerned about the baby. The gifts got better, too. Soon I was getting clothes, and CDs, and makeup.”
She begins to perk up as she tells the story.
“More time passed and they began to tell me how they couldn’t have children of their own but how desperately they wanted children and how much love they had to give. How each one of them had a beautiful home and a beautiful husband and could provide a beautiful life for some poor unfortunate child who would otherwise have a hellish life of poverty and neglect with his worthless piece-of-trash biological mother. Of course they didn’t put it in exactly those words. Quite the contrary, they were extremely sympathetic to my situation.
“Right before the baby was born, the gifts reached their peak. I got a fake fox jacket, a Walkman, a pair of suede Nine West ankle boots, and a gold tennis bracelet. The diamonds turned out to be fake but I was an amateur back then.
“I ended up giving the baby to the woman who gave me the boots. It had nothing to do with the boots. I laid the four gifts out on my bed and did Eeny Meeny Miney Moe.
“Once the baby was gone, that was the end of the ladies and the gifts and the church’s hospitality. I was out on the streets again, and while I was out there it occurred to me if I got pregnant again I’d be invited back. I’d be warm and well fed and taken care of. More ladies would come bearing gifts. Then I did a little more thinking and thought, why do I need some stupid home for knocked-up girls? I bet I could do a lot better on my own. I bet I can do better than a coat. I bet there are women out there who would buy me a car, maybe even a house in exchange for a baby. I bet there are women out there who might even be willing to skip all this ‘pretending to care about each other’ bullshit and just give me cash.”
She finishes her account. By now her enthusiasm has vanished, and she’s returned to her earlier dull detachment.
I feel thoroughly nauseated. I don’t blame childless women for trying to find children, and I don’t blame teenaged girls for making mistakes that lead to making children they’re not prepared to care for, but I can’t forgive my sister’s lack of compassion for anyone, including herself.
Where did it come from? How did I not see it during all those years we spent together?
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry all that happened to you. But you didn’t have to run away in the first place. You could have come to me.”
I walk over to her and stroke the top of her head the way I used to when she was little.
“Shannon. I need to know. Did Dad start hurting you again after I left with Clay? Is that why you ran away? Did you blame me for that?”
She looks up at me from the floor.
“You still don’t get it, do you? I didn’t run away from Dad. I didn’t run, period. I left. I went looking for something else. The only reason I didn’t do it sooner was because you were there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t leave you. You left first.”
“That’s not fair. I wanted you to come with us.”
“Not really. You had Clay to take care of. You put him first and that’s the way it should have been. He was your son.”
“Please don’t talk that way. You know I loved you, too.”
“You didn’t love me.”
“How can you say that?” I ask her, trying to keep my voice from sounding panicked. “I took care of you. I cooked your meals and did your laundry. I read you books and helped you with your homework. I tucked you in at night and nursed you when you were sick.”
She doesn’t look impressed.
“You did the same stuff for Dad. A guy who treated us like shit. That’s not love; that’s duty. You were a soldier with an assignment. That’s the way I always thought of you. Shae-Lynn the soldier. And I was one of your missions.”
She falls silent for a moment when I don’t respond.
“When I was a kid, I used to wish you’d be a wreck,” she goes on. “Just once I wanted to see you break down and cry, or throw something, or tell Dad to go to hell. It never happened until Clay was born. Then all of a sudden you turned into this rabid mother bear. I used to tell myself you couldn’t have loved me because how can you love if you can’t feel? You didn’t start to feel until Clay was born.”
“That’s not true,” I tell her.
“I know we were kids. I know we were helpless,” she adds. “But still. You took it for so long. And then one day, you had the power to stop it. I always wondered if you’d always had the power but you just decided not to use it to save me.”
I feel completely at a loss. All I can do is deny her accusations, but I can’t find the words to explain why she’s wrong.
It wasn’t about power. I never had any power. It was about the differences between motherhood and sisterhood.
Clay was my child. My responsibility. He is my creation.
Shannon was my sister. My equal. She is my reflection.
I could mold him, but I could only make changes to her surface.
“I did everything I could for you,” I tell her quietly.
She glances up at me and nods.
“Yeah. I guess I know that.”
She jangles the handcuffs against the sink’s pipes.
“What about now? Can you take these off? I gotta pee.”
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above her before I stoop to unlock the cuffs, and I realize she might be right: Maybe I am a soldi
er, but an ordinary one, not a warrior, living with a soldier’s fatigue and limitations and very small chance of glory.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SHANNON DOESN’T SAY A WORD to me during the drive back to my house. She tells me good night once we arrive and goes straight to her room.
I feed Gimp, take a shower, and gratefully exchange my thong and short, tight dress for a pair of old faded pink cotton Hanes panties and some Capitol Police sweats, then begin to pace around my house.
I can’t get to my safe place anymore. Ever since I saw the face at the window, I can’t find the way. I can’t blot out either of my conversations with Cam Jack or Shannon. I can’t stop thinking about how I’ve been used and discarded and how I allowed it to happen. I can’t escape.
I’m like a superhero whose secret hideout has been exposed, and now I’m forced to fly around endlessly looking for somewhere anonymous to land.
Dmitri could come back at any time. I know I should stay and protect Shannon; it should be part of my ongoing mission. But after all my years of devoted service, I’m finally going AWOL.
I decide to go see E.J.
I swap my baggy gray sweat pants for a denim miniskirt but keep the sweatshirt.
I think about the Russian as I slip on the Frye boot that he smacked me in the face with yesterday and wonder where the hell he could be.
E.J.’s house is dark, but the light’s on in the garage and I hear the radio playing. It’s safe. He doesn’t entertain lady friends there.
I park my Subaru beside his truck.
The door rolls open before I even announce my presence. A gush of yellow light spills onto the gravel.
He’s standing at his grill in a grease-stained white T-shirt, grass-stained jeans ripped at the knees, and his J&P ball cap; he looks great.
“What happened to your face?” he greets me.
I go help myself to a beer before I’ve been offered one.
“Did you have another go at Choker?” he asks me.
“What is it with Choker? One fight with him and everyone thinks he’s my new sparring partner.”
I plunk down in a lawn chair.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So this is one of those visits where you come over because you have something you want to talk about and won’t talk about it.”
“Yeah.”
“George and I are making grilled cheese…”
He waves his spatula in the air enticingly.
I smile back at him.
“Sure. I’ll have one.”
“Did you find Shannon? Dad said you came by the house this morning with Dusty and told him she’s missing again.”
“Yeah, I found her,” I reply, opening my beer and taking a grateful gulp. “I found her with that scumbag lawyer. They’re partners. He helps her sell her babies. She does it for a living, E.J. A fucking living. She gets pregnant on purpose and sells her kids. She’s been doing it all her life. I have ten nieces and nephews out there going to private schools and being raised by nannies named Consuela.”
He looks up from taking two more slices of bread out of the bag and buttering them.
“Are you shitting me? Ten?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d she come back here?”
“She says she’s decided to retire, so she’s trying to pull off this big scam where she’s promising the baby to different families and ripping them off. She says she came to me because she thought it would be a safe place to hide out.”
“You bought this?”
“I don’t know. I can’t come up with any other reason for her to be here. She sure didn’t come back to see me. You were right. She couldn’t care less. I don’t think she’s ever cared about anyone.”
He slaps a couple pieces of cheese between the bread slices and places them on George, who sizzles softly.
“It’s not your fault. She never got to bond with your mom. Maybe it ruined her. Maybe after that she could never bond with anyone.”
“Is this one of your mom’s theories?”
“Yeah. Is it that obvious?”
“It’s obvious it’s not yours.”
The sandwich is finished. He slides it off the grill and onto a plate and hands it to me. It’s a thing of beauty: golden brown and dripping bright orange.
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I take a bite of the buttery toasted bread and taste the warm melted cheese. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life.
“It’s kind of ironic if you stop and think about it,” I tell him while I happily chew. “My mom died from having a baby, and the baby that killed her turns out to be able to breed as often and as effortlessly as a brood mare.”
“Is that the way you think of Shannon?” he asks, his face taking on a look of concern. “That she killed your mom?”
“No,” I answer honestly but my chewing slows as I stop and really consider his question. “At least I don’t think so.”
“Maybe that’s the way Shannon thinks of herself,” he says.
“That would be awful.”
We both fall silent and eat.
He walks over to me when I finish my sandwich and puts a napkin in my hand. He lets his own hand lie on top of mine for a moment and squeezes. Not hard. Not too quick. Just a steady pressure. I feel all the energy that’s left in my tired body rush to my palm. The rest of me is insignificant and would blow away in a breeze if I wasn’t anchored to him.
“I got some napkins for you. I know you don’t like to use the finger,” he says, eyeing the greasy foam Steelers mitt leaning against his lawn chair.
My heart swells with gratitude.
“What’s wrong?” he asks me. “You look sick. Was the sandwich okay?”
“It was great. It’s…thank you,” I tell him.
“They’re just napkins.”
I take a deep breath and say it.
“I think I may have done something unforgivable.”
“When? Today?”
“No. It’s something unforgivable I’ve been doing for twenty-three years.”
He does the math.
“Does it have to do with Clay?”
I lose my nerve.
“Never mind. It’s not important. Besides there’s no reason why I should talk to you about it. You weren’t even around when I got pregnant with Clay.”
“What do you mean I wasn’t around? I’ve always been around. I’ve never been anywhere else but around.”
“You weren’t involved in my life.”
“Involved in your life? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. You stopped hanging around with me when we were in seventh grade and you didn’t start hanging around with me again until I came back from D.C. My dad’s funeral was the first time we’d talked in years. You took me out for a beer. Remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” he says and walks away from me toward the fridge to get himself another beer.
I watch the door open and his head and torso disappear behind it until I’m left staring at his bent-over backside, a view I’ve always secretly enjoyed.
“You were weird that day,” I say to his butt and the hand holding open the refrigerator door. “You kept making these bad jokes. I didn’t understand it. I thought you should be a little more upset and a little more respectful of a fellow miner being blown to bits. Do you remember the toast you made when we had our beers?”
He straightens up again, rips the top off a can, and holds it aloft.
“To Hank Penrose. May he rest in pieces.”
“Real funny.”
“What did you want from me? You wanted me to like him? To respect him?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe I was a little weird that day because, like you said, I knew I should have been upset, but I was happy.”
“How can you say that?”
His face clouds over and he slams the door shut.
He walks over t
o his workbench and taps a cigarette out of a pack of Marlboros.
“Because I hated him. Because he deserved to be dead. Because I should have killed him myself a long time ago.”
He looks terribly angry; then for a moment he looks embarrassed by what he just said, but the anger quickly reappears.
He lights the cigarette and smokes thoughtfully. It seems to calm him, but then he suddenly looks over at me and his face is contorted with a mix of emotions I’ve never seen there before: rage, grief, impotence.
“I was a coward. Don’t you understand? I couldn’t stand to see what he did to you, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a little kid. Then I started getting older and all I could think about was how I could hurt him. How I could fight back for you. But I was still a coward. Even though I’d sit in school and daydream about bashing his face in with a two-by-four, I knew I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the guts to do it. So I just started staying away from you. It was too hard to see you. If I wasn’t man enough to save you, I thought it was better to let you find someone who was.”
He finishes his confession. I think it’s the most words he’s ever said to me at one time in our lives.
I don’t know how to respond. I always thought it was my breasts that ruined everything. I thought he couldn’t be my friend anymore because I turned into a girl, but I didn’t turn into the kind of girl he wanted for a girlfriend.
“I didn’t need to be saved,” I tell him.
“Stop it!” he shouts at me.
He stubs out his cigarette and crosses the garage to where I’m sitting. He grabs me by my arms and pulls me up, close to him. I feel the fabric of his jeans brush against my bare knees and the damp heat of his breath on my face as he speaks.
“Stop being so tough all the time. Someone should’ve saved you. I should’ve saved you.”
He was my dad, I think to myself. You never could’ve saved me. It’s always been too late.
“Save me now,” I tell him.
“How?”
“Get me through this night.”
Our bodies are already touching; our lips are only inches away from each other, yet neither one of us seems capable of doing more or doing less. We’re paralyzed by memories of all the times we could have kissed and didn’t and trying to figure out why this time should be different.
