by Lee Schultz
I shuddered. To try and erase those images out of my head, I went back to the trucking part of the operation.
" On these trips in trucks, what about taking care of their cargo? They don’t even stop to buy food, or make a pit stop?"
He shook his head. "No. They gas up at the pump, and the drivers will stop at rest areas, but they never go into the trailers and nobody ever comes out. We can see horses in the rear part of the trailer, but those trailers are big enough they could easily cram a dozen people into them."
"So how does Iron County fit in?
He looked exasperated. "We’re a little shorthanded. Homeland Security is sucking up all the funding, and we don’t have the manpower to watch these guys twenty-four seven. Somehow, they seem to know when there is no police presence, and they fall off our radar. We sometimes can pick them up again farther down the road, but they keep changing vehicles. We’ve had undercover guys try and find roads into the property here, but you just can’t get good help these days, so far they’ve come up empty handed. We have limited budgets, and they’re minting money with their operation. Hard to compete."
He frowned. "And I’m beginning to think there’s someone local who is giving them information about patrol schedules. What with all the budget cuts, there are at least three nights a week when there’s no patrol cars from any agency except Iron River City, and Crystal Falls, and they’re pretty much limited to their cities’ boundaries."
I was getting drowsy, and this guy was starting to look really good. Sort of like how a real dog looks after about six beers. Except this guy was no dog. I kept telling myself he was too young (or was I too old?) and besides, he had the damn gall to look at me as a suspect......My eyelids were starting to slam shut.
Walters picked up on it. "Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stay so long. I’ll check back with you when you’re feeling a bit better." He patted my hand, turned and left. I watched him go until my vision closed in.
Fade to black.
25
I was on the couch with Holy Wah on my lap, a heating pad on my aching back, wrapped in an afghan. My back ached and walking across the room made the muscles spasm. My house reeked of gasoline and burned wood. I was engrossed in the newest Stephen King novel, when the phone jarred me back to the real world. I didn’t recognize the number, but I was feeling adventurous so I picked up.
"Hello," I said.
"Molly?"
My heart sank. I recognized the voice instantly - a voice I hadn’t heard in over ten years.
"Rosie?"
"Yeah, it’s me. Been trying to find you. Where are you?"
I strained to hear anything in her voice that indicated she was under the influence - of alcohol, street drugs, antipsychotics, aerosol propellant, bath salts, whatever she could find to alter her mind.
"I’m in Michigan, where are you?"
Exasperation "I know you’re in Michigan, where in Michigan? I’m in Iron River right now."
My heart sank even lower. My little sister. Alcoholic, substance abuser, mentally ill since early adulthood. The last three birthday cards I had sent, the last to a state mental hospital in Utah, came back as undeliverable. Moved, left no forwarding address. The last time I had seen her was at our father’s funeral. She didn’t even show up when our mother was laid to rest.
"Well, you’re not far from where I am. What are you doing in Michigan?"
"Looking for you. I need a place to stay while I get my life back together." As if it had been together much at all for the past twenty years or so.
I sighed. Just what I needed right then. I gave her directions. After all, she is my sister, my parents’ midlife baby, born a year after I graduated from high school. I was the only graduating senior whose mother came to the ceremonies pregnant.. I went off to college, married, had kids, and up until Rosie was around twenty, she was my childrens’ "magic Auntie," not much older than my children. She understood them and they adored her.
Rosie was "black Irish" with near-black hair and cobalt blue eyes, gifts from my father’s mother who was as Irish as they come. When Gran talked about "the auld sod" she was speaking from experience. Vivacious, near-genius-IQ smart, Rosie was popular with both students and teachers. She was elected Homecoming Queen, served on the student council, and was a killer debater in high school competitions. She is also tall and slender, a gift which I confess I envy.
After graduation, Rosie talked about medical school. She could have done, it too, if she hadn’t met Roger Sullivan. Handsome, smooth, and in my opinion, too good to be true, he swept her off her feet in more ways than one. They almost immediately started a family, and nine months to the day from their wedding their son Daniel was born. They seemed to be the perfect family.
It wasn’t until Rosie came pounding on my door one night around two a.m. that I learned that he also used her as a punching bag, and that she had been using cocaine because he wanted her to keep him company while he snorted. That night he had beaten the shit out of her and then locked her out of the house.
I called in both the police and social services - God knows what he was doing with or to their child, then almost two. The social worker and police officer found Roger zonked out in front of the television, while Daniel, clad in a full, wet diaper, clutched at the bars of his crib and screamed. I agreed to take little Daniel in until things settled down and my sister could figure out her next move.
Unfortunately, that next move involved stealing all the money out of my wallet, taking Daniel, and disappearing. Roger divorced her, got a court order saying he kept all the assets, and custody of Daniel, because Rosie never responded to the court documents, nor did she appear at the hearings.
The next time I saw Rosie was four years later. She called from the bus station and needed a place to crash. With many misgivings, I told her I’d come pick her up at the station.
I didn’t recognize her. She looked like a person in the last stages of AIDS. Thin as a rail, where she had always had a voluptuous figure. Nasty-looking hair. A face that could have come from a two-weeks–dead corpse. Sunken, lifeless eyes. Though she was tall, she was hunched over as if she were folding in on herself She was barely thirty, and she looked sixty. Easily.I was appalled, and said so. She said nothing.
The ride home was, thankfully, only about ten minutes. Rosie gave only grunts and one-word answers to my questions about where she had been, where her child was, what were her plans. She had coughing spells about every three minutes, bad enough that a couple of times I thought I was going to have to take her to the emergency department.
Even freshly showered with dinner under her belt, she looked awful. As I washed the dinner dishes, she wandered in and lifelessly picked up a dishtowel and began drying the dishes. I tried to be casual, but I really needed to know what was going on.
"So, do you have any plans? Are you going to be around here for long?"
She snorted. "I don’t have anyplace else to go. I’ve burned too many bridges."
I rinsed the last of the pots and pans. I set out two pottery mugs. "Decaf okay?"
She nodded. I ground the beans and got the coffee maker going. "Let’s go in and sit down, okay?" I took her hand and, unresisting, she followed me into the living room. I pointed her at a large overstuffed chair, and sat on the couch facing her.
"Now tell me everything that’s happened since we were together last. I got the birthday cards you sent me, but you never told me about your life."
She listlessly twirled a strand of hair around her finger as she talked. "After I ran away from your house –" she looked at me, pleading with me to understand – "we took a bus to Chicago. I just wanted to get away, as far away from Roger and my life with him as I could. So what do I do, stupid me, I got involved with people worse than him. I picked a place at random, bought a bus ticket to, it turned out, Cheyenne, which has got to be the windiest place in the country, even makes Chicago look tame. Got a job waitressing at a truck stop
." She stopped as if to get her thoughts in order. She kept twisting that lock of hair, first one way, then the other.
She took a deep breath. "I’m so ashamed, Molly. I hooked up with the first guy who acted nice to me, and ended up in Hell." Tears started tracking her cheeks. I picked up the box of tissues from the side table and handed it to hear. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose. "I ended up losing Daniel."
Shocked, I said "Oh, no! How could that happen!" I could only try to imagine what it felt like to lose a child.
Her voice wobbling with emotion, she continued, "I was using meth, heroin, anything I could trade – could trade – you know, for drugs." I struggled to keep my face neutral, nonjudgmental. I was horrified and I didn’t want to telegraph it to my sister.
She spun a sordid tale of a nightmare life - drug addiction, termination of her parental rights to Daniel because of her inability to stay clean and sober, getting passed from one man to another. A living Hell that was so far from my own upper- middle-class life that I didn’t even try to pretend to understand it. Finally an involuntary commitment to the state mental hospital’s rehab center. Once she had all the drugs out of her system, staff were able to diagnose the mental illness which had been disguised by the drug-induced craziness and paranoia. Bi-polar, the condition formerly known as manic-depressive state. Schizophrenia. A couple of other new "diseases" I had never heard of. She got up, went to the extra bedroom where she would be staying, and returned with her backpack, the single item of personal property she had. She reached in and pulled out a plastic ziploc bag and handed it to me. There were seven different identifiable prescription drugs and half a dozen film canisters containing a rainbow of pills.
I looked up from my examination of the contents of the bag. My mouth hung open, and all I could do was shake my head slowly back and forth and try to form words, opening and closing my mouth like a dying fish. Rosie sat there with her head bowed, her now-clean hair hanging down on both sides of her face, her hands folded in her lap. Awaiting judgment.
I laid down the bag, got up from the couch and went over to her. I knelt down in front of her and took her hands. "Rosie, if you’re ready to walk away from that old life and start working on a new one, I’m game. You can stay here while you figure out what you want to do. The only rule is, no drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. Can you live with that?" She nodded slowly.
I stood up. "Then let’s get started right now." I went to the kitchen, poured the fresh coffee into the mugs, and brought them into the living room. "Still take it black?"
She nodded, a shadow of a smile playing across her face, and accepted the mug from me. We sat silently, blowing on our coffee and taking little sips. I waited for her to speak, not an easy thing for me. At that point, I was in my lawyer mode, and I had to squelch the urge to treat her like a client, to give advice, to map out a plan of action. But I kept waiting.
Eventually, she seemed to come to a decision. "All right then. I think I need to see a doctor before I do anything else. I’ve done a lot of risky things and I want to make sure I won’t bring anything home that could harm you."
I nodded. "You need to put on a few pounds, too, so you don’t look so much like a survivor of Auschwicz. You try to apply for a job looking like that, the only job you’ll get is demonstrating caskets at the funeral home."
She looked up sharply, and began to laugh. I laughed with her. But it felt more like crying.
After a week she was gone again.
26It took Rosie most of an hour to find me. She had to call twice on her cell phone, for directions. I was amazed that she had not only a cell, but a car. She must be coming up in the world.
When I heard the car pull into my turnaround, I walked out onto the deck. The driver’s door of the scruffy-looking green Corsica opened and my sister unfolded herself from the seat. I hardly recognized her. Her hair, now mostly gray, was short, too short. Shaved-head-with-a-month’s-growth short. But her posture was good, and she seemed to have more spirit than the last time I had seen her.
I stepped off the deck and walked toward her, holding out my arms. She smiled and wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her hard. "Welcome to my little slice of heaven."
She turned in a complete circle, taking in the winter starkness of the woods, the snow-laden pines and firs, my cabin, with a wide-eyed wonder you usually see only in children.
"Wow, sis, this is so...it’s wonderful! How long have you lived here?"
As we stepped onto the deck and went into the house, I explained briefly how I came to be in the U.P. She listened, wide-eyed, totally focused on what I was saying, as if I would disappear if she took her eyes off me. While I talked, I poured coffee into pottery mugs – my own creations, this time – and placed one on the bird’s-eye maple table next to her chair. I didn’t mention recent events.
When I had finished, I asked "So, what’s been up with you? I sent you a birthday card every year, but the last three have come back as undeliverable, and I worried about you."
She hung her head and sighed. "It’s been a hard road, Molly. " She put her hands up to forestall comment. "I know, you pays your ticket and takes your chances, as Dad always said. I made my choices, and I’ve paid the consequences." She shifted in her chair, as if her back hurt and she was seeking a comfortable position.
"After I, well, ripped you off the last time, I hooked up with some people, well, let’s just say I thought they were friends at the time, and the short version is, instead of taking my prescriptions, I went back to street drugs. Spent a couple of years in and out of rehab and mental hospitals, finally walked out of the one in Utah. You can’t believe that place - it’s older than God, and half of it is shut down, only the absolute worst people are still there, and that includes," she looked up and I saw a flash of the grin that was the old Rosie’s trademark, "half of the staff."
She shifted again, and I caught a grimace of pain. "I got beat up a couple of times and ended up with a bad back from it. But that’s not the worst part."
She took a deep breath, as if gathering up courage. "Sis, I’m a mess. I have Hepatitis C,"
I winced. No cure, possible death sentence. Common among needle users.
And," she paused. A hand went up to twirl a lock of hair, something she’d done since childhood. She remembered, winced, and dropped the hand to her lap. "And, I’m HIV positive."
I gasped involuntarily, and my eyes started to burn. "Oh, Jesus, Rosie, I’m so sorry."
She put up a hand to stop any further sympathy. "I’m not done yet. I just finished a round of chemotherapy and radiation. I have cervical cancer, and it’s metastasized to my lungs."
The world closed in on me. Everything seemed to recede, sound muffled, as if I were wrapped in a thick, palpable fog which obscured everything except what was going on in my chest. It was difficult to breathe. The only other time I had experienced anything similar was some years ago, when I had to help extricate a guy from his smashed up car, and he had nearly been decapitated when his head went through the windshield. I came close to passing out then, and I felt the same now.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. In, slowly. Out, slowly. In. Out. The world came back into focus, and I could hear Rosie talking to me. The heaviness receded, and my eyes finally took in Rosie’s worried face. "You okay, sis?"
I nodded. "I don’t know what to say. You just laid a lot of heavy on me, Rosie."
"I know. I’m sorry. But with Mom and Dad gone, I don’t know where else to turn. Our dear brother, of course, is not an option." Our brother Buckminster, named after Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, was, as Rosie said, not an option. If for no other reason than his trophy wife would object to having a drug addict in her home.
I snorted. ‘Yeah. Ol’ Bucky would probably crap in his tailored Hong Kong suits if you showed up on his doorsteps." We shared a giggle at the picture of our pompous brother opening his door to find a haggard Rosie standing there. The Buck
ster is one of the country’s top heart surgeons with a pricey office in New York, and all the accoutrements of wealth. The top of the line cars - Beemers, last I heard - the mansion, the nanny for his kids so his airhead wife wouldn’t have to dirty her hands changing a diaper. I was amazed that she ever had sex, much less had a child. It might have mussed her hair.
With that rather uncharitable thought, I stood up, went over to Rosie, and hugged her. "Okay, Rosie, what are we going to do here. What’s the deal with your medical care."
"I actually had a job in St. Paul, one with a few benefits, and the health insurance covered a lot of my medical expenses. But I hit the maximum and they won’t pay any more. I had surgery to take care of the first cancer, then had chemo and radiation, and I thought we’d licked it." She looked down at her hands, as if the answer to a significant question lay within them. "I just had a followup with my doctor, and he’s found a lesion in my left lung. Wants to do surgery. But I don’t have any more health insurance, and because I had a job, I couldn’t get any Medicaid.."
She looked up at me. "So I sold everything but my car, and came here to die."
"Jesus Christ on a skateboard, Rosie, you can’t just give up like that!" I was appalled, not only at her defeatism, but at the society which takes care of the very rich and the very poor, and ignores everybody in between.
She shrugged. "I don’t have a lot of options, sis. I’ve come to grips with the fact that I don’t have a lot of time left. But," she looked up at me with a new resolve, "I want your help."
"Rosie, you don’t even have to ask. We’ve got some good doctors here and -"
