Part 3: A Premonition and A Push

I don't claim to be truly psychic--cause I'm not--but I do on occasion experience a form of premonition. It doesn't happen often, but I have learned to share the occasional odd thought out loud as a kind of fact-checking. If I say it out loud and it happens, I feel safer calling it a premonition.

That being said, in January the following occurred:
I often share familial stories with my community college students. I use them as a way of modeling how our lives do actually have connections to the literature, and to each other. At the beginning of the Spring 2011 semester I was teaching a class at the Santa Rosa campus of the junior college on Mondays and Wednesdays. I was about to share some story about my strange family configuration and where I am in the sibling line-up (see Storyscape Journal archives for the whole story) when it suddenly occurred to me that if either my brother or sister were on campus taking classes, they might hear a bastardized version of a story that isn't terribly flattering when told first hand. I jokingly asked the class if they knew any of my family; they laughed and shook their heads. It nagged at me for a bit and I even told the hubby about it. I wondered if either sibling would ever take college classes. Then I wondered if I would recognize either of them if I saw them on campus. When I saw my mother for the last time in May of 2004, she gave me a picture of my grown brother. At that time I hadn't seen him since he was 17 years old. In the picture he was in his mid-thirties. I cried because I would not have known him had I seen him on the street. I don't even have the benefit of a recent picture of my sister.

Six months later:
I am trying to decide what to do about contact with my sister. I have experienced a pretty wide range of emotions. I responded to her invitation to call her by asking when was a good time to call. She didn't answer.

I asked for advice on Facebook and the overwhelming response was to do a background check. So I paid the $19.99 to an online company (there are a ton) and got back very little information: A couple of phone numbers (one of which matched the one I had), three different addresses (all in Santa Rosa), one hit from criminal background (with very little information). I was about to give up the idea and not call her when I decided to take one more look at her FB page.

She had 9 friends listed so I checked out their profiles. None of them seemed particularly scary or off-putting. A couple seemed interesting, some even seemed like people who might be in recovery. This was a hopeful sign.

Then it occurred to me that if my sister had a Facebook page, then she also had some access to computers and that could be a very good sign. It has been my experience that as ubiquitous as computers and the internet are, not everyone is online. Many of my students struggle with the technology available to them. A surprising number can't quite get the hang of email. Many use their cell phones for only texting and phone calls, not for Facebook or Twitter or email.

So I made some calls and did some web crawling and found a page of information that said my sister had been a student at Santa Rosa Junior College. IN JANUARY!! She had had classes on campus when I was teaching. One of her instructors was my friend Anne Marie whose class was on the same floor and building and at the same time I had been on campus. I called Anne Marie, but realized that my sis had dropped the class after the first two weeks of classes. My friend had no memory of her. But the fact remained that my sister and I had been on campus at the same time I was wondering about her.

This was a very good sign and all the push I needed. Suddenly all of the reservations and fears that I had about seeing or talking with my sister fell away. I was compelled to see her.

Immediately.

The feeling was so strong, in fact, that I did a new online search to find her most recent address, confirm that the phone number she had given me was a land-line and was off the couch changing my clothes and getting ready to head out the door before my poor hubby had any idea what was going on. I took a few minutes to retrieve her earrings.

Haven't I mentioned the earrings?

My sister was a flower girl in both of my first two weddings. For the second I bought her a pair of faux gold and diamond earrings. After the ceremony was over I offered to hold onto them for safekeeping. The guilt at keeping her earrings from her was kind enough to stay within the confines of the jewelry box most of the time, only coming out when I came across them or the handful of times I wore them myself. It's as if all of the remaining guilt I had carried with me as a child had clung to the earrings. I cleaned them and found a tiny decorative oval metal box to put them in. If I was going to see my sister, I was going to return her earrings. All the while I was getting ready, I felt a really strong sense of urgency as if I had a finite amount of time to accomplish my mission.

The earrings and box went into my front pocket with my phone, my wallet was locked in the glovebox, and I was on my way. I left the house alone and drove the 18 miles to Santa Rosa. I tried to imagine what she would look like. She is ten years younger than me. She was always slender, her hair was a dirty blonde when we were growing up. She loved sweets and I wondered if that had changed her metabolism. Had she inherited the body type from Gram's side of the family (who I favor physically) or retained the slenderness from youth? After giving birth to three babies, anything was possible.

The closer I got, the more I envisioned a reunion from a movie. I imagined parking outside a tiny rental house with young children playing outside. A woman would happen to walk out of the door to check on the children and would look up at me, a seeming stranger on their quiet street. We would lock eyes. I would say "Bambe?" and she would say "Ginger?" and we would run into each other's arms. The fantasy didn't go beyond the hug but it did repeat itself over and over in my head as I inched closer to her street. It was occasionally interrupted by the voice in my head that would point out that the simplicity of that reunion was highly unlikely. Impossible in fact. I needed to stop that nonsense and focus on finding the street and the address.

Just as I reached the street she lived on, my phone rang. I jumped about a mile and answered my phone as I pulled over. It was my son who was quite intrigued when I told him that I was stalking my sister. My siblings are a bit of an abstract concept to my children. They are aware they have an aunt and uncle, but apart from a few pictures, a few mentions in my writing, and the very few stories I tell about my childhood years, they have only fuzzy pictures of the reality of these two people. The phone call required me to pull around the corner and ultimately drive around the block to return to the house numbers where I thought she lived. Once off the phone I found a parking space closest to the spot I believed I would find her house.

As I pulled up to the curb, and a woman walked out from between two buildings toward the street. I noticed then that the two buildings faced each other creating a kind of long courtyard between them, all doors face toward that yard. The address I had for my sister could easily be marked on one of those doors. I looked back at the woman and saw how slender she was; her face was very thin which was highlighted by the long pair pulled sharply back into a ponytail/bun. At first I only saw a brief profile and her back. She had on short black shorts and a tank top. Her arms were lightly tanned beneath various tattoos that were scattered on her arms, back and neck. She disappeared momentarily behind the backside of the building farthest from me and reappeared to speak to someone in a small pickup truck who pulled up after I parked. I wondered if I was witnessing a drug deal when the door opened and it looked like something passed between the woman and someone in the cab. I looked away.

I took a breath and decided to find the address. I stepped out of my car and walked behind it to the sidewalk. I looked back at the woman who had moved back again toward the far building and was holding a cigarette. Ah, no drug deal; she had simply bummed a smoke. Logically it would make more sense to ask where I could find the address than to wander into people’s yards.

The woman was watching me so I walked toward her. I wondered if it was Bambe and searched her features for something familiar. It was in that moment that I noticed the haunted look pass over her face. Her eyes were wide and only mildly frightened, as if the ghost in front of her was a welcome sight. And I suppose that I was.

I carry many of our mother’s features on my face; there are only a small number of people alive who react to me in the way she did at that moment. But I wasn’t sure yet if she was my sister, so I walked toward her and said, “Can you help me?” Her reaction was too close to the fantasy that had run through my mind on the drive.

“What are you looking for?” was the reply I heard. She may have asked who I was looking for.

“I’m looking for 492.”

That was when we knew.

“Ginger?”

“Bambe?”

She dropped her cigarette and ran to me at full speed. I moved toward her as quickly as I could. The impact our bodies made is not the sound you typically hear in the movie scene. It was very clearly the sound two bodies make when they hit; less noisy than the impact on a football field, more so than two lovers meeting in a field of daisies.

We held each other through that impact. Tight. Hard. We stood there with our arms wrapped around each other. And stood there. Neither wanted to loosen her hold or let go.

“How are you?” She said as if making regular conversation with someone she had seen the day before. Neither of us let go.

“Good. How are you?” I answered.

Part II: Reluctance

According to two converging pieces of family lore, after my mother left me with at my grandparents’ house (I was somewhere around three years old), my grandmother tried to take me to the doctor to get my immunizations updated. The doctor kindly informed Gram that because she had no legal rights, that they could not give me any medical attention no matter how well intentioned she was.

So a lawyer was contacted and temporary custody papers were drawn up. Gram drove to a house in Sonoma or Boyes Hot Springs where my mother was staying. My father was also in the house, although they were long since separated and the divorce was in full swing. The house was apparently full of people they both knew. He was willing to sign the papers and felt that is was important that my mother sign them also. She refused. My father told her that he would beat every person in the house until she signed the papers. Yes, he threatened her and coerced her into signing away temporary custody of me. There were no contradictions years later in their separate accounts of the details of that day. He felt strongly it was for the best. She disagreed but ultimately acquiesced. She insisted for the rest of her life that she did not agree to completely give up custody of me. She only agreed to a temporary custody situation.

My mother’s version of this story was told over and over while my siblings were growing up. They heard it far more often than I did, but we all understood the moral of the story. The implication was clear: signing even a temporary order will guarantee loss of custody. You will be cheated out of what is yours. I suppose on some level my mother felt both complicit and cheated. For her there was an underlying truth that she could be cheated out of her own child simply by signing one piece of paper.

From my perspective, that piece of paper had little or nothing to do with the where I grew up. I lived with Gram and Grandpa because my mother left me. A piece of the custody story that my mother perhaps didn’t tell my siblings is that she dropped me off at my grandparent’s house for another long weekend of babysitting. My grandfather told her not to bother coming back for me: the implication of course was that he wouldn’t let me go. My mother protested and a verbal argument ensued. But, and this is an important piece, she left me there. Instead of walking back into the house and taking me with her, she left me. Instead of going directly to the police department and telling them her father refused to hand her daughter over, she left me. Instead of contacting a lawyer, she left me. Presumably she left on her weekend away and followed Grandpa’s advice not to return for me.

Fast forward a generation. My sister has given birth to her third child. When the baby is born my sister is an inmate at a women’s prison. My mother and her husband are there and take the baby home with them. My sister refuses to sign any papers allowing my mother any legal rights of guardianship. The state did have some authority and gave my mother temporary custody of the baby anyway. Later, in argument between mother and daughter, my sister told my mother that there would be no signing of any papers and that my mother had better not take the baby away from her mother, although my sister did not claim her daughter once released from prison. Sometime before she died, my mother obtained legal custody of her granddaughter. Upon her death my brother became the baby's legal guardian. So the cycle, punctuated by great irony, continued.

These stories and many more began circling through my brain as I attempted to decide how exactly I wanted to proceed with contacting my sister, or if I really wanted to proceed at all. I had learned very different lessons from the stories of custody papers and signatures than my siblings had. I believe that they had learned how easy it was to become a victim and that perpetuating that sense of victimhood somehow gave them a sense of justification for their actions.

Over the years I had several arguments with my mother about her life choices. There always seemed to be something else she needed in her life in order to make it better or to be happy. She needed a new place to live, or a new husband, or a new boyfriend. She spent her life wandering from situation to situation led in large part by her addiction to alcohol. Because both women gave up custody of all three of their children, it seemed logical to me that they would have the same attitude about those choices.

My first impulse was to call my sister. My second came so quickly on the heals of the first that there was no time for impulsive actions. And I was driving, I had no headset and a bad signal, so I only had time to wonder what she was like. That took me to a very uncomfortable place. I attempted to reconcile the little girl I had known who desperately wanted love and was terrified that people were angry with her with the woman who had ended up in prison. The conversations I conjured didn’t go well from the onset. It was easy to imagine the stories about how she had been wronged by the system, or her son’s grandparents, or her oldest daughter’s father, or our mother and brother.

I live my life so vastly differently from the way my siblings live theirs. I live in a nice house and drive a fairly nice car in a town less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. My brother lives in a double-wide in Lake County. I have been pretty happily married for more than 20 years. Neither of my siblings has married. I can go to the grocery store and buy steak whenever I want. My siblings grew up on food stamps, and so far as I know their incomes haven’t improved much in adulthood. Most importantly, I raised my own children.

When I was a kid, I carried a fairly heavy burden around: I felt guilty that I lived with Gram and Grandpa and had a better life than my siblings. I believed it was better because we didn’t move often; we had nice things; my grandparents didn’t drink to excess; my clothes were often new and didn’t have stains or cigarette burn holes in them. Our house wasn’t furnished with remnants from the garbage truck my step-dad worked on. In my school pictures my hair was always combed and I looked clean and well dressed. I somehow felt responsible for what my siblings lacked because I was the one who ended up living with Gram and Grandpa.

I eventually came to realize that I had no control over the situation and was able to shed the coat of guilt I had made for myself. But shedding the fear that they resented me was much more difficult. This is really the crux of what made me balk at calling my sister right away. That and the fear that she was as immersed in her own victimhood as our mother had been.