Janet seemed so grown-up. Mom seemed to talk to her like an adult.
It was confusing.
I sat down on a chair. The doorbell rang, and as if she knew it was going to ring, Janet quickly stood up as if to run. Mother said, “Stay here,” and she peeked around the kitchen door.
“I think it’s the police.”
My sister was scared but fierce.
“Janet don’t run or they’ll catch you.”
Mother looked at me and Janet said, “Rickie, can you go see who’s at the door without them seeing you?”
Quiet as a mouse and using my powers of invisibility, I tiptoed along the old wooden floor, over the braided rug, and without being seen I looked through the silky curtain to see one single policeman standing there. Waiting.
Janet said, “Can you answer the door? Tell the policeman that your mother is gone at work. Tell him you can’t let anyone in the house because you’re alone. Don’t say anything else.”
I was excited. I had a part in the adult’s play! A part in the Jones Gang!
Mother said, “You know you don’t have to do this.”
Sure I didn’t.
If you do something you know is wrong, is your soul discolored, your future altered? I felt excited to help my family, and ashamed to lie to the policeman. I had been taught never to lie to anyone but I didn’t want Janet to be taken back to Good Shepherd. I wanted to be part of the two of them.
I opened the door. He was a policeman alright. He had a gun. I liked him. He was nice.
“Is your mother here?”
Headshake.
“So you’re here alone?”
Nod.
“And what is your name?”
“Rickie.”
“Janet Adele, is she your sister?”
“Uh-huh. Yes.”
“Has she been here today?”
“No.”
I was acting like I was there alone and I thought he believed me.
“So, she hasn’t been here at all?”
“No.” Wait a second, I’m practicing my Academy Award acceptance speech.
Ad-libbing then, “My mother is at work. She has to work lunch. She said I can’t let strangers in the house.”
He seemed to be going for it.
“When your mother comes home—when is that? Rickie Lee, can you ask her to call us? If your sister comes home . . .”
He called me Rickie Lee. I loved him.
Out of the corner of my eye, right behind the police officer, my sister was sneaking. She was just four feet behind him, tiptoeing across the lawn. A cartoon character, lifting her feet up to exaggerated heights, tempting fate when she could easily have gone another way. Implicating me because now I had to keep her secret as she escaped behind the policeman who up until this moment, I had been taught to respect and admire. Almost to the driveway and teenage freedom, she had the audacity and courage to test it.
“Uh, she . . .”
I tried to stare only at the policeman, but I saw my sister in back of him and my eyes probably betrayed my surprise.
Suddenly the officer turned and leapt in one impossible motion right off the porch and onto my sister, tackling Janet on our front lawn. It was horrifying. His body was on top of my sister, wrestling her as he pinned her arms to the ground. Janet kicked and hit and howled. She fought with all her might and she was a big girl, but he was stronger.
I cried out, “Noooo! Get OFF her!” and then I jumped off the porch, ran to the two of them, and tried to pull him off her. I punched the officer and kicked him, beating him with my little fists. I was on his back as he tried to cuff her. My mother was there then, pulling me out of this horrific scene.
“Let go of my sister! Get off of my sister! GET OFF! LET HER GO!”
The hillbilly neighbors were out of their houses. My mother yelled, “What are you looking at?” as the cop put Janet in the back of his car. Yelling at neighbors! Mom was crossing the invisible barrier to address the audience. Mother, how daring!
“Janet, I’m sorry!” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me. I was crying too hard. My PJs had grass stains on them. If I had done my part right, she’d be free now. I felt terribly guilty.
The officer, disheveled and disappointed, looked at me, just for a moment, a look that lasted a lifetime. His eyes said that I, a little girl, had lied to him. I was so ashamed. Mother seemed to be passive, neither stopping nor helping Janet—a parenting position she would always take with Janet. Now I was a liar, too. One thing for sure, cops did not shoot kids back then. Not for hitting them, not for kicking them, and not for running away. Of course, back then teenagers didn’t shoot cops. Cops and kids, it was a boxing ring with rules everyone respected. Hard to imagine now.
I was crying as the cop put my handcuffed sister in the back seat. Janet looked out the window at me, tears on her face. I like to think that my sister remembered my heroic actions and turned to smile at me from the car as it drove away. She was like a movie hero on her way to the gallows. Maybe she knew she’d get away again soon. I want to write it that way, if you don’t mind. Yes, she turned and smiled, as if to say, “You did good, kid.”
In reality, I stood there in the yard watching the car disappear until my mama said, “Come inside now.”
No one seemed to notice what had happened to me that morning. Seeing violence on my own sister on our front yard was fundamentally damaging. We did not discuss it except to laugh about how funny Janet looked just before the policeman leaped off the porch and tackled her.
My parents had fiercely protected me, but Mom considered Janet’s arrest as an ordinary part of growing up because of her own childhood. I, however, had not experienced anything like this. I had an entire moral code that had just been shaken to the core.
My father would have been unhappy that Mother had involved me in this criminal scheme. He recognized that the fragile construction of self-esteem had much to do with consistency in teaching kids right and wrong (even though he was not always the exemplar of the ideals he espoused).
My sense of duty, of being a good girl, was a shield between myself and the cruel children around me. They might not like me but I respected myself for my basic morality and kindness, and I could prove my goodness by not lying or doing hurtful things. I had dignity as my shield against childhood cruelties.
Now I was much less than a liar. I had lied and even fought with a policeman! He then confirmed my bad-girl status with his expression of disappointment. With my self-esteem shaken, I would have little to lean on when kids turned on me.
Janet was done with childhood, with Good Shepherd, with all of it. At fifteen years of age she had seen too much of a life that she did not enjoy one bit. She soon ran away again, but this time she got pregnant and moved to Minnesota with her teenage hoodlum, army-bound husband.
Janet, Bob M., their newborn daughter, and toddler son returned to our home two years later. Their firstborn, Bobby Jr., cried every night but Mother insisted his parents get up with him because Janet and Bob M. needed to be the responsible ones. Some nights no one came so I would go to him. One night I went in to check on him and found his father, holding the baby upside-down by his feet and shaking him violently. “Shut up shut up,” he hissed. This was a violence far more horrible than anything I’d ever imagined. I was petrified, unable to move as I stood in the doorway.
My mother