Brilliant Disguise

Most people, when they hear a capsuled question regarding “the truth”, slide back to the infamous line from “A Few Good Men” where Jack Nicholson shouts to Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth!” It’s a great decree and one I’ve pondered a few times myself.

It makes me question, do we sanitize our answers of the truth to protect the person asking, or to protect ourselves? Or does it depend on the question being asked? There is power after all in holding on to knowledge or letting it run free.

Do we really want the truth, or do we want the answer to verify what we hope the truth should be?

People get confused about the concept of “Creative Nonfiction” and assume that perhaps the writer takes the facts and adds smoke rings of fiction to make it hazy. That is not the case. Writers in this genre take real events and try to tell them in a style that makes it more interesting. I envision it is much like writing a song, where the craftsman takes a well known topic and weaves known scenarios into a poetic fabric that offers a blanket of relatability about life and the human condition for others to uncover. This project is a bit different because I am still struggling to understand.

My story has unfolded quickly in these last few weeks, but I have been conflicted with how to put the words down that do not cause pain for those caught in this emotional landslide with me. So I have hesitated this week and asked a few people for permission, and not asked others. This might be creative or callus, but it is the track I am on.

My sister and I have a tangled relationship. There are threads that are tied very firmly to the core, and ones that drift about in any breeze. Jean Carolyn is 6 years older and as a child that would have been enough of an age gap to make me a bit of a nuisance. I remember blackmailing her boyfriends to give me ice-cream truck money so I would disappear.

My sister and my uncle Anthony are the only remaining people who can offer any insight into the question that I really want answered. Was my conception really an unpursued event that remained hidden because the main characters didn’t want to ask the hard questions? Who knew that I was Gordon Carey’s daughter, or possible daughter, and who remained in the dark? My mother surely must have known, but did she share it with anyone else, or did she carry it to her grave?

My sister was the first person I called when I was sitting at the computer looking at the DNA breakdowns on 23and Me. I asked her if she knew of anyone named Carey from our childhood.

She asked me how it was spelled.

I told her C-A-R-E-Y.

She answered, “Oh, I thought it was spelled without an ‘e’. C-A-R-Y”.

I immediately thought, ‘What were you a 6 year-old spelling bee champion, that you would know variations’? I’m hopeful I could spell my own last name at 6, but suspect if I could, it was more from a practiced routine and I probably still flipped a letter or 2 backwards. It was only later in the day when I talked to my new cousin Christine and she mentioned a variation in the spelling of the name, that my brain rewound and highlighted my sister’s wording. The Carey family were rum runners during prohibition and after, and spelled their name like the city in North Carolina. Cary, without an added “E”. When Paul Gordon (my grandfather) moved to Baltimore, either by accident or choice, he added the ‘E” as was only possible in that self-reporting era.

My sister has denied having any real knowledge of the family, just mentioning she remembered a car lot and men about my mother’s age. After talking to Christine, I suspected my sister was not being truthful. I don’t say lying, because there are degrees of qualifying not being truthful, and some of the threads of our relationship fray greatly on those elements of withholding and deflecting information.

To be clear, I don’t really know why I ever sent in a 23and Me DNA test kit, but I suspect it was because I spent a large part of my adult life believing there was no way I could genetically have the same DNA nucleotides as my sister. I suspected one of us was switched in the hospital before they put all the safeguards in place to protect babies from being kidnapped. Our vast differences are more complex than a MIT math board depicting the quadratic equation that would launch a Mars rocket landing.

As a child, my sister was the perfect traditional big sister. She was girly, she was beautiful, and she was fascinating. She rolled her hair in orange juice cans to get the bounce and waves that she lacquered into a classic shoulder flip. She loved the Beatles and knew all the dance moves on the Buddy Dean show. She knew how to use make-up to perfection and had those lovely full lips that modeled all the new Avon lipsticks. She was kind to me about a third of the time, and not tolerant the remainder because I was too much her opposite, and probably, to be fair, really annoying. I was more interested in hitting baseballs across Eastern Avenue in our version of sandlot teams, and rescuing any variety of animal or fowl. In summer, when she was ‘babysitting’ me, I was shoved, willingly, out the door to play all day. She sat a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of grape Koolaid on the steps at lunchtime and let me back in the house before my mom or step-dad came home from work so I could wash the sweat and grime from my sunsuited body to mostly look presentable.

People commented frequently that I was as dark as a beer bottle next to my fair-skinned sister and mother.

My mom had very few woman as friends, and looking back even these were not the strong bonds that most women make. One was 25 years older, and not a threat for male attention, and one was very subservient to my mother’s strong will. It was my sister who served the role of confidant from a young age. I’m sure this evolved through the years and she didn’t tell a 12 year old about sexual exploits, but my young sister helped her pick out clothes, and do hair, and make-up, and took dozens of kodak photographs of my mother in gowns or bathing suits, lying across her bed or standing by the window. I had no interest in those things so I happily sat on my hassock in another room instead of on the real furniture (in case I was a little dusty) and colored, read, or played with my Breyer horses.

Everything tilted when my sister turned 18. She had met a fabulous young man and was to be married. She was actually tolerate of me almost full time at that point and helped me make chewing gum wrapper chains that we hung around our room. I’m not sure how the disaster unfolded, I was just told that there was not going to be a wedding and my sister cried for what seemed the entire summer. Later, as an adult, I was able to put the pieces together a bit. Richard, her boyfriend, came from a wealthy Italian family in Towson. His family was not thrilled that my sister’s background included tobacco farmers and moonshiners, and a mother who worked outside the home. At the end of summer my sister enlisted in the NAVY and was sent to Bainbridge and Norfolk. I was 12 then and we had moved to the country. I still spent my time outside but I was able to have my first dog and we had many adventures catching and releasing tadpoles, building forts, and proving Lassie wasn’t the only smart dog. I was just too self focused to look for anything that wasn’t completely transparent so I didn’t question why she left abruptly.

Before my sister left home, we called her Carolyn. The Navy, being formal and efficient, used her first name, Jean. That makes the segments easier to separate. The sister I knew and grew up with was Carolyn. The woman who came back was Jean. Jean married another sailor, Terry, a man from Nebraska, during her 18 months away. The woman who was now Jean, did not look like my sister or act like my sister. She was much heavier, not interested in make-up or self care, and had cut her hair, which had somehow turned dark. Of course, I realize now Carolyn had suffered a major life crisis and instead of going for counseling, if it were even available, tried to deflect by running to a life not suited for her. Her marriage was a roadmap to a disaster that led to many separations, the birth of two children, and an ultimate divorce. Because she had lost her compass and her only direction was down at this point, her choice in men spiraled to a threshold I could not fathom. If she had used a dating profile, which she didn’t, she would have had to check off boxes of desired traits that had the commonality of being unemployed, addiction oriented, probable jail time, and have a propensity for verbal and or physical abuse. As a young adult myself, I found it difficult to find any commonality with Jean. I wanted to, because I remembered Carolyn, and for my nephew and niece, but the path of communication was almost obliterated. My mother was tougher. She continued to offer advice, money, job opportunities, cars, and compassion. I would make a new year’s resolution each year to try harder to be a ‘good empathetic sister’. One year I broke it 4 hours into January 1st when my three year-old nephew put a moon-pie in the toaster because he got up hungry at 11 and my sister was still in bed. I never made it past the second week of January of any year that I took up the challenge.

I’m not sure how our adult life would have evolved if Jean had not discovered religion for a period of time when her children were in their teens. This gave us a bit of a timeout card as it would have seemed like yelling at a nun in an oddly placed parallel universe. She and her (2nd or 3rd) husband John, had moved to a town in North Carolina when she announced she was now a member of the Pentecostal Church. Her mission was to offer me the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. Her church believed that women should never cut their hair, only wear dresses and never pants, and to follow the leadership of men in all matters. By this time, I was a Maryland State Trooper, carried a gun, wore pants with black stripes down the outside seam, and in charge of a team of men. I never visited her house because that husband had an open warrant in Maryland and I told her I couldn’t knowingly associate with the criminal element. He could never visit Maryland because they suspected, correctly, that I would have had him arrested. So when she visited, she stayed with my mother. (My niece and nephew had moved out of the house by this time) I used to want to mark the pantry door when she was in town by how long her hair was at that point, but never acted on it because my mother quelled the thought with a look. Neither of us thought there was much to say, and we developed a type of trivia filibuster conversation pattern. She would tell me the plot and characters of a series of TV shows and I would tell her the pedigrees of Great Dane breeding lines. She offered to lead to me to my eternal salvation, and I offered to tell her how I had delivered 20 criminals to their confined space at the Maryland House of Corrections. She told us about the fellowship of her church and prayer meetings that went into the night. I told her how I had been undercover and infiltrated a few subversive groups, and even gone to jail to get evidence from a woman who murdered her husband and business partner.

“And how did that work since you are a cop?” she asked.

“That’s the point of being undercover, I had a different name and cover story”.

“How could you keep all that straight? You have to lie to a lot of people, they aren’t all criminals. Don’t you feel bad tricking people?”

I didn’t answer her. I didn’t feel bad–there had been a woman at an office complex where I had worked undercover for 2 months to get information on a huge gambling operation who had thrown me a birthday party on my fake birthday and told me she knew we were going to be best friends for life. A week later, I was pulled out leaving no good-byes, and the FBI, as planned, took over turning our suspects and later applied for RICO violations. Surely no trickery was involved. She wasn’t the target.

“I heard people in your denomination speak in tongues and roll on the floor, how do you even know what they are saying? Is there a translation book?”

We would enter a bit of stare-down that I had perfected in childhood, and I occasionally saw a glimmer, just a slight edge, of Carolyn, but then she would revert back to series 6 of Magnum PI and Higgins’ relationship with the Lads.

Jean eventually dropped out of her church. The next time I saw she had a bobbed haircut and was wearing shorts. Her daughter had moved to Pennsylvania and had her first child and my sister decided to change states to be closer. A few years after that, my mom and her (then) middle husband joined them, again solidifying how strong their bond was.

The day after I talked to Christine, I called my sister again. My investigative skills were a bit dull, but I suspected my sister knew much more than she wanted to me believe. I have a technique when asking questions that has worked well for me in the past. I give a few queries together without pause, mostly complex, and the one I really want answered is near the end. It’s bit easier and the mind always goes for this when confused or wary. And people typically answer that one truthfully.

In 15 minutes I learned 2 additional facts about my father and/or his family that my sister had previously denied having any knowledge of, other than the spelling differences of the name.

When Carolyn was 14 years old she had gone to the car lot owned by the Careys where my mother was given a car.

“She was given a car?’

“Yes. She and Randy were separated and he took the only car so she needed transportation to take you to North Carolina and for work.”

“So I was 8. I was… 8. And mom was still in a relationship with the Carey family enough to get a car?”

“I don’t know how it all came about. But when she and Randy got back together he made her give the car back.”

It took another few minutes and and practiced yoga breathing to get to the 2nd fact.

“I was sorting mom’s mail one day and there was a letter from an attorney and there were 2 names listed. One was Paul Carey. And the other one I can’t remember because I didn’t know it.”

“And when was this?”

“It was a while before Buddy died…”

“So….2018ish….”

“That sounds about right. I said to mom, hey here’s a name from the past. She told me it had to do with an Asbestos case and she would handle it. If they needed to talk to her, they could call. I put it back in the pile and I never saw it again.”

I struggled a bit and luckily she didn’t hear my notebook hit the wall. Did she not realize what she said? ‘A name from the past’ that was so familiar to her that she remembered it after all these years. I wanted an interview room, where I could turn up the heat, or turn it off, and to give her a cup of burnt coffee before grilling her good cop, bad cop, all the cops. But I had no jurisdiction. I had sister jurisdiction, and only half-sister at that. I wanted to yell into the phone, “Liar, Liar, your fucking pants you didn’t wear for 8 years, are on fire”, but I didn’t because that would be childish, and even though she quit her religious sect from the past, she has since gone on to get her masters degree in theology and is an ordained minister. Although she can’t speak in tongues, I think she can preach in Latin. Cussing like a sailor feels like the wrong approach, although you can’t miss the irony as her being one started part of this.

I remained silent and soon realized she was telling me about a new show on Netflix called ‘The Residence’, and we were up to the third episode. I waited for a gap in Cordelia Cupp’s saga before telling her I had to let the dogs out.

I knew I had to use finesse at this point, but I was feeling a little bit of Rambo coming up on my right.

In the movie, “A Few Good Men”, after Nicholson’s character utters that famous phrase, he does go on to share the truth. And the truth is ugly –but it gets the acquittal of two innocent men. It also loses for them the one thing they cared the most about. And that was a life changer.