So Mom Called Me One Night

A story that I will never forget..

It was back in the middle of 2005 or 2006 that I was sitting on my couch watching T.V. while winding down. At around 8:30–9:00pm I’d start to feel my eyelids getting heavier and my body weight could be felt through my dropping shoulders and arms. Around that time, I got a call, it was my mom.

“Mmmyello” I said. (how Homer Simpson says it)

On the other end of the line was a frantic voice, “Aaron!, We have to go find your sister”.

“Why do we need to do that?” I asked quite apathetically.

Clearly irratated by my lack of concern, mom screamed, “She was kidnapped!!”.

Let’s start off with a small amount of background here. This will explain my (what most people would see as unusual) inability to give a crap about my sister or her impending doom at the hands of her captors.

A little backstory here: I am the second child in a family of 6. I have two other brothers and sister. She was born after me. Then a few years later my youngest brother came into being. So she is not an only child or the youngest or the first born. Her only distinguishing charateristic was the fact that she was born female. That’s it.

Given this rare and special situation it was common that she was lavished with all the attention and privileges that your standard princess would. You know, the keys to the kingdom and the cake to eat too and such. She got birthday partys and we didn’t. She got to go clothing shopping with my aunt and we got to hear all about it (we were so grateful for those smattering of crumbs at our feet).

More to the real heart of the matter, whenever she cried, it was taken care of. Even to the point where she could just make it up and we’d get the blame. I even remember a time when she didn’t want to eat her food because it wasn’t what she wanted, so my parents had to shower her with all sorts of attention just to get her to eat it. She was well over 12 at the time.

She also does this “smirk” when she wants to see if someone is looking at her after she does anything, even saying grace. So, as you can tell, she is an attention whore and every single thing in this world she’s ever done was to that end. If she can get attention, she’ll do it.

That compulsion to seek any and all attention is obviously encoded in her from upbringing, so naturally she transfers that need onto anyone she gets close to. Mommy and daddy aren’t constantly around to give it to her all the time now, so that job falls upon those poor souls that she calls “dates”.

As time went on, I grew to understand what kind of “person” my sister was and after a time I chose to banish her to the what I call the “shadow realm”. What this means is that I have actively worked to deny her the very thing she desires above all else. I deprive her of attention. I don’t look at her, I don’t talk to her, I don’t acknowledge that she is even in the zip code. I only know she is there, but give her the designation of a shadow.

This is a comfortable arrangment and I’m perfectly fine with it. Is she? I don’t know/care…

So let’s get back to the story. I’m tired, mom is frantic, sister is MIA and honestly, I’m perfectly fine with most of that arrangment. I mean, who wants their mom to be frantic??

As I was saying, mom just told me she was kidnapped. My response was a confident and eyeroll filled “uh, huh….” then I calmly asked “how do you know?”

To which she replied (frantic continuing) “the neighbors saw it!!”

I asked, “what did they see?”.

As she started to lay out this truly un-credible story, I was just filled with annoyance and questions and a as you could guess, a little incredulousness.

It turns out that my sister and her boyfriend Sean (I think that was his name) were on a “date”. And according to eyewitness accounts in the trailer park culdesac, upon returning home there was an argument occurring in the vehicle. Indistingushable back and forth arging was leading up to something, but the neighbors couldn’t quite tell.

She then gets out of the vehicle, storms up the stair to the mobile home. As she “horror movie” fumbles for her keys to gain entry to where all would be safe. He gets out of the vehicle and allegedly shouts “NO!” while pointing in her direction. He procedes to walk to her in a threatening manner. He then grabs her arm, and walks her back to the vehicle in a way that could only be described as Olive Oil being taken by Brutus while screaming for help from Popeye.

He opens the passenger door, throws her into the front seat, slams it, then walks around to the other side, gets in, starts up the engine and they drive off into the night. The Princess has been abducted. Someone wake the King.

After listening to all of this, I had a thought.

Being cursed with a reasonable amount of critical thinking, I put a small amount of it to use and I asked Mom, “why didn’t she just get out?”.

Some how Mom knew the answer and replied with quiver in her voice, “She was scared!”.

I once again answered the best way I could, “Mmm, hmm, I see”. I continued, “well what do you want me to do? I don’t know a thing about this guy.”

She pleaded that I go out and drive around and try to find them.

Spotting a slight falicy in that normally solid logic, I said, “I don’t know what kind of vehicle he has, I don’t know where he hangs out, I’m quite sure I do not know where the LAIR is, or where he takes his other victims”.

Mom interjected, “he drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee”.

Thank God she gave me that valuable clue, not like there was a super huge craze for SUV’s from 2002 -2008. Yeah, finding a rough Jeep Grand Cherokee will be a breeze to spot at night.

Continuing my attempts to be helpful, I informed Mom of this, she didn’t seem to feel it was useful. I told her that the police may have better luck finding this particular Bond villain.

I asked, “what’s Dad think of this? Where is he?”

She then told me something I’ll never forget as long as I live, I may even use it at their eulogy.

She said and I quote, “He’s out looking for them, he went to Walmart to try and find them!”

Take as long as you need with that one…. I’ll wait…

Mom revealed something about Walmart that I may never have figured out on my own. It turns out that the miserable people who are there are victims and they need our help. I’ll be sure to pay attention to see if any of them are blinking out morse or silently mouthing “help me” or “find my dad”.

That said, I still didn’t feel compelled to leave the couch. I told mom I was going to bed and I’m not going out. Even if I did find them, it is a situation I didn’t need to be involved in. Like I said, I don’t know this guy, is he going to hurt me with his legion of terror or drag me to dark depths of Walmart too? There were too many unknowns for me to embark on this rescue mission.

Mom was even more frantic at this point. She couldn’t believe that I wasn’t going to go and save my own/only sister.

She then said/shouted, “Fine, if anything happens to her, I’m holding YOU responsible!!”.

“Ok”, I said, “let me know how it turns out”. Then we both hung up.

I then continued getting ready for bed and giggling a bit. I kept thinking about that Walmart thing…

So around 10:30pm or so my phone rings. It’s Mom. She says, “you don’t have to worry anymore, we found her”. Rather generous of her to assume that I was worried.

I asked, “in how many pieces?”.

“One, she's ok!” Mom said.

Not that I cared all too much but I asked anyway, “so what happened?”.

Well, it turns out, the police actually did get involved… My sister convinced this guy to turn himself in!! She got him to drive to the police station and confess to the crime. She then got a restraining order on him.

So, just because of an argument, that was more than likely started because she was being a bitch or got caught talking to an ex-bofriend (again), this guy now has a police record.

UN-BELIEVABLE!!!

Weeks later, they were dating again and I have another story about that…

I wish I was creative enough to imagine this scenario…

I could not make this up.