Sister (12 page)

“Mom's going to wonder where we are,” I said, but I picked my way toward him through the weeds. The wind moved in the branches of the hickories, and they clicked together, the sound my grandmother made with her tongue to mean
Shame
. My father took the cigarettes out of his pocket, and I knew then that he meant for me to smoke one. “Somebody's going to see,” I begged, but the highway was a pale gray scar in the distance.

He opened the pack, selected a cigarette, put it between his lips. “I used to smoke,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

He lit the cigarette, drawing once, twice. His wispy hair lifted slightly in the wind. “Son of a bitches make me sick now,” he said. He coughed, shaking his head. “I want you to have your first smoke with me, not with some kid at your school.”

He held out the cigarette.

“Dad,” I said.

“One cigarette,” he said. “Then we can go home.”

His face wore the look that meant, no matter what, he was going to get his way. I took the cigarette from him gingerly, stuck it into my mouth, and sucked. It tasted like dirt. I spat out a stream of smoke, watching it curl upward and upward until it blended
into the sharp white tooth of the moon. The glowing end of the cigarette was oddly beautiful, like a ruby but deeper, etched with gray patterns of ash.

“Your mother would kill me if she knew about this,” my father said.

I took another puff, inhaling this time. My stomach churned chocolate cake with green icing; I choked for a minute, tears streaming down my face. “Kids aren't supposed to smoke,” I said.

“Tap the ash off the tip,” he said, and he demonstrated with his finger. Sparks spun into the arms of the hickory trees. I tried smoking with my left hand, then smoking no-handed. I tried blowing smoke through my nose.

“I could teach you how to do a smoke ring,” my father said after a while.

“That's OK.”

“I guess you don't have to finish all of it,” he said.

I handed it to him, relieved. He put it out under his heel and kicked loose ground over the butt. For a moment, I thought that if I stood on my toes the wind would lift me high into the trees, and their arms around me would be soft and warm, and the smell of them would be magic.

“You going to smoke when the kids at school give you a cigarette?” he asked.

I shook my head no. My mouth tasted awful.

“That's my good girl,” he said. He turned away, and I followed him out of the field. We passed Mrs. Luchterhand, who was riding one of her black Morgans. Both her long braid and the horse's tail were clipped with reflectors, which glowed like eyes. “Wonderful evening for a walk,” she said to my father, her voice high and airy, like my mother's.

When we got home, he led me inside through the back door so my mother wouldn't see. “Will Sam have to smoke a cigarette when
he
turns thirteen?” I said.

My father watched me kick off my sneakers by pushing my toes against the heels. “No,” he said. “Take your shoes off with your hands.”

“How come?”

“They'll last a long time if you take care of them.”

“I mean how come about Sam?”

My father laughed and shook his head as though he were remembering something private. “Boys can take care of themselves. It's you I've got to worry about.”

“Why?”

He smiled, reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a small box wrapped in green paper. “Happy birthday,” he said, and he watched me open it. It was a necklace with my birthstone. He'd picked it out himself. “For my teenage daughter,” he said.

 

The clock by the bed glows 2:00
A.M.
when I first start hearing music, or, more precisely, a muffled, driving beat. I close my eyes, half dreaming the long Saturday nights in Horton, the slow cars moving up and down the dirt road that followed the lake-front all the way out to Herringbone Beach, trawling for girls sitting in small groups in the grass. Music was the simplest bait—Led Zeppelin, the Stones, AC/DC. My friends and I floated toward that music and the heat contained in the sound of it, so much like a heartbeat, but faster, harder, freed from the limits of the body.
Hey, girls, wanna ride? Wanna ride
? and we came up out of the long trampled grass, brushing off our jeans, rubbing stiff knees. In the morning, I'd get up and go to early Mass, tamed by knee socks and a fresh cotton slip, penitent in my good church dress.

I led two lives when I was in high school, and each had its own sound track. Classical music was for church and home: my private voice, a gift from God. This was the music that accompanied the girl my parents knew, the girl my grandmother ad
mired and my teachers praised. Mornings, I got up early and practiced on Elise's piano for an hour before school; after school, I used the grand piano in the school auditorium, taking the late bus home with the athletes and cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. They treated me kindly, if a bit uncomfortably; I was something of a bewilderment to them. But every now and then I'd show up at their parties, which made me acceptable, even marginally cool. Rock was for those forbidden nights—lurid, public, urgent—and this is the sound that unravels me from my sleep, peeling the layers away like onion skin, until finally I get up and step into my sweatpants. Pulling an old sweater of Adam's over my T-shirt, I go into the kitchen, open the French doors to the cold night. The moon is almost full, and the houses and trees are outlined in silver. I can hear lyrics, laughter, and I realize the noise is coming from the belly of the ravine. Sometimes I walk there in the morning before work, carefully following the faint deer paths until I reach the trickle of water at the bottom called Poison Creek. In spring, it swells into a river, seven or eight feet wide; Adam and I saw a dead raccoon once, swollen and stiff, its curious hands stretched skyward.

My next-door neighbor, an older woman whose name I do not know, steps out into her yard. She has a man's coat draped over her shoulders; she uses her hands to pin it chastely over the front of her robe. When she sees me, she walks over to our lot line and stops precisely at the edge, as if she's toeing a mark for a race. “You're new here,” she calls, “so I'll tell you. They have parties down there every fall.”

“Who?” I ask. She is wearing slippers shaped like rabbits, and they hop in place as she shifts from side to side in the frosty grass.

“Kids,” she says, and she takes one hand from the front of her coat to shake her finger in the air. “High school kids. They wait till the weather gets cold and the police don't want to get out of their nice warm cars and chase them off.”

“I'm Abby,” I say, but she doesn't hear me.

“Goddamn kids. I called the police, but you know they won't do a thing about it. If it were up to me, I'd just send Charlie on down there with his gun.”

She turns, rabbits marching, back toward her house, without saying good-bye. I've seen Charlie huffing around their lawn in summer, squirting weed killer on the dandelions and Queen Anne's lace, and I don't like to imagine him with a gun. Still, as I go back into the house, I understand some of my neighbor's anger. When I was a girl, my grandmother told me how it surprised her whenever she looked—really looked—into a mirror.
It's not how I feel
, she said, but I did not understand. Now I stand in front of the oval mirror hanging beside the French doors. My hair is brittle-looking; the skin beneath my eyes looks bruised. At five months, my pregnancy shows enough to make me look potbellied, though Adam says that isn't true. Dirty-looking freckles have erupted across the backs of my hands, my chest, the bridge of my nose. One long worry wrinkle runs parallel with my eyebrows. This is not the way I feel.

I often wonder what Sam would look like today, whether or not I would recognize him. At twenty-nine, he'd probably be getting our family's slumped shoulders and the beginnings of a receding hairline. Of course, if he was trying not to be recognized, he'd keep his blond hair dyed brown or black, though perhaps his hair would have changed naturally, turning reddish like my mother's. A few years ago, my mother and Auntie Thil were spending a day at the Wisconsin Dells when they saw a man with a long red beard who looked so familiar that my mother followed him from souvenir stand to souvenir stand, fingering T-shirts and postcards and mugs, until she heard his voice. “That fellow had a deep voice,” she told Auntie Thil when she found her again. “Sam talked through his nose.”

“Didn't Sam have a deep voice?” Auntie Thil said.

“No, he didn't,” my mother said. And then she got very
upset. “I'm his mother! Don't you think I would remember a thing like that?”

Later, when Auntie Thil told me the story, I could hear my mother's voice rising above the sound of the falls, see the other tourists moving gently away, parents clutching their children's hands.

Laverne scratches on the door, and when I open it to let her in, I hear cars revving at the end of the street, bellowing male laughter, and a long, shrill wail that could be a teenage girl's giddy joy or else a cry for help. Which? The music swells again, and I can't hear anything else. Laverne hops up on the counter, butts her head against my hand. She knows that I don't have the heart to chase her off the way Adam would. But Adam isn't here, and I decide to walk down into the ravine, just to make sure I know the difference between the sounds of pleasure and pain. As I pull on my coat, all the warnings about walking alone at night play in my mind like a symphony, brief and discordant. What if there's someone hiding in the weeds? What if I were to take a wrong step, tumble into the open mouth of the ravine? But then, what if I am swallowing too many vitamins? What if, at this very moment, my cells are tingling with the radioactive kiss of a bomb detonated years ago? This is what Adam does not understand. No matter what we do, no matter how we plan, anything might happen at any given moment, and that moment will always be the one you least suspect—in the dark span of an eye blink, in the crick of a turned-away head, in the moment after you first awaken and realize that none of this is a dream.

 

The moon is so bright that I cast a shadow until I move beneath the sheltering arms of the trees that line the ravine. The music rumbles in my chest, in my throat, in the bones of my feet; bonfires flicker between the trees. When I stop to look back toward the house, all I can see are the windows. As children, Sam and I
sneaked out into the cornfields at night, following parallel rows, zapping each other between cornstalks with the beams from our flashlights. Now and then we'd look back to see the porch light, a beacon reminding us where we belonged, calling us home. Once, I turned off my flashlight and waited, invisible and silent, as Sam's beam licked at the stalks around me, disappeared up into the sky.
Where are you
? he called.
Are you OK
? I heard him thrashing farther and farther away from me, his voice growing higher, shrill.

I'm not KIDDING! WHERE ARE YOU
?

Still I did not move, did not breathe, until his light winked out and left only the stars to watch over us.
Why are you so mean
? he sobbed, again and again. I crouched, hugging my knees, trying not to laugh and trying not to cry, every nerve in my body tingling, tingling. I mattered, I was needed. I was important to my brother.

At the foot of the ravine, the fires are giving off a cloud of thick, sweet smoke. Thirty or forty high school kids are standing around in groups, dancing close in the fallen leaves, their bodies weaving single silhouettes. A boom box is balanced in the low crook of a tree. Above it, girls sway in the branches, slapping at each other and laughing, and I realize I've discovered the source of the scream. If I called up to them and told them I had come out of concern, they would not understand.
Don't worry about us
, they might say, annoyance clouding their clear voices.
Nothing's going to happen to us
.

I walk around the outskirts of the bonfires, negotiating this odd sense of invisibility and remembering similar high school parties in Horton, on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. As soon as it was dark, cars began to line the winding dirt road, trunks packed with coolers of beer. Everyone drank and talked and wandered around the bonfires, the wood smoke clinging to our clothes and hair; I could smell it even after I got home and showered and slipped, still reeling, into bed. There was music in this too, a dizzying melody, and I wanted to get up and go downstairs to the piano
and sound everything out: the craziness of the dancing, the brush of a boy's cold cheeks, his impossibly warm mouth. Now I watch the faces of the girls, their lips and cheeks done up in red and pink, the forced colors of cheer. I watch their darting eyes and the way they use their hands when they speak, painting the air around themselves, weaving invisible cocoons. I watch the boys, the way they walk with their hips tugging them in the direction they want to go, their heads and shoulders bobbing smoothly behind as if innocent, simply along for the ride, and I remember waking up in my bedroom after coming home from one of those parties, cotton-headed, confused. It was the ninth of August, four days after Sam's official disappearance on August fifth, four days before I'd be interviewed by detectives investigating
incidents
at Dr. Neidermier's and the drive-in and Becker's Foodmart, investigating an assault on Geena Baumbach of Oneisha. Boys were moving from the door to the window, led by the sleek pull of their hips. One of them—Sam—went through my jewelry box. One of them opened my purse, which was slung over the back of my rocking chair. One of them bent over me and began to stroke my hair. “What a nice ring you're wearing,” he said, exaggerating his politeness. “Can I have it?” From a faraway place in my mind, I watched myself twist Elise's ring off my finger. There is no room for this in my mother's careful memories. There is no place for this in her longing for Sam's return. I never told; how could I? How could I be the one to finally break my mother's heart?