The September Sisters (10 page)

I let myself out onto the patio and sat in the chair next to her. She had her eyes closed, but I knew she was awake because she moved the cigarette to and from her mouth. “Hey,” I said, “I’m home.”

“Hmm.” She reached out blindly for my hand, and I gave it to her. “How was your day, honey?”

“It was good,” I lied.

“Good.”

I sat there holding her hand for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to grill her without getting her to suspect anything. “So,” I said, “what did you do today?” It wasn’t
an unusual question. It was something I might have asked her every other day and not even thought twice about her answer, but I held my breath, waiting to hear what she had to say.

“Oh, nothing much.” She opened her eyes, sat up, and smashed her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s getting too cold to stay out here. Don’t sit out too long.” She stood up and kissed the top of my head.

It wasn’t an unusual way for her to respond, but if there was anything I’d learned, it was to suspect everyone and everything.

THE LAST TIME
I remember my family’s being completely whole and ridiculously normal was June, nearly two months before Becky disappeared. My father took a Thursday off work, and the four of us went to the beach in Ventnor. On the way there in the car, my father had one hand on my mother’s thigh and the other on the steering wheel. We drove with the windows down, and it was this perfect blue-sky June day, so the breeze that came into the car was just right and not too hot, even though it was already summer.

My mother was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and her black bathing suit with her white linen cover-up. Becky and I had on our brand-new pink bathing suits (hers was
a bikini; mine was a one-piece). My father wore his navy swim trunks and his Pitt T-shirt. In the trunk of our car, my mother had packed towels and a coolerful of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and root beers.

When we got there, Becky and I collected seashells by the edge of the ocean, and our parents watched us from their towels. I remember looking up once and seeing them sitting there, my father’s hand on my mother’s thigh, as if it were permanently attached there. She leaned in close to him, so I could tell she liked it. Even though they were looking at us, it was clear they were thinking about each other.

We picked up pearly shells, black-blistered shells, and little chipped ridged shells that looked like potato chips and collected them in an old bucket. “She sells seashells by the seashore,” we sang over and over, taunting each other into saying it faster and faster.

Later my father went into the ocean with us and taught us how to bodysurf so we could catch the front hooks of the waves and ride them all the way back to shore. Becky ended up swallowing a whole lot of salt water, and she came up sputtering. My father swam to her and picked her up so he was holding on to her while he was treading water. “You’re okay, Beck,” he said. “You’re all right.”

“Baby,” I whispered to her, so she could hear me but my father couldn’t.

“Shut up.” She jumped off my father and tried to catch another wave, just to prove she could do it. And she could. When she stood up at the edge of the water, her blond hair tangled and in her face, she gave my father the thumbs-up sign.

“Way to go, Beck,” he said, shooting the thumbs-up right back to her.

“I’m getting out,” I told him. “I’m starting to feel pruny.” But really, I’d decided if Becky could steal my father, I’d have a go at my mother.

She was reading a book on her towel, a romance; she loves romance novels. When I sat down next to her, she said, “Sweetie, you’re dripping all over me. Take a fresh towel.” But she didn’t even look up from her book; she just kept on reading.

“Dad taught us how to bodysurf,” I told her. “Becky swallowed a lot of water.”

“Uh-huh. Good, hon.”

Before we left, we changed into dry clothes in one of the public changing rooms by the beach. I watched my mother dress with fascination, in complete awe of the womanliness
of her body, the sharp curves of her hips and the plumpness of her breasts. I wondered how long it would take for me to be like her, to
be
her.

It was Hal who eventually told us who the man in the red car was, not my mother. “Do you know who this is?” my father asked me, showing me the picture of them that Hal had brought over earlier in the day.

“No.” I shook my head. Even though I’d thought I’d seen her the day I’d cut school, it was still a shock to see the picture. In the picture I could see her face. Her eyes were wide and bright, and she looked like she was laughing. I hadn’t seen her laugh since before Becky disappeared, and the sight of it was so strange and moving that I almost wanted to cry.

My father leaned down to inspect the picture, as if some minute detail he might have missed the first time through would tell him everything. You’d think after what my mother had told me about Tommy, I would’ve immediately suspected her of having an affair, that this was some man she was cheating on my father with. But I didn’t. The thought didn’t even cross my mind. I didn’t think my mother was capable; she couldn’t have it in her. I’m not sure what my
father suspected, but he was visibly shaken.

It may seem strange that my father started to come apart over a picture of my mother in a car just because we didn’t recognize whom she was with. We both knew she didn’t have a car, and before Becky disappeared, no one would’ve cared or noticed what she did during the day. But we both also knew my mother was different now; everything was different now.

“Why don’t you just ask her?” I said. “There’s probably a simple explanation.” I was hoping if he found out, he would tell me too. But I knew he wouldn’t ask her. My parents hardly talked to each other at all anymore; since my mother had stopped wanting to talk about Becky, it was almost as if they didn’t have anything to say to each other.

It took Hal only a few days to find out who he was. His name was Garret Walker, and my father had no idea how my mother knew him.

When my father asked me if I’d ever heard of him, I repeated the name a few times before telling him it was unfamiliar. It’s a strange name, a uniquely snobbish-sounding name. I’d never known a Garret before. “Garret,” I said to my father. “Garret. Garret.”

“I know,” he said. It was weird the way we understood each other, the way this odd connection passed between us.

The night my father confronted my mother about the whole thing, he sent me over to spend the evening with Mrs. Ramirez and Tommy, so I missed what actually happened between them.

Instead of playing cards, Tommy and I did our homework at Mrs. Ramirez’s kitchen table. I kept thinking about what was going on over at my house. My father hadn’t told me specifically that he was confronting my mother about Garret, but he’d said as much when he told me they had a few things to discuss in private.

As I sat there at Mrs. Ramirez’s kitchen table, I began to wonder about the nature of love—how it could be lost and found and twisted into horrible and ugly things. I wondered if my parents still had a piece of their love for each other, something large enough to hold on to, or if it, like everything else, had vanished.

“His name is Garret Walker,” I said to Tommy.

“Who?”

“The man we saw with my mother.”

“You know him?”

I shook my head. “My father’s investigator has pictures.”

Tommy looked up so suddenly, I could tell he was startled. I knew he was thinking if the investigator had pictures of my mother, he might also have pictures of us on Mr. Barnesworth’s doorstep, but my father hadn’t mentioned it, so I knew he didn’t know. I wondered if Hal had taken the pictures on a different day entirely, if there was the possibility that my mother and Garret had been spending a lot of time together. “I don’t want to go back to Florida,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “He doesn’t know.” Tommy flipped his hair, so I could tell the whole idea of my father knowing we’d cut school together made him nervous. “Why don’t you want to go back?” I had this peculiar notion that it had something to do with me, even though I already secretly knew about Tommy’s hatred of his mother.

“I just don’t want to,” he said.

We sat there quietly for a few minutes, and Tommy looked like he was deeply involved in a math problem. I couldn’t tell if he was just pretending to do the work the way I was. “My mother was laughing,” I finally said, because I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop replaying her face over and over again in my head. “She looked so
happy in the picture.” I was sure Tommy knew about my mother’s depression, her breakdown after Becky’s disappearance. I was sure Mrs. Ramirez had told him everything, so I knew I didn’t need to rehash it, that he would understand exactly what I meant.

“Is your father mad?”

Tommy’s question sounded innocent, but I thought about everything my mother had told me about him, and I felt myself blushing. “No,” I said. “It’s not like that. She’s not cheating on him or anything.”

“My mother cheated on my father with a man named Irwin,” he said. “Can you imagine that, Irwin?”

I tried to pretend I was surprised about his mother cheating on his father, but I’m a terrible liar, so I don’t think I was very convincing. Tommy didn’t seem to care, though, what I knew or didn’t know about him. So finally I decided it was a safer subject if I just stuck to talking about my own mother. “She’s not cheating.”

“I mean, really,” he said. “Irwin.”

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Thomas,” he said.

“Thomas. So you’re Thomas junior.”

“He always called me Little Tommy, LT for short.”

“LT.” The name seemed to give him a whole new character, a different personality. I could picture LT, the tough guy from Florida who picked fights to defend himself. But that wasn’t Tommy, the boy who flipped his hair when he was nervous and held my hand as we ran from Mr. Barnesworth’s.

“He was the only one who called me that.”

“What happened to him?” I asked, although I already knew. It seemed like the right question to ask.

“He’s going to come get me soon, and I’m going to go live with him.” Even though I didn’t think this was true, it made me a little nervous. I didn’t want Tommy to leave. I wasn’t sure what I would do without him. Maybe he was reading my mind, because he said, “Maybe you could come with us.”

“Maybe.” I doubted that my parents would let me leave, but it seemed like a nice dream, so I let Tommy hang on to it.

As my father and I walked home from Mrs. Ramirez’s, I asked him to tell me what had gone on with him and my mother. “None of your beeswax, Ab.” He tugged on my hat a little to pull it down over my ears. It was cold, and our breath looked smoky in the air.

“Did she tell you about Garret?”

“It’s getting cold. It’s almost winter.”

I wanted to scream at him not to change the subject, but I knew it was no use. “Are you getting a divorce?” I whispered this, so when he didn’t answer right away, I couldn’t be sure if he heard me or not.

“Jesus, Ab. Of course not. Why would you think that?” He stopped walking and turned to look at me. “Your mother and I love each other very much, no matter what. You know that?” He shook my shoulders a little bit until I nodded.

I didn’t understand their love anymore, not the way I’d thought I understood it the day on the beach. In fact I wasn’t sure I understood love at all.

Garret Walker. All I knew about him was that he drove a red car, and he could make my mother laugh. I hated him.

I sat up in bed after my parents had gone to sleep and doodled his name over and over again on a piece of paper. I wrote his name in curvy letters and sharp-edged brisk letters, until it became just letters on a page, nothing more than that.

I had my own theory about Garret. I decided that Garret was my mother’s private investigator. During the day, when
I was at school, she went with him, scouring Pinesboro for traces of Becky, for clues that the police might have missed. When Garret found Becky, we all would be sorry for doubting him and, more important, for doubting her.

This theory didn’t explain why he made my mother laugh, but maybe she wasn’t laughing at all. Maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe the camera had caught her at a funny moment, where she’d contorted her face in agony or grief, in knowing that another day had passed without finding Becky.

But the thought of who Garret was gnawed at my insides, and I knew I needed to know the truth. I decided that if my father wasn’t going to tell me anything more about Garret, then I was going to have to find out myself. Though I felt a little embarrassed about my failure with Mr. Barnesworth, Tommy and I had managed to cut school successfully without getting caught, a thought that made me feel more than just a little exhilarated.

BY THE END
of November the ground had begun to freeze. We had an early winter, with our first official snowfall a whole week before Thanksgiving; it was large enough to get us a day off school.

I stayed in bed until ten, and then I sat by the front window and watched the snow. I saw Mrs. Peterson outside shoveling her driveway in her black high-heeled boots. I envied her pink-patterned scarf, which seemed to be wrapped in perfect order around her neck, unlike the scarves I wore, which hung funny and smacked me in the face. I wondered what the woman Mr. Peterson was cheating on her with looked like, and for some reason I instantly thought of my mother and Garret.

When Tommy rang the doorbell right after lunch, I still had Garret in my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to keep him away from my mother, that if only she stopped spending time with him, everything would be okay. I decided that if I could talk to Garret, somehow I could fix things. I’d gotten out the phone book and begun searching to see if he was listed. He was.

I answered the door to let Tommy in, and before he could say anything, I said, “Come on in. I’m going to call Garret Walker.”

“What?” His breath came out frosty on my front porch. “Are you nuts?” Maybe I imagined it, but I thought his eyes lit up just a little bit when I said it, as if he didn’t think I was nuts at all but had just added an element of excitement to an otherwise dull day.

I led Tommy into the kitchen and picked up the phone and started to dial. “What are you going to say?” Tommy asked.

I hung up the phone quickly, realizing he was right. What was I going to say? It was just like the way I’d planned our escape from school but hadn’t really thought about how we’d get into Mr. Barnesworth’s house. “What do you think I should say?”

He shrugged. “You could pretend to be your mother.”

I didn’t know if I could pull my mother’s voice off, so much scratchier than my own, but I wasn’t sure yet how well Garret and my mother knew each other, so I thought maybe I could make it work. “That’s not bad,” I told him. I figured I had nothing to lose. Even if my father found out about this, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be too angry with me, and if my mother found out, well, I didn’t think things could be much worse between us.

I picked up a napkin from the table and put it over the receiver, thinking that this would help disguise my voice or at least make it sound more muffled. I’m not sure if Garret even knew about me, so he probably would have no reason to suspect I wasn’t my mother.

As I started to dial, I realized that Garret might not even be home, that he could have a job like my father and be at work despite the snow, so it almost surprised me when he picked up on the second ring. “Hello,” he said. His voice sounded a little high for a man’s, not at all what I expected, and though I’d seen the pictures Hal had taken, I suddenly envisioned Garret as a small and very thin rat. When I didn’t answer, he said it again. “Hello. Hello. Is anybody there?”

I cleared my throat and tried to speak softly and do
my best to imitate my mother. “Hello,” I said. “Yes, this is Elaine. Elaine Reed.”

“Oh, hi there.” His voice softened, and my stomach sank, because I could hear that he was fond of my mother, just from his tone. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. I tried to choose my words carefully, to sound mature, the way I’d overheard my mother on the phone in the past. “I’m doing well, thank you.” Tommy nodded at me, so I knew he thought I sounded authentic. “I’m calling to tell you that I can’t see you anymore. I need to spend more time with my husband.”

There was silence for a minute, and I felt my heart beating rapidly in my chest, a drum so loud that I was sure Garret could hear it even through the phone. Finally Garret spoke. “Elaine,” he said. “Elaine.” I had this feeling he was about to profess his love for me, no, my mother, so I hung up the phone as fast as I could.

“Well, what did he say?” Tommy said.

I shook my head. “Nothing.” It was his pause, the way he said my mother’s name as if it were something close to him, something that belonged to him, that really got to me, and I wasn’t sure how to explain this to Tommy.

But I hoped that maybe my phone call had been enough.
If Garret stayed away from my mother, maybe she would stay away from him too, and that would be the end of it.

Just after the first snowfall Harry Baker paid us a personal visit to tell us that the police were calling off their search of Morrow’s field until spring. It was the first time I’d seen him since my early-morning phone call, and when I saw him walk in the front door, I felt ill. Maybe it was a feeling of helplessness, but suddenly my stomach felt as if it were about to capsize, to refuse to keep down the dinner I’d just eaten. I thought I would be able to see it in his face, the way he pitied me, but I couldn’t. He was just the same old Harry.

My father didn’t take the news well. “Jesus, Harry,” he said, “you can’t call it off.”

“Not calling off,” Harry said, “just postponing until spring.”

“Until spring?” My father sounded incredulous. Spring seemed so far away, such a long time to go without any answers.

“The ground is frozen,” Harry said.

“Well, you don’t even know that she’s there.” It sounded silly the way he said it, as if Becky were alive and simply hiding in the field.

“You’re right,” Harry said. “So we’re following up on any other leads.”

“You have other leads?”

“Not right now, no.”

My mother came downstairs in the middle of the conversation. She hadn’t gotten dressed, and she was wearing a pair of ratty green sweatpants and one of my father’s old holey undershirts. Her hair was messy and matted in a funny way in the back, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. “Harry,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchier than normal, thickened and dulled by sleep.

“We’re doing everything we can.” I watched him pity my mother, watched his eyebrows twist this funny way so he looked sad and distraught. But it wasn’t a genuine sadness, like my mother’s; it was a tired sadness, and I wondered if I was imagining the sense of relief in his voice. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to tell him that he hadn’t tried hard enough, that he’d wasted half the fall suspecting my mother.

For Thanksgiving, Mrs. Ramirez cooked a turkey and invited my family over to eat with her and Tommy. My father seemed relieved by the invitation, as if he were afraid
to ask my mother to cook for us, afraid to expect it from her, even. The year before, Thanksgiving dinner without Grandma Jacobson had felt strange enough, but this year, without Becky, would’ve been even more bizarre. That’s why I was glad Mrs. Ramirez invited us. It seemed to break tradition, in a way, to create this whole new holiday.

Mrs. Ramirez cooked enough for an army: a huge turkey, which my father carved, mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, bread, and three kinds of pies. I hadn’t expected her to be so good at cooking such American foods. I’d thought she would be good at making tacos or nachos, so when I saw her feast at dinner, I felt ashamed. In truth she is an excellent cook. The food we had at her house was probably the best Thanksgiving dinner I ever had.

Tommy’s mother called in the middle of dinner, and we all got quiet as Mrs. Ramirez took the phone into the kitchen to talk to her. I watched my mother smile at Tommy. She gave him her fake, flashy smile, the one she gave to lost dogs and poor people. I was ashamed of her, and I wanted Tommy to look away.

We ate in silence for a few minutes until Mrs. Ramirez came back into the dining room. “Toe-moss,” she said, and she handed him the phone. She sounded stern, insistent. I
was surprised to see Tommy get out of his chair and walk into the kitchen. I wondered when he’d started talking to his mother again. I felt surprisingly alarmed. I liked it better when he hated her. I wondered, if he started talking to her on a regular basis, whether he’d eventually move back to Florida, leaving me here all by myself.

Right before dessert my mother got a headache, something she’d been having a lot lately and something that the doctor said could be a residual effect of the concussion. My father ushered her out but ordered me to stay behind for pie. It felt a little strange to be there without my family, what was left of it.

After Mrs. Ramirez watched me dutifully eat a piece each of pumpkin and apple pie, she let Tommy and me go into the living room to play cards while she cleaned up from dinner.

“What did you talk to your mother about?” I asked him as I dealt the first hand.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “The snow.”

His answer surprised me at first, but then I remembered that there’s no snow in Florida. I thought it must be strange to live in a place where it didn’t snow in the winter, and in my mind Florida turned into this surreal place, with orange
and purple sunsets and soft breezes. “That the first time you’ve seen snow?”

“Yeah. I guess so. Except my mom said once when I was a baby, we came here for Christmas and it snowed then, but I don’t remember it.”

I nodded. I wanted to ask him if he was going back to Florida, but I didn’t have the guts. I was afraid if he said he was, I would start to crumble like my mother.

“She asked me what I was thankful for.”

That was something we used to do at Thanksgiving at Grandma Jacobson’s every year. We’d go around the table one by one and say one thing we gave thanks for. My parents usually said each other, and Becky and I would say something silly like a television show we enjoyed watching or a present Grandma Jacobson had given us earlier in the day. My grandmother would always say she was thankful for her girls, and she’d smile at my mother and Becky and me. I guess this left my father out, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. I don’t think he would’ve wanted her to include him anyway.

“What did you say?”

“I told her I was thankful for snow,” he said. “It was all I could think of.”

“I know what you mean. We used to do that at dinner, and it’s hard to come up with something.”

“I’m thankful for these cards,” he said, and held up his hand.

“You have a good hand?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

I smiled. “I’m thankful for this game,” I said. Though I meant it to be a joke, it was serious in a way. This game passed the time. Spending afternoons with Tommy kept me away from my parents, took me out of this whole messed-up life of mine for a few hours.

He paused for a moment and looked at his cards. I thought he was planning his next move, planning on stealing the game from me or something. But then he looked up at me and shook the hair away from his eyes, so I could see that he was serious, his deep brown eyes open wide, as if poised and waiting for rejection. “I’m thankful for you,” he said.

I felt my heart flutter a little, the way it used to around James Harper. I couldn’t help smiling. “Me too,” I said. We looked at each other for a moment, and just like the day a few weeks earlier when we held hands behind the evergreen tree, I felt this intense connection to him.

Then, without even moving his eyes, he threw down another card. “Uno,” he said.

I wondered if he’d said he was thankful for me to butter me up, just so he could win the game, but I didn’t think so. I wanted to believe that he was beginning to need me, just the way I needed him.