The September Sisters (17 page)

THE FIRST TIME I
went to visit my mother in her apartment, I was surprised by how barren it was. I’d known going in that it would be nothing special, but there was something about it that was almost prisonlike, something I might expect to be military housing. The walls were this rough brown brick that was impossible to hang things on; the carpets were thin and speckled green. The floors creaked when you walked on them. “The kitchen isn’t so bad, don’t you think, Ab?”

I nodded because I didn’t want to disappoint her, but the kitchen was as terrible as the rest of the apartment. It was very dark—no windows or anything, just the great big glaring fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling and this awful
brown and white linoleum. It wasn’t even big enough to fit a table. My mother had set up a card table in the living room near the kitchen, and I guessed that was where she ate.

Going to visit my mother in her apartment became a part of my routine, something I did every Saturday. My father would drop me off in the street below and then watch me walk up from the car. It was the most freedom he’d given me in a long time, since before Becky disappeared, but I guess it was just too awkward for him to walk up and see my mother.

There wasn’t much for me to do in her apartment, and the days dragged on. She had only a small TV in the corner of the living room, propped up on a cardboard box. She’d tell me I could turn it on, watch whatever I wanted, but it was too hard to see. It made any show oddly miniaturized, like a poor imitation of the show, not the real show itself.

My mother started smoking constantly, inside the apartment and everything, and she seemed very shaky, maybe nervous to see me. She sat there at the card table with the cigarette hanging between her two trembling fingers, saying, “I’m going to quit, sweetie, in just a few days.”

“Okay,” I said, though I knew she wouldn’t. Truthfully I didn’t care. I found the smell of her cigarettes warming,
familiar. It reminded me of a summer night in the pool with Becky.

My father sent my mother a check each month to cover the rent on her apartment and her food. Maybe he was so used to taking care of my mother that he didn’t quite know how to stop, or maybe he let himself believe that he wasn’t the one she was leaving; it was the situation. Or maybe he was just afraid that if he didn’t take care of her, then someone else would.

My father may have supplied the money, but Garret was the one who took my mother places—drove her to the supermarket and such. It didn’t seem fair that she spent so much time with him, but I knew that life was far from fair.

My mother and I never went to that diner she’d talked about. In fact when I went to visit her, we barely left the apartment. We’d sit there and play a game of cards or watch the small TV or read or something. We hardly talked.

There was so much I wanted to say to her, rational arguments in my head for why she should come back home. At first I decided not to say any of it, afraid if she got angry, she would leave again or, worse, do something terrible to herself. But after a few Saturdays with her in the apartment, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you come home?” I
said. “Dad really misses you.”

“Oh, Abby.” She sighed. “It’s not that simple.”

“I’ll help you with everything,” I told her. “We’re doing a cooking unit in home ec now.”

“That’s nice, sweetie.” She lit a cigarette and looked off into the distance, so I knew the conversation was over, that she’d stopped listening.

The next weekend I met Garret for the first time. He isn’t as tall as I expected him to be, not nearly as tall as my father. In fact he probably isn’t much taller than Tommy or my mother even. And his height gives him this strange air of childishness. I wondered if that was part of what my mother liked about him. He’s completely the opposite of my father.

When I walked into her apartment, he was already sitting there. I knew him instantly from the picture, and I felt myself cringe. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Abby,” Garret said right away. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

I remembered his voice from the phone call, and I felt a little sick, wondering if he knew I was the one who had called him, if it was something he and my mother had laughed about. I wondered what exactly he’d heard about me.
Yes,
I wanted to say,
I’m the daughter who didn’t disappear. I’m the
one who’s left, the one she abandoned.
I was annoyed with my mother for intentionally bringing us together, and I wondered if this was her way of showing me that she was never coming home.

If I’d known that Garret would be there, I wouldn’t have come to see her at all. I would’ve told my father I had too much homework to do or that I wasn’t feeling well.

“I should make some tea,” my mother said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had some tea together. Abby?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

“I hear that you like to read,” Garret said, as we both sat down at the card table while my mother clanked around in the kitchen, trying to figure out tea.

“I guess so.” I was unwilling to offer him anything, not even the smallest part of me. I already felt disloyal to my father simply by talking to Garret.

“Anything in particular?”

“Not really.” I shrugged.

“What about that book you were reading before,” my mother called from the kitchen. “The one with the bird in the title. You loved that, didn’t you, sweetie?”

“
To Kill a Mockingbird.
” I almost laughed, thinking about my mother’s reaction the day I’d been reading it and
her falsely cheery tone now.

“Good old Atticus Finch,” Garret said.

“Garret’s quite a reader,” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

I wasn’t impressed by Garret’s knowledge. It occurred to me that Garret and I probably had more in common than my father and I did, but this made me feel even more awful, so I just sort of shrugged and looked away from him.

“You read that in school?” Garret asked.

I nodded, and I remembered that Garret’s daughter would’ve been my age had she lived. I felt this tiny bit of sympathy for him, this sadness that she hadn’t gotten to do something as simple as reading a book.

“She’s in a special advanced class.” My mother carried the tea in paper cups, one at a time. She put my cup in front of me. “Tea is supposed to be so good for you. I read an article about it just the other day.”

“Tea warms the soul,” Garret said, and he smiled at me.

The smile gave me the creeps in an odd way. He isn’t a creepy man, he’s almost elflike, but his smile really got at me. I felt the way I’d feel when I’d go to the doctor for my yearly checkup, and he’d smile at me when he asked me to say ahh, as if Garret believed he was only trying to help, yet
somehow, he was causing pain.

The three of sat there and sipped our tea in silence. My mother and Garret smiled at each other across the table, and I started to feel sick.

I could tell she was in love with him just by the way she smiled.

I told Tommy about Garret at lunch the Monday after I met him. “I can’t believe she invited him over there,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “If my mother ever…” He didn’t continue, as if the thought of having to have tea with his mother and Irwin was something too painful to put into words.

“I have to do something,” I said.

Tommy nodded. “When my parents used to get in fights, my father used to send my mother flowers. Maybe you could get your father to do that.”

I shook my head. There was no way my father was going to send her flowers; I could see it in his eyes, the way he’d already given up on her. But what Tommy said gave me another idea.

The next Saturday I went to my mother’s armed with my lunch money from the entire week. I’d been sharing
Tommy’s lunches every day and saving the money my father gave me for something far more important.

After I got out of the car and walked into the building, I waited for a few minutes, until I was sure my father had driven away, and then I went back outside and walked one block down to the minimart.

It was really the first time I’d been out alone since Becky disappeared, and the thought was both exhilarating and frightening; anyone could take me, snatch me right there off the street.

With the money I’d saved up, I had enough to buy my mother a dozen red carnations, and as I carried them up to the door of her apartment, I already had it planned out in my head, the lie I would tell her. “These are from Dad,” I said as soon as she opened the door.

“Oh?” Her hands shook as she took them from me.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” I walked inside.

She nodded. “I don’t even know if I have a vase.” She rummaged through her kitchen cabinets and came up with a large plastic cup. “Well, I guess this will do.”

After she’d put the flowers in water, she came and sat next to me on the couch. “Dad really misses you,” I said. “He talks about you all the time.” This was a lie that I told
myself was okay to tell her because it really was for her own good.

“Oh?” She pulled a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it, and then she turned away from me to blow the smoke into spirals in the air. But I felt a sort of satisfaction; I could tell by the nervous way she tapped her cigarette in the ashtray that the flowers had gotten to her.

Over the next few weeks I tried to do other things, smaller things. When I got home from my mother’s each Saturday, I’d tell my father how much she missed him. “She said that?” my father would ask. I’d nod, knowing it was wrong to lie to him, but I also knew if I didn’t, my father would let her go.

I brought my mother flowers three weeks in a row, until the Sunday after the third week, when my father came up to my room while I was doing my homework. “Your mother called to thank me for the flowers.” He stood in the doorway in the dark hallway, and when I looked up, he seemed more like a looming shadow than my father. I tried to think of what to say to him, but before I could think of anything, he said. “Just don’t do it again, okay, Ab?”

I was surprised that he didn’t seem angry—his voice
instead sounded broken and forlorn, so I knew just from hearing it how much he really did miss her.

Some days I thought I was the only one who remembered Becky, the only one who thought about her in the quiet, empty spaces of the evening. I knew this wasn’t true, but because we didn’t talk about her anymore, it sure felt that way.

Detective Kinney called periodically with updates. They’d caught a serial killer in Philadelphia who might have some answers; the police went back out to dig in Morrow’s field. But each lead turned up nothing, no sign or trace of Becky.

In April my father let Hal Brewerstein go. “He’s terrible,” my father said to me. “He didn’t know what he was doing.” But I remembered the files Hal brought us, the secrets he’d revealed about my neighbors, and I couldn’t help thinking that he wasn’t terrible at all, that my father just needed to blame someone for something.

Detective Kinney stopped by a few more times to talk to my mother. Each time my father told him she wasn’t here; only he neglected to tell him that she’d moved out.

Kinney finally caught up with my mother in her
apartment in late May, because she complained about him when I went there one weekend. “That man,” she said, “that darn detective. He doesn’t know anything.” She seemed especially shaky, suddenly subject to all the evils of the world living alone in her horrible apartment.

“You should come home,” I told her, though I knew that nothing I could say or do was going to bring her home.

“Oh, Abby.” She gave me a half hug with her one arm that she wasn’t using to smoke. “Someday you’ll understand.”

But I don’t think I ever will understand why she left my father.

BY JUNE MY
quietly abnormal life felt like a routine. I tried not to think about the way things had been a year earlier, when the four of us had gone to the beach. It felt like so long ago, like something that had happened to me in another lifetime.

Once school was out, I spent most days with Tommy and Mrs. Ramirez. My mother took a part-time job as a waitress at that diner she’d talked about. Some days, when she wasn’t working, I spent the day with her. But most days I was with Tommy.

Tommy and I were friends but not the kind of friends Jocelyn and I had been, the kind who told each other everything. Mostly we had a quiet friendship, where we would do
things without talking much. And then occasionally there were moments like the day we kissed in the snow, when suddenly there’d be an instant of something else passing between us. Tommy would squeeze my hand or reach up and brush a piece of hair away from my cheek or kiss me again, as he did right after school let out for the summer and Mrs. Ramirez let us go swimming in my backyard without her.

Kissing in the pool, I felt oddly weightless, and the whole experience seemed unreal, almost as if it had happened in a dream. It didn’t feel like the same pool that Becky and I had swum in the summer before.

At night I lay in bed and thought about Tommy. Sometimes I would lie there and close my eyes and think about Tommy kissing me and what it might be like if he French-kissed me, how his tongue might feel against mine. Then I’d start to imagine if Tommy had ever wondered the same thing, if he wanted to kiss me that way.

Jocelyn and I had talked about it the year before, and we’d decided that French kissing was disgusting, yet the thought of it was different now. It felt somehow thrilling. When I’d think about Tommy this way, though, it would pain me to look him in the eye the next day. Or I’d stare at him too closely sometimes, watch the way his eyebrows
arched when he laughed. His hair had grown back in, but he’d gotten it cut a few times over the spring, so it was still a lot shorter than when I first met him. I kind of liked it the way it was in the summer, short enough to still look cute. I could see his entire face without it looking too shocking, the way it did with the buzz cut.

The relationship between my father and me also changed into something new, something completely different. Last summer I was a child, the one who fought with her sister, who whined, who was punished and sent to her room. This summer I became something like his equal, cooking dinner for us some nights, cleaning up the house, washing our clothes. We too hardly talked, but when we did, I noticed my father treated me more like an adult. He spoke in softer tones. He asked my opinion on things. Sometimes I wondered if he mistook me for my mother or for some strange blurry combination of all three of us—me, my mother, and Becky.

It was strange to hear my father talk to me about mortgage payments and car repairs. “Car needs new tires,” he would say.

And I nodded like I understood. But inside, I was
thinking,
So what? Who cares?

After dinner we swam in the pool sometimes before bed, but it was so quiet that I didn’t like to do it. Every time I got in or I looked at the inner tubes, I thought about Becky swimming toward me, wanting the pink one so badly. I’d feel guilty, and I’d think,
Why didn’t I just let her have it?
What was the big deal anyway? She could’ve had this one thing; it wouldn’t have been so much to give.

My father swam laps at night; he’d move quickly across the pool, so he reminded me of an eel, the way he slid through water as if it were nothing. Some nights he’d swim for over an hour, and I’d get out of the pool and just sit there in what used to be my mother’s chair and watch him.

When he was finished, he’d lean over the side, out of breath, and say, “Get me a towel, Ab.” And I’d have to run to the deep end of the pool with the towel for him, a towel that I’d washed myself earlier in the day and would wash again a few days later. There was something about being in charge of the washing machine that made me feel grown up.

One day in the middle of June, Tommy ran over to my house to tell me what his grandmother just heard when she was getting her hair done: Katie Rainey had disappeared from her
bedroom the night before. Katie Rainey, the almost popular girl, whose sister had taken over my spot at the lunch table, was gone, vanished, just like Becky.

I shook my head over and over again because I couldn’t believe it. There was another family; there was someone else. And then I started to feel a little ashamed for what I felt creeping up my body; was it joy? The feeling startled me so much that I was speechless.

“The police are looking for her right now,” Tommy said.

The police. I began to feel a smug sense of satisfaction when I thought about Kinney’s having to admit that my parents had had nothing to do with Becky’s disappearance after all. I imagined his big nose wrinkled up with dismay, with the realization that he had been wrong, that it was his fault Becky hadn’t been found yet.

For the first time in months I considered that Becky could be alive. I wondered if Katie was with her, if they were together. Would Katie remind her of me? After all, we were the same age, and we used to run with the same crowd at school.

With Katie’s disappearance there were new clues, new leads. Kinney came back to our house for the first time in months,
and he spoke in hushed tones to my father in the kitchen while I tried my best to listen in. I heard that neighbors had spotted a blue truck, that some of Katie’s clothes were missing, that the screen was gone from her bedroom window.

“It’s terrible,” my father said to me after Kinney left. “Just terrible.” His face was twisted funny, and he pulled on his mustache. I imagined that suddenly he could feel it all again, the pain of realizing Becky was gone, like a knife twisting over and over in his stomach.

A few hours later I heard my father talking on the phone to someone I assumed was Katie’s father. “Really,” he said. “If there is anything I can do. Anything at all.”

While the police searched for Katie, both my parents lit up just a little bit. My father decided for the first time since my mother had left that it was time to clean the house, and he moved out all the furniture and had me do the dusting and vacuuming. My mother had a little makeup on when I went to visit her at her apartment, and for the first time in a long time she wasn’t smoking. “Oh, those poor people,” she said to me, sucking in her breath as she said it, but I wondered if like me, she felt hope, a sense that everything could be all right again.

One evening about two weeks after Katie had disappeared, my father called me into the kitchen. “Look,” he said, pointing out the window. “Look over there. Do you see that?”

I saw something moving between Morrow’s field and our yard, only I couldn’t make out its shape. “I think it’s a deer,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head. “It’s a person. There’s a person in our yard.”

I felt something catch in the back of my throat and then the brisk pounding of my heart. For an instant I thought I could believe him, that it could be Becky, back from a yearlong trip, unharmed and no worse for wear.

I followed him out the back door across the yard. He ran so quickly that I almost couldn’t keep up with him. “Hello,” he called. “Anybody there?”

Then I heard a bark, and I stopped right where I was. The dog came out a little, and I could see her. She was medium size with longish fur that was matted down probably from weeks of being on her own. My father sat down in the grass and put his head in his hands. The dog rolled over onto her back and put her paws in the air.

“Look. She likes you,” I said.

“Goddamn dog,” he said.

“She looks sweet.” I walked up to her and let her sniff my hand. Becky and I had always wanted a pet, but our parents never let us. My mother was allergic to cats, and my father thought that dogs were too much work. When we were younger, we’d dreamed of having something furry and cuddly we could play with. “Can we keep her?” I said.

“What, Ab?”

“The dog. We should keep the dog.”

He shook his head. “She’s a stray.”

“Look how thin she is.” You could see the outline of her ribs across her chest. “I’ll take care of her. I’ll do all the work and everything. You won’t even know she’s here.” I suddenly wanted the dog so badly, more than I wanted anything else.

“I don’t know, Ab.”

From my father, this was a yes, so I hugged him. “You won’t regret it,” I told him.

“We’ll have to take her to a vet. She could have rabies.”

When I thought of rabies, I thought about raccoons foaming at the mouth, not about skinny, needy dogs. “She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t have rabies.”

“Still,” he said. “We’ll put her in the basement until then. I don’t want her walking around the house.”

I was so thrilled that he was letting me keep the dog that I didn’t care. I thought about what Becky would think if she could see me. I knew she’d be insanely jealous, crazy over the fact that we hadn’t been allowed to have a dog when she lived here.

I put the dog in the basement, and once I started petting her and gave her some leftover hamburger from dinner, she came over and snuggled up with me. It was such a nice closeness, so simple. She already loved me, and I’d given her almost nothing.

The dog became as much Tommy’s as she was mine. He too had never been allowed a pet, so he was thrilled when he saw her. He went with me to walk her every day (I, of course, wasn’t allowed to go alone), and he liked to come over just to sit with her. He was even the one who helped me come up with her name, Tabby, a combination of Tommy and Abby. She was just this kind creature who wanted nothing more than to love us, even when no one else did.

Katie Rainey was gone nearly a month before the police found her. Kinney didn’t call my father to tell him what had happened. One evening, as my father and I watched the
news during dinner, Katie came in as a breaking story. She was found safely in New York City with her boyfriend. As it turns out, she’d run away with him, intentionally left her family behind.

My father’s face drained of color as the newscaster recounted the details. It took him a minute before he said it. “Well, thank goodness she’s safe.”

I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t want to say out loud what I knew we both were thinking. Everything was still ruined; Becky wasn’t coming back.