The September Sisters (18 page)

ONE YEAR TO
the day that Becky disappeared, my father stayed home from work. He lit candles in the kitchen and played Becky’s favorite Christmas songs on his record player. It was weird because it kind of felt like a memorial service.

I sat with him in the kitchen for a while and thought about the fact that I could almost forget the sound of Becky’s voice echoing through the upstairs hallway, could forget that something like that had ever existed.

For the anniversary, as my mother called it, she and Garret planted flowers in a public garden near her apartment. She called and invited me to go with them, but I told her I thought I shouldn’t, that someone needed to stay with my father.

“Of course, sweetie,” she said. “I understand.” But I knew she really didn’t. Her voice had this sad, hectic lilt to it, so I could tell she was really hyper but on the verge of being depressed.

“It’s just that you have Garret,” I told her. “Dad has no one.”

“You don’t need make me feel guilty, Ab. I’m not the enemy here.”

“I know,” I said. I hadn’t been trying to make her feel guilty necessarily, though I did think she deserved it.

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

“Not good. He’s lighting candles in the kitchen.”

“Your father is lighting candles?”

“Yeah.”

“He keeps it all bottled up,” she said. “He never talks about anything.”

“He talks.” But I knew this wasn’t true. I just felt the need to defend my father, to make my mother see that he was better than Garret.

“He should see Dr. Shreiker. He’s been doing wonders for me.”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He’ll be fine.” I didn’t think my father would ever see a therapist. It wasn’t his thing. He was
good at putting on a sane outer appearance, even if he was going crazy inside.

“He’s always too darn fine.” We were both silent for a minute. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about him. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Okay.” It was a promise I meant to keep.

“You take care of him then, Ab. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I didn’t ask my mother what kind of flowers she and Garret planned on planting, though for some reason I guessed it would be roses. I thought roses were the perfect flowers for Becky, thorny and beautiful all at once, their deep red color so vibrant that when you walked by they would assault you. That was Becky.

I guess it wasn’t fair of my mother to ask me to take care of my father. It should’ve been the other way around; they should’ve been taking care of me. But I was past being angry about this, and I just started to accept my role as another fact, another normal part of my life.

“What did your mother want?” my father asked when I went back down to the kitchen.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“What’s she doing today?”

“Planting flowers,” I said, intentionally leaving out
the part about Garret.

“Flowers,” he said. “Your mother always loved flowers.” I thought he was going to bring up the carnations I’d given her, and for a moment I felt embarrassed, but he didn’t mention it, and he had this sort of dreamy faraway look in his eyes.

Years ago my mother had had a garden in the backyard in a corner behind the pool. She planted all kinds of flowers—roses and azaleas and marigolds. In the spring her little garden would bloom up so nice—oranges, yellows, reds, pinks. It gave our yard a whole different look, made it something special.

But the spring after Grandma Jacobson died, she stopped taking care of it, and all the flowers died, shriveled into brown eyesores in the back of our yard. Sometimes when I look out there, I miss the flowers so much it surprises me, this deep aching sadness for them.

“It doesn’t seem like only a year, does it?” my father said. I shook my head. It felt like a lifetime, an entirely different universe. “She’s not coming back, is she?”

At first I thought he meant my mother, but then I realized he was talking about Becky. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re all I’ve got left, Ab.” He reached out for my hand and squeezed it.

For some reason this frightened me. It made me feel too fragile, as if I too could disappear at any moment.

A few hours later my father blew out the candles and went outside to sit on the patio. “There’s something about being out there,” he said. “I feel closer to her.”

I knew my father’s closeness to Becky was imaginary, but sitting out there made him feel better, so I pretended not to notice. “That’s a good idea,” I told him. “I’m going to take Tabby for a walk.”

I took Tabby next door to pick up Tommy, and the three of us walked around the neighborhood. “My grandma told me,” Tommy said, “about today.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said, though suddenly I felt like crying. It was strange, the way I could be so calm in front of my parents, but when I talked to Tommy, I wanted to break.

“My father left on a Thursday,” Tommy said, “sometime in August. I don’t remember the exact date, though. I didn’t think about it at the time.”

I nodded and handed him Tabby’s leash. She’d been pulling me to go faster, and I didn’t feel like keeping
up. “Here, you take her.”

“I didn’t think I would have to remember it a year later. I thought he’d be back in a few days.”

“It doesn’t seem real,” I said. “This stuff happens in books, not in real life.” Tabby barked and surged ahead, pulling Tommy with her. I had to take big strides just to keep up.

“What is it, Tabby? What is it, girl?” Tabby rarely barked. I knew this was her defense mechanism, something she did if she was frightened.

“Maybe she saw a bird,” I said, “or a rabbit.” I’m not sure what she saw, but she started running faster, pulling Tommy and me behind her. She ran and ran until we got to the large open space of Morrow’s field, and then she stopped and started sniffing the air. “She smells something,” I said. Tommy was breathing heavy, and he had to hang his head down just to catch his breath.

For a moment I wondered if Tabby was an amazing dog, some sort of superhero that would stop right there and find Becky. I imagined her digging up something horrible like a bone, or sniffing out Becky’s scent, or taking us to the spot where she was buried. But she wasn’t Lassie. And after a few minutes of sniffing, Tabby lay on the grass and started
panting, out of breath from her run. “We should take her back and get her some water,” I said.

“Let’s sit down first.” Tommy sat on the ground next to Tabby, and I sat next to them. “There’s a whole world out here,” Tommy said, “just behind the neighborhood.” I thought of the first time I’d taken Tommy to Morrow’s field, and I thought about the way he’d kissed me and made me feel something for the first time in the longest time.

I reached over for his hand because I needed something solid to hold on to. And he let me sit there and hold it for just a few minutes. There was something peaceful about the whole thing, sitting like that in the sun with Tommy and Tabby, and I felt this moment of warmth, the sudden feeling that everything would be okay.

After a few minutes of quiet, Tabby started sniffing the air again and barking, and she jumped up and started running back toward my house. “What’s wrong with her today?” I said.

“Dogs know. They can sense when things aren’t right.”

Tommy and I ran after her, and I wondered if what he said was true, if Tabby knew that there was something different about this day.

Once we got through the clearing and entered my yard,
I saw what Tabby had been barking at. There was smoke coming from our back patio. My father was sitting on my mother’s smoking chair, a bowl sitting in front of him with its contents on fire and smoking.

“What the heck?” Tommy said. “What’s he doing?”

I shook my head and ran toward my father. Tabby was still barking and running around in circles by my feet now.

“Jesus,” my father said. “Get that mutt to stop yapping, will you?”

Tommy and I exchanged glances. I could tell he was thinking what I was, that Tabby might be a mixed breed, but she was no mutt. Still, Tommy and I stood back and watched as my father threw pictures into the flaming bowl.

“What are you doing, Dad?” I finally said.

“Cleaning. Getting rid of things.”

I went closer and saw he had a shoe box of pictures next to him; most of the pictures were of Becky and me, and then some of him and my mother. I recognized the box. My mother had kept it in their bedroom, and she’d always said she was going to make it into a scrapbook; only she never did. It was one of those things she never got around to, like signing Becky up for voice lessons. My first reaction was to be surprised that she hadn’t taken these pictures with her. Then
I realized what my father was doing, destroying my whole life, my history. “Stop it.” I grabbed the box from him. “Stop.”

“Ab, give those back.”

I shook my head. “I’m not letting you burn these. I want them.”

“You don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “If I want to burn them. I’ll burn them.”

“Mr. Reed,” Tommy said. His voice sounded higher than usual, and it cracked on my father’s name.

“Tommy, stay out of this. Why don’t you go home? And take that stupid dog with you.”

But Tommy didn’t move, and neither did Tabby. She just kept barking. I think both Tommy and I were frozen for a moment. But I knew I didn’t want my father to burn those pictures, so before he could take the box back from me, I turned around and started running as fast as I could, back toward Morrow’s field. I wasn’t sure where I was going, only that I had to get away from him, that I couldn’t let him take anything else from me.

“Abby,” I heard my father yell after me. “Abby, get back here. Oh, for Christ’s sake.” But I didn’t turn around or slow down or anything. I just ran as fast as I could with the pictures, through the field to the other side, to the
neighborhood on the other side of it. I must’ve run a half mile before I stopped to catch my breath, and then, as I stopped to breathe, I realized I was crying. I almost couldn’t distinguish between the sweat and the tears on my face because they both were there, blending together, and I could feel them both, but strangely, I also felt nothing.

Before I knew it, Tommy ran up behind me. “You can really run for a girl.” He was out of breath and panting the way Tabby did when she needed water.

“Where’s Tabby?”

“I put her in your house.”

“Why did you do that?” I felt myself getting hysterical, thinking that if my father could burn pictures, could destroy an entire life, he would think nothing of hurting a dog.

“She’s fine,” Tommy said. “She’ll be fine.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You can come home with me. My grandma is cooking menudo. We can look at your pictures.”

I didn’t say anything, but when he reached his hand out, I took it.

Mrs. Ramirez didn’t ask why I was staying for dinner or why I had a box of pictures with me or even why I’d been crying.
I heard her go into the other room to call my father and tell him I was there, but I also heard her say, “Let her stay, Jim. Maybe some menudo do her good.”

“Let’s go upstairs and look at the pictures,” Tommy said. I followed him blindly up to his room.

We sat on Tommy’s bed, and I finally let go of the box. He started taking out pictures and asking me questions: “Who’s this?” and “What are you doing here?” and so on.

I told him all about Grandma Jacobson, about her sapphire hearts and her terrible cancer. We looked at pictures of my parents when they were young, when they both looked so happy and they were holding on to each other in a park and smiling. And then we looked at pictures of me and Becky—us as babies, us as toddlers, us dressed up for Christmas in these little red velvet matching dresses, us at Thanksgiving with bright orange bows in our hair.

“She looks different than she does in the other picture.” I knew he was referring to Becky’s school picture, the one that still hung on bulletin boards and telephone poles around Pinesboro. “She looks more alive here. You can see how much energy she had. That other picture makes her look flat.”

“Who ever looks good in their school picture?”

He nodded. “I guess they’re just supposed to be for parents and grandparents to gush over or whatever.”

“Not for this.”

He looked at me, and his eyes were so expressive that I could tell there were so many things he wanted to say but didn’t know how. I could see everything he was feeling: pain for me, compassion, longing, the need to fix something that was so broken it was unfixable. “Did you ever think about its being you?”

I’ve thought about it a million times. What if I’d been the one to disappear instead of Becky? What would’ve happened to my family then? I wonder if we would’ve broken in the same way or if somehow Becky’s spark would’ve fixed things in a way my quietness couldn’t. But I didn’t feel comfortable telling Tommy any of this, so I just shrugged and said, “Not really, no. I try not to.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He could’ve meant right here, right in this moment, in his bedroom. But I suspected he was saying that he was glad I wasn’t the one who’d gone missing. I tried to imagine if he would’ve been friends with Becky had I been the one to disappear, and I just couldn’t see it.

Tommy stood up and locked his bedroom door, and
then he sat back down on the bed next to me and started to put the pictures back in the box. I knew as soon as I saw him lock the door that he was going to start kissing me, and I wanted him to so much.

I don’t know why, but I started crying again. It was different now, though. It was more like relief, the sudden feeling of safety, the deep pit of missing Becky. I was crying silently, and I felt the tears running down my cheeks; I didn’t move to wipe them away. But Tommy did. He reached up and touched my face with his thumb, gently pushing away the tears. “Don’t cry, Abby,” he whispered.

“I don’t want to.” But I couldn’t stop myself.

“I want to kiss you,” he whispered, almost as if he were asking me a question.

I nodded, to let him know I wanted to kiss him too. And then we were kissing and not just a quick kiss like we had those few other times. No, this was slow and long, and it lasted for probably five minutes. And it was the most amazing thing I’d ever felt.