The September Sisters (2 page)

Becky and I had secretly made fun of him, of his little roly-poly figure and extra-large square nose—the one reason, we were certain, that he wasn’t married like everyone else on the baseball team. But I was no longer laughing at his appearance. I became serious; like everyone around me, I was suddenly in a whole new world.

The first day after Becky disappeared was filled with this strange sense of shock. None of us knew what had hit us, not me, not my parents, certainly not the police. Though I know this isn’t entirely true, I feel as though we all sort of sat
around, that we were afraid to move, unsure.

I know that the town we live in, Pinesboro, had never seen anything like this before. I overheard Harry Baker tell my father that the first twenty-four hours are crucial, that if a missing child isn’t found on the first day, she’s probably dead. But still, it felt like no one took any action, that even Harry Baker wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to do in this situation.

It took my father until dinnertime to get a search together. He scoured the house for flashlights, pulling open every drawer in the kitchen and cursing when he couldn’t find one. “Dammit, Elaine. Where do we keep the flashlights?”

My mother didn’t answer. She’d already taken a Valium and fallen into a deep, silent sleep.

MY HOUSE SITS
on the corner of Shannon Drive and Sycamore Street. The house faces Sycamore, and we happen to be number six, giving us an address that seems to roll right off the tongue, 6 Sycamore Street. The three
S
’s make it an easy address to remember, something my parents have been drilling into me practically since I was born, our address and our phone number, two pieces of information that I must never forget.

It sounded funny, hearing our address on the news, listening to my father repeat it over and over again on the phone as he called everyone in his phone book and tried to enlist their help.

On the second day it was raining, but my father’s entire
baseball team showed up, looking burly in green and yellow slickers, with flashlights and tangled umbrellas. They didn’t look like the men I’d seen running around the dusty field, hollering at one another, or the men holding on to beers at a summer barbecue. These were different men, pitiful, soaking wet, and possibly afraid. My father told me they were going out in a search party, though it seemed strange to me, calling something like that a party.

I’m not sure exactly where they searched, but when my father came home, he left his shoes, a large white pair of Reeboks with blue stripes on the sides, in the foyer. They were so caked with mud that you couldn’t even see the stripes anymore.

Before Becky disappeared, Pinesboro was a quiet place. We are only forty-five minutes from Philadelphia, but we might as well be an entire world away. The only time I’ve ever been to the city is on the occasional school field trip to the art museum or the Franklin Institute or to go to the airport the one time we went to Disney World. The city feels dirty, a little dangerous, crowded. But Pinesboro strikes me as the complete opposite. It’s made up of treelined streets and colonial-style houses with nice green backyards and tall
oaks and evergreens. Our neighborhood is like most others in Pinesboro, several winding, hilly streets, with two-story house after two-story house, each one strangely identical, yet slightly different in its color or style. It was the kind of place where people didn’t always lock their doors, where we were allowed to play on the sidewalk, even at night.

The night Becky disappeared we’d been sleeping with the windows open. No one could be sure whether or not we’d locked the front door. My mother started crying when Harry Baker asked her, and my father said he hadn’t checked, that it wasn’t something he thought of. It may sound strange, but that’s the way things were in Pinesboro.

One of the first things my father did the week after Becky disappeared was have air-conditioning units installed in all the bedrooms, so we could close the windows at night, and he had a new dead bolt installed on the front door. He also added a security system that he arms every time he enters or exits the house. Our house is like a prison, something that sometimes feels like it’s keeping me in, locked away, not keeping other people out.

After Becky disappeared, my mother retreated to her bedroom, and she spent most of the first month in bed. I saw
her only rarely when my father made me go in their bedroom and sit with her. But she wouldn’t talk to me. She may have been sleeping, but I doubted it. She had done the same thing after my grandmother, her mother, had died the year before. She has this way of withdrawing, of folding herself up in her own sadness so no one can get through to her, not even my father.

When my father went out to search, Mrs. Ramirez, our next-door neighbor, came over to sit with me. I’d never liked her, even before Becky disappeared. She was old, and she smelled like cooked spinach, and she didn’t speak English very well.

Before Becky disappeared, Mrs. Ramirez watched us occasionally if my parents went out to dinner, until I’d turned twelve the year before and insisted that we were too old for a babysitter. My father had relented, and we hadn’t seen Mrs. Ramirez much over the past year except if she was in the backyard watering her rosebushes while we were out in the pool. Then she would come up to the wooden rail fence and lean over. “Hallo, girls,” she would say, and wave. “How you doing?” Her accent was usually enough to send Becky and me into fits of giggles, so all we could do was dive under the water to try to suppress them and let my mother
go over to the fence to chat.

“Abigail,” she would say (only she pronounced it Ah-bee-hail) when she got up to go to the bathroom, “you no move.”

I wondered what it would be like to be somewhere else, to have everyone out there looking for me, but then I was afraid. I didn’t know exactly what to think about where Becky was, but I decided that bad people had her, that they were doing terrible things to her. I imagined her bound to a chair and gagged and being tortured with a hot poker. We’d seen something like that in a movie once. It was something we weren’t supposed to be watching, and when my father walked in, he’d changed the channel and sent us to our rooms. I’d had nightmares about that movie sometimes, even before Becky disappeared.

When Mrs. Ramirez came back from the bathroom, she stared at me so intently that I wondered how it would feel to spit in her face. “Ah-bee-hail,” she said, “we pray now for your
hermana
.” This made me uncomfortable. We don’t pray in my family. I don’t even know how to pray. Mrs. Ramirez closed her eyes and whispered things that I didn’t understand. I kept my eyes open and watched her, knowing that if Becky were here, she would kick me until we both started to giggle. Suddenly I began to miss her.

Across the street from us live the Petersons and the Olneys. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson are young and don’t have any children. Both of them work in the city and are hardly home. Becky and I stole short glimpses of them sometimes on Saturdays, when they’d weed the front yard. We were strangely in awe of them, fascinated. Mrs. Peterson is beautiful, with long red hair halfway down her back, and she always wears high heels, even with jeans. Mr. Peterson is tall and muscular, and sometimes he takes his shirt off when he works outside in the summer, a sight I find both disturbing and enjoyable.

Mrs. Olney is a large, loud woman, and her husband, thin as a rail and quiet. In fact, even though he’s lived across the street from me all my life, I’m not sure I’ve heard him talk more than once or twice. The Olneys have two boys. One was a junior in high school; the other one attended Pinesboro Community College and still lived at home. The one who was in high school, John Olney, is fat like his mother and quiet like his father. “Poor kid,” my mother would say when we saw him. His older brother, Shawn, plays the guitar and aspires to be in a rock band. He dressed all in black and was the first person I’d ever seen wearing real leather pants.
Sometimes, before Becky disappeared, we’d hear his band rehearsing in their garage even though the door was closed and they were all the way across the street. It was a loud screeching sound that my mother hated, and she kept saying she couldn’t wait until he moved out.

For a few weeks after Becky disappeared, Mrs. Olney brought over casseroles every night. They were delicious creations, better than anything my mother has ever cooked: tuna and noodles with cheddar cheese, chicken tetrazzini, turkey potpies. The food smelled amazing when she brought it to the door, and the whole house seemed to come alive when we warmed it in the oven.

One afternoon, while my father was out searching and Mrs. Ramirez was in the bathroom, I stole a glance out my front window, and I saw a police car in the Olneys’ driveway. This was my first indication that my neighbors, people I’d known all my life, would become suspects.

Every day became startlingly the same, something like a routine. I watched television with Mrs. Ramirez while the world moved slowly all around me. My mother stayed immobile in her bedroom. My father searched and searched. There was no distinction among these days, something that
set one apart from the others. Becky’s absence began to feel like something normal, like something that had always been hanging over us.

One day, nearly three weeks after Becky disappeared, my mother left her bedroom for the first time and went out on the patio to smoke. Mrs. Ramirez and I were watching
Family Feud
, a show I can’t stand but that Mrs. Ramirez loves. “Sur-bey says,” she’d say over and over again, and chuckle. I heard my mother walk down the steps, but I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to frighten her back into her room. Then I heard the patio door slam, and when I turned to look outside, I saw her sitting in the deck chair, white puffs of smoke swirling up above her head.

“I’m going outside,” I said to Mrs. Ramirez.

“Where I can see you, Ah-bee-hail.”

I opened the door to the patio as quietly as I could and snuck up and sat down next to her. “It’s hot out here,” I said.

She nodded. “It’s hot in there too.”

Mrs. Ramirez had a tiny personal fan that she sometimes blew on the back of my neck. But that fan gave me the creeps, and I hated it when she did that.

My mother took a drag on her cigarette, then took it out
of her mouth and tapped it in the ashtray. I inhaled deeply, intoxicated by the woodsy smell of the smoke, a smell so particular to my mother that I suddenly realized how much I loved it. She reached up and caressed the top of my head, ran her fingers through my hair. “We need to get you some school clothes,” she said.

Every year we went school shopping in the middle of August. We waited until the big department stores had their back-to-school sales, and then we’d have a day at the mall—lunch and everything. The day usually ended early, with Becky and me fighting and my mother having a headache, but still, it was one of the best days of the year, something I always looked forward to. I was surprised my mother thought of it. I’d remembered that school started in a few weeks, but I didn’t think she had.

She smashed out the cigarette in the ashtray, grinding it down to the butt. Then she turned to me and put her hand on my cheek. “As soon as Becky gets back,” she said, “then we’ll go.” She sounded perfectly calm, normal almost.

“What if she doesn’t come back?” I whispered. I couldn’t help thinking it. The day before, I’d overheard Harry Baker say to my father that three weeks was a long time for these types of cases.

My mother took her hand from my cheek, then reached up and slapped me there, not hard but enough to surprise me. It was the first time she had ever hit me, had ever shown me more than indifference or love. She got up without saying a word and went back into the house.

I sat there for a few moments, staring longingly at the pool, which I hadn’t been in since the night Becky disappeared. I began to wonder about those inner tubes, if they really mattered that much, pink or orange or whatever. I closed my eyes and did what Mrs. Ramirez was always trying to get me to, attempted to pray. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it, but I wondered if God made deals. If I told him that Becky could have the pink inner tube, if I promised to always be nice to her, I wondered if Becky would be allowed to come home. But I wasn’t sure how to say it all, and then I felt silly sitting there all alone with my eyes closed, so I got up and went back in the house.

“Where’s my mother?” I asked Mrs. Ramirez. She shushed me. It was the bonus round, and she was watching intently, but she pointed upstairs.

A few hours later my father came home, sweaty and dirty and carrying a pizza. “Did you find her?” I asked, the same way I asked him each night. I’d have the same feeling
when I saw him walk in: It was hope that he’d have Becky with him, that she’d just been playing a game, hiding all along.

My father didn’t answer. He put the pizza down on the table. “We have to eat,” he said. My father isn’t a cook; in fact I don’t think I’d ever seen him make more than a can of chicken soup, and that was only one time, when my mother had the flu. My father is a numbers man, a bill payer, a straight-and-narrow arrow, as my grandma Jacobson used to call him.

I thought about telling him what had happened with my mother earlier on the patio, but I knew it would make him mad. He’d tell me I shouldn’t bug her, that I should mind myself.

I took a piece of pizza, and we sat there together and ate in silence. There were a lot of things I wanted to ask him: where they were searching; what they’d found; if he, like my mother, truly believed that Becky would come home. But I wasn’t sure how to ask him any of that without it sounding bad. Instead I asked him if he thought my mother was okay.

“Sure, Ab, she’ll be fine. You know how she gets.”

I nodded.

“Tomorrow morning I’m going back on TV,” my father said. “We’re going to offer a reward.”

“What kind of reward?”

“Money, Ab. A hundred grand.”

It suddenly seemed spectacular to me that Becky was worth that much money. We often talked about what we’d do if we had a lot of money, the things we’d buy. Becky always said she would buy her own horse, though I told her we wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it. “It doesn’t matter.” She would shrug. “If I’m that rich, I’ll buy my own stable.”

“You’ll come with me,” he said. “Mrs. Ramirez has a doctor’s appointment.”

If Becky had been there, we would’ve spent the rest of the night looking through our closets for something to wear to the television station. We would’ve fought over the little makeup cases our mother bought us for our birthdays the year before. Becky would’ve insisted that she would somehow get on TV.

Instead, after we finished eating our pizza, my father sent me up to my room to go to bed. “We’re getting up early tomorrow,” he said.

In my room it was too hot to sleep. Though we had the new air conditioning, I wasn’t allowed to turn down the
temperature to cool the room off completely. My father had already told me about how expensive it was, about how we couldn’t afford all the electric costs.

So I lay on the floor, under the fan, trying to follow a blade, around and around. For a moment I felt as if I could slow down time, make it move at my own pace, even make it go back.