Sister (13 page)

The music stops, and the yodel of a police siren billows unevenly through the air, bouncing off the sides off the ravine so it's hard to tell where it's coming from. Bodies scatter wildly into the brush, and I'm caught up in their panic and running too, clumsily climbing over fallen logs, branches whipping my face.
The cops
! we'd call to each other, and suddenly everyone would be scrambling down the side of the bluff, fighting for a foothold, the evening's dizzy drunkenness evaporating like mist. Then would come the long, aching silence, the crunch of footsteps on gravel overhead as we clung to the slender trees growing out from the
side of the bluff, praying to Blessed Jesus that they wouldn't give way. Below, the lake sparkled diamonds in the distance, but all we could think of was the rocks directly below us and the murmur of gulls disturbed from their sleep and the cops' yellow beams stroking the leaves only inches from our faces.

I cannot imagine that the cops here tonight are much different from the cops I remember from Wisconsin. They all have their badges and billy clubs, their crisp uniforms and questions, a heavy walk that means
Do what I say
. Sam had disappeared before, sometimes for several days; and each time, they found him, or else didn't find him; but either way, he always ended up back home. Once, my mother found things missing—money, a tiny silver picture frame, her watch—but when Sam came in to breakfast his first morning back, it was as if she had forgotten these things had ever existed.

“Good morning,” she sang as he sat down at the table. His eyes were like poison, and he kept them fixed on his cereal bowl. My father no longer addressed him directly; instead, he talked to the sugar dish, or the newspaper he was reading, or our ancient cat, Rose, who still loved Sam and struggled arthritically into his lap. “So he's finally come back from God knows where,” he muttered to the ceiling, but Sam just blinked his poison eyes—he didn't speak to my father at all, directly or indirectly. Rose purred and purred, pushing the top of her head into his hand. I watched that hand, waiting for it to respond, and I knew something had been lost in Sam when it did not.

But how easily things might have been different! When the police asked their halting questions, my mother simply gave them the answers that should have been true. Sam had had his moments, like any teenage boy, she said, but he had no special difficulties, there were no fights at home. The friends and relatives who said otherwise were betraying Sam at the very time he needed them most; the truth was what you made it, and it was only by stating these things to strangers that they became terrible, unal
terable fact.
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all
. So I kept silent about the night that Sam came into my bedroom with his friends, looking for money, jewelry, anything they could sell. “So, Sam-boy, this is your sister,” said the one who was stroking my hair. He looked older than Sam, and he had the knife Mrs. Baumbach would later describe: a leather grip, an odd tip curved like a question mark. “She isn't going to breathe a word of this, is she? Your sister can keep a secret,” and he moved his hand over my shoulders and gown, lightly, as if he were soothing a child. Sam had my confirmation locket, the birthstone necklace my father had given me. “You got anything else?” was the last thing he said, but I was too scared to answer. Abruptly the one standing over me straightened, and then they were gone, filing out into the hallway, leaving only the smell of their cigarette smoke, and a bitter cologne I've never encountered since. For years, I worried I'd come home to find Sam waiting beside my door, or rummaging through my jewelry box, or pointing a gun to my head. I worried that someone would discover the part of me that hoped my brother would never be found.

I cross our lawn and sit on the steps that lead up to our deck, trying to catch my breath. Clouds have dimmed the moon to a quiet star, and the wind rises, shivering in the branches of the apple trees. I wonder why I was running in the first place—I wasn't doing anything wrong.
I heard the music
, I practice saying.
I was concerned. I came out to investigate
. Still, I am afraid as I listen to the cops thrashing through the trees below me, and when I see the glow of a flashlight moving in my direction, I stand up quickly and prepare my face, because this is what you do when the police ask you questions. You smile, a big, wide, friendly smile. You ask if you can be of any help. You assure them that, regardless of appearances, everything is really all right.

H
alloween is Adam's favorite holiday, and this year he's offered to take Pat's girls around our neighborhood during official trick-or-treating hours at dusk. Pat lives above her antique store on a busy street in downtown Cobblestone; her neighbors are a hardware store, a liquor store, a gas station. But our streets are quiet, the houses set close together, the neighborhood windows plastered with cutouts of black cats and witches riding on brooms. Even our next-door neighbor Charlie hung a homemade ghost from the corner of the house, his wife calling shrill instructions as she held on to the stepladder. This morning, when I look out our bedroom window, I can see the white sheet flapping in the wind, its Magic Marker mouth stuck in a wide, pitiful howl. I want to walk over and pull it down, put the poor thing out of its misery. I don't like Halloween. There's something unnerving about skeletons in the grocery store, bats suspended from the ceiling at work, hay-stuffed corpses sprawled on people's lawns. I'm hoping we'll get by with a simple smiling jack-o'-lantern, but no such luck. Adam goes out to get one and, when he returns, the truck bed is filled with a dozen of the ugliest pumpkins I've ever seen. He carries them into the kitchen one by one, proudly, as if they're trophies.

“I'm going to carve them for tonight, surprise the girls,” he says. “You want to help?”

Laverne eyes the pumpkins suspiciously. My expression is probably the same.

“How much did all this cost?”

“Next to nothing, can you believe it?” Adam says. “They're irregulars. Carl Jaeger let me have the lot for twenty bucks.”

“Carl Jaeger should have paid you twenty bucks to take them,” I say, staring at the odd shapes, the warty cheeks and splintered stumps.

“Wait and see,” Adam says. “I have an idea. The girls are going to love it.”

So I cover the linoleum with old newspapers, and we sit cross-legged on the floor, the history of the past months spread between us. Adam pulls the first of the pumpkins into his lap; he holds it steady against his knees, wiping its face with a warm wet cloth. He is gentle about this task, turning the pumpkin's face from side to side the way one might turn a child's face, alert for dirty ears, smudges, sleeping sand. My lap is already filled with my stomach, which is about the size of the next-to-smallest pumpkin—big enough to have made my descent to the kitchen floor unwieldy. Big enough so that strangers are starting to notice. Some make predictions: Most say it's a girl. Adam and I have told my doctor we don't want to know in advance.

My mother is predicting a healthy boy with my almond-shaped eyes and her own mother's smile. A boy just like my brother. She believes it's no coincidence that my revised due date—January fifth—is the day before Sam's birthday. “The doctor says that's just an estimate,” I say. “It could be born in December, or as late as the middle of January.”

“Or January sixth,” my mother says. “Stranger things have happened.”

She looks for signs in everything. She claims burning bushes are everywhere and that most of us just haven't learned how to
see them. Last Saturday night, when she and Auntie Thil joined hands with the other members of their women's prayer group, they saw a little boy, dressed in an infant's snow-white baptismal gown, walking up the long gravel driveway toward our house in Horton. This, she called to tell me, was the child I will have. Sam coming home like the prodigal son.

She says, “Have you thought about naming the baby after Sam?”

Adam outlines a pair of squinting eyes, a mouth that badly needs a dentist. There's nothing he likes better than transforming an idea into something concrete. Every day as I drive to work, I pass things he has made, places where he's left his mark: this new porch, that refurbished farmhouse, a delicate gazebo tucked between the trees. He's planning another sculpture for our side yard. Inside the house, he rearranges our furniture. He paints and papers and plans. As my belly swells, he touches me—the small of my back, the indentations behind my knees—as if he is evaluating my structural integrity, longing to make improvements: a pillow, supportive hose, sturdier shoes. He reminds me to take my calcium supplements. He fusses over how much or how little I sleep. Is there anything I can do? he asks. Is there anything you need?

He holds his pumpkin in front of his face. “What do you think?” he says from behind it.

“Scary,” I say.

He lowers it, looks at it closely. “You think so?” he says. “Scared, maybe.”

“Aren't you going to make any happy ones?”

He chooses another knife. “You can make the happy ones,” he says.

But my first jack-o'-lantern will turn out sad; I can already tell by its flat, scarred cheeks, complete with tear-shaped blight marks. I cut open its forehead, and there's that pumpkin smell—rich, mildewy, dank, the odor of sealed, dark boxes, the odor of
secret things. I separate the seeds into the wooden bowl for baking; the orange goo goes into the compost bucket. My mother doesn't put her faith in things like supportive hose and vitamin tablets, what she calls
quick fixes
. The power of prayer will smooth the ache out of my tired back, reduce the swelling of my ankles better than elevation. The day she called me to say her group had prayed for my ankles, I got the giggles.

She sighed.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It's just a funny thing to imagine.”

“Abby, when is it we remember to pray?” she said in her practiced businesswoman's voice. “When things are going OK? No, it's when we have problems that we remember God and turn to Him. That's why He sends us these little hardships.”

“God's talking to me through my ankles?”

“Don't laugh,” my mother said, but she laughed a little herself.

My jack-o'-lantern is an unhappy disaster. The mouth is lopsided, the left corner slicing too far down into its chin. One eye is smaller than the other. I turn it around for Adam to see.

“It's much scarier than mine,” he says.

I'm surprised. “But it isn't scary.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn't.”

We are looking at the same thing—how can we see it so differently? Adam squints one eye, widens the other, mimicking my pumpkin's expression. I nail him with a glob of pulp, and he whips back a handful of cold, wet seeds. When I yelp, the baby shivers sympathetically. Adam says it's bigger than the length of an outstretched hand. He reads all the brochures I bring home from the doctor; he even gets books at the library. There is nothing Adam loves better than a technical word, crisp in the mouth like a fresh stick of gum. Conduit, carburetor, compressor. Parturition, gestation, lactation. The baby, Adam reminds me, is de
veloping according to the genetic blueprint we carry within our own cells. It is immune to my mother's prayers and premonitions. Visions of little boys dressed all in white.

“He's a goddamn encyclopedia,” Pat complains, her big laugh like an engine that fires but won't catch. Pat suspects terminology of all kinds: She's at home with gizmos and doohickeys, whatchamacallits and thingamajiggers, sniggering references to ovens and buns and biscuits. She tells her own half-grown biscuits—three bone-slender white-haired girls—that the baby is in my stomach.

Uterus
, Adam corrects her, and Pat snorts; I blush, the girls roll their pale blue eyes. Three plain little girls with elaborate frilly names: Alinda, Lorentina, Tamela. “My leeches,” Pat calls them, running her hands through their strange white hair. They make me nervous—all children do—and I'm already dreading this evening, when they'll fill our small house with their shrieky voices, their pounding footsteps. Those spindly pumping arms and legs. Those gap-toothed mouths. “You won't feel that way about your own,” Adam says, but I worry that I might drop it like a cup, overfeed it like a goldfish, leave it behind in the grocery store the way I'm always doing with my purse. I worry that I won't love it. I worry that I'll love it too much. I worry that I'll look into its eyes and see the figure of a boy, dressed all in white, walking up the driveway toward the house where my brother and I grew up.

 

Highway KL links the townships along Lake Michigan like so many rosary beads—Horton, Oneisha, Farbenplatz, Fall Creek, Holly's Field. Each summer, Sam and I played survival games in the fields along this road, stockpiling food in makeshift forts, estimating how long we could live off the land. We gathered the crisp young shoots of wild asparagus, sweet beans yellowing in the fields, sour gooseberries, tart wild raspberries. We invented a secret language. We carried clumsy stick weapons. At home, we
explored my mother's pantry, dug our hands into the bins of cornmeal and oatmeal and rice, ran our fingers over the jars of pickles and tomatoes and beets in the root cellar; in the attic, we opened her cedar chest to inhale the bitter scent protecting our sweaters and scarves. It seemed that winter was always coming, a new virus constantly making its rounds, another bad influence seeping into the community—rock music, hip-hugger jeans, marijuana cigarettes. My mother looked in our ears and under our tongues, measured our height and weight against the chart in the bathroom closet. Once a week, we were forced to swallow a teaspoon of cod liver oil,
just in case
.

What were we preparing for even then? My mother still saves everything: string, rubber bands, slivers of leftover soap, bottles, rags, Christmas cards, our clumsy school projects, worn-out shoes. She collects discount dresses with crooked seams, bargain blouses, coupons. Her purse is heavy as an anvil, bulging with things she might need. Saint Christopher dangles upside down from the rearview mirror of her car; each New Year's Day she blesses the house with holy water. And when these charms fail, there are always her intuitions, premonitions, dreams, which are true just often enough so that I can't dismiss them. Even now, she always knows when I'm thinking about her. If I say to Adam, “Maybe I'll call Mom today,” she'll call me first. In Baltimore, at the beginning of my first and only semester of college at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, I tried to tell my roommate about my mother's gift.

“My mom's the same way,” Phoebe said. She was from Connecticut, wealthy and agnostic, and despite our differences we'd immediately become friends. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. Her teeth were perfectly straight from years of braces; she saw a dermatologist and, she told me privately, a psychotherapist. It was the end of our first week of classes, and we were stripping our beds, getting ready to do our laundry.

“No, you don't understand,” I said. “It's like she has
ESP
or something,” and I told her how she'd sketched my father's face
the day before she met him. I was showing off a bit. I'd never been to New York City or gone sailing off the coast of the Florida Keys like Phoebe, but I had a mother with a special gift. I'd impressed friends in Horton with this story, and no one had ever questioned it. But Phoebe said, “What does your dad look like?”

“He's tall, with brown hair, and he parts it on the side. He sometimes has a mustache.”

“That could be half the men in the world,” Phoebe said. “Did you ever see the sketch?”

The drawing hadn't been saved. The only ones who ever saw it were Auntie Thil and my mother.

“I don't think my mother would lie,” I said, hurt.

“I didn't mean it that way. I'm just saying people believe what they want to, that's all.”

“This is different,” I said. “I'll prove it. I'll think about her right now and she'll call me.”

“You want to put a dollar on that?” Phoebe said.

I hesitated; betting was a venial sin.

“No?”

“Sure, but you'll lose.”

“Let's see if anybody else wants to bet,” Phoebe said, and she headed for the door. But someone was already knocking. “Telephone, Abby,” she said. “It's your mom.”

Phoebe and I stared at each other. If someone had yelled “Boo!” we would have screamed.

“No way!” Phoebe finally said. “You arranged that in advance.” She never would believe that I hadn't. But that morning, I'd caught a glimpse of my own beliefs through the eyes of someone else.
People believe what they want
. That night, as I struggled to undress for bed without exposing anything unnecessary, Phoebe said, “Can I ask you something? Why do you always have a penny pinned to your underwear?” A penny? Could she mean my Saint Benedict medal, which my cousin Monica and I had vowed, along with the rest of Girls' Catechism, to wear for life? I tried to ex
plain: Saint Benedict medals prevented possession by the devil. “Do you think other people are possessed because we don't wear them?” Phoebe said.

“No,” I said earnestly.

“So then it's just Catholics the devil wants? How come?”

It seemed as if everything I'd ever believed in was being exposed as wishful thinking, foolish superstition, or, at best, a matter of opinion.

“Can I ask you another question?” Phoebe asked, after we'd turned out the lights. “If your mother has this gift, why can't she find out what happened to your brother?”

 

The phone rings just as I'm finishing my third jack-o'-lantern, one with a growly expression and a frayed gray stump like a woman's hat. I pick up the receiver in the hallway, coating it with pumpkin slime; I already know who it has to be. “Happy Halloween,” my mother says. “Are you having a nice weekend?”

“We're carving jack-o'-lanterns,” I say, picking a pumpkin seed out of my hair. “Twelve of them.”

“Twelve!” my mother says, and the pause that follows is her secret, silent laugh, the laugh that is now mine. I've always envied women like Pat, with their booming, sexy laughter.

“I won't keep you long,” my mother says. “I was just thinking about that jack-o'-lantern you and Sam had, the one so big you both fit inside it. Remember that, Abby?”