Sister (14 page)

“Not really,” I lie. “I was pretty young.”

“You were five,” she says. “I've got the picture here in front of me. The two of you with just your heads sticking out. Like chicks in an egg. I'll send it on.”

“Oh, that's
OK
,” I say, but I know it will arrive by certified mail, just like all the other things she's sent over the past few weeks: Sam's baby clothes, preserved in cedar chips, his baby blanket, and, most recently, his handmade christening cap and
gown wrapped up in acid-free paper. She has saved it all, every last bit, scented with sandalwood, preserved beneath plastic, and I don't need holy dreams to tell me she means to pass it along to my child in the same way that my grandmother passed Elise's belongings to me. It was hard for me to remember I'd never known Elise; my grandmother's memories became, at times, more real than any of my own. Even now, I remember the day of the cannery fire as if I'd actually been there. I remember the day of the funerals. I remember my grandmother's grief. I don't want my child to grow up that way, remembering things that belong to other people. It's too great a responsibility, living up to the perfection—or the imperfection—of the dead.

Now my mother is describing the day we brought Sam home from his christening. It's one of her favorite stories. My father lifts Sam out of his white blanket, plucks the lacy cap from his head.
There you go, sport
! he says in his booming voice, rocketing the baby around the room as my mother and grandmother cry in unison,
Support his neck
! But when they lay Sam across my lap, I support his neck without being told. I hold out my wrist when she checks the temperature of his milk. I soothe him when he cries in the crib beside my bed, singing little songs. And as I listen to my mother talk, I realize it's happening again—I
remember
this, and yet, of course, that's not possible; I wasn't even two years old. “You were always a natural mother,” my mother says. “You took such good care of your brother.”

“Adam's better with kids than I am,” I say, but my mother doesn't want to change the subject.

“I mailed you Sam's christening gown. Did you get it?”

“We did.”

“Your grandmother made that, you know. Now I'm glad I didn't give it to Monica.”

“But you should have,” I say. “It's so beautiful. Someone should use it.”

“I keep hoping you'll use it,” my mother says. “I keep hoping you'll change your mind.”

“Mom,” I say. “Why do we have to keep fighting about this? If the baby grows up and wants to get baptized, that's fine, but I'm not going to do it. You
know
I don't go to church, and even if I still believed in original sin, which I don't, I'd have to think long and hard about baptizing my child into a church that doesn't give women the same rights as men.”

“I just hope you don't regret your decision,” my mother says. “It's a comfort to me now, knowing Sam was baptized. Knowing that even if I won't get to see him again in this world, we can be reunited in the next.”

It's the first time I've ever heard her mention the possibility that Sam won't be found. “I'm glad it's a comfort to you,” I say, as gently as I can. “But it's not a comfort to me. I'm not even sure if I believe in an afterlife.”

“Oh, Abby,” my mother says, her voice full of anguish. “Then what's the point of anything? How can you live from day to day if you think we just end at death?”

“Look,” I say, “I've got to go now. I'll call you later, OK?” I hang up, drained, miserable. In the kitchen, Adam is at work on a new jack-o'-lantern, one with a double stem like devil's horns. I remember sitting in the big pumpkin with Sam, back-to-back. The hard wriggling knobs of his spine. The cool walls of the pumpkin. That damp, secret smell.

“How's Mom?” Adam says. I can tell he is pleased with his jack-o'-lanterns; it's put him in a teasing sort of mood. “Any more holy visions of the baby?”

“No.”

“Hallelujah.” He uses a long-handled tweezers to pluck out a perfect oval eye. “Is she mailing us more stuff?” he says, but I've got my head in the fridge, so I can pretend I don't hear. Cheese. Eggs. Milk. I don't want to talk about anything. “It's lunchtime,” I tell Adam. “You hungry?”

He shakes his head no. He is covered with pumpkin guts. He is consumed by his pumpkins, the idea of what his pumpkins will be. Absurdly, I think of Genesis, God bending over his new creation, dividing space, naming names.
And he saw that it was good
.

“I'm going to make an omelet,” I say. If I were living in Wisconsin, If I were the person I used to be, I'd be having a baby shower, planned by my mother and Monica. I'd unwrap rubber nipples, disposable diapers, a breast pump, IOU notes for baby-sitting and housework. Monica would loan me clothes her babies had outgrown; she and my mother and Auntie Thil would make me special teas, accompany me to doctor's appointments, take me on trips to department stores to finger stuffed animals and jangly mobiles. We would make lists of ridiculous names—Garbanzig Rototiller, Chainsaw Elizabeth—before studying the worn
Christian Names for Babies
book that has been passed family to family for as long as I can remember. Of course, I would be planning the baptism—choosing godparents (my mother and Harv), making a reservation with the priest, preparing an announcement for the Baby News page of the weekly paper. Suddenly I am missing my mother terribly. I want to call her back and tell her I'm sorry, I'll baptize the baby, I'll start going to Mass, I'll do anything she says, just to feel like I'm part of that life again, blessed with that kind of certainty.

“What else is on the way?” Adam says.

“Just a photograph. You don't have to look at it.”

My voice is as sharp as the sound of the egg cracked against the bowl. Adam gets up and comes over to the stove. “What's the matter?” he says. I open the shell, and there's the sudden surprise of a double yolk.

“Nothing.” I puncture them each with a fork, add milk, beat them a bit too briskly. “My mother. You know.”

“I
don't
know,” Adam says. “What did you talk about?”

“She wants us to baptize the baby.”

“So what else is new?” Then he sees my face. “I don't un
derstand why she keeps after you about it,” he says reasonably. “She knows we don't go to church.”

I pour the egg into the hot pan. “That's not the point,” I say.

“What
is
the point?”

“Salvation.” How can I explain this to Adam, with his blueprints, his careful reasoning, his twice-measured plans? Adam, who rearranges a room again and again, spinning each piece of furniture around himself as if it is a planet and he is the sun, the center, the confident source of gravity. I dump the omelet onto a plate. It falls apart, half cooked, ugly, nothing I want to put in my mouth. “Look,” I say, “what would you think about having a baptism anyway? Just to keep everyone happy? I mean—”

Adam stares at me as if I've developed stigmata. “I would hate it,” he says firmly. “You want to talk religion—fine. What kind of sin is hypocrisy?”

I scrape my omelet into the sink, turn off the burner, and go down the hallway to our room. The air smells of pumpkin, Adam's sleep, mine. The intimate odor of our lives. Beside the bed is the cradle he has made entirely by hand, the headboard carved with pineapples, those old pagan symbols of fertility, life. My grandmother's bed had four tall posts with a pineapple crowning each one. I remember being put down to nap on that bed beside my brother, the sour breath of the dog scorching our faces as we dreamed. Sundays after Mass, we'd burrow deep into the pile of guest coats, inhaling the dizzying clash of perfumes, scratching our cheeks on rhinestone brooches. Above the bed hung a large wooden crucifix. Once, my grandmother lifted it down to show us how the back could pop open to reveal blessed candles (half burned!), holy water, and oil, all that was necessary for an emergency baptism or last rites, the final cleansing of the soul.

I arrange my body in the center of the bed. The baby settles deeper into me, and I feel the click click of each fine bone in my
spine separating. My hips pop too, first the right, then the left, my body coming loose in preparation for birth. “It'll be even worse than you imagine,” my mother says, “so you might as well not think about it.”

Just after I dropped out of the conservatory, she dreamed that I appeared in a cherry-colored nightgown and stood beside her bed, not quite close enough to touch. At the time of the dream, I was living in a room in an apartment filled with people I did not know. Downstairs there was a grocery store, where I worked part time, mostly nights and weekends; during the day I looked for a better job, a full-time job. It was the first time in my life I'd ever been hungry. I stole what I could from the grocery; I swallowed glass after glass of cold water to curb my appetite. My brother was still missing, I was a disappointment to my mother and grandmother, and worst of all, I'd confirmed my father's predictions: I couldn't make it in the world. One night, I decided that I'd cash my next paycheck and hitchhike to Mexico or Montreal or Alaska, somewhere far enough from where I was so that even God wouldn't be able to find me.

“What's wrong?” my mother asked my dream self, and I opened my chest and stomach to show her that emptiness there. The next night, I came home from work to find a delivery of fruit and chocolate. Attached was a note from my mother, saying a check for five hundred dollars was in the mail. “Abby, you can never disappear,” she had written. “I will always know where you are, because you will come to tell me.”

 

I awaken to the sense of someone moving through the room. It's late afternoon, already starting to get dark. My heart hammers in my chest even as I tell myself it's only Adam, it's all right. How much longer will I wake up at the slightest sound, thinking my brother and his friends have returned to stand beside my bed? It's guilt, I suppose, that brings them back. Maybe it would help if I
told someone what I saw, what I didn't say, but whom? And after so many years, how could it make a difference? Mrs. Baumbach is dead; Dr. Neidermier has retired to Florida. The drive-in closed, and my mother has told me that even Becker's is in trouble, threatened by the new Piggly-Wiggly in Holly's Field. Adam's weary weight presses the bed beside my legs.

“You said your mom was sending a photograph,” he says.

“Yes.”

“What's in it?”

“Nothing. Just Sam and me as kids.”

Laverne hops up on the bed, teetering between us. The sound of her purr is ridiculously loud.

“It's weird,” Adam says, and his voice is soft, musing. “Your mother tells me all about your brother every time she calls. You won't talk about him even when I ask.”

“I don't know what to talk about,” I say, remembering the queasy feeling of having to answer questions, questions. Police with radios; reporters with cameras; detectives with notepads and busy scribbling pens. My mother hovering nearby, afraid I might say the wrong thing, afraid that our family would look as if there were something terribly wrong with us. Afraid of what happens when people begin their talk in a small town like Horton, people who would say it was all my mother's fault for being a career woman, a women's libber, a woman who'd lost sight of her duty to her husband. I would have said anything to protect her. I would have said anything to re-create my brother in the image she held up to us all.

“Then don't talk about anything,” Adam says. “Just talk. Just tell me
something
.”

And so I describe the pumpkin my father bought from the Luchterhands, so big Sam and I could both sit inside it. “After my mother took the picture,” I say, “my father told me to get out of the pumpkin so she could take one of Sam alone. He asked if Sam could fit inside all the way, and when Sam scrunched down,
my father fit the top back on and sat on it so Sam couldn't get out. We hadn't carved the face yet. At first, Sam was laughing, and my mother and I were laughing too, but my father put his finger to his lips. Then we heard Sam say something, and then he screamed, and the whole pumpkin began to shake. He was three or so, and my mother was pulling at my father and saying,
Gordon, please, you're scaring him
, and my father was laughing and saying she should lighten up. After a while, Sam stopped making noise and it got very still, so my father said,
All right
, and he lifted up the top. Sam had wet himself, and so my father spanked him.”

The baby shifts inside me, a twinkling sense of motion. I try to imagine all the things to come: first steps, first words, wet kisses, lengthening limbs and complicated rages, slamming bedroom doors, car doors, front doors leading to the sidewalk, to the street, to the town and the whole wide world. I know my mother believes that by bringing Sam back, she can finally put things right. I want to believe that too. But here are the shapes of my brother and his friends moving through my room on careless tiptoe. Here is my brother's face, close to mine. Here I am looking into his cool stare and finding nothing that I recognize. How will I feel if, someday, I look into my own child's face and see that same flat stare? Adam puts his arm around me; I touch his sandpapery elbow.

“I finished the jack-o'-lanterns,” he says. “You want to see?”

I get up and follow him out of the bedroom. The long hallway leading toward the living room seems like the tunnel we are told to expect when approaching death, the walls pulsing with a peculiar glow, the light at the end drawing us closer, close. The living room is alive with jack-o'-lanterns: flickering on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, leering from the log grate below, hunkered down in a row along the coffee table, balanced on the wide windowsill. Now I see that Adam had these places in mind when he chose the pumpkins this afternoon; no longer awkward or oddly shaped, each one seems perfect, tucked neatly into the book-shelf, snuggled in the cat's round wicker bed. I turn to let the
shadows lap their way around my body. The pumpkin smell thickens the candle's scents: pine, vanilla, lavender, rich enough to eat. I'm dizzy with their odor, their color, Adam's arms spinning around me like a welcoming web, snug and warm.