The September Sisters (15 page)

After my father had forbidden my mother to see Garret, I think she did start to die a little. She became instantly
deflated, an odd ghost of her former, recovered self. I took my father’s takeout dinners up to her room on trays. My father asked me to, afraid, I guess, to face her. I think he felt bad for their argument, only he was too stubborn to admit it. He spent several evenings eating dinner with me at the kitchen table, staring out the window, as if he were watching something amazing outside, something invisible to me.

My mother spent most of the week after their fight lying in bed, sprawled out and limp, her eyes round and empty. It reminded me of when I saw my grandma Jacobson in bed just before she died, her body stolen, devoured by cancer. Only physically there was nothing wrong with my mother.

When I brought her the trays, she didn’t eat, didn’t even acknowledge my presence. I was hurt by the blank stares or the shaking of her head when I tried to put the food in front of her, even though I knew it wasn’t personal, that she’d distanced herself from everything, not just me.

So after a few nights I was surprised when she reached out for me, when she held out her hand for me to grab onto. I squeezed it, and she squeezed back. Her hand was surprisingly cold and dry; her fingers felt bony as they curled around mine.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said to her, though I knew
nothing would be okay. I wanted to reassure her, wanted to help her the way that Garret did. I thought if only I could talk to her, if only I could understand her, then she wouldn’t need him. I guess that’s exactly what my father thought, exactly why he was so destroyed by her relationship with Garret.

“Abigail. Abigail,” she said. “Come lie with me.”

So I did. I put her tray down on the floor and got into bed with her. I snuggled up next to her body, the way I used to when I was younger and I’d had a bad dream and I’d fled to her room so she would hold me against her and I would feel in her warmth this instantaneous sensation that everything would be fine. My father would get angry when I’d wake him up; he’d say, “Jesus, Ab, it’s the middle of the night. Go back to sleep.” But my mother would open up the covers on her side of the bed and let me in, and she’d let me sleep there all night if I wanted to.

For some reason I got up the courage to ask her about Garret. “Why do you need him?” I whispered. I thought if I could understand, I could help.

“Who?” she said, and then it was as if it had suddenly occurred to her who I meant. “Oh, Abby.” She leaned over and kissed my head.

It surprised me when she started talking, when she told me the details, the things you can’t get from a detective’s file. Tiffany Walker had pale green eyes and long brown hair that she wore in two braids down her back, Indian style. After she died, Garret pulled his Volvo into the garage one evening, shut the door, locked himself in the car, and turned it on. Apparently his wife found him after he’d passed out, but he hadn’t been there long enough to die. After that, Garret starting going to therapy with Dr. Shreiker, the same guy my mother saw, and by the time she walked in, six years later, he was still learning how to deal with his pain without wanting to die.

My mother met Garret in Dr. Shreiker’s waiting room one afternoon when the doctor was running behind. My mother said the doctor came out into the waiting room to apologize to both of them and told them to chat, that he thought they’d have a lot in common. This seems like it’d be against some kind of code of ethics or something, but I don’t know.

“And we just became friends,” my mother said. “He understands me.”

It was so different from the way my mother had met my father, something I’d always turned into a fairy tale in my
mind. One winter day when they both were in college, my mother had gone ice-skating with her friends. I imagined it must’ve been beautiful then, snowy and magical outside. My father had a job working for the rink, driving the Zamboni machine. Every so often he’d clear the ice, yell for everyone to get off, and then drive around on the machine.

But people didn’t want to stop skating, and as the day progressed, they started to get a little drunk and angry, and every time my father came on to clear the ice, people would throw snowballs at him.

My mother felt so bad that she left her friends, and she stood by the little hut where the machine was parked. “People are terrible,” she said to my father as he got off the machine and wiped the snow from his face.

“Nah, just drunk,” my father said. “They don’t know the difference.”

“Well, I think it’s awful, just awful.”

My mother started to walk away, but my father called out after her, “Hey, I get off in an hour. How about some hot chocolate?”

My mother smiled at him, and my father said he always remembered that smile, just the right amount of teeth, just the right amount of arch. When she smiled at him, he felt
like all the snow was gone, and he was warm; the world was perfect.

But after my mother told me the story about Garret, I felt sick, and I didn’t think I had it in me to try to help her. I wanted so much for her to make my world okay, for her to fix everything that went wrong, that when I cuddled up against her I felt tears running down my cheeks. I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t, and before I knew it, I was leaning my face on her ratty sweatshirt and I was crying, and she was stroking my hair back softly, just the way she would have after a nightmare. “I need you,” I whispered, and then I instantly felt guilty even though it was true. I didn’t want to pressure her, but I wanted her to be there for me, to help me out of this the way a mother is supposed to help you out of things.

She didn’t say anything, but she continued to stroke my hair back until I stopped crying. Then I was so tired, so unbelievably drained, that I couldn’t move, couldn’t lift my head. I fell asleep there, just like that, with my head on my mother’s sweatshirt.

When I woke up the next morning, the bed was empty; my mother was gone.

THERE WERE ODD
similarities between my mother’s disappearance and Becky’s. I realized her absence when I woke up and went downstairs. My father had already contacted the police. I felt this sudden, nagging pit in the bottom of my stomach, this sensation of losing something so large, I’d yet to realize its importance.

The morning after my mother left, I walked downstairs and saw Kinney sitting at the kitchen table with my father. My father was crying. It was the first and only time I’ve ever seen my father cry. He didn’t cry once the whole time after Becky disappeared, or at least not in front of me. This time I was instantly afraid; I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong.

“What happened?” I said. My voice shook, and I thought I was going to cry again, though not a relieved sort of crying the way I’d done the night before in my mother’s arms, but a reckless, uncontrollable shaking sob, something that would completely take the life right out of me.

“Did your mother tell you she was going somewhere?” Kinney asked.

I shook my head. “She’s gone,” I said. But it wasn’t a question; it was something that I automatically knew from watching my father cry, from listening to Kinney as he sat at our kitchen table.

There wasn’t much Kinney or anyone else for that matter could do about my mother leaving. She was an adult, and there was no sign of foul play, no sign that she’d gone unwillingly. “People leave,” Kinney told my father. “Happens all the time.”

“But she’s not well,” my father said. “She shouldn’t be alone.”

Kinney looked sort of disgusted with my father, as if he thought we’d already wasted too much of his time. “Look,” Kinney said, “I’m sorry. But this isn’t police business.”

Of course that wasn’t true. Everything was police
business. My mother’s disappearance aroused new suspicion that she had done something to Becky. Somehow her disappearance ended up on the news, only the newscaster made her sound like a common criminal, like someone who’d jumped bail. It didn’t seem fair that every day husbands and wives parted, wives left their husbands and vice versa; mothers and fathers disappeared into the dark, silent night. But when my mother left, it became the whole town’s business, the whole world’s, really. When my mother left, it seemed like a crime.

I’d begun to blend in again at school, begun to feel a certain anonymity, but as soon as she left, that all disappeared. I heard the whispers again, felt the sting of being an outcast, as if there were something exceptionally ugly and wrong about me all over again.

You would’ve thought I would be angry with my mother, but part of me felt I could understand her, the need to get away, out of our house, away from everything Becky.

After my mother left, Tommy started being nice to me again. I guess he decided to forgive me for betraying his confidence to my mother, or maybe he felt sorry for me, felt we now had this new connection: His father had left him; my mother had
left me. We were these two lost and abandoned creatures, unable to understand how we’d become so unloved.

“Hey,” he said to me at lunch on the Monday after my mother vanished, “it’ll be okay.”

“No, it won’t,” I said.

“Where do you think she is?”

I shrugged. I’d already convinced myself that my mother was dead. I was sure she’d left my father and me to die, that she didn’t want to die in front of us, didn’t want us to see her suffer. She didn’t want one of us to find her in the garage with the car turned on, barely breathing.

My other thought was that she was with Garret. I tried to convince myself this couldn’t possibly be true. Strangely, I took more comfort in thinking of her dead than I did thinking of her with Garret. It didn’t seem fair that my mother could leave my father for another man, not after Becky had left all of us, not after my father had been consumed by sadness.

“We can play cards after school if you want.”

“Whatever.”

He reached for my hand under the lunch table and squeezed it once, quickly. I couldn’t look at him because I was too embarrassed, too ashamed. I didn’t want to like
him anymore, didn’t ever want to fall in love or out of it. My father’s love for my mother had become so ugly that it’d pushed her to leave us just so she could be free of it.

After school Tommy let me ride his skateboard for the first time. He taught me how to push off with my left leg, then jump on the board as if I were sailing on a boat down our sidewalk. I was sure my mother wouldn’t have approved of my being on the skateboard. She would have said that skateboards were boys’ toys and that even if Tommy looked cute riding one, I didn’t. She would also have commented about how dangerous they were, how you could just slip right off the sidewalk and get hit by a car or something like that. But she wasn’t there—

It was still cold outside, though it hadn’t snowed in a while, so the ground was frozen but not white. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough for being outside, and my ears turned red and numb almost instantly.

“Ah-bee-hail.” Mrs. Ramirez came running out of the house after a few minutes with a worn black knit hat. “You freeze to death out here.” She firmly pushed the hat over my head; it was too big for me, and I could tell it covered too much of my head and made me look ridiculous. But I really
was cold, so I didn’t complain. “Now you kids be careful out here.”

“We will.” Tommy sounded annoyed. Suddenly I felt a little jealous of him for Mrs. Ramirez’s pestering, her concern. It’s strange how I’d hated it when my parents had hovered; it had become annoying and seemed so trivial. But it was worse when they didn’t do it, when it felt as if no one cared what I did or if got hurt or if I wore a hat when it was cold outside.

When she went inside, Tommy turned to me and said, “Jeez, she drives me crazy sometimes.”

I nodded. “At least she cares about you. She really does.”

“Too much, I think. Here.” He took the board back from me. “I’ll show you how to ride up the driveway and spin around.”

It sounded dangerous to me, and I almost protested, but then I changed my mind. I didn’t want Tommy to think I was a chicken, and I definitely didn’t want him to get mad at me again. Then I’d be inside, sitting on the couch with Mrs. Ramirez, suffering through some talk show.

I watched Tommy speed up the driveway, then circle and flip the board up to fly down. “Look.” He laughed and
held his hands out as if he were surfing. “No hands.” He skidded to a stop in front of me. “Here, you try it.”

“I don’t know if I can,” I said.

“Sure. It’s easy. It’s all about balance.” I took the board from him and stood on it like he’d shown me; then I started pushing off with my leg to get momentum. For a moment I felt wonderfully free, and I gave myself up to the cold afternoon, to the sensation of flying. I don’t know if I was going too fast when I tried to turn or what, but all I know is that one moment I was floating on Tommy’s skateboard and the next I was sliding down the driveway headfirst.

I didn’t feel any pain; there was nothing but this numbness, this dull sensation that I’d fallen. I watched the skateboard roll the rest of the way down the driveway empty, until it ran almost right into Tommy, who was already on his way up to see if I was okay.

“Are you hurt?” he said. “Are you all right?”

I felt dazed, and I shook my head a little, and I felt this incredible warmth around my eyes, something so warm that it felt nice against my freezing face. I reached up to touch it, and when I withdrew my hand, I saw it was spotted with red, with my own blood. “I’m bleeding,” I said.

He nodded, so I knew it must look bad; he must have
already seen it. Oddly I didn’t feel panic at all, but I gave in to the warming sensation of my blood, a feeling of surrender. I’d fallen and hurt myself, and I was this broken thing in Mrs. Ramirez’s driveway, and I felt like that was exactly where I belonged.

“Grandma,” Tommy called. “Grandma.” He sounded panicky, and his eyes were wide, round brown saucers.

“You have nice eyes,” I told him, and I reached up for his face, but I felt my hand groping sort of blindly in the wrong direction.

Tommy ran up to her front door and banged on it a few times. “Abby’s hurt,” he said. “Abby fell.”

Mrs. Ramirez walked outside, and when she saw me lying there in the driveway, she said, “Oh,
Dios mío
! Get in the car. Thomas, get her in the car.”

Tommy pulled me up by my elbow, and I instantly felt dizzy. “I feel like an idiot,” I told him, and I was smiling when I said it, but I didn’t know why.

“Hurry up!” Mrs. Ramirez shouted.

She was already in the driver’s seat, and Tommy laid me down in the back and sat next to me. For some reason I noticed that I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, and I told Tommy, but he didn’t do anything. Or maybe I didn’t tell
him; maybe I just thought I did. But all the way to the hospital all I could think about was how unsafe this was, how we could all die as Mrs. Ramirez sped down winding Tourret Road to take me to the ER.

Because I was bleeding when Mrs. Ramirez and Tommy brought me in, they took me back right away in the emergency room, something that I guess is pretty unheard of. But it turned out that my injuries looked a lot worse than they really were.

It looked like I had blood pouring from my eye, but really I’d only cut my face, just above the eye. As the blood ran down, it hid the cut, leaving Tommy and Mrs. Ramirez to think I’d been blinded. The cut needed two stitches, and the doctors thought I might have a mild concussion. I also had some pretty severe scrapes on my knees, which the nurse cleaned with antiseptic and bandaged up. The doctor said I would need to wear an eye patch bandage for three days, just to make sure the cut healed properly. But the doctors could see no damage to my eye itself.

By the time my father got there, I had been stitched and bandaged and was wearing my eye patch, which felt uncomfortable and itchy against my face. “Ab.” He ran into
the room, out of breath, just as I was about to be sent back out into the waiting room to Tommy and Mrs. Ramirez. “What happened? Are you okay?” He shook my shoulders a little bit and then hugged me close to him. “God, I was so worried. I thought…”

“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing.” He reached up and touched the eye patch, traced its edge with his fingers. It was such a warm gesture coming from my father that it surprised me. “Everything’s falling apart,” he said. Even though he was touching my eye patch, I didn’t think he was talking about me. I thought he was talking about my mother, about how if she had been here this probably wouldn’t have happened.

“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a cut. I got two stitches.”

“Thank God.” He grabbed my hand and tugged on it. “Thank God you’re okay.”

“It’s nothing.” But suddenly I could feel pain. I don’t know if the anesthetic was wearing off or what, but my eye started throbbing and my head started throbbing, and I was intensely aware of the raw, scraped skin on my knees. It hit me that I was in the hospital, that I’d been hurt, and I wanted to cry. “I wish she were here,” I said. I realized instantly how unclear that was, that my father couldn’t tell
if I meant Becky or my mother.

I was thinking about my mother, about how I wanted her to hug me and tell me everything would be fine. But then I thought about Becky, how if she were here, she’d be fake sobbing in the waiting room, saying, “I don’t want Abby to die. Don’t let her die, Dad.” Always the drama queen. She would’ve been the one getting all the attention, even as I sat in here and got stitched up, but I think I would’ve liked it all the same, just to see her cry over me, to see anyone cry over me.

“Let’s get you home,” my father said.

We walked out into the waiting room, and the first thing I noticed was Tommy, his face white, his lips trembling, his eyes so wide open still, it was as if they’d been frozen there. Mrs. Ramirez stood up and patted my father’s shoulder. “Doctor say everything be A-OK, Mr. Reed. Just wear the patch for three day.”

He nodded. I couldn’t tell if my father wanted to thank her for bringing me here or scream at her for letting me get hurt in the first place, but he didn’t do either one. He just reached up in this awkward, shaky way and grabbed onto her hand on his shoulder.

I wanted to say something to Tommy, to reassure him
that this wasn’t his fault, that I would be fine.
No permanent damage
, I thought about saying to him.
Nothing doing.
That was something my grandma Jacobson used to say all the time,
nothing doing
, as if it were this hip sort of phrase that she’d caught on to. It used to make Becky and me laugh.

But all I could bring myself to say to him in front of my father and Mrs. Ramirez was, “They stuck a foot-long needle in my forehead to numb it.” It was obviously the wrong thing to say, and I can’t be held completely responsible for its stupidity because I wasn’t exactly myself. But Tommy started to turn this weird shade of green, and he started coughing, until I thought he was going to throw up. So I told him that it didn’t hurt, that everything was numb, numb, numb.

He stopped coughing and looked at me. “I know,” he said. And I believed him. I knew he did know, that he understood my numbness, maybe even felt it the way I did.