The September Sisters (20 page)

AFTER MRS. RAMIREZ
had her heart attack, Tommy’s mother drove up from Florida. I watched from my bedroom window as she arrived. I saw the car with Florida plates drive slowly up our snowy street, and I knew immediately who it was. I felt myself cringe for Tommy, for the way his whole world had suddenly been shattered, again.

I watched her get out of the car. She was Mrs. Ramirez’s height but a lot skinnier and younger-looking. She had long, thick black hair that she’d pulled up on top of her head for the ride. I watched as she pulled her suitcase out of the trunk, but then she disappeared from my view, so I couldn’t witness her reunion with Tommy firsthand.

My father kept me updated on Mrs. Ramirez’s condition,
and a week and a half after she had her heart attack, and a day after Tommy’s mother arrived, he told me she was coming home from the hospital. “We’ll go visit her at home tomorrow,” he said.

I had no idea where Tommy had been staying while Mrs. Ramirez was in the hospital. I didn’t think he’d been over there, in her house, all alone, but I hadn’t seen him since the week before, not hanging around after school or anything, so either he was avoiding me or he hadn’t been going to school for the past week. I wanted to believe it was the second choice; I didn’t think he would ignore me anymore.

It felt strange walking over to Mrs. Ramirez’s house with my father the next evening. The ground was still covered in snow, and the only sound as the two of us walked was the crunch of our boots. “Stay where I can see you, Ab,” he said as we walked up to the front door.

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “I will.”

“I mean it.”

Mrs. Ramirez’s daughter answered the door. “Oh, you must be Abby,” she said when she opened the door. “My mother has told me all about you. Please come in.” She shook my father’s hand as we walked in. “Mr. Reed, I can’t thank
you enough for everything you’ve done for my mother.”

“Jim, please.”

“Jim, then. Okay. You’ve been a godsend.” I wasn’t exactly sure what my father had done for Mrs. Ramirez, aside from visiting her in the hospital a few times, but I suspected there must be something else for her daughter to seem so thankful.

Mrs. Ramirez was lying on the couch with an afghan covering her legs. She looked older than she had two weeks ago, tired. Tommy sat on the love seat, watching TV with her. He looked up and caught my eye as we walked into the room, but then he turned away, quickly. My father put his hand on my shoulder, something that may have looked like a nice gesture to everyone else but to me felt like a restraint, something holding me back from everything.

“How are you feeling, Rosalie?” My father bent down so she didn’t have to turn her head.

“Eh,
así así.
I’ve been better.” My father squeezed her hand and stood back up.

“I have some cookies in the kitchen,” Tommy’s mother said, “if you’d like some.”

“We don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

Tommy’s mother smiled. “No trouble at all, Jim.” She
may have been taken in by my father’s politeness, but I wasn’t, and I doubted Tommy was either. I could still hear his voice yelling that Tommy was a bastard.

It was strange the way we just sort of stood around there. “Why don’t you have a seat?” Tommy’s mother said when she came back in with the cookies. My father sat down in the chair right next to where we were standing, and I had nowhere else to go but to the love seat, next to Tommy. When I sat down, Tommy looked away from me. I think he was afraid to watch me, to catch my eye in front of my father.

Tommy’s mother put the plate of cookies down on the coffee table, but no one reached for them. She sat on the couch with Mrs. Ramirez and rubbed her feet. “How are you doing, Mom? Is it too cold in here?”

Mrs. Ramirez shook her head. “No. I okay.”

“My mother has hated the cold for so long.” She sounded like she was apologizing, the way she said it.

My father nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

“So she’ll be much happier in Florida, won’t you, Mom?”

It took a minute for what she said to really sink in. Then I felt it settling deep in my chest, my heart. Tommy was going back to Florida.

“A little bit of sunshine, Rosalie, and you’ll be as good as new.”

She shook her head and chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Sure you will, Mom.”

I tried to sneak a glance at Tommy, but he still wasn’t looking at me. If I hadn’t been so sure that my father was watching my every move, I would’ve kicked him or pinched his leg or something. I had this sudden, overwhelming sense of devastation. This loss would be different from Becky, because I knew where Tommy was and where he was going, but I also knew it was far, far enough that I might never see him again.

When I saw my mother on Saturday, she mentioned to me that it had been my father’s idea for Mrs. Ramirez to move to Florida. He’d come up with it in the hospital, right after he’d called Tommy’s mother to tell her what was going on. He’d even offered to pay for Mrs. Ramirez’s move, and he promised to clean up her house and get it on the market. It made him seem like a generous guy, so warmhearted.

My mother’s hand shook as she tapped the cigarette in the ashtray. “Your father, always trying to take care of
people.” But she wouldn’t even look at me as she said it, so we both knew that wasn’t why he did it.

Tommy went back to school for a few weeks before they left, but I didn’t really see him until the day before. I walked out of school, and I saw him across the street on his bike with his high school friends, but I walked over there anyway because I knew I had to talk to him. As soon as I got up close, his other friends waved and took off, and then there I was, standing next to him on the sidewalk. He leaned against his bike, looking awkward, but still sort of cool in a way.

“Hey,” he said, “I was gonna wait for you. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you in a while. My mother made me promise to come right home after school.”

“Oh.” I felt myself blushing. I wondered what my father had told her. But I was also glad that he said he was going to wait, that if I hadn’t approached him, he would’ve found me.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” he said. I nodded. I knew he was leaving soon. I could see them from my bedroom window, and I’d watched Tommy and his mother take bundles of trash to the curb. I wondered how Mrs. Ramirez felt about their throwing away the remains of her life. She’d
always said she’d wanted to move to Florida someday, but I doubted she’d imagined it this way. “I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I turned my head a little so I didn’t have to look at him. I didn’t want to see everything in his eyes. I didn’t want to know that he was hurt or angry or, worse, excited about going back to Florida.

“We could walk home together if you want.”

“Okay.”

Tommy held his bike to his left side, and I walked on his right. We couldn’t hold hands or anything because he was using both hands to walk the bike. I don’t think we would’ve held hands anyway, though. “So, will you miss Pinesboro?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Some of it, I guess.”

“No more snow,” I said.

“No more snow.” He sighed, but I couldn’t tell if it was really the snow he’d miss or me.

“Your grandmother going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” We walked for a little while in silence, both of us staring straight ahead. It’s not that I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to him, because I did. There was so much that I was afraid of saying it. “Maybe you could come to Florida sometime, to visit.”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe.” But we both knew I never would. “We can write to each other.” But we knew we wouldn’t do that either.

We walked into our development, and I found myself going slower. I didn’t want the walk to end, didn’t want this to be the last time I ever saw Tommy. It was so strange saying good-bye to someone and not knowing what to say. I wondered what I would’ve said to Becky if I’d gotten to say good-bye to her. But I wasn’t sure about that either. I might’ve told her that I loved her, that I hoped she was happy wherever she was.

I looked at him carefully and tried to memorize his face. I realized suddenly that I didn’t even have a picture of him, not even a school one. I would have to rely on my memory to recall his eyes, the smooth shape of his face, the way he smiled, the sound of his voice when he said my name.

“I have something for you,” Tommy said, so I knew he’d been telling the truth—he really had planned on waiting for me. He stopped walking for a minute and took a book out of his bag. “They’re Shakespeare’s sonnets. I thought you’d like them.”

I felt overwhelmed that Tommy had gotten me a gift, the first gift I ever got from a boy. “Thanks.” I took the book
from him. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“I wanted you to have something so you wouldn’t forget me.”

“I don’t have anything for you.” But I suddenly wished I had, for the reason Tommy had gotten me something. I wanted him to have something to remember me by. I’m not sure why I thought to give him my necklace, but it seemed like the only reasonable thing to give him. I put down my bag so I could unclasp it, and then I held it out to him. “Here.”

“I can’t take your necklace,” he said.

I nodded. “I want you to have it.” I thought about what my grandma Jacobson had said when she’d first given it to us. “My heart.”

Tommy closed his fist around the necklace, as if he could feel it beating, feel its pain. “Are you sure?”

“Take it.”

We started walking again, and then we rounded the corner and could see both our houses right up the street. Though we walked slowly, there wasn’t much farther to go. When we got to my house, we stopped, and we just stood there not saying anything.

It was the end of us, right there in the street, and we
both knew it. But neither one of us knew how to say good-bye. “Have a safe trip,” I finally said.

He opened his fist to show me the necklace, then squeezed it shut again and closed his eyes. It’s the last real memory I have of Tommy, standing there in front of my house, holding on to his bike with one hand, my heart with the other.

In the book of sonnets, Tommy had circled No. 116 in red ink and written at the top, “To Abigail”:

When I first read it, the poem seemed like an odd thing for Tommy to have circled. I don’t think Tommy really meant it as a sign that he would always love me, that he would be waiting for me one day, that our love would last forever. Or maybe he did.

We had been to the edge of doom, all of us, me and Tommy, my parents, even Mrs. Ramirez. And our love became all twisted up in funny ways. My parents’ love didn’t survive. It had broken over this edge. My mother had fallen to the bottom; my father was hanging ever so carefully at the top. I thought that my love for Tommy might survive, though even as I thought it, I knew it was foolish. Deep down I knew our lives would continue on separately.

But as I understood it, Tommy and I had sat at the edge of doom together, and somehow this was what made us learn to love each other. I decided that the poem was Tommy’s heart. And when I wanted to remember it, all I had to do was open the book.

The next morning I watched from my bedroom window as Tommy and his mother packed up the car. They filled the trunk with boxes and suitcases and tied his bike to the back. Before Tommy got into the car, he turned and looked up at my window. I’m not sure if he could see me sitting there or not. It’s hard to say with the glare from the sun and the distance. But I felt we were staring at each other for a moment before he turned and got in.

I sat at the window and looked outside long after they drove away. I couldn’t believe how quiet it was, how empty the world outside appeared.

SIX MONTHS AFTER
Tommy left, my mother gave up her apartment and moved in with Garret. They bought a little house not too far from Sycamore Street, close enough for me to walk to. Though I don’t like it, I’ve started to realize I’m going to have to try to forgive Garret for taking my mother. In some ways, I guess he tried to save her from herself.

After she moved, my mother told me she quit smoking, but I still smell it on her sometimes, the smoke poorly concealed by too much gardenia perfume, a smell so sickeningly sweet that it makes me nauseated.

About a week after my mother moved in with Garret, I watched Mrs. Peterson move out. I saw her out the front
window, her beautiful face splotchy and red from crying. The next day the other woman moved in. She was tall with short black hair, and she had an autistic daughter with the palest ivory skin and darkest black hair I’d ever seen, the girl Tommy must’ve seen in the window the snowy day we sledded down the hill. It struck me, the way families fell apart so easily, as if the ties that bound them together could come loose with even the slightest pull.

In the fall I started high school. The school combined three junior highs, so there were plenty of people there who didn’t know me. Though Jocelyn was still in my homeroom, for the first time there was another girl alphabetically in between us, Kathy Redman, a girl who had no idea that I was Becky’s sister. She and I both joined the school newspaper, and we became friends. We sat together at lunch, and my father even let me go to a football game with her on a Friday night the weekend of my fifteenth birthday, though he did insist on sitting up in the bleachers a few rows behind us.

I started to understand what Tommy had felt at the high school, the idea that in a brand-new place where everyone was starting over, you could become someone else. And for the first time since Becky had disappeared, I didn’t mind
going to school. This feeling, this incredible weightlessness of starting over, lasted for about six weeks, until one day in the middle of October when I was called out of my honors English class to go to the office.

His words are an ending, a relief and a heartbreak all at once, because I know that everything that happened over the last two years, everything that has led me right here, right to this moment, is finally over.

I can tell you that my father’s words are a surprise, but that isn’t entirely true. Though I had started to move on in high school, I was still waiting for something. I could still remember the echo of my mother’s words, her thin voice faltering just a little bit.
Little girls. Little girls don’t just disappear.

My father signs me out of school and takes me home before he tells me all the details. I’m glad that I don’t have to hear it standing there in the hall of my high school, because I have the image of myself falling down, collapsing onto the floor in front of everybody, setting myself up for another three years of being an outsider.

My father sits me down on the couch and gets me a glass of lemonade before he starts talking, and the gap between those words, “They’ve found her,” and what he tells me afterward seems like forever. I think about the last two years the whole time, in that empty space, the way Becky looked the last night in the pool, her sapphire heart buried in the mud, Kinney’s accusatory stare, the red glow of my mother’s cigarette as she smoked at our kitchen table.

When my father finally starts to talk, his voice is so soft, so even that it almost doesn’t sound like he’s telling me something horrible.

Becky’s body was discovered in a backyard in Harry Baker’s neighborhood, just behind Morrow’s field, so close to where the police were looking, yet so far away. The man who’d taken her lived six houses down from Harry and, according to my father, had been at the last barbecue we went to at Harry’s house. I wonder if Becky had talked to him that night after I left or if he’d watched her from a distance, stalked her even.

The man’s name was Jack Turner, and he died of a sudden heart attack just around the time Tommy left for Florida. It’s possible Becky might never have been found, that his horrible secret would’ve died with him, if the people
who bought his house at an estate sale hadn’t decided to put in a pool. It was the pool contractor who found her nearly as soon as he started digging up the backyard.

My father admits that he has known about the body for two months, but it was just this morning that he found out for sure. Kinney called him at work to let him know it was a definite DNA match. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “You didn’t need to know if it wasn’t her.”

For once I don’t feel annoyed by his need to protect me.

We have Becky’s funeral on a snowy day in December, nearly two and half years after she disappeared. It takes us two months to get the body back from the police, two months for them to determine that they are not exactly sure how or when she died or if she’d been molested. I am glad for that, because I think it might be better not to know.

Standing in the cold cemetery, my mother reminds me of an ice sculpture, perfectly still and frozen. She has her hair pulled back, and I notice how it has started to get a little gray. Garret holds on to her the whole time, and it
looks like he’s holding her up, keeping her from crawling into the icy ground with Becky. Even when I hug her, she doesn’t respond, doesn’t curl into me in the slightest. “She’s not well,” Garret whispers, and I nod.

My father dresses in a dark suit and tie, with a long black overcoat and black hat. His handsomeness surprises me. He’s the one I stand next to, the one I hold on to.

“Are you all right?” my father whispers.

“Yes,” I whisper back. “She’s dead. She’s dead, dead, dead.”

He nods. Maybe he already understands what I am just beginning to realize. There is an ending. Finally there is an ending.

A few weeks after Becky’s funeral I receive a package in the mail from Tommy. I didn’t expect ever to hear from him again, so the package is a nice surprise. I hastily pull off the wrapping, and I see it, the old shoe box. I let out a little cry. My pictures.

Tommy wrote a note and taped it to the box:

I open the lid. Suddenly there we are, me and Becky as children, in our matching pink bathing suits with our feet hanging in the pool. The blond girl with pigtails, slightly different from how I’ve made her in my memories. She’s missing teeth in the one picture, and her hair is lighter than I’ve come to picture it. And then there’s me, the frizzy mop of brown hair, my head hanging off to the side, annoyed at having to pose for one more of my mother’s pictures.

The pictures from Tommy are a gift, a childhood in a box, something to take out and look at when all I can think about are the two years that followed, the two years of which there are no pictures.

When I go back to school after Christmas, people suddenly seem to remember, to know me again as the sister of the missing girl. Kathy still eats lunch with me, but she’s become close to some other girls on the paper who make me feel a little uncomfortable, their stares sometimes piercing me as if I were some kind of scientific specimen.

But there is one person who doesn’t stare, the new boy who has moved to our school from upstate New York and has never even heard of Becky. He’s tall, and he has this thick, wavy brown hair. He wears tiny glasses, and when I first see him the day he comes in to join the paper, I immediately think his glasses make him look very smart in a handsome sort of way.

On his second day at the paper, he comes over and sits down next to me. For a minute I look around thinking that it’s someone else he came to talk to, but I’m the only one there. “I’m Richard Rucker,” he says.

“Abby Reed.” I search his face for an indication that he recognizes the name, that he knows I am Becky’s sister, but I see nothing there.

Richard and I become friends, and we talk on the phone, sometimes for hours. He asks me to go to the junior prom with him, an idea that doesn’t thrill my father since I’m only a sophomore still, but he reluctantly says I can go after I tell him how excited my mother is about the whole thing. She is so excited, in fact, that she actually takes me to the mall to shop for a dress. In the dressing room she’s lit up and laughing, and when she sees me in the dress I end up buying, a
red strapless one that flows out at the bottom, she has tears in her eyes. She holds her hand up to her mouth and gasps, “My little girl is all grown up.”

When Richard comes to pick me up, my mother and Garret come over to the house to see me off. My mother is smiling, and Garret is laughing, and he looks more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him. My father takes out the camera, and I realize it’s something I haven’t seen since before Becky disappeared.

This is the first time Richard meets my parents, and I’m surprised by the easy way my father shakes his hand. My mother gives him a big hug. “Don’t you look so handsome,” she says, and though I feel myself getting embarrassed for him, her comment pleases me.

The prom is magical, the high school gym disguised so well by balloons and streamers and painted backdrops that it doesn’t feel like our high school at all. Richard and I dance almost the whole time, fast fun songs and slow songs where I lean in close to him, where I feel the warmth of his body against mine. We kiss on the dance floor, in the middle of a slow song, and for the first time I feel like I’m in a fairy tale, a happy story, not a sad one.

I can walk to the cemetery from my house, and a few weeks after the prom I make a deal with my father so that he lets me go alone as long as I get home before dark. I realize how strange it is that it’s Becky who made him so overprotective of me and then Becky who allows him to start letting go.

Sitting there alone, on the warm April grass, I feel this strange new sense of freedom. It is refreshingly quiet in the cemetery, and I sit there and think about Becky, about all the times we fought, and then I see her so clearly that last night in the pool, her head bobbing above the water. After a few minutes I feel like I should say something, that I should talk to her, that maybe she will actually be able to hear me.

Once I start talking, I can’t stop, and I tell her things that I haven’t told anyone else: everything that happened with me and Tommy and how it feels to kiss Richard. By the time I’m done talking, I realize it’s almost dark, and I know I will have to run home to keep my promise to my father. But I tell her that I’ll be back soon, that I will have other things to tell her.

And I know I will be back to tell her these things because I imagine as the two of us got older, we would’ve become friends, we would’ve loved being sisters, just the way my mother always said we would.