Sister (22 page)

“Let me get it,” he says. “I'll tell him you'll call back when we're done eating.”

He goes down the hall and picks up the phone. I play connect the dots with his responses, and the picture I come up with isn't a friendly one. Steam rises from the meat loaf, and I hear Adam say, “Look, you can just tell me. Did Therese ask you to call?”

“Adam, don't! Let me talk to him,” I yell, but before I can get up, Adam's standing in the doorway.

“Great,” I say. “All I need is a fight with Harv too.”

I push past him to the phone. “Harv?” I say. “Hi, Harvard. Look—”

“When have I ever pushed my beliefs on you?” It takes me a moment to recognize Harv's voice; I can't remember ever hear
ing him angry. Adam is standing beside me, too close. “Your mother asked me to call you,” Harv says, “because they found the remains of your brother in a dry well on the Luchterhand's old property. The ID came back positive this morning.”

For over ten years, I have imagined this phone call, expected it, dreaded it, wished for it. But what Harv has just said cannot be true. I shrug Adam's hand off my shoulder; I'm so relieved I start to laugh. “That's crazy,” I say, almost smugly.

“The developers found him. They were digging a foundation for those condos going in. There must have been an old home-stead along the bluff. Even the Luchterhands didn't know about it.”

“Mom told me about that subdivision,” I say. “She says the Luchterhands made out like bandits when they sold that land. She's thinking she could sell our place for some serious bucks.”

“Did you hear what I just told you?”

A strange thought is occurring to me:
This is real
.

“Abby,” Harv says. “Listen. They also found the knife Geena Baumbach described, which means Sam was one of those boys who…” I pass the phone to Adam and go back into the kitchen. Everything looks delicious. Should I wait for Adam, or should I eat now? I can hear him asking questions about Sam, and it annoys me to hear him speak my brother's name.
You never even met him
, I want to say. I help myself to a slice of the meat loaf. He's mixed the meat with chopped sweet onions, the way I like it best, then baked it with bread and egg and dried tomatoes from our garden. I spread my slice with mashed potatoes, thick as sour cream, and drizzle gravy on top. It's hot, but I'm greedy, I swallow it down. Next I ladle green beans onto my plate; I pop them into my mouth with my fingers.

“Did he fall down there by accident or did someone…” I can't hear the rest. Then, “How can they know what really happened?”

I cut another slice of meat loaf, cover it with ketchup. Adam
hates it when I do this; ketchup, he says, is an insult to meat. I fill my glass with milk and drink it down in long, aching gulps. I've drifted through this pregnancy on a shallow wave of nausea that leaves everything around me dull, unappealing. But tonight the food has color again; I taste salt, sweet, the richness of beef. Adam comes back into the kitchen, stops, stares at the collage of food on my plate.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I should have waited. I was just so hungry.”

“It's OK,” Adam says. “Harv says you should call him back when you can. Your mother is staying with his mother, and she doesn't want to talk to anybody.”

“I think I'd like dessert,” I say. “Do we have anything sweet in the house?”

“We'll come up with something,” Adam says. He himself doesn't seem to have much of an appetite, but he sits with me as I finish my meal, and afterward he makes baked apples for dessert. When I start to get up to clear the dishes, he puts his hand on mine, holding me in place. Then he tells me everything he's learned about my brother—tells me over and over until I hear him, until I understand.

 

Sam wouldn't do a think like that
. My mother's voice, a fragment of a dream I can't remember, awakens me in the gray hour before true dawn. I get up to go to the bathroom, marveling at the way familiar things look unfamiliar at this time of day: the toothbrush, the soap, the long, limp slope of the bath towels. The sound of my mother's voice winds around me like the refrain of a simple-minded song.
A thing like that
—her euphemism. I put on my bathrobe and creep to the kitchen, the cold floorboards biting the balls of my feet, and I sit in the rocking chair beside the French doors as light spills over the tops of the trees like a slow, persistent leak. The baby awakens, and for the first time I feel its conscious pres
ence. It
knows
me, I think with amazement. And I don't know whether to feel comforted or afraid.

A thing like that
. My mother and I heard Geena Baumbach's story from my grandmother, and it's not hard to imagine how it was. What woman hasn't awakened in the night to a noise that shapes itself into a man's heavy footstep? What woman cannot hear of a break-in and see that same shadow fall across her own bed? Mrs. Baumbach remembered it had been a long day of tornado warnings, the sky above the swollen lake purple as the underside of a tongue. Twice, a peculiar twisting finger bled through the cloud cover to touch the fields the way a child might slip a sly finger into a bowl of cake batter—just to taste. Late in the afternoon, Father Van Dan came over at a run. The wind flapped his black skirts into a frenzy, and when he leapt up onto her porch, his hair was standing on end. “Don't go taking chances, Geena,” he said. Lightning shattered the sky like an omen. “Come on over with the rest of us.” But Mrs. Baumbach was unwilling to spend a day in the basement of the church, making small talk, playing cards, drinking lukewarm coffee with the group of nervous parishioners who lived in the trailer park west of Oneisha. She had work to do: a sinkful of dishes humming with flies, that tacky kitchen floor she'd been meaning to wash for days, the set of matching pot holders she wanted to finish on time for her niece's wedding shower. She showed Father the pattern—two pale yellow geese, their long lovers' necks entwined, a sprinkle of daisies beneath them.

“I still got some git left in me,” she told him. “I can run over quick as a rabbit if I must.”

“You think a rabbit won't get blown away?”

“Not this rabbit.”

Father Van Dan studied her face to see how firmly she'd made up her mind. “Suit yourself,” he finally said, and she watched him dash back to the church, a wayward crow fighting the wind. For a while, she thought she might go on over to
the church basement after all. There'd be plenty to do helping Sister Mary Andrew and Sister Mary Gabriel with the clutter of coffee and Kool-Aid and Styrofoam cups, the tangle of children forced to share toys, the anxious parents worrying over fallen trees and flying glass. But now the worst of the storm seemed to be blowing out over Lake Michigan, and her kitchen was finally clean. She was happy she'd stayed at home. She hung a fresh strip of flypaper from the light fixture and made herself a cold supper: sardines and soda crackers, a can of diet cola, and—a treat—two butter cookies from the Christmas tin in the closet. She relished those cookies, allowing each one to melt into velvety slush between her teeth. The heat didn't bother her much. The lightning was far away, delicate as thread. Harmless.

A thick fish smell from the lake drifted in through the open windows, ruffling the homemade curtains with their embroidered heart borders, shivering through the leaves of the plants suspended by macraméd hangers, shuffling through the pile of letters and bills and advertisements on the coffee table. The storm was spinning itself into the lake; tomorrow night after work, she might drive to Herringbone Beach to look for the interesting pieces of driftwood and polished glass she used to make Christmas tree ornaments. She settled down on the sofa to finish her niece's pot holders. The portable radio beside her crackled with bursts of static like laughter. Ninety-two degrees. Humidity ninety percent. Tornado warnings in effect throughout Wisconsin until midnight. She pictured the families in the basement of the church, unfolding the cots, passing out pillows and sheets, snacking on peanut butter and jelly. There was no need for all that; this was clear. You just had to smell the air. She hummed to herself as she worked. The twilight passed into evening.

What woman hasn't had the uneasy feeling that she's being watched, stripped bare of potential and promise, broken down into muscle and sinew, bone and flesh? Mrs. Baumbach was seventy-six years old, a widow, an innovative cook, Father Van Dan's
closest friend outside the clergy. She made toys for the parish children out of toilet paper rolls and egg cartons and glitter; she was admired for her watercolor paintings of lakefront scenes. She kept the books at the rectory, something she'd taught herself to do. Oneisha was a town of less than seven hundred people, a place where people proudly announced that no one ever locked doors. Of course, there were incidents now and then: teenage boys speeding up the Fox Ranch Road; drunkenness; rabid animals; family disagreements; the occasional suicide.

Now Mrs. Baumbach was finding it difficult to concentrate. She got up to pull the shades, the fish smell oiling the back of her throat, and then—an odd impulse—she walked around the tiny house, latching screens. Perhaps the weather had unnerved her. Perhaps the butter cookies had been too rich. The wind whispered in the bushes as she sat back down to her work. It was after nine by the time the last puckered daisy was sewn into place. She thought about all the years she'd lived alone, how feelings like these had come and gone, leaving nothing in their wake but a vague sense of foolishness. She peeked between the curtains. The town was dark. There were no stars. She got into bed, tugged her white cotton nightgown over her knees, and pulled the sheet up to her lips.

She would never be able to remember their faces. She would never be able to say, exactly, how many boys there were. Five or six, she thought. Maybe two. She was certain the time was after midnight—or was it? No, she had just gone to bed. It took several days before she could weave a ragged story from the scraps, the false cuts, the oddly shaped pieces: faces like white moons hanging too close; the rough talk; the forced walk to the kitchen as they took turns stepping on the back of her nightgown. Certainly local boys wouldn't do such a thing. Certainly they must be boys nobody knew. She sat at the table with her head in her hands as one of them opened the refrigerator, pulled the pickle relish and mustard and cherry Jell-O onto the clean linoleum floor. The
juice pitcher shattered, and the boys kicked at the pieces, grinding them under the heels of their combat boots.
Bitch. We're hungry. Cook us something. Cook us some eggs
. And there was the knife, its question-mark tip:
Won't you do as I ask
? She got up and walked on her bare feet through the glass. She collected, eggs, margarine, milk. She turned on a burner, reached for a pan.

The smell of the margarine melting too fast. The smell of the boys, their sweet cologne, and the cigarettes they smoked as they waited for her to feed them. Sweat. The smell of her lilac talc rising from the folds of her nightgown. The pop and hiss of the eggs in the fat. The scold of the bacon, its irritable writhing. The angry burn of toast left too long in the broiler. The boys' mouths opening and closing over their laughter. Her own mother's voice like a faraway dream:
The way to a man's heart is through his stomach
. They found her Christmas tin of butter cookies and swallowed them, one by one.

What woman cannot recognize hunger? What woman can live for long in this world without being seen as merely a body, nourishment, egg and margarine, breast and belly, mouth and hip? Sam loved eggs—scrambled, poached, fried, hard-boiled, slathered with ketchup or mayonnaise. His favorite meal was a fried egg sandwich, which my mother often made on weekends, and as children we'd compete to see who could avoid rupturing the yolk, as my father intoned,
Don't play with your food
. I was allowed to make soft-boiled eggs for our after-school snacks; I served them in metal egg cups, so we could knock off their heads with a spoon, scoop up the salty yolk with the buttered tip of a piece of toast. Mrs. Baumbach could not remember how many eggs she prepared. She could not remember the boys' hungry faces. She could not remember how many boys there were. Maybe there were five boys. Maybe there were three. The only thing she was certain of was the knife—its unusual tip, its dark leather grip.

It was the parishioners coming up out of the church basement, heading home after the all clear had sounded on the radio,
who saw the light in Mrs. Baumbach's kitchen window. Someone noticed a torn window screen flapping like an injured wing. Someone called, “Hello-oh! Geena, are you still up?” while someone else, stepping through the wet lawn toward the back of the house, caught the last rush of a man's shape disappearing into the tall field of corn. The parishioners gave chase, but corn swallows everything: raccoons, skunks, foxes, dogs, unmindful children. Don't go into the corn, we were warned every year, but there was always another story of a child who disobeyed, wandering miles into the corn before he or she was found, dehydrated, exhausted, even dead. While the men searched the fields, the women cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and did the dishes and wiped the counters and straightened the house and swept the porch clear of last year's leaves—whatever they could do to help out, to put things right. The police, arriving from Horton, would find no footprints, fingerprints, no physical evidence of any kind. And the next day, a medical exam revealed that Mrs. Baumbach had
not been hurt
, though she required twenty stitches in her feet. Surely there had been at least four boys. Surely they were boys nobody knew.

The sun is coming up now; the tips of the bare trees quiver like the warning hairs along a dog's curved back. It should not take long for the police to reconstruct the ghost of my brother's last hours. I called Harv back for the facts, and here, at last, is the evidence I've needed. The ruptured well cover. The broken bones: left tibia, right femur, a shattered ankle, three cracked ribs. The knife, by now encased in plastic, labeled along with the other samples: teeth, hair, bits of rotted denim. For the rest of my life, I'll see Sam walking through the fields, through narrow strips of woods, following the lakefront toward the house where we are sleeping. Coming home. And I'll wonder, What if he'd made it back?