Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (13 page)

“She can come too.”

Jill shook her head again.

“She’ll come back,” I said.

“I hope so.” Jill turned back toward her duplex but then paused.

“Do you think I could talk to your father?”

“Why?”

“He’s a preacher, right?”

“He was one.”

“I need advice on how to remove the curse on us.”

“I thought you hated the Christers?”

“I’m desperate!” she said. “Besides, your dad’s got
the power
.”

It was true. Though he wasn’t a minister anymore, his hands still held a sense of holiness left over from when he’d baptized babies and given wafers away during communion. Sometimes I’d watch his hands at the dining room table or as he read the newspaper; his hands reminded me how we’d once been held together inside a circle of grace. He could still calm my little brother by touching his head, and by putting his hands on the two men from the party, he’d broken up the fight.

“You can talk to him in the morning.”

“OK,” Jill said reluctantly.

After she left, I lay in bed listening to my father snore across the hall and to the occasional truck rattling down on 419. I knew Jill thought if she could break the curse, her mom might come back.

I knew Jill was worried about kidnapping, but her biggest concern, and mine too, was sex slavery. There was a long history of sex slavery, one Jill and I had studied. I had noticed that older boys liked to talk about gory scenes in horror movies, and that Phillip and Eddie enjoyed pretending to shoot people, but Jill and I spent much of our time talking about girls held captive by men. Most horrifying were the Manson girls, particularly the one near our own age named Snake. There was the girl in California chained to the toilet in the day and kept in a box during the night. The crazy thing was, the thing we could not get our mind around no matter how hard we tried, was that even during the trial, she was calling her captor on the phone. We often told each other that David Cassidy wanted us as his sex slave. We wrote this in notes and folded them up in intricate triangular patterns and tossed them to one another in health class.

Jill knocked on our door early, before my dad had gone to work, while he was still drinking coffee. She said she needed a private word with him and they went out onto the deck and closed the sliding glass door.

I knew Jill wouldn’t tell him her mother was missing—she was too afraid of social services—but she’d ask about the curse. I felt embarrassed for her because my father didn’t believe in spells. When parishioners talked about ghosts he’d roll his eyes. But my dad listened to Jill and when she’d finished, he took both her hands in his own and shook his head slowly.

After he’d gone I asked Jill what he’d said.

“If God exists,” she said, “he doesn’t hate anybody.”

I nodded.

“Actually he wasn’t very helpful. I was hoping for concrete things I could do to break the curse.”

“Like what kind of things?” I asked.

She looked at me seriously.

“Like throw an egg in a river or search for a bird’s feather.”

That afternoon we walked duplex to duplex looking in basement windows. Did the inhabitants seem like people who would keep sex slaves? A guy who lived alone in one of the lower duplexes was high on our list of possible sex-slave masters, but when we looked into his basement all we saw was an exercise bike and a poster of Liberace. What about Dwayne? Jill shook her head. She was convinced that the person who kept a sex slave wouldn’t risk bad behavior; it would be a quiet guy, a guy who always ordered
the same thing every time he went into Long John Silver’s.

We walked out into the subdivisions. Under one carport was a large wooden box, but when we got closer we saw that the box held tools and a lawn mower. Another split-level had a row of mums that Jill thought looked suspicious, and I didn’t like the lawn jockey, his black face painted beige. Across the street, we spotted a man coming out of his front door, heading for his station wagon. He was wearing a wide tie and a powder-blue leisure suit. I thought the leisure suit alone made him a candidate, but when Jill saw that he carried a Bible she was more convinced than ever that the man might be hiding a sex slave.

After a few days, the Bamburgs grew accustomed to their mother being gone. As Beth pointed out, it wasn’t as if they saw her much anyway. Life with parents was unnatural and full of rules, and it was only when their mother was gone that the Bamburg children could live as they pleased, cozy and chaotic as puppies in a box.

Jill nailed sheets to the ceiling, tenting the living room, and spread blankets and pillows over the shag. The television was on day and night. Nixon, who to my dad’s horror had won the election, was always on the screen, his huge head smiling down at us like a distant emperor, as we played Operation and Mystery Date.

For the first days, we feasted on strips of bacon and chocolate milk and searched for Mrs. Bamburg in all the subdivisions along the highway. Jill decided that her mom had entered Parallel Time and was running a home for lost dogs in a big house in the country, pulling burrs out of long-haired dogs and giving the small, nervous ones lap time. People left Bent Tree all the time, Jill reasoned; it was in the very nature of the place that souls who completed their trials drifted out and new sinners, like my family, made their way in.

After we ran out of bacon and chocolate milk, Jill heated up frozen pizzas and pot pies. We downed sugar by the spoonful, first granulated, then the confectionary. The Bamburg kids ate through the canned soup, the tuna fish, even the condensed milk, which they spread like jelly on saltines. On the two-week anniversary of Mrs. Bamburg’s disappearance, Jill served boiled potatoes covered with corn syrup and passed around a jar of maraschino cherries.

“All that’s left,” she said, “is this bar of dark chocolate and a half bottle of apple cider vinegar.” She sat on the floor with her legs crossed and her back curved, her spine sticking up through the material of her turtleneck sweater. Jill broke the chocolate into four parts. I passed mine to Beth, who looked at me gratefully before popping both squares into her mouth.

“If only we could photosynthesize,” Beth said, “all our problems would be over.”

“You could go to the food pantry at First Baptist.”

“Take food from the
Christers?
Have you lost your mind completely?”

I’d forgotten how much Jill hated the born-agains. To her, taking their handouts was worse than starving.

“I could sneak food from home,” I said.

“Would you do that?” Jill said. “It would only be until I start working.”

The next day, after we got back from school, I slipped two cans of ravioli and a couple of bananas under my shirt. As I came into the Bamburgs’ duplex, not bothering to knock, Jill and her sister and brother gathered around me, looking round-eyed like the possum that ate out of our garbage can. Jill didn’t even bother heating up the food; she just opened the can and split the ravioli three ways on the Pyrex plates. They each moved to a far corner of the tent, gulping down the food quick as hungry dogs.

The system worked well enough until my mother noticed a bulge in my jeans. I pulled out the jar of peanut butter and roll of Ritz crackers sunk down my pants. Her eyebrows arched up. I knew if I told her the Bamburg children were hungry, she’d let me take anything I wanted. My mother was funny that way. While she looked down at everybody who lived in Bent Tree, she’d been the first to bring a casserole down to 1B when she heard the old lady who lived there broke her hip. She’d even let Sandy do her and Eddie’s laundry in the basement while their machine was broken.
But I also knew if she found out Mrs. Bamburg was missing, she’d call the police.

At first I’d argued for calling the police myself, but Jill told me that the last time their mom left, they’d all ended up at a foster home with a lady who raised German shepherds in her backyard.

I told my mom: “We’re having an indoor picnic.” It was a lame excuse but better than nothing.

“We don’t have money to feed the neighborhood,” she said, turning me around and opening the cabinet so I could put the items back up on the shelf.

When I walked in empty-handed, the Bamburgs were disappointed. Beth started to cry. I told them that after dark I’d drop food out my bedroom window. While my mother watched
All in the Family
, I smuggled a loaf of bread and a stick of butter upstairs. Then I made the signal, turning my lights on and off three times. Jill, who’d been waiting in the shadows beside her duplex, ran barefoot over the yellow grass to pick up the bread.

Ronnie stopped going to high school. At first Jill nagged him, saying they’d get busted if he didn’t show up. But he claimed he’d told the ladies in the front office that his family was moving to Florida and they’d wished him well and taken his name off the register. Jill didn’t like him hanging around the duplex all day,
and she warned him that if he went outside during school hours, he’d blow it for all of them. Beth, on the other hand, loved school, and Jill had no trouble getting her up, making sure she showered and that her clothes were clean. Jill told me that if a kid came to school for too many days with stained clothes and dirty hair, the guidance counselor called child protection. Jill filled out the free-lunch form for her and Beth. In the cafeteria, she wolfed down everything, even the disgusting Salisbury steak and gross gelatinous gravy.