The September Sisters (13 page)

WHEN TOMMY CAME
back from Florida, he had this really, really short hair, a buzz cut. He looked so foreign to me that I knew instantly something would be different between us, that Tommy’s haircut symbolized a change for him, even if I was the only one to recognize it.

His mother and Mrs. Ramirez had bought him a skateboard for Christmas, and the first time I saw him after he got back, he was skateboarding down our street. “Is that Tommy?” my mother said as she peered out our front window. “Come look at his hair, Abby.”

It was him all right, gliding down the street as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I wondered why he hadn’t come over to show me the skateboard, why he was flying
down the street on his own. “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of liked it the other way.”

“He looks so much more grown up this way.”

I shrugged. “I guess so.” I was trying to act nonchalant, trying to pretend that Tommy’s hairstyle had absolutely nothing to with me, but inside, I felt sort of stung, deceived almost, which was stupid. Tommy had a right to cut his hair and to skateboard and not tell me about any of it.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “He’s sort of cute this way.”

Her comment made my cheeks turn red, and I wondered if she suspected how I felt about him. “He’s all right,” I said. “Nothing special.” And then I felt disloyal to Tommy. I knew I would have been hurt if he’d said the same thing about me.

“So why’d you cut your hair?” I said when I saw him at lunch the first day back in school.

“My mother did it. She said it was too long.” He sounded surprisingly pleased, though, not the way I was used to him talking about his mother. “Do you like it?”

I nodded. “Sure. It’s nice.”

“I don’t know. I’m not used to it yet. It surprises me every time I see it.”

I thought that was a strange thing for Tommy to say. I didn’t think boys noticed their appearance the way girls did, but what Tommy said represented how I felt every time I saw myself in the mirror, every time I noticed my breasts and this serious, complicated look on my face that made me look foreign to myself.

Mrs. Ramirez had packed Tommy this huge container of enchiladas for lunch, and he scooped half of them out of the Tupperware container and onto my school lunch plate, which contained some scary-looking mashed potatoes. “Here,” he said. “I can’t eat all this.”

“Thanks.” I took a bite. “They’re delicious.” They were really good actually, even cold. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten a home-cooked meal.

“My grandmother makes the best enchiladas.” There was this awkward silence where we both just sat there and chewed. “How was your Christmas?” Tommy asked.

“Okay,” I lied. “Yours?”

“Pretty good. I got a skateboard.”

“I know. I saw you.”

“You did?”

It was strange the way I could see his eyes all the time, and they were so expressive that I could understand
everything that he was feeling in each instant that he was feeling it. That’s why I missed the hair, the anonymity it gave him. I could tell when I said I saw him on the skateboard that he was embarrassed, as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been really busy.”

“You have?”

“Well, you know.” It was pretty obvious I was lying, but I didn’t feel like explaining my way out of it at that point. “I got a set of Shakespeare’s plays for Christmas.”

“That’s cool.”

I smiled. I liked that Tommy thought that genuinely was cool. Jocelyn would’ve laughed at it, the way she did whenever I read or talked about books. “Seriously, Abby,” she’d say, “why do you think God invented TV?”

“It’s not a skateboard,” I said.

“Still.” He paused. “Did you tell your father?”

I nodded. “He called the police, but they weren’t interested, so he has his investigator looking into it.” I tried to sound nonchalant, even though I felt a surge of nerves just thinking about Tommy’s hand on my back as he pushed me through the laundry room window.

“Oh, that’s good, I guess.”

We finished the enchiladas, and then we just sort of sat there. I wondered if Tommy would want to kiss me anymore or if those two moments had been something purely disposable to him, like his hair.

Right after we went back to school after Christmas break, the weather turned exceptionally warm, and the world around us began to thaw out and melt. The sun was shining, and the temperatures were in the fifties. Our backyard filled up with these big muddy puddles, and the street in front of our house was wet and glistening in the sun.

If it hadn’t been for the warm spell, the police probably never would’ve discovered the body of a little girl in a riverbank in Philadelphia, about twenty-five miles from our house. If the weather had stayed cold, snowy, by spring she might’ve been too far gone for anyone to find her. The weather was so strange, it was as if someone had known she was there, someone had wanted the police to find her. I took it all as a sign.

No one in my family had talked about bodies before. We hadn’t talked about Becky’s being dead; we pretended not to consider the possibility. We talked about when she was coming home and what we would say to her. My father
still had the Christmas tree up, with her presents underneath it. We weren’t in denial; we were just hopeful, unable to imagine the permanence of Becky’s absence.

It was Detective Kinney who came to tell us about the body. He came in person, instead of calling. When I saw him walking in through our front door, I knew that there was significant news. It was the same way I felt when I saw Harry Baker on Christmas morning, only, because it was Kinney, I knew he’d have something important to say.

When Kinney showed up, the three of us had just sat down to eat dinner. It was one of the rare occasions when we did this, when my mother felt well enough to get out of bed, when my father actually remembered to pick up a pizza on the way home.

We all jumped a little when we heard the doorbell ring. My parents exchanged a brief glance, a moment, before my father stood up. None of us would admit it, but I think we all were waiting for the doorbell; every day, every moment we sat in our house, we were waiting for something to happen.

I recognized Kinney’s voice immediately. “Jim,” I heard him say, “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“No, not at all,” my father said. “Come in.”

By this time my mother and I both had made our way
into the hallway. I tried to catch Kinney’s eye, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe it would be better if we just spoke outside for a minute,” Kinney said to my father. My father let himself out onto the porch and shut the door behind him.

“I’m going out there,” my mother said, but she didn’t move. She stood frozen next to me in the hallway. I think she was afraid the same way I was. We both knew if Kinney wanted to talk to my father outside in private, he couldn’t have come here with good news.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said to my mother, but I don’t think either one of us believed it.

“The pizza’s getting cold,” she said, but we didn’t go back to the table. We just stood in the hallway. It was probably only a few minutes—it couldn’t have been more than ten—but it felt like ages, as if time had stopped and trapped us there.

When my father came back in, his face was completely white, paler than I’d ever seen him, eerily ghostlike. “Jim, what is it?” My mother finally moved and walked to him.

“Let’s sit down, girls,” he said. “Sit down.”

We went back to the kitchen table, but none of us touched the pizza. “Jim, you’re scaring me.” My mother
ran her fingers loosely through her hair, something I’d seen her do a million times, something seemingly careless, but I noticed then how tense it made her look.

“Okay,” my father said. He took a deep breath and looked at me. I could tell he was debating whether or not to send me to my room.

“I want to know,” I told him, and I guess the way I said it convinced him to let me stay, because he nodded.

“They found a body in Fairmount Park. A little girl. About her weight and height and age.” I knew he couldn’t bring himself to say Becky’s name, to say her name in the same breath as “body.” She wasn’t a body; she was a person, my sister, his daughter. “They haven’t identified it yet, but Kinney wanted to tell us. They thought it might be her.”

“No,” my mother said. She shook her head violently, back and forth and back and forth. I watched her hair whip into her face. “It’s not her. It can’t be her. How did she get to Fairmount Park?”

“Elaine.” My father stood up and wrapped his arms around her from behind. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to restrain her or hug her.

I thought about the body and what it might look like and how Becky could have been dead and rotting beneath
the snow and we didn’t even know it. I wondered if the ice had preserved her body, the cold. But if they couldn’t identify the body, I didn’t think it had. I thought of this movie I saw once where these kids find a dead body and the eye sockets have rotted out and there are maggots crawling in and out of them. The smell of the pizza suddenly invaded my nose, overtook my senses, until it overwhelmed me so completely that I thought I was going to be sick.

I stood up and ran to the powder room. I bent over the toilet coughing and gagging, and I felt my insides coil up and back, but I didn’t throw up; I just gagged a few times. I sat down on the floor and leaned my cheek against the lid of the toilet. The plastic was so cool that it felt nice, and I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and go back into the kitchen.

“Ab.” My father knocked on the door. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “I’ll be out in a minute.” The last thing I wanted was my father coming in here, trying to talk to me or make me feel better. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I wanted him to think I was old enough to know the truth; if he didn’t, I’d never learn anything.

I stood up and opened the door, and my father was still standing there. “They don’t know if it’s her,” he said.

“I know.”

“It could be anyone.”

“I think I’ll go to bed,” I said. “I’m tired.”

He nodded. “Sleep well.” It seemed like such a funny thing to say, after the news he’d just delivered. I wasn’t sure how I would ever sleep well again.

I felt like a terrible person, but as I lay there awake in bed, I almost felt hopeful. If that really was Becky, we would know what happened to her. The police would find her killer and bring him or her to justice. We could have a funeral, and people would send condolences, and we would find a way to piece life back together into something whole, even if it was different from before.

It began to dawn on me that dead was better than missing, vanished, disappeared. At least dead was final. I started thinking that if only we could have a funeral, everything would be okay.

The only funeral I’d ever been to was Grandma Jacobson’s. We’d gone to Pittsburgh for it, so we could bury her in a plot right next to Grandpa Jacobson. She died in the spring, so it was this beautiful, warm March day. For some reason I’d expected it to be just the four of us, but my grandmother had had a lot of friends. There must’ve been a
hundred people there as we buried her, and afterward they came back to Grandma Jacobson’s house, where my mother catered a lunch.

I remember hearing a lot of stories that I never knew about my grandmother. People were laughing and recounting wonderful memories, trips they’d taken with her, and times they’d spent with her. Becky and I sat on the couch in my grandmother’s living room and listened to all these little old people tell us how wonderful she was. Her house didn’t smell like her anymore—like cinnamon and sickness. It smelled clean, like Lysol, and something altogether new that I didn’t recognize.

It was strange, but I hadn’t been as sad as I’d expected to be. We’d known for a few months she was dying, and that whole time I felt the sadness like a weight in my chest, pulling something out of me that I didn’t even know I had. But after she died, I felt better. My mother had said to me and Becky that we should be happy that she wasn’t suffering anymore. That now she could be free of the cancer, that she could find Grandpa Jacobson again, and the two of them could be happy. I didn’t necessarily believe any of that, but still, I’d felt this startling sense of relief that came completely to the surface at the funeral when I watched
them lower her casket into ground.

My mother cried, and so did Becky. Becky clung to my mother’s dress. I’m not sure if she was old enough even to understand what was going on, but I think the mere fact that my mother was crying frightened her. This was the first time we’d ever seen my mother cry.

I didn’t cry, though. I held on to my father’s hand, and I kept thinking,
This is it. This is it!
When her coffin was in the ground and people threw handfuls of dirt over the top, I knew she was gone. She was completely gone. It’s not that I didn’t miss her, that I didn’t long for her after that, but at that moment I had this feeling of completeness, finality, the end of something. My grandmother was gone.

I thought that if we could have a funeral for Becky, then at least we would know where she was. We would be sad, and life would never be the same, but we could move on. At least I could feel something again; at least I could sleep at night; at least we could go visit her grave and talk to her. At least it would start to be over.

We didn’t hear anything from Kinney for three days, and each day ticked by like an interminable moment. It felt like time had stopped, that it was holding us there, cruelly, while
we waited. Most of those three days are a blur, and I can only truly remember this dull feeling of hope mixed with dread. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever felt, and it made my heart beat constantly faster and faster, my breath shorten, as if I’d been running. I’d have to stop to catch my breath, even if I’d just been sitting down.

Tommy knew about the body, though he didn’t say anything about it. I could see it in his oddly exposed eyes, some sort of new pity for me, the way he stared at me just a little too long as I ate my lunch, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t.