The September Sisters (8 page)

THOUGH HE DIDN’T
tell me about it, I suspected my father had the same thought I did after the police officers left on Saturday, because Monday morning before school I met his private investigator, Hal Brewerstein, for the first time. Hal was a burly man, even bigger than my father, with curly blond hair and a deep, raspy voice, a voice that I guessed had felt the effects of too many cigarettes, because he always reeked of cigarette smoke. He reminded me of a football player, and I couldn’t imagine him creeping around, glancing into people’s lives without their knowing he was there. But supposedly he was very good at his job.

My own idea of how I could find the kidnapper myself was still a little vague in my mind. I didn’t know yet what
I was going to do exactly, just that I had to do something. I started to think that maybe the police were right, that it had to be someone close to us, maybe one of our neighbors who had taken her, but I wasn’t exactly sure yet how I was going to figure out which one.

The day I met Hal was also Tommy’s first at our school. Tommy is a year older than I am, and a grade ahead of me in school, and truthfully I hadn’t really given him a second thought since Saturday morning, so it hadn’t crossed my mind to look for him.

After I sat in what had become my usual seat at the outcast table at lunch, I saw him wandering through the cafeteria, holding on tightly to his tray, his bushy hair falling into his eyes. He shook his head a little in a motion meant to look cool, I thought, and to push the hair away from his eyes so he could see where he was going, but he just ended up looking silly, like a young tree wobbling in the wind, seconds away from falling over.

I waved to him and motioned to the seat next to me, which was empty. It was sad, but even the outcasts wanted to keep their distance from me now. He pretended not to see me at first, kept looking around, flipping his hair away from his
face, until James Harper walked into him, catching Tommy a little off-balance and almost knocking him and the tray to the ground. “Watch where you’re going, Brownie,” James said. I felt bad for Tommy then, the only dark face in a sea of pale white. Right after that, he acted as if he had seen me waving for the first time, and he carried his tray over to sit with me.

It was the first time I’d really eaten lunch with anyone all year, if you could count Tommy as anyone. I’d gotten used to reading a book at lunch, so I wouldn’t feel so awkward, so left out, eating in my own little world. That’s how I’d gotten ahead in
Hamlet
.

After Tommy sat down, we didn’t say anything to each other for a few minutes. He’d bought tomato soup in the lunch line, and I had my chicken nuggets. “The first day sucks,” I said to him. “Actually, this whole school sucks.”

“This whole town sucks,” he said. I was surprised that he said anything, and it caught me off guard for moment.

I guessed he must have been missing Florida. I’d been to Florida only one time. A few years back the four of us went to Disney World. I just remembered the thick, humid air and the tall, thin palm trees. Tommy sort of reminded me of one of those palm trees in a way. “You
don’t like your classes so far?”

He shrugged and started slurping up his soup. That is one of my mother’s pet peeves—soup noises—and I had the urge to knock the spoon right out of his hand the same way my mother would have if Becky or I had made that noise, but then I realized he wasn’t doing it to be obnoxious. He just didn’t know any better. “What are you reading?” He looked up from his soup and pointed to my book.

“
Hamlet
,” I said.

“Oh, I read that last year.”

“Oh.” I found myself disappointed. Tommy had read
Hamlet
in eighth grade too. Mr. Fiedler had told us that we were special, that our advanced English class was way ahead. Usually, he said, you didn’t get to read
Hamlet
until eleventh or twelfth grade.

“It was pretty cool.” He said this with an air of superiority, as if to suddenly remind me that he was older and oh so much cooler than I was.

“Yeah, I guess.” I chewed on one of my nuggets and watched as he finished off the soup by holding the bowl up to his mouth and drinking the remains.

“That’s really disgusting,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s on your chin.” I handed him my napkin. He took it and wiped his face sheepishly. “So,” I said, “were you popular at your old school?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know.” Tommy struck me as the type of boy who was not popular or even aware enough to want to be. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to be cool. He reminded me more of the tech kids who were cool in their own slick sort of way, not the same kind of cool as an athlete. That’s why his
Hamlet
comment surprised me. I hadn’t expected him to know anything about English. For some reason, I’d pictured him as the kind of boy who was obsessed with cars and finding new ways to use curse words.

“I used to be almost popular,” I said. “See that table over there.” I nodded toward the one Jocelyn and I had sat at all last year. “That’s where I used to eat lunch with those girls up there and that one over there.” I tried to nod my head toward Jocelyn without making it obvious that I was pointing her out. Jocelyn was laughing at something that Andrea said and shaking her long blond hair against her back. She was wearing hot pink lipstick, an amazing, enviable shade that I could see even from my seat a few tables back. They looked in our direction and started laughing again, and I
quickly averted my eyes.

“She looks like a snob,” Tommy said.

“She’s not.” My old instinct to defend her kicked in. “Well, I don’t really know.” I finished off my last nugget, while Tommy stared at me intensely, as if he were scrutinizing me, squinting his eyes a little, turning his head to the side. It made me feel uncomfortable, the same way I felt when older boys would stare at my chest, and I knew I was blushing.

“What’s it like?” Tommy asked.

“What?” I pretended not to understand him, but of course I knew that Mrs. Ramirez had told him everything about me.

“You know.”

I shook my head, but I suddenly felt myself blinking back tears. I bit my lip. The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of him. “I have to go.” I stood up and threw my book on my tray. “I don’t want to be late for class.”

Later that day, in English class, we talked about Hamlet’s need for revenge. Mr. Fiedler asked us why we thought Hamlet went to the lengths he did to try to avenge his father’s death.

We were quiet for a few minutes. I think none of us were sure what he wanted to hear. I thought about my mother’s idea of my grandmother’s spirit. I wondered, if she were to come to me and tell me where Becky was and how she’d gotten there, what I would do, how I would feel. Then I thought that Hamlet wasn’t really trying to get revenge; he wanted justice, wanted things to be set right, and they weren’t really the same things. I didn’t want to say it out loud, though. I didn’t talk much in school anymore; I didn’t want to feel everyone’s eyes on me, everyone’s stares or giggles, so I kept the thought to myself.

I began to think about Becky and the lengths I could go to to find her. I thought about how Hamlet was going to put on a play to catch his father’s murderer. What a joke! If only it were that simple. I tried to imagine us putting on a play, me and my father, Mrs. Ramirez, the detectives, my crazy mother as the star.

When Mrs. Ramirez picked Tommy and me up after school, we pretended that our lunch had never happened. “How you day?” Mrs. Ramirez asked. Neither one of us said anything. Mrs. Ramirez was used to my being quiet, but I’m not sure what she was used to with Tommy. “You
meet all Ah-bee-hail’s friends?” Nothing. “So quiet.” She shook her head.

I was surprised to find both my parents at home when I got there. It was another moment that sent off a warning signal in my brain. Something about Becky. Only the reason they both were there was that my mother had been released from the hospital and my father had taken the afternoon off work to bring her home.

My mother looked surprisingly with it, seminormal even, except for the large bruise on the left arch of her forehead that was this purplish yellow color. “That looks painful,” I said, and reached my hand up as if to touch it; only I was afraid to, so I left my hand suspended in midair.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Come here.” She held out her arms to hug me, and I went to her, relieved. I’d been needing comfort from my mother for weeks, been needing her in a way that I couldn’t even begin to need my father or Becky or Jocelyn, for that matter. She kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair.

“Are you really okay?” I asked. I had this sudden surge of hope that the doctors had cured her. Three days in the hospital and she was a new, fabulous woman, the
mother I’d known years ago.

“Sure I am, sweetie. I’m just a little depressed, that’s all.” I understood her depression to mean a sadness for Becky, an empty hole, and I understood it completely. But I was hopeful that she had come back a new person, that the old person, the woman who’d stayed mostly in her bedroom since Becky’s disappearance, had been left at the hospital.

After dinner I sat up in my room staring at a blank piece of paper that was supposed to be an essay for Mr. Fiedler about Hamlet’s revenge. But all I could think about was Becky. Finally I wrote at the top of the page: “Where is she? Who took her?” I tried to imagine Shawn Olney and his father as suspects, but they just didn’t seem to fit. Then I thought about the man in my dream, the one who was vaguely familiar and yet a stranger to me. I wondered if he was someone else in the neighborhood, someone I didn’t know as well.

As I sat there, I started to draw a map of my neighborhood, marking the houses of the people I knew and the people I didn’t really know that well but whose names I knew. The neighborhood I live in is small enough so that I at least know who lives in every house.

After I finished my map, I sat there, looking at all the
houses, all the names; the possibilities of where to start, what to do next, rambled around in my brain, like prematurely exploded fireworks, popping so loudly that none of the colors even made any sense.

A FEW DAYS
after I had met Hal for the first time, he brought my father thick manila folders filled with all sorts of information about the people of Pinesboro, mostly my neighbors. Some of it didn’t surprise me: Shawn Olney did drugs, and the hard-core stuff, not just marijuana. Mrs. Olney had been married before, and Mr. Olney was not Shawn’s biological father. Mrs. Ramirez had signed up to become an Avon lady (but had never sold a drop of makeup). But other things I found shocking: Mr. Peterson was cheating on his wife, his lovely, perfect wife, with the beautiful red hair and lovely heels. Detective Kinney had been arrested as a teenager driving in a stolen car (a crime deleted from his record after he had performed 150 hours of community service).
Harry Baker’s real first name was Edward.

I watched my father pore over the information with Hal and then throw up his hands in disgust. “It all means nothing,” he said.

“Nothing means nothing,” Hal told him.

But I agreed with my father; everything that Hal had brought him seemed useless.

Tommy and I began playing Uno after school and on Saturdays, when my father took my mother to her therapy sessions. Tommy had brought the game with him from Florida, but I already knew how to play. Becky and I had played it sometimes on snowy days and Saturdays when there was nothing else to do. It’s a pretty simple game actually, where you match colors and numbers and so on, but we played it enough that we began to take it seriously, and we each developed our own strategy.

The odd thing about the game is that it doesn’t really require you to talk. Once you have one card left, you have to say “uno,” but other than that you don’t have to say anything. Tommy and I didn’t. We’d just sit there for a few hours, throwing cards into a pile, back and forth. Sometimes, if one of us spaced out or was too slow, the other one
would say, “Your turn.” Otherwise we were quiet.

It’s not that we were hostile to each other. It was more that I found a sort of comfort in playing cards with him and not having to say anything at all. For a few hours I would concentrate on strategy, on winning a game. It was an odd sort of friendship—if you could even call it a friendship—very different from what I’d had with Jocelyn, where all we would do is talk. But there was something nice about it, I had to admit.

One Saturday, a few weeks after my mother had started seeing a therapist, Mrs. Ramirez came in and interrupted our game. Usually she left us alone. She’d stopped bugging us about being friends, but she’d get this sort of smug, satisfied look on her face when she’d walk by and see the two of us playing cards, so I knew she thought we were friends. When she came in, she told Tommy that she was on the phone with his mother, and his mother wanted to say hello to him before they hung up.

Tommy put his cards facedown on the table and started swinging his hair a little to move it out of his eyes. I’d noticed this was something Tommy did when he got nervous, and I wondered why talking to his mother would make him nervous. “I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. I was surprised by
the forcefulness of his voice, the finality of his statement.

“She you mama. You talk.”

He shook his head. “Just tell her I’m not here.”

“I not going to lie to my
niña
.” Mrs. Ramirez held her hand over her heart.

He shrugged. “Then don’t lie. Tell her I don’t want to talk to her.” He looked at her so defiantly that for a moment I thought Mrs. Ramirez might slap him. But she was the one who retreated, looking wounded.

I can’t imagine not wanting to talk to your mother. As crazy or as distant as my mother seems, I always want her to talk to me. I found it strange that Tommy pushed his mother away while I constantly wished for mine to come closer.

Tommy picked up his cards and started playing as if nothing had happened. I debated leaving it alone, but I was too curious. “Why won’t you talk to your mother?” I asked him.

He looked directly at me, his brown eyes as wide and lost as I’d ever seen them. “I’ll tell you someday,” he said.

I nodded. I was okay with that answer. It was an indication that Tommy actually intended to be my friend.

Strangely enough, it was my mother who told me why Tommy hated his mother, not Tommy himself. My mother came to know all this from Mrs. Ramirez, who’d offered to drive my mother to the supermarket and such. We didn’t get another second car after my mother’s accident, and I’d just sort of assumed that my father was no longer going to let her drive. I was sure he was paying Mrs. Ramirez for these trips, as if she were babysitting my mother too, but I was also pretty sure my mother didn’t suspect, because she seemed to think that Mrs. Ramirez enjoyed her company.

The whole thing came up when my mother started asking me about Tommy and how I liked him so far. “He’s okay,” I told her.

“That poor thing,” my mother said. “That poor, poor thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now don’t you repeat this, Abby, you hear? What I tell you stays in this room.”

I nodded. I always thought that was a funny thing to say, as if what she would tell me would literally hang above us in the kitchen for the rest of our lives or something. “He walked in on his mother having an affair.” I tried to imagine Tommy entering a dark room and finding a younger,
prettier version of Mrs. Ramirez in bed with a man who wasn’t his father. “And then his father left. Just walked out of the house and hasn’t come back yet.”

It may have been an odd comparison, but I immediately thought of Becky. Tommy’s father was a grown man, and he left on purpose, but it seemed to me that once a person was gone and you didn’t know where, it didn’t matter how he’d left or why. It was being left behind, not knowing, that was worse than anything. I began to see Tommy differently then, and not because he was the first person my age I knew to have witnessed something relating to sex, but because I began to understand him—his quiet stare, his lost eyes, his nervous hair flips. “I guess Tommy blames his mother for a lot,” I said.

My mother laughed, a nervous, guilty sort of laugh, and I felt bad because I didn’t want her to think that I blamed her for something. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It takes two to tango, honey.” She paused and played with her hair for a minute, tucking the wispy strands behind her delicate ears. “You know Tommy’s father is black.” She lowered her voice a little when she said this, as if this were something that should be kept more secret than anything else she’d told me.

I didn’t see how his being black had to do with anything that had happened, but I don’t know anyone else who is a racial mix. We don’t talk about things like that in my family—race or ethnicity or even divorce. Where we live almost everyone is white with the exception of a few Hispanic and Chinese people, and the parents of everyone I knew in my junior high were still married. “His mother is Mexican,” I pointed out, wondering what my mother thought the difference between black and Mexican was.

“I know,” she said, “but still.”

I nodded in agreement, so I pretended I understood what she was saying, but I didn’t. Grandma Jacobson once made Becky and me promise that we wouldn’t marry black men. “You marry for love,” she told us, “as long as he’s not black.” When I asked her why it mattered, she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t care, except for the children. I have nothing against black people, don’t get me wrong, girls.” I didn’t understand what she meant then, and when she said it, I’d felt this vague sense of discomfort, though I didn’t understand exactly why.

“Well, anyway.” My mother undid her ponytail and tried to tuck those stray hairs in, but they just didn’t fit, and she paused for a moment as if trying to decide whether or not to tell me the rest. “Apparently, Tommy was getting in
a lot of fights at school. That’s why Maria sent him here.” I couldn’t really imagine Tommy fighting. He seemed too quiet to be a fighter. I guess he just had all this pent-up anger that welled up inside him until he let it burst out. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you all this. Shit.” It was the first time I heard my mother curse, and the harshness of it shocked me. “I need a cigarette.”

She went out on the back patio, sat in her usual chair, and smoked her cigarette the way she’d been doing for the few months before Becky disappeared.

I felt slightly off-center, the way I had the day my father took me to the hospital. I felt as if my mother had forgotten whom she was talking to, that she too had mistaken me for an adult.