The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  As soon as I opened up the paper, I saw the article about Becky. At first I was a little shocked, seeing her there, grainy and black and white, but then I realized this was probably not the first article. In fact she might have been in the paper frequently. The Pinesboro Gazette didn’t have much else to report. But it was the first time I’d actually seen the paper since she’d disappeared. My father must have been hiding it, getting up early to read it and then throwing it out before I could see it.

  On the front page was Becky’s picture, the same school picture that had become Becky’s image over the past few weeks. The headline read: police search morrow’s field for missing girl’s body. It was the first time I’d ever thought of Becky as Becky’s body, as something lifeless. It was the first time I’d ever thought that Becky might be dead.

  Looking at the headline, at Becky’s school picture and the word “body,” I was astounded. Then I felt angry. Becky couldn’t be dead.

  I read the article quickly, afraid that my father would come downstairs and snatch the paper out of my hands before I had a chance to understand it. Mostly it said what I already knew, about when Becky had gone missing, about the reward. But it said two things that surprised me. The first was about the police searching Morrow’s field.

  Morrow’s field is a big field that starts behind our neighborhood and separates us from Ford’s Creek, a larger neighborhood of smaller houses and town houses. We played out there sometimes in the fall, softball and soccer. Every once in a while we had a neighborhood picnic or a birthday party there. In the winter we built snowmen and sledded there. The field is huge, grassy, and muddy. You could get to it if you walked through our backyard, went behind the pool, and let yourself out the back gate. The article mentioned how easily accessible it is from our house.

  The other thing that surprised me was that the article said the police were questioning both my parents as well as some of the neighbors, whom the article didn’t name. It said that the police hadn’t officially named my parents as suspects, but I thought the article sort of implied that they were.

  I already knew that they suspected my mother, that her weird behavior somehow made her seem suspicious, but to know that they suspected my father too was a shock. My father is such a straight arrow, always worrying about the rules.

  I realized that I was going to have to do something. The adults all around me suddenly seemed so useless. I knew Becky had to be somewhere, maybe in Morrow’s field, maybe not, but I knew for sure that my parents didn’t have anything to do with it.

  I felt disgusted as I folded the paper back up and put it back on the porch where I’d found it, and I tried to brainstorm possibilities for how I could find her. Though nothing came to me, I kept trying to think of something because I knew it was better than the alternative, thinking about her as a body buried in the field.

  I reset the alarm. I didn’t want my father to know I’d seen the newspaper, that I knew now what was going on. If he knew I’d gotten the paper, he’d yell at me. But worse, I was sure he wouldn’t look at me the same, that he would somehow look guilty or ashamed.

  The last time I was in Morrow’s field had been two weeks before Becky disappeared.

  There was a barbecue at Harry Baker’s house, in the Ford’s Creek neighborhood, across the field from us. At the barbecue, Harry cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, and the men, my father included, stood in a circle around the grill, holding on tightly to their beer bottles. The men on my father’s baseball team had a barbecue every summer, and it was something Becky and I dreaded being dragged to. This barbecue was even bigger and more boring than usual, with the baseball team and Harry’s neighbors, none of whom we knew. We were instantly bored; we were the only children there over the age of five. We hung around my mother, listening to the women talk, but when the talk turned to gardening, Becky and I skipped away and plopped ourselves down in the middle of the yard.

  We pulled out blades of grass in fistfuls and tried to whistle through the individual blades. It was a trick I could never quite master, and sick of the sweet taste of the grass, I gave up after a few tries. I started pulling petals off a dandelion, saying silently to myself: James loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…

  Then Becky’s grass whistled, a sound so clear and high-pitched that it cut through the noise of the crowd, a birdsong. “Hey, Ab, I did it. I did it.” She clapped her hands.

  “So what?” I shrugged. “That’s stupid anyway.”

  “That’s just because you can’t do it.”

  “Can too.”

  “Cannot.”

  I reached over and yanked her pigtail so hard that her head bowed to the side. “Ow,” she yelled. “I’m telling.” And she jumped up and ran off in search of our mother. I pulled out clumps of grass and, frustrated, threw them around me.

  Becky returned moments later with my mother in tow. “Abby,” she whispered, but I could tell she was angry.

  “What?”

  “Really, you’re embarrassing me. Behave yourself.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I lied. When our mother turned around to walk back toward the women, I stuck my tongue out at Becky. Tattletale, I mouthed to her.

  Maybe our mother had a sixth sense, or maybe she had witnessed this scene so many times that she’d known it by heart by then. “Abby, go home.”

  “What?” I was surprised that I was being banished, then strangely amused.

  “Go home and wait for us in your room. Think about what you’ve done.”

  Now it was Becky’s turn to smile, and smile she did, a large, toothy grin that made her whole face light up. “Well, fine then,” I said. “This sucks anyway.”

  “Abby, mind yourself.”

  But I wasn’t listening. I’d already stood up and started walking in the direction toward home, toward Morrow’s field.

  In the field there were a few boys in Becky’s grade who were playing catch, and they seemed oddly lit up by the dusk, like shadows, throwing the ball and then chasing it. I could hear them yelling to one another, their voices high-pitched and mellow, like girls’. The grass was particularly green, a deep emerald shade that reminded me of The Wizard of Oz when it suddenly popped into color. We’d had an extraordinary amount of rain over the summer, and it showed. I skipped across the field, happy to be away from the party. I was free. Free at last.

  After Becky disappeared, I tried to remember it the way it was then, emerald and amazing, nothing at all like a possible burial ground.

  Chapter 5

  I QUICKLY CAME to learn that everyone was a suspect. It wasn’t just the steely glances or, worse, the people who refused to look at us as my father took me on our first trip to the supermarket, just the two of us. It was the lack of other things after a certain amount of time: condolences, well-wishers, offers to help, or even the missing space of something as simple as Mrs. Olney’s tuna casserole on the top shelf of our fridge.

  My father said to me, as we walked through the crowded market, feeling like lepers, “Well, you know, Ab, it’s times like this when you learn who your real friends are.” But it sounded like something mechanical, something he’d heard someone else say and decided he should believe. It did not sound like my father.

  As luck would have it, we ran into Mrs. Olney in the pasta aisle. I saw her coming, but my father, who was sorting through brands of spaghetti, looking rather lost, didn’t notice. “Dad,” I whispered, trying to get his attention. But he didn’t hear me. She might have been the first person to look directly at us, but seeing her didn’t comfort me one bit. As soon as she saw the two of us, she sped up, all three hundred or so pounds of her bouncing in her pink floral muumuu, the sound of her pink flip-flops smacking the hard white tile, and her heavy breathing reminding me of this video I’d seen in school of a bull charging a matador.

  “Despicable,” she said. “You people.” She shook her finger at my father, who suddenly looked up and frowned at her. “You sent those policemen after my son. My son wouldn’t hu
rt anyone. And you parading around here like you didn’t do anything wrong.” I waited for my father to defend himself, but he didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head slowly. “You can’t just go around ruining people’s lives,” she said. “You just can’t.” She looked directly at me and shook her head. I noticed the mole she has above her left eye had a little hair growing out of it, and I had to suppress the urge to reach up and rip it out. “You tell them to leave Shawn alone,” she said. “He hasn’t done nothing to nobody!” Then she swung her cart around us and clacked down to the next aisle.

  “Let’s go.” My father grabbed my arm.

  “But we haven’t gotten anything yet.”

  “I said let’s go.” He left the cart sitting there and pushed me toward the door.

  The next week I had to go back to school, and for the first time since Becky disappeared, my father went back to work. I started to feel everything slow down, come to a sort of automatic halt. For the first time in weeks Becky became the background of our world.

  On the first day of school my father dropped me off on his way to work. “Mrs. Ramirez will pick you up,” he said. “Right out here. Three o’clock.”

  I nodded.

  “Wait for her,” he said. “Don’t try to walk. Don’t go with anyone else.”

  I was about to roll my eyes at him, but I didn’t want to hear him yell at me, first thing in the morning, so instead I just promised to do what he said. “Ab,” he said as I got out of the car. I turned back to look at him. “Have a good day.”

  When I walked into school on the first morning, people looked at me and looked away. People started whispering. At first I thought they were looking at my outfit. I wore the same jean shorts I’d been wearing all summer, my favorite pink shirt, which was now a little too tight, and my ratty pink flip-flops. It was my first first day of school ever without a new outfit to wear. But I hadn’t mentioned that to anyone at home, not after that horrible trip to the mall with Mrs. Ramirez. It was also the first time in three years that Jocelyn and I hadn’t coordinated our outfits over the phone the night before. I’d called her, but Mrs. Redfern told me Jocelyn was out with her father and would call me back if it wasn’t too late. She never called.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that I was different, and it wasn’t just the clothes or the new figure or the fact that Jocelyn wasn’t waiting for me in our usual spot by the lockers. People stayed away from me like I was a disease, like something they might catch if they got too close, like they were afraid that they would disappear too.

  The day began with homeroom, where I sat next to Jocelyn, just as I always had. Reed and Redfern—we were as close alphabetically as we had been friends for the past few years. “Hey.” I tapped her on the shoulder.

  She smiled, but I could tell it was fake. It was the smile she reserved for people we didn’t like, for her mother’s intrusive questions. We kind of stared at each other for a few minutes, and then it started to feel uncomfortable. For the first time in our friendship we weren’t sure what to say to each other.

  Finally she said, “Look what I got for my birthday.” She pointed to her earrings, which were little pink stars, so delicate and perfect that they would’ve been exactly what I would’ve wished for most in the world six weeks ago.

  “Nice.” I was smiling so wide and so hard that I thought my face might crack. Usually Jocelyn and I had a lot to say to each other; we’d tell each other everything. But there was the huge, obvious gap between us, the difference between my summer and hers.

  Mr. Halburt, our homeroom teacher, quieted us down and took roll. I watched Jocelyn out of the corner of my eye, and I noticed she was wearing makeup, blue eye shadow, to be exact, the palest shade of baby blue I’ve ever seen. We had never worn makeup to school before.

  When the bell rang for first period, Mr. Halburt pulled me aside, so I didn’t get to walk with Jocelyn. “Abigail,” he said, “I have a note here from Mrs. Austin. She’d like you to go see her during first period.”

  “I have algebra,” I said. “Math is my worst subject. I shouldn’t miss it.” Mrs. Austin is the school guidance counselor, and I knew immediately why she wanted to see me. She would want to know all about my summer and Becky and how I was handling it all. Mrs. Austin wears bright pink lipstick, and when she applies it, she must not use a mirror because it’s always smudged down her chin. She was the last person I felt like talking to.

  Mr. Halburt patted me on the shoulder, then looked me straight in the eye. I could tell he was trying to see if I was okay in that intrusive way that teachers have when they believe themselves to be gods who can fix everything. “It’s the first day,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” He said it like he was talking about the math class, but the way he looked at me, I wondered if he was trying to console me, to remind me that life goes on, that everything in junior high is a fad, here one week and gone the next. I might be a leper today, but by next month I would just be Abigail Reed again. Or so I hoped.

  Mrs. Austin asked me a bunch of questions about how I felt, how things were at home, how my parents were. I told her everything was fine, that we were just fine, fine, fine. I thought about how annoyed my father would have been if he’d heard the questions Mrs. Austin asked me. None of her damn business, he would have said. But I guess she was just trying to do her job.

  I suppose she was trying to help me, pulling me out of first period like that. But the truth of the matter was she only made things worse. I had to walk into algebra class in the middle, which meant that when I opened the door and walked in, everyone turned to stare at me. I felt my face turning red, and I slunk down into a seat in the back of the room.

  The worst part of the day by far, though, was lunch. You have to understand the way the lunchroom worked. There were certain tables you sat at and certain ones you didn’t. Each section of tables was reserved in a way: one for the popular kids, the ones who would be the homecoming queens and kings, the football players, and the cheerleaders in high school; one for the outcasts, nerds, geeks, computer whizzes, whatever you want to call them; one for the athletic kids; one for the brains who weren’t quite nerds; and one for the up-and-coming populars, the people who are just on the brink of being cool but aren’t quite there yet. This was the section Jocelyn and I and our other friends had sat in all last year.

  When I walked into the lunchroom, Jocelyn was already there, but she wasn’t sitting at our normal table. She was sitting at the popular table, and she was talking to Andrea Cass, her neighbor and also quite possibly the most snobbishly popular girl at our school. I debated walking up to them, asking them if I could sit there. Jocelyn and I had made a pact the year before. If one of us were to break into the popular crowd, we would bring the other one with us. But I suddenly knew that the pact was no longer good, that if I sat at that table, it would immediately get quiet, everyone would stare at me, and when I’d get up to put away my tray, they would giggle.

  Instead I sat at my normal table, with some girls Jocelyn and I had been semifriends with the year before. These girls had been our lunch-table friends and nothing else. Jocelyn and I had aspirations to be in the popular crowd one day; these girls were perfectly content being behind them, always on the outside looking in.

  “Hey,” I said, and plopped my tray down.

  “That seat’s taken.” This came from Katie Rainey, who is the plainest of the girls, too plain and boring to be popular, Jocelyn had always said. At first I thought she was lying, and I was ready to call her on it, about ready to punch someone in the face even. I felt this anger rush up inside me, like a violent thunderstorm that seems to come on suddenly but that you know has actually been welling up in the hot, hot atmosphere all day. But then I looked up and saw Katie Rainey’s younger sister standing behind me. My seat was being taken by a stupid seventh grader.

  “Sorry.” Though I wasn’t quite sure what I was apologizing for, I stood up, looked around the lunchroom, and decided there was nowhere for me to sit. I didn�
��t belong anywhere. I dumped my tray without eating anything and spent the rest of my lunch in the library, pretending to read a book.

  Mrs. Ramirez was late, and I ended up waiting out in front of the school for her for fifteen minutes. I was tempted to start walking home. I knew it would be quicker and less painful—the last thing I wanted to do was talk to her—but I knew she would tell my father, and he would be mad. Since Becky had disappeared, I’d had the constant craving for his acceptance, a need for him not to be disappointed in me. It was strange because before, I’d never really worried about what my father thought about me.

  So I sat outside and waited. I watched Jocelyn and Andrea walk out together. I waved to Jocelyn as she walked by, and she gave me a little half smile. The year before, Jocelyn and Becky and I had walked to the corner together. The elementary school was next door to the junior high, and we all got out at the same time, so Jocelyn and I would meet Becky right outside.

  When we got to the corner, Jocelyn turned one way toward her development, and Becky and I turned the other way toward ours. Sometimes Becky and I played a game when we were walking home, where we’d look at the people outside, our neighbors watering their plants or whatever, and make up stories about them. We said things like Mrs. Johnson, whom we often saw getting her mail, had killed her husband and buried him in the backyard, when really we both had overheard our mother say he’d left her.

  I longed for that right then, for walking home after the first day of school, for someone to laugh with. I felt so desperately sad, suddenly, so empty.

  By the time Mrs. Ramirez showed up, I was practically in tears, just sitting there, feeling sorry for myself. “How you day, Ah-bee-hail?” she asked as I got into the car.