The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  She turned away from the stove to check the table. “Abby, set another plate.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Who’s coming to dinner?” I imagined she might say Harry Baker, Mrs. Ramirez.

  “Becky.”

  “Becky?” I didn’t expect to hear her name, even though I was thinking about her, even though I wanted her empty space to be filled, wanted to hear her brag about her birthday the next day. I suddenly had visions of a life returned to normal, of the two of us pulling each other’s hair and squabbling over an inner tube, of a family that ate dinner together, of a mother who spaced out only occasionally when she lounged around with a cigarette in her hand.

  “She’ll be home for her birthday. Becky wouldn’t miss her birthday.”

  “You’re right,” I said quickly. “You’re right.” But I didn’t really believe it. I set the fourth place because I was afraid if I didn’t, my mother would make a silent retreat back into her own hazy world.

  All through my birthday dinner my mother kept getting up to look outside, to peek through the front window. “I thought I heard something,” she said.

  Finally my father said, “Elaine, have a seat. Relax.”

  “I can’t relax, Jim. Don’t tell me to relax.”

  I chewed my meatballs, pretending they were the best birthday dinner ever. But I was afraid to say anything. I knew if someone moved the wrong way, said the wrong thing, my mother would storm upstairs, and my father would run after her. I preferred this strange dinner party of my mother’s to being alone on my birthday.

  “I remember when you were born, Ab, just like it was yesterday.” He tried to change the subject.

  I nodded. He says this every year. Then he recounts the story of my mother going into labor, of how the first time he held me, he thought I was boy because the umbilical cord was still attached. He did the same thing to Becky on her birthday, only then he talked about her small, weak lungs, and she’d use this to her advantage. She’d crawl on his lap and hug him until he’d start to tear up, just thinking about how she been so blue, helplessly unable to breathe for the first seconds of her life.

  By the end of dinner my mother was a wreck. She paced through the front hallway. While my father and I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink, we could hear the clicking of her feet, back and forth and back and forth. It was all very odd, really—not that it wasn’t odd anyway—but it was still my birthday. When I looked at this with my mother’s logic, I wondered why she thought Becky would come home today, not tomorrow. I wondered if my mother might be confused, if somehow she’d collapsed the two of us into one person in her mind, one little girl. I wondered if I’d become invisible.

  “Dessert,” my father called to her. “Time for cake.” He’d picked up cupcakes on the way home from work—chocolate with vanilla icing, my favorite. At least he’d remembered that.

  My mother came back in. Her hair was messy, falling out of the neat, tight ponytail it had been in earlier. She looked oddly disheveled. “I don’t understand it,” she said to my father. “I just don’t understand it.”

  He went to her and gave her a hug, and I could see he was solid but defeated. This was quite possibly the nicest exchange I’d ever seen my parents have. There was something so sweet, so desperate in their hug that I knew instantly how much they loved each other. “People don’t just disappear,” she said. “Little girls. Little girls don’t just disappear.”

  My father stroked her hair back into her ponytail. “It’s time for cake. Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” I knew my father was trying to do this all for me, and I felt ashamed that I would even want him to. I wasn’t even sure if I should have a birthday anymore.

  I heard the grandfather clock in the hall chime, so I knew it was six o’clock. If Becky were here, she’d be hopping around the kitchen saying, “Six hours until my birthday!” “Be nice, Becky. It’s Abby’s day,” my mother would say, but she would smile, so I’d know she thought Becky was adorable, that she didn’t really mean it. It was strange that I missed that, that it didn’t quite feel like my birthday without it.

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said. “It’s okay. We can have the cupcakes later.”

  My father shook his head and let go of my mother. “Ab, sit down. We’ll have them.”

  I didn’t want it to become an argument, so I did what he said. I wasn’t sure what he whispered to my mother, but then she sat down too. He put a candle in my cupcake and carried it to the table singing “Happy Birthday” in that funny off-key way he has of singing things. He put it down in front of me. “Make a wish.”

  He looked me solidly in the eye when he said this, so I knew what he wanted me to wish for. I was surprised. I didn’t think my father believed in wishes.

  Chapter 7

  BY THE END of September, work on Becky’s case had slowed down considerably. My father complained that the police weren’t doing enough, weren’t looking hard enough for her. He told me that he blamed the lack of progress in Becky’s case on the fact that we lived in such a small, clean suburban county. “The police aren’t used to crime here,” he said. “What do we have? A burglary every once in a while, some minor vandalism?” He waved his hand in the air, as if all that were nothing, that compared with Becky, it meant nothing.

  But the police did finally manage to find the man in the blue van, something that my father did not exactly give them credit for. “How long does it take to find somebody?” he said, and I think the fact that it took them that long was not a good sign.

  His name was Oscar P. Derricks. The police found him after pulling him over in what Harry called a routine traffic stop. They found a Baggie of marijuana in the glove compartment and took him into the station, and someone there put two and two together. It was Kinney, not Harry, who called my father to tell him about it. This was when we also found out that Kinney had been put in charge of the case in order to avoid a “conflict of interest,” something my father said was bullshit.

  What I know about Oscar Derricks came from the little I overheard of my father on the phone and the very little my father told me. Oscar was twenty-four years old; he was a high school dropout; his permanent residence was listed as a subsidized apartment in Camden. Apparently he worked as a delivery driver for FTD, delivering flowers and such. Sometimes he’d make deliveries in Pinesboro, though not often, only when the regular guy was sick or flooded with calls. He hadn’t made any deliveries in Pinesboro the week of Becky’s disappearance.

  When the police asked him what he had been doing on my street, sitting in his van, he denied ever being there at first. The police got a search warrant for his van, his apartment, his workplace, but the only thing they turned up was fourteen pounds of marijuana, which he admitted he’d been selling.

  Oscar’s story checked out when the police turned up one of Oscar’s best customers, Shawn Olney.

  “I can’t believe there drugs in this neighborhood,” Mrs. Ramirez clucked one day on the ride home from school. “Used to be safe for the children.”

  “Do you think he knows where Becky is?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “He sell the drug. Little Shawn. I remember him when he this high.” She held up her hand to show the size of a toddler. “He always such nice boy. He shovel my driveway when it snow.” I thought about Mrs. Olney attacking my father in the supermarket aisle, and I felt a cruel sense of satisfaction that Shawn had indeed been doing something wrong.

  A few days after the police found Oscar, they charged him with drug-related crimes, but they were thoroughly convinced that he had nothing to do with Becky’s disappearance. “If he didn’t take her, then who did?” I asked my father.

  He shrugged. “That’s the same thing Kinney said to me earlier.” Only I guess what my father meant was that Kinney had said it in a much more accusatory way.

  After Oscar was cleared, my father hired a lawyer and a private investigator. I heard about the private investigator through Mrs. Ramirez, because he was a frien
d of one of her sons-in-law. “He good man,” she told me. “He find your hermana just like that.” She lifted her fingers from the steering wheel to snap, and I felt the car jerk to the right a little bit. “You no worry now.”

  I found out about the lawyer only because he called one day right after I got home from school. When my mother didn’t answer the phone in her bedroom, I picked up. The man on the other end asked for my father, and when I told him he wasn’t home and asked if I could take a message, he informed me that he was my father’s attorney, Raymond Garth, and that he would appreciate it if my father could please return his call.

  It made me nervous that my father had a lawyer. I wondered if the police were planning on arresting my parents.

  I thought about what would happen to me if they did, where I would live. Both sets of my grandparents are dead. My father has a sister in Ohio he doesn’t talk to much, Aunt Claire. I’d met her only once, and she seemed like the sort of cold woman who would sew a lot and ask children to mind their manners. I didn’t think I’d have to live with her, but maybe I would. After all, she was my only blood relative.

  I didn’t think Mrs. Ramirez would take me in, as much as she’d been watching me lately. All her children were grown, and she was always talking about the trips she was going to take to see her grandchildren in Florida—someday, once she saved enough money.

  It was just after my birthday that I saw my father hand Mrs. Ramirez an envelope. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Reed. This going straight to my grandkid fund.” I realized that my father was paying her to pick me up from school, to cart me around, that in all actuality she was nothing more than my babysitter. I didn’t think my father had enough money to pay her to watch me full-time.

  Suddenly I started to get angry with Becky. You’ve ruined everything, I told her. You’re ruining my life. And I wondered if she could hear me, wherever she was.

  The weather the last week in September was cool and beautiful, and I talked Mrs. Ramirez into going outside in the backyard instead of watching TV. She sat on the back patio, in my mother’s smoking chair, while I ran behind the pool to the edge of the yard, where I could see Morrow’s field. I told Mrs. Ramirez that I wanted to practice my cartwheels, but really I wanted to see what the police were doing in the field. It didn’t seem like much; I saw an area that had been roped off with yellow tape, but I never saw a person out there doing something, looking for her. I wanted to go out there and start looking myself, but I couldn’t get away from Mrs. Ramirez’s sharp eyes. It was frustrating, standing there on the edge.

  One afternoon Mrs. Ramirez seemed to be paying particular attention to me, and every time she looked up I remembered I was supposed to be doing cartwheels, so I must’ve ended up doing about twenty of them across the yard until I saw it. A little blue glint, it caught the edge of the afternoon sunlight, and I bent over and reached out for it. When I realized what it was, I gasped at a sight so unreal and unbelievable that it was almost like finding Becky herself: Becky’s necklace, sunken in the dirt by a maple tree root, right by the edge of Morrow’s field.

  I was so excited to find the necklace that I picked it up and ran over to show it to Mrs. Ramirez right away. I didn’t think that maybe I shouldn’t touch it, because I had to; the necklace was something that was so real, such a part of Becky, that it wasn’t something I could leave just lying there in the dirt.

  A few years back, just before my grandmother got sick and died, she gave Becky and me these necklaces for our birthdays. Each necklace had a little sapphire (our birthstone) shaped like a heart on a thin gold chain. I didn’t like to wear mine. I was afraid I’d lose it, and I’m not really a big fan of necklaces anyway. Usually I feel like they’re choking me, and they make my neck itch. But Becky put hers on and decided she would never take it off. Becky loved jewelry, and this being her only authentic piece, she wore it and showed it off constantly.

  Mrs. Ramirez called my father, who called Detective Kinney, and a few minutes after my father got home, Kinney arrived. My mother, hearing all the commotion, got out of bed and came downstairs. I held out the necklace and showed it to her, feeling this oddly enormous sense of pride that I’d done something useful, but as soon as she saw it, my mother started shaking violently, as if she were sobbing; only she wasn’t crying. I knew that I was the one who’d made her shake, so I just stood there, all of a sudden sort of dumbstruck.

  Kinney took the necklace from my hands and dropped it into a clear plastic bag. “You shouldn’t have touched it.” Kinney sighed. “You contaminated it.”

  This only made my mother start sobbing harder, and I felt so terrible that I wished I’d never been the one to find it in the first place. I think it suddenly occurred to my father that I had the same necklace because he said, “Where’s yours, Ab?”

  “She has one too?” Kinney sounded annoyed, and I hated the way he referred to me as “she,” as if I weren’t even in the room.

  “It’s in my room,” I said.

  “Let me see it,” Kinney said, and I knew he didn’t believe the necklace was really Becky’s, that he couldn’t imagine that I’d found something he’d missed. Something I hated more than anything about Kinney was the way he never believed me; he always suspected me of lying or doing something wrong just because I wasn’t an adult. Kinney’s way of looking at things was on the surface: I couldn’t know anything because I was young; my mother must be guilty because she was sad. Sometimes I wonder, if Kinney had been a different person, someone who dug deeper, who believed there was more to every story, if we would’ve found her right away.

  I kept my necklace in the little blue velvet box it had come in on top of my dresser, next to my bin of barrettes. It was there, right where I’d left it. Before I went back downstairs, I opened the box and ran my finger over the sapphire heart. My grandmother’s heart. Becky’s heart.

  “Here.” I handed the box to Kinney. “It’s in here.”

  He opened it, glanced at it quickly, then shut it and thrust the box back at me.

  “Then that’s Becky’s,” my father said. “That’s Becky’s necklace.” He said it again, as if he couldn’t believe it was really true.

  “Could she have lost it earlier in the summer?” Kinney asked.

  “Did she have it on, Elaine? Had the girls been playing back there?” My mother was no longer shaking and stood perfectly still. She had this look on her face that reminded me of this sick bunny Becky and I had found in the pool once. It was almost drowned in there, half alive, its face glazed and afraid.

  “Elaine, goddammit.” My father shook her a little, but she didn’t say anything.

  I tried to think if Becky had been wearing her necklace in the pool the last night we were in there, and I couldn’t remember. I can picture it on her, certainly, bobbing up across her chest in the black night water, but I wasn’t sure if that image was that night or another one. I’d seen Becky swim with her necklace hundreds of times.

  “She loved that necklace,” my mother finally said. “She always wore it.”

  What my mother meant was, if Becky had lost her necklace when she was playing earlier in the summer, we would’ve heard about it. Becky would’ve noticed right away.

  “Can we have it?” my father asked Kinney. “Can we have it back?”

  Kinney shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reed. Evidence.”

  “No,” my mother said. “She’ll need it back. When she comes home, she’ll want her necklace.” Kinney looked uncomfortable, and he rubbed his top lip with his forefinger a few times. “You can’t keep my daughter’s necklace. It’s not yours to keep.”

  “Elaine.” My father put his hand on her shoulder. “Elaine, calm down.”

  It was one of those moments when I think the adults had forgotten I was there. They were so wrapped up in Becky’s necklace that they didn’t notice me. Kinney had put the bag with the necklace on my mother’s sofa table, so it was sitting there, right in front of me. Just within my reach. I thought abo
ut taking it, putting it in the velvet box next to mine, so the two hearts were together, touching. It’s not so much that I wanted the necklace. But I agreed with my mother; it wasn’t the police’s to have. Besides, I was the one who found it.

  Before I could do anything, Kinney picked the bag up. I think he was afraid of my mother’s picking it up and screaming bloody murder.

  “You don’t think she’s coming home, do you?” My mother looked him straight in the eye when she said this, and he began tugging on his bottom lip a little.

  “Mrs. Reed—”

  My father cut him off. “Abigail, why don’t see you Detective Kinney out? Your mother needs to lie down.” He put his arms around her and murmured something in her ear.

  She nodded. “Yes, Jim. I know.”

  I wondered what he had said to her, and I felt left out, as if some secret comfort had passed between them. My father looked at me and nodded toward the door. I expected Kinney to congratulate me, to thank me, to tell me that I’d done a good job, but all he said was: “No more snooping around, young lady. Why don’t you try to let us do our job?” He sighed heavily, as if I had just made things so much harder for him, a sigh that I couldn’t feel bad about because I believed they would’ve found the necklace weeks ago if they had really been doing their job.

  I nodded because I realized Kinney wasn’t ever going to listen to me, but I crossed my fingers behind my back. There was no way I was going to leave things up to the police.

  After Kinney left, I took my necklace and went up to my room. I took it out of the box and put it around my neck. I admired the blue sapphire, the way it caught the afternoon light through the window. It really is a beautiful necklace, something Jocelyn envied on Becky all the time. That was part of the reason Becky wore it, I thought. I decided right then that I would wear my necklace all the time, the way Becky had.