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.
Chapter 12
AT THE BEGINNING of October I started having the dream every night. Sometimes the man seemed so vivid, so close, that I thought I would even be able to describe him to Kinney, to make Kinney believe that he was real, but every time I woke up, the image fell away, so I knew I’d have nothing more to tell him than what I already had.
But I had to talk to someone, so I told Tommy about the dream one afternoon at lunch. Though Tommy and I had been sitting together at lunch for weeks, we rarely talked, and when we did, it was briefly, about the food, our homework. It must have come as a surprise to Tommy, because it was somewhat a surprise to me when I blurted out, “Do you think dreams can be real?”
“What?” He flipped his hair back, and for a moment I could see his eyes, deep, round saucers, like the eyes of a deer I’d once seen startled in Morrow’s field.
“I keep having a dream about that night.” I saw him nod, so I knew he knew exactly which night I meant, as if he understood that there was no other night important enough to speak of. I told him about the man in my doorway, about the one time I could see his face.
“You should tell the police,” he said.
I thought about the way Kinney looked at me when I told him about the man I thought I saw. “No. They don’t listen to me. They’re useless.”
“My father is a cop,” he said. It was the first time Tommy had mentioned his father to me, and I tried not to look alarmed, to give away what my mother had told me about him. I thought Tommy was going to be mad that I called the police useless, but what he said next surprised me. “Maybe I can help you.”
For Halloween I dressed up as a loaf of Wonder bread. It was my mother’s idea, and even though I thought it was a little strange, I went with it because she offered to make me the costume.
She’d been acting pretty normal since she’d come home from the hospital, but since she’d started going to therapy, she’d stopped talking about Becky altogether, and she didn’t want anyone else to talk about her either. Once my father said something to my mother about a report from the private investigator, and she covered her ears and ran out of the room. I thought this was strange, but I found it better than the alternative. I was disappointed, though. I’d wanted to hear what the investigator had to say, but when I asked my father, he just said, “Not now, Ab.” And he stormed out after her.
My mother made my costume out of a white trash bag and colored paper. She cut out the letters and the little circles and glued them on the front of the trash bag. Then she got me a white turtleneck, pants, and shoes to wear underneath, and some white face paint for my face. It was a pretty interesting-looking costume, I had to admit.
Tommy dressed up as a gladiator. Mrs. Ramirez made his costume out of cardboard and tinfoil. He had a sword and everything, though the tinfoil blade wasn’t exactly straight. Mrs. Ramirez topped the costume off with a tinfoil crown that held Tommy’s hair back away from his face, something like a headband. I didn’t think that gladiators had actually worn crowns, but I didn’t say anything to Tommy. I didn’t want to make him feel bad.
Tommy and I went trick-or-treating together, while my father and Mrs. Ramirez agreed to follow along behind us and keep a respectable distance, so no one knew they were actually with us. I told my father we were old enough to go by ourselves, but he shook his head and said, “Absolutely not, Ab.”
Mrs. Ramirez agreed. “Used to be safe neighborhood, but now with the drug and the”—she looked at my father and paused—“other bad stuff…”
Tommy didn’t want to go trick-or-treating in the first place. He said that he was too old for it. Maybe he was right, but I’d never thought about it that way before, probably because I always went with Becky, so I’d never felt too old to go. Until this year Becky and I had gone with Jocelyn and some of the other kids in our neighborhood. We formed a big group, a pack, and several of the parents walked behind us, talking, while we skipped ahead. It was different, though, just me and Tommy, my father and Mrs. Ramirez. Quieter.
I convinced Tommy to go when I told him about my plan to scope out the neighbors. I told him we both could get a glimpse into everyone’s house, to try to notice anyone who might be acting strange or seemed suspicious. “That’s a good idea,” Tommy said, a comment that made me feel a little excited.
Halloween night was unusually chilly, and we were expecting a frost. My father made me wear my coat over my costume, despite my protests. “No way. It’ll ruin the whole effect.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not going to have you catch your death out there.”
I tried to recruit my mother to my side, since she’d so carefully made the costume, but she was upstairs resting, and when I called out for her into her dark bedroom, she didn’t respond.
So I was Wonder bread with a coat on, which actually made me look more like a ghost nurse because all you could see were my white pants and shoes and my white painted face.
“Nice costume,” Tommy said when we met him out by t
he curb.
I felt a little hurt, and I almost made fun of his sword or his crown, but he already looked so silly that I just didn’t have it in me. “Whatever,” I said.
Tommy and I talked my father and Mrs. Ramirez into staying back in the street while we went up to the individual houses. We tried to attach ourselves to the ends of other big groups so we didn’t look so silly: the ghost nurse Wonder bread in a coat and the lopsided gladiator.
We skipped right over the Olneys’ house, and no one said a word about it, so I knew even Tommy knew about Mrs. Olney’s contempt for my family. It was a shame, really, because Mrs. Olney always gave out the best candy, the full-size chocolate bars, not the teeny-tiny miniature ones that we got from most of the other neighbors. And as we started out and I saw other kids bouncing away from her door with their pumpkin candy holders looking extra full, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit jealous.
So we ended up starting a little bit down the street, with the neighbors who didn’t really know Tommy since he was so new, but all of them knew me, even with the white face paint on. It took us some extra time at every house as each neighbor got me an extra piece of a candy, a pat on the head, a “How’s your poor mother doing, dear?” I found their condolences oddly insincere and too late. Where had all these people been since Becky had disappeared?
To be fair, I knew that some of them had joined my father in his initial search parties, but after that their interest had tapered off. My neighbors were too busy with their own lives, too busy being afraid of my family and what had happened to us, to offer any real help.
“I could just punch that woman,” Tommy said after we’d gone to Mrs. Johnson’s house and she’d pinched my cheeks, leaving a mark in the white makeup. “How do you take it?”
I was strangely pleased with Tommy’s urge to protect me. It was not the same way I felt about my father’s suffocating sense of protection. This was different. I thought about what my mother had said about Tommy’s getting into fights in Florida, and I wondered if he really would punch someone for me.
As we went from house to house, I felt sort of lost without Becky. The year before, we’d both dressed up as bees, another set of costumes my mother fashioned out of trash bags and colored paper. That whole night we kept buzzing at each other and stealing each other’s candy. It wasn’t the same, trick-or-treating with Tommy, searching for suspects. Somehow none of it seemed fun anymore.
Mr. Barnesworth had lived in our neighborhood for years, and Becky and I had always found him exceptionally creepy. He’s probably only a little older than my father, but he lives all by himself and never mows his lawn or anything, so the grass out front gets all ragged and weedy, and his house is what my father calls an eyesore. When we rang his doorbell, he didn’t answer. You could tell he was home because some of the lights were on inside. I wondered what he was doing in there, all by himself, and I wondered if he didn’t answer the door for anyone or just for us.
To me, this made him seem suspicious, as if he were avoiding us for a particular reason. I wondered if he could be hiding Becky in his house. Maybe he’d locked her in the basement. Maybe she could hear us on the porch, hear my father’s booming voice and Mrs. Ramirez’s chuckle from the street. But I knew I had no real reason to suspect any of this, so after we had rung the doorbell three times, we gave up.
When I got home, after I had separated my candy into piles on the living room floor and allowed my father to inspect it, piece by piece, for evidence of poison, I went up to my room, chewed on a peanut butter cup, and thought about Mr. Barnesworth. I wondered how I could find out more about him.
The knock at my door caused me to jump, and I was surprised when it was followed by my mother sticking her head into the room. “How was it?” she asked. She sat on my bed, right next to me, and smoothed out the front of my costume with her hands. “It got crushed.”
“Dad made me wear a coat.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” She sounded more amused than annoyed. “Here.” She handed me a jar of her cold cream. “I brought you this. For your face.”
“Thanks.” Last year our faces had been painted black and yellow, and Becky and I had taken turns sitting on the toilet seat in her bathroom while she’d cotton balled the goopy stuff onto our faces. I guessed this year, as with everything else, I was on my own.
“Did you get a lot of candy?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Good.” She kissed me on the top of the head. “Don’t eat too much tonight. You’ll get sick again.”
I nodded, but I didn’t remind her that it was Becky who always ate too much candy and got sick, that Becky was the one who’d thrown up in bed last year and cried out in the night for her.
The next day Tommy pleaded with me to call Harry Baker and tell him about Mr. Barnesworth. “I thought you were going to help me,” I spat at him; he turned away quickly as if he’d been slapped. I felt a little bit bad for snapping at him, but I didn’t apologize.
I called Harry Baker at home the next morning because I wondered if maybe, unlike Kinney, Harry, a friend of my father’s, might actually listen to what I was saying. I got up early, before anyone else was awake, and I got his home number from the little address book my mother kept in the kitchen drawer. He answered the phone, sounding sleepy and slightly annoyed, but as soon as I said who I was, he cleared his throat, which I took as a cue for me to continue. “I have someone I think you should look into.” I told him all about Mr. Barnesworth’s strange behavior.
His silence on the other end was deafening. He cleared his throat again. “Abigail, you have to let the police do their job.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t know what to look for.” I heard a muffled noise, and I thought he might be laughing at me, and I felt my cheeks turning bright red. “It couldn’t hurt to check,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant, as if I had other things on my mind, but of course I didn’t.
I worried all day that Harry would give me up to my father, that when I got home from school, my father would be there waiting for me, ready to yell and scream and ground me. I hadn’t been grounded since Becky’s disappearance. I wondered if my father would suspect that it wouldn’t have the same effect on me that it used to. Unless I was sent next door to Mrs. Ramirez’s, I spent all my time at home anyway. But if my father knew about my call to Harry, he didn’t mention it, so I figured he didn’t know. It isn’t like my father to keep quiet about something like that.
I had a hard time keeping quiet myself, waiting for Harry to call me back. Over the next few days I let my imagination run away with me. I imagined all the clues the police might find if they actually looked in the right places, that they might even find Becky herself, and she would come home, and everything would be back the way it was.
I waited until the end of the week, and when Harry still didn’t call me back, I tried calling him. I dialed his home again, but I got his answering machine. So then I called the station. Somehow I got transferred to Kinney, who picked up his line with a short clipped “Yes?”
“Mr. Baker.”
“No, Abigail, it’s Detective Kinney.”
“I need to talk to Harry Baker,” I said.
“He’s not in today.” The realization startled me: that Harry Baker continued to have a life, that he did not spend every waking moment working, looking for my sister.
“Did he tell you about our conversation?”
“Hmm?” It was clear Kinney didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
I took a deep breath before I repeated my spiel about my suspect, because I already knew before I started talking that Kinney was going to yell at me.
Kinney was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Abigail, we’ve already looked into everyone in your neighborhood.” He sighed. “I thought I told you, you need to let us do our job.”
I hung up on him. I closed my eyes and felt tears welling up against my eyelids, and I blinked, trying to hold them back.
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br /> Chapter 13
IN ENGLISH CLASS we finished Hamlet, and we moved on to To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a little disappointing, after Shakespeare, to be reading a book that the rest of the eighth graders were reading too. But Mr. Fiedler said it was a classic book nonetheless.
The English class I was in was strange, because the advanced classes in our school didn’t have to follow the same curriculum as the regular classes. Mr. Fiedler could decide whatever he wanted us to read, whenever he wanted us to read it, as long as the books were on the district approved list. He told us that he didn’t normally have his advanced class read that book second, that normally he continued on with something else by Shakespeare, but he’d geared up for a change. I thought that maybe after listening to what we had to say about Hamlet, he decided we were idiots after all, so he sent us back a bit to something more our speed. Or maybe he just really liked To Kill a Mockingbird and decided we shouldn’t miss out just because we were supposedly super-smart in English.
And so, as I started reading the book, Mr. Barnesworth became my Boo Radley. I imagined him pale and ghostlike, a criminal, inside his house waiting to be discovered. Since I’d read only the first few chapters of the book when I got this idea in my head, I didn’t know about the ending of the book yet. I didn’t realize that Boo Radley turned out to be a nice guy who saves the day. No, at first I thought this novel was fate, a sign that Tommy and I should cut school one day and break into Mr. Barnesworth’s house.
I’d convinced myself that Becky was in his basement, that Mr. Barnesworth kept a stash of little children in there, and that when Tommy and I broke in and rescued them, we would become heroes of our school.
“Why do you think he has your sister?” Tommy asked.
The September Sisters Page 9