The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  The field looked different from how I remembered it, I guessed because the police had been digging there. I think they’d tried to put the dirt back, to make it look as if nothing had ever happened there, but the snow had this weird brownish tint to it, as if it had mingled too closely with the disturbed earth.

  As soon as we stepped behind the first row of trees that divided the field from my backyard, Tommy grabbed for my hand. I couldn’t feel warmth from him through the thickness of my mittens and his gloves, but his grip was firm, reassuring.

  I heard the snow and the earth crunch beneath our feet, and I cringed, thinking of Becky, thinking of the cold sting of a snowball against her cheek and how that had made her run away from me.

  We walked across the field until we were standing in the center. Tommy looked around. “It’s not as big as I thought it would be.”

  “It’s big,” I said, thinking about how the police had spent all fall looking for Becky and had turned up nothing. “It’s big enough so you could get lost here.”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. He faced me and put his arms around me. I could almost feel him there, through the thickness of our parkas. Our faces were close, but not touching, until he bumped his nose against mine in a way that was sweet and sincere.

  “So this is it,” I said. I was talking about the field, but when it came out, it sounded like I was talking about so many other things.

  That’s when he leaned in to kiss me for the second time. The kiss was longer this time. His lips lingered there for a minute, and when he pulled back, he kept his face close, so I could feel his warm breath tickling my nose.

  For a second I thought about what Becky would think if she could see me. I knew she’d be insanely jealous, and she would be the one to tell my parents everything. But then I wondered if she were watching me from somewhere else, someplace near my grandma Jacobson, and if there, wherever she was, she could be happy for me, because there wouldn’t be any more jealousy. I wondered if she and Grandma Jacobson would clap their hands and hug each other and say something like “Good for her. She deserves to be happy.”

  I’m not sure I was happy, standing there so close to Tommy. But I was feeling something, and for the first time in the longest time it wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t hate myself.

  “We should go back,” Tommy said. “It’s getting dark. They’ll worry.” He pulled away from me and started walking. I followed behind him, looking around the field for a moment, trying to listen for my sister’s voice.

  Chapter 18

  I THOUGHT ABOUT the girl Tommy had seen in the Petersons’ window, and some nights, I dreamed about her, a raven-haired Becky, handcuffed to a post on a wall, held captive by a madman who cheated on his wife. “Why can’t you save me?” she asked, only when I heard the words, they came out in my voice, sounding small and empty, as if I’d gotten lost in an echo chamber.

  Though he didn’t mention it for nearly two weeks, Tommy hadn’t forgotten about her either. In the days before he left with Mrs. Ramirez to go to Florida for Christmas, he devised a plan to find out about her. “We’ll break in,” he told me on the last day of school before the vacation. I nearly choked on my sandwich when he said it. “I’ve been watching,” he said. “They leave for work around six-thirty.” Tommy must’ve noticed my shocked expression, because he said, “I can see their front door from my bedroom window.”

  “How will we get in?” I asked him, and I can’t tell you how the question rolled off my tongue as if it were the most perfectly normal thing in the world.

  “We will,” he said. “I know how.”

  The next morning Tommy watched my father leave for work, then watched Mr. and Mrs. Peterson kiss good-bye in the driveway. I watched them kiss too from my front window, having already put on my boots and winter coat and lied to my mother about going over to Mrs. Ramirez’s house. I caught myself admiring the way Mrs. Peterson had curled her hair, the way it fell in soft red loops out from her hat and onto her shoulders, and when I saw Mr. Peterson’s hand on her back, I felt a chill, remembering his hand on my shoulder and the file Hal Brewerstein had created about his affair. It surprised me the way their kiss disguised everything else, and it scared me too, the way something could look so beautiful but could secretly be hideous.

  Five minutes after they left, I met Tommy in the street with our sleds, just as we had planned, and then we ran across to the Petersons’ hill, which was still covered in snow, so if anyone should see us, it would look like we planned on sledding.

  “Come on,” Tommy said, once we were away from the street. “Follow me.” He led me to the laundry-room window, the same tiny laundry-room window that sat on the side of my house and Mrs. Ramirez’s house.

  “Through here?” I said. “We won’t fit.”

  “We will.”

  I wasn’t surprised when Tommy pushed on the window and it opened immediately. Before Becky disappeared, I was sure, my mother had never locked our tiny laundry room window either. “What were you going to do if the window was locked?” I asked him. But he didn’t answer.

  Tommy gave me a boost, and before I knew it, I was inside the Petersons’ laundry room. Officially a criminal, I tried not to think about what would happen to my mother’s mood if Tommy and I were arrested for breaking and entering or about the smirk on Kinney’s face as he booked me into jail. As I grabbed Tommy’s hand and helped pull him into the house, I pushed the thought out of my mind.

  With Tommy’s hair under his winter hat, I could see every bit of his face, his eyes, and he was illuminated. He suddenly seemed to have an easy confidence, a solid gaze, that made me feel both at ease and unnerved. Tommy was enjoying this.

  We made our way out of the laundry room and into the Petersons’ house, which was identical to both our houses, yet decorated with expensive-looking white leather furniture that I guessed people weren’t actually allowed to sit on. My mother despises furniture like that. Everything seemed to be in order, seemed to be terrifically adult and glamorous, the way I always imagined the inside of their house to be.

  We went up to the master bedroom, to the window where Tommy had seen the girl, but there was no sign of her. The Petersons’ bed was perfectly made up with a red velour comforter and mounds of pillows. I thought about Mr. Peterson’s affair, and I had to look away because I wondered if he had brought her here, his mistress. “There’s nothing here,” I said to Tommy, and I turned around to face him.

  “There’s this.” In his hand was a doll, her blond hair pulled back into a perfect ponytail and tied up neatly with a red ribbon.

  A few hours later I watched Tommy pack for his trip. It was the first time I’d ever been in his bedroom, and it felt strange, me sitting on his bed in Mrs. Ramirez’s house.

  He had Becky’s bedroom, but it was eerie to me how different it looked, how boyish. In Tommy’s opposite but identical room, Mrs. Ramirez had hung up pennants from various sports teams, ones from Florida and ones from some of the East Coast teams near us. And his walls were painted this deep royal blue.

  I hadn’t been inside Becky’s bedroom since before she disappeared. I was afraid to go in there at first, afraid I would destroy evidence or touch something I wasn’t supposed to. But then it became something like a shrine, a secret place that I’d lost access to. Everyone in my family left it alone; we pretended that that room wasn’t even there. It seemed almost sacrilegious to go in there, to touch Becky’s things.

  “Are you going to tell your father about the girl?” he asked as he folded some clothes into a suitcase.

  “I don’t know.” It seemed a little silly when I rolled it around in my brain.

  Tommy nodded. His hair was back in front of his eyes again, and it hid his expression, so I couldn’t tell what he was really thinking.

  “Are you excited to go back to Florida?” I said. I tried to sound cheery when I said it, but really I was annoyed that he was leaving, even though I knew it was out of his control.

/>   He shrugged and went to his closet to pull out some shirts. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “It’s probably warm there, nice.”

  “I kind of like the snow.” He turned and looked at me and smiled, so I knew it wasn’t the snow he was talking about, but the two times we’d kissed, standing in it. I had to look away because I didn’t want him to see me blushing.

  “Will you get to see your father?” I asked, just to change the subject. Talking about us made me nervous, made it seem like there was something real there, like Tommy and I were boyfriend and girlfriend.

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  I could tell this made him sad; there was a sense of remorse in his voice that he was usually able to hide. I wondered if Irwin would be there, if Tommy would have to bear Christmas with Irwin and his mother. I didn’t want to ask him, though. I didn’t feel right talking about Irwin unless he was the one to bring it up. Instead I said, “Becky loved Christmas.”

  He didn’t say anything, which was okay, because there wasn’t anything I wanted him to say. I thought about how Becky got so excited every Christmas morning, how she’d stay up half the night before, singing Christmas carols, usually until my father told her to go to bed or Santa would skip our house. She seemed too old to believe in Santa still, and maybe deep down she didn’t, but on the surface she pretended to believe.

  I’d discovered that Santa wasn’t real when I was six and I’d found all my Christmas presents in my mother’s closet two weeks before. Even though I taunted Becky with this memory, she refused to listen. When I tried to tell her over and over again, she’d put her hands over her ears and start singing.

  I thought Christmas was just okay. My mother is Jewish, and my father is Episcopalian, so until Grandma Jacobson died, we celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas. I’ve always preferred Hanukkah to Christmas, maybe because it is a little unusual, something that sets me apart from most of the other kids in Pinesboro, who on the whole are purely Christian. But I also love the meaning behind it, the miracle of the oil, the eight nights of celebrating. I missed that we didn’t celebrate it anymore.

  Eventually Mrs. Ramirez came up to tell me my father was downstairs waiting for me. “You be good girl for your parents when we gone.” She patted my shoulder in this funny way. I could tell she was trying to be nice, but it felt more like a slap.

  I hardly heard her. I was thinking about how much I would miss Tommy, how depressed I was that he was leaving, but it would’ve been too weird to tell him any of this, especially in front of Mrs. Ramirez. The only thing I could bring myself to tell him was to have a good trip.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said as I walked toward his bedroom door.

  “Yeah,” I said without looking behind me. “You too.”

  If he stayed in Florida, if I never saw him again, I wanted to remember his face the way it looked in the Petersons’ laundry room, not the way it looked as he stood in his bedroom, when I knew he looked sad.

  When we got home, I told my father about the girl in the window, but I only told him how Tommy saw her when we were sledding, not about our trip into their house or the doll. For some reason, maybe because he could detect the urgency in my voice, my father didn’t get angry with me, but he immediately called Harry Baker and left him a message. Then he ran to the front window to watch the Petersons’ house, sitting there so still for two hours that I thought he might’ve fallen asleep.

  “Dad,” I said, my voice sounding tiny in the dark front room of our house.

  “Ab.” He sounded tired.

  “Are you all right?”

  I listened and listened, but there was no answer.

  Chapter 19

  THERE WAS THIS Christmas song that Becky liked to sing: “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” My parents had an old Elvis Presley record where he sings that song. Becky would put it on my father’s record player from college and sing along with him in the living room. She’d use her hairbrush as a microphone and stand on her “stage” in front of the fireplace.

  My mother played that Elvis Presley record over and over, starting two days before Christmas. Every time it got to the end of Becky’s favorite song, she’d go in and move the needle, replaying the song two, sometimes three times. It was strange, really, to hear Elvis singing about being home for Christmas if only in his dreams. I knew my mother noticed it too, that she was thinking that Becky might come home, that she would be here somehow, in some way.

  My mother loved to hear Becky sing. “You have a voice like an angel, sweetie,” she’d say. Becky did have a beautiful voice, even though I never admitted it to her when she was here. It may have been what I was most jealous of.

  I never understood the concept of pitch; I couldn’t get myself to sing on key even when I tried really hard. Mrs. Richards, our elementary school music teacher, told me that she thought I might be tone-deaf. When we practiced for choir, she used to look right at me and lift her palm in the air a little bit, as if she believed the force of her hand hitting the air could bring me to the right pitch. But she loved Becky. In fact she’d told my mother a few times that she thought we should get Becky voice lessons, that she believed Becky really had something special.

  I wondered if Mrs. Richards missed the sound of Becky’s voice in her choir, if Becky’s absence was noticeable there.

  We didn’t even have a tree until Christmas Eve, when my father dragged in a scrawny leftover one that he’d found in the picked-over tree lot. My mother and I watched him drag it in the front door, neither one of us moving to help him. “Can’t have Christmas without a tree, ladies.” He was out of breath, and his cheeks were bright red.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Jim.” My mother had her hands on her hips.

  He dropped the tree in the entryway and shut the door behind him. “Elaine, it’s Christmas.” He looked at me. “Help me get this in the living room, Ab.”

  We put it in the corner by the fireplace, in the same spot where we put the tree every year, but this tree was smaller than usual, and it looked so sad, forlornly misshapen and out of place. “Bring down the ornaments,” my father said to my mother. She looked paralyzed, and I expected her to ignore my father, but she didn’t. She went upstairs and came back with the box of ornaments a few minutes later.

  In the box of ornaments Becky was everywhere. As I pulled them out of the box, one by one, I saw the ornaments she’d glued together in school; the ones that were her favorites, the blue with silver painted stars; the ones she liked to place near the top of the tree but couldn’t reach, the little red shiny balls that she’d hand to my father, giving him explicit instructions about which branch to place each one on.

  “Just put them up, Ab. Don’t think about them.” It sounded so harsh, but I didn’t think he meant it that way. I think he just wanted the tree to be there and decorated, that he wanted the world, our house to have some sense of normalcy.

  “You don’t have to do this for me,” I said.

  “I’m not.” But I wondered, If he wasn’t doing this for me, then who was he doing it for?

  The record moved to Becky’s song, and my mother reached over and turned it up. Maybe she was trying to drown out me and my father hastily decorating the tree; maybe she thought that if she turned it up loud enough, she’d be able to remember the sound of Becky’s voice, the clear crystal pitch that could sing out above the record. I can still remember it. If I close my eyes, I can hear it.

  On Christmas morning my mother refused to get out of bed, but my father came and woke me up and told me to have a look at the presents Santa had left for me under the tree.

  “Please,” I groaned. “I haven’t believed in Santa for like seven years.”

  “Well, luckily,” my father said, “he still believes in you.” He sounded almost cheerful, and I wondered what exactly had put him in such a good mood. Maybe he still believed in holidays, in peace and happiness and miracles and all that stuff. Maybe for one day he made himself believe.

 
There were more presents under the tree than I’d expected. I picked up the first one I saw and started to unwrap it. “Hey.” My father pulled it from my hands and put it back down. “That’s not for you.”

  In years past my parents had divided the tree down the middle, with my presents being on the far side near the fireplace and Becky’s on the side by the window. I’d inadvertently reached for a present on her side. It was strange, but in the past few months I’d forgotten about the lines we’d used for dividing things.

  You might think it was odd that my father put presents for Becky under the tree, but I didn’t, not really. In fact I felt guilty about starting to unwrap her present. After Christmas, I knew, my father would save these presents for her. When she came back, we wanted her to feel as if she hadn’t missed a thing.

  Sometimes at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I’d think about what I’d tell her when she came back. What I planned on saying: The only thing you’ve missed is missing you. I thought this over and over again. What made that true were things like this, her Christmas presents, neatly wrapped and waiting for her.

  When I moved to my side of the tree, I saw that there were just two presents there. I’m ashamed to say it, but I felt jealous of Becky, even without her being here. There were five presents on her side and only two on mine. Even vanished, she was a stronger force than I was, something to be reckoned with.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” my father said. “But usually your mother is in charge of these things.”

  “No,” I lied. “It looks like a lot. It does. Thank you.” I felt genuinely grateful that my father loved me enough to go out and buy the presents on his own, even if he’d bought Becky more.

  I opened the bigger, heavier present first, which turned out to be a boxed set of Shakespeare’s plays. “This is great,” I said. “Thanks.” I really meant it. I was surprised that my father had thought to get this for me and excited that I could occupy the rest of my break reading.