“I knew you had your nose in Hamlet all fall.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
The second, smaller present was a thirty-dollar gift certificate to the Pinesboro mall. I thought about what I would buy with the money, and I realized it was the first time in a long time that I’d thought about clothes or buying something or shopping. Those things seemed like part of a different life now, almost like something I’d done in a dream, somewhere very far away from here.
I stood up and hugged my father. “Thank you,” I said.
“Merry Christmas, Ab.” He held on to me a minute longer than he usually would in a hug, and then he patted me on the head before letting me go. “Do you want to know what I got her?”
For some reason, I thought he was talking about my mother at first. He’d often share his ideas for presents for her with me or Becky or ask our advice if he wanted to buy her a girl thing like jewelry. Becky was better at helping him than I was. But then I saw he was staring at Becky’s presents, so I knew he was talking about her. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me.”
“There’s something here for each month, “he said, and pointed to each present. “August, September, October, November, December. There’s something that she missed in each one, something I’ve been saving for her.”
I’d had no idea that my father was saving things for Becky. I’m not sure why this surprised me exactly, but it didn’t seem like something I would expect from my father. Becky’s disappearance had changed him. “That’s nice,” I told him. “She would’ve liked that.” After I said it, I realized that I’d used a verb tense that made it sound like she was never coming back.
I think my father noticed too, because he looked away from me and didn’t say anything else about his presents. I wanted to know what he’d saved for her each month, but I knew he wasn’t going to tell me after what I’d said. He sat down on the couch and just stared at the tree, as if he were expecting something beautiful to jump out of it.
“It’s quiet,” I finally said, just to say something, to break the awful, piercing silence.
“Turn on a record or something.”
“That’s okay.” I didn’t want to hear Christmas songs again, didn’t want to imagine Becky singing, Becky jumping up and down in front the tree. “I think I’ll go upstairs and read.”
“Okay,” he said, but I knew he hadn’t really heard what I’d said.
“Merry Christmas,” I said before I took my presents and went upstairs.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Merry Christmas.” But his voice sounded flat.
Harry Baker rang the doorbell around noon. It was the first time he’d come by since the day in November when he told us they were postponing the search. As I looked out my bedroom window and saw him standing by the front porch, I felt a surge of hope. It was Christmas. There were miracles on this day. It’s the day Jesus Christ was born, and that had to mean something.
I guess my mother thought the same thing I did, because by the time Harry was in the entryway saying hello to my father, we both were racing down the stairs. “Elaine.” He nodded at my mother and sort of half nodded at me without really looking at me.
“What?” she said before she even made it down the steps. “What is it, Harry?”
Harry shook his head, so we all knew instantly that they hadn’t found her, that he hadn’t come with any news. He was here only because it was Christmas, and he used to be one of my father’s friends, and now he felt sorry for us.
I knew it was impossible, but it seemed like my mother was shrinking right before my eyes. I watched her crumpling, smaller and smaller, but then I realized she was just slouching to the floor, where she held on to my father’s leg. “It’s Christmas,” she said.
“I know, Elaine.” My father reached down to pat her shoulder and help her stand up. He hugged her. “Why don’t we get you back into bed?”
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I should do.” Her voice sounded frantic, a little bit crazy, and I started to get frightened for her all over again.
“Ab, show Harry into the living room. I’ll be right down.”
I felt silly leading Harry to our couch, because he’d been in our house a dozen times in the past few months; he knew where it was. Luckily my father returned quickly. I didn’t want to look at Harry. I despised him for the way he failed to understand me, us, our family. I believed he was the one who could’ve stopped the others, who could’ve told them that it was not my mother they were looking for but someone or something else.
“Harry,” my father said when he came back downstairs. “Harry Baker.”
“I didn’t mean to upset her.” Harry’s voice was quiet, almost timid sounding, not like the Harry I remembered on the baseball field.
“Ab, why don’t you go back to your room?”
“It’s okay,” Harry said, “I’ll only be a minute. I just have something I wanted to give you.” He fished around in the inside pocket of his coat for a minute. There was this uncomfortable silence in the room, as Harry searched his pockets and my father and I stared at him. I felt this intense tension between my father and Harry, and it was strange, because I could picture the two of them laughing in Harry’s backyard, as they held on to their cans of Budweiser and their barbecued hamburgers.
Harry lifted Becky’s necklace out of his pocket and let it dangle over his hand so we both could see it. “Here,” he said, and he handed the necklace to my father.
My father rubbed his temple and then reached over for the necklace. “Jesus. I thought you needed this as evidence.”
Harry shook his head. “We checked it over for everything. Prints, fiber, what have you. But nothing turned up. It was just sitting in a box. I thought you’d like to have it. Detective Kinney wanted to keep it just in case, but I said just in case what, you know?” Harry laughed a little; I was surprised by how nervous he sounded. I wondered if he’d taken the necklace and brought it over here without Kinney’s permission. I began to see this as Harry’s peace offering, as a gesture that he wanted to go back to being friends with my father.
My father clapped Harry on the shoulder the way he used to when Harry left a picnic at our house and they were saying good night. “Thank you,” he said.
We all were silent for a moment, as if we were mesmerized by the necklace hanging from my father’s hand, the tiny sapphire heart sparkling like a little star on a crisp, cloudless winter night. I don’t know what my father and Harry were thinking about, but I was thinking about the look on my grandmother’s face when she gave us those necklaces, a round, glowing smile, her full wrinkly face lit up and pink. It was a look I hadn’t remembered in a long time, something that had been covered up by the hollow eyes and sharp bony lines left on her by the cancer. “I should go,” Harry said. “I don’t want to interrupt your Christmas.”
My father and I walked behind him toward the door. “Merry Christmas,” my father said as Harry began to walk away. Harry turned around and nodded to us, as if to say, “The same to you.” I saw his face then, and it was oddly contorted with something. I didn’t know Harry well enough to say for sure, but I guessed it was guilt or sadness or his failure to really do his job.
This was the last time I ever saw Harry Baker. Two weeks after Christmas he left the police force, and he packed up and moved to Arizona.
Chapter 20
WHEN TOMMY CAME back from Florida, he had this really, really short hair, a buzz cut. He looked so foreign to me that I knew instantly something would be different between us, that Tommy’s haircut symbolized a change for him, even if I was the only one to recognize it.
His mother and Mrs. Ramirez had bought him a skateboard for Christmas, and the first time I saw him after he got back, he was skateboarding down our street. “Is that Tommy?” my mother said as she peered out our front window. “Come look at his hair, Abby.”
It was him all right, gliding down the street as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I wondered why he
hadn’t come over to show me the skateboard, why he was flying down the street on his own. “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of liked it the other way.”
“He looks so much more grown up this way.”
I shrugged. “I guess so.” I was trying to act nonchalant, trying to pretend that Tommy’s hairstyle had absolutely nothing to with me, but inside, I felt sort of stung, deceived almost, which was stupid. Tommy had a right to cut his hair and to skateboard and not tell me about any of it.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “He’s sort of cute this way.”
Her comment made my cheeks turn red, and I wondered if she suspected how I felt about him. “He’s all right,” I said. “Nothing special.” And then I felt disloyal to Tommy. I knew I would have been hurt if he’d said the same thing about me.
“So why’d you cut your hair?” I said when I saw him at lunch the first day back in school.
“My mother did it. She said it was too long.” He sounded surprisingly pleased, though, not the way I was used to him talking about his mother. “Do you like it?”
I nodded. “Sure. It’s nice.”
“I don’t know. I’m not used to it yet. It surprises me every time I see it.”
I thought that was a strange thing for Tommy to say. I didn’t think boys noticed their appearance the way girls did, but what Tommy said represented how I felt every time I saw myself in the mirror, every time I noticed my breasts and this serious, complicated look on my face that made me look foreign to myself.
Mrs. Ramirez had packed Tommy this huge container of enchiladas for lunch, and he scooped half of them out of the Tupperware container and onto my school lunch plate, which contained some scary-looking mashed potatoes. “Here,” he said. “I can’t eat all this.”
“Thanks.” I took a bite. “They’re delicious.” They were really good actually, even cold. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten a home-cooked meal.
“My grandmother makes the best enchiladas.” There was this awkward silence where we both just sat there and chewed. “How was your Christmas?” Tommy asked.
“Okay,” I lied. “Yours?”
“Pretty good. I got a skateboard.”
“I know. I saw you.”
“You did?”
It was strange the way I could see his eyes all the time, and they were so expressive that I could understand everything that he was feeling in each instant that he was feeling it. That’s why I missed the hair, the anonymity it gave him. I could tell when I said I saw him on the skateboard that he was embarrassed, as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been really busy.”
“You have?”
“Well, you know.” It was pretty obvious I was lying, but I didn’t feel like explaining my way out of it at that point. “I got a set of Shakespeare’s plays for Christmas.”
“That’s cool.”
I smiled. I liked that Tommy thought that genuinely was cool. Jocelyn would’ve laughed at it, the way she did whenever I read or talked about books. “Seriously, Abby,” she’d say, “why do you think God invented TV?”
“It’s not a skateboard,” I said.
“Still.” He paused. “Did you tell your father?”
I nodded. “He called the police, but they weren’t interested, so he has his investigator looking into it.” I tried to sound nonchalant, even though I felt a surge of nerves just thinking about Tommy’s hand on my back as he pushed me through the laundry room window.
“Oh, that’s good, I guess.”
We finished the enchiladas, and then we just sort of sat there. I wondered if Tommy would want to kiss me anymore or if those two moments had been something purely disposable to him, like his hair.
Right after we went back to school after Christmas break, the weather turned exceptionally warm, and the world around us began to thaw out and melt. The sun was shining, and the temperatures were in the fifties. Our backyard filled up with these big muddy puddles, and the street in front of our house was wet and glistening in the sun.
If it hadn’t been for the warm spell, the police probably never would’ve discovered the body of a little girl in a riverbank in Philadelphia, about twenty-five miles from our house. If the weather had stayed cold, snowy, by spring she might’ve been too far gone for anyone to find her. The weather was so strange, it was as if someone had known she was there, someone had wanted the police to find her. I took it all as a sign.
No one in my family had talked about bodies before. We hadn’t talked about Becky’s being dead; we pretended not to consider the possibility. We talked about when she was coming home and what we would say to her. My father still had the Christmas tree up, with her presents underneath it. We weren’t in denial; we were just hopeful, unable to imagine the permanence of Becky’s absence.
It was Detective Kinney who came to tell us about the body. He came in person, instead of calling. When I saw him walking in through our front door, I knew that there was significant news. It was the same way I felt when I saw Harry Baker on Christmas morning, only, because it was Kinney, I knew he’d have something important to say.
When Kinney showed up, the three of us had just sat down to eat dinner. It was one of the rare occasions when we did this, when my mother felt well enough to get out of bed, when my father actually remembered to pick up a pizza on the way home.
We all jumped a little when we heard the doorbell ring. My parents exchanged a brief glance, a moment, before my father stood up. None of us would admit it, but I think we all were waiting for the doorbell; every day, every moment we sat in our house, we were waiting for something to happen.
I recognized Kinney’s voice immediately. “Jim,” I heard him say, “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“No, not at all,” my father said. “Come in.”
By this time my mother and I both had made our way into the hallway. I tried to catch Kinney’s eye, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe it would be better if we just spoke outside for a minute,” Kinney said to my father. My father let himself out onto the porch and shut the door behind him.
“I’m going out there,” my mother said, but she didn’t move. She stood frozen next to me in the hallway. I think she was afraid the same way I was. We both knew if Kinney wanted to talk to my father outside in private, he couldn’t have come here with good news.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said to my mother, but I don’t think either one of us believed it.
“The pizza’s getting cold,” she said, but we didn’t go back to the table. We just stood in the hallway. It was probably only a few minutes—it couldn’t have been more than ten—but it felt like ages, as if time had stopped and trapped us there.
When my father came back in, his face was completely white, paler than I’d ever seen him, eerily ghostlike. “Jim, what is it?” My mother finally moved and walked to him.
“Let’s sit down, girls,” he said. “Sit down.”
We went back to the kitchen table, but none of us touched the pizza. “Jim, you’re scaring me.” My mother ran her fingers loosely through her hair, something I’d seen her do a million times, something seemingly careless, but I noticed then how tense it made her look.
“Okay,” my father said. He took a deep breath and looked at me. I could tell he was debating whether or not to send me to my room.
“I want to know,” I told him, and I guess the way I said it convinced him to let me stay, because he nodded.
“They found a body in Fairmount Park. A little girl. About her weight and height and age.” I knew he couldn’t bring himself to say Becky’s name, to say her name in the same breath as “body.” She wasn’t a body; she was a person, my sister, his daughter. “They haven’t identified it yet, but Kinney wanted to tell us. They thought it might be her.”
“No,” my mother said. She shook her head violently, back and forth and back and forth. I watched her hair whip into her face. “It’s not her. It can’t be her
. How did she get to Fairmount Park?”
“Elaine.” My father stood up and wrapped his arms around her from behind. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to restrain her or hug her.
I thought about the body and what it might look like and how Becky could have been dead and rotting beneath the snow and we didn’t even know it. I wondered if the ice had preserved her body, the cold. But if they couldn’t identify the body, I didn’t think it had. I thought of this movie I saw once where these kids find a dead body and the eye sockets have rotted out and there are maggots crawling in and out of them. The smell of the pizza suddenly invaded my nose, overtook my senses, until it overwhelmed me so completely that I thought I was going to be sick.
I stood up and ran to the powder room. I bent over the toilet coughing and gagging, and I felt my insides coil up and back, but I didn’t throw up; I just gagged a few times. I sat down on the floor and leaned my cheek against the lid of the toilet. The plastic was so cool that it felt nice, and I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and go back into the kitchen.
“Ab.” My father knocked on the door. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’ll be out in a minute.” The last thing I wanted was my father coming in here, trying to talk to me or make me feel better. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I wanted him to think I was old enough to know the truth; if he didn’t, I’d never learn anything.
I stood up and opened the door, and my father was still standing there. “They don’t know if it’s her,” he said.
“I know.”
“It could be anyone.”
“I think I’ll go to bed,” I said. “I’m tired.”
He nodded. “Sleep well.” It seemed like such a funny thing to say, after the news he’d just delivered. I wasn’t sure how I would ever sleep well again.
The September Sisters Page 14