The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  My father turned his head away; maybe because he didn’t want her touching him anymore. I didn’t understand how the ways they’d always touched each other could’ve vanished so quickly in these last few months, how Becky’s disappearance could’ve stolen them, the way it had stolen everything else familiar to me.

  My mother stayed for less than an hour. Then she claimed she had to go home. It hurt me to hear her say that, to realize that our house wasn’t what she thought of as home. I know it hurt my father too, because he couldn’t look at her when she was leaving.

  I still don’t know exactly what she did for most of those two weeks she was missing. Hal Brewerstein traced her credit card and told my father that she had ended up in Pittsburgh. And she told me, just after she had moved into her apartment, that it was Garret who had driven her there and that she had gone to Pittsburgh to see Grandma Jacobson’s grave. My mother said that at the grave she’d felt Grandma’s presence; she believed her mother had actually spoken to her. “It was the strangest thing,” she says whenever she tells the story. “It was like I heard the sound of her voice coming off the wind. You know how distinct her voice was, Abby, so crackly and sharp, and she was telling me to save myself. Then I knew what I had to do.”

  After that, I guess, she came back and got the apartment, and that’s when she started to realize that we must be worried about her. She claimed it really hadn’t occurred to her to call, that we would miss her, not the whole way to Pittsburgh, not the whole time there. “I must’ve been in some sort of daze,” she said; “otherwise I would’ve realized.” I believed her; I knew that she could’ve been so out of it that she would’ve forgotten us completely.

  I am not sure what her relationship with Garret was then, and secretly I envisioned the two of them rolling around in bed together in one of those roadside turnpike motels. But I don’t know if that was true or not, or if Garret was only a friend to her, someone to listen to her, to understand her the way she felt my father and I couldn’t. All I knew was that Garret and his wife had split up a few years after their daughter’s death. Garret was unattached, even if my mother wasn’t. I thought that must mean something.

  Chapter 25

  THE FIRST TIME I went to visit my mother in her apartment, I was surprised by how barren it was. I’d known going in that it would be nothing special, but there was something about it that was almost prisonlike, something I might expect to be military housing. The walls were this rough brown brick that was impossible to hang things on; the carpets were thin and speckled green. The floors creaked when you walked on them. “The kitchen isn’t so bad, don’t you think, Ab?”

  I nodded because I didn’t want to disappoint her, but the kitchen was as terrible as the rest of the apartment. It was very dark—no windows or anything, just the great big glaring fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling and this awful brown and white linoleum. It wasn’t even big enough to fit a table. My mother had set up a card table in the living room near the kitchen, and I guessed that was where she ate.

  Going to visit my mother in her apartment became a part of my routine, something I did every Saturday. My father would drop me off in the street below and then watch me walk up from the car. It was the most freedom he’d given me in a long time, since before Becky disappeared, but I guess it was just too awkward for him to walk up and see my mother.

  There wasn’t much for me to do in her apartment, and the days dragged on. She had only a small TV in the corner of the living room, propped up on a cardboard box. She’d tell me I could turn it on, watch whatever I wanted, but it was too hard to see. It made any show oddly miniaturized, like a poor imitation of the show, not the real show itself.

  My mother started smoking constantly, inside the apartment and everything, and she seemed very shaky, maybe nervous to see me. She sat there at the card table with the cigarette hanging between her two trembling fingers, saying, “I’m going to quit, sweetie, in just a few days.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I knew she wouldn’t. Truthfully I didn’t care. I found the smell of her cigarettes warming, familiar. It reminded me of a summer night in the pool with Becky.

  My father sent my mother a check each month to cover the rent on her apartment and her food. Maybe he was so used to taking care of my mother that he didn’t quite know how to stop, or maybe he let himself believe that he wasn’t the one she was leaving; it was the situation. Or maybe he was just afraid that if he didn’t take care of her, then someone else would.

  My father may have supplied the money, but Garret was the one who took my mother places—drove her to the supermarket and such. It didn’t seem fair that she spent so much time with him, but I knew that life was far from fair.

  My mother and I never went to that diner she’d talked about. In fact when I went to visit her, we barely left the apartment. We’d sit there and play a game of cards or watch the small TV or read or something. We hardly talked.

  There was so much I wanted to say to her, rational arguments in my head for why she should come back home. At first I decided not to say any of it, afraid if she got angry, she would leave again or, worse, do something terrible to herself. But after a few Saturdays with her in the apartment, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you come home?” I said. “Dad really misses you.”

  “Oh, Abby.” She sighed. “It’s not that simple.”

  “I’ll help you with everything,” I told her. “We’re doing a cooking unit in home ec now.”

  “That’s nice, sweetie.” She lit a cigarette and looked off into the distance, so I knew the conversation was over, that she’d stopped listening.

  The next weekend I met Garret for the first time. He isn’t as tall as I expected him to be, not nearly as tall as my father. In fact he probably isn’t much taller than Tommy or my mother even. And his height gives him this strange air of childishness. I wondered if that was part of what my mother liked about him. He’s completely the opposite of my father.

  When I walked into her apartment, he was already sitting there. I knew him instantly from the picture, and I felt myself cringe. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Abby,” Garret said right away. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I remembered his voice from the phone call, and I felt a little sick, wondering if he knew I was the one who had called him, if it was something he and my mother had laughed about. I wondered what exactly he’d heard about me. Yes, I wanted to say, I’m the daughter who didn’t disappear. I’m the one who’s left, the one she abandoned. I was annoyed with my mother for intentionally bringing us together, and I wondered if this was her way of showing me that she was never coming home.

  If I’d known that Garret would be there, I wouldn’t have come to see her at all. I would’ve told my father I had too much homework to do or that I wasn’t feeling well.

  “I should make some tea,” my mother said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had some tea together. Abby?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “I hear that you like to read,” Garret said, as we both sat down at the card table while my mother clanked around in the kitchen, trying to figure out tea.

  “I guess so.” I was unwilling to offer him anything, not even the smallest part of me. I already felt disloyal to my father simply by talking to Garret.

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Not really.” I shrugged.

  “What about that book you were reading before,” my mother called from the kitchen. “The one with the bird in the title. You loved that, didn’t you, sweetie?”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I almost laughed, thinking about my mother’s reaction the day I’d been reading it and her falsely cheery tone now.

  “Good old Atticus Finch,” Garret said.

  “Garret’s quite a reader,” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

  I wasn’t impressed by Garret’s knowledge. It occurred to me that Garret and I probably had more in common than my father and I did, but this made me feel
even more awful, so I just sort of shrugged and looked away from him.

  “You read that in school?” Garret asked.

  I nodded, and I remembered that Garret’s daughter would’ve been my age had she lived. I felt this tiny bit of sympathy for him, this sadness that she hadn’t gotten to do something as simple as reading a book.

  “She’s in a special advanced class.” My mother carried the tea in paper cups, one at a time. She put my cup in front of me. “Tea is supposed to be so good for you. I read an article about it just the other day.”

  “Tea warms the soul,” Garret said, and he smiled at me.

  The smile gave me the creeps in an odd way. He isn’t a creepy man, he’s almost elflike, but his smile really got at me. I felt the way I’d feel when I’d go to the doctor for my yearly checkup, and he’d smile at me when he asked me to say ahh, as if Garret believed he was only trying to help, yet somehow, he was causing pain.

  The three of sat there and sipped our tea in silence. My mother and Garret smiled at each other across the table, and I started to feel sick.

  I could tell she was in love with him just by the way she smiled.

  I told Tommy about Garret at lunch the Monday after I met him. “I can’t believe she invited him over there,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “If my mother ever…” He didn’t continue, as if the thought of having to have tea with his mother and Irwin was something too painful to put into words.

  “I have to do something,” I said.

  Tommy nodded. “When my parents used to get in fights, my father used to send my mother flowers. Maybe you could get your father to do that.”

  I shook my head. There was no way my father was going to send her flowers; I could see it in his eyes, the way he’d already given up on her. But what Tommy said gave me another idea.

  The next Saturday I went to my mother’s armed with my lunch money from the entire week. I’d been sharing Tommy’s lunches every day and saving the money my father gave me for something far more important.

  After I got out of the car and walked into the building, I waited for a few minutes, until I was sure my father had driven away, and then I went back outside and walked one block down to the minimart.

  It was really the first time I’d been out alone since Becky disappeared, and the thought was both exhilarating and frightening; anyone could take me, snatch me right there off the street.

  With the money I’d saved up, I had enough to buy my mother a dozen red carnations, and as I carried them up to the door of her apartment, I already had it planned out in my head, the lie I would tell her. “These are from Dad,” I said as soon as she opened the door.

  “Oh?” Her hands shook as she took them from me.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” I walked inside.

  She nodded. “I don’t even know if I have a vase.” She rummaged through her kitchen cabinets and came up with a large plastic cup. “Well, I guess this will do.”

  After she’d put the flowers in water, she came and sat next to me on the couch. “Dad really misses you,” I said. “He talks about you all the time.” This was a lie that I told myself was okay to tell her because it really was for her own good.

  “Oh?” She pulled a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it, and then she turned away from me to blow the smoke into spirals in the air. But I felt a sort of satisfaction; I could tell by the nervous way she tapped her cigarette in the ashtray that the flowers had gotten to her.

  Over the next few weeks I tried to do other things, smaller things. When I got home from my mother’s each Saturday, I’d tell my father how much she missed him. “She said that?” my father would ask. I’d nod, knowing it was wrong to lie to him, but I also knew if I didn’t, my father would let her go.

  I brought my mother flowers three weeks in a row, until the Sunday after the third week, when my father came up to my room while I was doing my homework. “Your mother called to thank me for the flowers.” He stood in the doorway in the dark hallway, and when I looked up, he seemed more like a looming shadow than my father. I tried to think of what to say to him, but before I could think of anything, he said. “Just don’t do it again, okay, Ab?”

  I was surprised that he didn’t seem angry—his voice instead sounded broken and forlorn, so I knew just from hearing it how much he really did miss her.

  Some days I thought I was the only one who remembered Becky, the only one who thought about her in the quiet, empty spaces of the evening. I knew this wasn’t true, but because we didn’t talk about her anymore, it sure felt that way.

  Detective Kinney called periodically with updates. They’d caught a serial killer in Philadelphia who might have some answers; the police went back out to dig in Morrow’s field. But each lead turned up nothing, no sign or trace of Becky.

  In April my father let Hal Brewerstein go. “He’s terrible,” my father said to me. “He didn’t know what he was doing.” But I remembered the files Hal brought us, the secrets he’d revealed about my neighbors, and I couldn’t help thinking that he wasn’t terrible at all, that my father just needed to blame someone for something.

  Detective Kinney stopped by a few more times to talk to my mother. Each time my father told him she wasn’t here; only he neglected to tell him that she’d moved out.

  Kinney finally caught up with my mother in her apartment in late May, because she complained about him when I went there one weekend. “That man,” she said, “that darn detective. He doesn’t know anything.” She seemed especially shaky, suddenly subject to all the evils of the world living alone in her horrible apartment.

  “You should come home,” I told her, though I knew that nothing I could say or do was going to bring her home.

  “Oh, Abby.” She gave me a half hug with her one arm that she wasn’t using to smoke. “Someday you’ll understand.”

  But I don’t think I ever will understand why she left my father.

  Chapter 26

  BY JUNE MY quietly abnormal life felt like a routine. I tried not to think about the way things had been a year earlier, when the four of us had gone to the beach. It felt like so long ago, like something that had happened to me in another lifetime.

  Once school was out, I spent most days with Tommy and Mrs. Ramirez. My mother took a part-time job as a waitress at that diner she’d talked about. Some days, when she wasn’t working, I spent the day with her. But most days I was with Tommy.

  Tommy and I were friends but not the kind of friends Jocelyn and I had been, the kind who told each other everything. Mostly we had a quiet friendship, where we would do things without talking much. And then occasionally there were moments like the day we kissed in the snow, when suddenly there’d be an instant of something else passing between us. Tommy would squeeze my hand or reach up and brush a piece of hair away from my cheek or kiss me again, as he did right after school let out for the summer and Mrs. Ramirez let us go swimming in my backyard without her.

  Kissing in the pool, I felt oddly weightless, and the whole experience seemed unreal, almost as if it had happened in a dream. It didn’t feel like the same pool that Becky and I had swum in the summer before.

  At night I lay in bed and thought about Tommy. Sometimes I would lie there and close my eyes and think about Tommy kissing me and what it might be like if he French-kissed me, how his tongue might feel against mine. Then I’d start to imagine if Tommy had ever wondered the same thing, if he wanted to kiss me that way.

  Jocelyn and I had talked about it the year before, and we’d decided that French kissing was disgusting, yet the thought of it was different now. It felt somehow thrilling. When I’d think about Tommy this way, though, it would pain me to look him in the eye the next day. Or I’d stare at him too closely sometimes, watch the way his eyebrows arched when he laughed. His hair had grown back in, but he’d gotten it cut a few times over the spring, so it was still a lot shorter than when I first met him. I kind of liked it the way it was in the summer, short enough to still look cu
te. I could see his entire face without it looking too shocking, the way it did with the buzz cut.

  The relationship between my father and me also changed into something new, something completely different. Last summer I was a child, the one who fought with her sister, who whined, who was punished and sent to her room. This summer I became something like his equal, cooking dinner for us some nights, cleaning up the house, washing our clothes. We too hardly talked, but when we did, I noticed my father treated me more like an adult. He spoke in softer tones. He asked my opinion on things. Sometimes I wondered if he mistook me for my mother or for some strange blurry combination of all three of us—me, my mother, and Becky.

  It was strange to hear my father talk to me about mortgage payments and car repairs. “Car needs new tires,” he would say.

  And I nodded like I understood. But inside, I was thinking, So what? Who cares?

  After dinner we swam in the pool sometimes before bed, but it was so quiet that I didn’t like to do it. Every time I got in or I looked at the inner tubes, I thought about Becky swimming toward me, wanting the pink one so badly. I’d feel guilty, and I’d think, Why didn’t I just let her have it? What was the big deal anyway? She could’ve had this one thing; it wouldn’t have been so much to give.

  My father swam laps at night; he’d move quickly across the pool, so he reminded me of an eel, the way he slid through water as if it were nothing. Some nights he’d swim for over an hour, and I’d get out of the pool and just sit there in what used to be my mother’s chair and watch him.

  When he was finished, he’d lean over the side, out of breath, and say, “Get me a towel, Ab.” And I’d have to run to the deep end of the pool with the towel for him, a towel that I’d washed myself earlier in the day and would wash again a few days later. There was something about being in charge of the washing machine that made me feel grown up.