The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  “Everything is freezing,” Tommy said. “Everything dies in the winter.” He squeezed my hand, and I felt it tingling, even through the thicknesses of our gloves.

  After Tommy and I got too cold from walking, we went back to my house and made hot chocolate. I made it with milk, on the stove, the way my mother used to do for Becky and me in the winter, and I sprinkled cinnamon on top. I felt old doing this, cooking in the kitchen with Tommy watching me. I felt his eyes on me, following me as I walked back and forth between the stove and the refrigerator.

  We sipped our drinks in silence at the kitchen table, but we stared at each other the whole time. Finally Tommy said, “I’m sorry we didn’t find her.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

  “I wanted to give that to you,” he said. It sounded so odd, yet it was the sweetest thing anyone ever said to me, so it made what he said next feel just right. “Can I kiss you again, Abigail?”

  I knew that to someone else, it might have seemed like Tommy was just using me or something, but I knew he wasn’t. We had this undeniable connection when we were alone together that made everything else in the world disappear: Tommy’s high school friends, my parents, Becky. Every time he wanted to kiss me, I wanted him to, and not because I was lonely or depressed or needed the attention or whatever, but because I genuinely wanted him to.

  I stood up and held out my hand and led him into the family room. We sat on the couch together, just staring at each other for a minute, and then Tommy reached up and put his hand on my cheek. “You’re cold still,” he said.

  “I’m okay.” But really I was freezing, unable to warm up. He started kissing my cheeks, slowly, just small kisses that he dotted around my face. Each kiss was warming, amazing. Then I tilted my head so he could kiss my lips again. We just sat there and kissed for probably twenty minutes, and the whole time, I let myself think of nothing else but him kissing me.

  “Let’s lie down,” Tommy whispered, and I let myself lean back and relax. He was lying on top of me, and I felt his entire body, the warmth of it. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, but I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to kiss Tommy. I wanted more.

  He put his hand on my stomach and then started moving it up slowly. “Can I?” he said. “Do you want me to?”

  I nodded. I was afraid to speak. I thought that if I did, the perfect moment would collapse. He put his hand under my shirt and then on my breast, softly at first. He cupped my left breast with his hand, and just let his hand sit there a minute. I don’t think he knew what he was supposed to do next, but I didn’t know either, so I just let him keep his hand there while we were kissing. “Can I take your shirt off?” he whispered.

  I nodded again and sat up so he could lift my shirt over my head. He traced the outline of my bra with his finger and then reached behind me to unhook it. He fumbled a little; he couldn’t get it undone, so I reached back and did it for him. He took my bra and put it on the floor, and then he sat up and just looked at me for a minute. I should’ve been cold, sitting there with my shirt off, but I wasn’t. I was completely warm. “You’re beautiful, Abigail.”

  No one had ever told me I was beautiful before, not even my parents, really. I was always the special one, the smart one, and Becky was the beauty. I know it’s true; mousy, frizzy hair won’t win me any beauty contests. But Tommy sounded so sincere that I knew he meant it, and I loved him for that.

  I started kissing Tommy again, and he touched my breasts.

  I was so involved in Tommy that I didn’t hear the front door open; I didn’t even hear my father’s footsteps as he approached us. In fact I didn’t even know he was there until I heard him say, “Jesus Christ, Ab.” And then suddenly Tommy sat up, and I started grabbing for my shirt, but I couldn’t find it. “Ab,” my father whispered. I knew he was there, but I couldn’t turn around. I didn’t want to look at him. “You little bastard,” he said to Tommy. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I finally found my shirt and slipped it back over my head. I knew that I needed to save Tommy. “Go home,” I said to him. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Abby.” He turned to look at me, and I saw this incredible sadness, this weight of knowing we’d just done something we could never take back. Everything would be different now; we’d lost our bubble, our little private world that protected us from everything else.

  “Get the hell out of my house,” my father yelled at him. “Jesus Christ.”

  Tommy got off the couch and ran to the front door. He forgot his boots, but I didn’t want to call after him.

  “Dad,” I said, “it’s not what you think.”

  “Abigail.” He sat down in his chair in the corner, but we didn’t look at each other. “Is this because your mother left? We tried to raise you right, do the best we could. This is because you don’t have your mother, isn’t it?”

  “You make it sound like I committed a crime,” I said. I wasn’t sorry for anything, and I didn’t think it was wrong. I was fourteen; I made out with a boy on our couch. It wasn’t the end of the world.

  “Abigail,” he said, “just go up to your room. I can’t look at you right now.”

  “Dad, I—”

  “Just go, Ab. “

  So I went upstairs and sat on my bed, and I thought about Tommy kissing me and what might have happened if my father hadn’t walked in.

  I can only imagine what happened next, when Tommy went home:

  Tommy walked across the snowy lawn in his socks. By the time he got to his front door, his feet were soaking wet and freezing. He was shivering, and so cold, and thinking about how he’d left me there with my father. And he was still picturing my breasts, how soft they were, so much softer than he’d imagined.

  As he walked up to the front door, it finally dawned on him that he’d left his boots at my house, and he tried to think of what he would tell his grandmother, how he could’ve left his boots, for Christ’s sake. He worried about what my father would tell her. Then he decided to stand out on the snowy porch for just another minute, soak it all in. He took a deep breath and realized how much he loved the snow, how much he would miss it when she sent him back to Florida. But he realized he needed to face things, to accept the consequences. He took a deep breath and then stepped inside.

  The house was strangely quiet except for this odd whirring sound, the noise of a mixer, going on and on and on. “Grandma,” he called out, “I’m home.” She didn’t answer. “Grandma,” he said, louder this time. Nothing. But maybe she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the mixer. So he left his wet socks in the foyer and walked to the kitchen. The first thing he noticed was the mixer. She’d left it on and in the bowl. So forgetful. He walked to turn it off, and on the way he almost tripped over her. She was lying on the kitchen floor, not moving.

  He screamed and jumped back, and he thought she was dead. I’ve killed her, he thought. The God she believes in is punishing me.

  My father and I both heard the sound of the ambulance. At first I thought it was coming to our house, and I ran down to see if my father was all right. My first thought was that my father had done something terrible to himself, that I’d ruined him, pushed him over the edge.

  “It’s next door,” he said when he saw me. And we both ran out to the porch to see. For a moment I thought that Tommy was hurt, that he’d told Mrs. Ramirez what had happened and she’d gone after him with her carving knife. But I saw Tommy run outside to talk to the EMTs, and that was when my father ran across the lawn.

  “What’s going on here?” he said to Tommy. They eyed each other for a minute, and I could tell Tommy was unsure if he should even be talking to my father, but then my father shook his shoulders a little. “Son, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just found her like this.”

  A few minutes later they carried Mrs. Ramirez out on a stretcher, and she looked dead. She had these tubes hanging out of her nose, and she wasn’t moving. It
was worse than seeing Grandma Jacobson with cancer or imagining Becky buried in Morrow’s field, because it was real and right in front of me. I was so stunned to see it that I had to look away. “I’ll drive you to the hospital,” my father said to Tommy. To me he said, “Ab, go call your mother and tell her you’re staying with her tonight.”

  I was so numb that I just nodded and didn’t even argue with him. I guess I should’ve wanted to go with them, to comfort Tommy or something, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be as far away from there as possible.

  I don’t know what my father and Tommy said to each other on the way to the hospital or while they sat there and waited. That’s something I don’t even want to try to imagine because it’s too weird to think of it.

  What I do know for sure: Mrs. Ramirez had a massive heart attack while she stood in her kitchen making brownies. Had Tommy not found her when he did, she might have died. Apparently she’d been having chest pains for weeks, but she’d been ignoring them, passing them off as indigestion. The heart attack forced her to look at things: She had a weak heart, and unless she started taking it easy, she was going to die.

  I spent the night at my mother’s apartment, the first and only time I slept over there. I’m not sure how much my father told her or exactly what he said, but as she sat next to me on the couch, tapping her cigarette nervously on the ashtray, she tried to talk to me about sex. She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I’d heard it all in school, in sixth-grade health class. Only when my mother said it, she turned bright red and put a funny emphasis on certain words, like “condom.”

  I told my mother that I wasn’t ready to have sex, and when I was, I wouldn’t be stupid about it. This basically shut her up. “Well, I know, Abby. Of course,” she said. “It’s just your father…”

  “He was exaggerating,” I said. I wanted to change the subject in the worst way, so I said, “I don’t know what Dad was doing home in the middle of the afternoon anyway.”

  “Oh,” she said. “He must’ve had his appointment with Dr. Shreiker.” It surprised me that she knew something about my father that I didn’t, which indicated to me that they were still talking, even when I wasn’t around. “They’ve been letting him have the time off work once a week,” she said. “He needs it.” I couldn’t imagine my father talking to a therapist. But I could tell the whole thing made my mother happy, so maybe, in some strange way, he thought he was doing it for her.

  Chapter 30

  AFTER MRS. RAMIREZ had her heart attack, Tommy’s mother drove up from Florida. I watched from my bedroom window as she arrived. I saw the car with Florida plates drive slowly up our snowy street, and I knew immediately who it was. I felt myself cringe for Tommy, for the way his whole world had suddenly been shattered, again.

  I watched her get out of the car. She was Mrs. Ramirez’s height but a lot skinnier and younger-looking. She had long, thick black hair that she’d pulled up on top of her head for the ride. I watched as she pulled her suitcase out of the trunk, but then she disappeared from my view, so I couldn’t witness her reunion with Tommy firsthand.

  My father kept me updated on Mrs. Ramirez’s condition, and a week and a half after she had her heart attack, and a day after Tommy’s mother arrived, he told me she was coming home from the hospital. “We’ll go visit her at home tomorrow,” he said.

  I had no idea where Tommy had been staying while Mrs. Ramirez was in the hospital. I didn’t think he’d been over there, in her house, all alone, but I hadn’t seen him since the week before, not hanging around after school or anything, so either he was avoiding me or he hadn’t been going to school for the past week. I wanted to believe it was the second choice; I didn’t think he would ignore me anymore.

  It felt strange walking over to Mrs. Ramirez’s house with my father the next evening. The ground was still covered in snow, and the only sound as the two of us walked was the crunch of our boots. “Stay where I can see you, Ab,” he said as we walked up to the front door.

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “I will.”

  “I mean it.”

  Mrs. Ramirez’s daughter answered the door. “Oh, you must be Abby,” she said when she opened the door. “My mother has told me all about you. Please come in.” She shook my father’s hand as we walked in. “Mr. Reed, I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for my mother.”

  “Jim, please.”

  “Jim, then. Okay. You’ve been a godsend.” I wasn’t exactly sure what my father had done for Mrs. Ramirez, aside from visiting her in the hospital a few times, but I suspected there must be something else for her daughter to seem so thankful.

  Mrs. Ramirez was lying on the couch with an afghan covering her legs. She looked older than she had two weeks ago, tired. Tommy sat on the love seat, watching TV with her. He looked up and caught my eye as we walked into the room, but then he turned away, quickly. My father put his hand on my shoulder, something that may have looked like a nice gesture to everyone else but to me felt like a restraint, something holding me back from everything.

  “How are you feeling, Rosalie?” My father bent down so she didn’t have to turn her head.

  “Eh, así así. I’ve been better.” My father squeezed her hand and stood back up.

  “I have some cookies in the kitchen,” Tommy’s mother said, “if you’d like some.”

  “We don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  Tommy’s mother smiled. “No trouble at all, Jim.” She may have been taken in by my father’s politeness, but I wasn’t, and I doubted Tommy was either. I could still hear his voice yelling that Tommy was a bastard.

  It was strange the way we just sort of stood around there. “Why don’t you have a seat?” Tommy’s mother said when she came back in with the cookies. My father sat down in the chair right next to where we were standing, and I had nowhere else to go but to the love seat, next to Tommy. When I sat down, Tommy looked away from me. I think he was afraid to watch me, to catch my eye in front of my father.

  Tommy’s mother put the plate of cookies down on the coffee table, but no one reached for them. She sat on the couch with Mrs. Ramirez and rubbed her feet. “How are you doing, Mom? Is it too cold in here?”

  Mrs. Ramirez shook her head. “No. I okay.”

  “My mother has hated the cold for so long.” She sounded like she was apologizing, the way she said it.

  My father nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

  “So she’ll be much happier in Florida, won’t you, Mom?”

  It took a minute for what she said to really sink in. Then I felt it settling deep in my chest, my heart. Tommy was going back to Florida.

  “A little bit of sunshine, Rosalie, and you’ll be as good as new.”

  She shook her head and chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Sure you will, Mom.”

  I tried to sneak a glance at Tommy, but he still wasn’t looking at me. If I hadn’t been so sure that my father was watching my every move, I would’ve kicked him or pinched his leg or something. I had this sudden, overwhelming sense of devastation. This loss would be different from Becky, because I knew where Tommy was and where he was going, but I also knew it was far, far enough that I might never see him again.

  When I saw my mother on Saturday, she mentioned to me that it had been my father’s idea for Mrs. Ramirez to move to Florida. He’d come up with it in the hospital, right after he’d called Tommy’s mother to tell her what was going on. He’d even offered to pay for Mrs. Ramirez’s move, and he promised to clean up her house and get it on the market. It made him seem like a generous guy, so warmhearted.

  My mother’s hand shook as she tapped the cigarette in the ashtray. “Your father, always trying to take care of people.” But she wouldn’t even look at me as she said it, so we both knew that wasn’t why he did it.

  Tommy went back to school for a few weeks before they left, but I didn’t really see him until the day before. I walked out of school, and I saw him across the stre
et on his bike with his high school friends, but I walked over there anyway because I knew I had to talk to him. As soon as I got up close, his other friends waved and took off, and then there I was, standing next to him on the sidewalk. He leaned against his bike, looking awkward, but still sort of cool in a way.

  “Hey,” he said, “I was gonna wait for you. I’m sorry I haven’t seen you in a while. My mother made me promise to come right home after school.”

  “Oh.” I felt myself blushing. I wondered what my father had told her. But I was also glad that he said he was going to wait, that if I hadn’t approached him, he would’ve found me.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” he said. I nodded. I knew he was leaving soon. I could see them from my bedroom window, and I’d watched Tommy and his mother take bundles of trash to the curb. I wondered how Mrs. Ramirez felt about their throwing away the remains of her life. She’d always said she’d wanted to move to Florida someday, but I doubted she’d imagined it this way. “I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I turned my head a little so I didn’t have to look at him. I didn’t want to see everything in his eyes. I didn’t want to know that he was hurt or angry or, worse, excited about going back to Florida.

  “We could walk home together if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  Tommy held his bike to his left side, and I walked on his right. We couldn’t hold hands or anything because he was using both hands to walk the bike. I don’t think we would’ve held hands anyway, though. “So, will you miss Pinesboro?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Some of it, I guess.”

  “No more snow,” I said.

  “No more snow.” He sighed, but I couldn’t tell if it was really the snow he’d miss or me.

  “Your grandmother going to be okay?”