By the time he was in high school, my brother stopped asking for my mother; it was my father who asked after Sam. Where is he? my father would say, coming home from work, coming in from the shed. Perhaps Sam was kept after school? Or maybe he was in his room? Or studying at a friend’s? In fact, nobody knew where Sam went on those nights he didn’t come home until dawn, those days when he left for school and the principal called to say he had never arrived. Often, we’d sit down to eat without him, because Sam would come home late or not at all. “Where is he, goddamnit!” my father said one night, jabbing his fork into his peas so hard the plate seemed to chime the late hour. “Six-thirty sharp we eat. How many times do I have to tell him that?”
He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ve got work tonight at Fountain,” he said. “I’ll be home by nine, and Sam better be here.” But minutes after he’d left the house, he came back inside. His hands were shaking; his arms and jaw were shaking. “That little fucker,” he said. I had never heard him use that word before; I never heard him use it again.
“What happened?” my mother said, but my father did not answer. He opened the refrigerator and stared intently into that cold blue light.
I followed my mother outside. It was dusk, September, and each step shouted with leaves. My father’s Ford was parked with its nose to the shed, and my mother stopped behind it. “Sam,” she said. “Get up now, honey, get up,” but I still didn’t see him. Then the darkness behind my father’s back tires took shape, and my brother crawled out. He was sixteen years old, drunk and laughing. Red and gold leaves were pressed like pleading hands to his face and hair and chest.
It was almost four in the afternoon by the time we finally left the house, my mother walking too carefully over the ice. When we reached the car, she handed me the keys, though I didn’t feel very well either. “I am never going to make it through this,” she said. She’d been chanting these words like a prayer ever since my grandmother phoned early in the afternoon, worrying about what had happened to us. “We overslept,” I said, and this was partially true. I’d decided to lie down on the couch for a few minutes and had fallen asleep for two hours. When the phone rang, I’d been vaulted into the air by the sudden charged clarity of knowing exactly who was calling and why.
“Well, come for dinner at least,” my grandmother said. “We’re happy to wait till you get here.”
I could hear my mother vomiting in the bathroom upstairs.
“Actually,” I said, “Mom’s kind of sick. I think she picked up the flu.”
“It could be food poisoning,” my grandmother said. Then, “Does she have a fever?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think so. I think she just needs to rest,” I said. “You go ahead and eat. I’m sorry about all this, Grandma. I’ll apologize to Father Van Dan. I—”
“Let me speak to your mother.”
“She’s getting sick,” I said, truthfully.
“Your father, then.”
“He isn’t here.”
My grandmother sighed, and when she spoke, her voice shook with terrible sadness. “Olaf heard a rumor that Gordon was moving out.” My mother was coming down the stairs. Her eyes were red, wet-looking. Grandma? she mouthed, and when I nodded Yes, she held out her hand for the phone, but I turned away.
My grandmother said, “Is it true?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s all right,” my grandmother said. “Your mother’s standing right there, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she’ll feel better later this afternoon?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Then come over when you’re ready,” my grandmother said. “Abigail, please, it’s Christmas. I’ll be expecting both of you.”
I hung up, and when I told my mother I’d promised we would come later, her face took on the expression people use to face the inevitable: surgery, birth, death. “Do you think I’m still drunk?” she asked.
“Hungover.”
“Drunk is the better part,” she said, and she turned back toward the bathroom.
Now, as I drove down our long gravel driveway, my mother pressed her forehead against the cold window, gulped the damp winter air. It was that delicate time between daylight and dusk when the least brightness seems an exaggeration and the landscape loses its depth. Farmhouses twinkled with red and blue and green Christmas lights, intimate and warm, and they looked almost close enough to touch. We passed a manure spreader outlined in white lights; a mailbox transformed into an elf’s toy shop; a stand of young pine trees, each with a gold star lashed to its tip, so that it seemed like a small constellation was hanging only inches above the snowy fields. Just before we crossed the railroad tracks into town, my mother finally lifted her head.
“‘Welcome to Oneisha,’” she said, reading the sign that Uncle Olaf had made years before. Now it was riddled with bullet holes, spackled with ice.
“Oh, God,” I said, and I started to laugh because the Hornleins’ rooftop was bustling with its usual arrangement of reindeer, and—look!—there was the faded grinning Santa at the Klopps’, and, at the Pfiels’, the electric-green swing set, quarreling with elves. Over the years, I had come to know each of these decorations by heart, and I loved them because they were familiar to me, because I had been taught to admire them. Now I saw them with the eyes of an outsider. The town looked like a carnival—garish, sparkly, a child playing fancy in rhinestones and glitter.
My mother was laughing too, a bit ruefully, as if it hurt her head. “Let’s drive by the crèche,” she said, and I turned into the Saint Ignatius parking lot. The crèche was life-size, made of wood, and it stood on a cordoned-off section of asphalt beside the front entrance to the church. There were real bales of hay, evergreen boughs for the floor and the roof, and metal poles for the stanchions. Every few years, all the figures were repainted: white sheep, brown mules, a dark-haired Joseph, a blond and blue-eyed Jesus. The animals wore exaggeratedly human expressions of piety, while the wise men looked at their feet like shy boys at a dance, wondering what to do next. As I pulled up close, my mother’s face was bathed in the light of the floodlamps. Together we stared at the crèche. How deliciously warm and sleepy Baby Jesus looked!
“Where’s Mary?” my mother said suddenly. “Look, they moved her all the way to the back!”
It was true; Baby Jesus was alone in the foreground, while Mary knelt, open-armed, beside three candy-pink pigs, a brilliant red rooster. Even Joseph could have touched Jesus from where he stood, his arm resting on the back of a steer. “Can’t let a mother get too close. Might sissify the boy,” my mother said. She was imitating my father’s voice. I had never heard her so bitter. “Let’s go,” she said, and I pulled away and continued up the street to my grandmother’s house.
It was truly dark now, the gunmetal blackness of winter. As we pulled into the driveway, my grandmother opened the front door, waiting. Behind her, the light from the hallway blazed like flames, and yet there she stood, untouched. I thought of a story she’d told me once about a saint who had been thrown into a room of fire. There he’d lived for three days and three nights before emerging, healthy and whole. “Thank goodness,” my grandmother said when we came up the walk. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
“Merry Christmas!” my mother said, accepting my grandmother’s kiss.
The remnants of the meal were still on the kitchen table: the half-eaten carcass of the turkey, a few slaughtered pies, green beans congealing in margarine. Why weren’t the dishes already done? Where was Uncle Olaf? Where were Monica and her fiancé? Auntie Thil was there, but she was flushed, nervous. Her hands shook as she took our coats and carried them down the hall to my grandmother’s bedroom. “Here, sit,” my grandmother said, leading us into the living room. “I’ve sent the others home. I thought we could pray together, come up with a solution to all of this.”
“To all of what?” my mother said.
“I know that Gord
on’s left you,” my grandmother said, and my mother stepped back as if someone had struck her. “First your child, now your husband. What’s next—I suppose a divorce?”
My mother glanced over at me, a brief terrible look that said, Traitor. Then she turned and walked out of the house, leaving the door open behind her. After a moment, Auntie Thil walked down the hall and closed it softly. I thought about my mother’s coat, lying limp, dormant, across my grandmother’s bed. I thought of the car keys, a cold lump in my pocket, and I wondered where my mother would go. My grandmother reached for my hand, and I pulled it away without thinking, staring at her as if she were someone I’d never seen before. What right do you have to judge her or anyone? I wanted to say, except that I was actually saying it, each word torn from my throat.
“Abigail?” my grandmother said. “What did you say?”
I ran down the hall, grabbed our coats, and I left my grandmother’s house. Outside, the frozen darkness was pulsing with Christmas lights, bloody red, sickly green. The familiar street looked sinister, a fun house of mirrors and lights from which there was no escape. Where had my mother gone? I checked behind my auntie Thil’s house, where the iced-over pond gleamed like an eye. I could see my uncle Olaf watching TV in the den, and I stared at him through the window the way once, at a county fair, I’d stared—fascinated, horrified—into a cow’s stomach, which had been fitted with a transparent panel. I walked behind my grandmother’s house and came up the side yard and onto the street, where I started toward the hazy glow of the floodlights surrounding the crèche at the church.
At first, I mistook my mother for one of the statues around the Baby Jesus, but then she moved, came closer to the cradle, closer than Joseph, the animals and wise men, until she stood right beside it. Her arms were wrapped around her shoulders, and when I saw her kneel down in that makeshift manger, I realized she meant to stay there for good, to curl herself up and rock herself, rock herself warm in that cold yellow light.
Nine
In the fall of my third year living in Baltimore, two and a half years after I’d left the conservatory, my mother called to say she’d received a letter from my father. He said that he was being watched. He said that he’d been awakened one night by someone trying the locks on his windows and doors. He said he had developed six of the Seven Deadly Warning Signs of cancer and was making out his will. Would she like the Ford?
“I suppose it’s none of my business anymore,” my mother said. Their divorce had been final for over a year. A priest at Saint John’s had told her that as long as she didn’t remarry, she was not in a state of mortal sin. “But he doesn’t sound like himself.”
“Maybe he’s drinking.”
“Or getting Alzheimer’s or something.”
“Or maybe it’s just age.”
“He’s only sixty-two, Abby.” She sighed. “And I certainly don’t want his Ford. He knows what I really want.” My father had gone through Sam’s bedroom, through the house and the shed and the attic, collecting everything of Sam’s that would fit into his car. Even now, my mother didn’t know what, exactly, was missing, and this bothered her as much as the missing items themselves. My father, of course, denied he’d taken anything. “I’m entitled to half,” my mother said. “I deserve more than that ashtray.”
I’d heard all this before, but I was relieved to have a conversation with my mother that wasn’t focused on what she referred to as my lifestyle. Adam and I were living together in a one-bedroom apartment near the basilica. We’d met in a Laundromat. He’d dropped out of the Baltimore School of Design the semester before I left Peabody, and now he worked as a carpenter. “All that abstraction,” he said, “was starting to give me nightmares.” I had a full-time job at a thrift shop and a vague idea about returning to school. But the longer I was away from it, the harder it was to make plans to go back. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study.
“Well, what would you really like to do?” Adam said. “I mean, in your wildest dreams.”
“I’d be like that woman who studies gorillas.”
“Jane Goodall.”
“That’s her.”
“Biology, then.”
But that wasn’t what I meant. I wanted a misty morning in the jungle, the cries of strange birds, the solitude of my tent. A place where my grandmother couldn’t mail me prayer cards and religious medals and books on prayer; a place where my mother couldn’t reach me with yet another far-fetched scheme to find Sam. As each month passed, and there was less and less chance that he’d be found alive—if at all—she became increasingly, unbearably optimistic. She’d enrolled in Christian counseling, encouraging me to do the same. She believed Sam’s disappearance was a test of faith, one that she would endure and eventually pass with stained-glass colors.
Two nights later, she called again. This time, my father had phoned her, his voice so soft she barely recognized it. He wanted to know if she’d heard from Sam.
No, she said eagerly. Have you?
Wouldn’t you like to know that! he said, and then he told her about senior citizens in Arizona being drugged and carried off to experimental labs against their will.
Is Sam there? my mother said. Have you seen him? Gordon, please! But my father hung up, and she had not been able to reach him since.
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
She had. They’d contacted the police department in Cape Coral, the nearest city of any size, and Homicide sent a detective to visit my father. She judged him a lonely eccentric who knew nothing more than anyone else did. She advised my mother, through the Horton police, to forget about the incident.
“I think it might be better if we handled this ourselves,” my mother said. “The police down there don’t know your father. They don’t realize how he can be.”
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “what if you were to visit him? You could post flyers. I looked at a map, and there are lots of little towns around there. I’d pay your bus ticket, if you’d go.”
“I don’t know if I can get the time off,” I said. But I couldn’t help imagining myself as the hero, the one who—against all odds—rescued her brother, returned him safely home, redeemed herself in the eyes of a mother who, for months, had been telling her she’d thrown away her future, who gave her gift subscriptions to The Catholic Digest, Leaves, Guideposts, who warned her that God has ways of making stubborn people listen to His voice.
“For all we know, Sam could be there right now,” my mother said. “Maybe Sam’s the one who’s been watching him. Maybe he saw himself on TV.”
“Maybe,” I said.
A few weeks earlier, my mother had been interviewed on a talk show, along with other parents whose lost children—if alive—would be adults by now. There, on national television, Sam’s face was displayed, first as a seventeen-year-old, then aged three years by forensic experts. They showed him clean-shaven, mustached, bearded. They showed him wearing different styles of hair.
“You can ask the neighbors if they’ve noticed any visitors. You can post a flyer, in case he shows up nearby.”
“What if Dad doesn’t want me to visit?” I said. “I mean, we haven’t exactly kept in touch.” In fact, I’d sent him cards on his birthday, but he’d never acknowledged them, or sent me anything on mine.
My mother paused. I could hear her clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a habit that meant she was formulating a careful reply. “I just wouldn’t tell him you’re coming,” she said. “And while you’re there, if you wouldn’t mind, you could ask him what he’s done with Sam’s things.”
The next day, the owner of the thrift shop gave me a week off without complaint. “You’ve been with us over a year,” she said, and I felt the long, gray winter of my failure. If I wasn’t careful, I might end up spending the rest of my life in that same dark shop, collecting my minimum-wage check twice a month, worrying because I had no health insurance. That night, desperate for any kind of ch
ange, I cut my long thick hair in front of the bathroom mirror and, afterward, buzzed it with my Lady Bic. “Good God,” Adam said when I came back into the living room, but I liked how it made me look: knowing but indifferent. The sort of look my father would despise on any woman. The sort of look that Sam would recognize.
Now I was tired, catching a cold, cramped by the duffel bag I’d wedged into the tight space between my feet and the seat ahead of me. It was October, one week before Halloween, and the bus—the last in a series of complicated transfers—was hot and sour-smelling. The cutout paper jack-o’-lanterns in the windows we passed seemed too vivid, frightening in a way I’d never noticed up north. Gaping mouths. Glowing orange teeth. Faces as round as the souls we used to draw in Sunday school, rising from their unsuspecting bodies. Halloween night was followed by All Saints’ Day. Still sick from trick-or-treat candy, we dressed as saints and marched into the church holding candles, singing “When the Saints Come Marching In.” My mother would be sitting on the outside edge of the pew so that she could wave to me and Sam as we walked past, hot wax nipping our fingers. I always chose to be Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, who was beheaded after she refused to marry a wealthy man. For three days and nights she lay dying in her cell, while beautiful music filled the air. As a teenager, I’d sit at Elise’s piano with my hands spread over the keys, praying to hear what Cecilia heard as she was drawn up into heaven by the force of God’s desire.
I believed these stories in a way my brother never did. I hoped that I too might be chosen, God’s capricious wishes revealed, my life irrevocably changed. When Sam first disappeared, I was strangely envious that he’d been singled out, the prodigal son who’d come back to a grand celebration. But now, ironically, I was the one returning to my father.
Sister Page 16