The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  “I don’t know.” Why anyone would’ve taken Becky was beyond me in the first place, but Mr. Barnesworth gave me the creeps, so who knew exactly why he would do anything? "If you don’t want to go with me, I’ll go myself.” He sighed. I knew that would get him. I’d learned to tap into Tommy’s instinct to protect. I felt almost ashamed of myself for using him this way, but honestly I was afraid to go to Mr. Barnesworth’s on my own

  “Fine,” Tommy said. “But if we get caught, I’m telling everyone it was your idea, that I only went along to make sure you were safe.”

  “Whatever.” But the way he said it made me blush, and I had to look away so he wouldn’t notice.

  We waited until the next Tuesday to cut school. Tuesday mornings Mrs. Ramirez volunteered at the library, so we knew she wouldn’t be at home, and we knew she wouldn’t have a chance to see us walking around when we were supposed to be at school.

  Tommy and I both went to homeroom, so we could be counted on the attendance. Otherwise the office would call home to ask our parents why we weren’t there. We knew there would eventually be a problem if our morning teachers counted us as absent and compared that with the list of homeroom absences, but I was hoping no one would notice. Teachers didn’t always do these time-consuming comparisons; most of them just didn’t care enough. I knew the only teacher who would notice if I was missing was Mr. Fiedler, and that class was last period, so I’d be back for that.

  After homeroom Tommy and I met by the front doors. As everyone else shuffled on to first period, we opened the doors and ran away through the side parking lot of the school. We avoided the front lot because we knew that’s where the monitors usually stood, waiting to catch cutters like us. I’d never cut school before, but I could see the monitors out the window of my first-period algebra classroom, stopping the occasional student trying to get away with skipping. Luckily we didn’t get caught, and before we knew it, we were walking down the treelined street toward our neighborhood.

  I had this sudden eerie sense of déjà vu. I hadn’t walked through these streets since last spring, when I’d walked them with Becky and Jocelyn. Walking them with Tommy, I had this overwhelming feeling, this sense of lightness. “We used to walk home from school this way,” I told him.

  “I walked home in Florida,” he said, “except when it got too hot or it rained. Then I took the bus.”

  I’d never ridden on a school bus, except for the occasional field trip. Our neighborhood is too close to the elementary school, junior high, and high school for the district to provide us bus service, so I always walked or got a ride. “A bus would be cool,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It was okay.” The way he said it, I could tell he was thinking of something unpleasant that had happened to him on one of those bus rides. I wondered if he’d gotten in a fight or if someone had tried to beat him up. I didn’t want to ask him, though. I didn’t want him to get mad and change his mind about going to Mr. Barnesworth’s.

  The dumb thing about our plan was that we planned our escape from school perfectly, but we did no planning on how we were going to get into Mr. Barnesworth’s house. I didn’t really start thinking about that until we actually got to our neighborhood and began cutting the back way across the development behind us, so we would avoid being seen. Even though Mrs. Ramirez was at the library, we were afraid one of our other neighbors would see us and dutifully call my father. I tried not to think about what would happen if he found out about this.

  I asked Tommy how we should get into the house.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you had a plan.”

  “I did,” I lied. “I do. I just wanted your opinion.”

  “Well.” He sounded a little nervous. “Maybe we should ring the doorbell first. I don’t know, pretend we’re selling something for school.”

  It was a good idea, and it seemed much less scary than breaking in. But I wondered if it would work. On Halloween, Mr. Barnesworth hadn’t even opened the door. Besides, I assumed he wouldn’t even be home, that he must have a job. That’s why I’d convinced Tommy that the only way to do this was if we went during the school day.

  It was odd the way I’d pictured myself inside Mr. Barnesworth’s house all week, finding Becky, seeing her standing there. I imagined the way it would feel to see her again, what I would say to her. I thought I would hug her, that I would hold her body close to mine and tell her that everything would be okay now that we were there. Tommy and I would be instant heroes. But I hadn’t imagined how we would get in there until right then.

  We crept along the back of his property a little first, trying to peer into these two small windows that went into his basement. We have similar windows to the basement in my house, and I knew from playing in my backyard that we wouldn’t be able to see anything. “This is a waste of time,” I told Tommy. “Let’s just try to go in the front.”

  Before we went to the front yard, up the walkway to the door, we hid behind this large oak tree and kept a lookout at the street. The street looked virtually empty; all my neighbors were at work or at school. “Let’s go,” I said. Tommy looked at me, his eyes wide and more lost than I’d ever seen them, and I could tell that he was afraid. This made me nervous, and I felt this little runner of sweat begin to trickle down the back of my neck.

  When we got up to the door, I told Tommy to ring the bell. He argued with me. “Why don’t you do it?” he said. “This was all your idea anyway.”

  I gave him a look. “I’m watching out for the neighbors who know me.”

  “The street’s empty.”

  “You never know. Someone could decide to walk his dog or something.” But the truth was I was nearly paralyzed by fear, almost too afraid to move my finger to the doorbell.

  “Fine.” He put his finger on the bell. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest so loudly that I thought I might give myself away.

  When we heard the lock begin to turn, the creak of the door beginning to open, we both jumped. I hadn’t expected him to open it, hadn’t expected to come face-to-face with the man I’d convinced myself was a crazy kidnapper. I was suddenly afraid for me and Tommy, for my parents, for Mrs. Ramirez. What would they do if we disappeared too?

  When the door opened, Tommy and I took a step back, almost in sync with each other. But standing there, in the foyer of the house with an identical layout to mine, was a short middle-aged woman with brown highlighted hair. The highlighted part was right down the center, and it reminded me of a skunk stripe. “Can I help you?” she said.

  I suddenly wished that Tommy and I had come up with a plan B, the way they always do in movies. We hadn’t expected this strange woman to answer the door. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do, and I felt oddly frozen, paralyzed.

  “We’re selling raffle tickets,” Tommy said, before I could even think to say anything. “For school.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be in school now?”

  “We have off today,” Tommy lied.

  “Parent-teacher conferences,” I said. I was surprised by the squeaky sound of my own voice.

  “Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?” I wasn’t sure where Tommy was planning on going with this, since obviously we didn’t actually have tickets to sell. And I began to wonder how any of this was going to get us into the house. It also dawned on me that this woman made Mr. Barnesworth seem more normal. Whoever she was, old skunk hair didn’t seem like the type to hide children in the basement.

  “Hmm, I don’t think so. Not this time,” she said. She began to shut the door.

  “Wait.” I was desperate, not actually sure what I was going to say until it popped out of my mouth. “What about Mr. Barnesworth? Would he like some tickets?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t know,” she said. “He’s very ill. I don’t think so.”

  Tommy looked at me. “He’s ill?” I said.

  She looked us over, up and down, as if sizing us up. “Do you two know him well?”

  “Yes,�
�� Tommy lied. I almost reached over and pinched him. What a stupid thing to say! I was beginning to worry he was getting us into more trouble than we were already in. Whoever this woman was, there was a good chance she’d know that Mr. Barnesworth didn’t even know who we were.

  “Well, nice to meet you then. I’m Sara Alban, his nurse.” She looked at us, expecting our names, but we pretended not to understand and just smiled at her. I felt myself sweating, even underneath my too-tight bra, making it more uncomfortable than it already was before. I thought about how sick my grandmother had been when she needed a nurse to come to the house, and I felt suddenly guilty for thinking of Mr. Barnesworth as my sister’s kidnapper.

  Tommy must’ve had a similar thought, because he said, “Sorry to bother you.” He grabbed my hand and started to pull me away from the house. We walked quickly down the street, and as soon as we thought she couldn’t see us anymore from the doorway, we cut behind Mr. Barnesworth’s next-door neighbor’s evergreen tree. Tommy’s hand was sweaty, but it felt nice to hold on to.

  By the time we got to the tree, I was out of breath and shaky, and I felt like I was about to cry. “I don’t think he’s it,” Tommy said. I nodded. “Come on. Keep walking.” He was shaking his hair out of his eyes, but his voice sounded even, in control. He still didn’t let go of my hand, and I didn’t want him to.

  We walked behind the properties, down the treelined divider between our development and the one behind it. As we walked, I felt my heart slowing down. I began to be able to breathe again. “This was stupid,” I said, “wasn’t it?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “No, it was fine. Now you know.”

  “I guess so.” I felt like an idiot, though, suspecting Mr. Barnesworth, calling Harry Baker early in the morning. Then I began to feel deflated. I felt like we would never find Becky, that she wasn’t trapped somewhere in our neighbor’s basement, that she could be anywhere in the entire world by now.

  “Hey,” Tommy said. He let go of my hand and pointed up to the street in front of us. “Isn’t that your mother?”

  I looked to where he was pointing, unable to register what he’d said to me. I’d worried about seeing Mrs. Ramirez, Mrs. Johnson, but not my mother. I didn’t believe that she ever left the house when I was in school. I imagined her solidly fixed to it, as if she were somehow attached to the foundation, like another wall.

  Sitting in a strange red car at the stop sign that divided our development from the main road was a woman who looked eerily like my mother and a man I’d never seen before. Before I could get a good look, they pulled out onto the main road. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell.”

  “Well, it probably wasn’t her anyway.” But he sounded the way I felt, unsure. I began to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I was afraid I was going to be sick right there in front of Tommy.

  We were back at school for lunch, and if anyone had noticed we were gone in the morning, no one said anything to me. For the rest of the day I thought about my mother and the man in the red car. There was a chance that it hadn’t been my mother, that I was worrying for nothing, but it had looked so much like her, her blond hair pulled back the way she always did, in a ponytail. I wondered what she’d been doing, who’d she’d been with. I felt afraid for her, worried about her being in the wrong place.

  When Mrs. Ramirez picked us up from school, Tommy and I didn’t say anything to each other in the car. It was as if the morning had never happened, as if Tommy and I had never held hands and run, sweating, through the trees. It was as if we’d discovered a whole new world together in the morning, but by the afternoon that world had vanished, become something hazy that I couldn’t be sure had ever quite existed in the first place.

  “Did you see my mother today?” I asked Mrs. Ramirez. Tommy was sitting up front, and I was in back. He turned around and gave me a look that seemed to say, What the heck are you doing?

  “No, Ah-bee-hail. Not today. Tomorrow we have big shopping trip!”

  “Oh, right,” I lied. “I thought today was Wednesday.” I thought that I could safely ask Mrs. Ramirez about my mother’s whereabouts without her suspecting a thing. My mother, on the other hand, was a completely different story.

  By the time I got home, I’d convinced myself that my mother would be gone, that the man in the red car had driven her somewhere far away. So I was almost surprised when I found her sitting out back, in her chair, smoking a cigarette, just like any other day.

  I let myself out onto the patio and sat in the chair next to her. She had her eyes closed, but I knew she was awake because she moved the cigarette to and from her mouth. “Hey,” I said, “I’m home.”

  “Hmm.” She reached out blindly for my hand, and I gave it to her. “How was your day, honey?”

  “It was good,” I lied.

  “Good.”

  I sat there holding her hand for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to grill her without getting her to suspect anything. “So,” I said, “what did you do today?” It wasn’t an unusual question. It was something I might have asked her every other day and not even thought twice about her answer, but I held my breath, waiting to hear what she had to say.

  “Oh, nothing much.” She opened her eyes, sat up, and smashed her cigarette in the ashtray. “It’s getting too cold to stay out here. Don’t sit out too long.” She stood up and kissed the top of my head.

  It wasn’t an unusual way for her to respond, but if there was anything I’d learned, it was to suspect everyone and everything.

  Chapter 14

  THE LAST TIME I remember my family’s being completely whole and ridiculously normal was June, nearly two months before Becky disappeared. My father took a Thursday off work, and the four of us went to the beach in Ventnor. On the way there in the car, my father had one hand on my mother’s thigh and the other on the steering wheel. We drove with the windows down, and it was this perfect blue-sky June day, so the breeze that came into the car was just right and not too hot, even though it was already summer.

  My mother was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and her black bathing suit with her white linen cover-up. Becky and I had on our brand-new pink bathing suits (hers was a bikini; mine was a one-piece). My father wore his navy swim trunks and his Pitt T-shirt. In the trunk of our car, my mother had packed towels and a coolerful of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and root beers.

  When we got there, Becky and I collected seashells by the edge of the ocean, and our parents watched us from their towels. I remember looking up once and seeing them sitting there, my father’s hand on my mother’s thigh, as if it were permanently attached there. She leaned in close to him, so I could tell she liked it. Even though they were looking at us, it was clear they were thinking about each other.

  We picked up pearly shells, black-blistered shells, and little chipped ridged shells that looked like potato chips and collected them in an old bucket. “She sells seashells by the seashore,” we sang over and over, taunting each other into saying it faster and faster.

  Later my father went into the ocean with us and taught us how to bodysurf so we could catch the front hooks of the waves and ride them all the way back to shore. Becky ended up swallowing a whole lot of salt water, and she came up sputtering. My father swam to her and picked her up so he was holding on to her while he was treading water. “You’re okay, Beck,” he said. “You’re all right.”

  “Baby,” I whispered to her, so she could hear me but my father couldn’t.

  “Shut up.” She jumped off my father and tried to catch another wave, just to prove she could do it. And she could. When she stood up at the edge of the water, her blond hair tangled and in her face, she gave my father the thumbs-up sign.

  “Way to go, Beck,” he said, shooting the thumbs-up right back to her.

  “I’m getting out,” I told him. “I’m starting to feel pruny.” But really, I’d decided if Becky could steal my father, I’d have a go at my mother.

  She was reading a bo
ok on her towel, a romance; she loves romance novels. When I sat down next to her, she said, “Sweetie, you’re dripping all over me. Take a fresh towel.” But she didn’t even look up from her book; she just kept on reading.

  “Dad taught us how to bodysurf,” I told her. “Becky swallowed a lot of water.”

  “Uh-huh. Good, hon.”

  Before we left, we changed into dry clothes in one of the public changing rooms by the beach. I watched my mother dress with fascination, in complete awe of the womanliness of her body, the sharp curves of her hips and the plumpness of her breasts. I wondered how long it would take for me to be like her, to be her.

  It was Hal who eventually told us who the man in the red car was, not my mother. “Do you know who this is?” my father asked me, showing me the picture of them that Hal had brought over earlier in the day.

  “No.” I shook my head. Even though I’d thought I’d seen her the day I’d cut school, it was still a shock to see the picture. In the picture I could see her face. Her eyes were wide and bright, and she looked like she was laughing. I hadn’t seen her laugh since before Becky disappeared, and the sight of it was so strange and moving that I almost wanted to cry.

  My father leaned down to inspect the picture, as if some minute detail he might have missed the first time through would tell him everything. You’d think after what my mother had told me about Tommy, I would’ve immediately suspected her of having an affair, that this was some man she was cheating on my father with. But I didn’t. The thought didn’t even cross my mind. I didn’t think my mother was capable; she couldn’t have it in her. I’m not sure what my father suspected, but he was visibly shaken.

  It may seem strange that my father started to come apart over a picture of my mother in a car just because we didn’t recognize whom she was with. We both knew she didn’t have a car, and before Becky disappeared, no one would’ve cared or noticed what she did during the day. But we both also knew my mother was different now; everything was different now.