The September Sisters

by Jillian Cantor

  One day in the middle of June, Tommy ran over to my house to tell me what his grandmother just heard when she was getting her hair done: Katie Rainey had disappeared from her bedroom the night before. Katie Rainey, the almost popular girl, whose sister had taken over my spot at the lunch table, was gone, vanished, just like Becky.

  I shook my head over and over again because I couldn’t believe it. There was another family; there was someone else. And then I started to feel a little ashamed for what I felt creeping up my body; was it joy? The feeling startled me so much that I was speechless.

  “The police are looking for her right now,” Tommy said.

  The police. I began to feel a smug sense of satisfaction when I thought about Kinney’s having to admit that my parents had had nothing to do with Becky’s disappearance after all. I imagined his big nose wrinkled up with dismay, with the realization that he had been wrong, that it was his fault Becky hadn’t been found yet.

  For the first time in months I considered that Becky could be alive. I wondered if Katie was with her, if they were together. Would Katie remind her of me? After all, we were the same age, and we used to run with the same crowd at school.

  With Katie’s disappearance there were new clues, new leads. Kinney came back to our house for the first time in months, and he spoke in hushed tones to my father in the kitchen while I tried my best to listen in. I heard that neighbors had spotted a blue truck, that some of Katie’s clothes were missing, that the screen was gone from her bedroom window.

  “It’s terrible,” my father said to me after Kinney left. “Just terrible.” His face was twisted funny, and he pulled on his mustache. I imagined that suddenly he could feel it all again, the pain of realizing Becky was gone, like a knife twisting over and over in his stomach.

  A few hours later I heard my father talking on the phone to someone I assumed was Katie’s father. “Really,” he said. “If there is anything I can do. Anything at all.”

  While the police searched for Katie, both my parents lit up just a little bit. My father decided for the first time since my mother had left that it was time to clean the house, and he moved out all the furniture and had me do the dusting and vacuuming. My mother had a little makeup on when I went to visit her at her apartment, and for the first time in a long time she wasn’t smoking. “Oh, those poor people,” she said to me, sucking in her breath as she said it, but I wondered if like me, she felt hope, a sense that everything could be all right again.

  One evening about two weeks after Katie had disappeared, my father called me into the kitchen. “Look,” he said, pointing out the window. “Look over there. Do you see that?”

  I saw something moving between Morrow’s field and our yard, only I couldn’t make out its shape. “I think it’s a deer,” I said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s a person. There’s a person in our yard.”

  I felt something catch in the back of my throat and then the brisk pounding of my heart. For an instant I thought I could believe him, that it could be Becky, back from a yearlong trip, unharmed and no worse for wear.

  I followed him out the back door across the yard. He ran so quickly that I almost couldn’t keep up with him. “Hello,” he called. “Anybody there?”

  Then I heard a bark, and I stopped right where I was. The dog came out a little, and I could see her. She was medium size with longish fur that was matted down probably from weeks of being on her own. My father sat down in the grass and put his head in his hands. The dog rolled over onto her back and put her paws in the air.

  “Look. She likes you,” I said.

  “Goddamn dog,” he said.

  “She looks sweet.” I walked up to her and let her sniff my hand. Becky and I had always wanted a pet, but our parents never let us. My mother was allergic to cats, and my father thought that dogs were too much work. When we were younger, we’d dreamed of having something furry and cuddly we could play with. “Can we keep her?” I said.

  “What, Ab?”

  “The dog. We should keep the dog.”

  He shook his head. “She’s a stray.”

  “Look how thin she is.” You could see the outline of her ribs across her chest. “I’ll take care of her. I’ll do all the work and everything. You won’t even know she’s here.” I suddenly wanted the dog so badly, more than I wanted anything else.

  “I don’t know, Ab.”

  From my father, this was a yes, so I hugged him. “You won’t regret it,” I told him.

  “We’ll have to take her to a vet. She could have rabies.”

  When I thought of rabies, I thought about raccoons foaming at the mouth, not about skinny, needy dogs. “She’s fine,” I said. “She doesn’t have rabies.”

  “Still,” he said. “We’ll put her in the basement until then. I don’t want her walking around the house.”

  I was so thrilled that he was letting me keep the dog that I didn’t care. I thought about what Becky would think if she could see me. I knew she’d be insanely jealous, crazy over the fact that we hadn’t been allowed to have a dog when she lived here.

  I put the dog in the basement, and once I started petting her and gave her some leftover hamburger from dinner, she came over and snuggled up with me. It was such a nice closeness, so simple. She already loved me, and I’d given her almost nothing.

  The dog became as much Tommy’s as she was mine. He too had never been allowed a pet, so he was thrilled when he saw her. He went with me to walk her every day (I, of course, wasn’t allowed to go alone), and he liked to come over just to sit with her. He was even the one who helped me come up with her name, Tabby, a combination of Tommy and Abby. She was just this kind creature who wanted nothing more than to love us, even when no one else did.

  Katie Rainey was gone nearly a month before the police found her. Kinney didn’t call my father to tell him what had happened. One evening, as my father and I watched the news during dinner, Katie came in as a breaking story. She was found safely in New York City with her boyfriend. As it turns out, she’d run away with him, intentionally left her family behind.

  My father’s face drained of color as the newscaster recounted the details. It took him a minute before he said it. “Well, thank goodness she’s safe.”

  I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t want to say out loud what I knew we both were thinking. Everything was still ruined; Becky wasn’t coming back.

  Chapter 27

  ONE YEAR TO the day that Becky disappeared, my father stayed home from work. He lit candles in the kitchen and played Becky’s favorite Christmas songs on his record player. It was weird because it kind of felt like a memorial service.

  I sat with him in the kitchen for a while and thought about the fact that I could almost forget the sound of Becky’s voice echoing through the upstairs hallway, could forget that something like that had ever existed.

  For the anniversary, as my mother called it, she and Garret planted flowers in a public garden near her apartment. She called and invited me to go with them, but I told her I thought I shouldn’t, that someone needed to stay with my father.

  “Of course, sweetie,” she said. “I understand.” But I knew she really didn’t. Her voice had this sad, hectic lilt to it, so I could tell she was really hyper but on the verge of being depressed.

  “It’s just that you have Garret,” I told her. “Dad has no one.”

  “You don’t need make me feel guilty, Ab. I’m not the enemy here.”

  “I know,” I said. I hadn’t been trying to make her feel guilty necessarily, though I did think she deserved it.

  “How’s he doing?” she asked.

  “Not good. He’s lighting candles in the kitchen.”

  “Your father is lighting candles?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He keeps it all bottled up,” she said. “He never talks about anything.”

  “He talks.” But I knew this wasn’t true. I just felt the need to defend my father, to make my mother see that he was be
tter than Garret.

  “He should see Dr. Shreiker. He’s been doing wonders for me.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “He’ll be fine.” I didn’t think my father would ever see a therapist. It wasn’t his thing. He was good at putting on a sane outer appearance, even if he was going crazy inside.

  “He’s always too darn fine.” We were both silent for a minute. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about him. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  “Okay.” It was a promise I meant to keep.

  “You take care of him then, Ab. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  I didn’t ask my mother what kind of flowers she and Garret planned on planting, though for some reason I guessed it would be roses. I thought roses were the perfect flowers for Becky, thorny and beautiful all at once, their deep red color so vibrant that when you walked by they would assault you. That was Becky.

  I guess it wasn’t fair of my mother to ask me to take care of my father. It should’ve been the other way around; they should’ve been taking care of me. But I was past being angry about this, and I just started to accept my role as another fact, another normal part of my life.

  “What did your mother want?” my father asked when I went back down to the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” I lied.

  “What’s she doing today?”

  “Planting flowers,” I said, intentionally leaving out the part about Garret.

  “Flowers,” he said. “Your mother always loved flowers.” I thought he was going to bring up the carnations I’d given her, and for a moment I felt embarrassed, but he didn’t mention it, and he had this sort of dreamy faraway look in his eyes.

  Years ago my mother had had a garden in the backyard in a corner behind the pool. She planted all kinds of flowers—roses and azaleas and marigolds. In the spring her little garden would bloom up so nice—oranges, yellows, reds, pinks. It gave our yard a whole different look, made it something special.

  But the spring after Grandma Jacobson died, she stopped taking care of it, and all the flowers died, shriveled into brown eyesores in the back of our yard. Sometimes when I look out there, I miss the flowers so much it surprises me, this deep aching sadness for them.

  “It doesn’t seem like only a year, does it?” my father said. I shook my head. It felt like a lifetime, an entirely different universe. “She’s not coming back, is she?”

  At first I thought he meant my mother, but then I realized he was talking about Becky. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re all I’ve got left, Ab.” He reached out for my hand and squeezed it.

  For some reason this frightened me. It made me feel too fragile, as if I too could disappear at any moment.

  A few hours later my father blew out the candles and went outside to sit on the patio. “There’s something about being out there,” he said. “I feel closer to her.”

  I knew my father’s closeness to Becky was imaginary, but sitting out there made him feel better, so I pretended not to notice. “That’s a good idea,” I told him. “I’m going to take Tabby for a walk.”

  I took Tabby next door to pick up Tommy, and the three of us walked around the neighborhood. “My grandma told me,” Tommy said, “about today.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said, though suddenly I felt like crying. It was strange, the way I could be so calm in front of my parents, but when I talked to Tommy, I wanted to break.

  “My father left on a Thursday,” Tommy said, “sometime in August. I don’t remember the exact date, though. I didn’t think about it at the time.”

  I nodded and handed him Tabby’s leash. She’d been pulling me to go faster, and I didn’t feel like keeping up. “Here, you take her.”

  “I didn’t think I would have to remember it a year later. I thought he’d be back in a few days.”

  “It doesn’t seem real,” I said. “This stuff happens in books, not in real life.” Tabby barked and surged ahead, pulling Tommy with her. I had to take big strides just to keep up.

  “What is it, Tabby? What is it, girl?” Tabby rarely barked. I knew this was her defense mechanism, something she did if she was frightened.

  “Maybe she saw a bird,” I said, “or a rabbit.” I’m not sure what she saw, but she started running faster, pulling Tommy and me behind her. She ran and ran until we got to the large open space of Morrow’s field, and then she stopped and started sniffing the air. “She smells something,” I said. Tommy was breathing heavy, and he had to hang his head down just to catch his breath.

  For a moment I wondered if Tabby was an amazing dog, some sort of superhero that would stop right there and find Becky. I imagined her digging up something horrible like a bone, or sniffing out Becky’s scent, or taking us to the spot where she was buried. But she wasn’t Lassie. And after a few minutes of sniffing, Tabby lay on the grass and started panting, out of breath from her run. “We should take her back and get her some water,” I said.

  “Let’s sit down first.” Tommy sat on the ground next to Tabby, and I sat next to them. “There’s a whole world out here,” Tommy said, “just behind the neighborhood.” I thought of the first time I’d taken Tommy to Morrow’s field, and I thought about the way he’d kissed me and made me feel something for the first time in the longest time.

  I reached over for his hand because I needed something solid to hold on to. And he let me sit there and hold it for just a few minutes. There was something peaceful about the whole thing, sitting like that in the sun with Tommy and Tabby, and I felt this moment of warmth, the sudden feeling that everything would be okay.

  After a few minutes of quiet, Tabby started sniffing the air again and barking, and she jumped up and started running back toward my house. “What’s wrong with her today?” I said.

  “Dogs know. They can sense when things aren’t right.”

  Tommy and I ran after her, and I wondered if what he said was true, if Tabby knew that there was something different about this day.

  Once we got through the clearing and entered my yard, I saw what Tabby had been barking at. There was smoke coming from our back patio. My father was sitting on my mother’s smoking chair, a bowl sitting in front of him with its contents on fire and smoking.

  “What the heck?” Tommy said. “What’s he doing?”

  I shook my head and ran toward my father. Tabby was still barking and running around in circles by my feet now.

  “Jesus,” my father said. “Get that mutt to stop yapping, will you?”

  Tommy and I exchanged glances. I could tell he was thinking what I was, that Tabby might be a mixed breed, but she was no mutt. Still, Tommy and I stood back and watched as my father threw pictures into the flaming bowl.

  “What are you doing, Dad?” I finally said.

  “Cleaning. Getting rid of things.”

  I went closer and saw he had a shoe box of pictures next to him; most of the pictures were of Becky and me, and then some of him and my mother. I recognized the box. My mother had kept it in their bedroom, and she’d always said she was going to make it into a scrapbook; only she never did. It was one of those things she never got around to, like signing Becky up for voice lessons. My first reaction was to be surprised that she hadn’t taken these pictures with her. Then I realized what my father was doing, destroying my whole life, my history. “Stop it.” I grabbed the box from him. “Stop.”

  “Ab, give those back.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not letting you burn these. I want them.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “If I want to burn them. I’ll burn them.”

  “Mr. Reed,” Tommy said. His voice sounded higher than usual, and it cracked on my father’s name.

  “Tommy, stay out of this. Why don’t you go home? And take that stupid dog with you.”

  But Tommy didn’t move, and neither did Tabby. She just kept barking. I think both Tommy and I were frozen for a moment. But I knew I didn’t want my father to burn those pictures, s
o before he could take the box back from me, I turned around and started running as fast as I could, back toward Morrow’s field. I wasn’t sure where I was going, only that I had to get away from him, that I couldn’t let him take anything else from me.

  “Abby,” I heard my father yell after me. “Abby, get back here. Oh, for Christ’s sake.” But I didn’t turn around or slow down or anything. I just ran as fast as I could with the pictures, through the field to the other side, to the neighborhood on the other side of it. I must’ve run a half mile before I stopped to catch my breath, and then, as I stopped to breathe, I realized I was crying. I almost couldn’t distinguish between the sweat and the tears on my face because they both were there, blending together, and I could feel them both, but strangely, I also felt nothing.

  Before I knew it, Tommy ran up behind me. “You can really run for a girl.” He was out of breath and panting the way Tabby did when she needed water.

  “Where’s Tabby?”

  “I put her in your house.”

  “Why did you do that?” I felt myself getting hysterical, thinking that if my father could burn pictures, could destroy an entire life, he would think nothing of hurting a dog.

  “She’s fine,” Tommy said. “She’ll be fine.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “You can come home with me. My grandma is cooking menudo. We can look at your pictures.”

  I didn’t say anything, but when he reached his hand out, I took it.

  Mrs. Ramirez didn’t ask why I was staying for dinner or why I had a box of pictures with me or even why I’d been crying. I heard her go into the other room to call my father and tell him I was there, but I also heard her say, “Let her stay, Jim. Maybe some menudo do her good.”

  “Let’s go upstairs and look at the pictures,” Tommy said. I followed him blindly up to his room.

  We sat on Tommy’s bed, and I finally let go of the box. He started taking out pictures and asking me questions: “Who’s this?” and “What are you doing here?” and so on.