Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  “I’m Abby,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me.

  “Goddamn kids. I called the police, but you know they won’t do a thing about it. If it were up to me, I’d just send Charlie on down there with his gun.”

  She turns, rabbits marching, back toward her house, without saying good-bye. I’ve seen Charlie huffing around their lawn in summer, squirting weed killer on the dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace, and I don’t like to imagine him with a gun. Still, as I go back into the house, I understand some of my neighbor’s anger. When I was a girl, my grandmother told me how it surprised her whenever she looked—really looked—into a mirror. It’s not how I feel, she said, but I did not understand. Now I stand in front of the oval mirror hanging beside the French doors. My hair is brittle-looking; the skin beneath my eyes looks bruised. At five months, my pregnancy shows enough to make me look potbellied, though Adam says that isn’t true. Dirty-looking freckles have erupted across the backs of my hands, my chest, the bridge of my nose. One long worry wrinkle runs parallel with my eyebrows. This is not the way I feel.

  I often wonder what Sam would look like today, whether or not I would recognize him. At twenty-nine, he’d probably be getting our family’s slumped shoulders and the beginnings of a receding hairline. Of course, if he was trying not to be recognized, he’d keep his blond hair dyed brown or black, though perhaps his hair would have changed naturally, turning reddish like my mother’s. A few years ago, my mother and Auntie Thil were spending a day at the Wisconsin Dells when they saw a man with a long red beard who looked so familiar that my mother followed him from souvenir stand to souvenir stand, fingering T-shirts and postcards and mugs, until she heard his voice. “That fellow had a deep voice,” she told Auntie Thil when she found her again. “Sam talked through his nose.”

  “Didn’t Sam have a deep voice?” Auntie Thil said.

  “No, he didn’t,” my mother said. And then she got very upset. “I’m his mother! Don’t you think I would remember a thing like that?”

  Later, when Auntie Thil told me the story, I could hear my mother’s voice rising above the sound of the falls, see the other tourists moving gently away, parents clutching their children’s hands.

  Laverne scratches on the door, and when I open it to let her in, I hear cars revving at the end of the street, bellowing male laughter, and a long, shrill wail that could be a teenage girl’s giddy joy or else a cry for help. Which? The music swells again, and I can’t hear anything else. Laverne hops up on the counter, butts her head against my hand. She knows that I don’t have the heart to chase her off the way Adam would. But Adam isn’t here, and I decide to walk down into the ravine, just to make sure I know the difference between the sounds of pleasure and pain. As I pull on my coat, all the warnings about walking alone at night play in my mind like a symphony, brief and discordant. What if there’s someone hiding in the weeds? What if I were to take a wrong step, tumble into the open mouth of the ravine? But then, what if I am swallowing too many vitamins? What if, at this very moment, my cells are tingling with the radioactive kiss of a bomb detonated years ago? This is what Adam does not understand. No matter what we do, no matter how we plan, anything might happen at any given moment, and that moment will always be the one you least suspect—in the dark span of an eye blink, in the crick of a turned-away head, in the moment after you first awaken and realize that none of this is a dream.

  The moon is so bright that I cast a shadow until I move beneath the sheltering arms of the trees that line the ravine. The music rumbles in my chest, in my throat, in the bones of my feet; bonfires flicker between the trees. When I stop to look back toward the house, all I can see are the windows. As children, Sam and I sneaked out into the cornfields at night, following parallel rows, zapping each other between cornstalks with the beams from our flashlights. Now and then we’d look back to see the porch light, a beacon reminding us where we belonged, calling us home. Once, I turned off my flashlight and waited, invisible and silent, as Sam’s beam licked at the stalks around me, disappeared up into the sky. Where are you? he called. Are you OK? I heard him thrashing farther and farther away from me, his voice growing higher, shrill.

  I’m not KIDDING! WHERE ARE YOU?

  Still I did not move, did not breathe, until his light winked out and left only the stars to watch over us. Why are you so mean? he sobbed, again and again. I crouched, hugging my knees, trying not to laugh and trying not to cry, every nerve in my body tingling, tingling. I mattered, I was needed. I was important to my brother.

  At the foot of the ravine, the fires are giving off a cloud of thick, sweet smoke. Thirty or forty high school kids are standing around in groups, dancing close in the fallen leaves, their bodies weaving single silhouettes. A boom box is balanced in the low crook of a tree. Above it, girls sway in the branches, slapping at each other and laughing, and I realize I’ve discovered the source of the scream. If I called up to them and told them I had come out of concern, they would not understand. Don’t worry about us, they might say, annoyance clouding their clear voices. Nothing’s going to happen to us.

  I walk around the outskirts of the bonfires, negotiating this odd sense of invisibility and remembering similar high school parties in Horton, on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. As soon as it was dark, cars began to line the winding dirt road, trunks packed with coolers of beer. Everyone drank and talked and wandered around the bonfires, the wood smoke clinging to our clothes and hair; I could smell it even after I got home and showered and slipped, still reeling, into bed. There was music in this too, a dizzying melody, and I wanted to get up and go downstairs to the piano and sound everything out: the craziness of the dancing, the brush of a boy’s cold cheeks, his impossibly warm mouth. Now I watch the faces of the girls, their lips and cheeks done up in red and pink, the forced colors of cheer. I watch their darting eyes and the way they use their hands when they speak, painting the air around themselves, weaving invisible cocoons. I watch the boys, the way they walk with their hips tugging them in the direction they want to go, their heads and shoulders bobbing smoothly behind as if innocent, simply along for the ride, and I remember waking up in my bedroom after coming home from one of those parties, cotton-headed, confused. It was the ninth of August, four days after Sam’s official disappearance on August fifth, four days before I’d be interviewed by detectives investigating incidents at Dr. Neidermier’s and the drive-in and Becker’s Foodmart, investigating an assault on Geena Baumbach of Oneisha. Boys were moving from the door to the window, led by the sleek pull of their hips. One of them—Sam—went through my jewelry box. One of them opened my purse, which was slung over the back of my rocking chair. One of them bent over me and began to stroke my hair. “What a nice ring you’re wearing,” he said, exaggerating his politeness. “Can I have it?” From a faraway place in my mind, I watched myself twist Elise’s ring off my finger. There is no room for this in my mother’s careful memories. There is no place for this in her longing for Sam’s return. I never told; how could I? How could I be the one to finally break my mother’s heart?

  The music stops, and the yodel of a police siren billows unevenly through the air, bouncing off the sides off the ravine so it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. Bodies scatter wildly into the brush, and I’m caught up in their panic and running too, clumsily climbing over fallen logs, branches whipping my face. The cops! we’d call to each other, and suddenly everyone would be scrambling down the side of the bluff, fighting for a foothold, the evening’s dizzy drunkenness evaporating like mist. Then would come the long, aching silence, the crunch of footsteps on gravel overhead as we clung to the slender trees growing out from the side of the bluff, praying to Blessed Jesus that they wouldn’t give way. Below, the lake sparkled diamonds in the distance, but all we could think of was the rocks directly below us and the murmur of gulls disturbed from their sleep and the cops’ yellow beams stroking the leaves only inches from our faces.

  I cannot imagine that the cops here tonight are muc
h different from the cops I remember from Wisconsin. They all have their badges and billy clubs, their crisp uniforms and questions, a heavy walk that means Do what I say. Sam had disappeared before, sometimes for several days; and each time, they found him, or else didn’t find him; but either way, he always ended up back home. Once, my mother found things missing—money, a tiny silver picture frame, her watch—but when Sam came in to breakfast his first morning back, it was as if she had forgotten these things had ever existed.

  “Good morning,” she sang as he sat down at the table. His eyes were like poison, and he kept them fixed on his cereal bowl. My father no longer addressed him directly; instead, he talked to the sugar dish, or the newspaper he was reading, or our ancient cat, Rose, who still loved Sam and struggled arthritically into his lap. “So he’s finally come back from God knows where,” he muttered to the ceiling, but Sam just blinked his poison eyes—he didn’t speak to my father at all, directly or indirectly. Rose purred and purred, pushing the top of her head into his hand. I watched that hand, waiting for it to respond, and I knew something had been lost in Sam when it did not.

  But how easily things might have been different! When the police asked their halting questions, my mother simply gave them the answers that should have been true. Sam had had his moments, like any teenage boy, she said, but he had no special difficulties, there were no fights at home. The friends and relatives who said otherwise were betraying Sam at the very time he needed them most; the truth was what you made it, and it was only by stating these things to strangers that they became terrible, unalterable fact. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. So I kept silent about the night that Sam came into my bedroom with his friends, looking for money, jewelry, anything they could sell. “So, Sam-boy, this is your sister,” said the one who was stroking my hair. He looked older than Sam, and he had the knife Mrs. Baumbach would later describe: a leather grip, an odd tip curved like a question mark. “She isn’t going to breathe a word of this, is she? Your sister can keep a secret,” and he moved his hand over my shoulders and gown, lightly, as if he were soothing a child. Sam had my confirmation locket, the birthstone necklace my father had given me. “You got anything else?” was the last thing he said, but I was too scared to answer. Abruptly the one standing over me straightened, and then they were gone, filing out into the hallway, leaving only the smell of their cigarette smoke, and a bitter cologne I’ve never encountered since. For years, I worried I’d come home to find Sam waiting beside my door, or rummaging through my jewelry box, or pointing a gun to my head. I worried that someone would discover the part of me that hoped my brother would never be found.

  I cross our lawn and sit on the steps that lead up to our deck, trying to catch my breath. Clouds have dimmed the moon to a quiet star, and the wind rises, shivering in the branches of the apple trees. I wonder why I was running in the first place—I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I heard the music, I practice saying. I was concerned. I came out to investigate. Still, I am afraid as I listen to the cops thrashing through the trees below me, and when I see the glow of a flashlight moving in my direction, I stand up quickly and prepare my face, because this is what you do when the police ask you questions. You smile, a big, wide, friendly smile. You ask if you can be of any help. You assure them that, regardless of appearances, everything is really all right.

  Seven

  Halloween is Adam’s favorite holiday, and this year he’s offered to take Pat’s girls around our neighborhood during official trick-or-treating hours at dusk. Pat lives above her antique store on a busy street in downtown Cobblestone; her neighbors are a hardware store, a liquor store, a gas station. But our streets are quiet, the houses set close together, the neighborhood windows plastered with cutouts of black cats and witches riding on brooms. Even our next-door neighbor Charlie hung a homemade ghost from the corner of the house, his wife calling shrill instructions as she held on to the stepladder. This morning, when I look out our bedroom window, I can see the white sheet flapping in the wind, its Magic Marker mouth stuck in a wide, pitiful howl. I want to walk over and pull it down, put the poor thing out of its misery. I don’t like Halloween. There’s something unnerving about skeletons in the grocery store, bats suspended from the ceiling at work, hay-stuffed corpses sprawled on people’s lawns. I’m hoping we’ll get by with a simple smiling jack-o’-lantern, but no such luck. Adam goes out to get one and, when he returns, the truck bed is filled with a dozen of the ugliest pumpkins I’ve ever seen. He carries them into the kitchen one by one, proudly, as if they’re trophies.

  “I’m going to carve them for tonight, surprise the girls,” he says. “You want to help?”

  Laverne eyes the pumpkins suspiciously. My expression is probably the same.

  “How much did all this cost?”

  “Next to nothing, can you believe it?” Adam says. “They’re irregulars. Carl Jaeger let me have the lot for twenty bucks.”

  “Carl Jaeger should have paid you twenty bucks to take them,” I say, staring at the odd shapes, the warty cheeks and splintered stumps.

  “Wait and see,” Adam says. “I have an idea. The girls are going to love it.”

  So I cover the linoleum with old newspapers, and we sit cross-legged on the floor, the history of the past months spread between us. Adam pulls the first of the pumpkins into his lap; he holds it steady against his knees, wiping its face with a warm wet cloth. He is gentle about this task, turning the pumpkin’s face from side to side the way one might turn a child’s face, alert for dirty ears, smudges, sleeping sand. My lap is already filled with my stomach, which is about the size of the next-to-smallest pumpkin—big enough to have made my descent to the kitchen floor unwieldy. Big enough so that strangers are starting to notice. Some make predictions: Most say it’s a girl. Adam and I have told my doctor we don’t want to know in advance.

  My mother is predicting a healthy boy with my almond-shaped eyes and her own mother’s smile. A boy just like my brother. She believes it’s no coincidence that my revised due date—January fifth—is the day before Sam’s birthday. “The doctor says that’s just an estimate,” I say. “It could be born in December, or as late as the middle of January.”

  “Or January sixth,” my mother says. “Stranger things have happened.”

  She looks for signs in everything. She claims burning bushes are everywhere and that most of us just haven’t learned how to see them. Last Saturday night, when she and Auntie Thil joined hands with the other members of their women’s prayer group, they saw a little boy, dressed in an infant’s snow-white baptismal gown, walking up the long gravel driveway toward our house in Horton. This, she called to tell me, was the child I will have. Sam coming home like the prodigal son.

  She says, “Have you thought about naming the baby after Sam?”

  Adam outlines a pair of squinting eyes, a mouth that badly needs a dentist. There’s nothing he likes better than transforming an idea into something concrete. Every day as I drive to work, I pass things he has made, places where he’s left his mark: this new porch, that refurbished farmhouse, a delicate gazebo tucked between the trees. He’s planning another sculpture for our side yard. Inside the house, he rearranges our furniture. He paints and papers and plans. As my belly swells, he touches me—the small of my back, the indentations behind my knees—as if he is evaluating my structural integrity, longing to make improvements: a pillow, supportive hose, sturdier shoes. He reminds me to take my calcium supplements. He fusses over how much or how little I sleep. Is there anything I can do? he asks. Is there anything you need?

  He holds his pumpkin in front of his face. “What do you think?” he says from behind it.

  “Scary,” I say.

  He lowers it, looks at it closely. “You think so?” he says. “Scared, maybe.”

  “Aren’t you going to make any happy ones?”

  He chooses another knife. “You can make the happy ones,” he says.

  But my first jack-o’-lantern wi
ll turn out sad; I can already tell by its flat, scarred cheeks, complete with tear-shaped blight marks. I cut open its forehead, and there’s that pumpkin smell—rich, mildewy, dank, the odor of sealed, dark boxes, the odor of secret things. I separate the seeds into the wooden bowl for baking; the orange goo goes into the compost bucket. My mother doesn’t put her faith in things like supportive hose and vitamin tablets, what she calls quick fixes. The power of prayer will smooth the ache out of my tired back, reduce the swelling of my ankles better than elevation. The day she called me to say her group had prayed for my ankles, I got the giggles.

  She sighed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a funny thing to imagine.”

  “Abby, when is it we remember to pray?” she said in her practiced businesswoman’s voice. “When things are going OK? No, it’s when we have problems that we remember God and turn to Him. That’s why He sends us these little hardships.”

  “God’s talking to me through my ankles?”

  “Don’t laugh,” my mother said, but she laughed a little herself.

  My jack-o’-lantern is an unhappy disaster. The mouth is lopsided, the left corner slicing too far down into its chin. One eye is smaller than the other. I turn it around for Adam to see.

  “It’s much scarier than mine,” he says.

  I’m surprised. “But it isn’t scary.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  We are looking at the same thing—how can we see it so differently? Adam squints one eye, widens the other, mimicking my pumpkin’s expression. I nail him with a glob of pulp, and he whips back a handful of cold, wet seeds. When I yelp, the baby shivers sympathetically. Adam says it’s bigger than the length of an outstretched hand. He reads all the brochures I bring home from the doctor; he even gets books at the library. There is nothing Adam loves better than a technical word, crisp in the mouth like a fresh stick of gum. Conduit, carburetor, compressor. Parturition, gestation, lactation. The baby, Adam reminds me, is developing according to the genetic blueprint we carry within our own cells. It is immune to my mother’s prayers and premonitions. Visions of little boys dressed all in white.