The September Sisters (11 page)

IT SNOWED SIX
more times between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and by Christmas break we had ended up using a total of five snow days, which was almost our district’s whole allotment for the entire school year.

After the day when Harry told us about the police not searching the field anymore till spring, the snow began to depress me. If Becky’s body really was buried in Morrow’s field the way the police thought, I knew the ground there must be terribly cold, and I wondered if she could feel it, if she knew cold the way neither one of us had known it before. This made me so sad; I couldn’t bear to watch the snow fall anymore, and I ended up spending most of the days off up in my room, reading the second
half of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Despite my own miserable failure with Mr. Barnesworth, I began to like the book as I read more. In particular, I was affected by Tom Robinson, the black man who gets convicted for a crime he didn’t commit just because he was black. As I read, I thought about Tommy and how my mother had commented on his race and how James Harper had called him Brownie on his first day of school. It made me sad for him.

One snowy day, as I was reading and I’d just gotten to the part where Tom gets convicted, I told my mother about what was going on in the book. We were lying in the living room together. She was reading a book that her doctor had suggested during therapy, something about grieving, when she looked up and asked me how my book was.

“It’s good,” I said. “It really is.” And I meant it. I really felt for Scout, for the way the adults didn’t understand her. “It’s kind of like a mystery,” I told her. And then I told her all about the whole case, about how Mayella Ewell was raped and everyone thought Tom did it just because he was black. “Even though Scout’s father proved at the trial that it would’ve been impossible for Tom to be the rapist, the jury still just convicted him,” I told her.

“Well, that’s terrible,” my mother said. “That’s just a shame.”

I was surprised by her response. I’d pictured my mother as one of those members of the jury who might deliberate and say,
Well, jeez, the evidence does make it look like he’s innocent, but still, look at him, he’s b-l-a-c-k.
“I thought you didn’t like black people,” I said.

“Abby, what are you talking about? Why would you say that?”

“Well, the way you talked about Tommy’s father, I thought—”

“What a terrible thing to say. Do you really hate me that much?”

I didn’t hate her at all, but I was trying to understand her, and I realized I had failed horribly, that I’d suddenly turned our quiet relationship into something ugly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You think you’re so smart,” she said. “Reading all your books the way you always do for that darn English class, but you don’t know anything, Abigail Reed.” She slammed her own book shut and stormed out of the room.

I felt particularly bad because I knew this wasn’t her crazy, irrational anger; this was my mother, and she was
actually, truly angry with me for the first time since Becky had disappeared.

About an hour later Tommy rang the doorbell; he was dressed in a snowsuit that made him look like an Eskimo. “Maybe we could go sledding,” he said. His hair was underneath a big black hat, and for the first time I could see every inch of his face perfectly. He looked different this way, cuter.

“I’ll ask,” I said. “You can come in if you want.” This was only the second time Tommy had ever been inside our house, and I felt a little nervous, leading him in to sit on the couch.

My mother was lying in bed. I saw her eyes were open, so I knew she was awake. She was staring out the window. “Who was at the door?” she asked before I could say anything.

“Tommy. He wants me to go sledding with him. Can I go?” I was expecting her to say no, expecting her to tell me I was grounded or she didn’t want me leaving the house. That’s what my father would’ve said if he had been here. I was sure of it.

“Just don’t sled in the street,” she said.

“I can go?”

“As long as you’re with Tommy,” she said.

It was odd the way she said it, as if she thought Tommy could protect me from something. She would’ve never let me go sledding by myself, not this year anyway. I suddenly realized the way boys were looked at differently from girls. I could have been insulted, except I wasn’t. I was excited about sledding, about leaving the house. “Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t sure this was the right thing to say.

“Abby.” She stopped me as I turned to leave. I thought she was changing her mind. “Turn off the lights on your way out.” I turned them off, and because I was thinking about sledding, I didn’t think about what it meant for my mother to be back in bed in the middle of the day in darkness.

Becky and I loved to go sledding when it snowed. The Petersons have this oddly shaped, winding hill in their side yard that’s perfect for riding down on the orange, saucer-shaped sleds our mother had bought us a few years earlier. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson told Becky and me we could use the hill to sled whenever we wanted to, and we had come to think of it as our own, an extension of our property in the winter.

Sledding was one time when we never fought (we had identical sleds) and when we laughed a lot, giddy to be home
from school and so freezing cold that we were out of our minds. We’d stay out in the snow so long that our faces would start to hurt, to feel like they were cracking, as we’d yell things to each other going down the hill. It was as if the snow had numbed our jealousy of each other, given us a break from being sisters, from having to share so much that we didn’t want to share.

“You ever been sledding?” I asked Tommy as I pulled the two orange sleds from our garage. I hesitated for a moment as I took them out of the storage area, feeling somewhat uneasy giving away Becky’s sled to Tommy. I told myself she wouldn’t mind, that she would want him to use it, but I knew that wasn’t true. Becky didn’t like anyone touching her things.

“No.”

“It’s not hard,” I told him. I handed over Becky’s sled. “Here, take this. I’ll show you.”

I led Tommy to the top of the Petersons’ hill, plopped my sled down, and sat on it. I moved back and forth, pushing the sled into the snow to start marking out my path; then I crossed my legs and put my hands onto the snowy ground. Tommy mimicked me, in this funny way. He looked uncomfortable touching the snow.

“Now you have to push off with your hands, “I said. “The first time going down is sort of slow, but once you make a path, it’ll be better.” He nodded. “Okay,” I said. “On your mark, get set, go.”

I pushed as hard as I could, and then I was going down the hill. The whole experience was magnificently freeing. Though I’d been down this hill this same way so many times in my life, it felt unbelievably new. I felt something on the way down that I hadn’t felt in so long, this tiny surge of joy.

When I got to the bottom, I stood up and looked for Tommy. He’d fallen off the sled halfway down the hill and was trying to stand up and regain his balance but kept slipping. “There you go,” I yelled. “You almost have it.” Then I watched his face as he finally made it, as he went down the hill. He looked fearless; it was a look I’d never seen from him before, something genuine and perfect.

“Good job,” I said when he reached the bottom, and I lifted up my hand to give him a high five. As he reached up to high-five me, he lost his footing, and he started to slip. He grabbed onto my hand, as a reflex, I guess, so I went down with him.

I started laughing, and then Tommy started laughing
too, and we both ended up on our backs in the snow. I rolled onto my side to look at him, and I was still laughing, but he’d stopped.

“Abigail,” he said. It was the first time anyone had ever used my full name so sweetly. I liked the way it sounded when he said it, even though usually I preferred Abby.

He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned his face close to mine, and that was when I realized he was going to kiss me. Even though I was freezing, lying in the snow, I felt my cheeks getting hot, and I could feel my heart pounding underneath all my layers. I’d thought about my first kiss so many times, imagined what it would be like with James, how his lips would feel. Jocelyn and I had spent some afternoons last year practicing kissing our hands, just in case. I remembered Jocelyn saying, over and over again, that the worst thing you could be labeled at our school was a bad kisser.

But when Tommy went to kiss me, I wasn’t thinking about any of that or about being cold or the fact that we were lying in the snow. I was just thinking about how much I wanted him to, how I wanted to know what his lips tasted like.

I leaned toward him and tilted my head a little, and
then I felt his lips on mine. His lips were much softer than I would’ve imagined and a little salty-tasting. When he kissed me, I felt this weird sort of electricity, this tingling sensation in my legs.

The kiss was short, and when he pulled back, I could see his breath, like frosting, lighting up the air. “Abigail,” he said. I smiled at him and watched my own breath like little puffs of smoke from my mother’s cigarettes. “Abigail.” And this time I instantly noticed the way his voice curled on the second syllable, as if he’d suddenly seen a ghost.

“What? What is it?”

“Are you sure they don’t mind us sledding here?”

I shook my head, feeling giddy from the kiss. “Nope, not at all. Besides, they’re at work.”

“But what about her?” He pointed to the window. I turned but saw only the curtain being drawn across the window. “The girl,” he said. “What about the girl?”

THERE WAS A
moment after Tommy kissed me when I felt warmth, when I was alive, and then Tommy’s words sank in. The Petersons didn’t have a little girl.

Tommy slipped and fell as I grabbed his hand and started running toward the Petersons’ door, and he called after me, “Abby, wait.” But the cold had made my ears numb, and as I ran, I let myself tune him out, the frosty air like cold, cold water rushing through my eardrums. Before Tommy could get up, I was ringing the doorbell, two, three, four times, then banging on the door, as hard as I could, so hard in fact that when Mr. Peterson opened the door, I almost fell.

“Abigail Reed, is that you? What is it, are you hurt?”

I was out of breath and shaking, but I managed to
say, “Where is she?” By then Tommy had reached me, and I pointed to him and said, “He saw her, a girl, in your window.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Where is she?” By this point I was crying, and the tears running down my cheeks felt so warm that I felt as if I were melting. I wiped them away because they stung and because I was embarrassed.

“Why don’t you let me walk you home?” he said, and he stepped outside even though he didn’t have his coat on and put his arm around my shoulder.

Tommy reached for my hand and pulled me hard. “It’s okay, sir,” he said. “I’ll take her home. Abigail,” he said in a whisper, “I don’t think it was her.”

I calmed down by the time Tommy and I were sitting in Mrs. Ramirez’s living room, drinking the hot chocolate she made. “Ooh, you two catch you death out there.” She shook her head.

“Grandma, please.” It surprised me that Tommy’s annoyed look was enough to get her to leave the room, but it was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who was she?”

“I don’t know. But she had very dark hair, much darker than…” I don’t think he could bring himself to say Becky’s name.

My mind wandered quickly to all sorts of places—there were hair dyes, plastic surgeons, there were people who could make you look completely different—but then I thought about how foolish I’d felt after meeting Mr. Barnesworth’s nurse. “It’s no use,” I told Tommy. “What can I do?”

“No.” He shook his head. “We are not giving up.” When I heard him say the word “we,” I felt my heart beat a little faster, the way it had when he kissed me on the hill.

Tommy and I kissed one more time before Christmas break. It was funny, the way nothing changed between us, and yet everything changed. Neither one of us said it, but I could tell that he assumed that if Mrs. Ramirez or our parents were to find out about the shift in our relationship, we would somehow be torn apart.

I knew, despite my mother’s anger when I’d implied that she didn’t like people of other races, that if she found out that Tommy and I had kissed, she’d be furious. My father would become even more overprotective. Mrs. Ramirez would be ashamed that her amazing grandson liked the
daughter of the crazy neighbors. Maybe Mrs. Ramirez would send Tommy back to Florida; maybe my father would find another “babysitter” for me. This was why we pretended that nothing had changed.

The second time we kissed was the day I took Tommy to Morrow’s field after school. It had started snowing again earlier in the day, and by the time Mrs. Ramirez picked us up from school, there was a nice white coating on the ground.

“Maybe you have off again tomorrow,” Mrs. Ramirez said to us in the car. Tommy turned and caught my eye and smiled. I felt my face beginning to turn hot, thinking about the last day off, the afternoon on the snowy hill. “Roads little bit slippery.” She hit the brakes as if to make a point, and I felt us slide. I put my hand on the door and held on tightly.

When I got home, my mother was up in her room. She was lying in bed with the TV on, and she hadn’t gotten dressed. She’d been in her room again since the snow day the week before, when I’d unintentionally insulted her. I tried to tell myself that this retreat wasn’t my fault, that it had more to do with Christmas coming up and the fact that
Becky wasn’t here, but it was hard. I started to blame myself for her behavior, and I started to despise myself just a little bit. I filled up with such self-pity that I felt like a plump helium balloon that, if let go for a second, would rise so high into the sky it would disappear.

“It’s snowing again,” I told her.

She nodded. “I know.”

“We could take a walk in the snow if you want.” This was something she used to love to do when it was snowing just a little bit. The three of us—me, her, and Becky—would take a short walk outside and point out shapes of snowflakes. The flakes would hit our faces and melt, and my mother would hold on to our hands and laugh.

“I don’t think so.” She pulled herself deeper under the covers, retreating farther and farther away from me. “Why don’t you take a walk with Tommy?”

I tried not to react when she said it. I tried to shrug and pretend like it didn’t matter to me if I walked with him. But I felt my heart start to pound at the thought of being alone with him again.

“Show me this field,” Tommy said, after we’d walked once down our street. “I want to see it.”

“I don’t know.” The truth was I was afraid of Morrow’s field. I worried that Becky really could be there somewhere: her body, or her spirit, whatever it was. I was nervous that if I went back there, she’d begin to haunt me more than she did already.

In years past Becky and I and a lot of the kids in our neighborhood played in Morrow’s field when it snowed. It is the perfect flat place to build snowmen and make snow angels on the ground. The field is surrounded on all sides by trees, so it is like this secret, hidden world. We thought of it as this semimagical place where we were far away from everything, yet oddly close too. On one side it has a tiny, slanted hill where, after a few successive snowfalls, the snow begins to build up in drifts. That was where we’d make snowballs and throw them at one another.

Last year we’d had only one big snowfall, but it was big enough to get two days off from school. Becky and I had gone back there to build a snowman, but we ended up having a snowball fight. She threw the first one at me, and I guess she was trying to be funny because she started laughing and laughing. “Shut up,” I told her. She threw another one at me, and this one hit me square in the middle of my
thigh. “Stop it.” She laughed even harder, so I started making snowballs too and throwing them at her. I was throwing them hard, harder than I even realized I could, and one hit her on the cheek.

“Ouch.” She lifted a mittened hand to touch her face. “That stings, Abby. I’m telling Mom.” She ran toward the house.

“No, wait.” I ran after her. “Becky, come on. We were just having fun.”

Becky had a red welt on her cheek that turned into a purple bruise and lingered there for days. “What were you thinking, Abigail?” my mother said to me as she put her hand to Becky’s cheek. “Why would you do this to her?”

“She started it,” I said, and I stuck my tongue out at her when I knew my mother couldn’t see me.

“Honestly, Abigail. You’re older. Act your age.” She kissed Becky’s cheek, right on the sore spot, right where I hit it. I remember thinking that I wished I’d knocked her eye out, that I wished I’d really hurt her, made her pay for everything she did to me.

The field was quiet when I went there with Tommy. I think everyone had been forbidden to play there, snow or no snow.
People were suddenly afraid of the field, the same way they were now afraid of my family, as if it too held this strange, mystical power to transform them into something ugly.

The field looked different from how I remembered it, I guessed because the police had been digging there. I think they’d tried to put the dirt back, to make it look as if nothing had ever happened there, but the snow had this weird brownish tint to it, as if it had mingled too closely with the disturbed earth.

As soon as we stepped behind the first row of trees that divided the field from my backyard, Tommy grabbed for my hand. I couldn’t feel warmth from him through the thickness of my mittens and his gloves, but his grip was firm, reassuring.

I heard the snow and the earth crunch beneath our feet, and I cringed, thinking of Becky, thinking of the cold sting of a snowball against her cheek and how that had made her run away from me.

We walked across the field until we were standing in the center. Tommy looked around. “It’s not as big as I thought it would be.”

“It’s big,” I said, thinking about how the police had spent all fall looking for Becky and had turned up nothing.
“It’s big enough so you could get lost here.”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. He faced me and put his arms around me. I could almost feel him there, through the thickness of our parkas. Our faces were close, but not touching, until he bumped his nose against mine in a way that was sweet and sincere.

“So this is it,” I said. I was talking about the field, but when it came out, it sounded like I was talking about so many other things.

That’s when he leaned in to kiss me for the second time. The kiss was longer this time. His lips lingered there for a minute, and when he pulled back, he kept his face close, so I could feel his warm breath tickling my nose.

For a second I thought about what Becky would think if she could see me. I knew she’d be insanely jealous, and she would be the one to tell my parents everything. But then I wondered if she were watching me from somewhere else, someplace near my grandma Jacobson, and if there, wherever she was, she could be happy for me, because there wouldn’t be any more jealousy. I wondered if she and Grandma Jacobson would clap their hands and hug each other and say something like “Good for her. She deserves to be happy.”

I’m not sure I was happy, standing there so close to
Tommy. But I was feeling something, and for the first time in the longest time it wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t hate myself.

“We should go back,” Tommy said. “It’s getting dark. They’ll worry.” He pulled away from me and started walking. I followed behind him, looking around the field for a moment, trying to listen for my sister’s voice.