The September Sisters (19 page)

I felt his lips moving over mine, his tongue pushing slowly into my mouth, and it all felt perfect and warm and so nice. I knew it wasn’t the same thing, but I thought it felt the way sex was supposed to, like there was this whole new
completeness that I hadn’t even known existed before that.

When Mrs. Ramirez knocked on the door, we both jumped and as a reflex moved to opposite sides of the bed. “Dinner, kids,” she called.

“We’ll be there in a minute,” Tommy said. I instantly thought she would know what we’d been doing. His voice had cracked, and he’d sounded as if he were choking for air. But if she knew, she didn’t let on, because I heard her turn around and walk back down the stairs.

I was suddenly embarrassed, and I didn’t know how to look at him. He reached over and squeezed my hand. “I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you too.”

It was something I knew the adults around us would never understand or believe. But I believed it when he said it. I knew he meant it.

It turns out that menudo is really cow stomach, something I didn’t know until after I had some. Then I started to feel sick, but luckily Mrs. Ramirez wasn’t offended. She was convinced that the day had taken its toll on me. “Maybe you go home and go sleep,” she said.

But I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to face my father.
For a few moments up in Tommy’s bedroom I had allowed myself this fantasy that I was loved, that life could be something amazing. I wasn’t ready to let that go.

“It been hard year.” Mrs. Ramirez shook her head. She was talking more to herself than to either me or Tommy, so we both kept quiet. “May God pray for us.” She bowed her head and started whispering things under her breath. I looked at Tommy, but he just shrugged.

“We’re going to go watch TV, Grandma.” She waved at us to go but didn’t miss a beat with her prayers.

“Does she do that a lot?” I asked him, remembering the time in my living room when she tried to get me to pray for Becky.

“Sometimes. On and off. Like she’s religious when she feels like it.”

“Does it work then if you don’t do it all the time?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t believe it anyways.”

“Neither do I.”

“It’s like if praying worked, then why do bad things even happen?”

We went back up to Tommy’s room, and I put the rest of my pictures back in the box. “You can leave these here if
you want,” Tommy said. “I’ll take care of them for you.”

“Thanks.” I knew he would.

“I’ll keep them on the high shelf in my closet. No one looks up there. Grandma can’t even reach that high. They’ll be safe.”

I handed him the box. “I know. I know they will be.”

“What are you going to say to your father?”

“Nothing. Probably we’ll forget the whole thing ever happened.”

“You won’t forget,” he said.

I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. I felt myself starting to hate my father and my mother as well. I knew my anger toward them was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. They both were destroying my life in their own way.

He took the box of pictures and pushed it up onto the high shelf. “There,” he said.

“Thanks.” And I didn’t just mean for the pictures. I meant for everything, for the kiss.

Tommy came back and sat down next to me on the bed. “Do you know if my father hadn’t left and your sister hadn’t disappeared, we probably never would’ve met.”

“Even if we had,” I said, “it wouldn’t have been the same.” If Becky had still been here, Tommy would’ve
been my obligation, someone I was forced to be kind to because my mother made me, someone whom Jocelyn and I would’ve secretly made fun of. I felt kind of bad just thinking about it.

“My mother always says that everything happens for a reason. It’s such a stupid thing to say, though, you know?”

I nodded. “My grandma Jacobson used to say that all the time. I always thought it was something that old people said to make themselves feel better.”

“Does it make you feel better to think that?”

I shook my head. “No, not really. You?”

“Nah. I guess not.” Tommy leaned over and hugged me, holding me so close to him that I could feel his breath against my neck. We sat there and hugged each other for a while, neither one of us saying a word. We didn’t have to.

When I got home, my father was sitting in the living room watching TV, Tabby curled up at his feet.

“She’s a good dog,” he said when I walked in.

I nodded. “I know.”

“We should’ve gotten a dog years ago.”

I didn’t point out that Becky and I once begged him for a dog for what seemed like weeks after one of her friends
from school had gotten a terrier puppy and brought it in for show-and-tell. I didn’t remind him that he had a theory about children and dogs, that the two didn’t belong together because children just weren’t responsible. Everything was different now; it was a whole new world.

THE SECOND FALL
when school began again, I was just Abigail Reed. People had other things to talk about. Katie Rainey was an instant celebrity, being that she had both successfully run away and had a boyfriend who was old enough to drive. James Harper had lost his middle toe over the summer after getting his foot caught under a lawn mower. He’d spent weeks in the hospital and lost a lot of blood, and apparently it was touch and go for a while. But he was there, on crutches (and missing a toe), for the first day of school. I was old news.

Tommy began the year at the high school, so it was lonely at lunch. He turned fifteen two weeks before school started, and Mrs. Ramirez gave him a bike and a helmet for
his birthday. He rode the bike to school most mornings, and he was supposed to walk it home with me, but often I ended up walking by myself as he sped away on the bike with two new boys he met at the high school. It was as if he’d already forgotten our summer, and I suddenly felt more angry with him than I did with my parents.

On my fourteenth birthday my mother came over to the house for dinner. It was the first time the three of us had eaten together in months, and quite possibly the first time my parents had spoken to each other since the spring. It was my mother’s idea. She called me the week before and told me to tell my father she was coming. “Nothing fancy,” she said. “But I thought it would be nice for you, sweetie.”

My father picked up a pizza on the way home and opened a bottle of red wine that he and my mother shared. “To Abigail.” My father lifted his glass and touched it to my mother’s. There was this awkward moment of silence where I waited for my mother to add
and Becky too
, but she said nothing. She smiled at me. “Happy birthday, Ab,” my father said.

“You’re getting so old,” my mother said. “I can’t believe it. It seems like just yesterday when you were born.” She shook her head.

I didn’t feel right celebrating my birthday. It wasn’t like the year before, when we all were just waiting for Becky to come home. This year we knew she wasn’t, so we pretended that she had never existed at all, that she wouldn’t be turning twelve the next day. I wished that we’d just ignored my birthday too, that we’d pretended it hadn’t even happened. I felt this enormous weight of guilt hanging in my chest; it was a suffocating feeling, something that made me want to gag on my pizza or to stop breathing altogether. But I ate because I didn’t want to upset either of my parents.

I could tell my father was excited to have my mother at dinner. He kept staring at her and offering her more food and wine, which she took. I think they both got a little drunk, because by the time we’d finished dinner, my parents’ cheeks were rosy and they were laughing. When my father reached out his hand for my mother, she took it. Then she shook his hand and said, “Oh, Jim, really.” And she giggled. I felt a sudden surge of hope. Maybe my mother had gotten her depression out of her system. Maybe she would move back in. Maybe even without Becky we could be complete again, something real, a family.

But my mother let go of my father’s hand as quickly as she’d grabbed it and started gulping her wine, and my
father, looking suddenly wounded, turned away so he didn’t have to meet my eyes.

Tommy and Mrs. Ramirez showed up at the door with fourteen pink balloons just before we were ready for cake. “Happy birthday, Ah-bee-hail.” Mrs. Ramirez kissed me on the cheek.

“Here.” Tommy handed me the balloons. “Happy birthday.” I nodded but tried not to make eye contact with him.

My father had invited them without telling me, which made me feel a little annoyed. Things had been so strange with Tommy and me since school started that when I saw him standing there, I felt a little sick to my stomach. I was angry with him for ignoring me.

“Ooh. Everybody here today.” Mrs. Ramirez walked in and gave my mother a hug. “Long time no see.” My mother didn’t answer her, but she accepted the hug.

“Where’s Tabby?” Tommy asked. He hadn’t been over since school started, and I’d been walking Tabby by myself lately, though my father thought I was still walking her with Tommy.

“She’s in the basement.” I nodded toward the door. “Go ahead. She’ll be happy to see you.” I didn’t mean to say it
accusingly to make him feel guilty or anything, but it kind of came out that way.

“Oh, bring her upstairs,” my mother said. “I’ve been dying to meet this infamous Tabby. I can’t believe your father let you keep that dog. Really, Jim, you surprise me.”

My father shrugged. “I’ll get the cake.”

Tommy brought Tabby upstairs, and then we all sat at the table. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to me. It was strange; I felt like I was watching the whole thing in slow motion, like it was one big cartoon or something. It didn’t seem real that all these people were here for me and that they were singing. When the singing stopped, I blew out the candles, but I didn’t make a wish. I no longer believed in wishes.

After we had cake, I asked Tommy if he wanted to take Tabby out for a walk, partly because being in the house with everyone there was starting to make me feel suffocated and partly because I really wanted to see him alone.

We took Tabby around the block and walked in silence for a few minutes, but when Tabby stopped to sniff a tree, I looked Tommy square in the eye and said what I was really thinking. “Why have you been ignoring me?”

He shoved his hands into his pocket and stomped his feet a little, as if trying to stay warm, but it was still mild outside, so I think he was really just nervous. “I haven’t,” he said. “I don’t mean to.” He took a hand out of his pocket and put it on my shoulder, a touch that suddenly felt warm and reassuring, and I didn’t pull away even though I was still annoyed with him.

“I miss you at lunch,” I said.

He nodded. “I miss you too.”

“I wish I were in high school.”

“I know.”

“Will you wait for me after school tomorrow?”

“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t know if I can every day. It’s just…”

I felt bad for being so jealous that Tommy had other friends, because I felt like a terrible person for wanting him to be as lonely as I was. “Well, it’s okay if you can’t.”

But the next day when I got out of school, he was there, waiting for me, and we walked home together.

MAYBE IT’S THE
snow that changes everything, the transformation of the world from green to white, from fresh to frozen. It was snowing again when Tommy and I went back to Morrow’s field. Our last real day together.

We had off from school because of the snow, and Tommy knocked on my front door in the morning. “My grandmother wanted me out of the house,” he said, almost apologetically. “We could go sledding if you want.”

I was still angry with Tommy for being older than I was, for having a life that was separate from mine. After our talk on my birthday, he waited for me some days after school. But I hadn’t seen him waiting for the past two weeks, so I was a little annoyed with him when he showed up on my
porch. I still thought about that day in the summer when he told me he loved me, so deep down I wasn’t really mad at him, but I didn’t know what to expect from him anymore. “I don’t know. It’s kind of cold outside.”

“Well, whatever. We can watch TV then.”

I wondered what had happened to his high school friends, but I didn’t want to ask. Truthfully I was tired of being alone. “Come on in. Let me get my boots on.”

Tommy had grown taller over the past few months, and he looked a little more muscular. He suddenly seemed more grown up, and he had these large broad shoulders. His hair was a little longer, so it looked the way it had when I first met him, but it didn’t look shaggy anymore. It was the first time I could really picture Tommy as a man, somebody’s father or husband or whatever, and the thought thrilled me a little.

“How’s school?” I asked him while I rummaged through the closet for my boots.

“Its okay. It’s good, I guess.”

“Hmm.” I found my boots in the back, right next to Becky’s, and I hesitated for a moment before pulling them out. I wondered if they would fit her now, how much her feet could’ve grown in a year and a half.

“I got an A on my English paper last week. And I’m doing pretty good in all my classes.”

I took my boots into the foyer and sat down to yank them on. “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

“Yeah. I like it a whole lot better than last year.”

“Gee, thanks a lot.”

“You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Well, I don’t know how you meant it.” I felt myself getting jealous. It was the way I’d feel when Becky would get all the attention, when I’d feel my parents loved her more than they loved me. Tommy liked high school better than he liked the time he’d spent with me last year.

He sat down on the floor next to me. “I do miss you.”

“Whatever.”

“No, I mean it.”

“It’s not a big deal.” I stood up. “Let’s go outside.”

Out in Morrow’s field it could’ve been any other winter day in any other year. People were playing and throwing snowballs and building snowmen, and everyone was laughing. I couldn’t stop thinking about Becky. It was worse than the year before, when it was quiet, like a shrine. To me, this all felt wrong, and I thought about God striking all of us down
with a big bolt of lightning or something. Everybody had already forgotten.

“It’s too crowded here,” Tommy said, as if he could read my mind. “Let’s just take a walk instead.” I let him take my hand and lead me around the block, so we just walked together in the snow. Being out in the open like that for the first time made me feel like we were a couple, like something solid that belonged joined together.

“I’m so sick of this place,” I said. All the houses in our neighborhood looked perfect, little icicles hanging off the undersides of the roof and all that, snow covering the front lawns.

“Everything is freezing,” Tommy said. “Everything dies in the winter.” He squeezed my hand, and I felt it tingling, even through the thicknesses of our gloves.

After Tommy and I got too cold from walking, we went back to my house and made hot chocolate. I made it with milk, on the stove, the way my mother used to do for Becky and me in the winter, and I sprinkled cinnamon on top. I felt old doing this, cooking in the kitchen with Tommy watching me. I felt his eyes on me, following me as I walked back and forth between the stove and the refrigerator.

We sipped our drinks in silence at the kitchen table, but we stared at each other the whole time. Finally Tommy said, “I’m sorry we didn’t find her.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“I wanted to give that to you,” he said. It sounded so odd, yet it was the sweetest thing anyone ever said to me, so it made what he said next feel just right. “Can I kiss you again, Abigail?”

I knew that to someone else, it might have seemed like Tommy was just using me or something, but I knew he wasn’t. We had this undeniable connection when we were alone together that made everything else in the world disappear: Tommy’s high school friends, my parents, Becky. Every time he wanted to kiss me, I wanted him to, and not because I was lonely or depressed or needed the attention or whatever, but because I genuinely wanted him to.

I stood up and held out my hand and led him into the family room. We sat on the couch together, just staring at each other for a minute, and then Tommy reached up and put his hand on my cheek. “You’re cold still,” he said.

“I’m okay.” But really I was freezing, unable to warm up. He started kissing my cheeks, slowly, just small kisses that he dotted around my face. Each kiss was warming, amazing.
Then I tilted my head so he could kiss my lips again. We just sat there and kissed for probably twenty minutes, and the whole time, I let myself think of nothing else but him kissing me.

“Let’s lie down,” Tommy whispered, and I let myself lean back and relax. He was lying on top of me, and I felt his entire body, the warmth of it. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, but I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to kiss Tommy. I wanted more.

He put his hand on my stomach and then started moving it up slowly. “Can I?” he said. “Do you want me to?”

I nodded. I was afraid to speak. I thought that if I did, the perfect moment would collapse. He put his hand under my shirt and then on my breast, softly at first. He cupped my left breast with his hand, and just let his hand sit there a minute. I don’t think he knew what he was supposed to do next, but I didn’t know either, so I just let him keep his hand there while we were kissing. “Can I take your shirt off?” he whispered.

I nodded again and sat up so he could lift my shirt over my head. He traced the outline of my bra with his finger and then reached behind me to unhook it. He fumbled a little; he couldn’t get it undone, so I reached back and did it
for him. He took my bra and put it on the floor, and then he sat up and just looked at me for a minute. I should’ve been cold, sitting there with my shirt off, but I wasn’t. I was completely warm. “You’re beautiful, Abigail.”

No one had ever told me I was beautiful before, not even my parents, really. I was always the special one, the smart one, and Becky was the beauty. I know it’s true; mousy, frizzy hair won’t win me any beauty contests. But Tommy sounded so sincere that I knew he meant it, and I loved him for that.

I started kissing Tommy again, and he touched my breasts.

I was so involved in Tommy that I didn’t hear the front door open; I didn’t even hear my father’s footsteps as he approached us. In fact I didn’t even know he was there until I heard him say, “Jesus Christ, Ab.” And then suddenly Tommy sat up, and I started grabbing for my shirt, but I couldn’t find it. “Ab,” my father whispered. I knew he was there, but I couldn’t turn around. I didn’t want to look at him. “You little bastard,” he said to Tommy. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I finally found my shirt and slipped it back over my head. I knew that I needed to save Tommy. “Go home,” I
said to him. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Abby.” He turned to look at me, and I saw this incredible sadness, this weight of knowing we’d just done something we could never take back. Everything would be different now; we’d lost our bubble, our little private world that protected us from everything else.

“Get the hell out of my house,” my father yelled at him. “Jesus Christ.”

Tommy got off the couch and ran to the front door. He forgot his boots, but I didn’t want to call after him.

“Dad,” I said, “it’s not what you think.”

“Abigail.” He sat down in his chair in the corner, but we didn’t look at each other. “Is this because your mother left? We tried to raise you right, do the best we could. This is because you don’t have your mother, isn’t it?”

“You make it sound like I committed a crime,” I said. I wasn’t sorry for anything, and I didn’t think it was wrong. I was fourteen; I made out with a boy on our couch. It wasn’t the end of the world.

“Abigail,” he said, “just go up to your room. I can’t look at you right now.”

“Dad, I—”

“Just go, Ab. “

So I went upstairs and sat on my bed, and I thought about Tommy kissing me and what might have happened if my father hadn’t walked in.

I can only imagine what happened next, when Tommy went home:

Tommy walked across the snowy lawn in his socks. By the time he got to his front door, his feet were soaking wet and freezing. He was shivering, and so cold, and thinking about how he’d left me there with my father. And he was still picturing my breasts, how soft they were, so much softer than he’d imagined.

As he walked up to the front door, it finally dawned on him that he’d left his boots at my house, and he tried to think of what he would tell his grandmother, how he could’ve left his boots, for Christ’s sake. He worried about what my father would tell her. Then he decided to stand out on the snowy porch for just another minute, soak it all in. He took a deep breath and realized how much he loved the snow, how much he would miss it when she sent him back to Florida. But he realized he needed to face things, to accept the consequences. He took a deep breath and then stepped inside.

The house was strangely quiet except for this odd whirring sound, the noise of a mixer, going on and on and on. “Grandma,” he called out, “I’m home.” She didn’t answer. “Grandma,” he said, louder this time. Nothing. But maybe she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the mixer. So he left his wet socks in the foyer and walked to the kitchen. The first thing he noticed was the mixer. She’d left it on and in the bowl. So forgetful. He walked to turn it off, and on the way he almost tripped over her. She was lying on the kitchen floor, not moving.

He screamed and jumped back, and he thought she was dead.
I’ve killed her
, he thought.
The God she believes in is punishing me.

My father and I both heard the sound of the ambulance. At first I thought it was coming to our house, and I ran down to see if my father was all right. My first thought was that my father had done something terrible to himself, that I’d ruined him, pushed him over the edge.

“It’s next door,” he said when he saw me. And we both ran out to the porch to see. For a moment I thought that Tommy was hurt, that he’d told Mrs. Ramirez what had happened and she’d gone after him with her carving knife.
But I saw Tommy run outside to talk to the EMTs, and that was when my father ran across the lawn.

“What’s going on here?” he said to Tommy. They eyed each other for a minute, and I could tell Tommy was unsure if he should even be talking to my father, but then my father shook his shoulders a little. “Son, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just found her like this.”

A few minutes later they carried Mrs. Ramirez out on a stretcher, and she looked dead. She had these tubes hanging out of her nose, and she wasn’t moving. It was worse than seeing Grandma Jacobson with cancer or imagining Becky buried in Morrow’s field, because it was real and right in front of me. I was so stunned to see it that I had to look away. “I’ll drive you to the hospital,” my father said to Tommy. To me he said, “Ab, go call your mother and tell her you’re staying with her tonight.”

I was so numb that I just nodded and didn’t even argue with him. I guess I should’ve wanted to go with them, to comfort Tommy or something, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be as far away from there as possible.

I don’t know what my father and Tommy said to each other on the way to the hospital or while they sat there and waited.
That’s something I don’t even want to try to imagine because it’s too weird to think of it.

What I do know for sure: Mrs. Ramirez had a massive heart attack while she stood in her kitchen making brownies. Had Tommy not found her when he did, she might have died. Apparently she’d been having chest pains for weeks, but she’d been ignoring them, passing them off as indigestion. The heart attack forced her to look at things: She had a weak heart, and unless she started taking it easy, she was going to die.

I spent the night at my mother’s apartment, the first and only time I slept over there. I’m not sure how much my father told her or exactly what he said, but as she sat next to me on the couch, tapping her cigarette nervously on the ashtray, she tried to talk to me about sex. She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I’d heard it all in school, in sixth-grade health class. Only when my mother said it, she turned bright red and put a funny emphasis on certain words, like “condom.”

I told my mother that I wasn’t ready to have sex, and when I was, I wouldn’t be stupid about it. This basically shut her up. “Well, I know, Abby. Of course,” she said. “It’s just your father…”

“He was exaggerating,” I said. I wanted to change the subject in the worst way, so I said, “I don’t know what Dad was doing home in the middle of the afternoon anyway.”

“Oh,” she said. “He must’ve had his appointment with Dr. Shreiker.” It surprised me that she knew something about my father that I didn’t, which indicated to me that they were still talking, even when I wasn’t around. “They’ve been letting him have the time off work once a week,” she said. “He needs it.” I couldn’t imagine my father talking to a therapist. But I could tell the whole thing made my mother happy, so maybe, in some strange way, he thought he was doing it for her.