Sister (18 page)

At first, I mistook my mother for one of the statues around the Baby Jesus, but then she moved, came closer to the cradle, closer than Joseph, the animals and wise men, until she stood right beside it. Her arms were wrapped around her shoulders, and when I saw her kneel down in that makeshift manger, I realized she meant to stay there for good, to curl herself up and rock herself, rock herself warm in that cold yellow light.

I
n the fall of my third year living in Baltimore, two and a half years after I'd left the conservatory, my mother called to say she'd received a letter from my father. He said that he was being watched. He said that he'd been awakened one night by someone trying the locks on his windows and doors. He said he had developed six of the Seven Deadly Warning Signs of cancer and was making out his will. Would she like the Ford?

“I suppose it's none of my business anymore,” my mother said. Their divorce had been final for over a year. A priest at Saint John's had told her that as long as she didn't remarry, she was not in a state of mortal sin. “But he doesn't sound like himself.”

“Maybe he's drinking.”

“Or getting Alzheimer's or something.”

“Or maybe it's just age.”

“He's only sixty-two, Abby.” She sighed. “And I certainly don't want his Ford. He knows what I really want.” My father had gone through Sam's bedroom, through the house and the shed and the attic, collecting everything of Sam's that would fit
into his car. Even now, my mother didn't know what, exactly, was missing, and this bothered her as much as the missing items themselves. My father, of course, denied he'd taken anything. “I'm entitled to half,” my mother said. “I deserve more than that ashtray.”

I'd heard all this before, but I was relieved to have a conversation with my mother that wasn't focused on what she referred to as my
lifestyle
. Adam and I were living together in a one-bedroom apartment near the basilica. We'd met in a Laundromat. He'd dropped out of the Baltimore School of Design the semester before I left Peabody, and now he worked as a carpenter. “All that abstraction,” he said, “was starting to give me nightmares.” I had a full-time job at a thrift shop and a vague idea about returning to school. But the longer I was away from it, the harder it was to make plans to go back. And I wasn't sure what I wanted to study.

“Well, what would you really like to do?” Adam said. “I mean, in your wildest dreams.”

“I'd be like that woman who studies gorillas.”

“Jane Goodall.”

“That's her.”

“Biology, then.”

But that wasn't what I meant. I wanted a misty morning in the jungle, the cries of strange birds, the solitude of my tent. A place where my grandmother couldn't mail me prayer cards and religious medals and books on prayer; a place where my mother couldn't reach me with yet another far-fetched scheme to find Sam. As each month passed, and there was less and less chance that he'd be found alive—if at all—she became increasingly, unbearably optimistic. She'd enrolled in Christian counseling, encouraging me to do the same. She believed Sam's disappearance was a test of faith, one that she would endure and eventually pass with stained-glass colors.

Two nights later, she called again. This time, my father had phoned her, his voice so soft she barely recognized it. He wanted to know if she'd heard from Sam.

No, she said eagerly. Have you?

Wouldn't you like to know that! he said, and then he told her about senior citizens in Arizona being drugged and carried off to experimental labs against their will.

Is Sam there? my mother said. Have you seen him? Gordon, please! But my father hung up, and she had not been able to reach him since.

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

She had. They'd contacted the police department in Cape Coral, the nearest city of any size, and Homicide sent a detective to visit my father. She judged him a lonely eccentric who knew nothing more than anyone else did. She advised my mother, through the Horton police, to forget about the incident.

“I think it might be better if we handled this ourselves,” my mother said. “The police down there don't know your father. They don't realize how he can be.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “what if you were to visit him? You could post flyers. I looked at a map, and there are lots of little towns around there. I'd pay your bus ticket, if you'd go.”

“I don't know if I can get the time off,” I said. But I couldn't help imagining myself as the hero, the one who—against all odds—rescued her brother, returned him safely home, redeemed herself in the eyes of a mother who, for months, had been telling her she'd
thrown away her future
, who gave her gift subscriptions to
The Catholic Digest, Leaves, Guideposts
, who warned her that God has ways of making stubborn people listen to His voice.

“For all we know, Sam could be there right now,” my mother said. “Maybe Sam's the one who's been watching him. Maybe he saw himself on TV.”

“Maybe,” I said.

A few weeks earlier, my mother had been interviewed on a talk show, along with other parents whose lost children—if alive—would be adults by now. There, on national television, Sam's face was displayed, first as a seventeen-year-old, then aged three years by forensic experts. They showed him clean-shaven, mustached, bearded. They showed him wearing different styles of hair.

“You can ask the neighbors if they've noticed any visitors. You can post a flyer, in case he shows up nearby.”

“What if Dad doesn't want me to visit?” I said. “I mean, we haven't exactly kept in touch.” In fact, I'd sent him cards on his birthday, but he'd never acknowledged them, or sent me anything on mine.

My mother paused. I could hear her clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, a habit that meant she was formulating a careful reply. “I just wouldn't tell him you're coming,” she said. “And while you're there, if you wouldn't mind, you could ask him what he's done with Sam's things.”

The next day, the owner of the thrift shop gave me a week off without complaint. “You've been with us over a year,” she said, and I felt the long, gray winter of my failure. If I wasn't careful, I might end up spending the rest of my life in that same dark shop, collecting my minimum-wage check twice a month, worrying because I had no health insurance. That night, desperate for any kind of change, I cut my long thick hair in front of the bathroom mirror and, afterward, buzzed it with my Lady Bic. “Good God,” Adam said when I came back into the living room, but I liked how it made me look: knowing but indifferent. The sort of look my father would despise on any woman. The sort of look that Sam would recognize.

Now I was tired, catching a cold, cramped by the duffel bag I'd wedged into the tight space between my feet and the seat ahead of me. It was October, one week before Halloween, and the bus—the last in a series of complicated transfers—was hot and sour-smelling. The cutout paper jack-o'-lanterns in the win
dows we passed seemed too vivid, frightening in a way I'd never noticed up north. Gaping mouths. Glowing orange teeth. Faces as round as the souls we used to draw in Sunday school, rising from their unsuspecting bodies. Halloween night was followed by All Saints' Day. Still sick from trick-or-treat candy, we dressed as saints and marched into the church holding candles, singing “When the Saints Come Marching In.” My mother would be sitting on the outside edge of the pew so that she could wave to me and Sam as we walked past, hot wax nipping our fingers. I always chose to be Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, who was beheaded after she refused to marry a wealthy man. For three days and nights she lay dying in her cell, while beautiful music filled the air. As a teenager, I'd sit at Elise's piano with my hands spread over the keys, praying to hear what Cecilia heard as she was drawn up into heaven by the force of God's desire.

I believed these stories in a way my brother never did. I hoped that I too might be chosen, God's capricious wishes revealed, my life irrevocably changed. When Sam first disappeared, I was strangely envious that he'd been singled out, the prodigal son who'd come back to a grand celebration. But now, ironically, I was the one returning to my father.

The bus finally arrived in Pineland, which was no more than a dozen houses, a gas station, and a fruit stand. We stopped at a crossroads, where several people got off, before continuing on toward the Pleasant Acres Adult Community, two miles down the road. I carried my duffel up the long crushed-shell driveway, past the trailers with their birdbaths and plaster rabbits and windmill ducks, until I reached number 26, solemn and plain, its curtains pinched like wary eyes. I saw the Ford in the carport, and I knew my father was home. Slick with sweat, I climbed up the porch steps, dropped my duffel and rang the buzzer. Immediately I heard footsteps moving away from the door. The light behind the front curtains dimmed. The rooms seemed to hold their breath.

I leaned on the buzzer again, imagining the sound like a needle, stinging the tender back of my father's neck. I pictured him flattened in his La-Z-Boy, the volume on the TV turned down to a hum as he waited for me to go away. Or perhaps he was crouching below the kitchen counter, the way Sam and I once did, warned not to let anyone into the house while our parents were at work. We'd take turns peeking out the window over the sink, popping up like startled jack-in-the-boxes, knees cracking. Eventually, the stranger—a girl selling cookies, a woman with a Mary Kay smile—would go away, though we always worried someone might think to lift the welcome mat and discover the spare key.

That was an idea. I lifted the braided plastic mat that grinned the same Welcome, and there it was. I picked it out of the diamond pattern of dirt and rang the doorbell one last time. “Dad,” I called, and the front curtains moved slightly. He'd seen me. He wasn't going to let me in.

The sun was starting to set, sending orange streamers across the crushed-shell driveways, and I noticed that faces had begun to appear in the windows of the neighboring trailers. A man came out onto his porch to give me a hard stare. I unlocked the door, but it would not open. Furious, I threw my weight against it. I pounded it with my fists. More people appeared on their porches, and I was yelling at them to mind their own goddamn business when the sirens, no longer in the distance, distracted me. Two police cars fishtailed up the driveway, skidding to a halt in a spray of shells. I picked up my duffel bag as doors popped open, uniformed men launching into the air like springs. “Drop it, man!” one of them yelled. “Hands in the air, move, move!”
Man
? They weren't kidding. They had guns. I leaned against the door, arms and legs apart, the way I'd seen people do in movies.

I'd forgotten about my haircut. In Georgia, two little boys had run over as I opened the door to the women's room. “That's for
girls
,” they said, and even when I spoke, they were not sure
what to make of me. “My name is Abigail Elise Schiller,” I called over my shoulder. “This is my father's house.”

When the officers heard my voice, they seemed to relax a little, but they cuffed me anyway. The cuffs were hot, like everything else. They led me to one of the squad cars, which, mercifully, was air-conditioned. In the front seat, an officer was punching my name into a computer. On the porch, two more officers were opening my duffel bag, rifling through the manila folder of flyers my mother had sent me. They opened the map she'd marked with red circles—one around each town where she hoped I'd post the flyers. The officer rattled the cage that separated us from each other, and I squinted at him pleadingly, remembering the long interviews after Sam disappeared, the scribbling pens that meant no one believed what you were saying.

But all he asked was, “Do you know that man?”

My father was standing on the porch, gesturing grimly. The officers followed the movements of his hands, as if he were hard to understand. He'd lost most of his hair and at least twenty pounds; his blunt chin was hidden in his collar.
Only dogs look at the ground
, he used to say, his chin pointing at you, a challenge. “Gordon Schiller,” I said, trying not to sniffle. “That's my father.”

“He doesn't seem real glad to see you,” the officer said reflectively.

“We don't get along.”

By the time I was allowed to step out of the car, most of the neighbors had accumulated on their porches, smoking, sipping cool drinks, exchanging comments. The men wore polyester pants held up with broad leather belts; the women reclined in floralprint dresses, nylon hose, cracked white sandals, floppy hats. They looked past me without curiosity, as if they'd seen my type before and knew exactly what to make of it. It was my father they were all staring at. He ignored them, watching closely as the officers
removed my handcuffs, wearing the expression he always wore when observing anything vaguely mechanical.

“You called the police,” I yelled. “I don't believe this.”

“I didn't know it was you.” He scratched at the seat of his pants unselfconsciously, the habit of someone accustomed to being alone. A few thin, greasy strands of hair had fallen across his forehead.

“You looked out the window!”

“With that hair, you look like a goddamn boy.”

Furious, I rubbed my wrists, more for show than because they hurt. “What if I'd been Sam?”

I recognized the haughty look he always got when someone said something stupid. “You and Sam look nothing like each other.”

I picked up my duffel and started to walk down the driveway, back toward the road. A woman followed me, carefully lifting her feet as if she were walking through several inches of water. The sandals she wore had three-inch heels, and her face creased with makeup when she spoke. “He's missing a few pieces to the jigsaw,” she called to me.

“What?” I stopped. Back on the porch, my father was going through all his gestures again, the officers nodding, shifting their feet. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. My eyes watered, and for a moment the woman's face blurred into a clown's colorful leer.

“He's cuckoo.” She twirled her finger near one ear. “We've been worried over him. You family?”