Sister (3 page)

I water the spindly seedlings, careful not to wet their leaves. My mother's garden was something out of a picture book: tomatoes, sweet tapering carrots, melons that split at the whisper of a knife, the rich dark soil spread around them like a fancy cloth. She knew everything about vegetables and fruits, their special needs, their swift diseases, and she passed these rituals to me, along with her favorite casseroles, her belief in God, my grandmother's quilt patterns, herbs for cramp tea. Sam got the keys to my father's dirt bike, whispered jokes in the shed, blueprints and power tools and fine-print instructions, the sharp, secret language of men.
Looking back at the way our lives have worked out, it would seem I was the luckier one, but at the time I resented being shut out, left out, left behind.

My mother did her best to comfort me, but she had grown up in a family of sisters, women who learned early to love women. She didn't understand how my flesh crawled when she hugged me or touched my hair, how the smell of her body disturbed me because it reminded me of my own. “You need to spend more time with other girls your age,” she said, and by the time I turned sixteen, my friends and I took all the same classes, slept over at each other's houses, spent long hours on the phone. We may have talked about our classes, but mostly I remember talking about boys. We discussed ways to handle them as if they were poisonous snakes: on the surface they might be smooth glide, flickering tongue, but underneath they were hiss and venom and coil, never to be trusted. Each morning, I dressed for school as if I were dressing for a play. Everything from my blouse to my forbidden eye shadow (applied in the girls' bathroom, wiped away before I went home) was chosen for a deliberate effect. A successful combination of effects projected someone who did not at all resemble my real self, someone who could smile the proper smile, express an interest in appropriate things, and always be
a good girl
, bright but not brilliant, stable, cheerful, kind.
If you can't say something nice
, my mother taught me,
don't say anything at all
. I was a consummate actress, but at night my jaws ached with all the things I'd bitten back during the day. Even my prayers were censored, for fear of offending God's ear.

I don't want to raise my child the way Sam and I were raised, blue-for-boys and pink-for-girls, our assigned differences confirmed by the teachings of the Church. It never even occurred to me then that Sam might be lying awake himself, trembling with his own mute loneliness. In high school, he made friends with boys who dressed in black, who looked at the world with sullen, staring eyes. Of course, my father hated them. They weren't the
wholesome boys he admired, that he wanted Sam to be. They smoked cigarettes and pin joints behind the shed, and if I came out into the yard, they whistled and called me terrible, filthy names. No one dared call Sam a sissy now. The last of his youthful prettiness was gone. Nights, my father paced the house, turning the TV on, turning it off. When Sam finally came home, long past curfew, their arguments rang through the darkness, brief bursts of shouts like gunfire. I'd lie awake listening to Sam's new deep voice, my father's throaty rage. In the morning I'd go downstairs to find the tipped chairs, the smashed plates, and, once, a crack in the plaster where my father had thrown Sam against the wall. “If you want to live in my house,” my father said, “you better learn to live by my rules.”

It was the same thing the Church said to us. I didn't yet know I could leave God's house, but Sam found ways out of my father's. He started hitchhiking to Milwaukee, where he met new, older friends. We heard their voices when we answered the phone, men's voices, curt like my father's, and sometimes Sam wouldn't get home until the following afternoon. “In my day, a young man knew how to work,” my father began as Sam sprawled, hung over, on the couch. “Do you think I'd be where I am today if I had your attitude?” Sam just closed his eyes the way he did when he listened to his heavy-metal music, and I envied how he could make it seem as if he were no longer there. Yet I became more and more aware of his presence in the house, and I tried not to be there when I knew we'd be alone. He smelled of cigarettes and stale, dark air. He stole from my mother's purse. He stole from me too, creeping into my room during the day while I was at school, searching my closet and under my mattress, going through my dresser drawers until he found my baby-sitting money.

 

At lunchtime, I carry our anniversary cake out to the side yard, where Adam builds his outdoor sculptures. He's completed two
since we bought this house: a six-foot sunburst made of mashed tin cans, and a life-size human figure made of more cans, copper wire, and pieces of the body of a Mustang. Why do you make them? neighbors ask, but he just tucks his hands into his pockets, smiles, shrugs.
Why not
? Summer nights, he comes home from whatever construction site he's been working on, locks his toolbox in the garage, and walks between his sculptures in the twilight, whistling. His new piece is my favorite—a grasshopper, two feet high and six feet long. When it's finished, the right wind will make it sing, a sound like breath blown across the open mouth of a bottle.

I spread an old blanket in the midst of the sculptures and we eat, alternating chunks of sweet cake with sips of sour lemonade. Laverne climbs into my lap, nails scraping my thighs, and settles into the nest my legs make for her. Today I am missing Wisconsin, the wide, flat spaces that stretch for miles. “But you wouldn't ever want to move back to the Midwest?” Adam says when I mention this. His voice shapes a question, but his eyes are pleading
no
.

I shake my head and pick up his hand, turn it over, spread his fingers. Jealous Laverne hops out of my lap, fixes me with a cat stare.

“I'm happy right where we are,” Adam says.

“Me too,” I say, and I scoot around to sit behind him, enclosing his legs in mine; I lift his shirt and press my face against his smooth, damp back. His skin is freckled from too much sun, and here's the nick of a mole removed last year. His left thumb, smashed by a hammer, still isn't able to bend around mine. I trace the firm scar on his stomach left by a childhood appendectomy. Evidence embedded in bone and flesh. Perhaps it's just a matter of knowing how to read what's written there.

One hot day in the middle of July, less than a month before Sam disappeared, I heard the soft
whup
of a BB gun and realized the shots weren't coming from the fields.
Whup. Whup
. I followed
the sound to the backyard and saw Mom crouched in the shrubs at the corner of the house. One knee was bent, braced against the earth; she propped her elbow on the other. She looked like the statues I'd seen of Saint Bernadette as she bowed down to pray to Mary in the grotto.

“Mom?” I said softly, but she shook her head, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was the face of someone grieving, a widow's face, the face of a mother whose child has died, and I recognized it even though I'd never seen it before. I squatted beside her and peered through the hedge. All around the garden, the bird feeders my father and Sam had once built for her stood like sentries: finch feeders, songbird feeders, hummingbird feeders. She had low bluebird houses and another, higher house for purple martins. She had two concrete birdbaths, and between them she kept an old china plate spread with oranges to attract summer orioles.

Sam was squatting barefooted in one of the birdbaths, firing on robins and finches, starlings and grackles. The birds kept coming, used to the noise my mother and I made in her garden, some of them so tame they would eat out of our hands. A song sparrow fluttered in the grass, merely stunned; Sam aimed at it, fired, fired again.

“Make him stop,” I whispered, and then Sam looked up. He stared at us as we cowered in the bushes with our long hair trailing over our shoulders, our eyes wide. We looked like women. We looked like rabbits. We must have looked like prey. He raised the gun. Even now I have dreams in which I'm looking down the barrel, only the gun is one of my father's Colt .45s, and I wake up feeling the end of my life rushing toward me like a great gust of wind. But Sam didn't aim. He didn't fire. I do not carry beneath my skin a kernel of lead, smaller than a pea, which would almost be like a part of Sam carried with me forever.

Just after my grandmother's funeral, my mother phoned, her voice bright with news. “Oh, Abby, we may have really found
him this time,” she said. I listened to my mother's latest story—Sam fixing cars at an auto shop in Los Angeles—and I remembered how it was after Sam threw down the gun, after my mother had turned and walked away, when I stepped out of the bushes, stooped to touch each crumpled bird body, and he watched me for a while, hands in his pockets, no longer able to recognize a sister.

E
ach year, my parents leased our fields to one of the larger local farms, and spring rumbled in with the roar of the cultivators circling the perimeters of our land. There were no other children living close by; our nearest neighbors, the Luchter-hands, ran a horse farm three quarters of a mile down the road. My brother and I grew up in the company of beets, which stained our hands and mouths a bloody red; during luckier years, there were sweet peas or snap beans, sugar-sweet to the tongue. Once, the renters sowed field corn, which attracted rats the size of gourds. But the summer I was ten and Sam was nine, they planted sixty acres in sunflowers, and by August our house was surrounded by a fiery corona that swallowed the usual deep summer greens in an elaborate golden yawn. When the damp wind blew off Lake Michigan, we could hear the petals rustling, sexual and fierce, and Sam and I paused during our games, whirling to look over our shoulders; it was a summer we never felt completely alone. We avoided the cellar, the smokehouse, the walk-in closet in our bedroom; at night, we leapt into our beds so that anything lurking beneath them wouldn't be able to grab our ankles and pull us down. Mornings, I'd wake up and look out the window, and there
would be the bright, broad faces of the sunflowers, all facing east like so many wise kings. In his bed on the other side of the room, Sam was still sleeping, his head thrown so far back that his body formed a question mark. Even now, the memory of him frozen in that vulnerable arc fills me with an aching protectiveness, as if he were my child and not my brother.

That summer, Sam and I played only those games that involved wearing dark clothes and crouching behind shrubs and using words like
covert
and
operation
and
ambush
. A boy at school had an older brother who'd gone to work for the CIA; when we pressed him for details, he combed his hair with his fingers and said, “Classified,” in a way that let the rest of us know there were things in the world we had not yet begun to imagine. I remember that I wasn't discouraged when I heard that girls could not be spies, any more than I was discouraged by all the other things that, as a girl, I wasn't supposed to do, because I had a vague idea that becoming an adult meant turning into a man. It was not a fully conscious thought, but it was present in the same way that God was present, a concept you trusted you would understand when the appropriate moment arrived.

Until first grade or so, I had been just as securely convinced that I could grow into any animal I wished, and after careful consideration I chose to become a cat. To encourage this metamorphosis, I made cat noises and licked my skin and ate cat chow from the house cats' bowl beneath the sink. I pinned a piece of twine to the seat of my pants, wriggling my butt to make it swing from side to side. Once, I managed to elude my mother and board the school bus that way, and the older boys nearly strangled me with my tail before the driver intervened. Still, I believed in my right to choose my destiny, and when one of the semiwild barn cats had kits, I recognized this as a moment of truth and knelt beside her to nurse. But she scratched me—three parallel lines across my forehead, which lingered for weeks like a signature.

The summer of the sunflowers, I decided that the years I
had spent practicing for cathood had had a purpose after all: They'd given me all the skills I needed to be an effective spy. I could scale high walls and jump off cliffs and fight dirty, using my teeth and nails; I could contort my body to fit into small, dark places; I could move with the fluid stealth of a cat intent on a kill. Of course, Sam wanted to be a spy too. After morning chores, we filled our afternoons with secret missions, ambushes, and code words like
smokey bear
and
10-4 charlie
. We painted elaborate, colorful scenes of spies climbing up the walls of castles and parachuting out of airplanes, and these we hung above our beds for inspiration. But by August, we were forced to face our greatest limitation. There was nobody to spy on. My father was seldom home. My mother ruined the mood by saying things like: “If you want to know something about me, just ask. There's no need to follow me around.” The Luchterhands down the road were not an option because of the stallions; we remembered, from a visit to the barns in spring, the sound of those gunshot hoofbeats and high, crazed whinnies, the chill of those rolling devil eyes. And so we loitered around the house and barn, waiting for a mission, trying not to notice the watched feeling that followed us everywhere we went, invisible as breath and just as urgent, brushing the tops of the fields like wind. My father had grown up on this farm; it had been a hard life, one he rarely discussed. But he'd told us about the German POWs that my grandfather, himself a German immigrant, had hired as cheap summer labor. On hot, still nights, we thought we could hear them: their choked, guttural voices, the music of their chains, the hungry scrape of their bent tin spoons as they ate beneath the quarter moon.

 

My mother believed in intuition, God, and the power of prayer. The future came to her in quiet dreams and chilly flashes, a gift she'd had ever since her oldest sisters were killed in the cannery fire. One week after the funerals, she told her youngest sister, our
auntie Thil, “You come away from that stove,” and seconds later, the stovepipe exploded. She sketched my father's face on a napkin the day before they met. When she carried me, she dreamed that I appeared to her, a perfect baby girl who asked to be named
Abigail Elise
. Where did I come from? I asked whenever she told the story, and then she'd describe the netherworld she'd seen, a universe of unassigned souls, churning in a sort of primordial soup, each shrilling,
Choose me! Choose me!

Foolishness, my father said. But the time my mother begged him to stay home from work, he did. Later, we learned that the highway had been closed, due to an accident involving four cars. Two people were killed. How had my mother known? She just did. The artificial nature of spying puzzled her, though she tried her best to play along, to help us out and, in the process, convert our interest into something useful. She sent me to the garden to “ambush” slugs with saucers of beer; in the morning, she suggested that Sam “case the beans” for signs of Japanese beetles.

“That's not the same,” we told her, but neither Sam nor I could explain why. We flung ourselves at the furniture and moped: two combat-trained, sophisticated, deadly bored spies. It was this boredom, rather than our former sneakiness, that began to wear at her nerves. One day late in August, she decided that we could take our bikes into town, three miles away. We were to pick up some dishwashing detergent at Becker's Foodmart, stop for ten minutes at the dime store—just to look—and then we were to head straight back home.

For years, we had begged to go all the way into Horton by ourselves. We dug our battered Schwinns out of the shed and coasted down the long gravel driveway toward the road, making elaborate hand signals in case my mother was watching from the kitchen window. It was a warm, humid day. The east wind off Lake Michigan, which usually cooled our afternoons, had been stalled by a low, gray bank of clouds at the horizon. Buttercups and Queen Anne's lace choked the ditches, and every now and
then we passed a pale green patch of wild asparagus, delicate as mist. At first, we raced each other, because the flat length of road was a novelty, but after a mile or so we settled into a steady rhythm, side by side, and we felt how small we were, surrounded by fields of corn and alfalfa and, occasionally, cows. They were Holsteins mostly, and because of the heat, they clumped together beneath what shade they could find, usually small stands of trees that the first German settlers had left behind. Sometimes there was an old foundation beneath those trees, a boarded-up well, a scrap of rotting fence—all that was left of an original homestead. The cows watched us pass, releasing powerful streams of urine that splattered their legs and bellies, their silent mouths working, working.

Horton was the sort of town that happened all at once. It began with an old grain mill, the only warning before an eruption of close-set houses that led toward the downtown. If you looked between those houses to the west, you could see the fields that stretched behind them; if you looked between the houses to the east, you could see more fields, and a glimmer of aquamarine that was Lake Michigan. We propped our bikes against a telephone pole and went into Becker's Foodmart. As usual, it was crowded with cans of food that no one ate unless it was a holiday: cranberry relish, Boston brown bread, mandarin oranges. The Dessert of the Day was always arranged on a long, low table by the grocery baskets. This time, it was a strawberry shortcake, cut into crumbling cubes. My mother never let us try these samples, though she sometimes took a plastic cup of the complimentary coffee for herself.
Who knows how long that's been sitting there
? she'd whisper, sweeping us past and into the sour meat smell. Now we popped the largest pieces into our mouths, but they were dry, too sweet, disappointing.

Mr. Becker prided himself on greeting everyone who came into his store. All children looked alike to him, so he simplified the matter by calling boys Bobby and girls Susie. Today he was
stocking soup; we tried to slip past him to the household aisle, but there were jingle bells attached to the electric doors, and he'd heard them when we came in.

“Susie! There's my girl,” he bellowed, dropping the carton of soup cans and charging up the aisle. “What can I get for you now?”

“We know where everything is,” I said, in the voice I saved for adults like Mr. Becker. But Mr. Becker dropped one cold, heavy hand on each of our shoulders.

“What have you got to say for yourself!” he shouted at Sam. Sam looked at the floor and did not speak; I fixed my gaze on a pyramid of Fancy Artichoke Hearts. We both knew that when attacked by a bull or a bear, your best option was to play dead. “Cat got your tongue?” Mr. Becker asked, and then, mercifully, he released us and chuckled his way back to the soup. Sam and I headed for the dishwashing liquid, embarrassed for both ourselves and Mr. Becker. Rounding the next aisle, staring grimly ahead, we saw a tall, thin girl slipping a package of Hostess Ding Dongs into her purse.

She was about fourteen. She wore silver sandals and a gold ankle chain and frayed jean shorts that crept so high you knew she wasn't wearing any underwear. Her shirt was a man's white T-shirt with the sleeves and the collar ripped off. A gold star, the kind the teachers stuck on our papers when we spelled everything right, was glued to her cheek. She looked over at us, a slow, too casual glance, and we got very busy comparing the prices of Ivory and Palmolive. Without saying anything about it to each other, we knew we had gone undercover, real spies with a very real mission: follow the thief. I imagined our names in the Saint Ignatius Parish Bulletin, perhaps with a picture of us shaking Father Van Dan's hand. I imagined Mr. Becker rewarding us with cash, prizes, maybe even a trip somewhere.

“What should we do?” Sam whispered. The girl was heading
toward the automatic doors; they sizzled open and she disappeared, like an angel, into a pool of light.

“Go pay and then meet me outside,” I said, pushing the money into his hand, and I walked quickly up the aisle and plunged into the sudden bright heat of the street outside. The girl was standing at the edge of the curb as if she were waiting for me. Her purse bulged at her side. “Hi,” I chirped, trying to be cool. “Hey,” she said noncommittally. I thought that perhaps I'd seen her before, one of several girls who liked to sit smoking on the half-wall in front of the bank. She braced herself against the telephone pole where we had left our bikes and lifted first one foot and then the other to unbuckle her silver sandals. Each had a braided noose, meant to ensnare her big toe, and I thought I'd never seen shoes that looked so terribly cruel. They reminded me of the traps my uncle Olaf kept hanging in his basement, with bits of fur still clinging to the metal. There were red marks on her toes, and she rubbed at them the way an animal licks a hurt. I wanted to touch them; I wanted to ask her name. I wanted to be beautiful in the way she was beautiful, wearing silver trap shoes and a look that shivered inside me. This was the sort of girl my mother referred to as a
wild girl
, and suddenly I loved the sound of those words. They made me remember my cat days, moving by instinct and intuition only, prowling through the darkness with twenty-twenty vision, striking with a neat, clean blow. Her eyes did, in fact, look like the eyes of a cat: They were narrow and green, outlined in green eyeliner, made wider and brighter by green eye shadow. For the first time, I imagined my own eyes painted: fierce, mysterious, untamed.

By the time Sam came out with the dishwashing liquid in a paper sack, the wild girl was walking up Main Street in the same direction we'd come from, those cruel shoes swinging from her hand. “Let her walk ahead,” I told him. “If we tail her too close, she'll get suspicious.”

We got our bikes and crossed to the opposite side of the street, riding so slowly that we kept toppling into each other. Once, still walking, she stared back at us evenly, but then she tossed her hair and continued on, her bare feet slapping the side-walk. We had almost reached the mill when she made a military left and marched up the steps of a rectangular brick house. It was an ordinary, everyday sort of house, with a birdbath and a statue of the Virgin in the front. It did not look like the house of either a thief or a wild girl. The screen door slapped behind her; the shades were already pulled shut. The house looked forlorn, the way houses look when no one lives inside them.

We rode around the block, buying the time we needed to come up with a plan. We rode around the block again. Finally, we left our bikes and the bottle of detergent behind the hedge across the street and scurried along the side of the house until we found an open window. Because Sam was lighter, I lifted him up for the first look, hoping there wasn't a dog. His tennis shoes dug into my wrist, smelling of manure and grass.