If you’ve never been inside a Catholic church, I’ll show you what it’s like to go there, believing, into the cool dark air with only the light from the sacristy to guide you. Imagine the half-filled pews stretched out in rows as quiet, as impossibly even, as the rows of corn and soy in the fields behind the houses that trail from the church in four directions, the way light beams radiate from a child’s sketch of the sun. Pretend you’ve just come from one of these houses, as I have, as my grandmother has, as all the people around us have, and at first the measured stillness of the church seems torturous, unbroken, unbearable. But as your eyes widen to accept the dusk, you’ll notice a handkerchief twisted from palm to palm, a jiggling foot in an open-toed shoe. And, too, there are smells: rose perfume wafting from beneath a loosened collar, whiffs of manure from rubber-soled boots, dust that (I read this as a child, wanted it to be true) is mostly organic, made up of epidermal cells and bits of human hair. There is dust layering the top of the holy water font, where we dip the tips of our third fingers before making the sign of the cross. There is dust smudging the colors of the stained-glass windows, dust on the legs of the table where we select this month’s missalette, dust on the intricate statues with their deep, worried eyes. Everywhere there is evidence of the body’s desire for its own beginnings, the soul’s helium float back to God.
I want you to be here with us. I want you to feel what I feel, a teenage girl towering over her grandmother at the back of this small Wisconsin church. There is the altar boy in his cumbersome smock, peeking out from the doors off the sacristy, excused from English or Math or Civics to serve the daily noon Mass. There are the men on their lunch breaks, the smattering of older retired men, and so many women!—young mothers with their sleeping babies, older mothers in groups of three and four, and the dozens of widows, women like my grandmother, who are the raw heart of this church. When they speak, you hear the older languages floating around their tongues. They wear their hair in tight, curly nests; thin gold bands still dent their fourth fingers. They carry what they need in big black purses, secured with fist-like clasps, these women who remember times without bread when they had to feed themselves and their families on their own ingenuity and the Word.
The men of my grandfather’s generation were like visitors, cherished as guests who could not be relied on to stay for very long. They went off to war and disappeared, they were crushed under heavy farm machinery, they shot each other by accident and on purpose, they fell off horses and rooftops and silos, drowned in rivers, succumbed to snakebite, emphysema, whiskey. After my grandfather died of tetanus in 1947, my grandmother raised their four daughters and maintained the farm; when land taxes threatened to rise, it was she who sent the oldest two, Mary and Elise, to work in the cannery. Men died young; you mourned, you kept their graves tenderly, and—somehow—you went on. But when fire broke out, snuffing the lives of those daughters and fifteen other girls into ash, the shock left Oneisha and all the surrounding towns senseless with grief. These girls were the seed of the community, some of them already married and putting down roots like their mothers. A tragedy like this must have happened for a reason, and for some, that reason was all too clear. A girl’s place was in the home, not working for cash in an ungodly world where company owners locked fire doors, paranoid about theft. My grandmother was thirty-eight years old. For the rest of her life she would blame herself for my young aunts’ deaths. She sold the farm and moved her remaining daughters to town, where she kept them close to her, forever close. By the time I was born, in 1965, she was in her fifties, sharp and strong. God-like.
We pause at the back of the church, lingering the way polite guests do before walking toward the area where we always sit, the heels of my grandmother’s short boots meeting the floor with absolute certainty. I stay close behind her, feeling every inch of my height, my feet kicking after one another like loosely tossed stones. A place to sit. For some there are choices. One might choose to go all the way to the front, to sit half hidden from the lectern by the bulky old confessionals; one might stay by the new, modern confessionals at the back. There are favorite seats beside the pillars that support the fat, curved belly of the ceiling, with its painting of angels ministering to Mary as she walks in the cherry orchard; there are seats beneath the mounted statues, where a child might sit to admire the delicate toes of the apostles. But we sit in the middle of the church, away from the pillars, the statues, potential distractions, away from the drafts that pulse from beneath the warped frames of the windows, whisper from the long, dark line where the walls meet the floor. My grandmother rubs the knuckles of my hand with her thumb, her peculiar gesture of affection, and I glow with her touch, with the knowing looks of the women around us who observe me at Mass, day after day, and whisper the word vocation. Sometimes I am asked to sing while the other parishioners kneel at the altar, five at a time, to receive Communion. My musical talent, like all good things, is God’s gift, and such a gift is both a blessing and a burden. You wonder if you are worthy. You wonder what God might expect in return.
I want you to be here with us. I want you to feel what we feel. This is the tray that holds the hymnal, attached to the back of the next pew. This is the old-fashioned hat clip beside it. That is the altar with its hand-sewn linens, which are laundered by the Ladies of the Altar. Here are the flowers these same women bring with them from their gardens or sunrooms to decorate the church. These are the woven wicker baskets that will be circulated twice during the course of the Mass by old Otto Leibenstein: once to help the missionaries, once to maintain the parish. And somewhere in the sacristy, trapped in a ring of gold, is the Body of Christ, the miracle that results again and again from the Mass. The Processional is about to begin, and you know exactly what to do, feel the weight of two thousand years behind each simple ritual. You cannot imagine a time when this feeling of absolute purpose will leave you. You cannot imagine losing your faith. You cannot imagine the loneliness.
When my brother disappeared in 1984, I began to see myself in the third person, as if my life were a story being told to someone else. Though I listened with no particular interest, on occasion I did wonder what this third-person self might say or feel or do. She goes upstairs to her room, the same room they shared as children. She rearranges the glass figurines on her bookshelf, imagining her brother’s face. A man can take care of himself, my father liked to say, and though Sam wasn’t yet a man, he was wiry and tall, made taller by the steel-toed boots he wore, his cropped spiked hair, his dangerous eyes. He had disappeared several times before, reappearing hung over, dirty, his face drawn thin as if to shut out what he’d seen. This time, he’d left the house on the afternoon of August fifth. He didn’t come home that night; he didn’t come home the next.
A peculiar heat wave drifted in from the west, capped by a low bank of clouds that isolated eastern Wisconsin from its usual cool lake breeze. After three days, my mother went to the Horton police, adding a fresh report to Sam’s plump file: driving under the influence, vandalism, trespassing, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, truancy. “He’ll be home when he’s hungry, Therese,” they told her. “He’s probably shacked up with friends.” No one was eager to look very hard for a kid who had virtually dropped out of school, disappearing each night into the cars of strangers, accelerating south, always south, toward Milwaukee. But three days became four days, then five, and then a week. Clearly, something was wrong.
My father took a personal leave from the car lot, distributing Sam’s picture throughout Sheboygan, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee. My mother ran a small advertising company, and every morning she printed up new flyers for him to post on bulletin boards and telephone poles and in the windows of bars, new press releases to be sent to newspapers farther and farther away. Since she’d first reported Sam missing, there had been a series of break-ins: Dr. Neidermier’s big lakefront house on August tenth, Becker’s Foodmart and the drive-in theater west of town on the eleventh. Next came rumors of an incident involving an older woman in Oneisha, Geena Baumbach, a friend of my grandmother’s. These rumors grew, threading their way through polite conversations, twisting between quiet suppers and afternoon cups of coffee. There were people who moved away from us when we sat down in our usual pew for Mass. There were men who would no longer shake my father’s hand. Suddenly the police were eager to find my brother too. Perhaps, they told my mother, he was involved somehow—as a victim, or a witness. None of them dared suggest to her face that Sam had become a suspect.
All through the third week of August, strangers drove up the long gravel driveway to our house, parking on the shady grass beside the barn: police officers, detectives, reporters, all of them sweating dark necklaces around their crisp shirt collars. My mother split her time between her tiny Sheboygan office and our sweltering living room, where she served raspberry Kool-Aid and gingersnap cookies. She brought out Sam’s baby pictures, his old drawings, the statewide art prize he’d won in fifth grade for a watercolor painting called Tulips. She didn’t mention that, afterward, my father called Sam an “ah-teest,” that he’d spoken with a lisp, saying “ah-teests,” were fairies, and maybe Sam was a fairy too. Instead, she discussed my plans to leave for college the following week; she talked about Sam’s upcoming senior year and how she hoped he’d be back to start on time. I knew she was trying to present an image she felt would make her client—in this case, all of us—appear most appealing. She’d gone through Sam’s room, collecting rolling papers, loose joints, a plastic bag containing a piece of mirror and traces of white dust, and she put all these things in a bigger plastic bag and buried them in the field. “There’s no sense in having his life ruined by this,” she said, and she reminded me that I didn’t have to talk with the detectives if I didn’t want to. By the time the sheriff arrived with a warrant, Sam’s room was as clean as my own, lightly scented with lavender air freshener.
“You know Sam wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody,” she told me, and the way that she said it was like a prayer, as if she believed I had the power to make her words the truth.
So I watched as my third-person self told the detectives that, like her mother, she hadn’t seen Sam since the afternoon of August fifth. She said she’d never noticed signs that Sam was drinking or taking drugs, and that Sam and her father never fought, and that Sam had been missing school last spring to look for summer work—not an uncommon thing in Horton. She told them that there was no reason Sam might break into people’s houses, or steal, or assault a woman in her own home, a woman my grandmother’s age. She told them she had never seen a knife like the one Geena Baumbach described. Suddenly the walls spiraled swiftly inward. I woke up on the couch; a strange man in a Kool-Aid mustache was fanning me with a legal-size pad. The weight of the past few weeks hit me like a punch, and I sobbed as I came back into my body, feeling every painful inch of my pounding head and hollow chest, the tension knot between my shoulders, the sourness of my breath from telling lies.
That night, unable to sleep, I said the entire Rosary, remembering those long-ago trips I’d taken with my mother to Holy Hill Retreat. We’d meet my grandmother and Auntie Thil, her children, Monica and Harv, and we’d walk the Stations of the Cross, retracing Christ’s crucifixion over a mile of wilderness. At each station, we’d kneel down on stone to say a new Our Father and Glory Be, asking forgiveness for our sins. My father and Uncle Olaf never came along; Holy Hill was for women and devout old men. Sam had gone when he was small, but as he got older my father teased him the way he did whenever Sam wanted to do something with my mother and me. Harv’s persistence past age ten was unusual: a blessing, a sign. At twelve he announced he planned to be a priest, and after that he worked freely beside the women, building altars of flowers to the Virgin in May, arranging the family crèche at Christmastime, making the pilgrimage to Holy Hill that left our lips blue, our teeth chattering, our knees wet and chafing in the chill air.
My father scoffed at Harv, at men who were not what he called a man’s man. He was awkward around priests the way he was around all bachelors, loners, men who did not quite fit in with the others; he spoke a bit too loud, laughed a bit too long. As Sam approached adolescence, my father became increasingly concerned over his quiet ways, his attachment to my mother and me. No son of his would be a sissy, a priest, a man who belonged to no one. No son of his would serve as a mirror, reflecting back the things that frightened my father most about himself. And by the time Sam entered junior high, he was learning to see the world through my father’s rational eye. Painting pictures was silly because you couldn’t make a living at something like that. There was no point in picking out a dream house or boat or a sports car from a magazine; where would you get the money? If God was everywhere, then how come you couldn’t see Him? “If there is a God, let Him drink this glass of water,” Sam said, and he placed it on the windowsill, where it stayed for days. Yet, eventually, it was gone.
“Evaporation,” Sam said smugly.
“Maybe that’s how God drinks.” I was willing to believe, but Sam said that if God could do anything, He should be able to gulp eight ounces of fluid. He should be able to make everyone happy. He should float facedown in the sky, like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
It’s hard to remember the earlier times, when Sam was not spinning in his own lonely orbit. Without imagination. A man’s concrete eye. It’s hard to remember that my family once believed we were special, that God Himself would cup His hands over our house to protect us from each other.
In the choir loft above the sacristy, Eva and Serina Oben—still known in their seventies as the Oben girls—take turns singing and playing on the organ, which was purchased last summer from the profits of raffles and summer festivals, and it’s important to think about the quilts you helped to stitch or the pies you made or the pine cone wreaths that took all fall to glue and mount on coat hanger frames. My brother, like the other boys, was tacitly excused from tasks like these, but I helped the women with everything, and now the organ is as much my own as the bed I sleep in every night. Each note a familiar voice, holding me in place. Belonging, like my grandmother, to something larger than myself. I remember how carefully she taught me to pray to Mary, to Mary’s mother, Ann, to my guardian angel, a little girl who looked just like me. I remember her household shrines, the framed photographs of Mary and Elise in their flower-strewn coffins, the Infant of Prague on top of the refrigerator, the four-foot-high statue of the Virgin behind the house. Altars to family, to women and children. Even Jesus looked female, with his moist lips and flowing hair, his gentle mother’s eyes.
Eight years after my brother disappeared, I married a man who was raised without religious beliefs. Our wedding was a trip to the courthouse in the upstate New York town where we now live; my grandmother refused to acknowledge it. She returned my letters unopened. She hung up the phone at the sound of my voice. She died six months ago, believing that I, like Sam, had been lost for good.
“At least light a candle for her intentions,” my mother said, when I told her I couldn’t make it to the funeral. Work, money…I had good reasons, and my mother had heard them all before. Since leaving Wisconsin, I’d visited only once, and that had been ten years earlier. So on the afternoon of my grandmother’s burial, I drove to one of the Catholic churches in our town, a town with two universities, six movie theaters, an arts center, bookstores, outdoor cafés; a town thirty times the size of Oneisha and Horton combined. I sat in my car, remembering my Sunday school classes at Saint Ignatius Church, where girls were forbidden to step on the red carpet that sprawled down the aisle. Girls were confined to the pews, while boys got to finger the glittering chalice on the altar. Girls had to curtsy to Father Van Dan, got called into the rectory, one at a time, to place their hands on his Bible and pledge to keep their virtue. Girls could never be priests, because they weren’t made in God’s image. Girls were made to stay home with their babies and raise them; even the latest Pope said that was true. The harder I tried to think about my grandmother, to remember how close we were when I was young, to do the one thing that would have made her happy, the angrier I became. I could not imagine leaving my car and walking up the stone flight of steps into the church. I put my head down on the steering wheel and cried, and then I drove away.
But in dreams I still take my place beside my grandmother, fold myself eagerly into our pew. The voice of the organ is full of anguish, the rich wood reflecting darts of light that burn larger, brighter, when I—no longer an individual but part of this congregation—rise and begin to sing. How the dust shines in the air! The priest floats into the sanctuary, genuflects before the altar, prepares to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Think of how it feels to behold a miracle. Imagine the power of such a belief, how you might cradle it for warmth, a treasured glowing coal that whispers, I am loved. When the priest raises the host above the altar and speaks the magical Latin, that dull bread glistens like a full moon. We burn our faces in its heavenly light.
And then I am bursting through the heavy front doors. It is winter. Ice shines on the chipped stone steps, icicles hang from the railing. I exhale the white dress of an angel, which dissipates into the air. Or perhaps it is a lovely summer day, the sky filled with the faces of high drifting clouds, and still there is nothing I recognize. This is the point when I always awaken, with Adam sleeping beside me, secure in a world I inhabit until my grandmother appears to me and I’m left to wonder, What is this place? This room, this house, this life accountable to no one but myself. My brother’s disappearance, my grandmother’s death. The feeling after loss finally hits. The deepness of it. The hurtling down.
Church bells ring in the distance, faint as a faucet dripping. First light mists the windows. I slip from beneath the covers, sit shivering on the edge of the bed. It’s Sunday morning, early spring, 1995. Icicles drip from the eaves. The clock ticks on the wall. I cannot imagine what I will do next.
I’m trying on maternity dresses, hand-me-downs from Adam’s sister, Pat, all of them childish, ugly. There’s a full-length mirror on the closet door, and I twist and pose in front of it. The dresses billow like sheets on a wash line. Nine weeks into my first pregnancy, I cannot imagine how it will be to occupy that much space. “You’ll know soon enough,” my mother has assured me, but right now my stomach is its usual soft pouch. If it weren’t for this lingering tiredness, I’d think the doctor’s test was wrong.
“You want some toast?” Adam calls from the kitchen.
“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.” But I pull on another dress, turn sideways, stare critically as any teenage girl. Though I look the same as I always do, it feels as though I should look different.
Lately, I catch myself studying my body the way experts look at the body of a car, trying to determine where it’s been, what it’s done. I remember my brother once claiming my father’s car had been dented by a hit-and-run driver. My father called the police, and they came after a long, impatient hour, two stout men who questioned Sam about the slivers of wood they found embedded in the paint. “Looks like a hit-and-run phone pole,” the older one said, his lips pulled back into the wide grin of an unfamiliar dog. Sam was sixteen. His memory frequently suffered these gaps, visible as missing teeth. Where were you last night? I don’t know. What did you do? I forget. It took him three weeks of community service to pay the six thousand citizens of Horton, Wisconsin, what it cost to fix that pole.
When I try to think of Sam, I see the blurred edges of a figure done in watercolor—I have to stand back before he eases into focus, and even then I can’t see him clearly. Did he have wide-set eyes? Large, clumsy feet like my own? Were there freckles in the shape of the Big Dipper on his shoulder, or was that just something I told him once, giggling as he spun round and round, unable to turn his neck far enough to see? Sometimes I worry that the things I’ve invented outnumber the ones that are true. Then I recite the facts my mother gave to the police: the last time we saw him he was seventeen years old, he was five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred thirty pounds; he had blond hair and gray-green eyes, and yes, he did have older friends, men from Milwaukee we did not know, and yes, though he’d left the house on the afternoon of August 5, 1984, in his usual hurry, there was nothing peculiar about that day except that he never returned. Whatever happened next remains a mystery even now; there are suspicions, speculations, but no concrete clues. The possibilities wander through my dreams, catch me at odd moments like a skipped heartbeat. I have even tried to pray, crossing right thumb over left the way my grandmother taught me: Tell me, please tell me where he is.
It’s hard to remember being seventeen, but these few things I do remember as I tug the last dress down over my head: the town of Horton, my father’s lectures on citizenship, the stinging green odor of alfalfa fields stretching for mile after rippling mile, the brittle feathers of week-old pigeons—pinfeathers, my mother called them, and they did feel sharp against my hands when I’d climb into the belly of the silo to visit their nests. Adam is the sort of person who remembers everything, easily: what we had for lunch, the first time we made love, directions to a pond in Vermont where we swam three years ago. His mind is ordered as neatly as his dresser drawers. Pants to the right, shirts to the left. Socks rolled into balls, their lips pulled back to swallow their own bodies. Every so often, he’ll straighten out my clothes, refolding crumpled cotton, stroking creases out of linen. See, it’s so easy to find things now, he says, but within a day the crisp boundaries blur, long-limbed socks embracing shirts, panties twisted between them.
There are times when finding something only means risking another loss. Close to the mirror, I note the fine lines at the corners of my eyes, the deeper ones crossing my forehead, the slight downward curve reshaping my mouth. My body is slowly dissolving the landmarks of my childhood. Soon there will be others: stretchings and scarrings, a more complicated adult map. But I can still find the dent on my shin from where our neighbor’s retarded son kicked me, feel the incredible warmth of the blood as he stood over me on the playground, crying too. I strip off the dress and there are my chicken-pox scars: three along my breastbone, one beside my navel. There is the downy hair on my stomach that made me afraid, for one awful summer, that something had gone wrong and I was turning into a boy. All these things I find and more; perhaps there are others, evidence I’ve overlooked.
My mother still gets responses from the ads she places in newspapers, at the backs of magazines. Three years ago a woman thought she saw Sam in Salt Lake City; last year a man insisted he waited on their table in New Orleans. By now he would be starting to age the way, at thirty, I am aging, his shoulders creeping forward a bit, his stomach comfortably soft. I wish I could look at my changing body to see the person I’m becoming, not the person I have lost. My earliest memory is of Sam, newly born, one red fist corking his mouth, but though I examine myself from every angle, I can’t find one mark, one scar, the slightest clue I ever had a brother.
After breakfast, Adam and I sit on the back porch, drinking what we’re pretending is coffee. In fact, it’s a caffeine-free herbal substitute that tastes a little like dirt. He’s already wearing his work clothes: an orange T-shirt, a baseball cap, jeans with a list of Things to Do poking out from the left hip pocket. I’m back in my nightshirt, and whenever I look up from the dun circle of liquid in my cup, the color of the world overwhelms me: tiger lilies along the porch, summer sky, emerald grass. There are butterflies, birds, our marmalade cat, Laverne. There are brown tree trunks and speckled stones and the neighbors’ potted geraniums.
“How were the dresses?” Adam asks.
“Polka-dotted. Lots of little bows.”
“That figures,” he says, making a face. Pat is the queen of ticky-tacky things.
“At least there weren’t any of those T-shirts that say ‘Baby on Board.’”
He grins. “I’ll have to get you one.”
“Save your money.”
“Or maybe one that says, ‘Baby,’ with an arrow pointing down.”
“Ugh.”
We are spending the day at home, officially to celebrate our third anniversary but in reality to finish all the projects I’ve started around the house. There’s the partially stripped bureau in the garage. There are the seedlings I haven’t transplanted even though it’s June: peppers, melons, tomatoes, their tangled white roots peeping out from the bottoms of the peat pots, tasting air. “So what do you want to do first?” he says.
“I was thinking I’d tackle the garden,” I say, and I cradle my cup in my hands.
“Then I’ll finish the bureau.” He stands up, whistling, and carries his cup inside. I can see his shape moving around the kitchen, and it looks like the shadow of another, larger body. It could be my father’s shadow scraping the cast-iron pan, loading the dishwasher, wiping the table, except my father never did any of those things.
In Horton, there were names for boys who did dishes, who played indoors, boys who stayed close to their mothers. My father didn’t understand when Sam wanted to play with me instead of making friends with boys in town. Sometimes he tried to play with Sam himself, but Sam cringed away from his blunt, tousling hands, his booming voice that always seemed too hearty, too cheerful. Nothing annoyed my father more than what he called a sissy. He began to keep a closer eye on us, listen in on our private talks. If Sam picked up one of my dolls, my father asked, did he want to be a mommy? If Sam crept into my bed in the night, frightened by some dream, my father jerked him up out of the blankets and told him he was a big boy, old enough to sleep by himself.
“You look beat,” Adam says from the doorway. “Why don’t you go back to bed for a while?”
“I’m OK,” I say, although I feel as if I could put my head down on the table and sleep forever.
The seedlings are waiting for me in the back bay window. Beneath them, the wooden ledge has turned pale from the damp. I carry their trays outside to my little garden, two at a time, making trip after trip. Each year, I buy too many plants for the space that I have. My mother’s garden sprawled for half an acre behind our house, well out of reach of the shadow cast by the derelict barn. The doors of the barn were kept boarded shut, but I found other ways inside, and as soon as Sam was old enough I hoisted him in through the broken windows at the back. The old metal poles of the stanchions rose up around us like trees. Cobwebs swam through the air. “Don’t tell anyone,” I warned Sam, and I led him through the cow barn to the silo and my secret: the white, glowing bones of mice and opossums and raccoons that had fallen the twenty-foot drop and died after lonely weeks pacing that concrete circle.
Summers, we spent entire days in the barn. We hunted for field mice nests, stroking the soft blind bodies that were no bigger than our own fingers. We caught the barn swallows that fluttered against the windows, and when we opened our hands to release them, they lay briefly still in our palms, shiny blue, and we felt their beating hearts. Sam was like those swallows when I sat on the edge of his bed at night, his pale throat exposed as he closed his eyes to listen to my stories. I made paper hats for him and tin can shoes. I taught him to make the sign of the cross, top to bottom, left to right.
He was beautiful—you could tell by the way strangers stopped to talk to him, bending their faces too close. “What a waste!” they said about his long, thick lashes, the deep coral color of his lips, his golden-pine complexion. I was the paler, chubby version; I looked adults squarely in the eye. “My brother is shy,” I’d say in my coldest voice, and Sam would duck behind me and grip my hand, my father’s old watch rattling on his wrist. The watch was one of my father’s bizarre, infrequent gifts; it didn’t work, but as Sam got older he began to wear it everywhere. It made him look even smaller than he was, sweet, the little boy pretending to be a man. I hated that watch. It was heavy, scratched, ugly; it glowed in the dark like a disembodied eye, and I didn’t understand how Sam could like something I didn’t. I was the one who decided what we liked. At first, I tried to swindle it away from him; when that failed I used force, until my mother intervened. “That doesn’t belong to you,” she said, not understanding that I wanted not to own it but to destroy it, this thing that distinguished my brother from myself.
I dig holes for the seedlings, add rotted leaves from the compost, sink the frail roots into the soil the way my mother taught me. It seems to me now that Sam began to change when we were first separated from each other—one day, we were simply brother and sister, and then, abruptly, we became boy and girl, too old to share a bedroom, too old to play together with my dolls or Sam’s small Matchbox cars, too old to kiss each other good night, to touch. I did the dishes and vacuumed and dusted and worked in the garden with my mother; Sam mowed the lawn and helped my father change the oil in his car. I was given books to read; Sam was given things to build. I changed too, becoming self-conscious about my clothes, my hair, the too-flatness and too-fullness of my body. As a Catholic girl, I was to model myself on Mary, who was both a mother and a virgin. Mary, who Jesus allowed to suffer most because He loved her best.
The winter before my spring confirmation, I came downstairs wearing the confirmation dress my mother and I had made. It was white, of course, with frail puffed sleeves and two thick rows of lace at the hem. I was eleven, and I moved past Sam on tiptoe, pretending I was holy, a saint, an eager bride of Christ lifted by His breath so my feet wouldn’t touch the ground. “That looks fat on you,” Sam teased, and I whirled around and kicked him with my sharp white shoes. To punish me, my mother made me change clothes and then she put me to work lining the highest pantry shelves with fresh Con-Tact paper. The paper was orange and green, and it stuck to my hands. Sweat prickled under my arms as I wrestled it into place, carried armloads of pots and pans up and down the stepladder, all the while smelling my bitter, human smell. I wasn’t holy, and it was Sam’s fault, and I would make him pay.
It was a few days before his birthday, a particularly cold, gray January. We were still on vacation from school. The snow had drifted up to the windowsills, and the fields around the house stretched vast, empty, as if the soul of the world had been exposed. There was nothing to do except pick at each other, and later, as I sat reading in my mother’s rocking chair, Sam began to pester me about his birthday present.
“I didn’t get you a present,” I said, even though I had. “I mean, you’re going to be ten now, and that will change everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, you’ll be ten. Nine is much better.”
“Why is nine better?”
“There’s no sense in worrying about it,” I said. “You’re going to be ten, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
For a moment, he searched my face for a sign, but I made my expression like the snowy fields, smooth and white and without a landmark. He frowned, his gray-green eyes deep as the eyes of horses, full of want. “Will you love me as much when I’m ten?” he asked, choking on that shameful word love, and when I told him no, his face shattered. “I didn’t mean it,” I begged him, but he ran down the stairs to his bedroom in the basement and locked the door against me. Until the previous summer, we’d shared the bedroom that now was mine, just across the hall from my parents’. I knew how his body would be twisted on the bed, the pillow tucked to his abdomen, his mouth hanging open and silent between sobs. I knew the flush that crept up his chest to his neck, blossoming in his cheeks, the redness of his eyes. I’d been one and a half when he was born, and my mother has told me how I examined every inch of his tiny, perfect body. How I watched as she bathed and fed and diapered him. How his first word was my name.
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.