When I remember Sarah, I will always think of her as I did that summer she disappeared. I slept on her floor almost every night, limbs sprawled out across my old Pocahontas sleeping bag, head resting on our Pyrenean, Harrison’s, furry belly. She was eighteen, and I was thirteen. Aside from the one in our parents’ bedroom, Sarah had the only window air conditioning unit in the house, and it was cooler on her floor than it was anywhere else. I fell asleep each evening to the soft hum of the compressor, the short, broken hairs around my face moving slightly under the fan. Harrison’s stomach rose and fell as he breathed, and the movement was comforting and familiar.
On cool nights, when the stars were clearest and we could shut off the air conditioning, Sarah would let me move up onto the twin bed with her. Those nights were the best, when I could hear the crickets chirping in the window box and the wind passing through the bamboo wind chime I’d made for our back porch the year before. Sarah hogged all the sheets, sleeping on her stomach with one long, thin arm thrown over my side of the bed, but I never really minded. I liked the feeling of closeness. Come morning, when the day’s heat made our skin, sticky with sweat, cling together, she would push me out, back to the floor.
We lived in an old farmhouse, right on the boundary of Loyalsock and Eldred County in Central Pennsylvania. Our neighborhood was one line of houses and a Baptist church on a winding, pot-hole filled road squeezed between the Lycoming River and the deep, thick woods that stretched into the hills. In the spring, when the snow from the mountains melted and drained into the river, the houses’ basements would flood. There were flood marks on our basement walls that, like tree lines, marked the years since the house was built. The highest went up as far as the kitchen on the ground level, but then Mom had hidden it under a yellow, flowered wallpaper.
Unless you missed the turn that took you back to town, or got lost down the back road that led in to the Petro’s tree farm, it was hard to stumble upon our neighborhood. Sometimes Loyalsock and Eldred would fight over which county we belonged to, but usually they forgot we even existed, which was how most of us here preferred it.
“Out in the boonies.” That’s how Grandma liked to refer to our neighborhood. She was from the city—Pittsburgh—and she was always encouraging us to move there, as well. She told my mother that she didn’t like seeing her Sarah and Harriet living like hicks.
Mom said that we didn’t have the money to move. There was nothing wrong with the way we lived. Mom was a waitress at the Hoss’s in Montoursville. At age forty, she had thick ankles, frizzy strawberry blonde hair, and the curves of a thirty-year-old. Dad’s response to Grandma was to shrug and go out back for a smoke. He was a mechanic at the airport by the river, the same river across the street from our house, but closer to town, where the water grew brown and polluted. He spent most of his time at the shop, or in the barn where he kept old airplane parts, tractors, and cars that he took apart and put back together. He was tall, with a high forehead, a potbelly, and grease stained fingertips.
I agreed with my mom. I didn’t mind being poor. I found no appeal in the cold neatness of Grandma’s apartment, or the cars passing by under the windows, or the streets and sky that were always lit. Sarah didn’t like Pittsburgh either and said it was dirty, but she’d always find a coffeehouse or a bar to go to. I preferred summer in the boonies. During the three months school was out, the rules changed. The social boundaries shifted. The boy and girl who had thrown insults at each other in the hallways of high school were suddenly caught making out under the willowy trees by the church at the end of the road. And there weren’t any secrets. Everybody’s mothers would talk, at mailboxes at the end of driveways, or in the pews after church, and I liked hearing the gossip over dinner every night. I spent my summers catching fireflies and playing kickball and manhunt with the other kids. We’d stay up late, aided by the light of the moon and our parents’ back porch lights. During the days, I’d wade into the shallows of the Loyalsock crick, catching crawdads before they could bite at my toes, or I’d walk into the woods, seeing how far I could go before the loneliness and the quiet would scare me back home.
Sarah always worked in the afternoons and spent her evenings with whichever boy she was dating at the time. But when I turned thirteen, and she broke up with her current boyfriend and didn’t chase after another one, things seemed to change. The week school let out for that summer, she decided that I was old enough to be taken to the crick at night.
The house was still and hot, and her face hung above mine like a white moon as she whispered me awake. “Harriet. Get up.”
As my eyes focused, I could see her corn yellow hair hanging around her cheeks and her pink bangs covering her eyes. She pushed the hairs that had escaped my ponytail out of my eyes. My hair was dull and brown, so different from hers. In a sleepy daze, I slid out from under the sheets and slipped sandals onto my feet. “Where are we going?”
“I could hear Ma and Dad arguing in their room, and I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “I want to take you somewhere.”
She held my hand and led me into the hallway, her fingers smooth and warm in my own. Harrison was sleeping on the floor, a great, white, breathing mass, and we stepped over him. We walked on the side of the steps closest to the wall so they wouldn’t creak as much as we snuck down the staircase. I felt proud that I was able to be as quiet as Sarah. I heard my dad shouting something at my mom as we passed by their room, but his voice was too low for me to understand the words. We opened the back door slowly and didn’t lock it as we closed it behind us. Outside, it was as hot and still as inside the house, and the stars were dull and far away under the haze.
I followed Sarah down the back road until we reached a bridge that crossed the Loyalsock crick. I wanted desperately to walk back home, but I felt excited and didn’t want Sarah to think I was a baby. I’d passed over this bridge before in the car, but I’d never walked. It was small, less than ten feet up from the water, but rumor was that years ago some kid had fallen over the guard rail and drowned. During the day, in the shallows of the crick below, you could see the skeleton of an old bike half submerged in the mud, minnows drifting between the spokes of the wheels and snails feasting on the slimy green algae that grew on the handle bars. Sarah climbed onto the metal guard rail and sat there, her feet dangling over the edge, over the darkness. I followed her, kicking my sandals off onto the pavement so they wouldn’t fall. Looking over the edge, I could see the shadowy reflections of our bare feet in the water.
“Kids come here to drink Saturday nights,” she told me. “Sometimes they jump off.” The crick gurgled below us against the support beams. “Or they just hide under the bridge, on the bank. I used to sneak out here with Matt before we broke up. Now I just come on my own.” I was surprised that she had snuck out before, but I didn’t let it show. I was a teenager, like she was, and not to be surprised by such things.
We sat there in silence. I was afraid at first that our parents would catch us, but as we started to talk, that fear faded away. The constant rush of the crick blotted out all other sound, the darkness made faces invisible and safe. We talked, trading secrets. Sarah talked about books, kissing, and the taste of cigarettes. She told me about her boss who looked like Steve Schirripa, and how he’d been going through a divorce. He’d come to work drunk and spend the morning reciting passages from the Bible and trying to convert coworkers to Catholicism. In return, I talked about my unrequited love for Kyle, the gangly, tan boy who lived at the end of our road. I liked these tradings of secrets. They made me feel important and needed. When we finally got home, our sandals hooked beneath our fingers and our feet bare, I didn’t even mind when Sarah didn’t let me move into her room and sleep under the air conditioning.
Nights in my neighborhood were cool and exciting, but days without Sarah passed slowly and vaguely in a veil of haze. She worked at a riverside campground twenty minutes up the road, where the forest was deeper and there weren’t anymore neighborhoods. We didn’t have an extra car, so she rode her bike there every morning at 10:00
Mom and Dad were fighting a lot, and I blamed the heat. It was the hottest summer we had had in years—days glistened with mirages over pavement and dogs sat panting in front yards under willow trees—and at night, the walls trapped the heat like ovens. The heat crawled under your skin and came out in any way that it could.
“You always do this to me,” I remember Mom yelling one day as she came in the back door. Most arguments started out like this. “There is no communication with you. None.”
“Come on, Sue,” Dad said. He kicked off his boots, so worn that they slid right off his feet, as he came in the back door after her. “He’s just gonna be here for an hour or so, helping me in the barn.”
“I don’t care if you have a friend over, you’re an adult. But this just proves my point that you never communicate. Would it have been so difficult to just pick up the phone and ask me about this? Maybe I already had plans for dinner.”
“He won’t stay for dinner.”
“He’s getting here in an hour. We have to invite him to dinner.” She sighed. “I’ll drive all the way into town and order a pizza.” From the living room, I heard her footsteps carry her over to the fridge. “Oh, thanks a lot, John.”
“What?”
“What did you do with the money? I had the cash from my last paycheck on top of the fridge.”
“Sue, come on. It probably fell behind or something. I didn’t do anything with it.”
“We can’t afford this,” my mom said, “I want to send Sarah to the community college in the fall, but we can barely rake in the money for the first semester. And you blow what we do have on smoking and car engines?”
Somehow, the fights would always shift to Sarah. I was average, well-behaved, and so I was safe in times like these. I thought of my sister and our walk last night and I felt sympathy for her.
“Maybe Sarah should be helping out more,” Dad said. “We’re working to send her to college, and she spends her money on God knows what. I paid for my own education.”
When Sarah got home that night, I went up to her room.
“Mom and Dad were fighting today,” I said, sitting on the rug in the center of the floor.
Sarah had the smallest room in the house, but it was in a corner and had the most windows, and I always wished that it was mine. When the curtains weren’t drawn, you could see out into the old, overgrown pumpkin fields beyond our yard and to the line of pine trees that bordered the woods. Most springs, a dove would build a nest in the window box, and Sarah would refuse to open the windows, disturbing it, until its chicks had hatched and it had flown away.
Sarah shrugged. She was cross legged on the bed, a book called The Stranger sitting in her lap. She was holding a ballpoint pen in her hand, underlining and crossing things out as she read. “Mom and Dad always fight. They’re married.”
I sat down next to her, and caught a whiff of smoke. Mom made Dad smoke outside, but still, the smell stuck to everything. Sarah reached over to a fan on the windowsill and turned it on. One of the blades was broken and it made a whip whip whip sound as it spun.
“They want you to help pay for college.” She shrugged, and I questioned further. “What are you going to do?”
Sarah closed the book. “I’m not going to college,” she said.
I adjusted the fan, trying to stop the sound. “But you’re smart.” I never did as good as she did. “You’re just gonna find a job and stay here?”
It wasn’t that surprising that she wanted to stay. Most kids in our neighborhood went to college because their parents wanted something better for them than flood-stained farm houses so far out of town that the only radio stations they picked up were bluegrass. But still, some of them never left.
Sarah shook her head. “No. I’m not getting stuck in this town like Mom and Dad did. I’ve been saving up. I won’t need college. People underestimate the value of learning through experience.” Absentmindedly, she started tracing stars and moons on the inside of her ankle, covering up the two dark birthmarks I knew she had there.
“Are you scared to go to college?” I asked. I would be afraid.
“No. I try not to be scared of anything. College just isn’t for me, Harriet.”
I watched as she finished coloring in a star that stretched down to the underside of her foot. I shifted on the rug, picking dog hairs and fuzzies from the strands of fiber, and she went back to reading. I couldn’t imagine not going to school anymore. I needed it and its structure and predictability. But I knew Sarah was braver than I was.
In July, a flood came. The patch of woods on the bank across the street flooded first, the brown river water spilling over its banks, frothing at the bases of the gnarled chokecherry and fir trees. The abandoned fields behind our house were next. The water rose up around the dead corn stalks until we could see nothing but their tips, peeking above the muddiness like little desperate faces. The water line, getting closer and closer to our front porch, and the steady, never-ending pound of rain on our roof frightened me, but Sarah didn’t seem to notice.
I started to feel better when Kyle and his baby brother Zach waded out into the fields and stood balancing on the round fence posts. All afternoon, they took turns doing cannonballs into the water. Standing wet atop the posts, their T-shirts pulled tight and dripping against their thin chests, I thought they looked like scarecrows. Mom kept me busy, placing buckets under the leaks in our bedrooms and moving anything valuable upstairs, but as often as I could get away without her getting suspicious, I’d go to the bathroom where I’d stand on tiptoes and look out the window, watching them. I wanted to go swimming too. I wanted to impress Kyle by showing him I could swim.
Sarah caught me looking out the window once, when I didn’t close the door all the way, and she joined me by the windowsill. “Come on, Mom has more work for us.” She looked down at Kyle and his brother. “That’s how people get worms, or worse. Dumb kids.” She bent down to pull extra paper towels from beneath the sink.
“They’re not dumb,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear me.
That night, Mom, Sarah, and I went to our neighbors’, the Sauls, while Dad stayed home to keep an eye on the house. We ran over, our sneakers and socks filling up with water, our umbrellas doing nothing to stop the slanted rain. Sarah complained as we ran, saying that our basement flooded every year but we never did anything about it. She pouted through dinner, and afterwards, as we watched the evening news on the old, rabbit-eared television, she got even angrier because Mr. Sauls said something about the foreigners, except he said it “fer-ners,” taking our jobs, and Mom agreed with him.
Sarah left the room fuming. I heard her muttering something about “conservative mindedness.”
Mom apologized for her, laughing it off, but I followed her onto the back porch. She had collapsed onto the porch swing, and I sat behind her, looking out over the dark yard. The grass was soaked, puddling in the lower sections, and the ground seemed to be moving, rippling as each drop of rain hit.
“Everyone’s minds are so closed here,” she said finally. “Don’t become like them, Harriet.”
I nodded and promised quickly, “I won’t.”
I went inside and grabbed us both lukewarm Dr. Peppers from the counter.
“Thanks.” Sarah opened it, and there was a faint hiss as the fizz was released.
We sat on the porch swing all evening, sipping the sodas slowly, making them last as long as we could before we had to go back inside.
As the weeks went on, my parents had more arguments about missing money. The tan Oldsmobile my mom used to get to Hoss’s broke down, and we couldn’t afford to have it fixed. It sat in the gravel driveway by the barn, a layer of pollen growing on its hood and the seat cushions fading in the sun. Dad took the truck to work, and Mom was forced to get rides from friends.
After a couple weeks, I noticed that it was always the same person dropping her off. A big guy who drove a Ford truck and always played old rock music out the open windows.
Once, Mom invited him into the house.
“Hey,” he said, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, where I was watching TV.
I stared at him, confused. He wore a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves and had short, reddish hair and a face that look carved with its sharp, hard angles. I didn’t recognize him. “Mom?” I said, raising my voice.
“Harriet?” I got up from the couch and, avoiding eye contact with the stranger, sidled into the other room. Mom was at the sink, filling a glass of water from the tap. “You’re home,” she said. “I expected you to be outside somewhere with Sarah. Beautiful day like this.” My eyes lingered on the man. “This is Paul,” she explained. “He works in the kitchens at work. Paul, this is my daughter, Harriet.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, reaching across the table to shake.
His hand felt too big as I held it in my own, and I suddenly wished I had been outside today. I didn’t like meeting new people. I never knew what to say. I was relieved when Sarah walked into the kitchen behind me. She had taken the day off work, and I was glad to feel her presence in the empty space between me and the stranger.
“And this is my other daughter, Sarah,” Mom said.
She turned from the sink as they shook, and I noticed that Sarah held his eyes longer, gripping his hand more tightly than I had. Mom handed Paul the full glass, and he gulped it. For a few seconds, the only sound was of the liquid sliding down his throat. I noticed a tattoo on his right arm, and I tried to get a closer look as he was busy drinking. It was of a boy’s face. I moved to stand closer to Sarah, and its eyes seemed to follow me.
Paul put down the glass, still half full. “So how’re you girls’ summer going?”
Sarah shrugged.
“Fine,” I said. I was disappointed that Sarah wasn’t filling in my silence like she usually would. She was just staring at Paul, her face blank. I tried to look him in the eye too, but the second face on his arm kept staring at me.
“Alright.” He turned to my mom now. “Well, I better be getting going now. Thanks for the water, Sue. Nice meeting you girls.” He waved a thick hand at us and left. I heard the rock music start up as he got into his car, and the spray of gravel as he sped away.
Mom watched him leave and then turned to me and Sarah. “Paul’s been getting me to and from work. He’s been a huge help.” She picked up the unfinished glass of water, drank the rest, and put it in the sink.
I heard Sarah blow quickly out of her nose, an annoyed sound. She left the room, and I followed her back out to the couch. The news was playing on the television, but Sarah didn’t change it as she put her feet up on the coffee table.
“What?” I asked.
She didn’t look at me as she answered. “I can’t believe she invited him in.”
“What do you mean? You mean Paul?”
She looked over at me, her eyebrows raised in exasperation. “Oh, come on, Harriet. Open your eyes. Mom, who’s all about planning and communication, has a strange man over while Dad isn’t here. She drinks out of Paul’s water glass. What do you think would have happened if her daughters weren’t in the house?” She looked back at the television.
“I think he was just giving Mom a ride,” I said quietly, and she sighed.
After dinner I caught Sarah with a cigarette to her lips in the center of her bedroom floor. I pretended not to notice, and closed the door quietly before she knew I was there. That night, as I slept on her floor, I thought the carpet smelled a lot like my dad.
It was a week later when Sarah took me back to the bridge. It was evening this time, and Sarah lied to our parents, telling them that she had to work overtime and that I was going to a friend’s house. When we reached the bridge, it was sunset. For a moment, the water was blood red under the setting sun, and we sat on the guard rail as the light fell orange on our faces. And then, the sun disappeared beneath the mountains and the air suddenly grew cooler and the water blacker. The street lamp flickered dully for a moment before going out. The darkness was complete.
“We’re going to jump off today,” Sarah told me.
I looked over the edge. It was only eight or so feet, but the water seemed very far away, and I thought of the boy who was supposed to have drowned there. I wondered how deep the crick was, and if I’d hit rocks when I fell.
“I’ve done it before.” Sarah said, pushing her pink bangs out of her eyes. “This is something you need to experience.”
“Why?” I asked, looking again over the edge. I felt a sense of vertigo.
“You need to feel the complete freedom. You need to feel that rush of adrenaline and know your limitations.”
I was silent, not wanting to question her. I was afraid that at the smallest sign of weakness, she’d decide that this was too much for me to handle and take me home.
Sarah climbed off the guard rail and stripped down to her underwear, so that her wet clothes wouldn’t weigh her down, she explained, and gave them to me to drape over the edge of the bridge like flags. Her skin was white in the dark as she climbed to the edge of the bridge. I’d seen her change before, but this was different. She looked so exposed.
“Watch me,” she said, and I restrained the urge to stop her, to grab onto her wrist before I lost her to the air. I reminded myself that people did this all the time.
Sarah leapt, flew, and then fell, back straight and arms at her sides. She never paused when she jumped, not for an instant. The movement was continuous and without thought. There was a splash as she hit the water, and for a moment she disappeared. All that was left were the ripples hitting against the side of the crick bank, making the seaweed dance and move. I waited for her to resurface, hating that absence.
A second later, Sarah’s face appeared again above the water. Her hair was dark and wet, slicked back against her skull. She waved up at me. Jump, that wave said. I took off my jeans, slowly and self consciously, but I wouldn’t take off my T-shirt, pulling it down as far as it would go over my thighs. I climbed over the guard rail like she had, so that there was nothing but empty space an inch from my bare feet. I wasn’t sure if I could pry my fingers from the bridge, and I felt my toes curled around the edge of the pavement. I stood there for an entire minute before I was able to let go and jump. It happened quickly. There was a nauseating pull in my stomach. And then the slap of the impact. Warm, embracing water. A slightly bitter taste on my lips.
“Did you feel that?” Sarah asked me when my head broke the surface. “Did you feel that rush?”
I hadn’t. I felt sick. But I didn’t want to disappoint her, and so I nodded.
Sarah made me jump off the bridge half a dozen more times. Every time, I’d try to find that sense of freedom she described, but I never did. As I fell, I’d clutch my T-shirt to myself, curling my arms and legs in close to my body like a dying spider. I hated the split second before I hit the water. I hated the feeling of my stomach rising to my throat and the complete uncontrollability of the fall. It wasn’t until I was in the water, submerged, my knees bumping the muddy river bottom, that I knew everything was alright. I’d surface, and Sarah would tease me about how long it had taken me to jump, about how silly I had looked up on the bridge in my T-shirt, peeking meekly over the side of the bridge, but none of that mattered. Other than the occasional car that sped by, shaking the bridge’s foundations, and slicing open the night with its headlights, it would be completely dark. And in the water with Sarah, I would feel safe and like I belonged.
“It’s time to go home,” Sarah said after we had been there for a couple of hours. “Mom and Dad will be asleep by now, and we’ll be able to sneak in without them seeing us. Hide anything wet in the back of your closet until it dries out.”
Walking back home, we left dark footprints on the pavement behind us.
The end of July came, and things were feeling different. I didn’t play kickball like I had when I was younger, and the firefly season was coming to an end. I spent more time going into the woods because it was always cooler there, and I was beginning to hate the loneliness of the house. But sometimes even the shade of the trees and the dark smell of pine and rotting logs seemed to be pressing in from every side. No matter where I went, I felt trapped. I wondered if this was how Sarah felt.
We started going to the bridge more often. But instead of jumping, often we’d walk. We’d leave the bridge, and follow the winding back roads until we got tired. Sarah talked more than she had before.
“I know a guy who graduated a couple years ago,” she told me once. “He drove to Florida and joined the migrant workers, picking oranges and fruits in the fields. All year, he moves where they need work. He’s like a gypsy, never staying in one place for longer than a season.” She kicked a pinecone down the road using the side of her barefoot. “Harriet, everything brainwashes you into a way of thinking. Even family brainwashes you. Look at how unhappy Mom and Dad are together. I don’t want to be like that. I want to find another way to live.”
We were farther away from home than we’d ever been, and it made me nervous. Trees lined both sides of the road, and I thought I heard the hiss of a possum up ahead. Every night Sarah wanted to walk farther, and I wondered when she’d be ready to turn around. I looked up at her as the clouds shifted and the moon shone down on us, and she appeared different than she had at the beginning of the summer. Her pink bangs had begun to grow out, leaving a blonde halo around the crest of her head, and her hair had baked golden under the summer sun.
Sarah said, “The only way to really know who you are is to tear yourself away from everything.”
I imagined my sister miles away, picking oranges under the hot sun that bleached away the pink in her bangs. “Wouldn’t that be lonely?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “It would be liberating.”
Now I was imagining her gone. Not in a different state, a different part of the world. But just her absence. I thought of having to face high school and Paul and Mom and Dad’s fighting on my own.
The pinecone Sarah’d been kicking rolled to my side of the road, and I picked it up.
“You wouldn’t do that though, right? You wouldn’t leave without me?” I stared through the darkness, trying to make out her expression through the gloom, until she nodded.
“I promise.”
I felt myself breathe a little sigh of relief, and I dropped the pinecone back onto the pavement.
A cool front hit us in August. I took it as a sign that things were returning to normal. Sarah started letting me sleep in her bed more often. I could have gone back to my own room, but I liked having her close. The first day of eighth grade was drawing closer and closer, and I felt like my hold on her was slipping. Mom and Dad would fight every night before bed, and I needed the hum of the air conditioner to block out their voices.
The first Sunday that month, our church held its yearly back-to-school yard sale in the parking lot. Mom had to work, but she signed me and Sarah up to help. We hadn’t gone to church as a family since Easter, and she was feeling guilty about that.
For lunch, the church grilled us hotdogs, and a few of the neighbors brought Tupperware containers full of potato salad. Kyle and his family were at the table next to us, and I’d been giving him sideways glances all morning. He was browner and tanner than I remembered him, and I could see long, thin muscles moving under the skin when he helped his dad move their picnic table. He hadn’t had muscles before. I wondered if I looked different too, if swimming and jumping off the bridge all summer had made me look stronger and darker. As Sarah and I sat down on the curb to eat, Kyle did the same, a few feet away.
I tried to feel confident. I wished Sarah would say something, do something to break the silence. She always knew what to say to boys.
“Who’s your home room teacher this year?” I asked him.
He’d stuffed half a hotdog into his mouth, and he took awhile to answer. “Pryor. You?”
“Oh. Goodspeed.”
I looked at Sarah. Her hair was pulled back from her face, making her neck look white and exposed. She was staring out across the parking lot, towards the small, two-room church behind us. Her eyes were intent on the tiny birdbath next to the plastic statue of Jesus, his face bleached from the sun. I turned back to Kyle and asked him about his summer.
“My dad’s been teachin’ me to hunt and fish,” he said. “I caught a three footer at Rose Valley that fought like a bear. I had to wrestle it to the ground.”
I nodded. I wanted to tell him about spending time with Sarah, and how lots of nights we would sneak out of the house and go to the crick. I thought that would impress him, but I wasn’t sure if it was a secret or not. I glanced at Sarah again, but she was looking at the road now.
“Shit,” she muttered.
I turned and saw a Ford truck pulling into the parking lot, static filled rock music blasting through the windows. Paul sat in the driver’s seat and Mom in the passenger’s. They pulled into the spot closest to the church and stepped out, walking towards us. Mom was in her green skirt, the one she always wore to work, and Paul was wearing khakis and a white T-shirt, a McDonald’s bag clutched in his left hand.
“Hi, kids,” Mom said as she reached us. “Hey, Kyle. I felt bad about leaving you guys here all day without stopping by. It’s our lunch break. Paul drove us here.”
“Hey, guys,” Paul said, waving at us and smiling like we were old friends. I looked at his arm and was relieved to see that the face tattoo was covered up by his sleeve. I didn’t want to see it staring at me.
“You got rid of those jean overalls,” Mom said to Sarah, digging through the pile we still had left on our table. “Thank god. I thought you’d have those in your closet forever.”
“Where’s Dad?” Sarah responded. “Doesn’t he have his lunch break?”
Mom shook her head. “Your dad doesn’t fit in at fundraisers. I’m glad the church gave you lunch. I was worried that we should’ve picked something up for you too.” As she spoke, Paul opened up the bag and passed her a hamburger folded in tinfoil. “Do they have anything to drink here? We’re going to grab a couple sodas and then see if we can help you sell any more of this.”
Paul nodded at us, and I noticed that a thin, red moustache had started to grow over his upper lip. I didn’t nod back as they left, walking over to the grill at the other edge of the parking lot. I turned back to Kyle. I had thought of something to say to him. I wanted to tell him about our house flooding that summer, and how we’d had to stay at the Sauls’. I’d heard Mr. Sauls snoring that night, and I thought it might make him laugh.
“Look at them,” Sarah muttered in my ear before I could speak. Her voice sounded low and tense, and when I turned to her she wasn’t looking at me.
“What is it?” I said.
“Mom and Paul.”
“Hey,” Kyle said on my other side. “I’m getting another hotdog. Be right back.” He got up and followed Mom to the grill, where he found a bun and got in line for seconds.
I turned immediately to Sarah. I wondered if she had forgotten who Kyle was, and that was why she wasn’t helping me. “That’s him,” I whispered into her ear.
“That boy?” She looked after him. “What, do you have a crush on him?”
I shifted on the curb. “I told you already. That’s Kyle.”
But her eyes were still on Mom and Paul. I watched them too as they made their way back. They were taking their time, going through the other neighbor’s old clothes and old junk. Mom laughed with the neighbors, introducing them to Paul. I saw her reach over and take a fry from the bag in his hands. At Kyle’s table, he sorted through the clothes for a minute before holding a red blouse up to her torso.
“This would fit you, right?” he said.
“Oh, I don’t need any more shirts.” She smiled, and he put it back down.
They had reached our table now, and they stood as we finished our potato salad sitting on the curb. Kyle returned with his second hotdog, and I forgot about Sarah as I launched into my story about Mr. Sauls and his snores. Sarah sat beside me, her back tense against my arm, until Mom and Paul had to get into the truck and drive back to work.
“I’ve dated a bunch of guys, Harriet,” Sarah told me as we walked back home that afternoon. “It’s taught me to see things you might not know.”
We dragged the clothes we hadn’t sold in black garbage bags over our shoulders. They left long trails in the gravel, marking our path on the road behind us.
It wasn’t until that night that I started thinking about what Sarah had said. I kept picturing Mom taking Paul’s fries, or drinking out of his water glass. And these thoughts gave way to darker, more indistinct ones that made my stomach feel sick. I rolled over, pushing away the sheets, and shook Sarah awake to ask if we could go walking. It was the first time I’d been the one to ask. I wanted more than anything to kick pinecones down the yellow lines of the back roads.
“No, not now,” Sarah mumbled in the dark.
“Sarah,” I whispered back. “I’m afraid Mom and Dad are gonna get a divorce.”
She reached a hand behind her, feeling in the dark for my arm. When she found it, she squeezed. “You know, don’t worry about it, Harriet. They’re not going to get a divorce.”
I was silent for a moment, but something still felt wrong. “How do you know?” I asked.
“I can just tell.”
“But what about what you said about Mom?”
“Harriet.” Sarah groaned. “Mom isn’t going anywhere. If something was happening . . . if their marriage was falling apart . . . even then Mom wouldn’t leave. She’s too attached to this neighborhood. Too afraid to leave even if it was the better thing for her. Now please, drop it. I don’t wanna talk right now.” After a moment, she gave my arm another squeeze. “I promise, everything is fine.” Within a minute, her breathing had slowed, and she was asleep again.
I tried to believe what she told me, but I wasn’t able to shake that dark feeling in the pit of my stomach. I watched the rise and fall of Sarah’s shoulders as she breathed, trying to focus on nothing but their shape and their movement. Her back was to me, and I concentrated on the patch of skin above her tank top. Usually, I felt so different from Sarah. But sometimes, I thought we were the same. I looked at her skin, almost glowing in the darkness, and it made me think of my own. I stared at it until I thought I could see every wrinkle, every pore. “Everything is fine,” I repeated to myself. I shifted as close to Sarah as I could get without touching, close enough to smell the smokiness of her hair. Falling asleep, I held onto that smell, memorizing it like the patch of skin on her back.
It was a week later that Sarah disappeared. I woke up early in the morning, after the moon had dipped behind the horizon but before the sun came up, and Sarah was gone. The space next to me in the bed was cold, and I assumed she had got up to go to the bathroom. I fell back asleep. But when I got up in the morning, she was still not there. Remnants of Sarah’s presence were everywhere. A long, yellow hair on the pillowcase. An unfinished game of Scrabble in the center of the floor. Her last word was schism. Double letter score, 14 points.
It was a Monday, so my parents weren’t home. When I went downstairs, the house was empty but for the patches of light that fell through the kitchen windows, highlighting sections of dust in the air like ghostly figures. I called Mom.
“Don’t worry, Harriet,” she said. Even through the static, I could hear the sound of clinking plates in the background. “She probably just left early for work. I’ve gotta go. See you in a few hours.”
In my pajama shorts, I walked outside, and the place where her bike normally leaned against the barn was empty. For the moment, I was appeased. It wasn’t until the evening, when Sarah still hadn’t come home and we found out she’d never gone to work that day that my parents began to worry. As night fell, they called up our few neighbors and put together a search party. Mom discovered another paycheck missing from above the fridge and, yelling to my Dad that this was the last thing she needed right now, went to her other hiding spots. But all her hidden savings had disappeared, and she was forced to admit that they had disappeared with Sarah.
My dad knew a cop from the nearest local station and was able to convince him to stop by. After the cop had made the twenty minute drive to our house, he asked me, “Are you sure your sister never talked about running away?”
I was surprised by that phrase, running away. Sarah had left, and that was it.
“Think, Harriet.”
I thought of what Sarah had said about her friend and the migrant workers. But still, I didn’t think she’d go that far.
The cop sipped the iced tea my mom had poured him as he waited for my answer. I hesitantly listed a few of Sarah’s friends and mentioned some of the roads we had walked on, but it felt like betrayal. The cop assured my parents that they shouldn’t worry. Sarah was eighteen and could take care of herself. But when it got later, and she still hadn’t been found, my parents decided that, as a family, we should all go out ourselves. Some neighbors joined us. I saw Kyle. He trailed behind his parents, holding a flashlight, and he gave me a weak smile as we made eye contact.
My memories of that night are jumbled, confused. Thinking back, I see darkness and flashes of people. I only see them in pieces, by chance as a flashlight beam passes over them or a car speeds by, illuminating them in light. I’d see a sandaled foot here, a hand with scabbed knuckles there, a face with wide eyes here. None of them matched up. The foot would be too big for the hand, the hand too small for the face. I lost my parents at one point when they went down to search the riverbank, and I felt lost and lonely.
I was thirteen, and I no longer had a sister.
My parents kept the search going all night. At one point, they had a neighbor take me back home, and I fell asleep in my bed. It was too warm under the covers, but I refused to sleep in Sarah’s room.
A couple times after Sarah left, mostly in the following weeks, I went to the bridge on my own, like we would in the old days. Half of me expected to find her there one night, sitting on the guard rail, pale skin glowing under the moonlight. One night, I found the courage to pull off my clothes and jump into the crick on my own. It was strange, not having Sarah waiting in the water. At first, I felt that familiar old tug in my stomach. But I kept jumping, again and again. Something spurred me on like I was possessed. I tried to figure out what it was, and, as my knees scraped the bottom of the crick, I realized it was anger. Sarah had promised not to leave me, but just when I needed her the most, she had. The water was low, and my knees were becoming red and raw, but I continued to jump. Every time it got easier. After awhile, I became numb. I no longer felt that terrible pull in my stomach, the unfamiliar anger that kept my skin warm against the cool night, and could instead concentrate on the feeling of the air touching my skin as I fell through it. I could experience the drop, rather than have it just slip by. When I didn’t fear the fall, I could slow time down.
A few years passed by. Life slid back into a new pattern. I thought I saw her once. I was in a coffee shop in town, and it was my senior year of high school. I was nearly eighteen. I looked up in time to see a woman with a streak of pink in her hair walk by outside the glass window. She was wearing jeans and brown boots. I thought about getting up to stop her, but it was too late. The woman was already lost in the crowd. My hands and my feet felt very far away suddenly. I took a sip of my coffee, just to do something real and normal, but even the lukewarm liquid sliding down my throat felt distant. I saw that my coffee cup had left a brown half moon on my newspaper. I traced it, adding dark craters with my blue pen.
People always ask me about what Sarah was like, back when we were still kids. They ask me tentatively, What happened to her? I answer quickly, She ran away. Did you know she was going to leave? No. No, of course not. Do you wish you could see her again? Do you want to see the woman your sister has become? No, I answer again. No. I’ve been out of contact with her for five years. Five years changes a person. In five years, all your cells regrow and recycle so that you’re barely even the same body. Why would I want to see her? She’s not even Sarah anymore.