“What do you mean, gone?”
Fawn was quiet for a minute, then looked up at Ruthie with huge, saucer eyes. “Sometimes it just happens,” she said.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Ruthie said, rolling out of the damp bed. Her bare feet hit the floor, which was freezing cold. The fire had gone out. She threw a sweater over her shoulders, pulled on some sweatpants.
Ruthie marched down the hall to her mother’s room. She felt queasy, and when she burped, she still tasted schnapps. She half wondered if she was still a little drunk and stoned, which contributed to the this-can’t-really-be-happening sort of feeling that was washing over her. She put her hand on the knob and opened it slowly, not wanting the squeak of hinges to wake her mother. But when the door swung open, she saw only the bed, neatly made.
“I told you,” Fawn whispered. She’d come up behind Ruthie in the hall.
“Go get cleaned up and changed,” Ruthie said, her eyes locked on her mother’s empty bed. She stood a minute, swaying slightly, while her sister crept off down the hall.
“What the hell?” she said. It was six-thirty in the morning. Where was Mom?
She went down the steep, narrow wooden stairs, counting them, like she’d done when she was little, for luck. There were thirteen, but she never counted the bottom one, jumping over it like it didn’t exist, so that she’d have a nice even twelve.
“Mom?” she called. The full cup of tea was still on the table. Ruthie went into the living room to discover that the logs she’d put on the stove last night had never caught. It was a big soapstone stove set up against the brick hearth of the old, original farmhouse fireplace. The stove was their only source of heat—her parents refused to buy fossil fuels.
She bent over, head pounding, and hauled the unburnt logs out of the stove so she could scoop the ashes into the can next to it. Then she started a fire from scratch: wadded-up newspaper, cardboard, kindling.
Fawn padded down the steps, dressed in red corduroy overalls and a red turtleneck, her mother’s hand-knit thick wool socks on her feet. Red, of course.
“You’re looking very monochromatic,” Ruthie said, closing the glass door of the woodstove, the fire inside already crackling and popping.
“Huh?” Fawn said. Her eyes looked funny—all glassy and far away, like they looked when she was sick.
“Forget it,” Ruthie said, staring at her odd little sister.
Fawn had been born at home and delivered by a midwife, just like Ruthie.
Ruthie had been homeschooled until third grade, when her parents finally gave in and agreed to send her to West Hall Union School after she wore them down with her pleading. As much as she wanted to be there, the transition was difficult and painful—she was behind academically, and the kids teased her for the garish hand-knit clothing she wore, for not knowing any multiplication. Ruthie had worked hard to catch up and blend in, and soon excelled at school, getting top marks in the class year after year.
When Fawn turned five, Ruthie insisted on having her enrolled in kindergarten.
“There’s no way Fawn’s going to be a complete social misfit, Mom. She’s going to school. It’s the normal thing to do.”
Her mom had looked at her for a long time, then asked, “And what’s so great about normal?”
In the end, Mom had given in and enrolled Fawn in school. Ruthie watched Fawn worriedly last year, peeking out through the senior-class windows to the kindergarten playground, where Fawn always sat alone, drawing in the dirt, talking animatedly to herself. She didn’t seem to have any friends. When Ruthie gently brought this up with Fawn, her little sister said other kids asked her to play all the time.
“So why don’t you ever join them?” Ruthie had asked.
“Because I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Playing with the friends I already have,” Fawn had said, running off before Ruthie could ask what friends she meant—ants? pebbles?
Fawn stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her red overalls, and stared vacantly into the fire.
“So when’s the last time you saw Mom?” Ruthie asked, collapsing onto the couch and rubbing at her temples in a pathetic attempt to stop the pounding headache.
“We ate supper together. Lentil soup. Then Mom came up and tucked me in. She read me a story.” Fawn sounded like a robot running low on batteries. “ ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ”