How to Bury Your Brother Read online

Jamie sidled up to her in front of the photos. “He was such a cute kid.”

  She nodded. Paused. “Daddy said that even though it’s hard right now, it’s best for the family. That he could never”—she made air quotes—“‘fight his demons.’ Do you really think that’s true?”

  “Look at it from his point of view: Your dad, he’d been sent away to that terrible school, barely survived Korea. I shouldn’t speak ill of your grandfather—Lord knows he saved me when I had nowhere else to go—but he was a real son of a bitch. I never saw him crack a smile in the five years I lived with them. You and your brother, when you were growing up, you had everything. Good parents, nice house, plenty of money. Your brother had all that, a perfect life, people who loved him, who adored him, and look what he did with it.” Jamie spread his arms toward the pictures and the mourners.

  It was true. Yet Rob had taken the pills to numb something inside, numb something Alice would never understand or know. When he took off, not bothering to call, not caring enough to worry about her, Alice assumed he was busy having the time of his life in Paris or London or Los Angeles. And she hated him for it. The pills, though, they introduced a new tinge to her many conflicting thoughts about her brother: guilt.

  “Maybe I could have done something, found him or helped him in some way,” Alice said, but even to her, the words felt hollow.

  “He was so stubborn, that boy,” Jamie said with the overly mature air he used when talking about “the kids,” even though by age, he was thrown in between her father and her brother, truly belonging to neither generation. “He chose not to be part of this family anymore. He didn’t care about you or Richard or Maura. He wasn’t exactly—”

  “There you are!” Alice’s best friend and former college roommate, Meredith, kissed Alice on both cheeks before wrapping her in a long, tight hug, interrupting Jamie. Alice felt the threat of tears, so she stepped back and rubbed her hands on her belly, trying to ground herself.

  “Are you feeling better about the eulogy?” Meredith asked with a look at Jamie, who met her eyes before walking away. Alice had always been jealous of Meredith’s ability to dismiss someone with a look.

  “No, I wish”—Wish what? So many things—“wish I knew who he really was.”

  “Well—” Meredith started, to contradict her, comfort her, assure her, but Alice didn’t want to be comforted. She cut her off.

  “I’m just glad it will be over soon.”

  Meredith shut her mouth.

  Alice sat down on one of the benches that lined the church’s hallway, and they sat, shoulders touching, for a few minutes in a silence her friend knew enough not to interrupt. Alice rested her head on Meredith’s shoulder. She could close her eyes and sleep here for hours, just feeling her friend breathing and the baby squirming.

  “I’m going to name the baby Robbie, after him,” Alice finally said, raising her head.

  She had been so scared that breathing a name into existence, as she had three other times, would cause the baby to disappear from her womb. She felt now that she would be able to give Caitlin a sibling as the universe yanked away her own childhood hero, a Faustian bargain.

  “What did Walker say?”

  “He said he doesn’t understand why I’d want to and why I’m so upset, since Rob and I weren’t close.” Pregnancy hormones is what he’d actually said, accompanied only the first time by a small laugh.

  Not close. Like a second cousin or long-lost aunt. Not that Alice could fault Walker. She’d said it herself at their first date, to dismiss further questions about her brother. “One brother. We’re not close.” Had barely brought up her brother while she and Walker had been together.

  But she never believed it was really true, only knew that if she hadn’t said those words—not close—she wouldn’t have been able to smile up at Walker on their wedding day. She wouldn’t have been able to laugh with him on the couch as their spoons went to war over the few remaining pieces of cookie dough in the ice cream. She wouldn’t have been able to scream “She says keep holding on!” as he let go of Caitlin’s bike.

  To create those memories, she had to bury those of her brother, had to raise the stakes not to go back to the dark place of her young adulthood, not to go back to being consumed by someone who couldn’t even pick up the phone to let her know where he’d gone. But, she knew she’d never be able to explain that to Walker.

  Already, she could see the word liar floating between them. She’d felt the accusation from the moment Walker hugged her lightly when she told him the news of her brother’s passing, gasping like an asthma patient and blasting snot onto his church clothes. His hands had tensed around her shoulders with the knowledge that he was missing some essential bit of information.

  But had it been a lie? Alice wondered in the hours she spent alone, erasing and rewriting the eulogy, avoiding her husband and all the questions he had never known to ask, all the stories she had never told. What makes someone close?

  Is it that you talk every day or every week or every year, or is it that their favorite sayings, the way they watched a sunset, how they licked their lips while concentrating on a book, or sang to you when you were scared, are coiled around your DNA like any other molecule that defines you?

  * * *

  The funeral director rounded up Maura, Richard, Jamie, Alice, Walker, and Caitlin and led them to another side room while guests filled the chapel. Her family squashed the room’s new silence with anything but talk of the deceased. Maura summarized the plot of Cats for Caitlin, which they had tickets to for Saturday night at the Fox Theater. Avoiding Alice, Walker struggled for a conversation with Richard and Jamie.

  “Hot today,” Walker said.

  “Grass is dying,” her father said. The three of them stood with their hands in their pockets. “How’s yours, James?”

  Alice stared through the stained-glass window into the sanctuary. Through the lightest-colored glass, she could make out the brown casket with its regal gold trim in front of the white marble altar. Alice had gone with Maura to pick it out yesterday, trailing her at the funeral home while her mother scrutinized the various features of each, exactly as she would a new car. After Maura ran her hand along the cream silk inside one, she pronounced it “perfect” and ordered three, one for her, one for her husband, and one for her son.

  “Don’t you want one?” Maura asked.

  “No.”

  “We’ll all be matching. You’ll be left out.”

  Alice shook her head.

  “You’ll regret it later,” her mother had said before turning back to the funeral home’s director without missing a beat: “So, you’ll get these and coordinate with the home in New Orleans?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  New Orleans, where her brother died on Tuesday, according to the funeral director. More questions Alice didn’t want to ask. She was too afraid of what the answers would be.

  A church usher led the family to the front pew as the organ began “How Great Thou Art,” her brother’s favorite hymn, at least when she knew him.

  Sweat glistened on the pastor’s forehead as he approached the podium. The same pastor who her brother had spent so much time imitating to her in church, laughing under their breath until Maura shushed them. The man had been old back then. It should be him in the coffin, Alice thought, before regretting it. She apologized in her head as he began with ten minutes of listing the family’s résumé in the church: Bible groups Maura led, fundraisers she organized, instruction she gave at Vacation Bible School, how “we wouldn’t have expected any less from a pastor’s daughter.” The pastor pronounced Richard a “true servant of God,” mainly because of the checks he signed, Alice imagined.

  The pastor launched into a generic speech about “trusting God’s plan.” Alice sighed too loudly, and her mother shot her a look. She’d heard the same speech three times before at other church funerals
. It had prompted her to volunteer to give the eulogy in the first place, so that her brother could have something personal. No matter what her words would cost her.

  She tuned out and memorized the funeral pamphlet in her lap. Her brother stared at her from the photo as a teenager, holding the acoustic guitar she couldn’t separate from him in her memories. Underneath, July 16, 1968–August 27, 2007 stood out in cursive writing with his full name: Robinson Wesley Tate. He hated being called Robinson. Their mother named both him and Alice after literary classics, but he got the worst of it. Not that anyone would dare tease him in school.

  “Now,” the pastor said. “Robinson’s sister, Alice, would like to say a few words. Alice…”

  She scooted out of the row past her mother. The preacher placed his hand on Alice’s back and guided her to the podium, as if she might double over in grief, exhaustion, birth pains, or a mixture of all three. She straightened her dress, the largest of her maternity clothes, which had been stored in the deepest entrails of her house where they couldn’t mock her with the inadequacy of her misshapen uterus. The fabric smelled like attic with a hint of squirrel droppings.

  “Thank you for that beautiful service, Pastor Perry,” Alice read from her paper. “On behalf of my family, I’d like to thank all of you for coming today and honoring my brother’s life.”

  She skipped over the next line, which she’d found in a eulogy template online: Rob was a son, a brother… The list was supposed to go on…a chef or a father or a neighbor or a committed member of his community. “A child of God,” the website suggested, but that, she had no idea.

  “Rob was my older brother. I was always the deputy and coconspirator in his adventures. In the summers, we spent a lot of time at our father’s warehouse, building things with all the empty boxes. Rob would start planning at Christmas. He would draw up a blueprint using butcher paper he took from school. Our friends would help, but he always put me in charge of the most important section. One year, we made Atlantis. Another year, the White House. They never looked much like the real thing, but we always had a lot of fun crawling through our creations.”

  Alice chuckled awkwardly, remembering the seriousness he’d brought to the project, the tingling in her stomach as he assigned the roles, fearful for a second that he would forget her, and the swelling of pride when he assigned her the biggest part, like always.

  Alice’s eyes found Walker watching her carefully from the second row, questioning. Was this the same brother Alice acted like wasn’t worth mentioning? The one she said she wasn’t close to?

  A second too late, Meredith joined in with her own laughter to break the room’s silence. Alice looked back at her paper.

  “Rob was creative and smart like that. When he was still in elementary school, our mother ordered a set of encyclopedias so that we could look things up for school. Rob would start a volume and read it like a book. One year, he read the entire B volume. It seemed like he knew about everything: how baseballs were made, bullets, Brazil, bees. I was young at the time and didn’t realize the pattern until he had moved on to D.”

  She paused and attempted to make eye contact with a few people in the audience, like she’d learned in college in a required public speaking class. A lady from her mother’s tennis group gave her an encouraging smile from the third row. A man near the back snoozed with his head resting on the pew and his mouth wide open.

  “I always felt safe with him, no matter how crazy his adventures got. In the house where we grew up, our closets were connected by a crawl space that I was small enough to go through. I got scared at night and would open the door and crawl through to find Rob in his own closet, reading or silently moving his fingers on his guitar with nothing but a flashlight. He let me sleep in his bed, staying with me until I fell asleep.”

  She could still summon it, the sense of security she felt as she drifted off in Rob’s bed, her older brother still on the closet floor, quietly turning pages, the dog a few feet away.

  She looked at her parents. Her father stared at his shoes. Her mother looked straight at her, not really seeing anything, with her head held a bit too high, probably regretting not pushing harder in her request to edit Alice’s speech. Maybe not letting her mother help had been a mistake, but she knew what would have happened if she had accepted the help. Rob would become Robinson; her real memories would be turned into the version her mother wanted to present to the world, the one that had never existed. Alice looked over the rest of the audience and willed one person to cry, so she wouldn’t have to.

  “I had to take a lot of biology classes, and one of the first things you have to do is Punnett squares. A Punnett square determines the traits of offspring. For example, my parents both have brown eyes, but each have a recessive blue eye gene, so Rob got blue and I got brown. Since we learned of my brother’s passing, I’ve thought often about those squares. The truth is, I wouldn’t be who I am today—the ecologist, the mother, the friend—without him. My mother gave me her industriousness. My father gave me his levelheadedness. But I have Rob to thank for my passion, and for just a pinch of his rebellion.”

  She laughed again nervously at the reference to how the audience probably perceived Rob—as a teenage troublemaker with uncut hair.

  Without trying, her eyes bounced to Walker again. He stared at her, and she could read his face clearly, as she could when he was caught off guard. Their eyes met, and in an instant, he checked his expression, wiped it clear. But, she had seen it—hurt. Betrayal. She could see him realizing: Alice had been close to Rob. And she hadn’t told him any of the stories, any of this chapter of her life. She could see him deciding that the tension between them during the last week was more than pregnancy hormones and bad communication; it was the exposing of a decade-long lie.

  In an effort to get away from Walker, her eyes found the casket’s polished wood. She opened her mouth to begin her next story, about how her brother took over the school speakers with his high school band to sing her “Happy Birthday” in the style of the Beatles. But she couldn’t make out the words.

  She pictured the adult inside the casket, resting on the flawless silk, the adult she couldn’t tell one story about, the one she shared blood with, had thought she shared a mind with for so long.

  We weren’t close.

  He was my everything.

  Weren’t they both true? The tears came, unstoppable. She blurted out “Thank you” and stepped away from the podium. As she walked to her seat, regretting not getting the casket and thinking her mother was always right, she noticed someone she didn’t recognize lurking by the doorway. He was tall, and large, someone she would remember if she had seen him before.

  When she plopped herself into her seat, Walker’s knees shot toward Caitlin’s and away from Alice’s as if she were made of lava. She turned away from him to watch the stranger. Who is he? Did he know the adult Rob?

  After the pastor read a few more generic Bible verses, Alice popped up from her seat next to Walker to go after the stranger. She half waddled, moving as quickly as she could, and dodged several of her mother’s friends as they tried to praise her speech or tell her that she looked like she was “about to pop!” She reached the doorway and followed it to the side lot as an old minivan pulled out and drove away.

  She stood in the open doorway, watching the space where the van had been, until Walker exited the front door with Caitlin on the other side of the parking lot. Though he didn’t know he was being watched, he spun to look behind several times as he fast-walked to the car, pulling Caitlin by the hand. The earlier ease was gone from his stride, replaced by hardness and anger. Though his shoulders slumped from a level of sadness appropriate for a funeral, Alice knew grief over the dead had nothing to do with it.

  She breathed deeply, filling the parts of her stomach and chest that already felt close to bursting, and thought of little Robbie. When he came, Walker would forget about today
. The memory of her brother and his secrets would once again be hers alone to bare.

  * * *

  As the mourners filed out of the church, Alice found her mother in the bathroom. Crying.

  “Are you okay? Mama, I think the service was great.” Alice stared at her, unsure what to do. She reached her hand toward her mother’s shoulder, but Maura shuddered away from the touch.

  “It’s the damn flower company!” Maura said, suddenly straightening up. “I said no orchids. And what do I get? Orchids! Of course.” She scooped the flowers out of the vase and threw them in the trash can. Alice reached to stop the crystal from falling as her mother flung open the door.

  Alice remembered seeing her mother cry only twice. The last time was two mornings after Rob left. Alice woke up to the sound of her mother ripping band posters off his bedroom wall, sobbing.

  The first time was when Alice was about six. She remembered running around the house with Rob, chasing the dog, which—along with opening the decorative books on the shelf, doing crafts on the kitchen table, and the word fart—was forbidden in the Tate household. They ran around the main floor’s loop, all three panting and giggling, until the dog froze at the sound of the garage door. Both Rob and Alice barreled into the dog, and the tangled group rolled into a vintage bookcase, knocking two delicate plates off their stands.

  Maura ran in to survey the damage. When she saw the broken china, her face crumpled as tears ran down her red cheeks, bringing her mascara with them.

  “Those were wedding presents! I told you not to run in the house!”

  The dog ran off, but Alice and Rob froze, barefoot in the middle of a minefield, waiting to be dug out by the unfriendly forces.

  When Richard saw the mess, he crunched in to retrieve Alice. Rob waited until their father left to find the dustpan before struggling out of the wreckage. As Alice trailed Rob up the stairs, watching blood from his left foot drip toward the carpet, they heard their father say, “That’s why we shouldn’t have all these damn antiques. Children need to be able to play in their own house.”