At first, she thought the feeling of rage would come once the news sank in. Yet, eight days had passed, and she still felt, if not nothing, then annoyance only for how utterly predictable Walker had turned out to be. As soon as she read that text from Brittani—“Still sore after last night! ;-)”—she knew what the rest would say, right down to the punctuation (or lack thereof). She knew where he would meet Brittani, how he’d conceal the affair. She could guess when and how the texts started, so accurately that she’d grown tired of reading after a few screens, not even feeling the need to scroll all the way to the top of the message thread.
She couldn’t blame him completely for that, though, for his predictability was exactly why she had married him. Knowing what to expect meant comfort, safety, had allowed her to dive into him and blend herself effortlessly into his life without him asking questions about who she really was, about her past, or why this life would be appealing.
She circled the car once, the key heavy in her hand. One scratch down the door, the kind another car could do if parked too close—maybe that would free the anger and hurt, allow it to fill her. Maybe that’s what would help her move to the next step, the action, the what next, not working long hours at the Center or spending extra time in her garden or walking Buddy, as she had since she’d read the texts.
She stood next to the car, miming opening a door, trying to map where the scratch would happen, how long it would be, how wide it would be, all the while imagining Walker’s face when he saw it, how he’d first squint at a distance, wonder if it was just his Lasik acting up again. He’d gallop to the car, lick his thumb and furiously rub the mark, the beating in his chest growing thicker in his ears as he felt the indentation from Alice’s key.
It was sad, really. Pathetic.
As she could play his reaction to the car, she could also play her remaining years with Walker in her mind like a movie. She knew that Walker would never divorce her, no matter what he told Brittani—“when her mother improves.” Another thing that would never happen. Eventually, when Brittani grew tired of Walker’s games and ended the affair, he would book an expensive Caribbean trip for Alice and him. He would make quick friends with another perfectly chiseled father of two. She would read research papers on the beach in her black bikini. They would settle back into their lives.
Caitlin would find a job. Robbie would go to college. Alice would continue to grow the Center, withdrawing further into the lake’s serenity. Walker would retire, making a full-time job of watching sports, badgering his stockbroker, and playing golf. They would retreat to separate corners of the large house they shared as roommates.
Alice saw only two options in front of her: say nothing and let the comfortable, predictable future play out or tell him she knew and dare to ask the questions about what came next. Divorce, but what after? Her view of that path was hazy, foggy, and a sense of panic seized her chest as she thought of the blank space ahead.
She reached the key toward the paint, resting it there, feeling a type of reassuring power through her body at the pain she knew it would cause him. Just as she pressed in, ready to drag the key along the slope she’d mapped out in her mind, the door to the garage flew open and she jumped.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
She straightened. Caitlin stood in the doorway with a bright-green face mask globbed onto her skin, holding Alice’s old hiking boots with the leather trim.
“Nothing, just… Nothing.”
“Okay… Can I wear these to school tomorrow?”
Where had she even found those? “Sure.”
Caitlin disappeared back inside, and Alice followed. It was 9:00 p.m. She should go up and make sure Robbie was asleep.
She shut the door to the garage.
She would use the alone time cleaning out her parents’ house to let the choices settle in her mind and percolate. She trusted that by the time the wrecking ball swung, she would know what to do.
Chapter Three
The next morning, Alice passed her mother’s hair salon—which she always thought of as the dividing line between their two Atlantas—just as the morning air swallowed its first gulp of humidity. She could feel the day around her growing heavy as the chill whipped by her rolled-down window. In the passenger seat, Buddy curled deeper into himself.
She drove toward the neighborhood streets of her youth, where she had walked to school as a child. She followed the unexpected dips of the Chattahoochee riverbanks, trying not to think about where she was headed. When she finally glimpsed the river between the trees, she barely recognized it anyway. The full river of her childhood was low from years of less rain and brown from years of erosion, something that always surprised her, despite the clear downward slope of her graphs at the Center.
She stopped at the last turn before her parents’ house, where the river’s water stood almost completely still in front of her windshield. It was the same light where, instead of turning left to their neighborhood, a teenager drove his car straight into the water after a party one night when Alice was in elementary school. She had thought about him at the bottom of that river, ready to grab her foot and pull her down, too, long after Rob told her they already took out the body. Now, she wondered how it felt, jamming his foot on the gas, wondered if it had felt like flying when his car leapt off the last foot of dirt and pavement and dove into the water.
The brick colonial sat at the top of its long driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac, lined with perfect grass and tall magnolias, where she would climb even higher than the house as a child. She parked at the top, next to a sign giving notice of the impending demolition. She reached over to the passenger seat to pet Buddy as she studied the house from the front window of her Prius.
It was wasteful to demolish a five-bedroom house to replace it and the one next door with a ten-bedroom house, complete with a guest house, pool, and private tennis court. But as she stared at the second-floor window in the middle that used to be Rob’s bedroom, with its polished glass and its pale-green shutters, Alice understood the demolition. Perhaps the house’s loneliness seeped from the structure, casting an unmovable black shadow that could be felt by all who walked by, as it could by her.
Alice got out of the car, turning the unfamiliar key in her hand as she walked toward the wood-and-glass front door with Buddy ambling behind her. As she tried to unlock it, the door stuck from months of little use. She yanked it open and stepped inside with Buddy.
She paused as her eyes adjusted to the house’s dark coloring. Almost-black hardwood floors coated the entire main floor, and a grand staircase in the middle split off at the top to the house’s two quarters. Instinctively, she walked the circle of the main floor.
She passed her mother’s perfume cabinet, with her parents’ wedding invitation and her own in matching frames, one of the only differences she saw, as if her parents had frozen time when she left for college. Alice ran her fingers over the collection of crystal bottles that stuffed the cabinet. Her father brought each sparkling bottle home after a fight with her mother. As a child, she had coveted them so much that Rob stole one for her. Alice would dab the sweet-smelling liquid on her neck before bed, like she saw her mother do.
Alice walked through the dining room where her parents’ best china was set on the twelve-seater table as if they expected a large dinner party to arrive any moment. In the kitchen, the oak cabinets—where Rob would organize all the items in the pantry in ABC order—were still the same. Applesauce next to beans next to cereal. Each time he found it out of order, he’d have to take everything out and start again. She remembered now that she would sneak in before he got home to put everything back the way he liked it. When she moved the items her mother had shifted, Alice’s chest had swelled with such purpose at completing this simple task for the person who did everything for her.
Across from the cabinets, a breakfast den held a six-seater table where each morning, afte
r Alice checked on her science experiments in the shaky tree house, she studied her purple youth Bible between articles her father read to her from the paper. “Listen to this,” he would say to no one in particular, and Alice would snatch the rare offering of parental attention, enthralled by her father’s lulling voice as he read the latest story on the price of gas. They sat there until Maura and Rob woke up, when their mother would make grits and eggs and read the children’s daily vocabulary word.
But all of this stopped after Rob left.
Alice veered toward the closed door to her father’s office with his mahogany desk that faced out the window as she finished the loop, avoiding the French doors that led to a screened porch overlooking the river. At the sight of them, the loneliness after Rob left washed over her.
The memory was so sharp of her hours, days, weeks, years sitting on that porch, watching the leaves change. How she could go days without talking to another person. How she could see the tree house from the porch’s perch, longed so much to feel the sun on her face outside, to run in the grass, but instead remained a prisoner in the empty house. “Stay here, Alice,” her mother warned each morning as she left the house, perfectly primped.
She walked quickly back to the front of the house and climbed the grand staircase, where she had seen so many debutantes take pictures, her mother instructing them how to pose, pretending Alice didn’t exist since she refused to take part.
At the last step, Alice and Buddy stopped as she took off her shoes, ready for her mother’s screams to do so before she stepped on the cream carpet. She turned away from her parents’ closed bedroom door and walked down the hall, staring straight ahead so as not to make eye contact with the stately ancestors from her father’s side in the wall portraits. She walked past the closest door to Rob’s room, where Jamie lived after dropping out of college when Alice was young and again after his divorce, the only reprieve Alice got from her mother in the year after Rob left.
As she walked, Alice thumbed through a pack of green sticky notes that the estate company had told her to stick on anything she wanted moved to her own house. They would clear out the rest before the demolition and sell or donate it. Her parents’ entire lifetimes had been reduced to a stack of sticky notes, and green at that. “Tacky,” her mother would have said.
She opened the door to her childhood bedroom. The smell hit her first—a hint of lavender from the little baggies of loose lavender in the house’s drawers.
The walls were a light shade of pink she had always despised. A white bed stood centered in the room, which Buddy jumped on and quickly fell asleep. A desk and bookshelves crowded the right side, each packed full of books she had never opened.
On the left side, a white crib housed a collection of antique dolls. With their too-wide eyes and porcelain skin, they looked like something from a horror movie. Alice picked up the folded duvet from the bed and threw it on the crib to hide the creepy demon dolls. Every couple of minutes she jerked her head from the house’s creaks, half expecting to see a ghost. Although she hadn’t seen him since college, this was the exact place for him to show up again.
Alice opened the door to the bathroom and walked in front of the mirror, eyeing the door at the other side that would lead to the room she had stared at from the street.
She turned on the sink and splashed her face. As with a childhood bully that won’t stop whispering insults under his breath, she could hear every step of her socked feet on the bathroom’s tile, every drip of the faucet and patter of the water in the pipes. It echoed so loudly in her brain of the time after Rob left, when the dead quiet tingled in her ears, so different from before when Rob would practice scales on his guitar until three in the morning, sending the music bouncing off the floors. So different from mornings with Rob as bumps reverberated through the house, along with his yells of “dang” as he hit his toes on the baseboards in contrast to the rest of the family’s quiet. She missed that most when he left: those sounds that interrupted the polished quiet and gave it life, that reminded her she was where she needed to be, with him. She was home.
Alice shut off the water and went into Rob’s room.
With only her mother’s sewing machine on a bare table and spare dressers for supplies, the room looked soulless, but Alice saw it so easily as it had been before, with the record player and the KISS albums propped against the wall. Her brother’s twin bed had nestled in the corner farthest from the door with the band posters above it, all but the sheet stripped from his bed and books stacked in their place, as if it were a desk, since he rarely slept there.
The neatness of it all depressed her: the bolts of fabric tightly wound, the measuring tapes hanging straight, a notebook over on the table with girls’ measurements on it, the thread organized in a bin next to it in a rainbow. She walked around the room, opening and slamming the cabinets and drawers full of sewing supplies, if only to create some noise. All trash—or perhaps one of her mother’s friends would want them. She didn’t care.
You did this, she wanted to say to Rob. You ruined this.
She returned to her room and collapsed in the desk chair. The first day inside the house would be the hardest. She knew that. The sooner she started, the sooner she could leave and return to the solace of the Center, return to the roles she enjoyed—mother, friend, boss, conservationist—instead of the ones to which she was obligated. Daughter. Wife, her brain added, along with the conversation with her mother about Walker’s texts. The ones she was supposed to think about at this moment, but instead, she only thought about how her mother used to refer to divorce only by the letter D, as in “Jennie down the street is getting a D.”
When I get married, she remembered thinking, I would never get a D. I’d only be happy to always have someone to talk to, just like when Rob was here. Unlike with her brother, who would happily listen to her talk for hours about her love for Flemish rabbits—how could a rabbit even get that big?—she now knew that in the real world, being listened to always came with a cost.
She opened the first drawer.
Pencils, paper clips, blank scraps of paper, bouncy balls, erasers, and a highlighter littered the drawer. She shut it. One down.
Drawer two was full of miscellaneous paper. She took the stack out and set it on the desk—flipping through notes on Shakespeare, multiplication tables, and doodles of flowers. Easy enough. Then, another paper.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Tate,
As I’m sure you are also, at North Atlanta Christian Academy we are concerned about Alice’s behavior in the recent weeks. We are aware that Robinson’s departure has affected her and want to help her as your family experiences this transition. We have scheduled appointments for her with our faith-based counselor weekly, which she will have during her homeroom. We find that in situations such as these, parental involvement is key. I encourage you to call the school so we can set up a time for you to come into the office to discuss.
God Bless,
Mr. Hopefield
School Principal
“Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.” I Peter 1:21
She knew what her mother would have said, if Alice had shown her the letter—“Put it in a box in your mind.” Rob, though, had always hated their mother’s favorite directive. Alice remembered when she was in second grade, running the mile home from school, wiping the tears and snot from her face with the sleeve of her school uniform. When she flung the front door open, she finally rested with her hands on her knees and let the tears flow.
“Goodness.”
Alice jumped. She hadn’t expected her mother to be home.
“Well?” her mother said.
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing,” her mother corrected. She crouched down in front of Alice. “What happened?”
“Tommy killed Ralphie.”
Her
mother gasped. “Who?”
“Ralphie, my snake.”
“Oh.”
Maura led Alice to the kitchen table. She poured a glass of milk for Alice and more brown liquid into her own crystal glass. Alice looked out the window and tried to stifle her tears. She should have gone down to the river where she could be alone.
“Tommy, the Collins kid?”
Alice nodded. “He calls me—” She stopped so she wouldn’t start crying again. “He calls me…lizard face. I never want to see Tommy again.”
“Because he likes you, that’s all. You’re just going to have to put it in a box in your mind and forget it. Tommy could be your husband one day.”
Alice crossed her arms. She wouldn’t marry that dummy, even if humans were endangered and they were the only ones who could keep the species from dying out. Tommy didn’t even know that snakes and lizards were different.
The door burst open again.
“Al?”
“In here!”
“Do they let children waltz out of that school whenever they damn well choose?” Maura reached up to rub her temple as Rob ran in.
“What happened?” he said, breathless.
He always treated a childhood insult as if it were a stab wound, and in some ways, it was. “Someone told me you ran away crying at recess.”
Somehow, Rob always seemed to know when Alice had a bad day. She suspected that Rob’s friend Edward got daily updates at lunch from his own sister, Hayley, at Rob’s request, but on this day, Alice was thankful for the spying.
“You both go back to school, now!” Maura clanged the glass down on the kitchen counter.
“Yes, ma’am!” Rob said.
When he grabbed her hand and walked toward the door, Alice started to cry again. But then he winked at her. She relaxed.
“I’m going upstairs, and when I come down,” Maura called from the kitchen, “you both better be down the street.”
How to Bury Your Brother Page 4
