How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  Unlike Rob, Alice would have been too scared to lie. But they all (even their mother) knew Maura would let Rob get away with anything. Rather than provoking jealousy, their mother’s laxness with Rob was just another gift the siblings shared.

  Once he shut the front door, Rob repeated: “What happened?”

  She had introduced Rob to Ralphie when she found him two weeks ago and started keeping him in a box by the playground, told him about how they had played together at recess, how she had fed him worms, how he liked to lie in the sun and slither over her shoulder. But that was before Tommy stomped on Ralphie at recess. He had told the teacher he was only protecting Alice from a snake when she protested, but Mrs. Davis only thanked him “on Miss Tate’s behalf.”

  “What did Mama say?”

  “She said to put—”

  “Put it in a box in your mind?”

  “Yeah.” Alice glanced behind her, ready for her mother’s correction: “Yes.”

  Rob sighed.

  “Come on.” He tugged her hand, then took off running.

  Alice ran after him. He didn’t glance over his shoulder as she would have done, but kept his eyes ahead, sure that she would follow him.

  “Where are we going?”

  Instead of answering, he sped up, and she brought her arms in and tucked her head to keep up. They ran down another street, past houses she hadn’t seen before and out to another cul-de-sac, around a house that needed a paint job, through the side yard with its long grass, and out the back. They ran into the forest until Alice no longer heard the sound of the river.

  “Rob! Where are we going?”

  “We’re here.” Rob stopped abruptly and she barreled into him, though he didn’t move an inch. She bounced back and landed on her butt in the dirt.

  “You hear that?”

  She stood up and brushed the dirt from the khaki skirt and long socks of her school uniform. Mama would be angry. “What?”

  “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “AHHHHHHHH!” He screamed louder than she had ever heard anyone scream, and she flinched and whipped around behind her. Nothing was there. She looked back at him where he was still screaming. She covered her ears.

  “WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING?” she yelled so he could hear.

  He stopped.

  “Whenever I’m angry, I come here, and I scream.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Try it.”

  “Ahhhh!” she said.

  “That sucked.”

  She brushed the dirt off a tree stump and sat down.

  Rob sat on the dirt, not bothering to protect his school pants. “Do you want to know a secret?”

  “What?”

  “The ‘box in your mind’ is stupid. This is better than the box. Try it.” He stood back up and walked over to her. “What makes you angry?”

  “Tommy killing Ralphie,” she said immediately.

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, what else?”

  “Uhhhh.…”

  “Close your eyes. Picture the ‘box in your mind.’ What’s in it?”

  “Tommy saying I couldn’t play baseball because I’m a girl.”

  “What else?”

  “Mama making me wear this stupid skirt to school when the other girls get to wear pants.”

  “YEAH? What about when she makes you wear those lacy socks to church?”

  “YEAH! I hate those.”

  “Scream!”

  “I HATE THOSE!”

  “And what about Tommy?”

  “I AM NEVER GOING TO MARRY HIM!”

  “AHHH!” he screamed.

  “AHHH!” she answered.

  Rob changed his scream into a howl. “OW, OW, OW!” She laughed and stopped screaming.

  “Okay, again,” he said. “One, two, three. Go!”

  They screamed together, long and loud until they both stopped and gasped for air.

  “Feel better?”

  She nodded.

  “And one more thing: you can’t put what you want in a”—he switched to a zombie-like voice—“box in your mind.” She giggled. “You have to fight for what you want and stand up for yourself.”

  “How?”

  “What time is it?”

  She looked at her plastic pink watch: “Two.” She had wanted the blue one. She should have screamed about that.

  “Come on.” Rob took off and she ran after him, following him back to the street and toward the school.

  “No, Rob! I don’t want to go back to school!”

  He chuckled. “We’re not going back to school.” Even still, he ran toward the school.

  “Okay, wait here,” he said when he reached the spot between the high school and elementary school where they usually met to walk home together. He disappeared over the hill that led to the elementary school.

  She waited, watching as the last bell rang at the high school and the kids started walking toward the road and back to their houses. Finally, she saw Rob, dragging Tommy by the sleeve of his uniform shirt. He released him when they reached Alice.

  “What do you have to say?” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Alice.” Tommy looked at the ground.

  “And?” Rob said.

  “You’re not a lizard face.”

  “And, are you going to do it again?” Rob’s voice rose. “Are you going to mess with my sister again?”

  Alice looked at Tommy. His eyes were wide now, fearful. She almost felt bad for him, for Rob’s rage was as laser-focused as his praise. She reached her hand up to curl it around Rob’s arm, a silent warning, for that was their pattern. He brought the passion, the storm, the fun; she brought the calming morning fog, the tame to his anxiety. She felt his muscles release their hold on Tommy. Tommy shook his head no.

  “Good.” Rob shoved him lightly on the shoulder.

  Alice had drifted off to sleep that night thinking about boxes cracked open and anger spilling out, brainstorming what she would scream about tomorrow in the clearing. Ironic, then, that it was Rob himself who made her realize the wisdom in their mother’s advice.

  Chapter Four

  Alice looked around the remaining items in the bedroom where she had dreamed of screaming that night so long ago now. The possessions made the room feel full, maybe even homey, to someone else. The dolls, the desk, the books, the flowered chamber pot in the corner, Alice had lived beside them through her childhood, but they were all her mother’s. Nothing felt like it belonged to her, not then or now.

  She stopped at the unfamiliar pictures on the bedside table. In one, a woman with short flapper hair stood seductively in a light-blue dress, some distant relation she couldn’t remember. In another, a man looked seriously into the camera, a cigar at his lips—her father’s father? Alice flipped over the frame and slid out the back. Two pictures fell out. One of the man and the cigar and one of her and Meredith, from their days rooming together in college. They were on a summer trip in Savannah, lying on the beach’s brown sand in their bikinis, laughing.

  She reached for the other frame and slid out the back, her mother’s handiwork, no doubt. Another picture from college. Looking into the camera, Alice stood on a patch of grass, her clothes covered in dirt, holding a hoe, her face shadowed by a University of Georgia baseball hat that said Class of 1993. A man, tan with jet-black hair, looked at her, smiling, his hands in work gloves.

  Jake.

  Her stomach dropped. She slipped both photos into the small pocket of her backpack anyway.

  Two rooms down.

  She stood up to head to the next room, walking past the door to her closet. She remembered sneaking through the crawl
space to the closet where Rob often slept, where he would never turn her away, would always listen to her dreams, how he’d distract her from her nightmares with long stories.

  “Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Alice who lived with her brother in a tree house, high above the forest floor,” he always began. The story was about how the siblings had to save the animals and their forest, but he was always meandering off the main story to talk about the family of chipmunks below who missed their daughter since she left for chipmunk college or the hawks in the sky who argued constantly about where they planned to fly in the winter.

  “Where were we?” he’d say, ready to return to the siblings. But with him, it hardly mattered. They were together. By the time she sat next to him, she was already safe, already happy, and already her eyelids had become heavy again. And carefully, he’d pick his book back up until she heard only the sounds of the pages turning.

  She decided to allow herself one indulgence before going to the next room. She went into her empty closet where she pulled the little door open to the crawl space in between her and Rob’s closets. As she stuck her head inside, feeling the cool air from the attic above, her breath caught in her chest, and her heart jumped.

  Against the side wall, lying on top of two boxes, she could just make out the outline of an acoustic guitar.

  She carefully fit her shoulders through the small door and army-crawled toward the guitar with her feet dangling out the door. She lay on her back so she could pick up the guitar, angling it toward the light. She ran her fingers over the smooth wood. The strings stuck out randomly with all but one off the bridge. She blew the dust from the inscription at the base and squinted to see the initials in the light’s beam—RWT. Robinson Wesley Tate.

  Rob had left with this guitar; she remembered it so clearly.

  How did it make its way back here?

  She moved so she could study the boxes without the darkness of her shadow. Taped to the front of one was a piece of her mother’s stationery: From the desk of Mrs. Maura Tate. Across the sheet, her mother had written in large letters: FOR ALICE, DO NOT DISCARD!

  Alice pulled her legs into the crawl space until she was propped on her knees, so she could see the top of the boxes. They were sealed with a packing label from New Orleans still unbroken across the top, addressed to the house, but with no name. New Orleans, where Rob died, and the date was in fall 2007, just a few weeks after the funeral.

  She swallowed the fear down, the same fear that had stopped her from asking more questions after Rob’s death. Her mother wanted her to find the guitar, these boxes, even if her mother had never wanted to know what was inside. Perhaps she was too afraid that it was her fault that she didn’t do more, follow him, look more, a fear Alice knew well.

  The boxes were a choice, presented to Alice alone.

  She reached her nails to the end of the packing tape and picked off the tape, inch by inch, and opened the box’s faded top.

  Clothes. Jeans, sweaters, an assortment of T-shirts, socks, and underwear. She stacked the fabric item by item on one side of the box, then did the other side, to make sure she went through everything. She didn’t recognize any of it. Why would someone send clothes here? She noticed she was holding her breath and let it out through her mouth slowly.

  “Please don’t be more clothes,” she said to herself as she opened the second box. She yanked at the flaps, snapping them off from the tape and ripping the cardboard in half. A spiral-bound notebook, a folder of pictures from Walgreens, and a shoebox.

  She opened the folder and slid the pictures into her hand. With the first, her eyes immediately centered on the two faces, a man and a woman, before she realized they were naked. Her head jerked back, and she heard herself say “ugh!” before she knew who had said it. She looked at the scene again—someone’s poorly lit bedroom. The girl, who she didn’t recognize, was on her back, sideways on the bed, her dark-black legs dangling over the side. The man was standing, looking at her, hard and naked and trim, his face barely angled toward the camera. Alice looked at the next one, where the man looked straight at the camera, this time from on the bed behind the woman, who was skinny and pretty with a long neck and cropped short hair. Alice looked at the face. It was him. She flipped through the other pictures, which were the same. She closed her eyes tightly, hoping to get this image of her brother out of her head.

  Putting one hand over the lower half of the photograph to cover the naked parts, she studied her brother’s adult face. The blue eyes and sandy hair were the same, but his face was longer, with a strong jawline, balanced by the same dimples from his childhood.

  She opened the spiral-bound notebook, thinking perhaps it was a diary. The first page, written in cursive, said, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” Again, “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” And again. She flipped to the next page. Again and again, the same sentence, each one meticulously written, identical to the next. She turned pages and more pages—still the same. She flipped to the back page. It ended on “than,” the exact wrong amount of space required to finish the project.

  She moved on to the shoebox. She lifted the lid to find a fountain pen in a case, a bottle of ink, and a stack of envelopes. She removed one. It was addressed, without a return address, in neat script by a practiced hand. She flipped through the sealed envelopes, questions in her head threatening to bubble over. She didn’t recognize the first two names.

  Then, a name she knew, her father.

  She flipped frantically past envelopes addressed to her mother and Jamie, then another name she didn’t recognize, until she was on the last one. It wasn’t for her.

  She laid them out in front of her.

  Mr. Dylan Barnett

  Ms. Lila King

  Mr. Richard Tate

  Mrs. Maura Tate

  Mr. James Hudson

  Mr. Christopher Smith

  Mr. Tyler Wells

  Seven envelopes with seven names, and he didn’t have one for her. She didn’t know what the envelopes were, only that she wanted one. The same childhood feelings of rejection after Rob left entered her chest, constricting it and quickening her breath. Her brother didn’t leave her one.

  Seven names and addresses, so close, in Georgia, except for Lila, and still, so many questions to which she didn’t know the answers.

  Alice found the envelope addressed to her father and examined the decade-old seal, which would no doubt pop off cleanly, glad its job was finally done.

  She opened it carefully, unfolding the fancy paper inside with the same large, cursive script.

  Dick:

  “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but it should come abroad.” —Mark 4:22

  You could have prevented everything. I hope you carry this knowledge to your grave, and look your wife and daughter in their eyes knowing it’s true.

  Respectfully,

  Rob

  Daddy could have prevented what? Alice thought. Her mind went immediately to the image of her mother, lying in bed, ignoring the constant screech of the phone, after Rob left. Instead of attending her various activities, Maura read through the family’s library, looking for Rob’s loopy scrawl in the margins and his signature pencil tick marks from his habit of sliding a pencil down each page as he read. She separated those books into a pile that grew next to her bed until it was taller than Alice.

  She puzzled over the verse. It was just like Rob to choose something from King James to make his obscure point. A tickle of her old rage at Rob ran up through her tense shoulders. Poetics and symbolism had always been more important to him than clarity.

  As she sat there, rereading the open letter and ignoring the burning in her knees from her crouch in the closet, the unmistakable sound of rattling glass in wood rang out from downstairs. The front door.

  She threw t
he letters back in the box, scrambled out of the closet, shooed Buddy out, and shut the door, hurrying back to the hallway, as if she were afraid of being caught trying to sneak into Rob’s room as she had as a child.

  Booted footsteps slammed into the hardwood in the house’s foyer. “Alice? Aaallliiice,” the voice called.

  Jamie.

  She had wondered how long he could stay away.

  Rob’s Lost Letters:

  Mr. Dylan Barnett

  Ms. Lila King

  Mr. Richard Tate

  Mrs. Maura Tate

  Mr. James Hudson

  Mr. Christopher Smith

  Mr. Tyler Wells

  Chapter Five

  As she appeared on the landing, he sang “There she is, Miss America,” like always.

  He continued the song as she walked down the stairs. She breathed deeply, trying to slow her heart rate, but her thoughts were completely consumed with the letters. Maybe the others would say more, maybe even why he left, where he had been. She adopted the calm facade she always used when speaking to parents about to leave their children for a week at the Center’s summer camp, being careful not to betray the chaos she knew would come. She didn’t want Jamie to know about the letters, not yet. Not until she knew what they said and what to do with them.

  The song ended.

  “I came to see if you needed any help.”

  He had offered to help three times before. And each time, Alice had said she wanted to be alone. Although she loved Jamie like a father (he had been around more than her own, after all), she had needed the space to think about Walker without Jamie’s continuous monologue. Now though, she wanted only to grab the box from the closet and go, to reread her father’s letter in the privacy of the Center’s cabin and let someone else deal with her mother’s various collections of china. And with Jamie helping, she could finish in half the time.

  “Actually, I could use your help.”

  “Really?” He beamed back at her.

  She nodded. “Everything seems pretty clean and organized here. I bet we can finish by the end of the day if we work together.” She hoped.