How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  Buddy carefully wobbled down the stairs, having given up on Alice returning upstairs. Or maybe his old ears had finally picked up Jamie’s voice.

  Jamie leaned down to pet him. “I should’ve brought my dogs! I didn’t know Buddy would be here.”

  Alice smiled, but said nothing. All she needed was six prima-donna competitive border collies underfoot—who already got 80 percent of Jamie’s attention (and the same of the trust fund her father left him).

  “Well, why don’t I start in Richard’s office? See if there’s anything related to the business we might need.”

  “Sounds great.”

  She watched him as he started down the hall with his hunched back and not quite steady footsteps before she walked to the dining room. The verse from the letter filled her mind as she looked at the china cabinet, table, and oversize buffet, wondering where to start: “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested.”

  She opened the bottom drawer in her mother’s china cabinet, expecting to find another set of perfectly stacked china with thin paper between each plate. Instead, it held a moldy roll, a set of three-pound weights, and her mother’s diploma from Agnes Scott in a gold frame and was lined with what looked like every Christmas card her parents had ever received. What the heck?

  She opened the drawer above it where her mother kept her silver serving platters, stamped on the back with her social security number. She remembered her mother displaying the numbers proudly, as all the wives in the neighborhood had done, to ensure the silver would be returned if stolen. Instead, a few broken mismatched plates littered the drawer over one of the platters, next to a bottle of cough syrup, which had leaked onto the drawer’s wallpaper lining. Dried red goo caked one side of a folder labeled Financial. Alice opened it, thumbing quickly through tax documents, a pamphlet from an auction in Atlanta where her mother had purchased an antique armoire, and random bills of money floating between the pages. Alice’s heart began to race at her mother’s hidden rebellion.

  “Alice? You better come in here,” Jamie said.

  She ran into the office. “Oh no,” she said as she entered the doorway.

  Her father’s desk still sat in front of the window, but meticulously labeled boxes covered every inch of the floor space, as though a hoarder with perfect cursive had secretly taken refuge in the otherwise magazine-decorated house. Pegboard covered one of the walls, the little holes used to organize a random assortment of pots and pans, rifles and canes. A vintage unicycle hung from the ceiling. Another wall held framed paintings and pictures that reached from the floor to the ceiling, like a puzzle with each space occupied, some by framed postcards.

  Furniture protected by taped blankets crowded the room at different angles, and several mattresses stuck out against the organized chaos. A twenty-foot wooden table took up one corner, and a vintage train set sat on top, as if a child walked away for a glass of milk and planned to return. How could her mother have even gotten all this in here?

  She jogged back through the kitchen, throwing open the closed door that led to what decades ago had been the maid’s quarters. It looked the same as the office. The only difference was a twin bed stuck in the corner, the bedside table littered with tissues and a pair of her mother’s reading glasses.

  Alice opened a kitchen cabinet, then another, with Jamie and Buddy trailing behind her helplessly. Manila folders labeled with her mother’s tight cursive stuck out of most every drawer and shelf, amid bowls, directions on how to work the coffee maker, sports equipment, and photo albums. Her mother had replaced the perfectly alphabetized spice rack with a collection of random cords and dozens of reusable shopping bags, neatly folded and wrapped with rubber bands.

  She opened the fridge. It was stuffed with boxes of garbage bags and mismatched Pyrex and held a large crystal globe in the space where her mother used to keep several bottles of white wine. The globe read New York 1939 World’s Fair. Jamie caught the door as Alice closed it and took out the garbage bags.

  The important documents previously in her father’s left desk drawer were scattered among different folders in various locations. A folder labeled Certificates Alice found under a couch cushion held her grandparents’ death certificates, along with a Best Mother certificate Rob had made at school and her parents’ birth certificates. She found a folder between a stack of mismatched plates labeled Children with a picture of Alice as Glinda the Good Witch and Rob as a sheriff on Halloween. Several pages of veterinary records followed the picture, as if the family pets deserved the same footing as the family children.

  Alice realized she was wading through the wonderland of her mother’s decaying brain, all full of strange connections she couldn’t understand. Every drawer she opened was stuffed with expired canned food, scraps of paper with bits of information—“memory aids,” her mother’s nurse would call them—and expensive-looking antique knickknacks.

  When she had opened every cabinet and drawer on the main floor, she sat down on the only remaining cushion on the living room couch. Her whole body buzzed with overwhelming thoughts about how she would get the house ready for the estate sale company and then ready for the demolition, but above that came the guilt.

  She should have noticed her mother was getting sick. She should have known before that call from the police officer when her mother ran her BMW off the road and wouldn’t go with him because she thought he was a murderer. It seemed like her mother’s decline had happened so fast and so sporadically at first, like one of Alice’s graphs at the Center, all highs and lows, each more extreme than the last. Even after the crash—“fender bender,” as her mother called it—she had snapped back to normal, yelling at Alice to drive her home “this instant” or she would be late for a luncheon.

  She should have known before that next call. A police officer picked her mother up watering rocks with sugar water in the middle of the night in nothing but her nightie and took her directly to the hospital. But who did her mother call? Not her only daughter, but her housekeeper, who packed up some clothes, her most expensive jewelry in tissue paper, and her extensive collection of bathroom products and dropped them at the hospital.

  The bags would make their way briefly to Alice and Walker’s house, then to the assisted living facility. The packing had seemed like a kindness at the time, but now, Alice realized her mother hadn’t been trying to save Alice from the house’s painful memories, but to hide the destruction she had wrought on the house as long as possible.

  Jamie picked up a small stack of black-and-white pictures from the seat next to her, where Alice had thrown off the cushion after noticing a folder sticking out. He put the cushion back and sat beside her, still holding the photos.

  When he didn’t fill the silence, she glanced over at him and followed his eyes to the photos. The Tates were recognizable, posing in front of the large oak in her grandparents’ front yard—they stood on the left, each with a hand on one of Richard’s shoulders. He looked handsome in his army uniform. On the other side of the tree stood another family. A man stood behind his wife. A young woman in a fitted floral dress stood next to her mother, holding the hand of a little girl who looked about ten, in a black dress that must have been a school uniform. Jamie stood in front of the wife, smiling and looking straight at the camera, his little hands gripping backpack straps. He couldn’t have been older than six.

  “Is that them?” Alice said. “Your parents?”

  Jamie only nodded.

  Alice tried to think of something else to say or ask about them. The only thing she knew was that his sisters and parents had died in a car accident, that they were her grandparents’ best friends and next-door neighbors, and that Jamie had ended up in their care. Before she could ask anything else, though, he slipped the photo into his chest pocket.

  On the next one, he said: “This is your aunt Bennie, you know. Your father’s mother’s sister. She could never stand your mother.
I thought when Richard said he was going to marry her that she’d never get over it.”

  Alice leaned over to look at the photo. “Is that the one who called Mama ‘country’?”

  He chuckled. “Forgot about that.”

  She plucked the photo from his grip and ripped it down the middle. She tossed the two pieces on the floor and smiled at him. “Good riddance.”

  He laughed.

  “The house will be okay. We’ll work on it together. It’s mostly trash. It won’t take as long as you think.” Jamie put his arm around her shoulder, and she leaned in toward him.

  As if reading her mind, he added: “If she hadn’t wanted us to know she was having trouble, there would’ve been no way to know. She was always good at keeping up appearances.”

  “She got a dumpster,” Alice said. “I remember her telling me that. She got a dumpster and she was cleaning out the house, getting rid of stuff after Daddy died. Downsizing.”

  “I remember that too.”

  He tapped her knee twice, and she stood up. He handed Alice a garbage bag, and she accepted it without comment. After picking up the ripped photo and dropping it in the bag, she went straight for the kitchen. The letter with her brother’s writing was far from her mind.

  Chapter Six

  Jamie was right.

  Alice quickly adjusted to the new reality of the house and, in two hours, had become as efficient as an ant colony building a new home, ruthlessly sorting through her mother’s clutter, singularly focused on each task. She stuck the scrapbooks and most of the folders in a box to take home and sort through later. She left anything that looked valuable for the estate sale company. Everything else, she threw away. She had already stuffed twenty black trash bags and stuck a green sticky note on the perfume cabinet in her mother’s parlor. All without a peep from Jamie, as if the state of his friend’s office had shocked him into silence.

  When her hunger started to make a can of corn older than Caitlin seem potentially edible, she went back to her father’s office to find Jamie. Inside, he had written “trash” or “sell” with Sharpie on many of the boxes and had his own little stack of folders on the desk.

  “I broke a glass in here.” He pushed her lightly out into the living room. She let him guide her, glad for the lessened effort for her to make it back to the living room couch where they had sat earlier.

  “Lunch?” Her hand found its way to her growling stomach.

  “Why don’t you go pick up something and bring it back? I might be able to finish in there while you’re gone.”

  She sighed in relief. She couldn’t wait to sit in her car’s silence and its (mostly) clean and uncluttered space. “If you’re sure.”

  “How about the Varsity?”

  The classic burger joint in downtown Atlanta was a little farther than she’d planned on going, but he could probably sense her desire for a break. She didn’t protest. “The usual?”

  He nodded.

  “All right, I’ll be back in, like, forty-five minutes.” She stopped to pet Buddy on her way out, telling him to stay.

  She climbed into her car quickly and drove a bit too fast out of the driveway and down the street, only stopping when she reached the stop sign, out of view from the house. There, she stared at the river ahead.

  The house was an explosion, all the things her mother refused to talk about resurfacing in overflowing abundance. Even Rob’s boxes in the closet upstairs. How long had they been up there? Since Rob died? Given the state of the rest of the house compared to the state of the sewing room, it seemed like her mother hadn’t been on the second floor in years.

  The words from Rob’s letter rang in her mind, fighting with the image of her father in his army uniform, smiling and handsome. Which should she believe?

  Writing off someone like that was just like Rob. He had always seen people as all good or all bad, whether they deserved the criticism or the praise. Maura was good, strong, sweet, and he was constantly loyal and defensive of her. Richard, on the other hand, was misguided, selfish, stupid. Jamie was the only one Alice knew who had switched from one of Rob’s categories to the other.

  When a car honked behind her, Alice turned left toward the highway and the river disappeared out her rearview window. She rolled down one of the windows, with only the sound of the whirling air for company, and tried to let her mind sink into silence, if only for ten minutes. She looked over her shoulder to merge lanes onto the highway toward downtown. Her eyes stuck on the empty back seat, without her backpack, without her wallet.

  She sighed and merged the other way, toward the off-ramp.

  Five minutes later, as she passed the stop sign where she had sat minutes earlier, she screamed, relishing the violent vibrations in her throat, just as Rob would have.

  * * *

  When the house came into view, Jamie was in the driveway, putting a box into his car’s open back seat. Intending to grab her wallet and head back toward lunch, she pulled up next to him and left her car running.

  “Forgot my wallet. What’s that?” she asked casually, pointing to the box.

  His face was exactly like Caitlin’s when Alice had caught her trying to sneak out a few months ago with the fire ladder through her bedroom window. He shut the door to his car, sending a waft of wet dog smell into the air.

  “Some old Tate Trucking records. Think they would be good to have on hand, just in case. Lunch is on me.” He pulled his old leather wallet from his back pocket, the same one her father had, engraved with Jamie’s initials in the same font as her father’s, and handed her two twenties.

  Was Jamie being extra nice to her? It wasn’t like him to pay. He was terrible with money, and despite the aura of wealth from his house, his hobbies, his car, his dogs, he always seemed to be short of it.

  “I don’t want to drive without my license.” Alice started toward the steps.

  “I’ll get it for you,” he said. “Where is it?”

  She ignored him and continued to the door. Her hand lingered on the doorknob as the house’s familiar dread washed back to her. She twisted the knob, and the door bumped into another box.

  “Alice…? Alice, wait.”

  She reached into the box and pulled out an oversize manila envelope that rested inside. On the black flap was a smudged word. She could make out her mother’s handwriting, forming the word she would recognize second only to her own name: Robinson. A second, smaller envelope, unlabeled, hid behind in the otherwise empty box.

  “Were you going to take this?” Her tone was clipped, like when she needed children to pay attention to safety instructions at the Center’s aquatic camp.

  “Look, there are things in this house I thought your mother threw away a long time ago that are private to your parents, things they wouldn’t want you to see, that you shouldn’t see.”

  As he continued, her mind raced ahead to invent causes for what was inside. Jamie and her father shared so much: the past of the trucking business, stock in the company to which they sold their shares, a trust from Richard’s parents, who had officially adopted Jamie when he was twenty (“for tax purposes,” Jamie always said, sadly). The papers could have been anything.

  He finished a sentence: “I didn’t want you to get hurt, that’s all,” and she jumped in.

  “What were—”

  He spoke louder, over her question: “I know you hate being here.” She stopped talking. “All you’ve wanted ever since Rob left was to leave this house and never come back. You can do that. I’ll finish. I don’t mind.”

  “That’s not true,” Alice lied. “That’s not what I… If there’s something about… If there’s something about Rob…” Rob’s handwriting on the letters bounced into her mind, and her chest clenched with fear. Could Jamie have found the letters? Taken them?

  “If you give me a couple of hours, I can get rid of this stuff. Then, yo
u can go through all the scrapbooks, remember your parents in the way they would want to be remembered. I really think that would be best.”

  “This is my family. These are my parents, my brother. Not yours.”

  He stumbled back, and she knew she had wounded him. Your family, your parents are dead, she thought. He should have understood what it was like, to be left with nothing.

  “Well, I think you know that I love you like my own daughter. And I know it’s better for you, for your health, if you let sleeping dogs lie, if you let me take these. Or we can throw them out.”

  “My health?” she said, her voice rising. “Ever since Rob left, you and my parents were always protecting me. I’m a grown woman! I don’t need it. Maybe I never needed it!”

  “I think we both know that isn’t true.”

  She prepared herself for what she knew came next—a reference to her running away after Rob left. She knew, of course, that her “trips,” as she thought of them at the time, were why her parents and Jamie never brought up Rob around her, why her mother had limited her freedom so much, why the house felt so suffocating to her now, yet another pile of blame that her mother had heaped on her father that meant they never talked, never touched.

  “We all thought you were dead,” he continued.

  “I know.”

  “You want to know why I’m protective? Imagine if you thought Robbie or Caitlin had been kidnapped or murdered.”

  She blushed. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Well, not to me.”

  She needed to end this conversation. The longer it went on, the more anxiety she felt about the letters. If Jamie had found them, if he knew about them, they’d be gone forever. If he felt this strongly about whatever was in the envelopes, he would have destroyed them. Her heart jumped as she smelled a hint of burning wood. Had Jamie burned something? Had he burned the letters?

  “Walker’s on the way here,” Alice said. “He was going to help me go through the legal papers.” Walker was not on the way over to the house, but she knew Jamie wouldn’t stick around with Walker on the way. They had never warmed to each other.