As she finished the sentence, she stopped. She had evoked his name so easily when she needed it, even now, even after the texts. The ease of it made her tense. She saw Jamie looking at her and steeled her expression again. “I want you to leave. We’ll talk about this later.”
“I really do think you’ll come to regret this.”
“Leave the other box too!”
Alice watched as he turned and stormed off down the front steps and to the driveway. He set the box from his car on the hood of hers. As soon as she saw his car disappear out of the driveway, she raced up the steps to Rob’s room, threw open the closet door, and dove into the crawl space between their bedrooms. The guitar and the letters were still there where she left them earlier. Her hand went to her chest in relief.
She crawled to open the door to Rob’s closet and set the guitar down carefully on the carpet. RWT, the guitar reminded her.
She should go downstairs right now and read every single piece of paper in those boxes, she knew. Maybe even tear open the letters, recipients be damned. But Jamie’s voice echoed uninvited in her mind: You’ll come to regret this.
As she piled the letters, photos, and notebook on the floor next to the guitar, Jamie’s words ticked back and forth in her head like her car’s windshield wipers on a rainy day. The pressure built behind her eyes, images flashing so quickly she could barely grasp them: herself paddling alone in the canoe looking for Rob, them screaming in the clearing, the crushing longing she’d felt when she had been called to the principal’s office one day.
She remembered now, she ran all the way there, knowing Rob would be in the office waiting, the prodigal son returned. She circled the entire room, saying “Where is he?” out of breath. But it was only the school counselor who, after seeing the display, changed her school schedule to allow for weekly “faith-based sessions” and handed her the note she’d found earlier in her desk, addressed to her mother.
She climbed out of the crawl space and into the closet.
Of course, she knew now that despite her childhood certainty, he was never there. He was not waiting on her. He might not have even been thinking about her, missing her at all. The missing “Alice Wright” letter was only further proof.
She jumped at her phone ringing in her pocket. Walker.
“Alice, where the hell are you? The school called me—did you forget to pick up Robbie? Are you okay?”
“Sorry, sorry. I…I lost track of time.” She checked her watch. Damn. “I think I have bad service. I’m still at my parents’ house. I’ll leave now and get him.”
As she gathered all of Rob’s items in her arms, she spied two rolled-up posters in the corner, paper-clipped neatly and taped from where her mother had ripped them off the wall, as if she wanted to apologize to the Beatles and Kiss. Alice took everything to her car, along with the bracketed envelope with Robinson on it and the unlabeled one, moving faster than was perhaps necessary and hitting her thigh for Buddy to follow. After locking the front door behind her, confident Jamie wouldn’t have another key, Alice put the last box in her trunk and drove away from the house.
She eyed the larger envelope again with its black letters—ROBINSON—and thought again of that girl who ran to the principal’s office asking, “Where is he?” But what fresh pain would those answers unleash?
Chapter Seven
After a (belated) school pickup and basketball practice, Alice, Robbie, and Buddy pulled into the driveway at home. Walker sat in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch with a beer. By the time she parked, sent Robbie upstairs to shower, and placed Jamie’s box and her backpack with the letters and the two envelopes in the hall closet, away from the family, Walker was waiting for her at the kitchen counter.
She let the silence stretch between them as she opened the fridge, took out a bag of chicken strips, and sliced red and green peppers, dumped them in a pan with a packet of fajita seasoning, and set the stove to simmer.
“I can’t deal with stuff like today when I’m at the office. Not right now,” he said.
She ignored him. “Selective listening,” her mother had called it, Alice’s ability to completely tune out what she didn’t want to hear.
I should call Grace and make sure she watered everything, Alice thought.
She opened the kitchen cabinet and stood on her tiptoes to pull out a stemmed wineglass. Walker came up behind her and lifted it from the highest shelf with ease. He removed the rubber stopper from the bottle on the counter and poured a healthy glass, then slid it across the granite toward Alice.
She nodded at him instead of saying thank you, and he let another few seconds pass in blissful silence.
“A little early for dinner, isn’t it?”
She eyed the clock. It was 5:45 p.m. “I didn’t eat lunch.”
“I thought you were going to let the estate company handle most of the house. Isn’t that why we hired them? Now you forget Robbie and are too busy to eat lunch? You do remember the dinner party at Mark’s tomorrow, right?”
She stopped. She hadn’t. Was she supposed to bring dessert? “Of course, I remember. And the house is more complicated than I thought it would be.”
Taking breaks to stir the food or sip her wine, she told Walker about her day out of habit, starting with the disarray of the house. She paused, considering how far in the story to go, how much to tell. As she mentally ticked through the pros and cons of openness, she reached up to run her necklace’s pendant along its chain, the one with Caitlin and Robbie’s birthstones that Walker brought to her in the hospital while her C-section scars healed.
It was all such a joke, she thought. The necklace, the way he kissed her with the baby in her arms like he would never be as happy as in that moment. As if that happy moment would last them through the next decades of their marriage, would forgive everything from the funeral and all the secrets of their pasts.
The last few months, the weight of keeping the affair a secret, a barely hidden one at that, didn’t faze Walker, not like it would have Alice. Even as a child, Rob would have to coach her the entire way home when they planned to tell their parents a “story.” She could always feel her palms sweating, even as Rob tried to reassure her with their secret look, right before they entered the door. He would blink at her rapidly, like cats did to say they loved you (something he learned in the C encyclopedia). Whenever she saw cats do it, she couldn’t help but think of him.
“I can’t believe he did that,” she said, finishing the story with Jamie trying to take the “Tate Trucking” box, but leaving out the letters and the “Robinson” envelope. She turned back to stir the fajita filling.
“If your parents didn’t want you there, let Jamie finish up. It’ll be less work for you anyway.”
“I’m their daughter!”
“Don’t get all riled up. All I’m saying is”—he tilted up the beer bottle to finish the last sips—“if I died, I wouldn’t want people going through my stuff either.” He set down the bottle on the island like a form of punctuation.
“Really.” She pictured his new large office at the firm on the coveted partners’ hallway—a large mahogany desk, like in her father’s office, with a third drawer that locked and a separate locking file cabinet. She actually had no idea what his new office looked like. But she knew it involved wood and drawers with locks, now that she thought about it. Of course, Brittani would be only a few hallways away, close enough for them to exchange smiles in between meetings.
“It’s probably nothing, just some embarrassing stuff he doesn’t think your father wanted you to know.”
“What, like an affair?” She locked eyes with Walker.
He shrugged, betraying nothing. “Yeah, maybe.”
I know, she thought. She turned over the possibility of telling him what she knew, feeling the power of it at his clever shrug, the sharpened blade of it that she could stab into his ch
est at the exact moment it would hurt the most. Every day she waited to tell, it got sharper, stronger.
“What’s ‘affair’?” Robbie said, walking in to stand beside Alice. She ran her fingers through his damp hair without taking her eyes off Walker until he broke the gaze to look down at Robbie.
“It’s when someone that’s married spends a lot of time with someone who isn’t their husband or wife,” Walker said.
“Like Mom and Aunt Meredith?”
Walker smirked at Alice.
“Go watch Planet Earth, honey,” Alice said to Robbie. “Dinner will be ready soon.”
She walked toward the closet by the garage and pulled out her backpack, with Walker following her.
“Where are you going? Alice?” he whisper-screamed.
“An affair’s not ‘nothing,’ and neither is what I found in the house.” She walked to the car with him following her and pulled out the guitar. She handed it to him.
“It’s Rob’s.”
“Who’s…?” Walker started, but then recognition crossed his face and his eyebrows knit with the old hurt and confusion that boiled up from the funeral. Alice was back at the podium giving Rob’s eulogy. Looking back now, when her misty eyes had met Walker’s look of betrayal, it was the first time they both acknowledged the true facts of their relationship—that they didn’t really know each other, never had and didn’t care to now.
As he did in the negotiations with other lawyers, Walker wiped the emotions from his face, leaving only a hollow, empty look that seemed more serious than his previous look of betrayal. Walker handed the guitar back to her without comment.
He turned, and they both saw Robbie and Buddy peeking from behind the door to the garage.
“Why don’t we play a game of chess before dinner?”
“Really?” Robbie asked, his face all smile.
Walker nodded.
Alice stood with Walker and watched Robbie sprint down the hall and around the corner to get the chess set, showing more dexterity than in the last month of forced sports games and practices. Walker walked into the house and shut the door, leaving her in the garage holding the guitar. She leaned against her car.
She shouldn’t have gotten Walker involved, even in the Jamie argument. Always the lawyer, he argued the opposition, and his default position seemed to be if you didn’t engage, you couldn’t be blamed. And with him, the Rob issue was still sensitive, would always be something that stood between them.
Although Jamie’s concern for her “health” had sparked a familiar rage deep in her stomach, he had been right, in a way. Looking for Rob had only led her to pain and anger, never to him. Even when she tried to ignore him, not to talk about him, not to think about him, cutting off that part of herself cast a shadow over all the others. She had never been able to do what Maura did: two months after Rob left, like a switch, Maura returned to normal and never mentioned him again. The first part, the normal part, was something Alice could never get right.
Four months after he left, Alice said, as she had many times, that she missed Rob. As always when Alice mentioned Rob, her mother didn’t respond. Alice repeated the sentence louder, and her mother walked out of the kitchen and snapped at her to “stop dilly-dallying and get ready for dinner.” But Alice hadn’t stopped; she had pushed her. She ran after Maura and yelled, “Rob’s coming back. For me! I know he is,” and her mother, instead of ignoring Alice’s constant reminders of Rob, like usual, turned on her heels and thundered as loud as she could, “THEN WHERE IS HE?”
Alice had stopped, shocked by the outburst. After her mother sent Alice to her room without dinner, she lay in bed and turned the question over in her head. It was a good one—then where was he?
As a child, she never wondered why he left. That much was obvious. She would leave, too, if she could. That came later, in adulthood, once she understood the enormity of what he had done by leaving on his own.
As a child, she had wondered, Why didn’t he take me with him? When is he coming back for me? Where could he have gone? She decided maybe he was waiting for her to come find him. Maybe he was waiting for her to get the message, then they would leave together.
The first night Alice snuck out of her room, she went to the forest behind the abandoned house, where Rob had taken her years before to scream. He wasn’t there. The next night, she went to the school, shining her flashlight around the grass where a tent could hide. The third night, she went to the riverbank where Rob taught her how to fish, where she had smiled so big as he clapped at the first fish she reeled in. Nothing.
When she had returned home from that unsuccessful attempt, she had opened the front door carefully, slipped off her shoes and tiptoed up the stairs using only the front of her toes, like her mother always told her to do when she wore heels (as if she ever would). There wasn’t a moon and the house was pitch-black. She shuffled in the hallway with her fingers running along the wall, back to her room. She kicked something.
What could it be? Her mother had sent the dog and cats outside weeks ago, after they annoyed her while she was lying in bed all day after Rob left. Even though the animals always liked the kids best, they had jumped up in bed every day to keep Maura company. Her head full of visions of intruders, Alice put her hand over the flashlight, as Rob had taught her, to damper the light and clicked it on. She froze.
Her father sat on the floor with his back to Rob’s door, holding a bottle of something brown. His unfocused eyes looked at her as if he thought she might be a mirage. They stared at each other for a few seconds. His face was streaked with tears.
Ever so slowly, she stepped over his legs as he watched her silently. Looking back one more time, she opened her door, slipped inside, and shut it behind her.
Her heart beat through her chest as she climbed into bed. She stared at the ceiling and listened carefully for any stirs of her father moving.
Something she had heard at school gave her the next idea, one of Rob’s old friends laughing about going out to one of the river’s islands to smoke. She knew which island the kid meant. She and Rob had canoed there many times. Maybe Rob was camping there. It would be her biggest trip yet, but somehow, she knew he was there. She felt it.
She knew her father wouldn’t tell about catching her, but even so, she took more precautions. She packed a few sandwiches and waited until later in the night before she finally set off on her journey. She made her way to a different shore of the river, where people docked their canoes in the water with rope. It was the first time she had been on the water since Rob left. As she pushed out into the frigid November water, she felt happy for the first time since he’d abandoned her, imagining their reunion again and again. “You figured it out!” he would say, beaming with pride, and she’d smile, knowing that she passed his test, the only kind of test that ever mattered to her.
Navigating the river from a distant shore, in the dark, wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. Though she didn’t feel afraid, she eventually gave up, sitting straight in the canoe, waiting to hit land and for Rob to find her. She drifted like that for what seemed like hours, time nothing in the darkness, until she finally heard the rustling of leaves and branches in the water. Thinking she must be close to shore, she grabbed the paddle. As she registered that the paddle to her right was stuck on a large tree and that she should shine the flashlight to see what lay ahead, something slammed into her forehead and she fell, peacefully unconscious, back into the canoe.
She woke up what seemed like seconds later, in a hospital bed with her mother staring at her face with weary eyes as her father had done in the hallway.
“Thank God!” her mother screamed, and she threw herself at Alice as she blinked. Before she could process anything else, Alice’s first thought was that her life had changed beneath her yet again. When she returned home, seeing that Rob’s bedroom had been transformed into a sewing room for burgeoning socialites, the sc
rapbooks full of happy childhood memories vanished from their shelves, she knew it was true. Rob was gone from their lives, and as far as her parents were concerned, he should be gone from their memories too.
But now, neither could make that choice for her.
In the garage, Alice turned on the light and read the reassuring word Robinson on the envelope she had stopped Jamie from taking. She weighed its thickness in her hand, feeling its heft. It scared her to think there would be so much that she didn’t yet know. It also calmed her. The answers, they were here. They had to be. What kept him from her, where he went, the same answers she had sought that day on the river. But more than that, why?
In the house, Walker yelled, no doubt mourning another loss to Robbie at chess. She wanted to wait until she was truly alone to see what the Robinson envelope held. She turned off the light and went back inside to finish dinner.
* * *
After Alice cleaned up the plates and Walker put Robbie to sleep, they lay next to each other in bed with the lights off. Alice stared at the ceiling, thinking about the box Jamie tried to take, the unopened letters, Rob, his words to their father, all the mysteries of her life stirring together into one black hole of unknowns.
Had her mother sat in the sewing room, blinking as she focused on a stitch too late at night, wondering these same questions: What could she have done differently with Rob? Had she wondered what to do about her own husband? Had she ever wanted to pack up and leave her life behind, to go hide in a little shack on the coast, if only for a night?
Leaving was Rob’s thing, though it was always her father’s move, too, after a fight—a sudden business emergency in Memphis or a game of golf with Jamie that stretched from sunup to sundown. It was Walker’s, too, with his monthly trips to DC, which for the last few months he’d no doubt spent tangled in the hotel sheets with Brittani. Leaving was always the man’s play, not Maura’s. Not Alice’s.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 7
