How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  Walker crossed the emptiness of their king-size mattress. The light stubble on his chin from his five-o’clock shadow tickled Alice’s face as he kissed her earlobe.

  Her body locked, and she struggled not to jerk her head away from his lips. She always hated how he responded to tension by reaching for her physically, at the exact moment she wanted to be away from him, at the moment she most wanted to sink into their roles as roommates and ignore the other parts.

  “I’m really tired from all the stuff with Jamie today, okay?” She pictured the photo of Jake, zipped safely in her backpack, before hating herself for connecting her rejection of Walker with a man she had never refused. Was Walker thinking about Brittani right now? How she would have been the one to roll over, to kiss his cheek? Would things be different—warm, loving—if she were lying next to Jake instead of Walker? Would sex be something she looked forward to regularly, instead of a prescription pulled out in the worst moments of tension, a stint to keep the heart pumping when it was near giving up?

  “Isn’t the point of being off work to be less stressed, not more?” he said as if she were on vacation, instead of dealing with an ever-growing mountain of drama and deception. Walker rolled over so that his back faced her.

  They lay in silence for a few more minutes.

  Alice replayed her mother’s advice from last week: “Are you satisfying him?” Maura had asked.

  “Walker?”

  “Hmm?” he answered, already half asleep.

  “Do you think you can ever truly know another person, even someone you’re close with? Someone in your family?” Did I know my brother at all? Is it possible to feel you understand someone so deeply, yet know almost nothing about them? She wanted to hear one person say it: Yes.

  He turned to face her again. “What?” His voice was sharp with anger.

  Too close to Rob, Alice thought. “Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”

  Silence.

  “Tell me a secret,” Alice said. “Something I don’t know about you.”

  “It’s almost midnight.”

  “Just a quick one.”

  “I secretly love green apple martinis, but I’m afraid to order them at bars.”

  She chuckled. “No, something else.”

  “The only fight I ever got into was in middle school because some asshole kid was calling my brother names. I went up to him on the playground and punched him in the face. He got knocked down and started bleeding all over the place, and we both got detention.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  “My dad told me he was proud of me.”

  Alice considered this.

  “Now, go to sleep.” Walker rolled back over, and within thirty seconds, he was snoring lightly.

  Alice waited a few minutes to make sure he was asleep before she got out of bed. She tugged on her robe to fight the house’s winter chill and walked back to the garage. She climbed into the car’s front seat, shutting the door quietly. The guitar lay across the center console. She turned on the car’s overhead light. She found the large “Robinson” envelope and undid the brackets and slid its contents into her hand, a thick stack of black material.

  X-rays. Their snap and bend—now familiar from her endless conversations with Maura’s doctors—echoed in the car’s small space. She held the first to the overhead light. On the side, TATE, ROBINSON WESLEY was printed in all caps followed by CLARK STATE and an address. It showed some nondescript chest, or perhaps she was supposed to look at the ribs, heart, or spleen. The X-ray shone with different shades of black and white like an abstract painting, the kind Walker liked to remark that he could replicate easily and question why they had to pay to look at art he could do himself.

  When she reached the last papers, she gasped.

  The block letters of AUTOPSY REPORT screamed across the page and contrasted with the neat, businesslike script of the form’s author.

  Name: Robinson Wesley Tate

  Her eyes traveled over a simple diagram of a man’s body. Pen marks annotated the black etching with various dots and symbols she didn’t understand.

  Narrative: White male, aged thirty-eight. Primary cause of death: heart failure. Opioid and alcohol located in system. Evidence of malignant neoplasm of the lungs, spread into tissue and affecting liver and heart functions. Neoplasm of advanced stage.

  Her questions from the funeral about how her brother died flooded back. The heart failure and the drugs she knew, but her parents knew much more. She quickly Googled malignant neoplasm on her phone, finding that it meant cancer.

  She erased the image she’d had of her brother from the funeral of desperation, a drug overdose, and replaced it with one of her brother in a hospital, alone. As a child, Alice always felt Rob’s injuries more intensely than he did, and again, she felt that pain in her chest, the feeling that her cells were turning against her, as he must have felt.

  The stamps on the X-rays hit her with the same wave of loneliness and anger she’d felt in the years after he left. One said 2005, and the other held an address. Her brother knew his life would end soon, a full two years before he died. And even worse, the X-rays had been done less than a three-hour drive from her house. Why would he drive all the way to some hospital she’d never heard of in southern Georgia? And still not contact her? And you didn’t try to find him, her brain filled in, regret tensing her shoulders.

  Hoping the next would be better, Alice unbracketed the second envelope and slid out a few sheets of white printer paper. It was a contract with a private investigator, addressed to her mother but with Jamie’s information for payments and his signature at the bottom. The contract was for six months, with an opportunity for renewal, to locate a runaway, age fifteen when he left, sixteen now, with brown/blond hair and blue eyes. Paper-clipped to the front was a business card and a photo. The card was for a diner with the private investigator’s name and phone number scrawled on the back in pen. The picture was maybe the last taken of Rob before he left. He looked serious in the school portrait, as if from many decades ago, before people smiled for the camera. On the back, it said, “Robinson Wesley Tate, age fifteen” in her mother’s cursive.

  Had her mother and Jamie looked for Rob? Her father wouldn’t have participated or approved. With his elevated sense of duty, Richard felt that Rob was dead to him the second he walked out of the house on Amelia Island. “He’ll come back when he’s good and ready,” he said. “He’ll be back by Sunday” became next week, next month until eventually her parents stopped talking about Rob. Then, after Alice’s canoe trip and the hospital, her parents stopped talking altogether. You could have prevented everything, Rob had written. Could this have been what he was referring to? Their father could have looked for Rob, could have paid, could have not left Rob to his own devices, as he instructed Maura to do?

  As a child, Alice thought her mother felt the same way, but from the crying at the funeral, the carefully taped posters and the letters in the crawl space, she realized that was wrong. Her stomach swelled with gratitude toward Jamie, that he would keep a secret from her father. If he didn’t want Alice to know he had helped Maura, Alice understood. It hadn’t worked, after all, had only ended in disappointment for them and for Alice now. At least someone in the family had done something, though, while Alice stood by depressed and idle. She should call Jamie and smooth things over tomorrow. Thank him for helping look for Rob. Maybe Rob’s letter to Jamie or to their mother would explain why they couldn’t find him.

  Alice took the letters out of the backpack again and ran her fingers over the seal of her mother’s. She would take it tomorrow, hope her mother was having a good day, and if not, she’d open it anyway. She would.

  For now, though, she zipped everything into the safety of her backpack and went back to her bedroom. There, she tossed and turned for three hours before finally realizing what should have been obvious from t
he start—she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The figure of the man’s body—her brother—from the autopsy, with his x’s and o’s, burned in front of her eyes when she closed them.

  Chapter Eight

  By six o’clock the next morning, Alice had already walked Buddy around the neighborhood’s two-mile loop, pulled all the weeds in her garden with the aid of the headlight she’d bought for night fishing, thrown out the expired items in her pantry (and there were many), listened to some lectures from an ecology researcher that she had downloaded two months ago, and texted Grace that she would take the Girl Scout troop scheduled at the Center for later in the real morning hours, before she caught herself checking the digital clock in the kitchen four times in a ten-minute period. She racked her brain for another task. Anything to keep her distracted from the figure of the man on the autopsy report with his markings of pain and sickness. She finally made French toast and bacon, Robbie’s favorite breakfast, and carried it up to his bedroom on a plastic tray.

  “Captain Planet marathon!” she said when he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. She turned on his TV, and they sat on his bed, an hour earlier than he normally woke up, and ate the French toast and bacon, both doused in syrup. As the opening started, they sang the Captain Planet theme song about thwarting pollution.

  “This is so cool, Mom,” he said, in his Pokémon pajamas.

  She smiled at him, a little guilt behind her lips for waking him up early for her own selfish reasons and burrowed deeper under his covers.

  Two hours later, Caitlin and Robbie safely on their way to school in Chelsea’s car, Alice pulled into the parking lot of the little log cabin on Lake Lanier that acted as the office for the Georgia Creekside Center, with Buddy in tow. The sun reflected off the lake, giving it the appearance of sparkling.

  She opened the passenger door, and Buddy trotted to a folded comforter waiting for him by one of the rocking chairs on the cabin’s front porch. She watched as he walked in a circle twice, yawned, and fell asleep. She heard the boat knock lightly against the dock in the back as the wind made the lake restless, just under the surface.

  She hunched against the wind as she approached the cabin, letting her shoulders slump. Staying away for a week had been a test all involved knew Alice couldn’t pass, but she had expected to last more than a single day. After all, the Center kept her up long hours, caused plenty of hair-pulling over finicky donors, and offered little in the form of salary. The cabin’s roof leaked, and the juxtaposition of the alarming data she collected with the inaction of many Southern politicians depressed her. But she knew the work mattered. And the little cabin had always been her refuge, the part of her life that was hers alone, a dream she’d sketched out in silence at Duke, then breathed to life with her ingenuity and a few pen swipes from Walker’s checkbook for the startup cash. Today, she needed that escape.

  Grace had returned her text in the morning with a bug-eyed emoji that radiated judgment, saying she would come in the afternoon instead. Alice would have Girl Scout Troop 1298 of Birmingham, Alabama, to herself.

  The screen banged against the door as Alice went inside to start more coffee. The Center didn’t have heat, only a space heater in the corner, so she kept her favorite North Face jacket tight around her as she waited for the coffee. She studied the map they kept tacked to the door, with all of Georgia’s waterways outlined in black. It morphed into the figure from the autopsy. The coffee maker beeped. Only an hour of silence to fill before the girls would pile in—excited, screaming, giggling, uncomplicated. Then, this afternoon, Alice would visit her mother with the letter. She would read more of her brother’s perfectly looped words. She only hoped these would be happier.

  Alice warmed her right hand over the steaming coffee as she used her left to make a list of everything she could do to take up the hour. After she could think of nothing else, Alice called Buddy in for a treat. He trotted behind her as she fed a struggling mouse to the snake and climbed on a step stool to dump fish into the tank of Bentley the turtle, the Center’s mascot. She filled the boat with gas and lowered it into the water. She collected water samples in different areas around the Center, then sat at the computer to record all the measurements and check the water-quality data Grace had input yesterday.

  She shook her head at the lake water levels, and Buddy’s ears perked up at the tsks. Through the window over the desk, Alice saw a long expanse of mud with trees and limbs where the lake’s shore had receded in answer to Georgia’s years of drought. The graph provided the only proof at first because the sinking was so slow, you could hardly notice it. The homeowners along the lake always seemed to wake up one day in anger, months or years from the true start of the decline, and wonder how the lake got so low, so dirty, while they had been concentrating on the everyday struggles of their lives. Like life, she thought, you think you have all the time in the world, and then you wake up one day and your life is caving in around you. It seems sudden, but you consented to the avalanche each day, as the stones moved inch by inch.

  Measurements entered, she poured herself another cup of now-lukewarm coffee with a little milk before sitting back at the desk. She stirred the coffee with her finger and watched the white of the milk until it disappeared into the black coffee. This is the last cup, she promised herself.

  Still ten minutes to go. In search of anything else to fill her thoughts but Rob’s autopsy, the evil word—cancer—echoing in her brain, she fished out the pictures from the zippered pocket of her backpack. She stared into the eyes of a younger Alice, standing next to Jake.

  They looked so young. Alice looked happy, the regret and loneliness from after Rob’s disappearance replaced with gratitude and surprise that she’d found someone like Jake, the same happiness and ease that was absent from her wedding photo with Walker, the same emotions she’d recognize next in the picture of little Caitlin on Alice’s chest at the hospital. Jake looked into the camera with a wide smile, without a trace of the coy guardedness visible in most photos of men that age. How naive she was, completely unaware of the power she had given Jake.

  By the time Alice applied for college, her mother worried, no doubt, that Alice wouldn’t find a husband at all. Her mother invited the first “eligible” boy over for dinner two days after Alice turned sixteen, and she didn’t stop until Alice packed her bags for college. Each time, Alice crossed her arms and stared at her plate as if she could set it on fire. In reality, it wasn’t the boys who irritated her (though they did), it was the Leave it to Beaver routine her parents, even Jamie, put on for them, as if the dinners weren’t the only time they ate as a family in all the years since Rob left. Not acknowledging the truth, that after Rob disappeared, they ceased being a family. He had somehow been the glue holding everyone together.

  When Alice packed up her bags for the University of Georgia, her mother rationalized the choice over Georgia State (where Alice could live at home) because it would be “the perfect place to find Mr. Right.” Not wanting to harm her chances of escaping the house at last, Alice only smiled and said, “Maybe,” though her real plan was to spend all her time studying science and none of her time preparing for an MRS degree.

  There was one problem with that plan, though, and his name was Jake O’Connell.

  Alice first saw the problem while walking back to her dorm from her freshman literature class. The problem sat with his back against one of the trees that shaded the Quad, where a group of fraternity boys played football. He wore faded blue jeans and a green T-shirt from one of the agriculture clubs, Birkenstocks lined up next to him. He caught her staring and winked. They waved at each other without speaking for the whole semester.

  Alice thought it was the perfect relationship. But everything changed the next semester when she walked into her resource conservation class, drew South Korea from a hat, and went to sit under the proper sign, next to a window. She watched the students running to class before they were late.

 
“Hey,” said a male voice as a face popped into her field of vision. She jumped.

  “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you. I… Hi. I’m Jake.” The boy from the Quad extended his hand, smiling a quirky smile that showed slightly crooked teeth, surrounded by a neatly trimmed beard.

  Two years older, Jake was a junior, studying international affairs with a focus on environmental policy. This class was his life goal, and he debated passionately for South Korea. So passionately, that by the end of the class, their group won the competition. And because of the half-study, half-make-out sessions that filled Alice’s semester, she ended it with an A and a boyfriend.

  Her sophomore year, with many nights of whispered secrets behind them, Alice told him her biggest, about Rob, that she had never told anyone. It would forever intertwine the two men in her mind.

  That night, Jake and Alice lay outside on Myers Quad, trying to point out different constellations, or if they didn’t know their names, making them up with ridiculous stories for how the stars were named.

  “Sometimes, I think I see him.” She had told Jake about Rob, about her family, about how she had been sure he would come back for her. About the night she ran away and the years-long ripple effect that left her mother more protective than ever. Jake propped up his head with his hand to look at her.

  “What do you mean?” The streetlamps lit his outline just enough for Alice to fill in the rest of his expressions from memory.

  “I’ll be sitting in a room and think I see him outside the window.” She chose her words carefully. “I’ll be walking downtown and think I see him walking in front of me, be at the Grill and think I hear someone say his name. I know it sounds insane. I don’t even know what he looks like anymore. I don’t know if I would recognize him, but I can’t stop seeing him.”

  Jake didn’t try to speak, so she continued, the words spilling from her mouth.