How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  Visiting her mother felt like that. Alice never knew if she would turn around to no attackers and calm waters or turn around to a battle underway and need to jump into the fray to defend her crown—the one she didn’t want to begin with.

  Maura lay on her hospital bed, designed to look like a real bed. The television mounted in the corner of the room blared the shopping channel. Alice wasn’t even convinced her mother could see without her glasses, but Maura stared without blinking and didn’t move in response to Alice’s knock.

  “Hi, Mama. How are you today?”

  Maura turned toward her, an urgent movement in slow motion.

  “Alice. I’m your daughter.” Alice inched closer to the bed.

  “I know who my own daughter is. I’m not an idiot,” her mother snapped at her, crossing her arms and turning her head away. A good sign. The sickly sweet days were the worst.

  Alice sat in the chair by the bed, moving an open copy of Our Town, which Caitlin must have left when she visited on Sunday. “How are you?”

  “Terrible. The people here are insufferable,” her mother said.

  “What happened?” Alice asked, happy for a conversation in the present. Alice had never thought she would so crave her mother’s ridiculous complaints as she had for the past months.

  “Yesterday, at breakfast I was with the girls, all of us eating off god-awful trays—is there no more dignified way to serve food? Anyway, they settle on a discussion of grandchildren, as they always do, and the main lady, Jean, she asks what my grandchildren call me. I say ‘Mimi,’ and then they go around the table and every one of them—do you know what they say—Granny! Granny! Who on this godforsaken earth would want to be called ‘granny’? I can assure you, I have nothing in common with such a person.”

  “You’ll find something in common with them. What about Karen. You like her, don’t you?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh,” Alice said. “I’m sorry. Do you need anything?”

  “One thing: I need you to go to the Fur Vault and pick up my mink coat. I’ll need it for church on Sunday, as the weather is getting cool.”

  Alice sighed. It was the end of winter, not the beginning (and never mind that Maura didn’t need a fur coat in the mild Georgia winters—ever). Alice had forgotten about the long brown coat that she had loved to pet as a child, walking behind her mother as they climbed the steps to church. Or at least she had loved the soft fur before she found out what died to make it. She made a mental note to remember to pick it up. Even if her mother eventually forgot the request, Alice didn’t want to leave a coat that could be sold for a semester of college tuition.

  “You need to remember to take it back in the spring. Even if I’ve expired, it needs to be returned for the insurance. You’ll remember that?”

  Alice smiled, another good sign. While Rob was Maura’s favorite topic on bad days, on good days, her own death was her favorite. Memory was funny like that, Alice had learned. Like how some days Maura couldn’t remember Alice, but could apply an eight-step skin-care routine, as she had nightly for decades. The bottles were lined up on the bedside table even now, although if anyone asked how she kept her skin so youthful, she always claimed the secret was only Vaseline and good genes or “luck.”

  “Yes”—her mother glared at her—“ma’am.” Maura turned her head back to the shopping channel.

  Alice decided to test the waters, to flip around on the ledge and see what awaited her.

  “Mama, I’ve been at the house—”

  “What? Stop mumbling. You know I hate it when you mumble.”

  Louder now: “I’ve been at your HOUSE.”

  “Okay, I heard you. It’s my memory that’s the problem. Not my ears.”

  “I was wondering…about those pictures in the upstairs hallway. They’re all Daddy’s relatives. I want to make sure I keep any important family pictures.” Alice glanced at her mother who half watched the blurs on the shopping channel. “Are there any pictures of your family? Anywhere?”

  Maura looked at Alice, and for a second, Alice thought she wouldn’t respond. Maura turned back to the blurs in the corner.

  “Not of which I’m aware.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I suppose I threw them out.”

  “But you never get rid of anything.” After her hours of wading through the house yesterday, Alice knew this for a fact.

  Maura shrugged.

  Alice knew her mother wasn’t proud of her rural background. Her father preached at a small church in Arkansas, or so Alice had pieced together over the years.

  “They are dead,” her mother said. “Soon, I will also be dead, and there would be no use for such sentimentality. You’ve never met them anyway.”

  “That’s true. I never met them.”

  Her mother turned her head back to the shopping channel.

  “In the house, I found something. Mama, can you look at me?” She turned. “Do you remember those boxes in the closet upstairs? The ones you left for me?”

  Her mother looked in the distance, and Alice could see the gears turning, shifting through her brain’s clutter.

  “Rob’s?” Alice prompted.

  Maura’s eyebrow twitched. The tides shifted, as they always do—frantically.

  “Why isn’t he with you? Where is he?” Her mother’s voice rose, and she looked left to right as if searching for her son.

  Alice was trapped in this conversation, forced to dive into the water and attempt to beat her opponent. She tried reciting the response she had practiced many times. “He can’t be here right now. But he loves you, and he is going to come by later.” Usually it was enough.

  “He’s not coming because he’s mad at me, isn’t he? He hates me. He hates his own mother. I should never have told him to stay away. I know I deserve it, everything I’ve gotten.”

  Alice continued her script before her brain processed what her mother said: “He loves you. I promise. He’s not mad… What do you mean you told him to stay away? When?”

  “You’re trying to protect him, aren’t you? You hate me too. My only children hate me. What did I do to make my only children hate me, God?” She looked at the ceiling, throwing her arms up, questioning. “All I’ve done is try to be the best mother I can be and do what I thought was right.”

  “Mama, no one is mad at you.” Alice reached over and put her hand on top of her mother’s. Her mother jerked her hand away. “What do you mean though? Can you explain it to me, please?”

  Ignoring her, Maura turned to Alice before lacing her hands together in a begging prayer. “Please. Please. Please. Let me call him. Let me call my son. Please let me—I have to tell him the truth. I have to tell him I want him home. I always wanted him. He’ll come visit then.”

  “All right! All right, Mama. You can call him, but he probably won’t answer, okay?” Alice picked up the phone on the bedside table and dialed the number, handing it to her mother, hoping it might elicit some sort of explanation.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Alice watched her mother’s tear-stained but happy face, tightening her grip on the bottom of the chair. A beat passed before her cell phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. Eventually, it stopped, and her mother’s smile sank.

  “He didn’t answer. I’ll leave a message, though, and he’ll call me back.”

  Alice played the automated voicemail in her head. “You’ve reached 6-7-8…” The emotionless machine voice was unaware of the situation.

  “Hey, it’s Mama. I miss you so much, Robinson. Please come home. Alice is with me and she misses you. We both want you back. We’ll do whatever it takes to get you back. I’m sorry. I take full responsibility… The guilt is on my shoulders. I drove you away, like Alice probably thinks. She’s right, you know.”

  She hung up the phone, satisfied. “Now, w
e’ll wait for him to call back.”

  “Excuse me for a minute.”

  Alice stood up, taking her backpack with her. She walked like she did in college after one too many beers, wanting to appear normal, calculating every step, wondering if it was too long or too short, too light or too heavy. When she reached the hallway, she sank down to the floor and took out her phone.

  One new voicemail.

  She swiped, and a screen full of voicemails of the same number appeared. She brought the phone to her ear and listened to the desperate, yet cheery sound of her mother’s voice on the other end until the message ended.

  * * *

  Alice looked at the drooping garlands, which still snaked around the railings lining the hallways even though Christmas was several weeks past. It had been Alice’s first Christmas without her mother, and the family, plus Jamie, had crowded around the dining room table without Maura’s lace tablecloth, eating off mismatched plates and bowls, with paper napkins and plastic containers instead of Maura’s usual formality. The scene had so depressed Alice that she went downstairs to find a silver goblet, if only to have a little of her mother’s flair. She always despised it—the endless polishing of those silver forks! But without her mother’s touch, Christmas hadn’t been the same.

  Alice would never say that to her mother though. If she hadn’t realized she had been left for Christmas, Alice certainly didn’t want to bring it up. After Alice brought her here in the summer, her mother didn’t speak to her for so long that she began to forget the sound of her voice. She would sit in the chair by the bed while her mother watched the shopping channel and try to remember. How thick was her accent? Did she actually say story for lie, or did Alice make that up? Did she really say warsh for wash, the only betrayal of her rural Arkansas roots? Until one day her mother had turned to her and gossiped about the neighborhood drama like normal. She never knew if the choice was intentional, or if her mother simply forgot to be angry.

  After a few minutes, a hello came from the end of the hall, and Alice looked up to see a nurse rolling her mother’s friend Karen to the sunroom in a wheelchair. She pulled her legs closer to her chest as they passed and smiled at the nurse.

  “Hello, Mrs. Mays,” she said, and Karen frowned. Not dead after all. Typical.

  Not for the first time, she wished Rob were here to share the burden, to tell her she was doing the right thing with their mother. Alice unzipped her backpack and took out the letter, staring at the words on the envelope. “Mrs. Maura Tate.” Who had she been kidding? She couldn’t read the letter to her mother.

  Alice slid a finger under the flap. It revealed the back of a photo, where “Robinson Wesley Tate, age thirty-nine” had been written lightly in pencil. She took the photo out. In the picture, Rob sat alone on the steps of what looked like a church. His hands rested on the acoustic guitar, not in a playing motion like the photo from the funeral pamphlet, taken in his teenage years, had shown. Instead, his arms draped over the top, his body shielded behind the guitar’s own, as if he crouched behind for shelter. He was skinny, the plain black T-shirt he wore engulfing his shoulders, far removed from the pictures she found in her parents’ basement where he looked strong and stocky. She stared into his blue eyes, the same, but with hollowed skin surrounding them. He smiled, putting on a brave face, but he looked sick, the cancer Alice read about in the autopsy already turning his body against him.

  She unfolded the yellowed paper that was behind the photo in the envelope. The same large script that decorated the front of the envelope covered her mother’s letter end to end, a neat, loopy, and loose cursive, much different than her mother’s tight letters.

  Mama,

  I think about what you must have thought when you were a newlywed, pregnant with me. Perhaps you walked through the house, rubbing your stomach and basking in the glory of God’s creation. Perhaps you painted a nursery or watched as someone else did it. Perhaps Richard was even happy, thinking of his coming son—of the baseballs they’d throw, of the driving lessons he would someday give him and the company he would pass on, like his old man, of the day they would drink his first legal beer at a bar, toasting glasses and joking about women.

  Then, I came along of course and fucked everything up. For both of you.

  Even now, thinking about the call that will come to the house, how you’ll get the news of my death, I’m happy, thinking of his reaction. Will he feel responsible? Or will he thank God the great scar on the Tate family has finally been erased? Will he cry? Comfort you or leave for Memphis, slamming the door behind him, like usual?

  I digress.

  What I wrote to say is this—I’m sorry. When I ran away, I was ashamed, of the person I was already and the person I was becoming. I knew I had to get away from it all. Leaving you and Alice was a cost I didn’t want to bear, damage I didn’t want to inflict, but when I walked out onto the beach that night, it had seemed so temporary, and I never imagined I wouldn’t see you again.

  I called, waiting to hear how much everyone missed me, waiting to hear that I had won, shown Richard a lesson that I could be on my own, that he needed me. When you picked up the phone that day, I expected to hang up like normal, to wait until you or Alice, or even Richard, said “Hello?” just to hear your voice to tide me over.

  Was it my breathing that gave me away? That day, that call, is still one of the darkest days of my life. I’ve never forgiven myself that because of me, because of looking for me, Alice was put in danger. Perhaps you don’t remember, but you yelled that I had ruined everything, that I should stay away and go if I was going to go, that it was better for her and better for you. I’ll always remember that thwack of the phone as you slammed it down before I thought of something redeeming to say. I don’t say that to pile on blame, quite the opposite. You were right.

  As the years inched by, I only became more afraid to show you everything your golden child had become. It was always better to have the weight of your disappointment than to show my scars without shame.

  I wish I could go back and explain everything away, but the truth is too much now, so I’ll rely on meaningless platitudes, something I know you hate. Can’t help it here, though, I’m afraid.

  I know you blame me. I’ll certainly accept it.

  I know you blame yourself, for that call and for whatever else. I won’t accept that. Please, allow it to rise out of your own body; let the unseen black fog seep through the air, and I’ll swoop down and breathe it in deep. Because I don’t blame you, for anything. My cowardly absence has allowed you to carry blame though. That was wrong.

  Love,

  Robinson

  Alice folded the letter delicately, so if any tears escaped, they wouldn’t drip on it. Then, she shook her head and sighed. Why did it matter if she damaged the letter? Her mother wouldn’t read it. She couldn’t understand the message, even if Alice tried to tell her.

  Her first thought was of Rob holding the phone after her mother slammed down the receiver. Alice closed her eyes. She saw it so clearly now—her mother trying so hard to get him back had been the thing that kept him away.

  Could it be true? A piercing in her chest caused her to slump on the floor.

  She was wrong, Rob. It wasn’t best for me. You were best for me.

  Strangely, her next thought was how much her mother loved her. Telling Rob to stay away, worrying so much after that night she ended up on the river, and getting so worked up with anger that she had yelled at Rob, who Alice knew her mother wanted back home more than anything.

  What had Maura’s “golden child” become, though, that Rob was so afraid of showing?

  He had died from an overdose, sure, but could that really be it? Not for the first time, worry about Rob’s death filled Alice. Rob clearly felt so much blame and responsibility, for her and for their mother, felt so much disappointment that he was the “scar” on the family.

 
Did Rob commit suicide? The letter seemed so dark, but surely Rob had some good times in the two decades they’d spent apart. She hoped.

  Her chest tightened, too, remembering the anger she’d heaped on him, concentrating as if she could send him messages, as she thought she could as a small child. This is your fault. Had part of him heard?

  The letter also said that Rob hadn’t seen their mother again. But she had tried to find him, something he didn’t seem to know about. At least if he did, he didn’t let on in the letter. There was one person who would know if they found anything. She took out Jamie’s letter and peeled herself off the tile floor.

  Reading the letter had hurt her; writing it had no doubt hurt Rob. It showed their mother’s own pain. That pain wove their family together, even hundreds of miles apart, across memory and time and death.

  Even through it, Alice smiled, because he was the same. The Rob who wrote the letter was her Rob. The one she remembered.

  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 Eleven

  As Alice drove toward the school pickup line, she dialed Jamie.

  The phone answered on the first ring. “There you are,” he said cheerily. “I was hoping you would call.”

  She paused, thrown off by his unexpected pleasantry after their argument. Before she remembered the speech she had rehearsed—she understood why he had felt the need to warn her about the autopsy but still didn’t agree with his methods—he barreled on.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Jamie said. “I was completely out of line. I hope you know that I was only angry because I love you like my own daughter. I don’t want to put that in jeopardy. You can do whatever you want with the house, and I won’t try to interfere. I hope I can still come to Caitlin’s play?”