But she was doing something now, was untangling her mistakes and the pain she had put off with Rob, daring to relive the choices she had made and, for the first time, admit why.
* * *
Alice said goodbye and thank you again to Kayla and left the house, as she heard Mark reassuring Kayla that she hadn’t done anything wrong and that Walker “was having a hard time at work.” Alice opened the door to her car. Walker slumped in the passenger seat with his head resting against the window. She decided to let him figure out how to get his own car home in the morning.
Walker looked up as she slid into the driver’s seat. She started the car, and Walker laid his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes halfway.
She drove in silence to the end of the Welshes’ street and took the left onto the parkway that led to her neighborhood. The route felt so empty without kids’ chatter in the back seat and that old country song Walker liked to sing with them after a few beers.
“If you let her go to New York…” Walker lifted his head off the headrest and turned toward her. “If we let her go to New York, she won’t come back.”
Alice stared straight ahead at the road, empty except for one truck in front of her—a teenage couple huddled together while the boy gunned it at every light, probably trying to make curfew. She stopped at a red light.
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
“It’s true,” Walker said. “You know she’ll like it better there. You know. She won’t come back. She’ll call you, but she won’t call me. She’ll be gone.”
He slurred his last words slightly: “You know. Let’s just make her stay, keep her here.”
Walker laid his head on the cool material of the seat belt, which fell an inch, then locked itself and he rested his head there, letting it sway with her turns.
She watched him at the next red light as his breathing slowed and his face relaxed. She longed to teach him the lesson he hadn’t yet learned, the one she knew all too well: You can’t make someone stay if they don’t want to. Even your child. Your brother. Your friends.
She reached a hand to run through his soft brown hair with the slight curl at the end that Robbie had inherited. The light turned green, and she let her hand drop.
Chapter Twelve
Robbie was asleep, and Walker ambled to the bedroom, leaving Alice to pay the babysitter and turn off the house’s many lights. After, she sat on the family-room couch in the dark and stared at the black television. She didn’t turn it on, but let the thoughts in her head fight with one another. Even with last night’s lack of sleep, she didn’t feel ready to go to bed.
“Come on,” she said to Buddy, and he sprung from where he had laid his head in her lap and followed her to the garage. She opened her car’s passenger door and he climbed in.
Alice let the full moon guide them to the little pond by their house, the same one where Walker had lost thousands of golf balls over the almost twenty years they had lived here. A few minutes later, Alice sat on the dock, barefoot, and listened to the eerie quiet, interrupted only by splashes in the water and the sound of Buddy sniffing in the grass behind her.
She fished in her backpack for the picture of Jake, realizing then why she had brought it. She let her head rest on the dock’s rough boards. The moonlight lit the faces in the photo, but her eyes still squinted to make out the details: the mud on their clothes, the garden behind them where they had been planting vegetables that would be used at the on-campus day care.
The photo showed one of the last times she’d seen Jake, only days before she had dropped him at the airport.
She remembered how they had woken up in his apartment, like they had so many times over the last two-and-a-half years, how they’d dotted each other’s faces with sunscreen and spent a few quiet hours digging in the dirt. Later, they’d ended up back in his apartment, where they’d soaped the caked-on dirt from each other’s bodies. The urgency of his kiss was the only betrayal of what the week would bring.
While Alice finished her senior year, Jake would spend a year in Ecuador, implementing a professor’s research on the impact of agricultural-based interventions on community engagement, which he had already spent the year after his own graduation working on in Athens as a research assistant.
“We’ll only be apart nine months,” he said, standing with her at the airport gate a few days later. “I’m going to find the best apartment, with a view of the beach.” They planned for her to come to Ecuador after she graduated, to be with him for a few months until the research ended.
Throughout the next months, Jake’s letters glowed with the excitement of another continent. He wrote stories in his tiny, slanted script detailing the generosity of the community, about once-hungry children who kicked soccer balls with him, about a baby cow he nursed back to health and his adventures traveling South America with members of the research group. He sent a whole letter about a trip to the Galapagos Islands, which inspired him to get a tattoo of a tortoise. The letter included a picture of it—a large thing that wrapped around his right calf, its shell colored with the yellow, blue, and red of the Ecuadorian flag.
The letters became a war inside Alice, splashed on the page.
As she read them at the lab desk where she examined plants under a microscope with only the fluorescents’ humming noisily above her for company, Alice fell more in love with him. Her boyfriend cared about people, spent months helping create something, was adventurous enough to permanently ink his body. Someone Rob would like.
When she wrote back, though, she struggled to imagine herself in the country Jake called “the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” rather than in the lab, with her plants, near Meredith and the rest of her friends and everything familiar. She didn’t want to write that latent anxiety had begun to tick in the back of her brain. She didn’t want to explain how that blow to the head when she ran away in the canoe had lodged it in, how it haunted her whenever she stepped off her parents’ plan for her life.
Instead, she wrote about the conference prizes she won for her research on the evolution of sunflower species, about what Meredith and the rest of their friends planned for after graduation, about how nights over a few beers became easily sentimental as graduation neared, as life reared up to fling everyone to different corners of the earth.
As the date for graduation came closer, Alice counted the weeks until she would fly to Ecuador and see Jake, until everything would be right, feel right, when they were together again. She was counting on it. She pictured it in her mind to steady herself—her getting off the plane in Ecuador, a well-tanned Jake picking her up in a dirty Jeep Wrangler, a little box in his pocket that would assuage her fears, a far-off gem she’d never heard of, that he purchased from a healer promising a long, happy marriage. Never mind her mother’s dream of Mr. Right and her own dream never to fulfill it.
She imagined how they would spend a perfect summer together at the beach and white-water rafting through the Amazon, then fly back together, holding hands the whole way, choose a graduate school together, maybe out west where Jake was from. He would like that. They’d find Rob. Then, they’d all three be together, be happy.
One night, two months before she was set to leave, she was walking back from a friend’s house downtown when she felt someone staring at her. The streets were emptier than normal. It was bad weather, and still early, and most of the students were napping before the night’s festivities. She turned to the left, acting as if she were adjusting her backpack strap, to see if he was friend or foe. When she looked, though, her brow furrowed in confusion, and she found herself staring. A man, older than most of the college crowd, stood on the next street. He wore a gray band tee that blended into the drizzly sky. His dirty-blond hair was shaggy, too long, and looked like it needed to be washed.
“Rob?”
She crossed the street, accidentally stepping in front of a car.
>
The driver slammed on his horn, and she turned to look at the sedan as it stopped inches from her. When she looked back to the sidewalk, her heart racing, she could only see the blur of the man’s high-tops as he rounded the street corner.
She tucked her elbows and raised her knees high as her legs pumped hard, trying to chase after him. He turned down an alley. Seconds later, she skidded around the same corner, hydroplaning with her sneakers on the wet sidewalk. It was empty.
She walked back to her apartment, lost in thought: Could it really have been him? As she went over every millisecond in her head, she grew more sure that he was here to find her, to undo his past mistakes, to beg her forgiveness for leaving her alone in that terrible house.
She went back to the street corner at different times, looking for the man in the gray band shirt. But he wasn’t there.
A week went by, until 8:00 p.m., the night Jake promised to call. She grabbed the phone on the first ring.
“Jake?”
“It’s great to hear your voice.”
“I know calls are expensive.” He had only called a dozen times since he left. “And that this call is to book my flight to Ecuador, so I want to get it out of the way that I can’t come right now.”
“What? Why? Did you not tell your parents yet?” She hadn’t, but that was secondary.
“It’s Rob. I think I saw him.” Talking as fast as she could, she told Jake about the man she saw downtown, how she had chased after him and how he had disappeared. She knew Jake would understand. “I have to stay, so he knows where I am. So he can find me.”
“Al… Al…” He stuttered, like he did the rare times he was really scared, but hearing Rob’s nickname for her only made Alice more confident in her decision. “How do you even know it was him? It could’ve been anyone!”
“But he ran.”
“Maybe he ran because there was a strange girl chasing him!”
“No, that’s not… No. If your fellowship isn’t over after I talk to Rob, I’ll come then. Otherwise, I’ll see you in August. It’s not much longer anyway. We’ll be fine.”
Jake sighed. “Alice, they offered me a permanent position: director of sustainability. I’ll be here for two years, maybe three. Help get an infrastructure in the local communities. They need me.”
Alice felt like she was choking on her tongue. She simultaneously couldn’t breathe and forgot how to talk. He wouldn’t say yes, not without talking to her. Right?
“I know you’re going to love it here! They need a research assistant to gather water samples and said you can do it. The apartment is perfect.”
Alice’s vision of herself in the airport, the ring, grad school out west, it all poofed in her head, leaving only blankness, a rootless uncertainty that lasted years rather than the blip of a single summer. She paced with the phone still in her hand, the cord trailing her like a leash.
“Alice? Are you there?”
Was she? She felt empty. The wind whooshed through her chest. Her body was merely an outline of matter, hollow in the middle.
“Yes,” she managed to croak. She sounded like a demented frog. “I can’t leave! Tell them no, tell them you have to come back. Tell them something came up.”
“I’ve been working toward this for years. This is a big deal. You should be happy for me!”
“I can’t come to Ecuador for three years.” Silent tears raced down her cheeks and fell onto her T-shirt. “What about Meredith? What about my parents? What about grad school? What about finding Rob, like you said?”
What about me? she thought.
“I promise, when it’s up, we’ll come back. We’ll find Rob, like we planned, we’ll move anywhere you want, go to any grad school, we can even live with Rob if you want to!”
“I. Can’t. Come,” she said through tears.
They went back and forth like that, yelling at each other, apologizing, arguing, until Alice heard knocks in the background. She pictured Jake sitting in a little phone booth, a line of men knocking against the glass.
“Alice, I have to go now. I love you.”
“How can you say that? Don’t say that!”
After the line went dead, she threw the phone against the wall, drank half a bottle of rum and crawled into Meredith’s bed. She didn’t wake up Meredith, but instead watched each second tick on Meredith’s Marilyn Monroe clock. With each, she became less sure it was Rob that day.
Tick.
She had thrown away her relationship with Jake over a mirage, a hallucination.
Tick.
She was mad. Mad at Rob. Mad that he left. Mad that he didn’t come back for her, that he never would.
Tick.
Mad that he didn’t want to see her, because if she knew anything about Rob, it was that he always did exactly what he wanted.
Tick.
Mad that her mother was right that day when she screamed, “Then where is he?”
Tick.
He was off, having the time of his life, like he planned, leaving Alice to torch her own, over and over, trying to find him. Each drop of resentment she amassed for Rob, she drained from Jake, until she knew he had always been too good for her.
Tick.
It was good that he figured out who she really was now, because he never would’ve been happy with her anyway, like Rob wasn’t happy at home with her. Jake would have left too.
Tick.
Then, blank.
Alice sank into her sadness and shame. She remembered nothing tangible from that month, only knew that she became a feral thing, animalistic, like a neighbor’s cat that was so bent on its own destruction, it would attack its tail like a predator, causing open sores.
Alice’s next memory was several weeks later, when she woke up to Meredith yelling at her. That morning, Alice remembered with perfect clarity.
“Get up!” Meredith had yelled. She shoved Alice into the shower with her clothes on. The cold water felt like darts that somehow all hit Alice in the temples.
“Let me out!” Alice screamed. She jumped to each side, attempting to step out, but Meredith blocked her. They screamed at each other like that, both wet, both breathing heavily.
“Do you know what happened last night?” Meredith yelled. Something Alice had never seen burst inside her. Meredith cried openly, not bothering to hide her tears as Alice would. “Some guys I don’t even know brought you home passed out at 3:00 a.m. I was so worried about you! I called everyone. I went downtown to try to find you.” Meredith sank down next to the toilet and wrapped her arms around her legs. “I can’t handle this anymore.”
Alice turned off the faucet and stepped out, soaking with the frigid water. Meredith handed her a towel.
“Just enough. Enough! Okay?” Red from crying ringed Meredith’s dark-brown eyes.
Alice nodded. Seeing her friend so broken pieced something back together in Alice. It was enough.
Later, when Alice emerged from the bathroom in her robe, Meredith had a cup of coffee, two Advils, and the faculty phone book waiting for her. She pointed to the book and ordered, “Beg. We’re walking across that stage together,” then disappeared into her bedroom. As Alice made the calls, it amazed her how much you could mess up your life in so little time.
She called her professors and worked out makeup assignments. She scheduled meetings with her adviser and the other professors in her major about the future. The director of her lab offered to put in a call to Duke, and two weeks after Meredith’s intervention, they were planning a post-graduation trip to the beach. She blinked, and she was at Duke, taking summer classes for her master’s program.
By that time, any thoughts of Rob were locked in a box, deep in her brain where she knew it was dangerous to go, so intertwined with her past and her resentment, with Jake and their plans and her life’s glaring failures. Meanwhile, her body marche
d forward with the rest of her mother’s plan for her life, like a researcher grabbing for the next hypothesis after her primary one had failed.
A year and a half into her program at Duke, with many more hours logged alone in the lab, a man touched her elbow as she walked out of the graduate library.
“I see you at the library a lot.”
She stared at him, confused about whether he was trying to mug her or ask for directions. He was tall, and her eyes were in line with his Duke Law sweatshirt.
“I’m taking you out this Friday. I’ll pick you up in front of the library.”
“Oh, I…” Alice stammered, without forming a complete thought.
“Alice, right? My buddy’s girlfriend lives down the hall from you. It’s Walker, by the way,” he said and turned, jogging off with his bag over his shoulder.
She showed up at the library as instructed to find his polished BMW, the type that would have made her mother proud. Sitting in the front seat as he drove, Alice allowed her brain to switch to autopilot.
At the restaurant, she sipped the wine he ordered and nibbled on her salad, exactly as she knew she was supposed to. When he asked her a question, she found the words—her mother’s words—effortlessly on her lips. And when he poured more wine in her glass and asked casually, “So, do you have any siblings?” it felt like the most natural thing to say, “One brother. We’re not close.” It felt so easy to lock the box in her mind that she had packed when she left UGA, to split herself forever into two Alices, and to exist only as the one her mother had nurtured for decades. It felt so right to tell the truth to Walker and to herself: My brother and I aren’t close. We’re nothing but strangers now.
After reading her mother’s letter, though, Alice longed to reach into that moment to say He remembers you. He believes he’s doing what’s best for you. Would that knowledge have changed what happened next?
The young Alice would never have been able to grab the perfect dress for visiting Walker’s parents in Birmingham without even trying it on. This Alice chatted mindlessly with the girlfriends as Walker smoked cigars on the porch with his friends, chuckling along when one of the women followed a complaint with “but that’s our boys for ya.” This new Alice allowed herself to be absorbed by Walker because even though she knew she would never love him with her whole self as she had with Jake, she knew her heart would never again be broken.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 12
