Caitlin drew her hand across the crowd to silence it, then closed her eyes. The audience waited quietly, and she let them, a slight smirk on her face. She had practiced for and anticipated this moment. Alice could see the passion in that smirk.
Caitlin took a breath near the microphone so that the sound filled the room and Alice’s car, prompting the audience to take their own breath.
I grew up skipping along the Atlanta streets.
I grew up cheering in a too-short skirt with ribbons in my hair for men represented only by numbers. I grew up with a chill in the air bouncing around in the straw-lined back of a tractor on Halloween. I grew up diving headfirst into lakes and rivers and oceans, fighting against the burn to open my eyes underwater.
These things, I inherited from my parents and their parents before them.
The most valuable thing I inherited, though, was my ability to lie.
Light chuckles escaped from the audience, no doubt primed to participate, maybe by the spirit or a few beers before the performers came on. Someone in the back yelled “Okay!” and Caitlin took another breath.
Down South, we don’t call it lying though. That would be too negative, that wouldn’t be godly! Oh, no. In the South, we call it “telling stories.”
“Oh, no!” someone in the back yelled and Caitlin smiled, speeding up now like a train picking up steam, the crowd egging her on.
We Southerners have told stories since we settled on this stolen land, which a story says we conquered for God, bless our hearts. We told stories through slavery and through the War of Northern Aggression and through civil rights. We told a story called The Birth of a Nation. We tell stories so well, we call them history.
We’ve told some stories so many times they’re already worn out—the wife who ran into a doorknob, the child with the cigarette burn he must have gotten from a punk at school, the daughter who went to live with relatives for a year and came back quiet and twenty pounds heavier, the son who needed nothing more than prayer and some private time with the church chaplain.
“Woo!” someone yelled. And again, another “Go, girl!”
From a young age, children are taught that mothers and fathers tell stories differently.
Fathers concentrate their stories on the past and the future. They tell stories about where they’ve been—my father’s phone constantly abuzz from work texts that cause him to run off to the office and come back smelling of perfume.
“Damn!” yelled the audience, and Alice felt a tremor in her chest like she’d been stabbed.
Even before technology, he learned from the storied tradition of men before him who left too early, came home too late, and drank too much, telling stories so that they didn’t remember what they had done.
They tell stories of the future. We teach our Southern gentlemen at a young age to promise the world so that they can get what they want in the present, because the future is a long ways away.
The present requires a different type of story though. In the present, men tell their stories in the form of questions they don’t bother to ask:
Caitlin bent into the microphone, almost whispering the next lines.
Are you happy?
What do you want?
Does this feel good?
The crowd erupted in claps and oohs. Caitlin grabbed the microphone with both hands.
Outsiders say the South is a matriarchal society, so it’s fitting that Southern women are the true masters at telling stories. Their daughters pick up this knowledge like rules passed down in a sacred book.
Mothers concentrate their stories in the present. They move around money to pay for the new washing machine, stealing funds out of a family cashbox in which they themselves invested half. They use the lie of makeup and a smile to make things neat so that questions aren’t asked.
Southern women are so good at telling stories that they tell them effortlessly, even to themselves.
This too shall pass.
It’s just a phase.
He needs this.
It’s my fault too.
They tell the lie that it’s not worth it to make a fuss, that it’s easier to keep quiet, to keep their darkest fears locked in a box in their mind that only God can find. Southern women think our stories make us happy, when really, they’re more than little white lies. Because those lies keep us—
The crowd couldn’t be silenced as the stomps and shouts and whoops punctuated each line that her daughter labored over. Caitlin allowed the noise to fill the white space.
Those lies keep us quiet.
Gagged.
Silenced.
Complacent.
I would like to say the cycle ends with me. But I know this skill of telling stories has been mixed with my blood as much as the smell of hay or the taste of grits cooked in bacon grease or the fierce rain of a summer storm beating against my skin.
Or maybe that’s just a story I tell myself.
Caitlin took a step back from the microphone and bowed. Claps and snaps filled the room, and someone in front of the camera stood up, blocking Alice’s view slightly. She could just see Chelsea running onto the stage and catch Caitlin smile as they kissed. The crowd cheered harder, right as the video went to black.
Alice let her phone fall into the cup holder.
She felt naked, exposed, as if Caitlin had seen right into the core that she had worked so hard to hide, had found the box she’d hid in her mind and had opened it, cataloging every pain but sneaking out before she was caught.
This must be what my mother feels like, she thought suddenly. What it feels like to lie in that hospital bed with no control over the secrets and bad memories tumbling from your subconscious.
Alice leaned her head on the steering wheel and let the car’s heat blow into her face. When her eyes started to water, she opened them wide to let in air, to keep tears from falling. She lay there with her head on the wheel until students began filing out for their free period. Then, she turned on the car and used her last gallon of gas to get to the station.
* * *
When she got home, Alice sat on the front porch steps with Buddy until the sky turned from blue to orange to pink and finally faded to black. Buddy, having given up on fetch hours ago, lay on the cement. Alice ran her bare foot over his coat, feeling the soft fur between her toes. The beer next to her was warm and half-full by the time headlights flashed at the top of the hill.
Buddy perked up his ears. When screams of little boys poured from the open car door, he ran to Robbie.
“Mom, can we order Chinese food?” Robbie yawned as he approached the house. It’s exhausting being a kid these days, Alice thought to herself, as she leaned down to pick up his backpack.
They ordered food and ate it on the couch while watching Inspector Gadget, their tradition when Walker left town. What would the tradition become if they divorced?
“Since Dad’s out of town, do I have to go to practice tomorrow?”
“Remember what Dad said—after this season we can talk about stopping if you don’t like it. Your team’s depending on you though.”
He looked at Alice with droopy eyes, and she reached to put her arm around him. He leaned his head in toward her chest.
“But after school and practice tomorrow, you get to go to Caleb’s, remember?”
He looked up at her. “And watch Star Wars.”
“Right.”
Alice put him to bed in her and Walker’s room. While he tangled himself in her covers, she turned on the evening news quietly, intending to stay awake until Caitlin made it home from rehearsal. She should say something to Caitlin, she knew, but she didn’t know what, couldn’t explain the exposure she’d felt watching the video and didn’t want to burden her with it. As she always did when Walker was out of town, Alice fell asleep almost immediately, though, with the soft glow of t
he TV as a night-light.
* * *
She woke to the sound of Buddy whimpering. He lay at the foot of Walker’s side, where Robbie slept.
She leaned over to Robbie and brushed the hair off his sweaty forehead. He was always a hot sleeper. The red numbers on the alarm clock glowed 3:12 a.m. She stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, then left the bed. Buddy perked his head up. “Stay,” she whispered, and he lay his head back down on Robbie’s ankle.
Alice crossed her arms against the cold as she walked through the house and then up the stairs. She stepped lightly on the carpet with only the sound of her ankles cracking to cut through the house’s slumber. When she reached Caitlin’s door, she pushed it slowly, silently with her fingertips. Caitlin lay on the bed, the covers tucked under her chin with her hands, and three textbooks, her computer, and her phone scattered around her body like a halo. The floor was littered with a hyper-organized chaos of office supplies: index cards lined up in a row or joined in a web with masking tape, pictures ripped out of magazines, and piles of pens organized by colors. Alice could never understand Caitlin’s need for order. Her outfit for the next day was hung on the closet doorknob with the shoes tucked underneath.
Alice sat in the chair opposite the bed. She pictured Caitlin in the video and tried to reconcile the little girl breathing before her with the confident, strong woman on that stage.
Caitlin could do what she couldn’t, could show her scars without shame. She didn’t have a box in her mind like Alice, like her mother. Didn’t have secrets like Rob, that she’d have to write down in a letter only after she died. She was right on the video, Alice thought—the tradition would end with her, and it made Alice smile with pride.
When Alice felt herself beginning to drift off, she stood and walked to the door. She would talk to her tomorrow.
“Mom?” Caitlin mumbled. “What’re you doing?”
Alice crossed over to the bed, stepping carefully to avoid the papers on the floor. “Just making sure you got home okay.” She leaned down and brushed the hair out of Caitlin’s face, feeling the cool of her forehead.
“Rehearsal ran late. They can’t get a scene right. Peter keeps forgetting his lines,” Caitlin said with her eyes still closed.
“It’ll be okay, go back to sleep.”
Caitlin turned over to face the other wall. Alice watched as her breathing slowed again.
When Alice returned to her bedroom, she couldn’t fall back asleep. She scrolled through CNN on her phone, then checked her email.
An email from the Georgia Department of Corrections told her that an inmate had completed her visitation application and that she could come during visiting hours. She read through the list of rules and went back upstairs to Robbie’s room, where she retrieved clothes for him and packed his overnight bag for Caleb’s so the morning would go faster. Even with her anxiety about the visit, she knew she wanted to get it over with, to see Tyler. Tomorrow. She wanted Rob to lead her to the end of this search, and hopefully to an answer on what to do with her own family.
She stood in front of her closet in one of the rare times when she fretted about what she would wear. Perhaps her mother had been onto something with the fur coat. Were you supposed to dress in your Sunday best to go visit prisoners? The dress code they’d emailed Alice was only slightly less restrictive than Caitlin’s impossible school dress code: no hats, no revealing necklines, no skirts above the knee, no flip-flops, etc. She opened a drawer and ran her fingers over her folded T-shirts before giving up and returning to bed for another hour of sleep.
Chapter Twenty
With the kids off, Alice set out toward the prison on the monotonous highways that decorated Georgia’s map like the scribbles of a particularly artless child. She should be visiting Rob, not Tyler.
When Alice arrived at Clayton County Prison in jeans, a light-blue blouse, and ballet flats she fished from the back of her closet, she realized she probably didn’t need to worry about her wardrobe as much as she had. She studied the building, one of the ugliest she had ever seen, through her windshield as she parked.
The off-white structure reminded her of a building made entirely of Legos because of its harsh, square appearance. Little slits littered the stone like scars on a human body. Nothing but dirt surrounded the area, until fences twisted with barbed wire rose quickly, encasing the fortress.
She parked and walked to the entrance. As she passed two guards, complete with full body armor and large rifles, she held Rob’s letter to Tyler in front of her like a shield. She nodded at one of the guards as she passed, but he stared ahead, not acknowledging her. Maybe these guards were like the ones who stood at Buckingham Palace and couldn’t react to other people. Seems peaceful, she thought, knowing your reaction should always be to stare ahead, seeing everything but not really seeing it, like a kind of meditation.
In the visitors’ center, a large woman sat behind glass. Without looking up at Alice, she demanded, “ID.”
Alice fumbled with the backpack’s pockets. Her fingers thumbed uselessly through endless stacks of the heavy personal credit cards she shared with Walker, business cards for the Center, her loyalty cards to Home Depot and Kroger, and receipts for soil and wood from Lowe’s and another for glue sticks she’d bought for Robbie’s class.
“Sure, let me just… It’s right here. I just need to…”
She thumbed through another zippered pocket. Nothing. She reached for her wallet, before she realized it was useless since she rarely returned her cards to it. After a little more digging, she remembered she’d put her driver’s license in her pocket that morning to make it easily accessible for this very moment. She smiled apologetically at the woman and placed it in a little metal box that snapped shut and disappeared.
Alice twisted her wedding band up and down on her finger.
“Who are you here visiting?”
“Tyler Wells,” Alice said.
“Checks out,” the woman said, still without looking up. “Smile.”
Alice did as the woman told her without realizing why the command came until the flash of light made her close her eyes. As she blinked back spots, the box’s snap reverberated from the walls and she jumped. She smiled again at the woman behind the desk, who still refused to look at her, before she slid out her license and the sticker with her picture on it, just like her mother’s. The technology at the Georgia Department of Corrections had apparently progressed little in the last decade.
After stuffing her bag and everything else into a locker that reminded her of high school, Alice proceeded to the last door where a guard who looked about sixteen waited with a wand like the ones used at the airport.
He asked who she came to visit and then went to retrieve him. But a few minutes later, he returned to say Tyler already had a visitor and that she would need to wait until they left.
Defeated, Alice walked back to the locker and sat on an unadorned bench next to it to wait her turn with Tyler’s letter balanced on her knee. She looked at the address, as she had done many times before coming here. Tyler hadn’t been in jail when Rob wrote this. He lived in a suburb, like she did, not far outside Birmingham. Did he have a job, a normal life? Would he get to go back there? Did he have a family? Did they miss him? Did they know he was here? Or like Rob, did Tyler prefer to avoid those who loved him most?
A buzz rang through the waiting area and the doors opened. A woman and a teenage boy exited. The woman looked down at the floor and rested her hand on the boy’s shoulder as they walked. The boy looked about fourteen. He smiled briefly at Alice as they approached a locker on the other side of the room. He unlocked it and handed his mother the key. After taking out the belongings, he laid each evenly spaced on the bench in such a way that the routine must have been developed over many days like this one. He slipped the key back in the lock, turned it, and shut the locker with the exact right amount of force to close i
t but not to create an echo of sound in the jumpy room. He turned and smiled at Alice once more as their eyes met before the pair disappeared out the second door and down the corridor from which Alice came.
Rob had been like that, she thought, even until the end, even amidst his dark moods. She remembered how a week before their final trip together to Amelia Island, their father had taken off for Memphis after a fight with their mother. The next night, at exactly 5:00 p.m., Rob rose from his perch on the couch where he had been strumming his guitar, mixed their mother a drink in one of the nice crystal glasses, and brought it to her without comment. Maura only nodded and took the drink in her hand, gulping before she even took the first sip. Or, hours before he left, Alice had sat outside at dinner with the family, listening to her father and Jamie laugh about someone they used to know. Before she even realized she had rubbed her arm, Rob had popped up and retrieved her jacket, draping it over her shoulders against the beach’s chill. He was like that, able to anticipate their needs before they could, even as something seemed to shift inside him, a change in the family’s tectonic plates felt by all.
It started with the guitar.
The tension had probably been building longer, since that day at the river with Edward and Hayley, maybe even before that. Were there glimmers that morning at church when he asked Alice about heaven? Either way, it was the night with the guitar that stuck in her mind now, the winter before he left.
She had been asleep in Rob’s bed. As usual, she woke with confusion, unable to remember if she had fallen asleep there, or in the closet and Rob had carried her in, or in her room, only to sleepwalk into Rob’s.
Whack, the sound that jolted her awake.
She wasn’t scared, would never be with Rob. She walked to the back window. He stood on the awning where she sometimes found him in the middle of the night. He gripped the neck of an electric guitar that Jamie had given him for Christmas the month before. (Alice had gotten a chemistry set.) When he first unwrapped it, Alice had noticed how striking it was, and it was even more so against the dark night sky—red and black, the sides curved up harshly toward the neck like devil’s horns, with a dash of white on the otherwise perfect paint. Rob looked out to the river; he didn’t see her yet.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 18
