He raised the guitar over his head and brought it down with force until the base smashed into the copper awning, sending an icy puff of breath up against the winter sky.
Whack.
Alice looked to the left and right, worrying their parents would run in before she remembered that Daddy was out of town and Mama was at some sort of party where you “buy” tables. “You’ll come with me one day soon,” she had told Alice as she walked out the door in her evening dress and white gloves.
Whack.
Whack.
He brought the guitar down again, but it was resilient, and despite the torture, only half the strings had snapped.
Whack. Whack. Whack.
She could see the muscles through his shirt as he raised it again above his head.
Whack, whack, whack, whack.
He started heaving, and his shoulders jumped up and down as if he were sobbing, even though Alice couldn’t see his face. He slammed it down with all his force until the neck finally broke. He sat down on the awning next to the broken guitar.
“Rob?”
“Yeah,” he said, like he’d known she was there all along.
What’s wrong? she started to ask. Or Are you okay? But, she faltered, stopped and started, for she wasn’t sure how to get him to confide in her, didn’t have the language she needed to express her questions. He was always the keeper of her secrets, the defender in her nightmares, the explainer to her confusion. Never the other way around. She was starting to recognize his dark moods more, but they were only that, an inexplicable darkness with no known causes, like any other storm.
She stepped through the window, onto the awning that shaded the first-floor window, and picked up the neck of the guitar. Alice raised it over her head and grunted, slamming it down into the copper as hard as her forearms could. So hard that she lost her footing because of the force. Rob grabbed her pajama shirt and pulled her back toward the house, just as she thought she would go over the edge.
She sat next to him, heart beating in her ears because of her brush with such a fall. They stared at the river in the distance, lit by the moonlight.
Eventually, he stood up. With a sniffle, he wiped his face on his sleeve. Then, he picked up the guitar’s base and neck in both hands and threw them over the edge of the house. They landed with a crack next to the porch, and Alice watched as the base rolled a few feet down the hill.
“Let’s go back inside,” he said. Once he stepped in through the window, he patted his acoustic guitar, laying innocently on the carpet, a gesture of care toward the remaining musical soldier.
The next morning, neither of them mentioned the destroyed guitar. Stupidly, Alice assumed that meant that Rob would go back to normal.
* * *
“You can go in now,” the teenager playing dress-up as a guard said to Alice.
She stood and walked to him, but as she approached the door, he moved to block her path.
“Ma’am, nothing can go in with you.”
Briefly distracted by the guard stepping in front of her, then calling her “ma’am,” it took Alice a second to realize the statement referred to the letter.
“It’s just paper. You can check it if you want.”
“Nothing can go in with you,” he said, before adding: “Ma’am.”
“Okay, one second.”
What could she do with it? She could put the letter in the locker and mail it to Tyler, but then she wouldn’t know what it said, and she didn’t want to come back here.
With one last glance at the pristine seal, she turned over the envelope and ripped off the flap. She yanked out the paper. The motion sent something flying, and she glanced back at the guard, who still stared ahead. She wondered what would happen to her for littering in the jail, or was it a prison?
Exactly halfway down the page and centered on the paper with such precision Alice wondered if Rob had used a ruler, sat one simple sentence—
Be good.
Unlike the others, it wasn’t signed.
She turned the letter over, expecting something else on the back. “Be good?” Alice stood puzzling over what it could mean and became a little afraid at the prospect of going inside.
She bent down to pick up whatever had fallen out of the letter. They were little googly eyes, the type she had used in crafts as a child, and with her own children. She picked them up, one by one, collecting them in her hand, and threw them away. What could they mean? Some kind of inside joke?
“Ma’am, are you ready?”
“Yes, yes,” Alice said.
With one more glance at her brother’s handwriting on the letter, she slid it through the slot of a nearby trash can and watched it disappear into the darkness.
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 Twenty-One
A female police officer wanded Alice again, gave her a thorough pat-down, and read more rules—no hugging, no kissing, no holding hands. The visit could be stopped at any time by the guards for any reason. Alice nodded in agreement, and the guard eventually showed her to a metal table in a room full of metal tables and families talking under their breath.
A woman bounced a baby on her knee. A man in orange rested his hand on a table separated by an inch of impenetrable space from the hand of a woman in a pink floral dress. Women littered the room in their best dresses, decorating the drab decor and the men in uniform like colorful candles on a plain birthday cake.
A guard escorted a hulking man in orange to Alice’s table. He must have been over six foot four. With his bulk, he towered over the guard but allowed the guard to escort him into his seat. The orange of the jumpsuit and his dark hair framed his acne-scarred face.
“Alice,” he said in greeting, with a simple nod at her. She smiled at him, unsure how to begin. He sat straight with both feet on the ground, before changing his mind. He fell over the table, letting his arms bang on the metal, eliciting a snap from one of the guards. He slid his arms to the edge and used his hands to push himself up, shifting to one side of the too-small chair. When he stilled, he looked back at her.
“So.”
“Right!” Alice said. “Like I said, my brother sent you a letter.”
“Okay,” he said in argument, the same way Caitlin spoke to Walker when she didn’t agree but didn’t want to argue either. As if to say, Okay. For now.
“Well, Rob and I were really close when we were kids, I mean, we weren’t those types of siblings who don’t like each other or fight a lot or anything,” Alice said, picking up speed with every sentence as Caitlin had on the video, until she was short on breath. “But then, when I was eleven, he left, and I never knew why. I always wanted to find him, always hoped we would get back in touch, but we never did, and then I found out he had died. And my parents threw this funeral for him, this terrible funeral with all their friends, and I decided to talk because no one else—”
“I was there. I know how it was.”
“What?”
“I was there.”
“You were the man, the man who left after the eulogy, weren’t you? I tried to talk to you, but you were gone.”
He nodded and shrugged, as if to say your loss.
She paused, unsure of where to go next.
“Why didn’t you send the letter?” he said.
“I brought it. It’s…it’s in the locker room.” She could fish it out of the trash if she needed to, although that would probably be some sort of security violation. “I read it.”
“You read my letter?” His voice rose a bit, with an edge to it that made her want to apologize and explain.
�
��Well, they wouldn’t let me bring it in. I’ve never been to visit…here…before. I told them they could—”
“What did it say.” Less a question than a demand.
She looked at the clock on the wall and wondered how many minutes she had until a guard would usher Tyler away. She dreaded being cut off before she got anywhere with him, but half desired the rescue from his curt attitude. “It was very short, shorter than most of the letters and—”
“What did it say?” His hand morphed into one giant fist on the metal table, and she watched the veins in his hands bulge through the skin, imagining the fear that the people in that gas station must have felt when Tyler barged in with all his intimidating bulk and demanded the money from the register.
“It said ‘Be good.’”
Tyler’s face froze, and he withdrew his hands and legs until it seemed to Alice that he occupied half the space he had before. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then a pipe burst inside his face. The strong jaw trembled, and his shoulders curved in on themselves. One tear threatened to clang onto the table, and before Alice could react to it, a stream came. She looked from left to right at her surroundings, unable to decide on the proper response. The man at the table next to them saw the scene in a glance and then positioned his body with his back to Tyler as if refusing to acknowledge what he had clearly seen. A guard at her three o’clock glared at them, and Alice feared that he would approach them and tell her to leave.
Tyler wiped his face with the back of his hands and leaned his face down to drag the side of it along his shoulder like Alice’s childhood cat did when she gave herself a bath. To his right, Tyler caught the eye of the guy next to him and mumbled, “Fuck you looking at.” The man’s head snapped back to look straight ahead.
After thirty seconds, Tyler changed tactics and stopped trying to hide. He rested his hands on the table and looked down at them. He allowed the tears to roll down his cheeks until his face gave the appearance of rain streaks on a dirty car.
“Are you okay?” Alice reached to touch Tyler’s hand. He didn’t acknowledge her right away and she wished she hadn’t said anything, because obviously, he wasn’t okay. She never had been good at saying the right thing in these situations. She caught the eye of a guard who shook his head in warning. She remembered the no hand-holding rule and moved her hand away from Tyler’s.
“It’s—” He took in a breath like a balloon filling with air that seemed to raise his frame over a foot. It deflated. “I wasn’t good.”
Alice nodded as if she understood.
“The people that left before you came in, the woman and the boy? That’s my wife and kid—one of them.” He wiped off his face with his massive forearm and straightened out again.
“I’m the reason Rob was in prison.” He spoke faster now, the story tumbling out. “I’m the reason. Me. You can hate me. And when he got sick when he was in, I couldn’t help but think, you know, if he was out, he would have had better doctors and shit and they could have made him better and he wouldn’t have died.”
Could it be true?
A pressure filled Alice’s chest as she waited for him to explain, waited for him to say why Rob had been in prison. She said a silent “please” in prayer that it would be something that wouldn’t forever alter her opinion of her big brother and childhood hero.
“We were both into some not-good stuff, and then one night we got caught. We heard the cops were coming and everyone took off. Somehow Rob and I got trapped together. We decided that the best bet was for someone to run at the cops and the other to get away. Rob said I would be the one to run. He said I needed to go back to my wife and kid, and he said make it worth it; be good. I remember that, ‘Make it worth it. Be good.’ So, I ran, and they took him.”
“I cleaned myself up like I said I would and got a real job. For a long time. My wife took me back in and my kid forgave me; we had two more. And then when I heard about Rob getting sick and so close to when he was getting out, I came to visit him, and I felt so guilty when I saw how sick he was. He just looked so bad right at the end, and I knew that they did it to him, in this place—that’s what they do—and I knew it was my fault. I would have… I don’t know, I thought I would have made it okay. People don’t mess with me, and I can be on good behavior. Rob couldn’t do no good behavior. But I let him run to them anyway.”
Alice’s eyes drifted down to her wedding ring, and she twirled it on her finger.
“He must have known that I’d end up like this, that I’d end up back here. Even if he didn’t want to think it, he had a lot of people that cared about him too. I didn’t want to say anything to my wife because we didn’t really talk about that part of my life. Then it started, a few beers, some shots, a little coke, a few calls to my old buddies and jobs here and there. I thought I could control it, but I couldn’t and I ended up back here. His sacrifice was for nothing. I didn’t even do the one thing he asked me to do. All he asked me to do was go to some house and to put these stupid eyes outside on the mailbox.”
She snapped back to Tyler as he continued, “That’s all I had to do. It wasn’t even a big deal. I did it for a while, but once I got in here, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even fucking do what he asked.”
He banged his head on the table, and one of the guards approached. He looked from Tyler with his head resting on the table to Alice and then said it was time for her to go. Alice stood up in a daze. Tyler started walking away.
“Wait! Tyler! Where did you take the eyes? What house?”
“65 Ringgate Lane, Marietta!”
Alice’s fingers clenched so hard that she felt her nails dig into her palm. Jamie’s old address. Why would Rob have wanted them left at Jamie’s house?
* * *
As she exited the dark building, Alice’s eyes burned at the harsh sunlight. She fast-walked to the car, spinning her backpack around and unzipping it as she went. She dug out Jamie’s letter, held pristinely in the laptop section of her bag, uncreased with its regal calligraphy and seal. Even though she made sure to control her pace—running in a prison parking lot probably wasn’t a good idea—the weight in her chest felt like she was running a marathon. After she climbed into the car, she tore the envelope, not taking care to make sure it remained intact. As she snatched the paper out, little googly eyes exploded in all directions throughout the car.
She unfolded the letter, reading:
Dearest Jamie,
Fuck you.
Always watching,
Rob
Alice finally saw the connection with the eyes from their childhood crafts together as a chilling, if not creative metaphor. The many times Jamie stayed with her and Rob, when he lived at the house off and on, they made sock puppets often, using eyes like these. Rob always did have a flair for the poetic, even as a child. It was second only to his skill at hyperbole.
Alice’s mind returned to the money from yesterday. Especially with Jamie’s history, she had suspicions about his explanation yesterday, but now she was sure he was hiding something. Maybe even something more than an inflated bill or charging her mother too much interest.
She took out the card with the PI’s name and number written on the back. Yesterday when she called, the number had been disconnected. This time, though, she called the diner on the front. Someone who sounded like a teenager answered, and she crossed her fingers and asked to speak to Clay Geoffrey. He put her on hold. Could it be? Maybe Clay used the diner as an office or worked there or went there frequently. Maybe he was there right now and would know more about Jamie and her mother and the search for Rob and why Rob would have been angry. If he was still searching for Rob up until the funeral eight years ago, he might even still be working today.
A woman with a smoke-stained voice answered: “You calling for Clay Geoffrey?”
“Yes,” Alice said eagerly, hopefully.
“I don’t know how to tel
l you this, but Clay’s been dead for thirty years.”
Thirty years?
If Clay was dead, that meant Jamie hadn’t been paying him since Rob left. Thirty years would have been only a few years after Rob disappeared.
Alice muttered “Thank you” and hung up. Suddenly noticing she was freezing, she rubbed her hands together to warm them and reached up to crank the heat. Her hand shook as she turned the dial.
A rush of images flew past, the sprawling ranch Jamie purchased after her father died, the designer dogs running along the acreage, the new cars with their shiny rims. She knew with a ferocity so strong she would stake her life on it: Jamie hadn’t given the money to the PI. He’d kept it. He had lied to her mother and lied to her.
Jamie’s money—from the business, from Richard, from Richard’s parents (his adoptive parents)—had always come in a trust because of his lack of talent with money management, part of the reason he had so frequently landed at the Tate house. He had lost his fortune more times than Alice could count: a failed marriage, failed businesses, his countless expensive hobbies and careers, including one as a poker player. Even if he felt he needed the money, stealing money from her mother when she thought it would go to look for Rob would be a new low, one that would surely elicit a response from Rob if he knew. Could it be that Jamie had even agreed with her father not to continue looking for Rob, had arranged with him so her mother would think she was paying?
As she pondered the possibilities, she saw a text from Edward saying that an intern had dropped off the prison files at the Center. Thankfully he didn’t send them to the house, Alice thought, before realizing the reason he didn’t: Edward knew she was hiding this from Walker. And he was right. Her cheeks darkened again.
She reached for her too-hot Nalgene water bottle in the cup holder and drank from it to calm herself before getting back on the highway for the two-hour drive back to the Center.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 19
