When Jamie came in that night, like he always did on Amelia Island, he was drunk. He asked if I had broken up with that bitch yet, and when I said no, he gave me a choice. He told me that this was our chance, that if I went with him now, he would do what he always promised. We’d go to New York, where the best music schools, the best guitar teachers, were.
If I didn’t, he said he would tell Richard that he caught me with drugs. He even took out a bag of pills in his pocket and shook it for dramatic effect. He said this would be the last straw, that he was sure I’d be off to military boarding school within a week. Truthfully, I considered his offer of running away together. It wasn’t a bad one. It was what I thought I deserved.
The girlfriend stopped me. She had been nice to me, without expecting anything in return. She had made me realize that the relationship I had with Jamie wasn’t the best offer I could get. And I was older than when he first made those promises to me. What did I need him for anyway? But I knew if I tried to leave, he would tell Richard right away, that I wouldn’t be able to get a mile before I was found and right back with Jamie.
I needed a distraction. Before I could think, I reached for the lamp on the table and hit him in the head, knocking him unconscious. I yanked the pills and his wallet out of his pocket and put them in my own a second before Richard ran in. He saw Jamie on the floor, bleeding from his head. He screamed at me, asking me what I had done, but his practicality quickly overtook his questions. He carried Jamie like a baby to the car and sped off to the hospital, leaving me alone in the room.
I knew I had to leave. Right then. I said bye to you before I left, but I didn’t have the heart to wake you up. Maybe I should have, but I knew you’d make me want to stay. I would have, if I had known I would never see you again. But, I still thought I’d be back soon. That I would wait for things with Jamie to die down, that I would spend a few months or even a year or two proving to Richard that I could make it, that I was special.
I went straight to the bus station and bought a ticket on the first bus out, ending up in Dallas, and went on a bender it seemed like it took months for me to wake up from.
I blamed Richard. I blamed myself. But, I didn’t blame Jamie until later. Once I was older, once I had been clean for a few weeks (though it never stuck) and had time to think about things. Up until the end, I always chose to be with Jamie, but had I? At that age?
How would my life have been different if I hadn’t started drinking at age eleven? How might my relationships have been different if I hadn’t had sex with a man fifteen years older than me as a child? I don’t know. Even now, I have someone who loves me for real, someone I would lay down all weapons for, but the physical stuff is all tangled in my mind like I got my wires crossed long ago and could never figure out how to right them.
I’m sorry I am telling you this now. I’m sorry I didn’t before. I heard through the grapevine you were pregnant (nothing creepy, I have my sources). Congrats. It’s a boy.
I don’t want you to worry. I believe Jamie and I have reached a, shall we say, understanding. But, you should know what he is capable of. Keep your family safe. I’m sorry never to have known them. But let this letter be a testament that even miles and worlds apart, you were always with me, always on my mind.
With love,
Rob
Rob’s Lost Letters:
Al
Mr. Dylan Barnett
Ms. Lila King
Mr. Richard Tate
Mrs. Maura Tate
Mr. James Hudson
Mr. Christopher Smith
Mr. Tyler Wells
Chapter Thirty-Two
Alice jumped in Jake’s truck and rapped her knuckles against the window as he drove back to her hotel.
“Do you think? Your son,” Jake started to say. “Robbie? Do you think?”
Alice slammed her hand down on the dashboard’s worn plastic. Her wedding band left a dent in the gray. She stared at it, her permanent mark on Jake’s life in New Orleans. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He reached over to pat the dent, like he could smooth it out.
“I’m … Can you ever be sure? I don’t think, they don’t see each other much, Walker doesn’t like Jamie. They don’t…” Her voice trailed off.
Rob had assured her he reached an “understanding,” with Jamie, but what did that assurance mean when Alice was worried about her son? Because despite what Rob wrote in his letter—“I wanted it”—she would never believe that someone Robbie’s age could want something like that.
Back in her hotel room, she stuffed her duffel bag with clothes, working so quickly her mind grew blank, focused on only getting home. As she closed the door with her bag over her shoulder, Alice remembered her favorite dress, the one she wore to dinner with Jake, balled on the floor from where she had dropped it that morning. She stepped forward, as if to go back for it, but knew she could never look at it without remembering the fear and confusion permeating through her at that moment. She turned around and shut the door, running back down the steps and into Jake’s truck.
A group of four college-aged men exited a bar and crossed the street in front of the truck with their arms around one another’s shoulders, one tipping into the other, the one on the end carrying a neon pink Hurricane cup. They laughed, happy and carefree. It was how she pictured Rob’s days when her mind was filled with anger toward him for leaving. But she didn’t know. Didn’t know anything.
How funny, how sad that she could grow up in the same house as Rob, share parents, share dreams and fears, feel his blood coursing through her veins, yet this giant nightmare lay between them. This thing with Jamie that she would never understand.
She looked away from the men trudging down the street as Jake raced through the French Quarter—too fast between lights, then slamming on the brakes, creating the illusion of progress. His fingers danced on the gearshift like Rob’s had on his guitar in the video. He saw her staring and flexed his hand out once, then gripped the gearshift until his knuckles turned white.
Just as she could see the highway ahead, see the road back to home, they stopped at a police barricade. Another two cars, then three quickly pulled up behind them on the one-way street.
Jake groaned.
“What?”
He rolled down his window to ask the police officer by the barricade where they could pass.
“Street’s blocked off right now,” he said to Jake. “You’ll have to wait a few minutes.”
She heard the music through the open window before she saw anything, the slow da-da, da-da, like a waltz from her childhood as she danced with Rob before her first forced Cotillion lesson (which didn’t last).
“Chest out!” her mother had called to her. Rob spun with his back toward her and stuck his tongue out without breaking perfect dance posture.
A band in black marching hats stomped down the street with their cheeks full of music. Behind them, men in police uniforms carried a dark-brown casket high over their heads, and along either side, people danced left, then right in a slow, mournful sashay. Some carried lace-trimmed umbrellas in different colors. They stepped slowly down the street, followed by an impossible number of people, black and white, and tourists among them, too, some carrying instruments, some carrying umbrellas and masks, some with their hands in the air. They all made their way down the street with those slow, mournful steps.
“What’re they doing?”
“It’s a second line,” Jake said. “It’s for a police officer. I saw it in the paper this morning, I forgot. Sorry, I should have gone another way.”
She squinted closer and could see posters with a commanding black man smiling with gray hair and a police cap. “Like a funeral parade.”
“Yeah, sort of.”
Jake and Alice watched through the windows as the crowd entered the iron gates of the cemetery. Police officer
s lowered the casket into the ground. Alice watched the family humming and swaying along to a hymn that the brass played. She leaned over to take Jake’s hand again and rubbed it lightly with her thumb. She thought back to her parents at Rob’s funeral, avoiding each other and their pain, everything hidden under the surface. Rob would have liked a send-off like this, with music, where those he loved weren’t afraid to look at one another through tear-filled eyes.
The music cut off abruptly and started again, fast and jubilant this time. Alice watched the mourners dance back through the crowd. The band stomped their feet, and the colors seemed brighter, as the crowd followed them back up the street, back in front of Jake’s truck. The posters with the man’s face jumped up and down.
She watched a little girl and boy twirling with an umbrella, so many times that she got dizzy again herself, and for a second, Alice thought she saw Rob out of the corner of her eye in the crowd. She smiled at the man, with sandy-brown hair and reassuring blue eyes that seemed to promise that it would be all right, and she thought that back at him in return. He turned around and disappeared.
“I know,” she said to herself and to Jake. “It will be all right. It will be.”
The blockade cleared, and they started toward the airport again, the highways crossing over the water that fed into the sea. Alice listened to her duffel shifting in the truck bed as Jake lurched the steering wheel left and right.
The truck stopped at the airport, and Jake leapt out to reach for Alice’s bag, but she had already swung it over her shoulder. He took her hand.
“Alice, I know this is a crazy time for you, but I would kick myself later if I didn’t tell you before you go that I love you. I always have, and I don’t want to let you go again.”
“Jake, I—”
“You don’t have to answer right now. It seems like our timing is never right. But, when it is, you know where to find me.”
She kissed him quickly on the lips and turned toward the airport’s entrance.
She knew he would stand there and watch her go, as she had done in college when she watched him head down the Jetway for the flight that would take him to Ecuador. But she didn’t look back at him as he had done then.
* * *
When she reached the Delta ticket counter, the person at the counter told her the next flight took off in thirty minutes.
“That’s the one I want,” Alice said.
“I’m not sure you can make it, ma’am. There’s also one in”—he looked down at his computer and clacked on the keys—“three hours.”
“The first one.”
He was still explaining what to do if she didn’t make it when Alice took off toward security.
When she arrived at security, she thrust her ticket in front of the TSA agent. “What’s the rush?” he asked.
She rested with her hands on her knees to take a breath, thanking herself for all those hikes through the Center’s woods.
He looked at the ticket. “Oh, you better hurry then.”
Her legs felt like nothing, gliding on the moving walkway as Alice ran to her gate, away from New Orleans and toward reality, away from Jake, but toward her son, away from one of the worst and one of the best days of her life. When she reached it, the flight attendant called for final boarding.
“Alice Wright?” the attendant said.
Alice nodded.
“Was about to shut the doors.”
Alice found her seat, in a thankfully clear aisle. For the first time since she’d read the letter, she let her eyes close and the questions in her mind take over. The memories from her and Rob’s childhood glowed at the edges, the glory years she had cherished so much and replayed to keep herself company in the quiet house for the remainder of her lonely childhood.
The quirks in Jamie’s personality that made Alice roll her eyes as an adult had enthralled her as a child. He opposed every quality her father took on: He was animated, bombastic, playful. She loved those puppet games and the little stage he bought for Christmas and would set up in the family room when her father visited the trucking headquarters in Memphis. The Christmas Eve Jamie allowed Rob and Alice to unwrap and rewrap all their presents.
Each memory went gray when she fell asleep, Rob still downstairs since Jamie would let him stay up later than her own bedtime. The static of a VCR tape at the end of its movie filled her ears, the screen buzzing with static.
She thought back to that night on Amelia Island, and instead of remembering how she had pretended to sleep while her brother walked out of her life, she thought about the crash that startled her awake, the car that drove away, the muffled screams of Rob, Jamie, and Richard in the basement and Jamie’s absence at their house for the weeks after, barely noticeable in the chaos of Rob’s disappearance. Her father had sided with Jamie, yes, but hadn’t he also been betrayed? Betrayed beyond something he could ever imagine, could ever let himself imagine by his best friend and adoptive brother?
Her father had chosen Jamie, had trusted the wrong person, and that mistake had destroyed her family. She knew that Rob was right, that Richard would have believed Jamie over Rob about the drugs, would have sent Rob to military school. She thought back to Jamie at Rob’s funeral, saying that Rob had every chance that Jamie and Richard didn’t have and had thrown them away, and shook her head.
The night she snuck out and found Richard drunk outside Rob’s door, he had felt responsible, far more than he had let Rob know. Even though she felt sure he hadn’t known the extent or even a little of what had gone on between Jamie and Rob. Rob and Richard had played a game of chicken, Jamie stuck in the middle, and everyone had lost.
She tried to replay the times that Robbie had interacted with Jamie. Had they ever been alone together? No, she told herself. Walker’s own short fuse with him regulated Alice’s visits with Jamie to the Varsity after church and the occasional family gathering. She replayed Robbie and Jamie’s every movement from Christmas, which Walker told her not to invite him to. She should have listened. Walker knew, she told herself. He sensed something that she couldn’t. What a bad mother that she couldn’t even sense that, from someone she knew her whole life? She recited her mantra from earlier: Robbie is safe at school.
Alice retrieved her phone and paid for the internet. She scrolled through three pages of Google search results on signs of abuse and what to say to a child who might have been abused, while promising herself it wasn’t necessary. The seat-belt sign came back on, and the pilot’s voice told the cabin to prepare for landing.
* * *
The Atlanta airport’s long escalator, that brought weary passengers up from the basement, had always meant coming home to Alice. She loved to watch the mass of people at the top, held back by ropes, waiting for their loved ones, and the antsy passengers fidgeting on the escalator, eager to reach them. Today, though, she stomped up the escalator between annoyed-looking people, like a soldier going into battle. Around her, couples kissed. Daughters held signs and embraced their fathers, dressed in army camo. Grandparents met their grandchildren for the first time. Alice felt nothing but terror looking at the happy people.
When she got in her Prius, though, a wave of calm rushed over her. Calm, because she knew where she needed to go next.
Chapter Thirty-Three
She sped to Jamie’s ranch, listening to her phone ringing in her backpack. The sound only egged her on, kept her concentrated on what she knew she had to do.
A highway. Traffic. The radio playing country music. The windows cracked open, and her chest welcoming the winter crispness. It meant nothing to her.
Jamie. Jamie. Jamie, she thought. All of a sudden, it occurred to her that this was how normal people committed murder. She had always wondered about those wives on the shows that Chelsea and Caitlin liked to watch, curled up on the couch together. Snapped. They had snapped. “I don’t know what came over me, it was like I was in a
trance.” Now Alice knew.
The exit came on fast, and she jerked the car to pull over. She drove past the blank fields on the way to Jamie’s estate, where she normally meandered, stopping to look at the horse-filled pastures and the tulip trees. She turned into Jamie’s compound, her tires spewing up gravel as she stopped in front of the intercom.
She pressed the button, refusing to announce herself. Let him look at the video. Let him see my face, she thought.
If he knew anything was amiss, he didn’t say so. “Alice! One second,” the box chirped back happily.
Her car tapped the iron gate as it swung open, and she gunned it up the long driveway. She climbed from the front seat and banged on Jamie’s door with his large knocker in the shape of a dog.
“There she is, Miss America!” he sang, as he swung open the door. “What a nice surprise.” When he saw her face, his smile fell. Alice pushed past him into the living room, and he slammed the door behind her.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what happened with Rob. The truth.” She circled the room, pacing like an animal about to go in for the kill. She could hear Jamie’s dogs barking in the back where they must be in a kennel somewhere, going crazy over the sound of the knock at the door.
He held her gaze and didn’t say anything, just crossed his arms over his chest.
“Tell me why he actually left! What you did!”
“This is why I told you not to look in that box.” He wagged his finger at her like she was a child. “Bringing up this mess again.”
A dirty dish from Jamie’s dinner rested on the side table by the television, and she picked it up, ready to hurl it at him. A satisfying flash of fear flew across his face. She set it back on the table.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“What is it you want me to tell you?” He circled now, too, opposite her, and they went around the room like two fighters in a ring.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 28
