She stopped and started again, changing tactics. “Just tell me, did you touch my son?”
“Robbie?” He stopped. “How could you say that? I would never!”
He seemed genuinely hurt, and Alice froze, a glimmer of doubt passing through her eyes.
“Did you…with Rob?”
“No! Of course not! Rob and I… I loved him. We… He loved me. We were going to move away together.”
“That’s not how Rob felt.”
“You don’t know! You weren’t there!”
“He was a kid though. He was only nine!”
“Do you think this makes me proud? Do you think I’m enjoying this conversation? We had plans, and then he attacked me! I was in the hospital for a week.” Silent tears fell down Jamie’s cheeks, over the wrinkles on his face like water droplets along dry soil. “And then he sicced his bodyguards on me like I was some kind of common criminal. They would come into my house and leave googly eyes on my pillow, Alice. I couldn’t leave my house. I only stopped fearing for my life once Rob died. You think I like that?”
He sank into a stained leather armchair and sobbed into his hands.
“If you loved him so much, why wouldn’t you give the PI the money to look for him, like you told Mama you would? Instead of keeping it?”
“He found Rob in two months. I went to talk to him and tried to get him to come back, tried to give him money. He wouldn’t come back with me. Then, he ran off again. I couldn’t tell your mother that I was why he ran away again. I can’t believe you would say I would do that to Robbie. I’m not a monster. Just because you think things, that’s not the same thing. It’s not the same thing. Rob was different.”
“Shut up.”
“He was different, he loved me, I know he did.”
“SHUT UP!”
He sobbed, loud violent sobs that turned into hiccups. The dogs barked louder, hearing the sound Jamie made, now more similar to that of an exotic bird than any human sound Alice had heard.
“I need to think, okay?” Alice said. “I need a second. You stay here, all right? Stay in the chair.”
“Stay here and what? Play computer games for a decade like I had to do before Rob died, afraid his thugs were always waiting around the corner for me? I like my life.” He cried into his hands. “He took my life. He did. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She screamed in frustration. She needed a silent second without Jamie’s tears and screams and lack of logic, without the dogs barking, to work out what to do with him. As she went to the door, she saw a box in the entryway, like the ones from her parents’ house, her mother’s handwriting on the side: “PI files.”
“What is that?”
Jamie kept his face in his hands.
“Jamie, WHAT IS THAT?”
He looked up, and she pointed to the box. He returned his face to his hands and sobbed.
She grabbed the box just in case and yanked open the door. She went back to the car, plopped the box next to her. She didn’t want to think about the box. How could there be more?
She lay down with her back on the hood. Like she had with Rob when their mother took them to look at the constellations in the sky one night, pointing out the symbols from the mythology she liked to quiz them on. Jamie had already begun with Rob even then, had already started to twist him, to confuse him, to hurt him. She hated Jamie. She did. She had never hated anyone, had never been able to say “hate” as a child—the “h-word” her mother would say. But she did. She hated him.
Revenge. That’s what she wanted, but how? Call the police? Tell everyone what he’d done? Tell her mother? Cut him off financially?
None of that would bring Rob back.
She let her eyes close for just a second, let herself pretend like she was still in that moment with Rob, listening to their mother pointing out Orion’s belt.
A sound rang out, and Alice bolted up from the hood. She would recognize the sound anywhere—
The sound of a single shot from her father’s favorite rifle.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Alice rested her head on her car’s window at stoplights, leaving a greasy imprint on the glass. The fog of police questioning and ambulances, all to finally tell her what she already knew—Jamie was dead—had filled her previous hours. In between, she read the contents of the box. It was full of fake PI reports, written by Jamie, filled with “sightings” of Rob, meant to string her mother along, convince her they were close to finding him. They made her sick. She left them in Jamie’s yard. They were nothing to her.
As Alice pulled into the driveway, she flinched from Buddy’s barking, too close an echo to the hours she had spent at Jamie’s listening to the same thing. Buddy jumped at the door and spun around waiting for his usual attention.
She opened the door, and mercifully, he stopped barking as Alice petted him. “Where is everyone?” She walked around the dark house’s loop, with Buddy following her. They must be at a late dinner, out and not expecting her home a day early.
Alice walked into the kitchen, still wearing her dirty, fishy clothes from lunch. She felt more tired than she remembered in her life. Back in the kitchen next to the phone, she noticed an envelope that she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t marked or sealed, so she opened it. Inside were two tickets for a week-long trip to St. Lucia, starting next week. Even at the sight of the tickets, much less the thought of a trip with Walker, a powerful feeling of loneliness weighed her chest.
She checked her phone and saw a text from Jake: You don’t need to text me back, but wanted to say that I’m thinking about you. She smiled for the first time in hours.
She went back to the bedroom, stripped her clothes, and kicked them into her bathroom trash can. The bathroom filled with steam from the too-hot shower, and she let the water run over her again. Jamie came to her mind. This morning, he had been in this world, and now he wasn’t. She didn’t grieve him, but the tangled web of her family, inextricably woven together with hurt and secrets and shame, filled her with sadness.
After she got out and dressed, she heard yelling from the kitchen.
“Mom? MOM?”
“In here!”
Robbie ran to her, and she leaned down to scoop him up in her arms.
Walker came into their bedroom, followed by Caitlin. She hugged Caitlin.
“I’m going to NYU!” she said. “Dad and I talked about it yesterday.”
“But…” Walker prompted.
“But I’m going to come home one weekend a month.” Caitlin smiled broadly.
“That’s great.” Alice looked at Walker, and he smiled back to her, a reassuring smile as if to say he had everything fixed, everything smoothed over for her return, as if their fight had never happened.
“We were about to go watch something in the basement,” Walker said. “We even found something we can all watch together. It’s a history documentary”—he pointed at Robbie—“about women”—he pointed to Caitlin—“in baseball.” He pointed to himself. He reached out to Alice, as if trying to envelop her in a hug, a reward for good behavior.
She leaned down to hug Robbie again instead.
“Mom, you’re crushing me!”
She laughed, one tear streamed down her cheek, just when she thought she didn’t have any left. She reached to stroke Robbie’s hair and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you. I love you so much.”
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“I’m just so glad to be home.”
She pulled away from Robbie. She grabbed the arms of both her children and looked at them, deep in their eyes, as she would have wanted her own parents to do, as she wished she had done with Rob that night he left when she pretended to sleep.
“Y’all can never do anything to make me not love you. Do you know that? Do you?”
“We know, Mom.”
She ti
ckled Robbie’s tummy lightly and he squirmed. “Yes!”
“You guys go start the movie. We’ll be right down,” Walker said.
Alice stood and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. Robbie stared at her, still in the same place.
“She’s fine, champ,” Walker said.
“I’m fine.” Alice smiled, and Robbie and Caitlin disappeared down the steps.
“I bet you’re hungry.” She followed Walker into the kitchen where he spooned fried rice and orange chicken onto a plate and popped it into the microwave.
“You’re home a day early.” He came over to her and wrapped Alice in a hug. This time, she let him. “I hope that means you want to make this work. I want you to know I’ve ended things with Brittani.”
“Walker—not tonight.” Today had already been the longest day of her life. She didn’t want to tell him about Jamie. She didn’t want to talk to Walker at all.
“We don’t have to talk about it tonight. I just want to say one more thing: We can move, if you want. I’ll leave the firm and go somewhere else, if that will make things better. We could start over.” He rubbed her forearm with his pointer finger.
“I got you something,” he said, and Alice’s chest clenched. He handed her the envelope with the tickets. “Before you say no, there’s this great resort a buddy at work recommended. We could go next week, reconnect.”
The microwave beeped, and he reached for her food.
“Think about it.”
She took the plate from him. “I don’t need to think about it. I want a divorce.” She said it quickly, casually, feeling pounds lighter with each syllable.
He stopped in his tracks, stunned, and she turned to go.
“Alice,” he called, and she turned back around.
He walked toward her, fast and puffed out like rangers always say to do with bears, to make yourself seem larger. She stood her ground.
“Let me ask you one thing,” he said. “And I want an honest answer for once in your life.”
“All right, Walker,” she said. If she leaned her face forward an inch, her nose would touch his chin. “What. What’s your question?”
“I loved you. I really did. Did you ever love me?”
She looked him in the eye. Robbie’s eyes. The eyes she loved, but not the way she loved Jake.
“I love what we built together.”
“That’s not a fucking answer.”
“Then, no. I didn’t.”
He spun away from her, knocked the container of rice off the counter, dodged Buddy as he rushed to lick it, and headed for the door, slamming it behind him.
As she reached into the silverware drawer for a spoon and shut it with her hip, she heard the roar of Walker’s car, driving away, driving to Brittani probably. Good. She hoped Brittani loved him, loved him like Alice couldn’t. She ate the food, standing in a halo of rice, following Walker’s rule of no food in the basement, even without him there. More, though, she wanted one more minute to herself before she joined her happy children.
She got the letter from her bag and unfolded the paper, careful not to look at it until she was ready. She wanted to skip past all the parts about Jamie and only reread the words her brother had written. The ones she wanted to burn into her brain.
You made me a better person.
Even now, so many years later, I find myself asking “What would Alice do?” like others ask about Jesus…
“Mom, Caitlin’s starting it!” Robbie skidded to a stop at the rice on the floor. “What happened?”
“Oh, I spilled something. Buddy’s working on cleaning it up.”
“Are you coming?”
“Yeah, I’m coming, honey.”
He turned toward the basement to go but twisted back around right as he took his first step.
“Who’s that drawing of?”
“What drawing?”
He pointed to the paper in Alice’s hand.
She turned it over, and her chest jumped for the twentieth time today.
On the back was the drawing Rob had slipped from her room that night on Amelia Island, the one she drew of him on the pier in Savannah. It was all wrong, nothing like the artistic drawing he had done of her, yet there was something about the eyes. You could feel them watching you, the way the irises curved toward the center, pulsated out in little strokes, like the sun’s rays.
“Oh, it’s… You remember how I told you that you were named after my brother?”
He nodded.
“That’s him.”
He came over to study the drawing with Alice, and she angled it toward him to look.
“Cool,” he said. “Come on!”
Alice let him take her by the hand and down the stairs. She let Caitlin and Robbie explain the documentary to her. She felt at peace—picturing Rob’s eyes in the drawing—the most at peace she had felt since before her brother left.
But let this letter be a testament that even miles and worlds apart, you were always with me, always on my mind.
In a few minutes, she fell asleep with her head resting on Caitlin’s shoulder, listening to the sounds of her children around her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
A few days later, Alice shook Caitlin awake at 6:00 a.m. on a school day.
“Let’s go for a drive,” she said.
“I have school!”
Robbie was at Walker’s hotel with him, and Alice had already told the school Caitlin wouldn’t be coming today. An important family function.
Not for the first time in the last few days, the thought occurred to her how different Caitlin and Robbie’s childhoods would be. Caitlin, her parents married (unhappily but married), living in a gated community in the suburbs. Robbie, shuffled between his parents’ homes, living with Alice along the lake where she already planned to buy the lot next to the Center, to build them a home there, one with a spire Robbie could climb inside to assemble his puzzles, looking at the water.
How different it would be, yet, couldn’t only a sibling understand something like that? A childhood, a divorce? For she knew no matter how many hours she spent awake at night, talking on the phone to Jake about all they missed, she’d never be able to explain to him fully the things Rob just knew about her, the things they had experienced together. No matter how much life they had lived apart.
“There will be coffee! Trust me and get dressed.” Alice flipped on the lights as she left the room. She heard Caitlin moan through the closed door.
An hour later, they sat in Alice’s car in front of her parents’ house.
“I forgot what this place looked like.” Caitlin put her Starbucks to-go cup in the cup holder and reached for her phone to snap a last picture of the house she could barely remember.
Alice sipped her own coffee, glancing back and forth from Rob’s window to her Prius’s clock to the backhoe’s sharp shovel and the hard-hatted man inside. They were running late, but none of the workers seemed concerned.
Alice followed Caitlin’s eyes as they scanned the scene, jumping over the caution tape in front of their car, past the garage where her father’s Jeep once stood, past the window to the right where her mother always put the Christmas tree.
They watched as one of the workers threw a paint-smeared hammer in the air and caught it. He did it a few times, their eyes watching the hammer’s ascent, before missing. It dropped into the pristine grass, and he looked left and right to make sure no one saw. Caitlin laughed.
“Why didn’t you tell me? About NYU and the video?”
She turned to look at Alice. Alice let the hurt she had been hiding show on her face, and Caitlin’s expression immediately softened. Alice returned her gaze until she looked away.
“I don’t know.”
Alice cracked the windows and turned the car off. The clock she had been studying went blank.
Caitlin looked at her hands, struggling to twist Chelsea’s class ring around on her ring finger. Her own, Alice had noticed, was on Chelsea’s index finger. Alice leaned back in her seat and waited for Caitlin to speak again.
“It was easy…to tell you I was gay,” Caitlin started, looking ahead with her eyes fixed on the middle, second-floor window—Rob’s window—or so Alice thought, though her daughter had no way of knowing which was his. “I knew you would still love me. I didn’t worry about that.”
“Of course, I still love you, honey. Is that what this is about?” Alice rested her hand on Caitlin’s shoulder.
“With the video…it was different. I was afraid if you saw it…” Caitlin swallowed. “I was afraid if you saw it, that you would think I didn’t love you.” She started to cry. “And I didn’t want you to think that. Because I do, and it wasn’t like that. I… It’s what I felt. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” She wiped her face with the backs of her hands, like she always did as a child when she cried.
“I know. It’s okay.” Alice reached over the center console to hug her. “But you can always tell me anything. I know you love me, of course I know that.”
They held each other, Caitlin sniffling into Alice’s shoulder and Alice breathing in her scent, the girl who always had her heart, who always would, so tightly.
She had decided to be more honest.
First, with herself, about Rob and what he meant to her, about all the choices she’d made, and why. Then, with Walker, about their marriage, about the divorce. And yesterday, with Maura.
Although Alice could never tell her mother everything she wanted to, everything she’d learned about Rob, she could do one thing. When Maura had inevitably asked “Where is Rob?”—as she always seemed to now—Alice had told some version of the truth.
“Remember, Mama?” she said, grabbing her mother’s hand. “He’s in New Orleans, playing his music, living with the love of his life. He’s happy, but he still misses us, and we still miss him.”
Alice paused, watching to see how her mother would react, if it would result in the tearful pleas that it normally did. But her mother only smiled and sat back.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 29
