Setting Free the Kites

by Alex George

  I hadn’t seen Nathan before the service started, and now I scanned the thinning crowd, looking for him. Just then I saw a plume of smoke jet skyward from behind a group of mourners. I headed toward it. Sure enough, there was Nathan’s mother, sucking on a cigarette. Nathan stood next to her, wearing the same suit he had worn to his own father’s funeral. He raised a hand in silent greeting.

  “Hello, Robert,” said Mrs. Tilly, expelling a lungful of smoke as she spoke. “I’m so very sorry about your brother.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Tilly,” I said. I turned to Nathan. “Do you remember when we went back to your house and flew that kite on the beach? After your father’s funeral?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “I want to do something like that for Liam.”

  “You want to fly a kite?”

  “No. But I want to find my own way to say good-bye. I don’t know if he would have enjoyed that funeral much. Come back home with me?”

  “Mom?” said Nathan.

  Mrs. Tilly had dropped her cigarette in the snow and was trying to extinguish it with the heel of her shoe. She looked up at us, distracted. “What?”

  “Can I go back to Robert’s house?”

  She smiled at us vaguely. “Of course. You boys go and have some fun.”

  Nathan and I exchanged glances. “Fun,” said Nathan drily. “All right, then.”

  The church was a five-minute walk from our house. I went back to my parents and told them that Nathan and I were leaving. I left them still standing by Liam’s grave.

  Back at home we went into Liam’s bedroom. Nathan sat down on the bed and looked at me. “Well?” he said.

  “Maybe we should play his favorite records as a final send-off.”

  “Good idea,” said Nathan.

  “I know the perfect song to start with.” I squatted down in front of Liam’s albums and scanned the spines until I saw what I was looking for. I pulled out the record and put it on the turntable.

  The song was “(I Live for) Cars and Girls” by the Dictators. Liam had loved the breezy, high-pitched harmonies, unashamed Beach Boys rip-offs, and frenetic, chugging guitar line that powered the song along. He used to rock back and forth in his wheelchair, singing along with the chorus:

  There’s nothing else in this crazy world

  Except for cars and good, good, good girls

  We listened to the song twice, and then Nathan chose the next record, something by Iggy and the Stooges. He lay on the bed and I stretched out on the carpet as we listened. The music was loud and fast and relentless. I let the waves of noise wash over me. When the song finished, I remained where I was, grateful for the silence.

  “I wonder where Liam is now,” I said.

  “That depends,” said Nathan.

  “On what?”

  “On what you believe.”

  “Why should it matter what I believe?” I said. “I’m not the one who’s dead.”

  “Of course it matters!” exclaimed Nathan. “How can you believe Liam is in heaven if you don’t think heaven exists?”

  “But I do believe in heaven,” I said quickly.

  “And what about Liam?” asked Nathan.

  I realized that I didn’t know what Liam believed. He had always come to church with the rest of us, but even when his mortality was on all of our minds, he and I had never talked about what might happen after he died. If he’d had any doubts, he probably would have kept them to himself—my mother was always alert for the faintest whiff of heresy within the family. “I guess he did,” I said after a moment, almost obliterated by remorse that guesswork was all I had left.

  “Hey, look,” said Nathan. He was holding an envelope in one hand, the Ramones’ debut record in the other. “This was tucked inside the sleeve. It’s got your name on it.”

  I grabbed the envelope and tore it open. My brother’s messy handwriting was unmistakable.

  Robbie:

  If you’ve found this letter, that means that you’ve been looking through my records. Good for you. Maybe you’ve even played a few.

  You always liked the hippies with their acoustic guitars more, but I still think there’s hope for you. I want you to have my records when I’m gone.

  And, Robbie, wherever I am now, it’s a long way away, so do me a favor and play them LOUD.

  Liam

  I silently handed the letter to Nathan. While he was reading I slipped the Ramones record out of its sleeve. I was going to play “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” ninety seconds of high-tempo anarchy with lyrics that always made Liam laugh. But instead I dropped the needle at the first track of side one, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” I knew that Liam’s decision to leave his letter where he did was significant. He adored all of his bands, but he loved the Ramones most of all. He had died wearing a T-shirt with their name on it. In honor of that, I decided to play the whole album, just in case he really was listening somewhere. As the opening riff blasted into the room, I remembered his request. I turned the music up as loud as it would go.

  We were pummeled by the waves of sound that shrieked into the room. The songs were all short and frenetic, squalling riots of energy. It seemed like a perfect epitaph, a noisy counterpoint to the quiet grief of the funeral service. I knew Liam would have approved.

  Buffeted by an onslaught of pile-driving guitar riffs, I lay on the floor and reread my brother’s letter, over and over again. Liam had listened to these records to escape from his illness. Now they offered a means of retreat for me as well—just as he had known they would. That blistering eruption of sound cauterized my hurt, numbed me into oblivion, and, just for a while, made everything feel not quite so bad.

  The music was so loud that we never heard the front door.

  I only knew my parents were home when the bedroom door was flung open. Before I could scramble to my feet, my father had stormed across the room and yanked the needle off the record with a sickening scratch that was even more abrasive than Johnny Ramone’s distorted guitar. In the silence that followed I could hear my ears ringing.

  “Liam’s body is barely in the ground and you’re already playing his records!” shouted my father. He had removed his jacket and tie, but his shirt was still buttoned up to the neck, which made him look like a forgetful schoolboy who had mislaid part of his uniform. He stood in front of me, breathing heavily.

  “We just wanted to say good-bye in our own way,” I said.

  My father’s gaze fell on Nathan, who was sitting very still on the bed, and then turned back to me. “A church service not good enough for you?”

  “Liam wouldn’t have enjoyed all those hymns, Dad. This was more his thing.”

  My father looked at me for a moment. “I never, ever want to hear another of his records again,” he said.

  “Actually,” I said, “they’re my records.” I gave him Liam’s letter.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  “Liam tucked it inside a record sleeve for me to find,” I said, more defiantly than I felt. “The Ramones. They were his favorite.”

  But my father wasn’t listening. He was staring at the letter, clutching the paper so tightly that it shook between his fingers. I glanced across at Nathan, who gave me the tiniest nod of encouragement. “So you see,” I said, “Liam’s records belong to me now.”

  My father handed the letter back to me. “You’re welcome to the damn things,” he said. “But you won’t play them in my house.”

  “Dad—”

  “Listen to me, Robert. If I hear so much as a single one of these songs again then I swear I’ll break every one of those records over my knee, one by one.”

  He turned and walked out of the bedroom.

  1978

  SEVENTEEN

  The weeks following Liam’s death felt like waking from a long sleep.

  A black knot of loss remained inside
me. Thoughts of my brother slammed into me the moment I awoke, fracturing the morning before my still-groggy brain could marshal its defenses. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know that Liam was going to die, but still his absence shocked me, day after day. Pain lurked around every corner, ready to ambush me when I was least expecting it.

  We barely noticed Christmas.

  I watched my parents for clues about how they were feeling, but they were giving nothing away. They packed up their feelings, out of sight and beyond harm’s reach. We politely went about things as if there were nothing amiss, but we were silent reservoirs of sorrow, each of us filling up with unspoken sadness. I climbed into my bed each night exhausted by the day’s charades and masquerades but knowing that I would be awake for hours yet. My grief would not relinquish me; it gripped me tight, suffocating me. Images and memories of Liam crashed through my consciousness, an unrelenting kaleidoscope of everything that was lost. As I stared wide-eyed into the darkness, I heard my father sobbing through the walls and my mother murmuring softly as she tried to comfort him. I listened to their sorrow and wished that they would share it with me. But when I went down to breakfast the following morning their masks were back in place. All I wanted to do was talk about Liam. It was the one thing that seemed utterly impossible.

  And so we each continued to negotiate separate courses through our heartbreak, tacking away from one another when our paths ran too close. My father spent more and more time at the park, and my mother disappeared in a storm of good deeds. She put herself on the church cleaning roster so often that the odor of industrial disinfectant began to cling to her. She volunteered to ferry elderly members of the St. Mary’s congregation to and from Mass every morning. On weekends she escaped into a maelstrom of culinary industry, producing delicious-smelling items for a never-ending fiesta of church bake sales and raffles. She would swat away my hungry fingers whenever I tried to help myself to a slice of cake or a freshly baked cookie. Not for you, she would admonish me.

  Nothing was ever for me.

  —

  JANUARY BROUGHT a brutal arctic front from the north. I couldn’t remember its ever being so cold. The frozen air settled deep in my chest, heavy and malignant, and seemed to slow the world down to a lethargic crawl.

  One bitter Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Tilly drove Nathan over to our house. My father was working at the park and my mother was organizing a winter coat drive at St. Mary’s. Having the house to myself meant that, for once, I could play Liam’s records as loud as I liked without fear of angry paternal sanction. Nathan and I spent several hours listening to music at a volume so loud that it made my head throb.

  Nathan sat by the window and gazed out at the yard while the records played. It was only his second winter in Maine, and he still couldn’t get over the snow. “I could look at this all day,” he said, hugging his knees.

  I walked across the room and looked out of the window. The snow hid everything. It made the world perfect and unblemished, and I knew that wasn’t right. Suddenly I needed to be out in it, kicking up a storm, obliterating all those smooth lines. “Let’s go outside,” I said.

  “But it’s freezing,” said Nathan.

  “So we’ll run around,” I said. “Or we could build a snowman and dress him up.” I opened the door to Liam’s closet, looking for suitable snowman clothes.

  “Hey, look at that,” said Nathan. My brother’s old wheelchair nestled at the back of the closet. Liam hadn’t used it in years—not since the hospital had delivered the gleaming motorized model that trundled about the house with a nudge of its rubber joystick. The sides of the wheelchair were pushed together so that the gray leather seat creased upward. Nathan hauled it into the middle of the room and opened it so that the metal frame locked into place with two heavy clicks. “Interesting,” he said.

  “Interesting how?” I asked.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “Is your pond frozen?”

  “Solid. Has been for weeks.”

  “Then I can think of something more fun than building snowmen.”

  We put on snowsuits, boots, hats, gloves, and scarves, and hauled the wheelchair out of the back door. Nobody had stepped into the yard for weeks, and the snow came up over our knees. We carried the wheelchair down to the pond on our shoulders, like the ceremonial throne of an invisible African prince. I glanced behind me and was pleased to see the messy trenches we had made, gratified by the violence we had inflicted on all that flawless white.

  The frozen surface of the pond was flinty in the pale afternoon light. Nathan stepped out onto the ice and jumped up and down several times. Once he was satisfied that it was safe, he began to make his way across the pond, testing for weaknesses. The ice was the color of cold bone, the freeze a deep one. Nathan turned and beckoned to me. I pushed the wheelchair in front of me.

  “Sit down,” said Nathan when I joined him in the middle. I lowered myself into the seat. He pushed the wheelchair to the far side of the pond and then turned it around.

  “Where are the brakes on this thing?” I asked.

  “You won’t need brakes,” said Nathan as he started to push. Once we had gained some momentum he gave me a final shove and sent me careening over the ice. The sensation of unbound velocity was thrilling. It felt as if I were floating, free of friction and gravity. When the wheelchair hit the bank of snow on the far edge of the pond, I was catapulted out of the seat and landed facedown in the snow. As I lay there I felt a sudden rush of happiness.

  Nathan hurried across the pond and helped me to my feet. We hauled the wheelchair upright and lifted it back onto the ice.

  “My turn,” he said.

  As I launched him back across the pond, Nathan flung his arms in the air and let out a shriek of glee. By the time the wheelchair hit the opposite snowbank, he was laughing wildly.

  And so, with Liam’s old wheelchair as our getaway vehicle, we staged another escape. For the next hour we sent each other back and forth across the pond, cackling with delight as we flew across the ice. We were two dark points of constant motion in that vast, silent stillness of white. We barely noticed the cold. We knelt, we squatted, we stood—we rode that wheelchair every way we could. One time Nathan hopped onto the back of it, and we sailed across the ice together. Our shouts rose up into the winter air.

  Finally we returned to the house, happy and exhausted, the wheelchair borne triumphantly aloft on our shoulders once again.

  My mother was waiting for us in the kitchen.

  She was standing by the window, still wearing her coat. Nathan and I froze at the back door.

  “I made you some cocoa,” she said. She pointed to two steaming mugs on the kitchen table. “You must be freezing. You’ve been out there for a long time. Take off your suits and warm up.”

  We did as we were told. We sat at the kitchen table in silence while my mother bustled around and told us about the coat drive at church. Nathan and I looked at each other over the rims of our mugs while she talked. Apologies and explanations formed on my lips but faded away as quickly as they came. The wheelchair stood by the back door, dripping tiny pools of melted snow onto the linoleum. My mother did not look at it once.

  Later that afternoon, after we had driven Nathan back to Sebbanquik Point, I wiped off the wheelchair with a rag. I folded it up and put it back in Liam’s closet. My mother didn’t comment on its disappearance. I waited for her stinging rebuke, but it never came. There were no angry words of admonition, not one.

  —

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, when I got home from school, I went into Liam’s bedroom, as I always did. I liked to spend a little time in there each day. I found comfort in being surrounded by his stuff. Those familiar things would never bring my brother back, but they made him feel less far away.

  That day, though, the sheets had been removed from his bed, the trash had been emptied, and his mess had been picked up off the c
arpet. I walked over to the closet and opened the door.

  The wheelchair was gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  After the incident with the wheelchair, my mother stopped volunteering at church. She became a constant, furtive presence in the house; I could feel her lurking, silently monitoring me. She spent hours gazing out the window, lost in thought. A stillness settled on her. She had been waiting for Liam to die for so long, and a terrible, fretful waiting it had been. His death had wrung out every last piece of her, and now there was nothing for her to do but sit quietly until her strength returned. Within that new calm I thought I could also detect a new resilience. She knew that she had survived the worst of it.

  My father, in contrast, could not stop moving. He ricocheted between our home and the park, filling his days with a never-ending circus of chores and distractions. He was always stepping out the door, escaping to somewhere else. There was no stopping him, but that was the point. That riot of perpetual forward motion gave him no time to think. It was only late at night, when he had no choice but to stop moving, that the tears came.

  Between my mother’s quiet surveillance and my father’s frenetic activity, home began to suffocate me. Now that I was no longer allowed to stay in the house alone, I could never play Liam’s records. They remained in his bedroom, silent, gathering dust. I thought about my brother’s letter to me, his plea to keep playing the music loud, and felt another twinge of betrayal, one more reason to feel bad about everything. Then one morning I remembered the invitation that Lewis had made at the funeral. The piece of paper that he had given me was still in my suit pocket. I dialed the phone number he’d written down and listened to the ringtone in my ear. Just as I was about to hang up, there was a rattle and I heard Lewis speak gruffly.