How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  “Of course!”

  “I’m so embarrassed for how I acted. I tossed and turned all night, worrying you were mad at me. I didn’t even eat breakfast this morning I was so upset.”

  “It’s okay,” Alice said, fighting her typical impulse to apologize herself when an apology was given to her. “The house was a surprise for me, too, and we were both…caught off guard.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure what you found was a shock too. The only reason we decided not to show you the autopsy after Rob died was that we knew it would be too upsetting. I’m sure that was hard for you to see.”

  “It was.” The figure from the autopsy flashed in her mind as she stopped at the light, and she thought back to the hollowed skin around Rob’s eyes in the photo from her mother’s letter. “But I’m glad I got the chance to see that you and Mama looked for Rob. Thanks for helping her. I’m sure it meant a lot.”

  “We tried, Lord knows we did. Your mother, well, angels couldn’t have done it better.”

  “And Daddy didn’t know?”

  She wished, no matter how unlikely, that Jamie would say her father helped, had changed his mind, had proven Rob wrong. If only Rob could have seen their father the night she tripped over him and his bottle of whiskey while sneaking back in the house. He would have understood how much Richard loved him, even if he wasn’t always good at showing it.

  Jamie sighed.

  “I still feel guilty about that, but I can’t say no to a woman in distress. She had already talked to Richard about it, and he didn’t want to be involved, didn’t want her to do anything either, but your mother wouldn’t stop. Credit goes to her. It was only a loan from me. I only wish it had ended differently.”

  “Me too.” Ended with Rob coming back to Alice, coming back to the family. Ended with Rob knowing their mother had searched for him, hadn’t wanted him to be on his own, had missed him and didn’t mean what she had said in rage after Alice ended up in the hospital. If only.

  Alice looked at Jamie’s letter, where it sat in the passenger seat.

  “How did the rest of the day go?” he said. “Find anything else of interest?”

  The light changed to green, and she looked away from the letter. There would be a time to give him his letter, to discuss what Rob had written to their parents, but not until she knew what to do with the letters addressed to people she didn’t recognize.

  “I’m pulling in to pick Robbie up now, but I’ll call you later in the week and give you an update on the house. Bye.”

  “Wait… My offer’s still good, if you need it. About cleaning out the house.”

  The last-ditch offer made her remember the shocked tone of his voice when she caught him with the box. She hung up, wishing she hadn’t heard the last part of the call.

  As she pulled into the elementary school pickup line, where it already wound out of the school and down the street, the word loan stuck out. A loan until after Richard died, when Maura had control of the purse strings absent his precise balancing and calculations. After everything Jamie had done, he deserved that, at least. She made a mental note to make sure her mother remembered to pay Jamie back. With interest.

  She unlocked the car, and Robbie climbed in the back seat.

  “Where’s Buddy?” he asked as he buckled his seat belt without her having to ask, as he had since he was small. He was her little rule follower, so different from his namesake, “the great scar on the Tate family,” as Rob had called himself.

  “I went to visit Mimi today, so I had to take him back. We’ll see him when we get home.” She glanced at Robbie in the rearview mirror as she pulled out of the school parking lot. He looked quietly out the window, probably deep in thought about the school day. She didn’t question him, but let him sit, allowing her own thoughts to fill the silence.

  Growing up before Rob left, Alice had been so much like Robbie, a rule follower, content with silence, quiet at school. But, after he left, she had inched closer and closer to her brother, adopting his world labels, rebelling, sulking, sneaking out to find him, and refusing to take part in any of Maura’s activities that she had submitted to with a frown with Rob around. Meanwhile, even separated from her, he had inched closer to Alice, writing his letters, hiding his fears about their mother on the highest shelf in his brain, as he had cautioned Alice not to. By the time he wrote the letters, the siblings seemed more alike than ever, as if opposite magnets drawn together by a force more powerful than either. The knowledge, although sad, made Alice smile, to think that she’d had an effect on Rob, even apart, as he had on her.

  * * *

  A few hours later, Alice shifted from one uncomfortable black heel to the other on the front porch of the Welshes’ stone mansion. She was about to fish her mother’s letter from her bag to read it again when the new Mrs. Welsh came to the door. Kayla opened her mouth in a wide smile and waved frantically with one hand as Alice approached the door. Alice waved back, returning the exaggerated smile and the jerky motion with her hand.

  “How are you?” Kayla leaned in and touched her cheek to Alice’s. “We were afraid we’d have to start without you!”

  “Sorry, the sitter was late.” Alice stepped into the oversize foyer.

  “Can I take your bag?”

  “Nope! No…I’ve got it.” Alice swung the bag behind her back.

  Kayla narrowed her eyes in confusion at her and the bag.

  “Thanks though.” Alice smiled.

  As they passed the stairs to the basement on their way to the kitchen, Alice heard the television and the laughter of Walker and Kayla’s husband, Mark, Walker’s best friend. They had met in undergrad at Emory and remained close.

  “I think we’re about twenty minutes away from dinner. The chicken’s almost done.” Kayla peeked nervously at the food in the oven. This was the first get-together at her house since Mark married Kayla, the twenty-seven-year-old fitness trainer he had run off with. Alice had been friends with his first wife, Helen, but after the divorce she moved to North Carolina with the kids to be near her parents.

  As Alice watched Kayla pour wine into the newly monogrammed glasses, she thought she should help toss the salad or set the table, as she normally would. But she wanted to talk to Mark about the X-rays. After she thanked Kayla for the wine, Alice disappeared down to the basement. She heard Kayla ask how much butter Walker liked on his lima beans as she descended the stairs but didn’t turn around.

  “Lady on the premises!” Mark called. He beat his hands on the wooden bar like a drumroll. Walker turned from the couch in the other room and raised a vintage whiskey glass in greeting as he watched her hug Mark.

  They talked about the kids briefly, and how Mark’s were adjusting to the new school—“They’re fighters, I’m telling you”—before Alice asked if she could get his opinion on something. She gestured toward the now-empty playroom next door. He nodded and followed her.

  “I know you’re not this type of doctor, but I was wondering if you could look at these.” Alice pulled the X-rays from her bag.

  “Hmm. What’da we have here?” he said. He glanced at them for a moment. “You stealing people’s medical records?” He laughed, but her cheeks flushed.

  “No, um. They’re my brother’s, I think.”

  “Oh.” He studied her for a second as he took a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his starched shirt. In the other room, Walker said “You’ve got to be kidding me!” at the TV.

  Mark held the black sheets to the light. Alice stared at each one as he did, trying to see what he saw.

  “You know, I’m an anesthesiologist.” He looked at her and she nodded. “But I’d say these indicate a pretty advanced stage of cancer. You can see it here,” he said, running his finger over the blotches on the black. “In the lungs and spreading into other areas. I can’t remember… Is that what he died from?”

  “I’m not s
ure.” She glanced at Walker looking at the TV and felt Mark’s eyes on her. “I also have this.” Alice retrieved the autopsy report from her bag.

  He whistled as he read the numbers on the blood analysis chart.

  “What?”

  “There’s a lot in his system.”

  “Could that be the normal dose, if someone was…if someone was terminal?” She tried to remain distant, imagining herself as a doctor on a medical show, asking about a John Doe patient.

  “The opioid could be from a legal prescription of pain medication. It’s likely he would be prescribed that if his cancer was advanced. But the amount in his blood here is way over the legal dose. About four times more.” He looked at her. “Combined with alcohol and a half a bottle of Tylenol, could be a lethal.”

  Mark was looking at her, studying her facial expressions with too much interest. She rushed to fill in the silence.

  “Clark State.” She pointed to the name and address on the X-rays. “Do you know any doctors who work there? Is it a good hospital?”

  His brow furrowed, then he shook his head no.

  “Clark State prison,” he said. “Not hospital. One of my buddies volunteers there. They always need medical help.”

  Every muscle in her body went rigid.

  A prison.

  Rob was in prison.

  “You okay?” Mark touched her arm.

  She waved him away, unable to form words.

  The intercom crackled, and Kayla’s voice rang out in her singsong: “Dinner’s ready, darlin’.”

  Mark flashed Alice a pitying smile and called Walker to come upstairs.

  * * *

  The dining room was freshly painted, a color so dark it looked black, with a large gold mirror hung above a china cabinet. Kayla and Mark sat at opposite ends of a long iron table with Alice and Walker on either side in monogrammed gold and maroon velvet chairs. Something about all the empty chairs and staring at herself in the mirror doubled Alice’s loneliness.

  As Kayla droned on about the table and the house, Alice tried to put together all the pieces—the cancer, the drugs, the amount, what she heard from her parents at the time, the letters meant for her mother and father…her brother behind bars. True, Rob had an intensity to him, even as a child, an affinity for disobeying the rules, but she didn’t believe him capable of doing something truly terrible.

  Walker stared at his dessert knife, brooding. He had been happy this morning when she said she planned to go to the Center instead of the house. But she could tell from watching his shoulder blades while she climbed the stairs behind him that he’d listened to more of her conversation with Mark than she thought.

  “So, I called them,” Kayla said. “I called them and got some guy in India—you know how it is—and I said, ‘Let me talk to your manager,’ and he put me on hold and someone else picked up and I explained the situation, that we were meant to have a dinner party here this week, and if they didn’t get this table here by then, they might as well cancel the order, and not only that, but that I had a three-million-dollar house to fill and I would never order from them again unless they got that table here!”

  Mark erupted in laughter. “Look at this girl. Knows how to get what she wants, that’s for sure.”

  Walker chuckled.

  “Alice, I don’t know how you do it,” Kayla said, and Alice whipped a bit too fast back to the conversation.

  “Do what?”

  Kayla spread her arms, gesturing to the expanse of stuff and house and space around them. Alice tried to focus on her, but a vision of the dining room as it had been before distracted her, the floral wallpaper with those blue jays on it halfway up, and below, the cream walls smudged from the hands of Caitlin and Robbie and Helen’s three children, playing and running, happy. Exactly the childhood she’d wanted for her children, the one that had been taken from her. Now though, with Helen and Mark’s divorce, the house was quiet; the water glasses, crystal.

  “I feel like I’m working three full-time jobs decorating this house. I’m working with a designer, but even then, there’s so much to do. On top of that, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping—we have people helping, but the agency sends people who’ve never done this before. They have to be watched so closely, you know. And trying to meet our new neighbors, go to Women’s Club events. I’m trying to learn to golf so Mark and I can play. And to think what it’ll be like when we start having kids.”

  Walker wouldn’t want more kids with Brittani, Alice dared to hope. Their screaming matches over the shots, the hormones, the cost of multiple rounds of IVF were the only time in their marriage they had been willing to come at each other, instead of retreat to separate corners. If he hadn’t wanted that, surely he wouldn’t want another baby at his age, but then again, that was with Alice and her misshapen uterus, not with Brittani’s likely perfect one and fresh eggs. She pushed the capers off her chicken.

  Kayla pursed her lips into an air-kiss to Mark across the table, and he returned it.

  “And you, on top of all that, with two kids and volunteering with those schools at the lake, it’s so sweet.”

  Walker gave Alice a look as if to say, I dare you. But the dinner was bad enough already without another fight about how what started as a “hobby,” alongside her “most important job” as a mom, had become a full-fledged career, with employees, a seven-figure budget, and partnerships with universities. She didn’t correct Kayla.

  “I know how you feel.” Alice took a long sip of her wine. “It’s a lot.”

  Alice pushed the thoughts of X-rays and prison and children out of her mind and listened closely so she could remember what Kayla said; she wanted to tell it to Meredith later. Any interaction could be deemed worth it if Alice laughed about it with Meredith afterward.

  “I try to talk to my friends, but they don’t understand. They do their jobs and they’re done, and they go to bars or to eat out or whatever. They don’t know what it’s like managing a house, you know?”

  “That must be hard,” Alice said. She did the math in her head—calculating how much older she was than Kayla. It felt like several generations. But really, it was nothing to do with age. Alice had heard this conversation dozens of times at the Women’s Club events she sometimes convinced herself to attend to make connections with new donors for the Center.

  “And on top of that”—everyone turned to Walker as he joined the conversation—“she has a new project too. Why don’t you tell them about your little project, sweetheart? I’m sure Kayla would love to hear about it.”

  How many drinks had he had? Alice tried to place his slurring, almost satirical tone on a spectrum she’d come to know well since Robbie entered school and Caitlin began high school. Ten? Twelve?

  “Oh yes! I would love to hear about it,” Kayla said.

  “Well, it’s a genealogy project,” Alice said. Walker let out a “Ha!”

  “I wish I had time to do that. My mother did a big project about five years ago. She went all around the country to local libraries and courthouses. One of my ancestors is a Native American princess. You wouldn’t know it, of course, with how pale I can get,” Kayla said.

  “My father sent off for military records when I was young too,” Mark said. “Found out one of our ancestors was a ‘damn Yankee’! I swear, I didn’t even know ‘damn Yankee’ was two words till I was about fourteen.”

  Kayla and Mark laughed together, while Alice stared and Walker brooded.

  “What are you finding, Alice?” Kayla said.

  “I’ve just started really. I’m in the documents phase right now, mainly gathering pictures and records in my parents’ house.”

  “Exciting,” Kayla said.

  “You know what else is exciting?” Walker said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “Alice thinks we should let Caitlin apply to New York University for college!”

 
Kayla looked at Mark, questioning, as Walker muttered “I’m done” and pushed away his plate. He disappeared back to the kitchen. Alice heard the jingle of his keys and shot Mark a look. He stood up to follow Walker.

  “Do you think it was the chicken?” Kayla said.

  Alice didn’t answer.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, hair down and curled like Walker liked, her lips outlined in red lip liner and filled in with red lipstick, all in an effort to erase last night’s tension, to keep things calm a little longer. She hadn’t dressed up this much since the last function she attended with Walker. She felt unlike herself, like someone else inhabited her body and said things like “bless his heart!”

  She was a liar—and had always been—with Walker, from their first date. Rob and Jake had hollowed her out, and Walker had met merely the shell left behind. Although the shell was only inches deep, he had never thought or cared to question what it had held before.

  Her children, however, didn’t deny who they were. Caitlin’s personality had surprised Alice, that always-questioning girl, a tomboy in her youth, directing boys and girls in play as she did now at the high school. How did she raise such a child, so willing to buck convention, when Alice’s habit was being quiet and doing what was expected? She figured it was random—nature, not nurture—but then with Robbie, it had happened again. She was raising a quiet, contemplative boy who seemed to ignore the pressure to fit in, even from his father, a boy who was happy to slump and drag behind his team members in the four organized sports teams in which Walker enrolled him each year.

  Her children gave Alice the courage to question her own choices, so slowly she had let the foundation of her marriage crack. Through the cracks, her real self, the one she had buried after Rob and Jake, came through. Inch by inch, Walker and Alice stepped apart and Alice stepped closer to herself.

  That’s why she didn’t blame him for the texts, not really. Finding them was almost a relief, to know that he felt the distance between them too. That he cared enough to do something; it was more than she could say for herself.