She wouldn’t repeat her past mistakes. Walker was safe. He would never have the same power that Rob had, the same authorization Jake had to destroy her, to promise her stupid little dreams about Rob that would never come true, then turn on her when she started to believe them.
* * *
On the dock, Alice strapped her feet back into the heels she hadn’t thought to change out of.
She again pictured Rob, on the other side of the phone call with her mother, when she told him to stay away after Alice came back from the hospital. He had stayed away. She had changed the course of his life, their life together, without even knowing it. And hadn’t he done the same—wrenched her off the course of Jake and toward Walker with nothing more than a misplaced doppelgänger?
She remembered how, as a child, one glance at Rob’s face could alter her mood for the whole day. The days of his lost-in-space expression, the blank sadness that made her constantly scan the house for anything that might nudge him further down into one of his dark moods. Her own anxiety would build up in her chest, turning over a joke or a story that she prayed would cheer him up. And he threw away his own days at school or the playground with one helpless look from her, rushing to her side.
And even now, he reached out of the grave, calligrapher’s pen in hand, into Alice’s life, bringing her back with his letters.
She couldn’t say she regretted any of it, the haphazard connections, made and missed, that led her to this spot on the pond. Marrying Walker had made her children possible and made the Center possible. For she had only thought of the Center six months into their relationship, when she had dared to dream again. With Walker, her dreams focused on work instead of on rings and weddings and children, as they had with Jake.
She only wondered, if Rob hadn’t left or if he’d come back, what would her life—her children, her marriage, her job, her friends, her family—look like? It was a hard question, one that Rob would never be able to ask of his own life and the many directions that never were. If things had been different, if she hadn’t gone to the hospital, what would he have done? It was only a fluke of timing that he called then. Imagine the call coming a week sooner, Alice safe in her bed. Again, Maura would hear the breathing on the phone, but this time, she would beg him to return, and he would.
Maybe he would be with his family in a house in the suburbs right now, a mama’s boy, ever-present at the nursing home, weighed down with his mother’s favorite books, teaching Caitlin and Robbie the guitar, laughing on Alice’s front porch with her deep into the night.
She could never know.
She put everything in her backpack. As she grabbed her phone, though, she hesitated. She opened the browser and decided to answer the one question she could. She tapped until the letters slowly formed into something she knew. “J-A-K-E O-C-O-N-N-E-L-L.”
The circle ran around its loop as the search results loaded painfully slowly. Alice rested her finger on the lock button in case she decided to make the screen go dark. There would probably be nothing. Not everyone was searchable on Google.
The first result was a Facebook profile. She clicked.
His profile picture showed a tanned man sitting on the side of a creek, holding a fishing pole. He wore sunglasses and a hat and had a beard, but she couldn’t make out his features with the zoomed-out photo. It was the only picture she could see since they weren’t “friends.” She clicked “About.”
Jake O’Connell. Lives in: New Orleans, Louisiana. A pang hit her chest. New Orleans. Where Rob had died, where the boxes came from. Where Rob’s letter to Lila was addressed.
Her eyes skipped over “Works at: Environmental Solutions” and centered on “Relationship Status: Single,” and a smile spread on her face before she checked herself. Emboldened, she hit the back button to go to Google and clicked the next result.
“Environmental Solutions” sat in the left-hand corner of the page with a blog reel down the center. She clicked “About Us.”
A picture of a man in a suit filled her screen, and her eyes bore into him. He looked different, polished, but she still saw the same playfulness in his deep-brown eyes. In her mind, he remained the twenty-year-old in his muddy Birkenstocks and cargo shorts, but they had both grown up.
Jake O’Connell founded Environmental Solutions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to develop solutions to watershed management issues in the Southeast. Drawing on a career of sustainable farming in Ecuador, Jake explores connections between the environment and the people who live there. He works for the people, representing them and the New Orleans environment to lawmakers in Washington, DC.
Alice clicked off the website and went back to the Google results. The next was a news article in the Times-Picayune, “Services for Kellen O’Connell.”
A bar appeared at the top of her screen. A text from Walker: Qhere arw yiu???
She ignored it and waited for the website to load.
Kellen O’Connell was a happy toddler, his parents said, despite his challenges. Jake and Christie knew their son had a rare disease when he was six months old. They are both genetic carriers for an infant lung disease that affects about eight babies born in the United States each year. In lieu of flowers, the couple requests donations to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
She closed the browser and called Buddy. The panic of picturing herself in that position caused her heart to thud in her chest.
Took Buddy out. Be back in a second, she texted Walker, and stood to go home.
Chapter Thirteen
When Alice woke the next morning, Walker had already left, no doubt up from bed in a productivity streak that always followed nights of heavy drinking. He could never sleep past 5:00 a.m. after too many drinks. When they were dating, often after a night out with Walker’s friends, Alice would wake to coffee, eggs, bacon, blueberry pancakes, and Walker’s tiny kitchen littered with abandoned plastic bags from the twenty-four-hour grocery store.
This morning, though, she climbed out of bed and circled the main floor once, listening for any stirring in the house with her shoulders tense around her ears. Hearing nothing, she continued toward the kitchen where she expected to find Walker at the coffee maker. She brainstormed justifications and arguments, accusations and reactions to last night as she went. Instead, she noticed his running shoes gone from their place in the front hall, next to the muddy heels she’d worn last night to the dock. She found her phone in its normal charging spot with a text from Walker: Ran to Mark’s to get car, then headed early to the office. Her shoulders relaxed.
She retrieved her backpack from the car and quickly, before she lost her nerve, flipped through the five remaining letters to find the closest address. She punched it into her phone’s GPS. As she expected, it wasn’t far away. If she hurried, she could probably get there and back in time for her appointment to pick up her mother’s coat at Macy’s.
After seeing Robbie and Caitlin off to school, including a promise that Alice would come pick up Caitlin before she went to the Fur Vault—“I can make time for something as crazy as that,” her busy daughter said—Alice pulled on jeans, brushed her teeth, washed her face, and threw her hair up in a ponytail. In ten minutes, she had climbed in the car with Buddy in the passenger seat, a to-go coffee in the cup holder, and the letter addressed in her brother’s cursive to Dylan Barnett in her lap.
Twelve turns and thirty-nine minutes later, the five-lane road whittled to four, then three, then two, until Alice’s car kicked up gravel on a dirt road. The GPS remarked, “Your destination is on the right.” Alice drove past a white ranch-style house next to a gas station. She inched her Prius up to the curb and scanned the house’s three windows for life. A television glowed in the right window. Buddy eyed the house suspiciously before lying back down next to her. For the first time this morning, she allowed herself to question the wisdom of the trip: Were these people murderers? What if Dylan didn’t live here anym
ore?
She glanced at the unopened letter in her lap. Mail fraud or not, it felt like an invasion of privacy to rip the delicate cream paper and the melted red of the fancy seal.
Alice looked at the house again as a truck pulled up behind her. An orange and blue Fisher-Price slide, a little Flintstone-style car with an orange roof, and about ten other toys littered the house’s overgrown lawn. Surely, she wasn’t in danger if there were children in the house.
The truck honked, and she turned down the next street to park. She cracked the window and told Buddy to “stay.” When she reached the black wooden door, she stopped. What to do now? Ring the doorbell? Knock? Leave the letter? No, that would defeat the purpose of coming. She wanted to talk.
She knocked on the door and stood back. She moved her wedding band up and down as she waited for the door to be answered. Nothing. The television blared what sounded like cartoons through the door. She pounded the door with a closed fist.
The television muted.
She fumbled for the letter as a man opened the door. He wore a white undershirt, carpenter jeans, and a five-year-old child in a princess nightgown around his thigh. Alice estimated the man to be about her age, perhaps a few years younger. His hairline receded slightly, but he had a friendly face. He began to ask “How may I—” then stopped. The man, with the girl standing on one of his booted feet, took a few steps backward, clearing the way for Alice to enter the house.
“Sorry to bother you,” Alice began. “I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
Alice looked at the girl for confirmation of some sort, but she only stared up at the visitor with big green eyes.
“Rob’s sister, right?”
Alice smiled. Dylan was still here! She had never thought that she and Rob looked alike, but maybe they did more than she realized. Alice nodded in confirmation, before clearing her throat: “Yes. Alice.”
“Dylan,” he offered.
He took another step backward and gestured theatrically with his arm for her to “come on in.”
She glanced back to the direction of her car, then followed as Dylan walked into the kitchen, where the countertops peeled up in the corners to show the wood underneath.
“Can I get you something? Water? Coffee? A Coke?”
“Sure, coffee,” she said. “Thanks.” She watched him carefully to try to get a read on the stranger.
“Sit down, sit down!” He pulled a wooden stool from the island and patted it twice. He whispered something to the girl, and she scurried down a hallway between the kitchen and living room, with more toys scattered across the carpet than in the yard. Somewhere down the hall, a door closed.
“I have to admit, I’m surprised to see you.” He took a seat on a mismatched stool on the other side of the island.
“Well, the reason I came was to give you this.” She slid the letter across the island. He took it, reading the name off the front before he turned it over and ran his hand over the embossed seal. In the back of the house, the sound of cartoons clicked on again.
Recognizing her purpose, Alice continued. “It was in Rob’s things when he died. They’ve been in storage, but when I took everything out, I found letters he wrote. From reading my mother’s letter, it looks like they were written shortly before…before he died.” She still had trouble admitting her brother was dead, that he was gone forever, as opposed to gone for now, as he had been most of her life.
“Do you mind?” he said, holding up the letter.
She shook her head no.
He slipped his finger under the envelope flap, waiting for the seal to release. He tugged out the folded papers and a photo. He looked at it, smiled, and set it down on the table in front of him, facedown.
Not wanting to intrude, Alice looked away and sipped the coffee from a mug with a small handprint on the side that dripped paint from its fingers. As Dylan carefully unfolded the letter on the same fancy paper as her mother’s and father’s, with black cursive writing that bled lightly through to the other side, Alice couldn’t help but steal glances at his face and try to guess at the contents. A slight smile, then a crease on the forehead, serious now, then a deep breath in and an exhale. He put the letter back in the envelope as Alice’s patience hit an end. The buzz of questions made her feel like she shouldn’t drink more coffee.
“Did you read this?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“Could’ve mailed it.”
Under the table, her hands returned to her lap and she fiddled with the wedding band.
She waited. He waited.
Finally, Alice said, “I’m hoping to find out more about my brother. We weren’t…in touch.”
“Oh, well.” He flipped the photo over and slid it toward her. “We were friends a long time ago.”
Alice’s eyes scanned the photo for Rob’s presence. She saw him in the middle of the foursome of guys sitting in chairs in a circle, guitar cases, amps, and beer bottles scattered at their feet.
“That’s me.” He pointed to a younger, skinnier version of himself wearing jeans and a T-shirt. “That’s Rob, of course. That’s my cousin, Michael.” He pointed to a young man who couldn’t have been older than Caitlin. He moved his face closer. “You know, I don’t really remember who that is,” he said of the fourth man in the photo, who looked older than the rest. “Oh, wait, that must be the manager of the 40 Watt.”
A jolt went through Alice’s body.
“What was his name?” Dylan looked toward a water stain on the top corner of the ceiling. “Leeee… Liam, Luke. I think it started with an L. I think—”
“The 40 Watt in Athens?” The college town housing the University of Georgia—and Alice for four years of her life. Her mouth hung open.
Dylan nodded.
“Rob was in Athens.” She stared at Dylan, willing him to answer the nonquestion, a classic trick of her mother’s that Alice trained herself over the years to counter with silence instead of a fumbled reply.
“Was that a question?” He laughed nervously. “Yeah, we were in Athens together. He was always close to the vest with his personal life, but I assumed you knew. You know what they say about assuming.”
Yes, she knew.
Like Alice had assumed that when Rob left the family on that trip to Amelia Island, he had boarded a train to New York or San Francisco or a plane to Berlin or Barcelona or anywhere far away from their parents and her and their life together. Instead, he had been in Athens, had been in prison in Georgia, and eventually had died in New Orleans.
“When?” she managed to force out.
“I got there in ninety-three, I think, and he was there a couple of years before me.”
In college, Alice had thought she was going insane, seeing Rob, seeing what she thought was a ghost of her previous life. But the entire time, he had really been there, and Alice had really seen him. She had seen him on the street that day, before she broke up with Jake. She was sure of it now. It wasn’t a vision. It was her brother.
“Why?”
She volleyed the question to Dylan, but her brain buzzed ahead of his answer. Rob came to Athens for her, she thought, she hoped. He came when he knew she would be there. It was too coincidental otherwise. But, then why wouldn’t he talk to her?
“When I got to Athens, he was deep in the music scene there. He dealt for all the biggies. I guess you could say he used the 40 Watt as a kind of office. My cousin Michael and I, we thought he was the coolest… You know how it is when you’re young and stupid.”
She had been to the black-floored music club with the colored Christmas lights dangling from the ceiling. It was right downtown, across from campus, near where she had eaten with Meredith yesterday. She could have seen him dozens of times. He could have seen her. He could have seen her when he was there…dealing, her brain finally registered. Dealing drugs. Maybe he’
d even gone to prison for it. But that was a line of questioning she wasn’t ready for.
“How did you know I was his sister?” Alice said. “Did Rob talk about me?”
“We’ve met before,” he said as if that explained it.
“No, we haven’t.” Alice looked him up and down. She hadn’t seen this man before in her life; she was sure of it. She stood up from the stool, ready to leave if necessary. Dylan was lying and she didn’t trust him, even if he was Rob’s friend.
“Sit down, I’ll prove it to you. In college, you lived in a purple house on Pulaski Street, didn’t you?”
She sat back down. Nodded.
“It’s innocent, I swear,” he said and put his hands up. “I helped Rob bring you back home one night when you weren’t doing so hot, to say the least. I don’t think I would remember my mother’s name in that state.”
Alice clenched the mug so hard, she burned her fingertips. Her mind rushed to make the logical connection that would verify what he claimed: that not only had they met, but that she had met Rob. That he stayed in Athens and knew where she lived for years.
“This must sound crazy,” Dylan said.
“What happened?” Alice tried to quiet her mind and concentrate on his voice.
“Michael and I were hanging out and got a call from Rob to come meet him at some place downtown where we knew the frats hung out. He was the kind of guy…” Dylan started to say, then folded his hands and his voice trailed off. “Well, if he called you and said to come somewhere, you went.”
“We got there, and he was drinking a beer at the bar, sticking out like a sore thumb. We figured he was dealing something to those rich bast”—he glanced up at her before correcting—“guys. Anyway, we thought he was there meeting someone he needed backup for. But when we got there, he pointed to a booth in the back and said that the girl—you—was his sister and that he wasn’t leaving the bar without you.”
How to Bury Your Brother Page 13