How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  “You be Robinson this time,” he said to Edward.

  “Then who are you?” Alice said suspiciously. Rob was always the best at being Robinson Crusoe. Duh.

  “I’m a cannibal!” he screamed. “And I want to eat you!”

  Hayley yelped as Rob stalked toward them like a zombie with his arms stretched high like claws.

  “Quick, explorers!” Edward said in a stuffy accent. “We must reach camp before he takes us!”

  They all ran off, screaming and giggling, into the island’s trees, which they knew so well.

  When the sun lowered in the sky, Rob and Edward paddled the canoe back. Back on shore, they tried to lift the canoe on top of the car, but they couldn’t reach far enough. While pushing, Alice tripped in the mud and scraped her knee on a rock. Blood trickled down her leg. Eventually, with Rob pulling from the top of the car, they secured the canoe and headed home to get showered before their mother’s return, laughing at their day of mischief as they climbed the staircase.

  When their mother called them for dinner, Alice came down in loose shorts and T-shirt. Her mother was fresh from the beauty parlor. Curls branched from her head like a tree’s leaves.

  “Good evening, Mama,” Alice said.

  “Robinson!” Maura called again.

  Richard appeared from his office, and all four sat at the table. Out the window, the gray clouds morphed into a vicious southern storm. The summer rain pounded down like a baptism, the thunder boomed and shook the glass in its frame as the window filled with a godly light. Alice watched the storm while Rob successfully defined capricious.

  She rose to put her dishes in the sink.

  “Alice Tate. What is that on your knee?” Maura walked over, bending down to inspect the blood that dripped down Alice’s leg like the chips in a game of Plinko. Her mother clucked her tongue.

  “It was my fault,” Rob said.

  Surprised by the lie, Alice’s eyes darted to Rob’s face. Rob, don’t, she thought at him, willing him to hear the message.

  He refused to look at her, trudging on with his story: “I pushed her, out by the river.”

  “Robinson!” Maura said, and looked at her husband, shocked. “Did Alice—”

  Pop!

  Alice saw her father’s hand sling across her brother’s cheek, dissected each movement of Rob’s face as it spun away from her from the force.

  “I will not raise the type of man to hit a woman. Go upstairs. Now!”

  Rob turned to go, his eyes only on Richard as he did, refusing to look at Alice. Her cheeks burned as if she had been slapped. He wouldn’t provoke their father so much if he knew that watching him getting slapped was worse punishment than getting slapped herself.

  “Come here, sweetheart,” Richard said, and she went to him, zombie-like, as if she were underwater, weighed down with the air’s new heaviness. He pressed a napkin into the cut. “Did it hurt?”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Maura said. “If you keep scraping your knees, they will scar. When you get older and you want to wear a nice cocktail dress, you’ll sit down at a dinner party and your knees will be scarred. That would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it?”

  Richard withdrew the napkin, and Maura walked over to Alice. Her mother’s imagined portraits of her later life made Alice wish she would never grow up. She stared at the floor, waiting for the moment when she could follow Rob upstairs.

  “Wouldn’t it?” her mother said.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?” Maura grabbed Alice’s chin and tilted it up to look her in the eye. Her mother stared with her crunchy curls, waiting for an answer.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If you can’t go down to the river without bloodshed, then maybe you shouldn’t go at all. Now, get a Band-Aid for that knee and get ready for bed.”

  “So unlike him,” her mother said as Alice left the room.

  An hour or so later, Alice came down to get a glass of water. The dinner plates were cleared and replaced with teacups. Their mother and Rob sat close together, talking about Greek mythology or the symbolism in Grapes of Wrath or the etymology of the word capricious. Maura barely looked up from her open book as Alice filled her glass and walked out. Rob looked up and winked. She smiled.

  By the time the southern storms gained their full force the next year, Rob had retreated deeper into himself, and while Alice could sometimes draw him out, those days at the river were over. And while Alice couldn’t see them then, the gray clouds that would drive her brother away just before his sixteenth birthday had already started rolling in over him.

  And he’d already begun setting up his poles as if readying to get struck by lightning, just to see how it would feel.

  Chapter Seventeen

  She pulled into a small driveway, and her headlights shined on the sign for “Woodland Cemetery.” She checked the address again. It was right. What could that mean?

  Alice thought about going in, but the gates looked locked. She glanced behind her. Robbie slept in the back seat with his headphones on. She already felt guilty for bringing her tired child to a cemetery at night (and feeding him fast food), so she wasn’t about to leave him in the car while she checked out a creepy graveyard in the dark. As she drove home, she listened to Robbie’s soft snores from the back.

  When she arrived home, Alice carried Robbie to his room and lay down in her own, the bed now empty with Walker out of town. Instead of searching “Christopher Smith” as she had earlier that day, she tried his name and “Woodland Cemetery.” It was a hit, on the records for who was buried on the grounds. So he was in the cemetery after all. And had been since 1997.

  Alice went out to get the letter. She opened it carefully, without ripping the paper. It was different though. While on the same type of paper as the other letters, it unfolded to the size of a poster instead of the letter size of the others. A huge decorative cross, done in fountain pen ink like the others, dominated the page.

  “What the hell, Rob?” Alice said to no one.

  She leaned in to look at it more closely. The strong pen marks without any wispy lines reminded her of the sketches he’d do as a teenager, always without the aid of a pencil. By age twelve, he’d filled an entire book with drawings of Jamie, the only person who’d sit for him more than once. Even Alice had grown tired of constantly being accused of moving, even though she was holding her breath.

  She went to her jewelry box and pulled a paper from its bottom drawer, the only relic she had left of Rob, which had escaped her mother’s Rob cleanse because it was in Alice’s school locker at the time. She liked to look at it in class, instead of paying attention, flipping back and forth between her textbook and Rob’s paper.

  The drawing looked like her. Even as a child, she knew it did, but something was different in the face, harder. The Alice in Rob’s drawing was strong, defiant; her lips full of a skeptical pout, her eyes narrowed.

  Looking at it now, it was her expression she noticed. She hadn’t looked at the drawing since his funeral, and before that, since leaving UGA for Duke. The remembering always hurt her. But now she wondered why she hadn’t taken it out, hadn’t framed it, hadn’t kept it near always. For Rob had drawn that strength so clearly, reflected back at her, the strength she always thought belonged to him alone. Was it possible he felt the same way, that it belonged to her alone? Or did he draw it this way because he knew what would come next?

  They had been on their way to Amelia Island when he drew it.

  Rob and Alice sat in Savannah, where their mother always forced the family to stop on the way. They had all eaten lunch and bought fudge at River Street Sweets. After giving a time (and a budget) to Maura, Richard disappeared with Jamie. Their mother told Rob and Alice to sit on the pier and wait for her. She handed Alice a sheet of times tables saying that she expected three pages complete before she returned. Rob sat ne
xt to her while she filled them out, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, his summer reading book for tenth grade. She remembered that was the book because she would read it over and over again after he left, looking for clues, wondering if it was something in the book that caused him to flee from her. She wondered now why he had been so diligent in reading if he knew he would leave before school began again.

  “I hate times tables,” she had groaned.

  “Let’s do something else, then.”

  “But Mama said I have to do these.”

  He motioned for the paper and she handed it to him. He bit his lip and began filling it in, using blocky letters that looked like hers, instead of the slanted ones he normally used. In ten seconds, he had already done more than she did in the last ten minutes. She looked out at a red-and-white riverboat as it chugged down the river, studying the way the water churned through the paddling wheel.

  “Okay, done. I’ve got a game for you.”

  She looked at him, smiling. The week had been one of his worst; he barely talked to her on the long drive that morning. The game, the times tables, showed it was over. The trip could return to normal. Everything would be fine now, she had thought then.

  He took out a sheet of paper from his school notebook and ripped it in half haphazardly, presenting them both to Alice to choose one, as if it were a cookie they were sharing.

  She pointed to the bigger half of paper.

  “Interesting choice.” Had she chosen wrong? “Here’s the game. You draw me, and I’ll draw you, then we’ll swap, and we can keep them forever to remember this exact moment.”

  “I suck at drawing. Why don’t you draw us both? It will be better!”

  “Because those aren’t the rules of the game,” he explained, patiently, firmly. She saw his point. She liked rules.

  She took the paper, and he spun around from her, looking right at her where she couldn’t see his paper. She did the same so that their feet lined up toe to toe, almost touching on the pier’s bench.

  Although she couldn’t remember what her own drawing of him looked like, she remembered the stress of making it. How she’d erased and redrawn Rob’s eyes, trying to get them right, trying to make them smart looking, trying to put the feeling that she got when she looked at him into the drawing, trying to make him understand, trying to will him to stay happy, to let the rest of the week with their parents and Jamie progress peacefully.

  Even with the erasing, she finished before Rob.

  She waited, until finally she got so bored that she picked the math worksheet back up, working backward through the problems he solved. Meanwhile, he looked rapidly from her to the paper, making a stroke or two only every minute. When she saw her mother approaching, loaded down with shopping bags, she leaned over to look.

  “You can see when I’m done!” he said, teasing.

  “Fine!” she said, laughing. “Then you can’t see mine either.”

  “ROBINSON! ALICE!” their mother yelled. “I know you can hear me!”

  Rob grabbed Alice’s hand to pull her up from the bench, and they jogged over to their mother, still smiling, and headed back to the Jeep to continue their trip.

  After tucking the drawing safely back inside her jewelry box, Alice returned to bed. Another question she could never ask him.

  She picked up Christopher Smith’s cross again. It might be another dead end, but she had one last-ditch idea.

  She looked at the clock. It wasn’t even 10:00 p.m. She found Dylan’s card and dialed the number. He answered on the first ring.

  “Dylan? It’s Alice. From this morning?”

  She explained about the letter and asked if he recognized the name.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Alice leaned her head back and hit it on her bed’s wooden headboard. She rubbed the spot that hit.

  “Well, thank—” she started to say.

  “But, let me ask around a little bit and see if I can find anything else, okay? I want to help you. Why don’t you give me a few days, and I’ll call you back?”

  “Really? That’s great!” Alice said. They hung up.

  She went to bed feeling hopeful. Things were finally happening. Alice felt like after decades underwater, she was breathing air again.

  Rob’s Lost Letters:

  Mr. Dylan Barnett

  Ms. Lila King

  Mr. Richard Tate

  Mrs. Maura Tate

  Mr. James Hudson

  Mr. Christopher Smith

  Mr. Tyler Wells

  Chapter Eighteen

  She arrived at Edward’s firm at 8:30 a.m. and told the secretary that she needed to see him.

  Ten minutes later, he strutted into the lobby from the back hallway in a slim-fitting gray suit with slicked hair. He shook the hand of another man in a suit and patted him on the back as he left.

  “Alice, hello.” He waved off the hurried explanations of his secretary. “I didn’t know we had an appointment today.”

  “I was hoping you could squeeze me in, for something…personal.”

  “I see. I thought it might come to this.” He said something to his secretary, who disappeared down a hallway.

  Did Edward know? She briefly wondered if Dylan or the prison had called to warn him before shaking it off as too unrealistic. Although, after finding out yesterday that Rob had lived in Athens for years, and after seeing that picture of her mother on the prison badge, Alice told herself not to assume anything else.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Alice and Edward walked to his large corner office, with a view of Atlanta. In the distance, Alice could make out the green of Centennial Olympic Park in one corner, where her father had bought Caitlin and Robbie their own bricks on their first birthdays to match Alice and Rob’s, where Jamie would take Alice and Rob to play in the fountains.

  Edward walked to his desk to retrieve a metal canister of water before sitting in an armchair at the end of his desk area and gesturing for Alice to sit on a couch across from it.

  The secretary came back in and handed Alice a plastic water bottle and Edward a file. Before Alice could say she didn’t need water—she hated drinking from plastic, too wasteful—the secretary had disappeared, walking faster in her heels than Alice ever could. Edward made tut, tut, tut and mmm sounds as he flipped through the file, Alice presumed to let her know it wasn’t her turn to talk.

  He slammed the file shut with flourish. “So. From our side of things, it’s fairly simple. We’ll send these files over to your attorney. They make clear what assets belong to whom and which are shared. Of course, we’ll be as helpful as we can, but I can’t promise any favorable treatment on your side.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I know we have, shall we say, a history together? But we—the firm, I mean—must remain objective. Think of us as your financial mediators, similar to the mediator you may see to resolve the arrangement for child custody. You are using a mediator, aren’t you? I really, personally, recommend that route.” He clasped his hands together with his fingers under his chin and whispered, “Keeps things from getting too nasty.”

  Alice’s cheeks burned the same way they had at the soccer game last night. Alice glanced at the clock. In DC, Walker would be sleeping in with Brittani, probably discussing their room service order before the “early morning” meeting he would attend at eleven.

  “Eddie.” She saw with pleasure that he still winced at the nickname. “I’m here to talk to you about how you’re listed as Rob’s designated contact with the prison.” A scared, knowing look crossed his face, like Jamie had when she found him trying to take the boxes. So, he knew.

  She stood up. “What the hell is that about?”

  Edward stood with his hands in front of his chest. “Alice, stop, okay? Honest mistake.”

  “W
hat’s an honest mistake? You’re saying you didn’t know about Rob being in prison?”

  “No. My mistake about your, um, divorce.” He did air quotes around the last word.

  “Forget it.” She wanted to. It was the first time someone had said the d-word out loud to her, and she wanted to clear the air of its existence. “What about Rob?”

  Edward gestured to the couch for her to sit again, and she did. He returned to the checkered armchair across from it.

  “What about him?”

  She glared again. Edward glanced at his watch.

  “I have a meeting with a client in ten minutes.”

  “Then make it quick.”

  “He called me a long time ago from prison and said I was his one phone call and that he didn’t want any of y’all to know. I brought him some things—toothbrush, clothes, books, other things he asked for. I went down there a few times to make sure he was all right. The prison called me when he was transferred. I sent him some money and tried to help him get things squared away. I would have told you, but he asked me not to. I only told your mother when I noticed him getting sick.”

  “When he got cancer? What did she say?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that’s what it was then. She said, ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ didn’t ask any questions, and that was it. I never heard anything else about it. I never told Rob I told her, obviously.”

  But her mother had done something about it, Alice knew. She had gone to the prison. If she hadn’t seen Rob (which his letter made it seem like she hadn’t), she must have been there for something related to what Edward had told her about Rob’s health.

  “Did you talk with him about anything else?”

  “He called me, or they did and told me what he needed, and I brought it or sent it to him. He called me to say thanks shortly before he died. That’s it. He never really wanted to chat.”

  “Sounds like you were a good friend.” Although she’d have done that and more if Rob had given her the chance. If he had trusted her instead of Edward.