How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  She tried to stay awake. With one finger out of the covers, she drew squares, circles, and rectangles of the shapes in the room, tracing each lightly with her hand in space. She counted how many items were in the room—143. She didn’t say her nightly prayers. She knew if she did that the devil would put her to sleep because he didn’t like prayers. She knew this because Jamie had told her.

  Alice practiced the songs she’d learned that year at camp, determined to remember them when school started in August, so she could teach them to her school friends. She sang under her breath: “Miss Suzie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell—ding ding! Miss Suzie went to heaven; the steamboat went to—Hello, operator…” When she reached the end, she started again, and each time she progressed through the song a little slower.

  When she heard a loud sound, she sat up in bed and realized she had fallen asleep. What time was it? Only pitch-black darkness and the sound of the ocean came through the window. She flicked on the lamp on her bedside table to look at the clock and saw it was 1:00 a.m. Afraid her parents would see the light, she turned it back off and went quietly to the door. She cracked it open.

  “Shh,” Alice said quietly, to no one. Everything was still. She crawled on hands and knees on the carpeted floor that separated her door from the landing and lay on her stomach, hidden behind the wall. Her head peeked through the railing at the living room and kitchen below.

  Light filled the room and she drew back slightly behind the wall, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light. She heard footsteps in the living room below. Daddy stomped across the room in plaid boxer shorts and no shirt. When he reached the stairs, he flipped on the light and she saw him disappear down them.

  Alice briefly considered a retreat to her room with the desk pushed in front of the door. She was probably strong enough. What if the sound she’d heard was robbers? She tried to play the sound back in her head. Was it a bang and then a shatter, like if the window were broken? Was it a prying, then the sound of metal on wood, as if someone had broken in through the door? Was it a bang and then a soft thud, like if something had fallen off a shelf, hit something on the way down, and then hit the carpet? She couldn’t remember.

  Since Rob and Jamie always slept in the basement’s two bedrooms, they were there. And now Daddy was in the basement as well. She thought the sound had come from that side of the house, but she couldn’t be sure. Daddy kept a rifle propped up beside his bed in their house, but he didn’t have it here. She tried to form a plan. If the robbers came up the stairs to the living room, what would she do?

  Mama was no doubt still asleep in the master bedroom. Daddy always commented that she slept like a log and that Rob and Alice would need to wake her up if the house caught fire. She slept deeply, because according to Mama, she had a bad ear, but Alice thought it had something to do with the pill she took after dinner.

  Now, Alice heard Daddy’s loud, tense voice, the words muffled by the distance. She inched her chin along the carpet closer to the opening, but still couldn’t hear what he said. She heard Rob too. They went back and forth for a few minutes, then it was quiet. She heard a door open and shut. A car started. No robbers then.

  While Alice prepared herself to go down the steps, so she could better hear the commotion, she heard footsteps on the stairs up from the basement. She lightly clicked the door shut, raced back to her bed and pulled the covers up to her neck. She shut her eyes tight as she heard a car pull away.

  Behind her eyelids, the level of darkness changed. Someone had turned on the hall light. Rob. She knew from the way he turned the doorknob—slowly, not trying to wake her, with less urgency than the situation required. The bed moved as he sat at the bottom. He was leaving and something told her now that it was more than just leaving the beach house.

  If she opened her eyes and said goodbye, he would be gone, and no goodbye could ever be good enough. She kept her eyes closed and became very conscious of her breathing. In, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Out, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, hoping that he would stay until morning, waiting, then stay forever.

  He sat there for a few minutes, and she felt the bed tilt slightly a few times, as if he had moved his hand to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it. But after thirty-two Mississippis, he leaned over to her bedside table, and she heard papers rustling.

  Then, he stood up and let out a small huff as he lifted something from the floor. Alice opened her eyes to watch him walk with his duffel and acoustic guitar case to the door. She opened her mouth to call his name, but no noise came out. He shut the door behind him, and he was gone.

  Alice heard the small flick of the hall light turning off, and it was dark again. Another door opened and shut before the house fell silent. She reached over to the bedside table. Even in the dark, she knew he had switched his drawing with hers.

  As a child and young adult, before she had slammed the door to Rob’s memory, she played this scene thousands of times in hundreds of variations. Each time, she willed herself to be brave, to open her eyes, to hug her brother and to tell him to stay. Alice returned to that day, that moment in particular when she feigned sleep and her brother watched her. It was in that mistake that she would find years of blame.

  She picked up the bag of books labeled “personal effects.”

  The first was A Confederacy of Dunces. She had never heard of it. On the first page, she saw “From the library of Mrs. Maura Tate” written in her mother’s usual neat script. She started reading, twisting the book to read her brother’s notes in the margin and around the corners as her mother had done so many years ago. Eventually, Alice fell asleep and dreamed random dreams of cluttered bedrooms, odd hats, and New Orleans.

  * * *

  Alice jolted awake when she heard the jostling of keys in the door. The sun streamed through the windows.

  When Grace opened the door, Buddy sprinted out into the yard, and Alice jumped. They both took in the scene: the papers scattered on various surfaces, the Indian food containers, the beer bottles, the crumpled yellow papers that covered the tile in the kitchen.

  “Well, good morning!” Grace said.

  Alice rubbed her eyes and glanced at her watch: 8:00 a.m. How late had she stayed up last night? She could lie back down on the couch and sleep for several more hours.

  “Coffee?” Grace pretended everything was normal and didn’t pause to read any of the papers. She went to the coffee maker and busied herself with scooping in the grounds precisely, filling the water, and preparing them both mugs. She stood in front of the coffee maker with her back to Alice, swaying her head to a little melody only she could hear.

  Alice stacked all the papers and files together and placed them back in the box with the books on top. She put the legal pad, now cluttered with her notes and the timeline, in her backpack. Next, she recycled the beer bottles and took the remnants of last night’s Indian food to the compost. When she finished, Grace turned to her with two coffee mugs.

  “Want to sit on the porch?”

  Alice nodded, and they brought their mugs to the rocking chairs on the back porch.

  Grace drew her legs in to her chest and rested her mug on one knee. She leaned over to blow it. “I just love the water in the winter, don’t you?”

  The gold necklace with her Korean name that Grace always wore glittered with the sunlight, and Alice absentmindedly reached up to drag the necklace Walker gave her with the kids’ birthstones along its chain. She wasn’t wearing it though. “Yes.”

  They both looked out over the water as they sipped their coffee. Alice studied the water and replayed last night. Her mind pictured the end of her notes where she had written New Orleans and circled it several times. She knew what she had to do next: the last letter, where the prison released him, where he died, where Lila King still lived.

  And, from a distant place in her mind, she added: Wher
e Jake lives.

  * * *

  By the time she made it back to the house, Caitlin had already sent Alice six different texts with things she forgot that she wanted dropped off at the school, where she would be holed up practicing until the play opening that night. Unusual, but Caitlin had inherited her mother’s habit of lapsing into forgetfulness when under pressure.

  Alice grabbed another cup of coffee and sat down at the computer in her house’s little office that the kids used for their homework. She brought the timeline and the last letter. As she had days before, she Googled Lila King. This time, though, she searched for something different.

  She passed the links for Lila King, a journalist at the Washington Post; Lila King, a teacher in California who recently won Teacher of the Year; Lila King, who died in Massachusetts at the age of eighty-seven, according to an obituary. Alice scrolled until she found Lila King, the singer, listed on websites for several bars and restaurants where she played. Most were in New Orleans, but some were scattered throughout the South. Alice couldn’t locate any listings for that week.

  She would go and find Lila, deliver the last letter. It seemed to make so much sense to Alice, especially while sleep deprived and a little hungover. Since she didn’t know how long it would take her to find Lila, she booked a one-way ticket to New Orleans for that night, after Caitlin’s play, when Walker would be back in town to watch the kids. She knew Walker would not take that well, wouldn’t take any mention of her brother well. But as Jamie would say, it was time to fish or cut bait.

  She walked into the bedroom and paused at the bed to kick off her shoes and jeans before she climbed in. She just needed to take a short nap. With her eyes closed, she ran through everything she needed to do before she left for New Orleans.

  Talk to Walker, obviously.

  Call her mother’s nurses to tell them she would be out of town for a few days and wouldn’t be visiting tomorrow. Text Grace that she’d be out of town for a few days. Get out of carpool duty for Robbie.

  Buy flowers for Caitlin’s play tonight. Deal with Jamie. Gather all of Caitlin’s requests.

  Sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Alice dreamed about New Orleans.

  She meandered the streets of the Big Easy as if tugged by some unknowable force. She knew she should find her hotel, but the thought floated by without judgment. She was lost but walked uninhibited. Even without a map or her phone, she felt at peace. Alice wandered up a never-ending street and ducked into the different plant-filled courtyards as she went.

  The street was empty, and but for the sounds of twangs, trumpets, and a jazzy saxophone that begged for her attention, absent of human players. As she listened to pick out the different instruments, her mind focused on the sound of a single acoustic guitar.

  She turned at an intersection and saw him: Rob sat on the curb with his guitar, fingering out the notes in the careful way he did as a teenager. She stood there and watched him, as she considered what to say. He looked up, and the music stopped.

  “Al! You found me!” He set the guitar down and stood up. She ran toward him. Healthy, he ran to her with a smile on his face. He had let his hair get so long!

  She ran faster to reach him, but on the other side of the street, Rob slowed to a light jog. His hair lost some of its shine, his face grayed and his muscles shrank, and he morphed into the Rob from the photo in her mother’s letter. The frail, shell-of-Rob Rob. Seeing this, Alice broke into a sprint, and her mouth fell open in a pant as she scrambled to reach the other side of the expanding street.

  “Al!” he cried. “Alice! Alice!”

  She ran faster: “I’m coming!” She tucked her head like she learned to do in PE and pumped her arms. Like she had run after him that day in the woods, when he’d told her to scream what she hated. Her calves burned, and she glanced at her feet, only to realize that she wore the sky-high heels with the red bottoms that remained untouched at the back of her closet from a bygone wedding anniversary.

  “Alice! Alice! ALICE!”

  She woke up with a gasp for air, as if she had just surfaced from a swimming pool.

  “Are you asleep?” Walker said. “It’s 2:00 p.m.”

  She was still in her bedroom. She looked at the clock on the bedside table and saw that Walker was right about the time.

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” She raised her hand to brush her hair from her face. It was wet with sweat. “I fell asleep at the Center last night, and I…just didn’t sleep well.”

  Walker frowned.

  “I came to drop my suitcase, but I’ve got to go into the office for a few hours. Meet you at the school?”

  She nodded. He turned to walk out.

  “Walker!” she said, remembering New Orleans and the information she had to deliver about Caitlin’s scholarship. He jumped, and then turned back. Seeing his expression, Alice’s resolve dulled. She made a quick calculation in her head: him finding out tonight would be better than finding out now because his window for reaction would be smaller. Or perhaps she just didn’t have the energy to get into it now.

  “Glad you’re home,” she said. He cocked his head, and she smiled.

  “Thanks,” he muttered and walked out.

  From there, Alice popped out of bed and started her flurry of activity.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Alice returned for her second visit this week to Hilltree High School with Caitlin’s stuff and Robbie in tow, and with plenty of time to make the 6:00 p.m. opening curtain.

  “Wait a second,” she said to Robbie, as he tried to scurry off with a friend and a deck of cards as soon as they entered the school. She hugged him. “I’ve got to go out of town tonight, so you’re going to be with Dad, okay?”

  “When will you be back?”

  “In a few days.”

  He nodded, and she kissed him again on the cheek, telling him to “Be good for Dad” as he ran off again, wiping his cheek on the way.

  As Alice made her way to the lobby, Dr. Garcia spotted her and charged toward her. “Tonight’s the night!”

  “Yeah, tonight’s the night,” Alice said. The night she would leave for New Orleans, the night she would come clean with Walker. The night she would choose not to tell any more little white lies.

  Seeing Meredith in the corner, carrying the bouquet of flowers Alice had asked her to pick up, Alice excused herself. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  Alice eyed Christian as he lingered behind Meredith. She turned around and asked him to get some sodas. He smiled and ran off nearly as fast as Robbie.

  “So, I’ve decided to go to New Orleans,” Alice said. “To track down Rob. I’m on the last letter, and something feels right about going there to finish this. To find out the last piece.”

  “Then you should go,” Meredith said, nodding, but with her eyes narrowed. “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “And how did Walker feel about that?”

  Alice grimaced. Why was Meredith always so damn direct? “I haven’t told him…yet. I was hoping you could check on the kids some, make sure Walker and Caitlin don’t start World War III while I’m gone.”

  “Of course.”

  Alice took a breath to ready herself to say out loud the thing she had kept from Meredith for weeks. “I think it will be good to think about things. I…I found…” Better to just come out and say it. “Walker’s cheating on me.”

  Meredith’s face softened, but she caught herself quickly when Alice waved her hand in front of her body, as if to say it wasn’t worth discussing. Meredith simply reached out to rub Alice’s arm. “Oh, honey.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Alice said, crossing her arms and pushing off Meredith’s touch.

  Meredith nodded, changing the subject: “New Orleans, huh?”

 
“Yup.”

  “Haven’t been there in a few years.”

  “I haven’t been there since…that time.” That time the three of them—she, Meredith, and Jake—had driven all night one Friday to make it to the Halloween parade on a whim.

  “I bet not a lot has changed,” Meredith offered, and Alice took it to mean that not a lot had changed with Jake, from the way Meredith looked at her carefully as she said it. So, she knew he lived there too. They had probably been friends on Facebook this whole time.

  “Maybe,” Alice said, without additional details.

  Alice saw Jamie exit the bathroom and head toward the theater. Meredith followed her eyes, and Alice tugged her behind a wall as he passed.

  “I thought y’all made up?”

  “We did, but I think he may have stolen money from my mother, a lot of money. Or not stolen, but not kept on paying the PI. I don’t think he’s—” Alice said as the bell sounded to indicate the audience should take their seats.

  Meredith and Alice found seats on the end. As a group of elementary schoolers sang “Catch a Falling Star” in a type of opening act while the audience settled, Alice’s phone vibrated. Walker: He would be a little late. Could she save him a seat? She briefly considered saying she had already turned off her phone, but texted him the seat number anyway. As bad as it would be to sit next to him as Caitlin’s announcement blindsided him, she worried what he would say without her there to police him.