How to Bury Your Brother

by Lindsey Rogers Cook

  The flight attendant reached Alice’s row, and she ordered a rum and Coke and eagerly handed over her credit card. She rested the drink on her knee and felt the cold seep through her leggings until her skin felt prickly from the ice. She closed her eyes.

  How many people heard her and Walker’s display? Were parents chatting about it right now over wine, how all wasn’t well in the Wright house? How Alice Wright had snapped? When she realized she didn’t care, a new calmness washed over her. This world had never mattered to her, as if she had always known she was a temporary visitor to the country-club-going, high-heeled Kayla Welshes of the world.

  Alice played her and Walker’s future life together again. This time, though, with the secret out in the open, pretending seemed impossible. The vacation to the Bahamas that he would propose if she agreed to stay became forced, his arms crossed. Unlike her previous vision of the trip, now, with the weight of what happened between them so visible, neither would be able to overcome it. By saying it aloud—cheating and affair—she had violated some pact between them.

  Surely Walker wouldn’t prolong the divorce or make it more difficult, both because of his reputation at the firm and because of the children. But Alice had heard plenty of stories, passed around the neighborhood as the mothers sat by the pool, of once-sweet husbands who as soon as they heard the word divorce became vicious and amassed a team of lawyers to fight for custody of children they hadn’t spent time with when they lived in the same house. The point: no matter how a man treated his wife when they were together, how he treated her when she wanted out remained a mystery. Would Walker be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

  It was past 2:00 a.m. by the time Alice made her way to the hotel in the French Quarter that Meredith had booked for her. With her clothes and shoes on, she lay down without unmaking the bed. With all the pillows at the top of the bed, Alice’s feet hung off the end. She kicked off her sneakers.

  Outside her window, the music swirled around the hotel. It came from all directions like a call and response with one saxophone answering to a set of drums blocks over, which was answered in turn by a breathy jazz singer below. She closed her eyes. She thought one happy thought as she tumbled into unconsciousness—

  Rob would have been happy here.

  * * *

  When she woke, the room was so dark that Alice lay still for a few minutes, questioning her location, the day, the time, if this was a dream, and if any of these questions mattered. Her hand fumbled on the bedside table in an unsuccessful hunt for the lamp. Finally, with her hands as a barrier in front of her, she inched to where she thought the windows were and opened the drapes. It was still dark outside, but she examined her surroundings for the first time by the light of the streetlamps. She found her backpack and retrieved her phone: 5:23 a.m. In Georgia, one hour ahead, Buddy would be pacing the hallway in front of her bedroom, waiting for his morning walk.

  She was tired still but knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. Alice ambled to the bathroom to splash water on her face, and as she did, her stomach rumbled. She searched the fridge but found only miniature bottles of wine and vodka. She would have to go out, but what could she find this early?

  Then she remembered she woke up in New Orleans.

  She dressed and trudged down to the lobby where the morning was still a continuation of the previous night. A woman yelled about the toilet in her room, and people staggered in and out, some dressed in costumes or masks, some obviously drunk. Alice walked out into the dark morning and headed toward the nearest lights.

  A few determined tourists still meandered in the streets, holding one another as cars scooted past them. The street performers, so active on her drive into the city, had dwindled to one man sitting on the curb, breathing into a saxophone. The sways that accompanied each note resembled a metronome clicking back and forth lazily on its base.

  She found an all-hours café and ducked inside to a booth by the window. A waitress took Alice’s order, rolling her neck at the same time. “Bloody Mary?” she wanted to know on the second rotation.

  After ordering coffee and the breakfast special, Alice laid the map from the hotel on the table. She had stared at the cross streets for Lila’s address so many times on her phone that her finger found the intersection easily on the map. It didn’t look far.

  She sipped her coffee and watched the last of the late-night patrons leave the diner. Her tired-looking waitress talked to another in a crisper uniform before she left. The new waitress came over immediately and smiled at Alice before refilling her coffee. Outside the window, the street cleaners took over the sidewalks from the flashy night creatures, the air eerily devoid of its normal jazz.

  Alice was beginning to fold the map when the name of another street caught her eye: Iberville Street. She looked from right to left as if she expected to get caught before she retrieved her phone and went to Jake’s website to check the address again. It was only a few blocks from her hotel.

  Three plates arrived, and Alice breathed in the foods that accompanied her childhood, mixed in with the Louisiana Creole. Her mouth watered as she picked up her spoon to scoop a bite of cheesy grits. Thinking of all the mornings with her parents and Rob at the kitchen table, Alice stirred her grits, eggs, and the bits of sausage until she ended with a slush that might as well have been churned through the blender. She stirred until she caught the eye of a man in a suit who sat down with his coffee. She straightened and spooned a bite of the mush into her mouth.

  As she buttered and spread honey on her biscuit, Alice rehearsed the conversation she would have with Lila in her head. Would she think Alice was crazy for traveling to another city and dropping in on her unannounced? Would she even want to talk about Rob? Could she be the woman from the nude photographs that Alice had found in the box at her parents’ house? Another part of her felt a desperate clinging. She knew Lila was her last chance to learn more about Rob. Whatever she learned today would be the most she knew about her brother, likely for the rest of her life. After she talked to Lila, he would truly be gone.

  Alice paid her bill and left the café, walking toward Mid-City and the cross streets on Rob’s last letter. By the time the sun warmed the asphalt in earnest, she was approaching the turn for Lila’s street. In contrast to the French Quarter’s five-floor-high houses with wraparound porches and only an inch between the houses, these spread out in a more residential area. Chained fences lined a few houses, and a man sitting in a rocking chair on his porch waved to Alice as she passed.

  She walked in the street now, because the block didn’t have a sidewalk, and she counted the houses as she passed, looking for the correct address. He could have died here. She remembered the liveliness of the city last night, with the music, which seemed to come from every direction, and the streetlamps with the light bouncing off the discarded purple and green beads that still decorated the trees. Now on Lila’s street, Alice pictured her brother trapped in one of the little houses, with no view and no music to give him comfort, instead of seated on the curb with his guitar, strumming alongside the jazzy street performers.

  Alice passed a fenced-in yard, decorated with signs that announced Private Property and Beware of Dog and glanced behind her to the man on his porch.

  The houses skipped a few numbers, and seeing the street number from the letter, she froze. Alice approached the gate of a purple wooden house with a small porch and reached her hand to unlock it and let the latch down silently. She walked on a stone path, decorated with pieces of colored glass stuck into the cement, which interrupted a sprawling yard with weeds that poked out at random intervals of brown and green. As she looked down, so she could navigate the collapsed-in first step, Alice jumped. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen a man in the window.

  She hunched herself over and shuffled to a bush next to the steps to peer in the window. The man paced back and forth in the parlor off the front door, appearing in front of the
window every few seconds. She held her breath as she watched his figure. He looked around her height, with hair down to his shoulders and a trim, but stocky build. He concentrated on a book folded over the spine so it could be held in one hand and tapped what looked like a pencil on the side of his head with the other as he walked.

  Alice turned away and bounded up the steps to the doorbell. She rang it three times. Then, on second thought, she opened the screened door and knocked hard on the wood.

  The doorknob turned in her hand and the door opened. As the light from outside streamed into the hallway, Alice could see him clearly for the first time. She had dared to hope it was Rob, this whole journey some twisted joke or perhaps a plot to fool her father or someone else, a brief jump in logic she hadn’t even realized she made until the breath deflated from her chest at the bemused expression on his unfamiliar face.

  “Hello?” he said with a smile.

  Rob is dead, she reminded herself. The pain felt new each time she remembered this. This is what she wanted from New Orleans: Rob alive. The ability to say to him, it’s okay. I forgive you for leaving, and to ask his forgiveness in return for not looking for him more, for not hugging him that night on Amelia Island and telling him not to go, for not asking him what was wrong that night he slammed the guitar. An impossible task.

  “Sorry. I, uh, thought you were someone else.” Her hands found her backpack straps, and she wrapped her thumbs around them.

  The man, who she guessed was about thirty, younger than Rob would be if he’d lived, shifted his hold on the book in his hand.

  “Okay, well?” he said, taking a step back, as if to shut the door.

  “Sorry! I’m actually looking for Lila King. Do you know if she lives here?”

  “You thought I was a woman?”

  “No, I didn’t think… Never mind. I’m Alice.”

  “Ben.”

  She extended her hand and shook his.

  “Do you know her?” she said.

  “What is this regarding?”

  “So, you do know her,” Alice offered.

  “I’m her cousin. Can you just wait a second? Was she expecting you? I can call her, if you want? Are you a fan?”

  “No. I’m…Alice. I’m… Can you tell her that Rob Tate’s sister is here?”

  “Oh, Rob?”

  She nodded. “You knew him?”

  “Yup.” He punched numbers into a flip phone before he placed it to his ear. He gave her a one-second finger, and the door slowly closed as Alice inched backward to get out of the way. The lock clicked.

  Alice looked at the door for a moment, confused, before backing up the rest of the way and letting the screen door slam in front of her face. She looked down the street to where a dog barked in the yard of the “Beware of Dog” house. How long should she wait before knocking again? After a few minutes, as she planned to walk to the end of the block and back, the door opened.

  “Sorry about that, Alice. Yes, she wanted me to tell you that she’s out for the day. Could you come back tomorrow, in the afternoon? She’ll be here then.”

  “Sure, I—” Before she could ask anything else, the door shut again. This time, though, Alice turned and walked down the steps and back from where she had come. She replayed the interaction in her head, trying to make it seem like a positive. She had found Lila King! She still lived in the house! Tomorrow afternoon wasn’t too far away.

  As she walked the three miles back to her hotel, she called Grace to see if she needed anything that could be done remotely. “You just take care of yourself. You’re on vacation!” Grace told her. She called Caitlin to ask about the cast party and tell her she went out of town and would be back in a few days. “You know how your father is,” Alice said. “He’ll get used to NYU. Just try to stay out of his way while I’m gone.”

  Alice called to check on Maura. Another subpar day, the nurses told Alice, before putting Maura on the phone. How much Alice wanted to tell her mother everything she found so far, wanted to tell her about New Orleans. “When I die, I want to wear the pearls,” her mother said. “The biggest ones. I’ll take them to my grave, so Robinson’s catty wife can’t have them. She’s been eyeing them, you know.”

  At least in her mother’s world, Rob was alive and married, maybe happy.

  “I’ll make sure of it.”

  She almost called Meredith but knew her friend would likely ask about the conversation with Walker. Alice decided to call and check on Dylan instead, to see if he had an update on the mysterious Christopher Smith. His letter had no words, only the cross, but Alice knew that for Rob, sometimes art could say more than words.

  “Was going to call you today,” he said. “I found someone who I think knew Rob through an old buddy of mine. I’m trying to meet up with him in the next few days. I’ll call you back, all right?”

  She thanked him profusely and hung up. The phone, with no one left to call, knocked lazily against her thigh as she walked.

  By the time Alice reached the French Quarter, it was almost lunchtime. She took out the map to find one of the restaurants the man at the hotel’s front desk had circled for her. Instead, her eyes lingered on the cross streets for Jake’s office.

  She picked one of the places and walked there. It seemed like everywhere she passed, people were sitting down to Sunday brunch. Although the time zone only differed an hour from Atlanta, the timing seemed infinitely different. People moved slowly through the thick air.

  She selected one of the circled places in the same courtyard as a famous beignet stand and picked up a USA Today from a street vendor on the way inside. She chose a table outside, where she had a good view of the slow-moving line for the sugary treats that looked one hundred people long.

  After turning down her second offer of the day for a Bloody Mary, Alice took out the crossword. She ordered a sandwich, but expected it to take a while to arrive, as things seemed to here. She filled in the boxes with a pen but kept having to reread the clues.

  Finally, she took out her phone. Taking a deep breath, she found Jake’s website again and dialed the number. It’s Sunday, she reasoned. No one will answer. Maybe she would just listen to his voice on the voicemail message, like she used to in college when she would call his phone and hang up when she knew he wouldn’t be home.

  Each ring echoed through her body; all the while, she told herself the call was nothing. Finally, a male voice picked up. “I told you already. Just meet me there with the truck at two. That’s all. Can you do that or not?”

  “Um. Hello?” Alice said.

  “Oh! I’m sorry. You’ve reached Environmental Solutions, this is Derek. How may I help you?”

  “Is…Jake there? Jake…O’Connell?”

  “Of course. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “It’s Alice. Alice Wright, actually Alice Tate…” Was she back to Alice Tate now? “Yes, Alice Tate. He knows who I am. We’re…old friends… We’re—”

  She heard him scream “Jake! Some chick named Alice is on the phone for you!” The line went blank.

  Alice briefly considered hanging up. She tapped the pen against the paper and watched the newest tourists join the line for beignets. A family with three young children slumped in the middle of the line, while the youngest child screamed. The middle child stared off at a juggler, not even noticing the screaming, deeply entrenched in his own world. It made her think of Rob. He tapped his sister on the shoulder to look, and she immediately stopped crying.

  “Alice?”

  “Jake?”

  “Alice Tate?”

  “Yes.” She wondered if he could hear her muffled voice over the noise of the courtyard.

  His tone changed to pleasant and he said, “How nice of you to call! How are you?”

  “I’m in town actually, and I was wondering if you would want to…” She paused, as she had never planned on
getting this far. Hang out, she almost said, before panicking and finishing, “Get dinner.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded before realizing he couldn’t see her. “Yes.”

  “Oh. Okay.” The line was quiet. “I mean, yes.” He cleared his throat. “I would like that. Good.”

  They arranged to meet that night at a place he recommended near her hotel and hung up. She sat staring at the phone in her hand until her sandwich arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When Alice left her hotel to walk to the restaurant, the French Quarter was still very much alive, despite the lack of a moon, which darkened the sky to black. A pack of bridesmaids pulling along a woman in a veil, stumbled through the streets, with their drinks in hand. Fanny-pack-wielding tourists in varying levels of drunkenness lined up outside some of the restaurants, distinguished by nothing except for the lines outside. Light poured from the psychic shops Alice passed, and voodoo dolls rested on backlit displays in store windows.

  She breathed in the dampness of the place, the humidity even in winter, devoid of Georgia’s winter crispness. Perfect weather for a night out, she thought, feeling comfortable in a cardigan and her favorite striped chambray dress, which she had stuffed into her duffel at the last minute.

  Since she left the hotel with plenty of time, Alice paused to listen to the street performers as she passed, picturing her brother among them. She loved to imagine Rob here playing with the fellow guitars and trumpets and drums.

  When she reached Burgundy Street, she had to double back because she’d missed the restaurant. It had a black door that blended into the wall with a small sign and little lights outside, in the deep part of the French Quarter, where the street performers played with a different type of soul, absent the tourists and their cash-stuffed wallets. Alice checked her watch—still thirty minutes early, enough time to compose herself, to think about what she would say to Jake after all these years, and why she had called him in the first place, why she grabbed this dress off its hanger at home.