Alice and Jake made their way to a green space, and when they arrived, he came around to open her door.
“Are you going to tell me where we are?” She tried to allow herself to fall into the predictable unpredictability of her years with Jake.
“The Botanical Gardens.”
Although they didn’t plan it, they walked through the greenhouse like a type of timeline. First, they started with the plants native to the southwestern United States. Jake pointed out different types of cactuses from his childhood and recounted memories of football games with his friends in the orange, dry dirt, always on the lookout for snakes.
They passed through the southeastern United States. Alice paused at a dogwood tree to tell Jake about how her mother told her and Rob that the tree’s wood was used to make the cross on which Jesus was crucified, and each time she passed one, Alice felt the need to say a little prayer.
They laughed at the sunflowers, remembering the many hours Alice had spent pulling off the leaves and counting the hairs for her undergraduate thesis. Jake reminded her that he bought her sunflowers once, and that, when he came back the next day, he had found them in the trash. She tried to hide that she had thrown them away, blaming it instead on Meredith until he busted out laughing.
“I just can’t look at them anymore!” she remembered screaming, before joining him in laughter. They agreed to never buy sunflowers again.
They stopped at the colorful plants that begged for attention among thousands of equally beautiful ones in the exhibition on the Amazon rain forest, where Jake pointed to a few of his favorites from his time in Ecuador.
They passed the Asia wing with a large pot of honeysuckle. When she learned in college that the bright-yellow bulbs that decorated the landscape of her childhood were known as Japanese honeysuckles and were, in fact, an invasive species in the South, she walked through campus looking at the patches and wondering how something she had considered so much a part of her could be a lie, could be destructive.
She told Jake now about running through bushes of honeysuckle so big, you could hide inside, and how she would always snap off a bunch when she came back from the river with Rob, how they would lick out the sweet nectar, letting the bulbs fall on the asphalt as they walked, barefoot.
Jake reached over and plucked two off the branch.
“You’re not supposed to do that!” She laughed, but she took them and showed Jake how to pinch off the bottom of the flower with a fingernail and pull out the string inside slowly. As she brought it to her mouth and licked the drop, tasting the familiar sweetness, she wished this minute would last forever.
They continued out of the greenhouse, hand in hand to the plants of New Orleans. At the end of an enclosed, ivy-snarled pathway, a large oak shaded a grassy area. It spanned out an impossible length, looking like the Tree of Life, draped with a cape of Spanish moss. As they rounded the corner, Alice slowed, seeing the white wedding chairs lined up underneath the tree’s shade. The ease in Alice’s chest tightened immediately, as if on a yo-yo.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Jake paused with her hand in his. “I always think that if I get married again, I would do it here, under that tree. In the summer, they put lights on it. It’s so beautiful.”
Her entire arm locked, starting with her fingers in his hand and continuing to her palm, her forearm, the tendons in her shoulder.
“Do you like it?”
She nodded and let his hand drop. She walked on the path away from the white chairs, trying to catch her breath again until she reached the sculpture garden where concrete art deco sculptures stood guard.
In the corner, near the end of the section, Alice stopped in front of a life-size sculpture of a woman. Pink and white flowers surrounded her. The woman sat on a block of concrete so smooth, it looked like marble. She supported herself with one hand on the block, while the other rested in her lap, loosely holding a flower. Her back stood straight and proud, and her face looked up at the sky with her eyes closed, as if she basked in the light of the sun. Her expression was neither happy nor sad, but content. She looked weightless, as if she had decided to let go, to sit in the garden and enjoy the thrill of being alive. Alice admired the sculpture, envying the feeling the woman so easily possessed.
“This is my favorite one,” Jake said.
“Me too. She looks so at peace.”
“She always reminded me of you, from the first time I saw her, when I first moved here.” He let out a little laugh. “I actually used to avoid this part of the garden because of that.”
Her chest twisted again. The fear that like Walker, Jake had an impossible-to-achieve view of her filled Alice with dread. Did Alice ever really have the peace of that girl in the garden? Or did Jake only want to see her like that, through his regret over leaving her? Was that image, like the one Alice showed to Walker, a little white lie?
Jake smiled and leaned over for a kiss. She let him, watching as his face approached, still trying to read him.
“Renascence.” She leaned in to read the plaque on the sculpture. “Do you know what it means?”
“Rebirth.”
She had allowed herself to be consumed by the grief and anger of Rob leaving for so long and only gave herself an out when she met Jake. Jake, who had the solution at the ready. They would, of course, find Rob together, and then live happily ever after. Now, though, Alice realized that even if they hadn’t broken up and quit that plan, it wouldn’t have worked like Jake suggested: them finding Rob and living a perfect life together, devoid of parents and bad memories. Rob’s issues magically solved.
Jake had been her solution for Rob, just as Walker was the solution for Jake, and now again, was Jake only her solution for her problems with Walker? Alice’s headache came back. The questions from Jake’s bed that morning flooded back to her before she could stop them. What was her plan with Jake? What was his plan? Why had she called him? Why had she come here?
Her stomach rumbled, and Jake laughed, unaware of the pulsating under Alice’s skin that was slowly creeping to her fingers and toes and the top of her head.
“Ready to get some lunch?”
He reached for her hand as they left the garden.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When they entered the seafood market, the owner asked immediately how many crawfish Jake needed. He waved toward a table instead, and the man’s hand flew to his chest in mock shock. He smiled at them, saying to sit anywhere.
Alice and Jake sat with a roll of paper towels and three different types of hot sauces between them. He rolled up his sleeves, and she did the same. A huge bucket of crawfish quickly appeared on the red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth.
“What’d you think of the garden?” Jake said.
He carefully pinched along the spine of a crawfish, then brought the head to his mouth to suck the juices.
“Beautiful.”
“Glad you liked it.” Jake sipped his beer.
They ate in silence for several minutes. Instead of the chaos inside her mind that only grew louder as the clock ticked on, Alice concentrated on twisting the tail of the crawfish with just the right torque for the meat to free itself from its shell. The cracks, slurps, and clattering sound of empty shells hitting metal rang out from the restaurant, as every table ate in concentrated silence.
Alice cracked the crawfish slowly, eating the little meat inside. She cracked and ate, cracked and ate, cracked and sucked and ate, but still she couldn’t shake the emptiness inside her that she wanted to fill and the feeling in her stomach like spinning in a whirlpool.
What had she thought sleeping with Jake would fix? When she thought of her mother, her children, she felt a brief glimmer of guilt about her own affair, but it was only that—a glimmer. She and Walker had never been honest with each other, could never be honest with each other.
Had she not begun her marriage with un
told secrets from the first date? She had told Walker, “One brother. We’re not close,” but now she realized it was a lie. With each minute in New Orleans, her soul recognized something in the place, as if she’d accepted part of her brother inside long ago and that part was coming home.
She had. She had breathed him in just as he promised to do with their mother’s guilt. She had let him reside in her head. And he’d called. He’d followed her. He’d cared about upsetting her when Jake found him.
Didn’t that show Rob had also made space for her in that cluttered head of his?
She looked at Jake again, smiling at her innocently over his beer bottle. Walker had begun their marriage by telling her what to do, by assuming he should take what he wanted without real consideration for her, saying simply before their first date, “I’m taking you out this Friday.” She had been lying to herself all these years, that she was content with Walker because of the Center, the children, because of reasons she couldn’t even name, blockages in her subconscious put there when Rob left, or evil forces lodged against her when she lay awake at night as a child, cursing God for yanking Rob away. Had she denied her destiny with the man in front of her, cowardly chosen not to go to Ecuador, just as she had cowardly chosen not to go to find Rob?
No, no. You’re spiraling, she told herself, Stop.
Jake ripped another paper towel off the roll. The man her parents called a “farmer” and asked, “When will he get a real job?” The man whose bony collarbone she had kissed, mouth open, when they slept together the first time. She could practically taste its saltiness as she ate, until she reached the bottom of the bowl where the crawfish had been. Her bucket of shells overflowed onto the tablecloth.
Jake studied her and ordered five more pounds. He slowed down his own cracks, but Alice kept cracking and slurping.
A vision of her mother flashed through Alice’s mind to say that she shouldn’t be eating this way in front of a man. Alice shushed her. She didn’t need to worry because Alice already had a husband, from a good family who could provide for her, as her mother wanted. And Alice had let it happen, let her destiny play out, let the Tate destiny play out, the same one Rob had rejected.
She understood now why he thought he was the “great scar.” She could see he felt so much responsibility for Alice, for Maura, when in reality, the blame for Rob’s death, for his exile from the family, was shared among everyone who refused to remember him, even Alice.
Jake cracked crawfish, assembling them on the edge of Alice’s plate like a little tower. Next to them, an older woman sat down, tied up her black-and-white-striped hair in a bun on the top of her head with two chopsticks and began to crack. The woman bounced shells into a bucket as if challenging Alice to a race.
Alice wanted to fall asleep and find Rob in her dreams like she had the other night, and scream at him: Why? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you let Jake take you to me? Why didn’t you talk to me in Athens? Why didn’t you call me when you were sick? Why didn’t you write me a letter? Why did you ruin my life?
Why
Why
Why
Why
She wanted to scream at Jake all over again, like she had last night. She wanted to scream at Walker over Brittani and everything else. She wanted to confront Jamie and tell him she knew about the stolen money. She wanted to stand on her father’s grave and chastise him for making decisions while Alice and her mother slept, for refusing to look for Rob, which forced his wife to trust the wrong person, for whatever Rob thought their father could have done to prevent everything that happened after.
She stood up without warning and went to the bathroom. The blood of the meal was all over her: the splatters of butter decorated her clothes, and her arms were red up past the elbows with hot sauce and seasoning. She stuck out her tongue, which stung with Tabasco, before running the water and lapping it up like two kittens Jamie got her and Rob for Christmas one year always did, fighting over the faucet’s stream.
Alice looked at herself in the mirror. She saw the woman in the statute. She saw her mother and Caitlin and the almond shape of Rob’s eyes. They all blended together and fought for the surface. Alice saw her tear-stained face, not yet thirteen, the night before she trudged alone in the woods. She saw herself whispering, “I will not forget. I’ll find you, I will” into the mirror in the bathroom she used to share with Rob in her parents’ house.
The promise had come easily to Alice. Her mother’s grief when she lay in bed, letting the phone ring, Alice had understood. She had watched her mother and thought, Good.
On Alice’s first night back after her stay in the hospital for the concussion she got while looking for Rob, she woke to her mother standing over her bed. Alice pretended to sleep. When Alice heard her mother chanting, “Please not you too,” she had struggled to keep herself from smiling at the pain in her mother’s voice. It was there, Alice realized, deep down, hidden, the pain she saw so freely now every time she visited her mother, the strong facade that the brief disappearance of her second child had cracked. Her mother felt it, too, the emptiness.
Now, Alice looked at her own face in the mirror and saw herself truthfully: a mother of two, past forty…maybe soon-to-be divorced. She saw her brother there, too, with his full eyebrows and his careful eyes, and she wanted him to speak so badly, to give her permission to leave him and her parents’ house and that little purple bungalow in New Orleans behind, to absolve her from guilt. She wanted to blame him and scream at him for everything that had gone wrong in her life. She wanted him to beg her for forgiveness.
She wanted him to explain to her how he had remained himself. In childhood, in Athens, in prison. How had he remained so squarely Rob? When Alice, in her comfortable house with her family and her children, constantly felt the rushing water of expectations and priorities she had never agreed to? How had he never wavered while she blindly followed the path her parents, then Walker outlined for her?
Rob, she thought, trying to summon him like she used to in childhood. Tell me your secret.
I don’t blame you.
She felt a weight lifting through her veins, a release of the bad, of the blame she’d heaped on Rob, on the teenage rage at him deserting, pulsing through her, loosening, leaving—
“Alice?” Jake knocked lightly at the door. “Are you okay?”
She looked back to the door, meaning to answer, but before she could, the wave lifted too far. She leaned over the toilet and threw up.
Jake stayed silent on the other side of the door. Alice rested her head against the dirty porcelain.
Hopefully Jake left, she thought.
“I’m going to get you some gum, okay? Do you want anything else?”
“I think I ate too much.”
Her hand went to her belly. When she heard Jake’s footsteps leaving, she rose and washed her face. She looked in the mirror, and the other faces were gone now, leaving only her own. She breathed.
Jake came back to the door, and she took the gum from him. She let him drape his arm around her, and she leaned into it as they walked outside.
“Do you want to talk about it?” He opened the door to the truck.
“Just, let’s go to Lila’s.”
She leaned her head on the seat belt as Jake drove, letting it cool her cheek, letting her mind quiet.
He patted her thigh with his hand. “No crawfish tonight, I promise.”
Chapter Thirty
Jake pulled up to the house, and she stared at it. She felt she had lived a lifetime since she bounded up the steps yesterday.
“Do you want me to go in with you?” Jake said.
Alice nodded yes.
He came around and opened her door, taking her by the hand. She let him lead her to the house’s door, and he walked up and rang the bell. There were no lights on, and Ben didn’t pace in front of the window like when she visited the day b
efore. It would start raining soon and the air had cooled. Alice wrapped the cardigan closer around her that she had buttoned up to hide her shirt and brushed at her stained jeans.
The door opened, revealing a woman with a pile of gray-haired braids wrapping around her head. She looked like an older version of the woman from the nude photos in Alice’s parents’ house. Lila King was about sixty years old. Had Alice let time slip away from her, remembering her brother as a teenager, or was Lila really much older than Rob?
“Alice.” Lila grabbed her in a hug. “Come in, come in.” Spying Jake, she said: “And who is this?”
“Jake.” He allowed her to hug him and returned the gesture more than Alice had.
Lila ushered them in and pointed to the couch before turning to the fridge. Alice approached it cautiously, as two cats hissed at the newcomers from the carpet. Lila handed them beers, and Alice drank in earnest, while Jake took a polite sip before setting his beer on the coffee table.
“I have something for you.” Alice handed the letter to Lila, who set it on the counter next to her, but didn’t offer to open it. “Were you and my brother…” Alice struggled with how to start.
“He was in my band, and yes, we were together,” Lila said, smiling. “Do you believe in soul mates?”
“Well—” Alice said.
“Yes,” Jake answered.
They looked at each other. Did that mean Jake thought she was his soul mate? Did she?
Lila laughed. “He was that for me. We were that for each other, I like to think.”
Alice smiled. To hear that her brother achieved such great love in this city full of music seemed to erase all the bad news. “I’ve been delivering these letters. I found them in my parents’ house, and yours is my last one. I’m hoping that you can tell me about him.”
How to Bury Your Brother Page 26