by Alan Rossi
Nathaniel was always eventually pulled into his brother’s world, and he couldn’t help noticing that since moving to the town, his brother had changed. He was someone Nathaniel didn’t recognize. He was at once more distant and more open, Nathaniel thought. Nathaniel couldn’t tell if this was because of the place, if the remote cabin and the forest and the mountain had changed his brother, or if his brother had changed first and had felt himself out of place in the city where Nathaniel still lived. His brother walked through the town, pointing out spots – family doctors and pediatricians, dentists, two chiropractors, a holistic healing doctor, a yoga studio, one meditation center (also one on a farm outside town), a new/used bookstore, several restaurants – but more than the actual places, he said that the doctor was Dr. Shelly, she was a good one, lots of homeopathic stuff, and the chiropractor was Dr. Nick, the meditation center run by a little Cambodian guy who everybody called Ted because it was easier to say than his name, the manager of the restaurant was Davis, etc., etc. Nathaniel had never known his brother to have any interest in other people, his brother barely had any interest in Nathaniel. And the fact that he lived with his family alone on the mountain seemed contradictory. Did he really know these people? Nicholas would eventually tell them that the town was associated with three nearby state parks, and along with a small art community that arose from the liberal arts college, there was an aspect of the community that was interested in outdoor sports, hiking, kayaking, rock climbing. He’d explain that there was no mall, no nearby fast food places, two gas stations, two garages, a body shop, a farmers’ market twice a week that brought in the rural community who lived outside the town proper. When Nathaniel had asked him why this place – Jack tugging on his hand to tell him a joke or get him to listen to what he had to say – his brother had said the college gave him a tenure track job, and when Nathaniel said he knew his brother could’ve gotten a job at a big state school and made more money, so why here, Nicholas had said, I like it here because there’s space to be a person alone and a person not alone, and that’s what April and I want for Jack. And when his brother said this, Nathaniel had at first laughed, then saw his brother wasn’t joking and wondered if Nicholas was aware of the contradiction of wanting to be alone and yet somehow suddenly having more friends, or acquaintances or whatever they were, than Nicholas ever had in the city.
Standing on the porch, Nathaniel could see the town in his mind: the old buildings set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of Appalachia that was just slightly distanced from authentic Appalachia, a place mainly for middle- and upper-class white people, a destination for travelers who wanted sweeping vistas of blue mountains in the summer, achingly beautiful trees shifting shade in the fall, snow-capped peaks in the winter, and relatively few foreigners, brown people, Nathaniel thought. Nathaniel and Stefanie both noted that when she was in town, she was looked at: dark hair and dark skin and while it was overt, it wasn’t malicious. White tourists visited the mountain town for its smallness, its safe quaintness, its Americana-ness, which Nathaniel hated a little, but which Nicholas seemed to have bought into. The two major streets of the town offered a view of Bear Mountain rising in the distance, blue and fog-cloaked, and then on the other side of Main, the river valley and rolling hills stretching away toward the piedmont. Nathaniel understood the idea of giving Jack some remoteness from city life, or just life in a fast-paced suburbia, but he didn’t understand the wanting to be near rural depression, or limiting cultural experiences, in particular, for him, like food. Where was Jack going to eat real Indian, Italian, Cambodian, Vietnamese? Sure, there were a couple of Thai restaurants, but those weren’t real, and where would he interact with the people who made these foods? At the time Nathaniel had felt sad that this chance to interact with people from all over the world, through food, and through him, Nathaniel, wasn’t going to be part of Jack’s growing up. It was disappointing that Nicholas had done much of his research in South America and still didn’t feel the need to give something more to Jack than a privileged view of white rural-ness. But Nicholas was his brother, and Nathaniel knew there had to be something else Nicholas wasn’t fully saying. He wondered if Nicholas’s friends at the school knew what it was. He wondered how many of them were thinking of Nicholas now.
It seemed that almost all of the inhabitants of the town knew of the car crash. At the grocery store, the coffee shop, a restaurant he and Stefanie went to, people offered heartfelt condolences. Over the course of a couple days, Nathaniel noticed that the townspeople shared more than just condolences: they shared their knowledge of Nicholas, of April, of the boy. They seemed to want to let Nathaniel know that they knew his brother, understood him even. They told Nathaniel information that was not necessary for him to hear: we all loved Nicky so much, did you know his book about plants from the rainforest, I mean, you’re his brother, you must know, but apparently his book about nature containing a hidden intelligence was a big hit. A woman said he was like their mini-celebrity. He performed public readings of the book, not just in the town, but in other actual cities. Chicago and New York. I had no idea he lived in Peru until I read his books. It must be wonderful having such a fascinating brother. Oh god, I’m sorry, the woman had said. I’m so sorry I said that. I wasn’t thinking. Another had asked, Have you looked his books up on Amazon? They have hundreds of reviews. He’s gonna be here even after he’s gone. That’s important to remember in this trying time. It made Nathaniel feel odd, even lonelier, this try at connection, this mock understanding of his brother, and it made him sense that he couldn’t be for Jack anything close to what Nicholas was, not only not a biological father, but also not a person of interest. Because of the smallness of the town, Nathaniel realized after a few days, because many people knew of his brother before he died, knew of his family, the townspeople felt they had some ownership. They liked talking about Nathaniel’s brother as if he was theirs. They seemed to like talking about all of it because it was such a tragedy, and it was their tragedy, part of them now. Nathaniel, now sitting on one of the porch rocking chairs, wondered if they’d also like talking about it even more once they learned that there was a custody battle going on, that this Tammy woman, the mother-in-law, was staking her claim. He thought the phrase, The mother-in-law is staking her claim. Fascinating and sad, they’d say. And the poor inept brother having to handle it all. But maybe they’d think good things about the situation. He imagined the townspeople, as they conveyed to each other – at decriminalizing marijuana meetings, after Hot Yoga, as discussion for meditation class, in the faculty cafeteria at the liberal arts university, at the two Thai restaurants, amid the folk rock of two small music venues, quietly in a used bookstore, too loudly in the coffee shop, in the aisle of the organic grocery, at the vegan café, among the art of local art galleries, on the trails of the state park, and at various other meeting places in their Blue Ridge mountain town in southern North Carolina – some version of the idea that it must’ve been so hard for the family, for the boy, of course, but also particularly for the brother, Nathaniel, who instead of simply missing his brother, had to clean his brother’s house, go through his brother’s and his sister-in-law’s things, box up those things, set up the services, call people, accept condolences and engage in what probably felt like rote, empty sentiment, and in addition to all this, somehow find some place in himself that wasn’t grieving and wasn’t distracted from grief for his brother’s four-year-old boy, Jack, his nephew, who the townspeople knew the brother loved so much, they’d seen him visiting often, more often than the grandparents on either side of the family, and how hard for the brother, and also for his wife.
Nathaniel looked at his phone, the phone number from the Tammy woman. He didn’t want to call. He thought that if he just waited something would occur that would allow him not to call, though he knew this was not an actuality and that he’d have to call. He enjoyed imagining how the townspeople saw his own suffering, though he knew it was a selfish thing to consider at the moment, yet he did
like it, there was a weird pleasure there, knowing that people knew you were going through something painful and doing it gracefully, and in thinking this thought, Nathaniel thought that he wasn’t doing it gracefully, he was imagining what people were thinking and saying and his brother was gone. Yet even this realization did not stop him from further imagining a townswoman, a person who’d served him at the coffee shop, named Meredith, and what maybe she was saying to friends and family about Nathaniel, Nicholas and Jack, the situation itself. Maybe she was saying that the boy must have found it totally confusing that his aunt and uncle were now living in his family’s house, sleeping in his mom and dad’s bed, cooking in their kitchen. Maybe she’d tell people that she had seen the uncle and the boy at the grocery store, the uncle probably just taking the boy out so he could feel normal, and the uncle had picked Jack up, the once-happy boy now with a fearful and stunned look in his blue eyes, a sadness through his whole being. She’d explain all of this at the pro-marijuana-legalization meeting, telling the members at the meeting how she’d seen how the boy did not want to be away from the uncle, who’d ordered himself a coffee and Jack a hot chocolate, and told her something so sad. Nathaniel remembered explaining it to her: this Meredith woman had asked how the boy was doing and Jack had sort of hid from her behind Nathaniel’s leg. He’d told her that Jack was sleeping next to him in his brother’s bed during the night, always holding onto him very tight and often clutching his t-shirt. During the day, Jack’s thumb was almost always in his mouth, and he followed Nathaniel through the house, his small hand gripping Nathaniel’s pantleg even when they sat down to read a book. Nathaniel had told this Meredith person all this and imagined her now telling it to others, and he found himself thinking of how others saw his suffering, his care, his possible neglect, ineptitude, and wondered if they knew anything about him, if Nicholas had ever in conversation conveyed what a fuck-up Nathaniel had once been. He wished he hadn’t said anything to this woman, but he’d kept talking, telling her that Jack not only did this holding on thing with him, he also did the same with his aunt, holding onto the black curls of his aunt’s hair when she held him, or her skirt, and not only that, but Jack had actually crawled under Stefanie’s skirt one afternoon when a friend recognized the boy in the bakery and came by to offer condolences and tried to say hello to Jack, had tried to say, Hi Jack, do you remember me? Ms. Katie? I’m a, I was, I mean, a good friend of your mom’s. How are you?, and Jack had at first hid in Stefanie’s skirt and then had actually crawled inside it, between Stefanie’s legs, and the Ms. Katie woman had apologized, quietly, in a whisper, and said she hadn’t meant to say that, she didn’t know what possessed her to say that, and she actually began crying in the bakery, and Stefanie had told her it was fine, also in a whisper, and the woman had left, and Stefanie had had to get her order of bread and croissants from the baker by walking up to the counter with Jack clinging to her legs. Nathaniel imagined this Meredith person passing this information on to others in the town, and he knew they all probably were looking at this tragedy askance, like not wanting to turn your head to look at what you know is just a coat on a chair but feels like the silhouette of a person watching you. And though they maybe felt like they were looking at it – both the deaths of the parents and Jack’s heartbreak as well as his yearning for some kind of safety, certainty – directly, inwardly, unconsciously, he knew that if they paid too much attention to these clear expressions of not wanting to lose anything more, of learning to hold so tight on to what he didn’t want to lose, that it could keep them from doing anything. Because they would see the uncertainty in their own lives. Just as he himself felt in those moments when Jack held on to his pantleg or gripped his shirt in bed, that he couldn’t do anything either, couldn’t possibly know what to do amid such clear and powerful impermanence. When moments like talking to this Meredith person arose in Nathaniel’s mind, he sensed his distance from himself, as though he was trying to judge his actions and suffering from some outside perspective, which he knew wasn’t helpful in any way, and which he also knew was a kind of romanticizing of the pain he was in, the romanticizing serving to distance himself from it, to turn it into a story he could tell himself and understand and pity, rather than doing what he should be doing, though he didn’t know exactly what that was. Jack was asleep, after all.
The wind picked up, Nathaniel felt a spray of rain on his face, and he noticed a deep, damp cold move through his body. He pulled his unzipped jacket together over his chest and then went back inside, gently opening and then closing the front door so as not to wake Jack. Stefanie was dumping the potato skins in the trash. He knew that his main job here should be to find some way to help Jack, but when he thought of how he might do that, he didn’t know how: was he supposed to help Jack understand where his parents were now? Were they anywhere? Did he invoke God? Was that something his brother had talked to Jack about? Did he go with a more scientific view that in nature energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change forms, and so Nicholas and April had simply changed forms, and were, actually, everywhere? Jack wouldn’t get that though. Or would he? Would Nicholas have said something more like that? It sounded a little like Nicholas, though he and his brother had stopped having those conversations years ago, and recently, in the last year or two, what they mainly talked about, or what Nathaniel mainly questioned Nicholas about, was when Nicholas was planning on returning to the real world, which Nicholas almost always deflected. They occasionally got into arguments, matters of perspective, with Nathaniel claiming that Nicholas had retreated from life, not just from society and thus community, which Nathaniel argued Nicholas could make change in, but also from the problems of the world: you’ve created your own little utopia in the mountains while everyone else suffers, Nathaniel had told Nicholas. Nicholas claimed, in his cryptic, unrevealing way, that he didn’t feel that was the case at all, that he wasn’t looking for some separate peace, that this was his attempt to speak from his inmost intention, for his inmost intention to manifest as action, to which Nathaniel had said that it seemed selfish, and that, actually, it had all been April’s idea anyway, and he was only following it out and seeing how some different life might feel. Nicholas had then quoted some old Japanese writer to Nathaniel, had actually sent Nathaniel an email, which had said, I think this explains my position best, though it hadn’t explained his position at all. Nathaniel had not understood and still didn’t, though he thought of it often and looked at the email often, looked at the quoted words like they were foreign objects from some other universe whose purpose and meaning he glimpsed intuitively, but with clear thinking he could not see: ‘Because the blue mountains are walking they are constant. Their walk is swifter than the wind; yet those in the mountains do not sense this, do not know it. To be “in the mountains” is a flower opening “within the world.” Those outside the mountains do not sense this, do not know it. Those without eyes to see the mountains do not sense, do not know, do not see, do not hear this truth. They who doubt that the mountains are walking do not yet understand their own walking.’ Nathaniel had read the passage so many times he had it memorized, and he had asked Nicholas about it several times, only for Nicholas to respond that they’d talk about it in person when Nathaniel visited next, but that never occurred. Was it something about knowing nature, being close to nature, Nathaniel thought now? Something about people’s oneness with nature? He thought of Jack, again, of what Nicholas would say to Jack now. It was impossible to know his brother’s mind. Could he say to Jack that his parents had gone away, but they would return, in another form, as grass or trees or a dog, or as the mountain, born again? But that didn’t make sense. What did he even think? To him, his brother was just gone, so was his brother’s wife, April, who Nathaniel liked in theory, but not always in practice. That’s all he felt – both were just gone. And he hated it, he didn’t want them gone, especially his brother, but that’s all that was left in their place: a goneness. The cabin, the cupboards of this kitchen, the smal
l farm his brother had made, all of it was just things. Was he supposed to simply help Jack let go of them, his parents? But how could he do that, he wondered, when he knew that all he wanted to do was also hold on to his brother? Something tightened in Nathaniel’s chest when he realized he had no idea what to do with or for Jack, and now, standing in the kitchen watching Stefanie rinsing some carrots, he tried to refocus on getting everything done so that he could understand clearly how to help Jack, and to begin doing it, because so far it felt a little like he’d been putting it off.
Nathaniel thought that all week he’d had to ask Jack to go away, when all the boy wanted to do was hold on to Nathaniel: telling Jack he wanted him to play with Stefanie in the backyard or could Jack go to the greenhouse to get some basil or sage, fill this basket, telling him these things so that Nathaniel could have a few moments alone on the phone with a local estate attorney, with the funeral home, with the bank, who he had to call twice, because he didn’t have the death certificates, calling the department of health to ask how to get the death certificates, on the phone with his brother’s school to figure out what insurance he had so that Nathaniel could figure out how life insurance was supposed to work, and also setting up cancelation dates for things like utilities and the postal service, all phone calls that required him to say that he was calling on behalf of his brother and sister-in-law, who had recently passed away, which he didn’t want Jack hearing over and over again, and all of which he wanted finished so that he could just focus on Jack. Yet now, standing in the kitchen with Stefanie, wondering why she was cleaning carrots and potatoes at ten in the morning, Jack napping because he’d gotten up so early and had worn himself out, there was now his brother’s mother-in-law, Tammy, in addition to everything else, and after listening to Stefanie tell him again, now slicing the potatoes, that he needed to call this woman back right now, no more waffling, that this was the most important thing, more than anything else now, he said he got it and told Stefanie that okay, he understood, he had to call.