Her brother would have despised this scene. If he were here, he would have led her to the narrow staircase and up to the sanctuary’s balcony, like he always did as a child on Sundays. They would invent fake nonsense conversations as they watched the people in their fancy outfits, Alice laughing so loudly their mother would give a stern look from below. Or they would talk, the scratchy carpet itching the back of Alice’s legs, exposed in one of the ruffled dresses her mother always made her wear to Sunday school.
“What do you think heaven’s like?” he had asked her once, as they tried to count the ceiling’s intricate tiled diamonds. He couldn’t have been older than twelve.
“Angels and singing,” she said with a child’s confidence. “And lots of animals. With wings.”
“In heaven, I want to live in a high, high building where I can play guitar on the roof and look out at earth. And you can live next door in a tree house over the forest. And we’ll see each other all the time.”
She hoped he was there now, but the larger, practical part of her brain doubted. Doubted that vision of heaven was real, maybe that heaven existed at all. And even if it did, doubted that her brother had made it there. She let herself slump and allowed her mind to rest inside the familiar blanket of Jamie’s chatter, ignoring her mother’s spirited small talk.
Her father shifted toward her. “The eulogy. It means a lot, to your mother.”
Alice nodded, and he reached a hand out, as if to lay it reassuringly on her shoulder, but pulled back at the last second and formed a fist at his side.
“He could never fight his demons,” her father said. “It’s better this way. For the family.”
She stepped back an inch, as if off-balance.
Before Alice could reply, the cheek of her nine-year-old daughter thumped onto her stomach. Her father looked at Caitlin, then turned away.
Alice reached down to stroke her daughter’s hair as her husband, Walker, strode through the crowd, standing six inches above even the tallest men, though they were all shrunken from age.
It’s better this way. For the family.
Could that really be true?
“She’s still pretty sensitive,” Walker said to Alice, with no explanation for his lateness or the dirty Converses on Caitlin’s feet that Maura was already eyeing. She tried to read his expression as Caitlin buried her head deeper into Alice’s dress. Though her daughter had never met her uncle, his dying had launched the concept of death into the air, as if she had only realized this week that it existed.
Two old men stood trapped between Richard’s handshake and Alice’s side hug in an awkward limbo. She gestured at Jamie, and he danced over to take Alice’s place in the line.
“You’re not going to die next, are you?”
“No, honey, I’m never going to die. You can’t get rid of me.”
Caitlin wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving pink streaks down her cheeks. “Promise?”
“Well, we’ll die sometime,” Walker said, leaning down to her level. “When we’re old.”
“But you’re old now!”
Alice gave her husband a face that said Let me handle this, idiot but remembering what was to come, she mustered her last reserves of patience and morphed her expression into the same fake smile she’d used with the mourners. Better to hang onto what she expected would be their last hour of marital (somewhat) peace for weeks.
Alice leaned down to her daughter. “We won’t die for a very, very, very long time. Okay?”
Caitlin nodded, and the family stepped forward to greet the next mourner. The receiving line continued.
“How did he die?” one of the mourners asked Maura, the question petering out at the end. Alice raised an eyebrow and awaited the reply.
“Heart failure. So unexpected.”
Her mother always lied with a smile.
She would never tell the mourners the words that rattled in Alice’s skull now. Like the game of Pong her brother had been so happy to get for Christmas one year, the two words bounced in an endless loop: overdose, OxyContin, and back again. They were the only words Alice had retained after her mother delivered the news to her in the church parking lot on Sunday, saying simply, “Rob is dead. Heart failure.”
Then, to the only question Alice dared to ask: “His heart stopped beating when he overdosed on OxyContin. Is that what you want to hear?”
* * *
When, finally, the last mourner entered the church, Alice stepped away from Walker and her mother, now cheerfully introducing Caitlin to her Thursday bridge group. She walked past dozens of cross-shaped flower arrangements that threatened to collapse into the crowd—all addressed to her mother—until she reached a table usually cluttered with church flyers.
Her mother had decorated it with a row of pictures that showed the two Tate children growing up. At various stages of childhood, they climbed their tree house, canoed on the river, hugged a golden retriever, or squeezed into the driver’s seat of one of their father’s eighteen-wheelers with Tate Trucking in block letters across the side. Alice’s cheeks burned with anger as she looked at their smiling faces. She longed to reach into the photo and pin him down there, to keep him from leaving, from dying.
Her eyes skipped over a photo of the young family in front of her parents’ house, a place she hadn’t been in years and hoped never to see again. She was sure her mother had brought the photo to torment her, as if her brother’s death and the tension with Walker were just shy of far enough.
The next photo showed the family’s annual trip to Amelia Island, the trip the year before her brother left. Five years younger, Alice was small enough to perch on his shoulders. Her legs dangled down over his strong arms, and she wore jean shorts and the T-shirt she’d received a few weeks earlier at her fourth-grade field day. She looked right into the camera, caught in mid-laugh. His neck and smile hid his other features as he tipped his face to look up at her.
She remembered thinking a day at the beach with her brother was the most fun she’d ever had, the most special she’d ever felt, his eyes focused on her as if he wore blinders to the rest of the world, while her father would barely look up from his newspaper when she talked, and her mother would only correct her grammar.
Was the family better off with him dead, as her father suggested? No. The only better reality would have been for him not to have existed at all, to erase these happy memories from her consciousness. Pretending her brother never existed, that’s how she’d chosen to live with Walker for the last decade, after all. The loss and loneliness of the years after her brother left were painful only because she had experienced the other reality, with him, the reality that had flooded back to her anew in each hour since his death.