Jamie sidled up to her in front of the photos. “He was such a cute kid.”
She nodded. Paused. “Daddy said that even though it’s hard right now, it’s best for the family. That he could never”—she made air quotes—“‘fight his demons.’ Do you really think that’s true?”
“Look at it from his point of view: Your dad, he’d been sent away to that terrible school, barely survived Korea. I shouldn’t speak ill of your grandfather—Lord knows he saved me when I had nowhere else to go—but he was a real son of a bitch. I never saw him crack a smile in the five years I lived with them. You and your brother, when you were growing up, you had everything. Good parents, nice house, plenty of money. Your brother had all that, a perfect life, people who loved him, who adored him, and look what he did with it.” Jamie spread his arms toward the pictures and the mourners.
It was true. Yet Rob had taken the pills to numb something inside, numb something Alice would never understand or know. When he took off, not bothering to call, not caring enough to worry about her, Alice assumed he was busy having the time of his life in Paris or London or Los Angeles. And she hated him for it. The pills, though, they introduced a new tinge to her many conflicting thoughts about her brother: guilt.
“Maybe I could have done something, found him or helped him in some way,” Alice said, but even to her, the words felt hollow.
“He was so stubborn, that boy,” Jamie said with the overly mature air he used when talking about “the kids,” even though by age, he was thrown in between her father and her brother, truly belonging to neither generation. “He chose not to be part of this family anymore. He didn’t care about you or Richard or Maura. He wasn’t exactly—”
“There you are!” Alice’s best friend and former college roommate, Meredith, kissed Alice on both cheeks before wrapping her in a long, tight hug, interrupting Jamie. Alice felt the threat of tears, so she stepped back and rubbed her hands on her belly, trying to ground herself.
“Are you feeling better about the eulogy?” Meredith asked with a look at Jamie, who met her eyes before walking away. Alice had always been jealous of Meredith’s ability to dismiss someone with a look.
“No, I wish”—Wish what? So many things—“wish I knew who he really was.”
“Well—” Meredith started, to contradict her, comfort her, assure her, but Alice didn’t want to be comforted. She cut her off.
“I’m just glad it will be over soon.”
Meredith shut her mouth.
Alice sat down on one of the benches that lined the church’s hallway, and they sat, shoulders touching, for a few minutes in a silence her friend knew enough not to interrupt. Alice rested her head on Meredith’s shoulder. She could close her eyes and sleep here for hours, just feeling her friend breathing and the baby squirming.
“I’m going to name the baby Robbie, after him,” Alice finally said, raising her head.
She had been so scared that breathing a name into existence, as she had three other times, would cause the baby to disappear from her womb. She felt now that she would be able to give Caitlin a sibling as the universe yanked away her own childhood hero, a Faustian bargain.
“What did Walker say?”
“He said he doesn’t understand why I’d want to and why I’m so upset, since Rob and I weren’t close.” Pregnancy hormones is what he’d actually said, accompanied only the first time by a small laugh.
Not close. Like a second cousin or long-lost aunt. Not that Alice could fault Walker. She’d said it herself at their first date, to dismiss further questions about her brother. “One brother. We’re not close.” Had barely brought up her brother while she and Walker had been together.
But she never believed it was really true, only knew that if she hadn’t said those words—not close—she wouldn’t have been able to smile up at Walker on their wedding day. She wouldn’t have been able to laugh with him on the couch as their spoons went to war over the few remaining pieces of cookie dough in the ice cream. She wouldn’t have been able to scream “She says keep holding on!” as he let go of Caitlin’s bike.
To create those memories, she had to bury those of her brother, had to raise the stakes not to go back to the dark place of her young adulthood, not to go back to being consumed by someone who couldn’t even pick up the phone to let her know where he’d gone. But, she knew she’d never be able to explain that to Walker.
Already, she could see the word liar floating between them. She’d felt the accusation from the moment Walker hugged her lightly when she told him the news of her brother’s passing, gasping like an asthma patient and blasting snot onto his church clothes. His hands had tensed around her shoulders with the knowledge that he was missing some essential bit of information.
But had it been a lie? Alice wondered in the hours she spent alone, erasing and rewriting the eulogy, avoiding her husband and all the questions he had never known to ask, all the stories she had never told. What makes someone close?
Is it that you talk every day or every week or every year, or is it that their favorite sayings, the way they watched a sunset, how they licked their lips while concentrating on a book, or sang to you when you were scared, are coiled around your DNA like any other molecule that defines you?
* * *
The funeral director rounded up Maura, Richard, Jamie, Alice, Walker, and Caitlin and led them to another side room while guests filled the chapel. Her family squashed the room’s new silence with anything but talk of the deceased. Maura summarized the plot of Cats for Caitlin, which they had tickets to for Saturday night at the Fox Theater. Avoiding Alice, Walker struggled for a conversation with Richard and Jamie.
“Hot today,” Walker said.
“Grass is dying,” her father said. The three of them stood with their hands in their pockets. “How’s yours, James?”
Alice stared through the stained-glass window into the sanctuary. Through the lightest-colored glass, she could make out the brown casket with its regal gold trim in front of the white marble altar. Alice had gone with Maura to pick it out yesterday, trailing her at the funeral home while her mother scrutinized the various features of each, exactly as she would a new car. After Maura ran her hand along the cream silk inside one, she pronounced it “perfect” and ordered three, one for her, one for her husband, and one for her son.
“Don’t you want one?” Maura asked.
“No.”
“We’ll all be matching. You’ll be left out.”
Alice shook her head.
“You’ll regret it later,” her mother had said before turning back to the funeral home’s director without missing a beat: “So, you’ll get these and coordinate with the home in New Orleans?”