“What the hell are you doing?” was his greeting. Jeremy was a sour, pimply thirteen-year-old, with dark curly hair that was tamped down on his sweaty temples. He scared Cady. She looked around without answering to see if Eric was coming back.
“Speak English, dummy?” Jeremy asked. His friend snickered.
Cady leaned protectively over the box. “We found a praying mantis, and she’s going to have babies, so we’re making her a house.”
Jeremy’s expression softened. “Shit, really? That’s awesome, can I see it?”
The next second, Jeremy was stomping his foot into the box. Cady screamed as the insect skittered from corner to corner before being crushed beneath his dirty sneaker. When Eric ran around to the front yard, the older boys bolted and left Cady crying, the poor praying mantis curling slowly into its death pose, like a clenching fist.
That memory swirled so vividly—a more palatable, childhood trauma to mix with the grief and anguish she felt now. At this moment, like that one, she felt ashamed that this had happened on her watch, ashamed by her helplessness, and most of all, ashamed that she had let her brother down. Surely, Cady thought, she had disappointed him as a sister, or else he would still be here. But that day with the mantis, Eric didn’t blame her; when he reached her, he hugged her tight until she stopped crying. He was always too good to her. They buried the praying mantis in the flowerbed with a smooth rock as a headstone.
Eric wasn’t having a headstone; he wasn’t being buried at all.
A small sound escaped from her mother’s mouth before she covered it with a tissue, which brought Cady’s attention back to the funeral. She watched as her mother pulled the tissue from her mouth, leaving small particles of white paper on her wet lips, before cramming the tissue back into the crumpled ball. Cady had never seen her mother look so stricken. Her face looked wet with some amalgamation of tears, sweat, saliva, and snot. Her chin-length blond hair looked greasy at the roots and disheveled, a result of her compulsively raking her fingers through it, her eye makeup was smeared around her red-rimmed eyes like bruising, and her cheeks were red, from rubbing or embarrassment. Cady had learned that the family of a suicide victim doesn’t get straight sympathy. Every “I’m sorry for your loss” that they received came with a look of curious judgment, the unsaid “How could you let this happen?”
Cady wanted to touch her mother, rub her back, do something to help, but she felt frozen. She was afraid that anything she tried to do to comfort her would be so inadequate, she would only make things worse. Eric had been her mother’s favorite, but Cady couldn’t hold it against her—Eric was her favorite, too. When Cady didn’t get as much attention from her mother, Eric made up for it through his secret eye-rolls and exaggerated obliging smiles that he knew only she would catch. They were the co-conspirators, and their parents were the marks.
While Cady and her mother were still in shock, her father stepped in and took over the business of her brother’s death—notifying their relatives, contacting the funeral home, making arrangements for Eric’s cremation. Her mother was upset about the cremation, and Cady privately felt the same but didn’t want to come between her parents. There was a horror in imagining Eric being burned in some oven and then pulverized, especially because it was so difficult for Cady to imagine him as a dead person.
Cady was upstairs in her bedroom when her father told her mother the decision to cremate had been made; she heard her mother in the kitchen banging pots and slamming cabinet doors and shouting at her father, “How could you? I wanted to see him, I wanted to kiss his face one last time, one last time, to kiss him goodbye. Wasn’t that my right as his mother, or did I have to give that up, too? Was that my punishment?” Cady couldn’t make out her father’s muffled responses, but she could tell he had remained calm, enraging her mother further. Cady normally took her father’s side when eavesdropping on her parents’ arguments, but even she hated him a little that night.
She imagined her father had set his mouth that day much the way he was now, his bottom lip pulled up and inward, creating little craggy dimples on his chin. His temples had long since gone gray, but now cold glints of silver shone throughout his dark hair. The slack skin on his neck pressed against his shirt collar, and a plum-colored bubble of blood had dried where he must have cut himself shaving. He was only fifty-six years old, but today it seemed everything on him was graying, aging, drying out. Whereas her mother’s grief rendered her preternaturally vivified, her father’s did the opposite. He had turned to stone.
The regular rhythm of the preacher’s monotone speech broke, and Cady looked up in time to see him drop his head and say “Let us pray.”
Her mind reverted again to the praying mantis. In the aftermath of its cruel death, Eric produced his longest coded note to Cady, a plot for vengeance he titled “Mission: Mantis Mommy Revenge.” The directions, translated, ordered her to first cut open all of their old cat Bootie’s toys and empty the catnip into a Ziploc bag, then wait until three in the morning (she had to set her Shark watch alarm), sneak down to the basement to get the ladder, and, without waking anyone up, take it to Jeremy’s house and climb on top of his garage. Cady never felt as nervous and important as she did that night. Sure enough, when she had completed everything and reached the top rung of the ladder, there on the garage roof was Eric, sitting Indian-style, waiting for her. Cady remembered that he was pleased to see her, but not surprised—that was the best part about Eric, he was always confident his little sister would come through for him.
She was frozen, crouching on her hands and knees on the roof of the garage; she could see the cedar shingles shine in the moonlight, slick from a recent rainfall. Eric walked on the slanted roof as if it were nothing. He told her not to worry, he had seen Jeremy sneak out on the roof plenty of times, but Cady yelped when his Converse sneaker squeaked and slipped an inch. She watched as he quickly scaled the incline to the roof’s apex, then walked along the ridgeline until he reached the wall of the main house. There he bent down and pulled on the last shingle before the wall. It lifted easily, and he revealed a hidden plastic baggie whose contents looked identical to the catnip. When Eric asked her if she knew what it was, she nodded so as not to disappoint him. He laughed and switched the two bags.
Cady could still hear Eric’s laughter in her ears, and it joined with the sounds filling the church—Jenny Park chuckled sadly as she stood at the lectern, giving the rest of the mourners permission to follow suit. She had been Eric’s high school girlfriend. They had been the academic power couple of Dixon Porter High, valedictorian and salutatorian, nerd royalty—until she dumped him the summer before they went to college, after she didn’t get into Harvard but Stanford instead and he wouldn’t go to Caltech to stay close to her. Cady had been sad when they broke up, but now she was glad Jenny had known Eric only at his best, before his mind turned on him.
Jenny’s silky hair, blue-black like a raven’s wing, fell forward as she read from a crumpled sheet of notebook paper. “Eric was the sweetest, smartest guy I’d ever met, but romance was never his best subject,” Jenny said—more gentle laughter from the audience. “I told him months before prom that my dress was red, and I kept reminding him that he was going to have to get me flowers, a corsage or a bouquet or something that would match. So the big day rolls around, and there’s Eric standing in my doorway with…nothing. But he has this big grin on his face, and he leads me to his old VW Golf parked out front, runs around the back of it, and ta-da! ‘Here are your flowers!’ he says. And inside the car were three large clay pots with green, leafy, shrub-type things in each of them. Not a bloom in sight.”