Dad was dead, that’s the start.
◆
The story is this:
My brother James and I were visiting our falling-apart father at his home in Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of June, just a couple months before my sixteenth birthday. Travel was difficult for us: we had a beat-up car and only enough money for two tanks of gas. I feared driving, and James had trouble, sometimes, maintaining who he was. Dad was an alcoholic, and we hadn’t seen him in more than three years, not even when Mom died. I was supposed to be, as far as the legal system was concerned, living with Dad. But I’d stayed with James, who’d stayed in Pensacola, and now we were visiting Dad because I had insisted we go, because I felt James needed to see him. Phone calls weren’t enough. I thought the drive from Florida would do everyone some good.
We took the long route through Mobile and up the westward side of the state, perpendicular to the panhandle, coasting through dilapidated towns. James did the driving even though I needed to practice. I hated being in cars, let alone at the wheel of one, and the thought of directing fifteen hundred pounds down a crumbling road through West Alabama, well, that was too much for me. If I had to drive, I preferred the freeways of Florida, the state where our mother moved us after the divorce. I had become spoiled by what collectively higher property taxes could buy: smooth roads, reflective paint. Maybe I was only comfortable driving with water nearby, the breezy proximity of a beach. More likely, I was just a kid scared of what I didn’t already know.
In hindsight, we should have seen Dad’s death coming. We arrived at near dark on a Monday night. Dad’s house—a tiny clapboard affair near the old steel district—was a wreck, littered with papers and folders and piles of laundry. Plastic plates and melamine bowls. His hands shook when he greeted us; tremors, I knew, from decades of drinking. “I’m arranging my affairs,” Dad said, as we surveyed the mess from the couch where we’d laid our bags. He wore a suit, and his thinning hair was parted neatly on the left. Dad hadn’t worked a desk job in years, not since we lived together as a family in Ohio, and it was hard––embarrassing, even––for me to square his appearance of having it together with the reality that he did not. He dressed, I thought later, like he was awaiting the arrival of acquaintances he wanted to impress.
That first night we ordered takeout and discussed our struggles. James had been “gifted” unpaid time off from working the roads to “get his shit together,” and I was entertaining the idea of quitting school. More time to work, to contribute. Dad nodded along as we talked, but he looked like he was dreaming.
Tuesday morning he put on the same suit and puttered around the house, ignoring us. And Tuesday night he slumped over in his chair, legs extended like he was stretching, hands resting, unmoving, on his chest. We’d just eaten dinner and were watching a movie in the living room, I think one of the comedies in that series about the hedge fund guy who pays people to be his family. James and I both looked at Dad and, I like to imagine, had the same thought, something about how his position looked uncomfortable, and how was he holding it for so long? And then I knew. The legs gave it away—the stiffness of the extension, the locked knees.
That’s what struck me, at least. His legs. Maybe James wasn’t struck by anything at all. It was possible, I would think later, that my brother’s mind had already begun to turn.
◆
James and I sat with the body for a while without speaking. I didn’t know what to do except sit. There was no one for us to go back to, no family for us to call. I found myself staring at Mom’s quilt spread over the back of Dad’s chair. One of my earliest memories was of her laboring over that quilt and the loping lines of pen-stroke blue across its yellow-and-white checkered pattern. I was eight when they divorced and Mom took us to Florida, James fifteen, and my memories of that time are tricky and made up, mostly, of scenes I would rather forget. Drunken arguments and cracked coffee mugs.
This quilt didn’t fit the space I permitted my father in my mind. Yet there it was on the chair, cloaking his shoulders. A keepsake, maybe, for him to remember the family by.
◆
Among the last things Dad said to us on Tuesday: Nothing. We were sitting at his dinky table, and I’d attempted to bridge the gap of our separation by asking what he was getting me for my birthday. I offered a reminder, my voice bright, intent on arriving at the routines expected of our roles: “It’s not too long from now, Dad.”
Nothing. He sat primly at the table, a lifetime drinker’s confidence holding him up and blocking us out. James mirrored his stance: arms on the table, eyes unfocused, back straight. That was when I knew our visit was a mistake. I had miscalculated. There was nothing he could give us.
But James and I were used to nothing. James did highly physical work for little more than minimum wage, usually on contracted projects tearing up roads and erecting construction barriers around the nicer neighborhoods near the Bay. He was an unreliable worker, so he mostly waved orange flags at traffic, a role they could fill, at a moment’s notice, with anyone else. I wanted to contribute more than small handfuls of cash from bagging groceries, which was why quitting school at sixteen sounded so promising. I had intended, in fact, for Dad to sign the paperwork.
But if we were broke, then James was slowly breaking. His dissociations had been increasing in number over the past year. Sometimes he was not the brother I had grown up with. Sometimes he thought he was someone else. There was nothing impossible about what happened to him; there were no ghosts or demons. Only the figurative kind, which, perhaps, are the most real. Stupidly, and selfishly, I had hoped seeing our ailing father might startle my brother back into himself, or at least startle away whatever sometimes possessed his mind. I was naïve.
The real last thing Dad had said to us, his mouth full of noodles: “I think I’m ready to go home.”
◆
James decided we had to move the body back to Florida so we could bury it on the beach. “That’s what he wanted,” James said.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Florida is where the sun shines.”
I stood up. “James.”
“Yes,” James said, “back home to Florida. Dad told us. Listen. He’s telling us now.”
“James, he never lived there.”
James looked at me with a serious and distant expression on his face. He was listening to a conversation I was not part of. “This was the point of our trip, Simon. We came here so we could take him, because he knew he could never make it on his own. We would have to carry him, and he knew that. He summoned us. We must bear the burden he felt he was. And what else is a father to a son but a burden? What else is a father but a spool of thread? A spool emptied of its thread, because we are what the thread has made. Simon. It’s us. We are the string, here to carry the empty spool.”
I stared at him. What was I supposed to say to that?
I turned from James to look upon our dead father and was struck by our similarities: Dad’s sharp nose, red cheeks, bushy eyebrows, receding hairline, thin lips—physical aspects James and I had both inherited to varying degrees. Other inheritances I knew better. I knew, for example, from the beers I snuck with friends that I would age into a man who flushed red and sweated profusely when he drank. I knew, from my father, that I would be a bad drunk. As a young child, I’d been told I looked like our mother, but there, at the end, looking at Dad prone in his chair, I could see I’d always resembled him. It was like I was standing over myself, in the future, asleep.
“OK,” I whispered. We wrapped the body in the quilt, packed him in the trunk, and started the long night-drive home.
◆
James used to tell me he was made of predictions. For a long time, I thought he meant he was good at guessing. He had always been the kind of person who bet on everything. But had he really bet that our father would drop dead when we were visiting the summer I was planning to drop out of school? Had he penciled those odds into a notebook? Doubtful.
But now we were driving back to Florida in the dead of night with Dad wrapped in Mom’s quilt in the trunk, which on its own felt like enough to give me a heart attack. A rivulet of sweat drained down the small of my back into the crack of my ass. My shirt stuck to me.
We were somewhere on I-20 when James said, “You know, we never called the police.”
“Were we supposed to?”
James shrugged.
At twenty-three, a more than legal adult, he should have known. His role was the knowledgeable one, with his eye on the present. I was just a kid. Knowing things was his responsibility.
And then, as we neared Demopolis, Dad spoke. What I mean is, James started channeling our father. I don’t mean this in a magical sense, but I don’t know a better verb. This was how my brother’s disassociations manifested. And once he started, he couldn’t stop on his own. We had to ride it out. I won’t call it acting because the transformation was too visceral, but it was close to acting: James was there physically, but he was otherwise gone.
From my perspective, James and I were driving, and then, suddenly, there was my brother’s body, transformed in his mind into our father, driving himself to be buried:
“I can’t believe you wrapped me in the fucking quilt. I hate that quilt. Do you know how hard it is to hold on to something like that? Maribeth made it—your mother made it, for me. And then she left me in Ohio and took you south, and the closest I could get was Alabama. I didn’t know how to fix anything. You never visited. Phone calls are useless. You wrapped me in that quilt. I could never get rid of it. You might as well have put me in a storage bin in the attic. Who do you think you are.”
◆
I started counting James’s transformations when I was ten, but he’d had them as long as I could remember. This one would make sixteen in six years—fitting, given my impending birthday, and the threshold it represented in my mind: freedom from school and from the structures I thought I was beholden to. When I started counting, James had an episode every year or so. But since Mom died, the number had increased: episodes every few months, once twice in a month. For much of my life, I had assumed he was putting on a kind of show. But as I grew older, my opinion changed. Maybe, whether by choice or reflex, James was just trying to make himself into whomever he had to be to keep going.
Our mother had accepted what happened to James as a reality of his life. It’s funny how we do this as people: we grow accustomed to what should be striking or impossible. And we were used to James.
Sometimes I would come home from school, skipping my way into the house from the bus, sticky with after-school sweat, and James and my mother would be engaged in a deep conversation at the kitchen table. One time I found them discussing film—they said words like mise-en-scene, they talked about dissolves and diegesis. My mother looked happy, as if she was finally having the kind of conversation she’d always wanted to have. James looked intense, focused, utterly unlike himself. He said some things to our mother in fluid, rapid French, and she responded in kind, but hesitantly, tripping over words she was not used to using.
They spoke French? I stood in the doorway of the house, watching them. I understood James was somewhere else, and I was used to that disappearance, but I marveled at our mother. I had not known this part of her existed. She was entirely herself, my same sad-smiling Mom, yet she was also someone I did not––could not––fully know.
Of course, this is the way of relationships with family. They care for you, you love them, you know them, but at their cores they are fundamentally closed to you, which means you are closed to them, and, maybe, to yourself.
◆
I didn’t want to, but we stopped at a bar on a backroad outside of Mobile. There were bright lights ahead of us, signs of civilization in the night. James slowed the car when he saw them.
“What,” he said, “do you think about a drink?”
I shook my head. “Let’s just keep driving.”
“My boy,” James said, “I am parched.”
“Who are you right now?” I said, looking out the window as we stopped. James’s voice was pitched differently, lower. He spoke with the lilt James spoke with, but the low voice, the clipped sentences—that was Dad.
James had stopped at one of those bars that capitalized on its isolation. The parking lot, such as it was, was wide and graveled over. A posted sign said TRUCKS OUT BACK. The bar was a place for stopping on nights like this one, when you were carrying a load and needed a breather. It was a figment from a song on AM radio.
A neon sign in the window next to the door read MIL ER, and I felt like running.
As James stepped out of the car, I said, “What about Dad?”
James laughed. “Let’s all have a drink.” He closed his door and started around the back of the car.
Did he mean it literally? The three of us? I imagined my brother opening the trunk and lifting our father out, tugging the quilt from the crevices of Dad’s underarms and dropping it on the ground, then dragging the body into the bar like a bag of the quick-drying concrete he hauled around at work before setting him up on a stool and ordering, Three shots of tequila, one for me, one for my kid brother, and one for dear old Dad. But James walked past the trunk, motioning to me and saying, “Let’s go.”
I followed James inside and sat at a table near the door while he went to the bar. He brought me a beer. “Nobody cares,” he said. The room, wood-paneled in a 70s style with various hanging license plates, signs, and dartboards nailed to the walls, was sparsely populated with truckers and locals who had nowhere else to be on a Tuesday night. A man dressed like a cop or a security guard sat at the bar. He leaned on his elbow, hand cradling his face, while he scrolled endlessly through his phone.
“How long are we staying?” I said. I sipped at the beer. It was lukewarm, and flat, and it made me think of various summer nights I’d spent in a friend’s garage, a six-pack split between us, getting tipsy drunk and putting each other in chokeholds to heighten the buzz before, maybe, making out with each other just to see what it was like.
Instead of answering, James asked a question that trailed off where my name would be: “What are you thinking about…?”
I paused with my fingerprint-covered glass halfway to my lips, unsure of how the sentence would end. Simon? Son? Did I want to hear one more than the other?
I watched his eyes, which were dilated and heavy-lidded. I watched sweat bead on his forehead. This was the look he’d get when he was starting to feel like himself after channeling someone else. He would come and go. His sky-blue t-shirt, emblazoned with the words WHAT’S UP in large green letters, looked gray in the dim lighting. Shadows lay under his eyes like wolves waiting. I wondered how I looked to him.
“I’m thinking,” I said carefully, “about home.”
“Me too.” He pointed at me. “Which one?”
“C’mon, James,” I said. He just stared at me. I stared back, then looked away. This was how it was going to be. “Ours,” I said.
The cop-dude at the bar, I realized, was no longer at the bar.
James nodded. “And school? How is that? Are you liking it?”
I shrugged uneasily and looked around the room. “Yeah…?”
“You’re lying, but that’s OK,” James said.
“I got it from you.”
“See?” He laughed, then lowered his voice––Dad’s through and through––and leaned across the table. “That’s something, son.” As soon as he said it, I knew this was the distinction I wanted, make-believe or not. It embarrassed me how much I wanted it.
I watched his gaze drift over my shoulder toward the door, and I knew the cop-guy was there. I pushed my half-empty glass toward the no-man’s-land middle of the table. “We need to go,” I said.
James raised his hand in a quieting gesture, his eyes locked on the same spot behind me.
I chanced a glance back, but there was only a heavily bearded man slouched in a chair near the door. No cops, no security guards. Just a slouching man the size of a television wrestler in retirement, clad in black biker leather from head to toe.
“I don’t like the way that guy is looking at us,” James finally said, nodding toward the man.
“It’s fine,” I said.
James sighed and tapped his half-empty can on the table. He sighed again. Tap tap tap. “I don’t like it when someone looks at my boys like this.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “James? It’s fine.”
He shook his head. “No, Simon, your brother won’t take care of this. I’ll have a word with the gentleman.”
I reached over to grab his arm. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
James stood up. He clenched and unclenched his fist.
“Wait wait wait,” I said, but James had already started walking, directed by the version of our father he kept in his mind. The look on his face said NOW OR NEVER, ASSHOLE. When the man saw him coming he stood up, and he kept standing, because he was the size of a building. I whispered, “Oh, James,” as my brother threw a punch without preamble and the place erupted.
◆
If you let your brother, even if he’s older than you, get in a fight in a bar off a backroad in the middle of nowhere, you might be stuck dragging him to the car where you’ve got your dead father wrapped in your dead mother’s quilt in the trunk. And your brother, loose-lipped and dazed from a bottle to the head, blood running into his eyes, mouth sputtering like a broken sprinkler, will fight you the whole way. That’s just how these things can go.
I pulled James out of the bar like he was a very large tree branch catching on the ground, the doorjamb, the steps, the gravel. He could barely stand. “Let me go,” he said. Was he telling me as himself? Or was this a father’s command? The tone wasn’t clear; the tone didn’t matter.
All I could think: Nothing. Again and again: nothing, nothing, nothing, in my voice, in James’s voice, in Dad’s voice.
I didn’t know what to do with James in the big picture, but in the moment, as a thrown bottle shattered green shards across the gravel at my feet, I knew I had to get him into the car. There was nothing but that. He stopped fighting me when I opened the door and shoved him toward the passenger seat. His left eye was swollen shut and he wore the expression of an out-of-weight-class boxer in the ninth round.
He tried to smile at me when I got in the car. “You’re driving now? Look at you.”
“Jesus, James,” I said. I put the car in gear and it shifted forward. I slammed the brake. Reverse, I told myself. Reverse. “I told you we had to leave. I told you.” I pounded my fists once, twice on the steering wheel, then took a long breath.
I looked in the rearview and stifled a groan or a yell, or both: the giant biker stood just outside the bar’s faded green door, next to the man dressed like a cop. My heart fluttered and fell like a gun-shot bird, but then I realized they were laughing. One gave us the finger, then the other did, and they walked back inside. The door to the bar closed. The neon sign blinked MI⅃ ƎЯ at me in the rearview.
I let out a long, shuddering sigh as I reversed the car out of its spot and turned toward the road. James leaned his head against the window, smearing blood on the glass.
“James?” I said. “Stay with me.”
He grunted, his breath fogging the window. “Simon, don’t leave your brother.”
“You’re right here,” I said. “Dad is in the trunk. He’s dead. I need you here. I have no idea where we’re going. It’s pitch black. The headlights are shit. James. Come on. Come back. Please, James.” Gravel crunched under the tires as I eased onto the dark tunnel of the road.
“He’s right there,” James mumbled.
To get to the Florida line, you take 84 to 21 South. Right? Simple enough. Straight shot, minimal merging. Drive slow in the right lane. Hazards OFF so a real cop doesn’t inquire. Hands at ten-and-two. No, they changed that recommendation: it’s eight-and-four, so your arms won’t break if the airbag goes off. New rules for the road. OK. OK.
I drove slowly all the way to Florida. James talked in his sleep about how he never got to see his sons. They wouldn’t even visit.
◆
He woke up one time, when we crossed the state line. What should have been a short drive to Pensacola took two hours, and it was the pitch black of 3 a.m. I had stayed in the right lane driving ten under, tensing every time a semi barreled by to pass us. James, mumbling in his sleep, sat up when we entered Florida. He looked out the window, then at me before he rolled it down. The car filled with that striking nighttime humidity I knew so well, the air heavy and warm but cooler than you know it wants to be.
“We’re here,” he said.
“We are,” I said.
“Thank you—both of you—for bringing me,” James said.
We passed an empty WELCOME TO FLORIDA roadside stand. Any fruit they had, any oranges, was under wraps and locked away. Did I feel welcomed to this place? Did it matter? Florida was home—I had no feelings I could name.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“I’ve only been to Florida once before,” James said. “I was older than you, not quite as old as your brother. I hitchhiked from Ohio with a friend. We were going to join the student protests in Gainesville, but we didn’t make it. Stalled out in Jacksonville. Hung out on the beach, then hitchhiked home after three days. I was so sunburned I got sick.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Do you regret it?”
“Regret what?”
“Not making it to the protest?”
“What did it matter? The war was going to happen anyway. We’re still there.” He pointed at a line of orange cones and barriers, markers for the day’s roadwork. “What about you? What’s the future hold? Are you going to join your brother out there, after you graduate?”
I thought of the unsigned paperwork I’d brought, and how easy it would be for James, in this moment, to forge Dad’s signature.
“I have no idea what I’m going to be doing.”
“Don’t you?” he said. “But I guess I didn’t either, not for a long time. Not ever, really.” He tapped the window. “It’s good work. Hard, though.”
I didn’t take my eyes from the road or my hands from the wheel. I swallowed. “Dad,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever come visit us?”
James was quiet. And the thing was, I knew it was James. I knew my father was dead, I knew all of this was a kind of figment, a misrepresentation. But I wanted desperately to play along. For maybe the first time, I wanted to be open to what was in front of me, to what a father might give. I watched the road, and waited.
Somewhere in that silence I realized I didn’t want what I thought I had wanted all this time. I would not have James sign those papers. I wouldn’t quit school. Some changes you can’t predict.
“I was scared,” James said at last. “It was easier to stay away and pretend you and your brother would visit me.” He laughed. “And then you did.”
◆
We buried Dad on an isolated strip of beach as the sun came up over Pensacola Bay.
Later I would recognize what James and I were doing: we were refusing to accept the permanence of Dad’s death. We were laying him to rest where we hoped he wanted to be. We were guessing. We were giving him shells and sunrise and drifting gulls.
But the coastline changes. Tides work as they work, and waves are as regular as breathing. I knew the ebb and flow of ocean cresting and falling would eventually peel away the sand in disintegrating sheets. Maybe the water would take his body with it. Maybe the tide would pull him away. We were burying Dad, but we weren’t keeping him there. As we dug, I found myself looking toward the new future, imagining how it would differ from what I had expected now that I had finally made a decision for myself.
James seemed to be at peace. The look on his face as we shoveled sand was striking in its normalcy. He looked like my brother, burying our father. He looked like he was taking care of things.
There was just one moment, when I handed James the shovel so I could sit in the surf and cool myself off, where he looked stricken. Barely a blink. He took the shovel and his face changed. He looked like a man being made to dig his own grave. But the look passed over him swiftly like the shadow of a cloud.
◆
When I woke around noon the day after we buried Dad, my brother sat at the folding table in our apartment’s kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal. He nodded at me when I sat across from him. His reflective vest was swung over one shoulder, like a towel for burping a baby.
“Long day today,” he said. “Overdue project near 29. I called in an hour ago and they said they need all the help they can get this week.” His eye, swollen from last night’s fight, looked better, though his face was bruised.
“Long night,” I said. I poured cereal into the bowl he’d left out for me—our morning routine.
He nodded. “You OK?”
I nodded.
“Good. What will you do today?”
“I don’t know. Something quiet. I might read. There are some books I’m supposed to read before––” I paused, with the spoon in my mouth. “Who’s asking?” I said.
“Me,” my brother said, and I didn’t have to ask again. I knew who he was in my bones.
◆
For a while I checked the news to see if anyone had reported signs of a body appearing in some kid’s sandcastle. There was nothing.
The week before I turned sixteen I went back to the beach and stood where we’d buried him. It was midday and a few families were spread out on towels under the confetti of umbrellas. The beach appeared unchanged. I knew where we had buried him, I was standing right there. Everything looked the same as it did the morning we rolled him into the wet muck. But I could also feel he was gone, as I knew he would be. Somewhere out in the ocean. I was old enough to know I wasn’t, really, standing on the same sand.