“How is everyone?” Pastor Harold sat next to Brenda in the front pew. “I hope we’re all hanging in there.”
“We’re okay,” Brenda told him. She handed out Kleenexes. “We’re keeping it together.”
“We’re each other’s backbones,” my mom said.
“That’s right,” Pastor Harold agreed. “These are strong families. Families with roots that run deep and broad. This is never easy, but there’s experience to draw on here.” He motioned to Brenda’s parents. “Together, you will all make it through this.”
The reverend’s mouth seemed to move automatically. I wondered if, after a while, being a clergyman was little more than breaking bread and drinking wine. An old man rubbing his hands together, turning dust to dust.
Brandon’s was the first funeral I went to. It amazed me how much sadness there was. Adults lost their composure. They huddled together to bawl on each other’s shoulders. I wondered if all funerals were so hard. For me, it wasn’t because Brandon was barely a teenager when he died — being young, I didn’t grieve for lost youth — but because of how it made me feel to watch others grieve. And in the way outsiders treated me, offering condolences like I was part dead myself.
I didn’t tell anyone this, but if it had been somehow necessary that Brandon die at that moment, then I wished that he’d killed himself. Then there would have been something to blame. Somehow this would have been an acceptable cause and effect. I’d heard of this happening, at least, learned about it on TV and in school. There would have been physical satisfaction in imagining this. The cool metal slipping between his lips. The buzzing sensation at the back of his cranium. Then the bloom. I could have understood that. It would have made sense to jump off a boat into the waiting mouth of a shark. Dying from asthma made no sense.
How Brandon died was obscene, but it fit the surroundings. I had to remind myself that it was late November in Nebraska. My half-brother hadn’t wanted to die, after all. He hadn’t planned any of this.
Brandon was a regimented kid. He learned to paint by numbers. He’d just turned fifteen and wasn’t unathletic when he could keep his breath. He was a strong reader of Gothic fiction and graphic novels. He woke up at 6:30 to eat three bowls of Lucky Charms every morning before washing his face. He knew a lot about American history, especially as it related to General Motors and Spider-Man.
We saw Brandon pretty often growing up. He was brought along for most of our family vacations. We picked him up from Bancroft for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Charlie stuck true to his promise, being responsible for his first son. They tossed around a football in the fall, saw a couple games at Wrigley in the summer if there were tickets. Brandon was buddies with our father in a way Todd and I never were.
Brenda must have been relieved that Charlie was never a stranger to Brandon. Her parents were supportive — they owned the hardware store in town — and her brothers and sisters helped out when they could, but it must have weighed heavily on her that she wasn’t strong enough, or financially secure enough, to move away on her own. She dreamed aloud of her and Brandon starting over in a new place but was never able to follow through with those plans. She relied on her parents to keep going.
Brandon had been jaundiced and colicky as a baby, and in some ways he never grew out of it. With his asthma, whatever house they lived in was too moldy in summer and too drafty in winter. He couldn’t always run with the other kids but was bright enough to hold his own. There were many things he was good at, non-sequiturs and puzzles.
He was an intelligent kid, there was no doubt. He’d had a lot of potential but was mostly an expert at becoming sick. If there was to be a manual for how to die young in a Nebraska winter, he could have written it.
When Charlie took me up to the casket, Brenda’s boyfriend, Monte, was running his fingers through Brandon’s hair. Brandon had thin blond hair and blue stitches in his scalp, with dried blood around the thread. His face was powdery and white. The makeup they put on Brandon made him look girlish.
Monte wore a white shirt. A tiger tattoo on his forearm showed beneath rolled-up sleeves. He asked my father about the stitches in Brandon’s scalp.
“They have to do an autopsy,” Charlie explained. “It’s state law when a child dies. They need a sample of the brain.”
Monte fingered the stitches. He touched the made-up face and cried under his breath, shaking his head.
“Little guy didn’t deserve it,” he said, trailing off. “Some stupid shit, this happening.”
Charlie put his hand on Monte’s back.
When Brandon stayed with us, while our new house was being built, he spent most of his time in the swimming pool. This was the summer before he died. To save money on condo rent, Charlie had his dream house put up in sections so we could live in the first half while the second was being finished. This is why Todd and me shared a bedroom that year.
Our house abutted a golf course. The swimming pool overlooked the seventh green. Brandon showed us how to time our cannonballs to mess up a golfer’s putt. We floated in the pool on inflatable mattresses, sipped on Mountain Dew slushies, watched the construction crew work on the house, until Charlie came home from the law firm where he had just made partner.
Brandon was a serious kid — while we watched cartoons in the afternoon, he read Russian novels that I wouldn’t pick up until college — but the pool helped him be immature. We had tea parties at the bottom, sinking plastic lawn furniture in the deep end then holding our breath while he poured imaginary Earl Grey and served raisin scones like my mom did for her friends. This was when Jurassic Park came out, so we pretended to be underwater raptors tearing each others’ flesh. He taught us how to snorkel, to float on our bellies at the surface, telling us what to visualize when we looked at the bottom of the pool. Sometimes he imagined he was a microorganism wading in a petri dish. Or a man whacked by the mafia, adrift facedown in the harbor.
He stayed with us for three weeks that summer. Charlie made sure the pool was finished before Brandon arrived because he knew how much his first son liked to swim. There wasn’t a public pool in Bancroft, so our vacations with Brandon always revolved around swimming or a body of water. Charlie liked to show Brandon things he normally couldn’t see — things that one isn’t able to experience in landlocked Nebraska.
We never used the pool much after the summer Brandon stayed in the new house. There were no swim parties for my birthday, no lazy days tanning beside the water. Mom quit cleaning it the next summer, so the water turned green, the blue-tile bottom slicked with algae. It would have been vulgar to swim in the pool then. After a few years Charlie quit calling the service to uncover and fill the pool in late spring. The tarp was replaced every fall, but there was never water underneath.
It’s hard to think about what it meant to Charlie to keep the pool covered and dry. To see it each morning while he sipped coffee at the kitchen window, staring at the mesh tarp layered over with snow or leaves. When he and Mom had dinner parties, he was the one who explained why we didn’t fill the pool. He never mentioned Brandon, but people seemed to know his death had something to do with it. It’s too much hassle, Charlie would say. Too costly to repair the pump. Too dangerous for the boys. Eventually he said the damn thing leaked, glancing at the empty pool with anger in his eyes. People knew not to talk about it then.