It was Aunt Edna who identified her. From the back seat of the detective’s plain, unmarked car, I saw two men in black rain slicks lead her down the walkway and into the house. A few minutes later I heard a hollow, wrenching sound come from inside the house. It wasn’t so much a scream as a low, painful wail. It was then that the older detective turned and spoke to me, although, until recently, I could not remember what he said.
Aunt Edna was at the blue car a few minutes later, her jaw set, her lips so tightly closed that when the young detective asked if she was “the sister,” she could only nod silently in response.
It would be many years before I saw what Aunt Edna saw that afternoon, my eyes lingering hypnotically on the body of my mother, how it was so carefully and respectfully laid out with perfect formality.
Other pictures showed that the same care had not been taken with my brother.
Jamie Edward Farris, age seventeen.
He was tall and lanky, with glistening black hair. In pictures, he appears rather thin, with a pale face and large, dark, nearly clownish lips. His eyes were a milky brown, like his mother’s, with thin eyebrows, and short dark lashes. Like hers, Jamie’s face gave the sense of having been composed of various parts selected from other faces, the eyes too dull and faded to go with the glossy black hair, the nose too flat to fit in with the high cheekbones and narrow forehead.
Jamie and I were typical “older” and “kid” brothers. We shared the same room, the same bunk beds. We often annoyed and frustrated each other. In the evening, we listened to music together, always records selected by Jamie, and sometimes played Chinese checkers on a bright tin board. From time to time, he would try to teach me things, the guitar on one occasion, and how to use a cue stick on another.
But despite all that, we were never really close. There was a sullenness in him, a sense of subdued explosion which kept me at arm’s length. Wanting a room of his own, resentful that Laura had always had one, Jamie often made me feel unwelcome in his presence, as if I were an unwanted intrusion.
But even more than he resented me, Jamie resented my sister. “Laura gets her own room because she’s a girl,” he often sneered at those times when she would return home with some small school triumph. It was a maliciousness and envy of my sister which I didn’t share and probably despised. In any event, I don’t recall missing him a great deal after his death, certainly not in the way I missed Laura, longed for her and called her name at night.
Still, I do remember Jamie quite well. I remember that he often seemed listless, drowsy, the heavy lids drooping slowly as he sat at his desk, the head following not long after that, nodding almost all the way down to the open textbook before it bobbed up suddenly, and he began to study once again. More than anything, he seems to have been one of those people who feel estranged from their own existence. There were even times when he appeared to dangle above his own life, unable to touch ground, find direction, move in a way that he’d willed himself. Had he lived, I doubt that much would have come of him, for even as a boy, he seemed to have inherited that lethargy and lack of spirit that was so visible in the woman in the red housedress.
Even so, as I must add in a final qualification, he was not entirely inanimate. There were things that truly interested Jamie. He could spend long hours practicing his guitar, despite the fact that there was never any noticeable improvement in his ability to play it. He liked to fish, and he, Laura, and I would sometimes walk to the pond a half-mile or so from our house, cast our bait into the water and wait—usually for hours—before finally returning home with nothing. Even before Rebecca urged me back, I remembered those little fishing trips surprisingly well, the shade of the trees, the small boats that skirted across the nearly motionless water, the bell on the ice cream truck that made three rounds per afternoon, even when the driver knew that on this particular stop, there’d be no customers but the Farris kids.
What else of Jamie?
Only a few scattered items. I remember him rushing to hide something in his desk as I came unexpectedly into the room we shared. I remember him breaking a guitar string and cursing, then, his anger quickly spent, meticulously stringing another.
And finally, there is this, which I remember more vividly than anything else, perhaps because it occurred only two days before he died. I was riding my bike down the block toward home when I saw him standing by the mailbox at the edge of our yard. I waved as I sped by, but he did not wave back. Instead, he continued staring, a little anxiously, up the street. He was clearly waiting for the postman to arrive, but I never learned what he was expecting in the mail. Perhaps it was a letter from a sweetheart we never knew about, or some item from a mail-order house that came three days later. Perhaps it was no more than a signed photograph from a movie star.
Whatever it was, Jamie was waiting for it nervously, and it was there that my mind had chosen to leave him, a figure waiting, tall and gangly, his black hair tangled and unwashed, his languid, nearly lightless eyes fixed expectantly on the road ahead. Better there, than sprawled across the floor of our little room, his face a bubbly mass of shattered flesh, the side of his head blown away, and hanging in a red, glistening flap over his hunched shoulder.
And finally, there was Laura.
As the years passed, I continued to remember her best of all. I remembered her with every sense impression. I remembered the sweet smell of her hair, how soft her hands were when they touched my face, the taste of her skin when I kissed her. I remembered the edginess and restlessness that sometimes came into her voice, rebellion building in her like a wave.
Laura was sixteen. She had my father’s black hair, as I do, but with features that were absolutely her own. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black when she walked beneath the shade, and her skin was a glowing white. Her lips were full and when she was cold, or when she cried, as she often did suddenly and explosively, for reasons I could not have fathomed, they turned a soft violet.
Even as a child, I recognized that there were powerful emotions in Laura. Something in her soul was always trembling. She seemed to stand on a ledge, looking down, at times with fear, at times with longing. Had she lived, I have sometimes thought, she might have ended up a teenage suicide. A great-aunt on her mother’s side, Quentin later told me, had shot herself in a small cottage in Maine, and when he pulled a dusty family album from its ancestral shelf and pointed the woman out, the resemblance between the lost aunt and my sister was astonishingly deep. There was the same nervous tension in her eyes, the corners of the mouth drawn down along the same narrow lines, a certain stiffness and rigidity in the stance, as if rigor mortis were already setting in.
Remembering Laura now, the melancholy that at times consumed her, it’s easy to see the ebb and flow of chemistry, to blame everything on the time of life she shared with my brother, he nearing the end of adolescence, she at its scorching core. But I believe that Laura suffered from more than a stage of development. There was something deeply wrong, askew, unbalanced. At night, she would often walk about the house, ghostly and forlorn, like some distraught maiden out of one of my mother’s romance novels. To Jamie, it was an annoyance, and often, when he heard her footsteps in the hallway, he would yell at her harshly, demanding that she return to her room, then lean over the edge of his upper bunk, glance down at me, and rotate his index finger at the side of his head, whispering vehemently: “She’s nuts.”
Nuts, perhaps, to Jamie, but to me she was the most mysterious person in the world. The nightly rambling that irritated him, enchanted me. I sensed that there were secret regions in her, lost rooms, labyrinthine caverns. I know now that I was in love with my sister, and that the feelings I had for her, and even the way her memory still from time to time overwhelms me, that all of this was part of an early romantic attachment, a longing that I experienced as a natural adoration, something that all boys felt for their older sisters. I have since learned that it was no such thing, that the excitement which I felt in her presence, the way my breath stopped when I heard her pass my closed door, the way I stole glances even at her shadow on the wall, that all of this had its roots in the first inchoate gropings of desire.