Authors: Kate Rockland
Alexis had laughed. Oh, the pleasure of Mark wanting to spend time with her! He always had been that way, even when they were teenagers. Never acting too cool to be with her, driving her to school each day, bringing her to parties his friends were throwing. He was proud of her.
“I promise,” she’d said, eyes glittering with the promise of the trip, how much fun it would be to really have her brother back for good. When he came home from the first Iraq tour his light shone a little less brightly, he laughed just a tiny bit less easily. He had sand in his backpack and boots. She’d find it in the shower; it was as though Iraq had followed him home at the end of each tour. He’d been twenty-five when he died.
The last picture on the wall was one of his casket draped with an American flag. “So morbid, Mom,” she imagined Mark would say, teasing Bunny. Alexis was the first to hear the news that he’d died. It had been the weekend, so when the doorbell rang Alexis was the only one home; Bunny was at a tennis lesson, and her father worked most Saturday mornings. She was supposed to be studying but she’d been hungry, and wandered downstairs to dig up a snack: celery and peanut butter. She was filling the celery stalks like small green canoes when the chimes of the doorbell rang.
Elsa will answer it,
she thought. It rang again. She suddenly remembered Elsa was away in El Salvador visiting her mother. Shit. She padded over to the door.
She was wearing Mark’s blue striped pajama bottoms and a white tank top. The top was thin, but when the doorbell rang a third time she realized she didn’t have time to grab a coat from the closet so she swung open the door.
There were three officers standing on the porch, their hats in their hands.
Mark can’t be dead because in the movies it’s always two guys,
Alexis thought, feeling a temporary relief at this inner proclamation.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you Bunny Allbright?” one asked. He couldn’t be older than twenty and was short and muscular.
He must have been a wrestler.
She felt sorry for him immediately, to be her own age and be given this job. She wondered why he was in the States and not fighting overseas. He had red hair and freckles, and she wondered if he’d been teased about them in high school.
“That’s my mom,” she said.
The three men looked at one another. The oldest one, in his forties, seemed to be in charge. “May we come in and wait for her?” he asked respectfully.
She didn’t say anything, but stepped aside and held the door. She gripped it so hard she later found a splinter shaped like a comma dug in her palm. The third serviceman was tall and well built, with chiseled features, messy brown hair, and full lips. Alexis felt him scan her body as he passed. It was lightning-quick, but she felt it nonetheless, as he kept his eyes averted from her the rest of the time he was in her house.
The three men sat on the white leather couch across from Alexis, their legs crossed, hats beside them. They didn’t looked hurried or uncomfortable. They were trained for this. Their shoes shone, and their fingernails were clean. For some reason, focusing on their clean-cut appearances was the only thing that kept Alexis from screaming.
“Look. Just tell me,” Alexis said. “Tell me what happened.” Her voice wavered on “happened,” and she squared her shoulders to fight it. She dug her fingers into the leather of the chair she was sitting on.
It was the older one who spoke. She appreciated this later, that he didn’t treat her as a child, or tell her he had to wait until her parents got home, those were his orders. He looked Alexis right in the eye, and she thought what an unusual color they were, nearly purple, but they were kind.
Each word he spoke was like a tiny injury to her body: roadside IED, six others killed, three lives saved by Mark throwing himself on top of them, Mark a national hero to receive the Medal of Honor for gallantry at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States …
They stayed three hours. Alexis fixed them a plate of cheese and crackers, even though they said they were just fine, thank you. She also brought out three bottles of VitaminWater, which she placed on the table and then nearly collapsed, remembering Mark teasing her about purchasing it just a few months ago: “You know they don’t really put all the vitamins in there that you need in a day,” he’d said.
“They do, too! It says it right there on the label.”
“Oh, Alexis, you are so gullible,” and he’d put her in a headlock, mussing up her hair, and she’d punched him in the gut, which was like hitting a brick wall.
The red-haired one caught her, gently helping her sit back down. She’d finally put on
Wheel of Fortune
and the four of them watched it in silence, the men never trying to get comfortable, sitting rigidly and straight-backed. She felt like pulling out her hair the entire time, the feeling was so intense she finally sat on her hands.
When her father returned, it was Alexis who told him, an unintended affliction, which she would forever after regret. It was as if by this simple act she’d somehow made Mark’s death her fault in John Allbright’s eyes. She’d been the first person to deal the blow that would change everything. After she spoke to her father quietly she walked with him to the living room, where the three men had stood, saluting him. They spoke to him as they had to Alexis, matter-of-fact and quick. There was no beating around the bush. Her father nodded, thanked them for coming. “I will inform my wife, gentlemen,” he said, as they turned and walked briskly out the door.
Her mother had needed to be sedated. Alexis sat on the stairs like she had as a child and listened to her being informed. Bunny screamed just once, “No!” and fainted. Their family doctor came to the house, administering the first dosage of sleeping medication she was still hooked on three years later. Alexis hadn’t thought doctors still made house calls; it felt archaic and absurd. That it was her family that needed such an extravagance, or called for such an unwanted luxury.
Her father flew alone to Boston to collect Mark’s body. The Marines held a ceremony at the airport. Alexis saw a photograph of it in the newspaper. There was an image of her father, standing stone-faced and grim among the fluttering flags on cars, the small white airplane landing behind him blurry. Alexis carefully cut the picture out and folded it inside one of her books.
Her father only cried at night. The sound was ragged, like a scuba diver coming up for air after a plunge into the ocean. Wet and ugly. It was more obscene to her than anything. Her father crying was such a strange phenomenon, a private and intimate sound. More intimate than sex. Her parents slept in separate bedrooms and his was directly above Alexis’s, the sound filtering in through an air-conditioning vent in the wall. Alexis sat next to it and tried to read at night sometimes, her hand on the vent, an attempt to soothe.
Mark was buried during a snowstorm. The older, silver-haired officer and the short wrestler-type were there, holding the American flag that would be presented to Bunny. The governor of Connecticut attended, along with his pretty wife, who sobbed softly into her handkerchief the entire time, the sound like a baby bird chirping.
How odd,
Alexis thought at the time.
Here is this woman who never met Mark, and she is crying. And I cannot.
When the rifles went off in unison her mother pinched her arm.
The coldness had seeped into Alexis’s bones, and the snow continued to fall. It was beautiful. Like confetti twinkling down on an empty stage. She’d thought of Mark teaching her how to snowboard on a trip to New Hampshire when she was nine, how he’d skied down the bunny slope with her again and again until she mastered it, their faces red and chapped.
Now she turned the door handle to his room. Bunny had turned it into a shrine. There were photographs of Mark in and out of uniform, condolence letters from former President George W. Bush, him and Alexis as kids, eating an ice-cream cone, a big splotch of green mint on his white Hanes T-shirt. He was missing a front tooth, his arm slung around Alexis. Her eyes welled up looking at it. He’d been so easy, even as a kid. In many ways Alexis was more like her dad than he was, so stiff, her emotions kept bottled inside. Mark was the opposite, like the sun had fallen in love with him and followed him wherever he went.
Alexis touched the gunmetal-gray weight that still resided on top of his dresser, the same weight she’d been playing with the day she’d promised him the cross-country trip. His deodorant had fallen off his nightstand and still lay on the floor, like a giant red bug. Football trophies spread across his dresser. Everything in here was silent and gleaming, as though someone (probably Elsa) dusted daily.
Alexis lay down on top of his red and blue plaid comforter, and stared at the ceiling. The bed felt soft beneath her. On the wall was his surfboard, long and off-white and sleek. Once after surfing in Rhode Island with friends, he’d come to dinner with seaweed in his hair and it had made her father laugh, changing the whole shape of his face.
Outside the window the wind picked up, and she noticed some of the leaves had orange tips. The seasons were shifting again, but Mark wouldn’t be here to see it. The three years that had passed felt like three seconds. She felt a weight on her chest that made breathing unbearable. Just then she felt another nudge from within.
A tear streamed down Alexis’s cheek. She wiped off the wetness, surprised still at the deep well of her emotions lately. It was as if she’d been saving up all her tears in a jar for quite some time, and it was now tipping over and pouring out.
“I feel you, baby,” she whispered aloud in the empty room. The droning sound of a lawnmower started up outside. “I can feel you.” She suddenly wished for a boy, and thought how much Mark would have loved him, carrying him around under his arm like a football. She would find out the gender in a week.
She heard the front door open and close, the sounds of heavy leather loafers treading across the marble floor in the front hall. She leaped off Mark’s bed and smoothed down the blankets so there were no ripples. She’d slipped her boots off and quickly bent down to put them back on, zipping up the sides.
She leaned over the banister and called into the front hallway. “Dad?”
A few seconds of silence. Then he walked slowly out of his office, set down his briefcase, and stared up at Alexis. His hair had gone completely white since the last time she’d seen him. A former polo player and Marine, he was still thick in the chest and had strong forearms, one with an anchor tattoo that he kept covered with high-thread-count button-downs. Bunny picked out suits for him, and they were always excellently tailored. He was a handsome man, with a strong jaw like Mark’s and the same Roman nose, but he had none of Mark’s warmth or charm in his face.
“I thought we agreed you were going to not come back here,” John Allbright said.
“Nice to see you, too, Dad.”
She walked down the stairs, refusing to show how afraid she was. Her footsteps gave off an unpleasant clicking sound as she descended.
“Well?” he asked. The gold in his Marines ring glinted under the light.
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“It’s about money,” she said, reaching the bottom step and staying on it so that she would be at the same height as him, not giving him the upper hand.
He smirked. “Knew you’d run out of it eventually. It was inevitable. ‘Send the girl a check,’ your mother kept saying. As if you’d learn anything that way.”
She burned with humiliation.
Billy,
she thought.
I’m doing this for Billy.
“Er, yes. You’re right, Dad. I certainly have had some difficult times over the last few years, going at it on my own. But
Skinny Chick
is actually doing really well, I have three million subscribers and I was recently on
Oprah
—”
She stood up straighter. Squared her shoulders.
He held up a hand as though she were a small bug to swat away. “Enough. Get to the point. How much?”
Her mother came in the front door just then, a mix of Chanel No. 5 and vodka trailing behind her. She took off a long white camel-hair coat and flung it onto a chair dramatically as she strode to the kitchen. Alexis realized she must have had a car service take her grocery shopping, as a tall, thin man wearing a dark blue cap and a nervous expression followed her, carrying brown paper bags. She’d been so lost in thought in Mark’s old room she hadn’t heard the front door close.
“You two can talk business after dinner,” Bunny trilled, her southern accent deeper when she was drunk. “We’re having penne à la vodka with chicken!” She was wearing a deep orange silk dress, her long hair curled and pinned in a ballerina bun on the top of her head.
She is still so beautiful,
Alexis thought. As usual, she was overdressed.
Her father glanced at his Rolex. “How much time do I have, Bun? There are some papers I wanted to go through.”
She made a
tsk
sound. “No time at all. The food’s already been prepared. I just have to pop it onto plates! Isn’t that wonderful?”
Alexis covered her smile with her hand. Her mother was famous for going to various restaurants in town and having them cook dinner, which she would then bring home and nonchalantly serve up as though every housewife did this. Her dad seemed to be trying not to smile as well, there was just a brief flicker of amusement on his stone face, and Alexis shared a moment with him in which she thought things might just be fine after all. Their eyes locked and a mutual frustration yet deep love for Bunny crossed between them. It was over before Alexis could be sure it had happened. John Allbright turned and strode into the kitchen.
Alexis followed him and sat down, glad to be off her feet again. They were starting to swell slightly from all the extra water weight. She reached down to rub her ankle under the boot.