Alligator Candy (24 page)

Each of us had always pursued our dreams—my mother in childbirth education, my father in anthropology, my brother in music, me in writing—against whatever obstacles we faced. For Andy and me in particular, since we started our careers after Jon's death, life felt urgent, and there was never time to wait or sacrifice what we wanted to achieve most. “We all came out of this more determined to not let it crush us,” Andy reflected. “It's like what they said after 9/11: we can't let this keep us down. There was more of a determined sense of urgency to keep moving.”

“You appreciate when things are good,” my mother said. “Happiness makes you feel very happy, laughing feels so good, going somewhere and having a good time feels so good, so you become a happy person.” In recent years, psychologists have referred to this as post-traumatic growth. My mother paraphrased psychologist John Brantner, who'd once compared grief and suffering to a metal spring. Grief and suffering compress the spring down, she said, “but when you experience happiness, it springs up” even higher. Over her desk, she hung a big yellow button. “Enjoy life,” it reads. “This is not a dress rehearsal.”

The more I learned of Jon's story, the more the story began to come to life in new and surprising ways. I began to see connections in things I had never seen or thought about before, sometimes in ways that unsettled me. For years, I had walked past the banners in our synagogue in Tampa, the ones depicting the prophesy of the Child Shall Lead Them, and the story of Jonathan and David. In all this time, however, I had never read the story of Jonathan and David, and, one afternoon, I looked up the translation. I read of the two friends' love for each other, and how Jonathan's father, King Saul of Israel, had grown jealous of David after David had killed Goliath and married his daughter.

But what really struck me was what happened next. Saul decides to have David killed, and Jonathan devises a plan to save his friend. He tells David to hide in the woods. Jonathan would then come to the woods with a bow and arrow, and shoot arrows into the woods in a certain direction if the coast was clear. Jonathan does this, and David returns from the woods to find that he's safe. But the two must say good-bye, and, when they do, the story says, “They cried together, but David cried the most.”

Woods. Bows. Arrows. Jonathan. David. David crying the most. It was strange. I was never religious, and I took the Bible stories as just stories from which one could glean whatever one liked. My brain blended the story with my own, twisting the two. Jonathan went into the woods. The killers came with their bows and arrows. Jonathan died, and I, David, cried for him.

I didn't know what, if anything, it meant, but the parallels felt striking. Such strange connections happened again, like when I listened to the only tape I had of Jon's voice, and heard that it was him describing the murder of Underdog by Simon Bar Sinister. There was more too, like the fact that my daughter, who had been named for him, would later have a bat mitzvah that randomly fell on the same weekend as the anniversary of Jon's death.

But most powerful was when my mother called to tell me she'd been moving a file cabinet in my father's home office when she found something amazing underneath: letters and poems of Jon's. I couldn't believe it. She had no recollection of these papers, and neither did Andy or I. The few treasured possessions we had of Jon's had been in the same small wooden box for decades. If my father had found these papers, he would have shared them with us. The only explanation—the only rational one—was that we had all somehow forgotten these existed, and that seemed absurd. But no matter: the fact that my mother found them, after decades, just weeks before I finished writing this memoir, was incredible enough.

Soon after, I received a manila envelope from my mom with Jon's papers inside. I had never seen anything he'd written, never heard his voice other than that one audiotape, and felt almost as though I couldn't even focus on the first page I pulled out. It was a one-paragraph story from December 1971, about two years before his death, when he was nine, written in blocky pencil on lined paper. “Trees and Birds,” it is titled. “One day there was a beautiful tree in the garden. What a garden. But did you know that some children use to play there but now there dead and then some children moved in the house. The End.”

I felt light-headed as I lowered the papers in my hands. A beautiful tree in the garden. Children played there. Now they're dead? I read the page again for clues. What was this? There was a red star in the upper right-hand corner. It must have been a school assignment of some sort. Maybe he was paraphrasing something he had read. Maybe he had just watched some filmstrip he had to describe. Or, who knows, maybe it was his own invention. My mind reeled. Was it a premonition of his own death in the woods? The “garden” across from our street? The woods, in fact, where homes had since been built and, as he wrote, “some children moved in.”

It didn't make sense. But nothing about his death ever did. I turned the page. “The Ugly Goblin,” this one was titled from an unmarked year. “There was a ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, spooky, spooky, ugly, yucky goblin. He was very, very ugly. But there was a friendly ghost named Gus and he lived with his best friend and he was a goblin but he was not that ugly. And did you know that there was a bat his name was fatso? And he was so fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. Boy—he was so fat he popped! All he's [bones] fell out. And he was very stupid because he had no brain and he did not know anything at all. The goblin was the stupid one. The End.”

Again my mind clawed for clues, reading the words like a cipher. A ghost? More death. The bat, another sign. The bat was stupid, the goblin too. Perhaps this was Jon's way of saying that he felt stupid, that he was struggling with his learning problems. I stopped myself in midthought. What was I doing now? What was I trying to divine? I flipped the page to find a short letter, written the summer before he died, when he was at overnight camp, the same camp where I had seen him posing shirtless and flipping a bird. “Dear Mom Dad Andy and also David,” he wrote. My name, David. So strange to see it in his own hand; this the only time I'd ever seen him use it at all. “I'm still having a great time,” he went on, “tell David thanks for he's nice letters he's ever had. How's Andy Mom and Dad and David. I hope there OK. Love, Jon.”

I read it again, savoring his mention of my name, not just once but three times. My name, David, his little brother, my big brother Jon. And I couldn't help but find more meaning in his words. This was it, the only reference to me at all, and what was he doing? He was thanking me for writing. Was I overreaching by thinking this? Was I seeking his approval? Or was I simply tuning in to some otherworldly missive, some message he sent to me—astonishingly—in the final days of my writing my book about him? I didn't know what to make of it and felt a bit foolish trying to make anything of it at all. I consulted my rabbi for insight, and he said the same thing that a religious friend of mine had told me: perhaps this is Jon here with you while you're writing your book.

But Jon would come to me in one more way. It happened on a clear, blue day in January 2013, and I was sitting at my desk at home, leafing through the eight-hundred-page case file while working on my book. I thought I had read everything, but there was apparently one thing I missed. In the middle of the case file, I came to an eight-page summary by the police of the first two days after Jon went missing. It started with the missing-person call from my dad. “Very briefly,” I read, “the child's parents reported that their eleven-year-old son Jonathan Kushner, had just finished cutting the lawn and his five-year-old brother asked him to go to the 7-Eleven store to get him some candy.”

As I read the words, I reached up to turn off the music on my computer. Then I read the end of the line again, focusing on the words “brother asked him to go to the 7-Eleven store to get him some candy.” They had my age wrong—I was four—but that was not what hit me. It was the rest of it, the part about how I had asked Jon to go get candy for me. He went because I asked him? He went for this reason alone?

Throughout my life, I had gone through so many iterations of my final exchange with him, and, yes, I did recall standing on the sidewalk asking him for the alligator candy. But I never entertained the thought that the
reason
he went to the store at all was because I had asked him. I thought he was just going anyway, and I had asked him to get me something while he was there. That thought alone had given me sometimes unbearable guilt growing up, and now, forty years later, out of the blue, the guilt came walloping back.

He had gone for me? Because I asked him? My mind and heart raced. Intellectually, I knew well enough that I should not assume guilt for his murder, that I alone was not responsible for his death. I knew that the living play self-destructive games of what-if when someone dies. Friends of Jon's had been asking themselves,
What if we had played with him that morning, and he hadn't gone?
Teachers at IDS had asked themselves,
What if we had allowed other students to go down that path when the killers were there?

But as much as I knew it was just my mind corroding me, I couldn't fight it. I felt responsible. I felt awful. Even though this was on the page in black and white, I still didn't know if it was completely true. But why would my father tell the police that Jon had gone to get candy for me? I thought back to the day when I was sixteen, and I sat with him on the back porch, listening to the news of Witt's execution on the transistor radio, and how my dad told me, for the first time, the details of Jon's murder. I remembered how, when I brought up my memory of my last conversation with Jon, my dad corrected me, telling me that, no, I wasn't the last to see him. The memory hadn't happened. The last person to see Jon was him.

I'd since wondered if perhaps my dad was protecting me—if he was purposefully revising the story so that I wouldn't beat myself up for having dispatched Jon to his death. As much as I thought that would be out of character for my father, since he was always so direct with me when we discussed such matters, now, with him dead, I would have no way of knowing. I called my mother to ask her what she thought: Could Dad have been lying to me? She agreed that that wasn't something he would do; he was not one to mask the truth. My mother's memory of what happened to the candy was hazy, but when I told her about the police report, she thought it wasn't accurate. As far as she recalled, Jon was going to the store anyway, and I had simply asked him to get me something while he was there.

Still, the truth felt like it was eluding me, and my emotions of guilt were already unleashed. I wasn't trying to be a martyr, I was just trying to cope. But I couldn't write anymore. I couldn't read. I had to get up and walk outside, breathe the crisp winter air. Guilt was corrosive, an acid, numbing me to the world around me, casting me back into the body of myself forty years before. I replayed the conversation with Jon again, calling it up like a hologram before my eyes. I heard myself talking with him about the alligator candy, saw him shifting his feet on the pedals, and I wanted to scream out, “No, don't go! I don't need the candy. Don't get it. Don't get it for me. Stay home. Stay here. I know what awaits you. I can see through the woods. I see the men there parked in their car with their Cracker Jack and Coke. I know what awaits you. I know everything!”

But I couldn't scream out. I couldn't travel through time. It was written. The story was done. Jon went to the store and never came back. And I would have to live with that, live with the missing pieces of his story that remained despite everything I had learned. But at least I knew enough to understand that even if I were responsible for Jon's decision to go to the store that day, I did not put Witt and Tillman there. I did not set the crime into motion. And perhaps Jon would have gone anyway. His death was beyond his or my control.

As I sit here at my desk writing these words, I have become filled with a sense that my brother is here with me. The peace sign that used to hang in his room hangs on my wall. My desk is covered with his case file. There's a picture of him in a small white frame beside me. I have never been one to believe in life after death or that people communicate with us after they die. I believe, though, that perhaps their energy remains in some form; something we can access in ways we can't fully understand.

All I know is that right here, right now, after so many months of reading and writing about Jon, I feel his presence like never before. The alligator candy is no longer just a reminder of evil and loss, of guilt and pain, it's a symbol of my connection to my brother and the gift he had gone to get for me. And a part of me hears him now in my head:

“David,” he says, “it's not your fault. Don't do this to yourself. David, I love you.”

And I know that this book is, perhaps more than anything, my way of telling him I love him too.

M
Y DAUGHTER
learned to ride her bike on the same sidewalk where I last saw Jon. As she eagerly climbed up on her seat, I put my hands on her shoulders and began to push, breaking into a stride as she pedaled. Then came that inevitable moment: when her wheels went faster than I could run, and her shoulders left my palms, and she kept going, moving her feet, steering delightedly on her own as I watched her go, and then return.

In the years since, I've been able to find inspiration in the person who came to represent that freedom to me most of all: Jon. I can finally do something that I could never fully do before: imagine him alive. I know that while his death was so tragic, he was never more alive than his very last ride. He was a boy on a bike, alone and independent, racing through the woods with candy in his basket for him and me. The wind was in his face. He was pedaling fast. He was heading home. And he was free.