The Life We Bury (3 page)

On the drive back to the Twin Cities, I watched the anxiety pace back and forth behind my brother's eyes, his brow and forehead creasing and relaxing as he processed what was happening. As the miles fell behind my tires, Jeremy grew more comfortable with our adventure until finally he relaxed with a deep exhale, the way I've seen dogs sigh in that moment when vigilance surrenders to sleep. Jeremy—the boy who laid his head on the bottom level of our bunk bed and shared my room, my closet, and my dresser drawers for eighteen years—was with me again. We had never been apart for more than a night or two in all our lives until a month ago, when I moved to campus, leaving him behind with a woman who swam in chaos.

As far back as I could remember, my mom had been prone to wild mood swings—laughing and dancing across the living room one minute, throwing dishes around the kitchen the next—classic bipolar from what I understand. Of course that diagnosis was never made official because my mother refused to get professional help. Instead, she lived her life with her fingers in her ears, as though the truth would not exist if she never heard the words spoken aloud. Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka—a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy—and you get a picture of the mother I left behind.

She hadn't always been that bad though. In the early years, my mother's moods used to have a ceiling and a floor that kept the neighbors, and Child Protective Services, out of our lives. We even had some good times. I can remember the three of us going to the Science Museum, the Renaissance Festival, and the Valley Fair Amusement Park. I can remember her helping me with my math homework when I struggled
to multiply double digits. I could sometimes find a crack in the wall that had grown between us and remember her laughing with us and even loving us. When I tried, I could remember a mother who could be warm and soft on those days when the world stayed off her back.

That all changed the day my Grandpa Bill died. A feral restlessness descended upon our little trio that day, as though his death severed the one tether that gave my mother stability. After his death she let go of what little restraint she possessed and simply floated on the wave of her moods. She cried more, yelled more, and lashed out whenever the world overwhelmed her. She seemed determined to find the darker edges of her life and embrace them as some kind of new normal.

Hitting was her first rule change. It started gradually, but eventually she took to slapping me across the face whenever her tea-kettle brain started to boil. As I got older and less sensitive to the slaps, she adjusted her aim to hit me in the ear. I hated that. Sometimes she would use implements like wooden spoons or wire flyswatter handles to make her point. Once, in seventh grade, I had to miss a wrestling tournament because the welts on my thighs were visible around my wrestling uniform and she forced me to stay home. For years she left Jeremy out of our battles, preferring to take all of her frustrations out on me. But as time went by, she began to lose control with him, too, yelling and cursing at him.

Then, one day she went too far.

When I was eighteen and out of high school, I came home to find my mother particularly drunk and angry and hitting Jeremy in the head with a tennis shoe. I dragged her into her bedroom and threw her down on the bed. She got up and tried to hit me. I grabbed her wrists, spun her around, and tossed her back onto the bed. She tried twice more to come at me and ended each attempt face down on her mattress. After the last attempt, she paused to catch her breath and ended up passing out. The next morning, she acted like nothing had happened, like she had no memory of her craziness, like our little family unit wasn't on the brink of its inevitable collapse. I played along, but I knew—I knew that she had reached a point where she could justify hitting Jeremy. I
also knew that once I left for college it would likely get worse. Those thoughts made my chest hurt. And so, just as my mother pretended nothing was wrong after her blackout, I buried my thoughts deep inside, hiding them where they would remain undusted.

But as we headed to my apartment that night, life was good. Jeremy and I listened to the Twins game as we drove—at least I listened to it. Jeremy heard the game but couldn't follow it from one minute to the next. I chatted with him, explaining things about the game as we drove, but he would rarely respond. When he did, he stepped into the conversation as if he had just come in from another room. By the time we pulled off I-35, up near campus, the Twins were laying a walloping on Cleveland, having scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth to take a six-to-four lead. I whooped as each run scored, and Jeremy whooped in imitation of me, laughing at my excitement.

When we arrived, I led Jeremy up the steps to my apartment on the second floor, his garbage bags in hand. We bounded through the door just in time to turn on the TV and watch the Twins throw the final out to win the game. I held my hand up to high-five Jeremy, but he was turning a slow circle, taking in the smallness of my apartment. The kitchen and living room were at opposite sides of a single space; the bedroom was barely bigger than the twin bed it contained; and my apartment had no bathroom, at least not within the confines of its walls. I watched as Jeremy scanned the apartment, his eyes covering the same territory over and over again, as though the next pass might expose a hidden bathroom door.

“Maybe I need to go to the bathroom,” Jeremy said.

“Come on,” I said, motioning to Jeremy. “I'll show you.”

My bathroom was across the hall from my front door. The old house had originally been built in the 1920s to hold one of those large, turn-of-the-century families that gave birth at a pace to outrun infant mortality rates. It had been subdivided in the 1970s with a three-bedroom apartment on the main level and two single-bedroom apartments upstairs, with only one of the upstairs units big enough to have its own bathroom. So at the top of the steep, narrow stairway, the door to the
right was my apartment, the door to the left was my bathroom, and the door straight ahead was the other second-floor apartment.

I dug Jeremy's toothbrush and flavored toothpaste out of one of the garbage bags and headed across the hall to the bathroom with Jeremy following at a cautious distance. “This is the bathroom,” I said. “If you need to go, just lock the door.” I showed him how to flip the deadbolt.

He didn't walk into the bathroom. Instead, he examined it from the relative safety of the hallway. “Maybe we should go back home,” he said.

“We can't, Buddy. Mom's at her meeting. Remember?”

“Maybe she is home now.”

“She's not home now. She's not gonna be home for a couple days.”

“Maybe we should call her and see.” Jeremy began rubbing his thumbs across his knuckles again. I could see a slight tremor growing out of his anxiety. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder to try to settle him down, but that would only exacerbate his reaction. Jeremy's autism was like that.

Jeremy turned toward the steps, contemplating their steep pitch, pressing his thumb even harder into the back of his hand, kneading the knuckles like bread dough. I moved to block Jeremy from the steps. He was taller than me by two inches and outweighed me by a good twenty pounds. About the time he turned fourteen he surpassed me in height, weight, and looks: his golden hair curled around his head with a Nordic swirl, where my dirty blonde hair stuck out like straw if I didn't tame it with a touch of hair gel; his jaw was square, with a boyish dimple on the tip, where my chin was forgettable; his eyes sparkled ocean blue when he smiled, where my eyes were the hazel of weak coffee. Despite having every physical advantage over me, he remained my “little” brother, and therefore susceptible to my influence. I stood a step below him, my hands on his biceps, easing him back, trying to turn his attention away from the stairs and back toward my apartment.

Behind me, at the bottom of the steps, I heard the door to the foyer open and close, followed by the cadence of feminine footsteps. I recognized the sound of her footfall, having listened to her pass by my door
every day now for the past month. I knew her only as L. Nash, the name on the piece of tape that crossed her letter box. She stood all of five feet two, with short, black hair that whipped around her face like water dancing off rocks. She had dark eyes, a pixie nose, and a chilly penchant for being left alone. She and I had passed each other many times in the hall or on the steps. When I tried to engage her in small talk, she smiled politely, responded appropriately, but never stopped—always doing her best to pass by my interruption without seeming rude.

She paused halfway up the stairs to watch me holding Jeremy by the arms, physically preventing him from leaving. Jeremy saw L. Nash and stopped moving, dropping his eyes to the floor. I stepped to the side to let her go by, the walls of the stairway squeezing together as she passed, the scent of her body wash and baby powder brushing my nose.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she returned, raising an eyebrow in our direction and walking the remaining few paces to her apartment door. I wanted to say something more, so I blurted out the first stupid thought that jumped into my head.

“It's not what it looks like,” I said. “We're brothers.”

“Yeah,” she said, as she turned the key in her lock. “I'm sure that line worked for Jeffrey Dahmer, too.” She stepped into her apartment and closed the door.

Her quip left me dumb. I wanted to shoot back my own clever retort, but my mind had seized up like a rusty bolt. Jeremy didn't watch L. Nash like I did. He stood quietly at the top of the stairs, no longer rubbing his thumb to his knuckle. His emergency had passed. The stubbornness in his eyes had been replaced by fatigue, it being well past his normal bedtime. I guided him into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then to the bedroom, where I rolled my old television in so that he could watch his movie on the DVD player. Then I grabbed a blanket and settled onto the couch.

I could hear Jeremy watching his movie, the familiar dialogue and music lulling him to sleep, distracting him from the insecurities of this new environment. Despite the drama at the top of the steps, I had to
admire Jeremy for adapting as well as he did. Even small changes in his routine, like a new toothbrush or the wrong breakfast cereal, could knock him off kilter. But here he was, in an apartment he had never seen before, an apartment half the size of the one he called home, an apartment that didn't even have its own bathroom, falling asleep for the first time in a bed that didn't have a top bunk.

I'd turned off my phone earlier in the evening to avoid the barrage of calls I expected from my mother, but now I pulled it out of my pocket, turned it on, and checked my missed calls. There were twenty-one calls from a number in the 507 area code, no doubt my mother calling from the detox center. I could just hear her screaming at me for shutting off my phone and for leaving her in detox and jail—even though I had no part in that decision.

The first nine voice messages were from my mother:

“Joey, I can't believe you'd treat your own mother like this—” [Delete]

“Joey, I don't know what I did to deserve—” [Delete]

“Well, now I know that I can't count on you—” [Delete]

“I know I'm a terrible mother—” [Delete]

“Joey if you don't answer your phone I'll—” [Delete]

“You don't love me—” [Delete]

“I'm sorry, Joey. I just wish I was dead. Maybe then—” [Delete]

“You think you're some hot-shit college—” [Delete]

“Answer your fucking phone—” [Delete]

“Joe, this is Mary Lorngren from Hillview Manor. I just wanted to call and tell you that I spoke to Mr. Iverson about your project…and he has agreed to meet with you to discuss it. He wanted me to make it clear that he is not agreeing to do it, mind you. He wants to meet with you first. You can call Janet tomorrow to find out when is a good time to come by. We don't like to disturb the guests during their meal times. So, just call Janet. Bye-bye.”

I turned off my phone, and closed my eyes, a slight smile creasing into my cheeks, absorbing the strange irony that I might soon be interviewing a savage murderer, a man who gave no thought to ending a
young girl's life, a criminal who survived for more than thirty years in the worst hellhole prison in Minnesota, yet I did not dread that conversation nearly as much as I dreaded seeing my own mother again. Still, I could feel a wind at my back, one that I chose to see as favorable, one that I hoped would bring me a good grade in my English class. With my sails filled, I might be able to overcome my procrastination in starting the assignment. It never occurred to me, as I nestled on my couch, that such a wind might also be destructive. When I finally fell asleep that night, I did so wrapped comfortably in the belief that my meeting with Carl Iverson would have no down side, that our encounter would somehow make my life better—easier. In hindsight, I was at best naïve.