The Wild Truth (18 page)

The next morning Sam and I flew on to the largest city in the largest state, to carry out the largest task of my life. Aside from constantly reminding myself of the need to stay strong and keep it together, I had given up trying to prepare for what would surely be the most devastating and difficult occurrence of my existence. But when the envoy from the mortuary delivered Chris’s remains, it was strangely consoling. An absolute relief came over me.
Oh. This is it? This isn’t him. This isn’t all that he was.
The container was not ornate as I had expected. His ashes weren’t even in an urn. They were in a dull dark brown box made of plastic. The container was much bigger than I had anticipated, yet it wasn’t daunting. As I held what they claimed was all that remained of my brother, I noticed the plain white label on one side. In neatly typed block letters was the name:
CHRISTOPHER R. MCCANDLESS.
Chris’s middle initial was
J
—Johnson, for our mother’s maiden name—and it pissed me off that they had carelessly made such a mistake. But my annoyance was short-lived. Nothing about this package identified who he was to me, and besides, Chris would have laughed at the typo.

Alone for a moment, I took a pen from my purse and respectfully reshaped the
R
into a
J
.

Then I removed from my suitcase a small backpack that I had taken along many trails and had brought to Alaska for one specific purpose. I turned the box from the mortuary on its side and began to gently place it into my pack. Not having realized exactly how the container was constructed, I panicked when the side with the identification label shifted slightly out of its housing, alarmed that my brother’s remains might spill out onto the floor, or float into the air, as ash will do. But the vestiges of my closest sibling were contained within a clear plastic bag, complete with a red twist tie that looked like it had just been pulled off a loaf of bread. The ashes were not of a powdery nature at all. They were more like gravel. A final sense of knowing that I was not holding all that was left of Chris ran through me.

Still, I held the backpack close through the entire trip back to Virginia.

S
AM AND I
RETURNED
from Alaska accompanied by the mystery that was attached to Chris’s belongings. No one was sure what to make of the items. Dad put every article, from the rifle to the journal, through a thorough inspection. His eyes focused with a detached concentration, dissecting the reasons why Chris would have possessed each one. Once his examination was complete and the display methodically organized, Mom walked around the table touching each item gently. She brought them to her face, one by one, eager to attain some sensory connection to her son. Each family member who arrived at Windward Key approached the anthology delicately and took the time they needed.

We hoped we would have more answers than questions after we developed the rest of his film. He’d been missing from our lives for more than two years, and the snapshots—photographs Chris had never seen—would tell us more about what he’d been doing.

I held that first envelope of photos from the drugstore for a long time before opening it. As much as I wanted to see Chris in them, every image would remind me that I would never see him again, and my mind refused to comprehend it. I didn’t want to—couldn’t—fathom that I’d never see him in the flesh or feel his protective hugs.

But just as his ashes were an unexpected comfort, as I sifted through the images, they too brought a smile that contradicted my tears. The first thing that struck me was how happy Chris looked. The contemplative, often angry face from our childhood photos was gone. He looked free, completely at ease. No one was forcing him to pose in front of the camera, to wear a suit or a smile. But he did smile. In fact, he beamed. I remembered that look, from a time when we went to Colorado as kids and hiked at Longs Peak with our parents, Shannon, and Quinn. Shawna had come along for the ride into the mountains but opted to stay in the Suburban, perfectly happy to prop her feet up and relax while reading fashion magazines. It had been an idyllic summer day in the Rockies. We stopped for lunch at the beginning of the Boulder Field, a long and wide stretch of stone deposits left behind by the destructive path of ancient glacial flows. My brothers and I scrambled over hunks of sedimentary deposits of earth in every size, testing the stability before putting all our weight onto one, then moving on to the next. It was like an exhilarating puzzle. Chris and Quinn were determined to make it all the way to the keyhole before descending. Dad allowed it but was adamant that they go no farther. The rest of us watched as the two brothers made their way up to the keyhole entrance and raised their arms triumphantly. They gazed through to the abyss for a short time before they scrambled back down to where the rest of us were enjoying the hard sun. The smiles on Chris’s and Quinn’s faces burned just as brightly.

Now here was that smile again. In one photo that appeared to be taken not long after Chris had left Atlanta, he stood thigh-deep in rich blue lake waters. In another, he wore a straw hat, sturdy hiking boots, and a grin as the Sierra Nevada spread out behind him. A humorous shot showed him holding up a drink as he sat in a beach chair at the side of a road, looking to hitch a ride, and another was of some beautiful wild horses. But the picture that affected me most of all was one in which he stood on an open road with no cars, people, or buildings in sight. The exhilaration in his eyes and the gorgeous snow-covered mountain range that rose behind him left no doubt as to where he had been heading. Despite the images from the last roll becoming more difficult to look at as I neared his final shot, those pictures told me what I’d known the whole time: Chris had left to find peace and happiness. He’d left a good-bye note among his possessions, thanking the Lord and saying he’d had a happy life. I didn’t know everywhere he’d been, but despite the dissonance of emotions banging through me, I was glad he’d found what he was looking for.

Otherwise, I was still in shock, wearing a false half smile and trying to keep it together for my parents’ sake. Compliant Carine emerged full force, and it felt easier to just go through the motions. My mother gave me and my siblings the task of summarizing our brother’s existence onto four poster boards for Chris’s wake, to be held the next day.

Mom handed me a large storage box of old photographs without having had the strength to look through it herself first. Shelly, Shawna, Sam, and I dug through the memories, organizing photos by date, and thus began the exhumation of our childhood together.

Board one was dedicated to Chris as a baby. “Well, here’s the beginning.” Shelly sighed and handed me a small picture of my mother, dated in April 1968. Mom stood proudly in a bathing suit, holding Chris—a tiny, underweight seven-week-old—up for the camera. Shelly’s lips tightened, and I knew why the photo upset her. While Mom was showing off her postpartum figure, Marcia had also just given birth—to Shannon. An image of Marcia at this time—exhausted after her fifth delivery and under command of our dad—would tell a very different story from the one Billie was aiming for.

“Oh my gosh, look at this one,” Shawna quickly intervened with a giggle. “I forgot just how cute he was as a baby!” She held up an eight-by-ten sepia-toned image of Chris, caught in what would prove to be a rare formal pose for the camera. He rested tummy-down, and the onesie he wore melded so perfectly with the white puffy blanket that he appeared to have been inserted directly into a marshmallow. Chris had propped himself up on one arm to have a look around, his hand in a gentle fist just in front of his ear. His huge brown eyes smiled cleverly at the camera while his lips appeared ready to say something well beyond his years.

Board two was for early childhood and grade school. I picked one of Chris with me in front of a spindly Christmas tree. We were dressed for church, our arms wrapped around each other, our grins wide as we stood among the gifts Santa had left behind. I found another seasonal picture of us, this one with our parents, taken when I was just one and Chris was four. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, was “Us at beach Christmas Day 1972—waiting for turkey to finish baking at home.” I thought about how all our siblings must have felt that day, at home with Marcia, wondering where their dad was. I buried it deep into the not-for-wake pile.

The next up for assessment was another picture taken at a beach. This was years later with several of our siblings at a waterfront house on the West Coast that Dad had rented for a family vacation. After the photo was taken, we’d all been locked out of the house. Mom and Dad were fighting inside, and an audience was not wanted that day, so we were forced to stay out on the sand. All Marcia’s kids, who had inherited her fair complexion, burned terribly in the sun and spent the rest of the vacation nursing huge blisters on their backs and shoulders.

I found another picture of Chris and me—we were buried in a colorful shed of autumn foliage, Chris’s hands entangled in Buck’s fur. “We used to make gigantic piles of leaves in the backyard at the Annandale house,” I said, “and run into them again and again.” My siblings smiled and passed it around so everyone could see.

Board three was for high school and college. Sam found a photo of Chris standing on the high school track with Andy. It was picture day at Woodson and the yearbook club photographers were out in droves. Chris was barefoot, running shoes slung over his shoulder. Both boys were posed for the opportunity, yet Andy’s wide smile contrasts with Chris’s pursed lips and squint toward the camera lens, as if the request to pause had interrupted something more important.

“Do you remember how he would wear that
exact
same shirt and shorts to running practice
every single day
?” I asked Shelly.

“Hell yes!” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “I think that outfit could have run around the track on its own.”

Shawna pulled out a photo from Chris’s high school graduation party at the Annandale house. “God, I remember that night,” I said. Chris was dressed like a young Tony Bennett and stood next to the piano where Dad sat. The party had been held under a big blue, white, and yellow tent on the back deck, and you could see blue and white balloons—our school colors—in the background.

I remembered how Chris had sung “Tender Is the Night” while Dad played the piano. Chris had an amazing voice, but when he sang, he always turned away just slightly . . . almost shyly. But he wasn’t ever nervous—he usually turned away so he wouldn’t start laughing. He had an embarrassed grin he’d get whenever he noticed someone looking at him, and he wasn’t always successful at hiding it.

Number four was the board dedicated to the man we did not get to share experiences with, who’d separated himself from our painful past. This was the man who smiled on that open road, doing exactly what he wanted to do. What he needed to do. I wished I knew more about what he’d done and whom he’d met. But in the absence of that information, we did the best we could to put the fourth board together. Though Shelly was still in denial, she also recognized something in those last photos of Chris. She’d heard mutterings of how foolish he was to go off the way he did, with such limited resources, to “find himself,” but she understood that she’d done the very same thing. She would never have dreamed of getting lost in Alaska but had loved getting lost in New York, where she’d moved alone and with very little money. They had both been on a journey, and the thought made her feel closer to him.

As we looked at the photographs, we didn’t need to speak to know we all felt the same way. We mourned the loss of this strong, dynamic human being. And we also knew why he’d felt he had to leave so decisively.

I believed that there was a part in all of us that wanted to march down the stairs and blame Walt and Billie for what they had done, for driving Chris to leave. But we couldn’t talk about it. Not there. Not then.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon Mom alternated between being catatonic and manic. At one moment I would see her sitting in a chair, alone, staring off into the distance, loneliness filling her face. Then something would snap and she would move about the house like a Tasmanian devil cartoon character, a swirl of nervous energy with vacuum and dust rags in hand, stressing over cleaning the town house meticulously before the guests arrived. Dad rearranged furniture. Then, after Mom stopped her spin just long enough for them to swap spats about placement, he rearranged it again. The stage was set for another show, one that none of us wanted to be in. Still, I was determined to say my lines and smile on cue.

Although I could see the intense pain on my parents’ faces, I could not bring myself to take them into my arms. To mourn and cry with them should have been the natural thing to do, but even the thought of it felt illusory. Those emotions only felt honest and cleansing when shared with my siblings, with Fish, or in quiet solitude. I was awaiting a sure reaction from my parents, expecting a breakdown and an apology at any moment. A request for forgiveness. I was certain the loss of their son would bring about this long-awaited change. I was grasping for anything positive in this devastating situation.
They’ll see now,
I thought.
They’ll change. They had to lose a son to make this happen, but it will happen, and I can help make it easier for them.