Close Your Eyes

1

It was October 29, ten days since I’d gotten the call about Alex. Though I spoke with Laurent Janssen every day (he was Dutch, it turned out, the head of the operational arm of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Netherlands), he had no news for me.

There were at least a hundred burned bodies from the blast, said Laurent. They were “simply overwhelmed” trying to identify who was who in all the rubble. The disorder reminded me of September 11, when people had made posters of their loved ones and Scotch-taped them all over New York. I even thought about printing posters myself, flying with them to Baghdad. Have you seen my brother?

I was disheartened by how chaotic things were in Iraq. Though Mr. Janssen assured me that the Red Cross was in charge, and I received daily emails from the State Department, it was seeming increasingly possible that I would never know what had happened to Alex. After all, there were new bombings every week. Laurent Janssen told me wearily that sometimes bodies were “just blown to pieces” by a blast and were not identified at all. “Time, it will tell you,” said Laurent, meaning, I suppose, that after long enough, they’d stop trying to sift through the debris and would just assume Alex was dead. This thought was unbearable.

When I pressed a State Department employee, he admitted that Alex had already been classified as “missing, presumed dead.” Maybe they weren’t even looking for him anymore. But I had not given up hope. Until they showed me his body—with the mole on his shoulder and the stupid tattoo of the word love in Arabic on his right wrist—until I kissed his cold face, as far as I was concerned, he was alive.

What do you do while you wait to find out if your brother is dead? Nothing seemed like the right thing to do. I couldn’t bring myself to show houses. It felt impossible to get out of my chair to walk Handsome. Even hitting the South Austin trailer park for fried avocado tacos was unbearable: the sun too hot, the lemonade too weak, those fat pigeons who wouldn’t leave me alone. If I thought about anything other than Alex, if I shifted my attention for a second, I feared I would lose him. It was exhausting to believe with all my might that he was okay.

I sat in front of my computer every morning, closing my eyes as the browser window opened, trying to see a message from Alex in my mind’s eye. The subject line would be FLED TO PARIS! or Amnesia—can you believe it?

There was no email from Alex. There were no phone calls. He had not appeared in the middle of the night, tapping on my window. He had not surprised me at Central Market, his hair damp and curling along his forehead. Still, I waited for him to arrive, and to explain where he had been.

I didn’t know what I would do with Alex’s body. We had been brought up without religion, but our mother was buried in Beth Israel Cemetery in Houston, so I figured that was where Alex would be buried, too.

A drive to Houston seemed as good a thing to do as any, so I made an appointment at the funeral home. A rabbi named Rabbi Goldman met me in a maroon waiting room. The room reminded me of the Paramount Theater in downtown Austin, what with all the tasseled curtains.

As Rabbi Goldman led me to his office, I thought about the time Alex and I went to see Casablanca during the Paramount summer movie series. It had been a rainy summer night, hot as hell. This was during Alex’s Vespa phase, and he’d told me to wear a raincoat and “take it like a man.” I muttered insults as I climbed on his sopping-wet ride, but the air smelled like basil as we whizzed by the community gardens, and the drops on my face felt cool and wonderful. We drove downtown as the sun broke through, and I watched my city light up—dazzling—and I held on to my brother.

I looked around the waiting room in the funeral parlor. This is a place for dead bodies, I told myself, but Alex is not here.

Rabbi Goldman cupped his hand around my shoulder as I looked at caskets with holes bored into them, “to let the worms in,” as the rabbi said. “The body will return to the earth,” said Rabbi Goldman. He said lots more, but I wasn’t really listening. We went to the graveyard, and I stared at my mother’s gravestone. Alex’s body will not return to the earth, I told myself. Not yet. Not if it is up to me.

Of course—heartbreakingly—it wasn’t up to me.

I had not attended my mother’s funeral, but a year afterward, my grandparents brought us to her stone setting. Alex and I stood in the muggy Houston afternoon, surrounded by our grandparents’ friends. I’d wanted to bring hydrangeas, my mother’s favorite flower, but my grandmother told us that flowers counted as ostentation, and I could bring a rock instead to place on the gravestone. I didn’t want to bring a rock. I held my right hand as if carrying a bunch of invisible hydrangeas, and I bent down and placed the secret flowers on the grave. I knew my mom would understand what I was doing.

That night Merilee told us we could no longer mourn our mother. She stood in front of the television and spoke in her important voice, her hands on her hips. Alex and I poked each other in the ribs as Merilee explained that the stone setting was all about closure. We were not to move back, we were to go forward. “The stone is now set,” she said grandly, and then she went to wash the supper dishes.

Alex whispered to me about our father getting out of jail, even on the day of our mother’s funeral. Our father would “come to claim us,” Alex told me—he would “take us away from all this,” Alex said, waggling his fingers at our grandparents’ matching furniture, the sound of Gramma crying softly in the kitchen. Alex and I had already started down different paths—while he thought our days in Houston were temporary, I knew we were never going back to Ocean Avenue. I wanted to believe his promises, but even at age eight, I was pragmatic, logical—and without hope.

After saying goodbye to Rabbi Goldman, I drove to Cypress Grove Retirement Village. I found my grandmother in the hallway, looking at a purple orchid. “Hi, Gramma,” I said. She glanced up, her eyes clear, but she did not speak. “So, Alex might be dead,” I said.

“Alex might be dead?” said Gramma, finally turning to me. “It was Izaan,” she said, nodding.

“No,” I said. “It was an Iraqi suicide bomber. It was two Iraqi suicide bombers, actually.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I hear you,” I said.

“He killed my girl,” she said. “He killed my baby.”

“Gramma,” I said, leaning in so close that I could smell her baby powder, “how do you know?”

Merilee shook her head, the prim certainty in her features softening in befuddlement. “I don’t know.”

I felt very cold. “What do you mean?”

“He’s a bad man,” she said. But all I saw on her face was uncertainty.

I stood up, dizzy. Gramma was senile, but was it possible she had never been sure what had happened on the night of my mother’s murder? If my father hadn’t killed my mother, then there was no explanation for her death, no lesson, no story. If this—my one truth—was not constant, then there was no ground underneath me.