This is a Memoir: Weeks 5 and 6

Half

When my brother died, I did not remember his name. I didn’t know what he was like as a child, or why he never got married. I didn’t ever share a house or car with him. We never went to the same school. I had never been to his apartment, never spent time alone with him, never met his girlfriends when he had them. I knew he loved flying, and so I like to think he wanted to be free, but he never told me that. I wish this story could tell him, but it won’t.

My dad, Michael, first got married in 1952 to a beautiful, blue-eyed, Catholic woman named Betty. The only time I believe I’ve seen Betty in person was at my brother’s funeral, so I remember her primarily as the woman in the wedding picture on my sister Adrienne’s mantel. Michael is tall, dark, smiling widely, showing off the tremendous gap in his front teeth his current dentures have eradicated. His eyes are alight: he is young, he is an American marrying an American, and he has waited his entire life for this. He is carrying Betty across some invisible threshold, and she is laughing. Her right arm thrown across his back, her mouth open, curly brown hair framing her heart-shaped face. My dad rarely talks about her now, but I know from that picture that, no matter what he says, they were in love. They were happy, even if only on that day.

Michael and Betty would have 6 children between 1955 and 1964: Paul, Adrienne, Mark, Jeffrey, Michael (who we called Suppy), and Caroline. I cannot give true details of how it fell apart. Michael doesn’t want to be the bad guy, so when he tells the story, I don’t trust it is the story complete. Betty did not believe in birth control. Betty did not want to go to therapy. Betty did not talk to him, did not tell him she loved him. Betty felt guilt about sex. But Michael had affairs. Michael worked such long hours and was never home. Michael was the one who left. In the end for all of us it seems to only matter that Michael was the one who left.

He left when he met my mom, Margie, or he was separated and got divorced so he could marry Margie, or he was already divorced and dating another woman when he met Margie. I don’t know whose story to trust, but however their marriage came about he met Margie when he was 42 at an Overeaters Anonymous retreat in Lake Arrowhead, California. She was 19. I like to imagine her crooked smile is what drew him in, although it was most likely her young, curvaceous body, her smooth skin, her emotional and sexual openness. They went on a walk in the moonlight, and he asked if he could kiss her. Darker still than the wedding photo, grey streaking his hair just above the ears, fit, intense, that gap in his front teeth mirroring his soul’s openness, she said, “Yes.” What else could she say?

Michael and Margie married within 6 months and then spent the next seven years pulling each other back together. Michael from poverty, from Betty, from his feelings of failure as a father, Margie from her own father’s failure, her mother’s depression, her responsibility as the oldest child who learned quickly to walk softly. My brother Allan was born in 1979, blond, chubby, excited to be alive from the first moment. I was born two and a half years later in 1982. All the things I don’t know about my brother who died I know about Allan. I was raised in the room next to him; his face, his cruelty, his adoration were the defining moments of my childhood, my adolescence, my adult self. He was to me what Mark was to the rest of Betty and Michael’s children.

Mark. His name was Mark.

The summer he died, Michael and Margie were moving from Virginia to Las Vegas. At 70 Michael had attempted to go back to work and after nine months understandably exhausted himself. Margie’s degree in Civil Engineering made Las Vegas, the single fastest growing city in the United States in 2001, the perfect new location. I had just finished my first year of college, and Allan had just returned from doing mission work for six months in Central America. Margie found a job before Michael found them a home, so the four of us moved into a two-bedroom rental house in the retirement community where my Grandpa (my mom’s stepfather) owned his own house. This would be my last summer living with my parents, and it would be spent sharing a room with my emotionally overbearing brother in a city where I knew no one.

I actually spent the first two weeks after the semester ended staying with my sister Adrienne in Newbury Park, about an hour north of Los Angeles. My consistently tumultuous relationship with Allan throughout the entirety of my childhood made me cleave to my sisters, Adrienne in particular. She is 25 years older than me, and my earliest memories of her are nothing short of worship. She is bright, wild, tender, charming, judgmental, protective, fierce, and beautiful. Perhaps she was not all these things the day my mom took the picture of us meeting for the first time, me a dark-haired bundle she is holding to her chest, the smile on her face revealing her deep love of our father, of all fathers, of motherhood, revealing her full-to-bursting heart edged with hurt and distrust so deep, feelings she cannot escape and will, in the near future and for decades after, face with bravery and sideways grace.

My relationships with Betty and Michael’s children have always been rife with conflict, although I did not know it when I was a child. In my mind, there was no separation except age between my older siblings and myself. Yes, we had different mothers, but I would never, and still never, call them my “half” siblings until I have to explain why my brother Paul is only 5 years younger than my mom. I cling to the closeness, to the love inherent in the word brother or sister, because the reality is uglier. There is still strife. I am still the daughter of Margie, a different wife, a different mother than Betty, Michael is still married to my mother, he still left theirs. Michael and Margie paid for my college, they bought me a car, Michael existed in close proximity to me my entire childhood. They are the ones he left. Allan and I are the ones he kept.

That sad truth stains even Adrienne’s and my sisterhood. It hangs between us, a divider, a barrier we dance around until we can’t anymore. She has resentment towards me that is not mine to own, I have anger towards her which is not hers to bear. We are swimming in blame, sticky and binding. That summer, staying in her house, driving that new car, wanting desperately to connect, I was still, at 19, only a half person. I couldn’t ask the right questions and, even if I could, what would I have done with her answers? We wanted closeness, but neither she nor I, for those two weeks, could stand it. I drove from Newbury Park to Las Vegas gratefully, not knowing how soon we would all return.

I couldn’t find a job that summer. I applied to about a hundred places, made a hundred follow up phone calls, and nothing. During the day I would sit and read, or watch my mom do exercise videos in which she would unsuccessfully try to make me participate. Allan and I would stay up late in the night talking, sometimes about our idea for a Radiohead Aerobics video, sometimes about Jesus or our collective sadness. And when we didn’t talk I would stay up pouring my host of teenage angst into a maroon, canvas journal. “You are disgusting.” “You are alone.” “No one really loves you.”

On the evening of July 20th, my brother Mark got into a two-man pusher prop plane with his coworker, Chris. Mark, at 41, worked his dream job at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Ontario, California, a 30 minute drive from where I went to college. He flew around the Pacific southwest picking up various engine parts so he could repair classic planes (the planes from his museum were even featured in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor). He didn’t have a wife, or children, but he loved his job, and he loved to fly.

They had flown to Palm Springs to see two jet fighters that had flown in from Russia and were coming home late in the evening. We don’t know when it happened, but the small wings on the nose of the plane stabilizing the craft as the propeller pushed it through the air fell off. Two tiny wings gone and down they went.

When the FAA retrieved the plane’s radio from the debris, there was nothing to hear, no cries for help, no maydays. Just radio silence as the ground approached, as though they both already knew they were dead, knew that within moments their bodies would be spread across the desert, no longer men but ears and arms and torsos.

On July 21, we were unpacking our new house in North Las Vegas. Allan and I had been fighting all day, as we were wont to do, and I was punishing him by playing the music in my room at deafening volume (what I believed to be a worthy sacrifice). He burst into the room shouting at me to turn it down. I glared at him over my box of DVDs. He stormed across the room and angrily cranked the volume knob to silent.

"WHAT?" I yelled at him.

"Mark died."

Please, God, do not let me say what I will say next. Stop time, stop my mouth, quicken my mind, but please, do not let me ask it.

"Who?"

“Mark. Our Brother.”

I appeared in the kitchen. Did I float there? Did I crawl? There is nothing between the word “Brother” and what is next. My dad sits at the kitchen table: one hand holds the phone to his ear, the other scrapes across his chest, clawing at the cotton and skin between his fingernails and the heart that is deconstructing. “Why God,” he cries out. His mouth tears open, there, in between his front teeth, still his soul, black and blank. “Why did you take my son?” Michael’s hands grasp at his shirt, pulling the fabric taut. He wants to tear it off, to bear his breast, to curse God. He wails, long, loud, a scream, a sob. Everything inside him is torn. Everything inside him is broken. Somehow he is on that plane, he is piecemeal across the desert, he is dead. Except he is not. It’s worse. His son is gone. His son is dead.

Michael is no stranger to loss. He was born the second son (the lesser son) of Charles and Bessie in Cairo, Egypt on November 1, 1929. Charles would abandon their family before Michael would turn 11. Michael would leave school and go to work sweeping the floor at a clock shop, Michael would care for his younger sister, Micheline, because his mother was too busy doting on Armand, his older brother. Michael would overhear his Aunt Alice saying to his mother, “Go to America without Michot. He is worthless. Leave him and take Armand.” There would be moments sweeping that floor when he would stand still and listen to the tick tock of the clocks intoning his aloneness. Tiny Michael, cardboard in the bottoms of his shoes to cover the holes, would be waiting for his family to leave him. He would run away to find his father, a soldier in the British army camped out near the Suez Canal, in the middle of the night. After being lured into a strange man’s home with the promise of a warm bed, that stranger would try to rape him. Michael would escape out the window and sleep under a park bench. Days later he would come to his Father’s tent. He would burst in, breathless, “Dad!” Charles would turn and stare down at him. “What are you doing here?”

There were nights when dinner consisted of bread and water, and there was night after night after night when he would fall asleep to the groan and vibration of his empty stomach. For his fourth birthday his mother brought home an unprecedented treat: a bunch of bright yellow, perfectly ripe bananas. After the feast Michael took the last one and, so afraid his older brother would steal it from him, slept with it under his pillow. When he woke up in the morning and reached his hand expectantly into his hiding place, he was met with the soft, wet mush of squashed fruit.

And then there was the war. Michael sat in an open air movie theatre, having left his six year old sister home alone, when there was an air raid. As the planes opened fire Michael started running. A machine gun bullet zinged past his ear as he ducked into a concrete shelter. He kept running, no time to think about what was happening, about what could be, about why God would so punish him. Get home. Find Micheline. Drag her under the bed. Hold onto her. Hold so tight.

When I imagine Michael’s childhood home, it is not a normal house but a prison: cinderblock walls, barred windows, feelings of hopelessness swirling across the floors with the dust bunnies. He is a boy trapped inside a nightmare hoping to wake up to something, anything, but this.

At 20 he will board a boat to Boston, and his awakening will begin. He will have 25 dollars in coins in his shoes, because he knows when he leaves the boat they will take all of his money. Because they can. But he will step onto American soil all the same, and he will be free, finally, ultimately. He will think he can leave all the terror in Cairo. He will think all he has brought with him is his pride, his possibility, his resourcefulness, and his 25 dollars.

Except Michael is never more than a breath away from that little boy in the clock shop. No wealth, no wife, no child can make him a man. He is trapped there, in the old shoes, hands full of squashed banana, stomach void, listening to Aunt Alice proclaim his worthlessness. I know that boy. I know him because even as he ages Michael clings to that broken child. Who is he without him? He doesn't know. And does it matter anyway? He is already lost. "What are you doing here?" He has been lost for so long.

We leave the new house half unpacked and drive to my sister’s home in Newbury Park. Slowly every sibling drags themselves across the country and arrives on Adrienne’s doorstep laden with the new burden of our decreased numbers.

The day before the memorial service my mom and I shop for Hawaiian shirts in a Wal-Mart. Hawaiian shirts, T-shirts, jeans, and khakis made up the entirety of Mark’s wardrobe. To my sister’s semi-formal vow renewal a few years earlier, Mark had donned a Hawaiian shirt made of silk to officiate the ceremony. We rifle through the men's section. It’s a relief to be away from them, from all of them. I cannot contribute to the communal grief. My memories seem trite, paltry in comparison to the man’s lifetime being described on repeat.

I am 10 years old and sitting on Mark’s lap facing him. His fingers are laced around my lower back, so close to my ticklish sides. I am prodding his chest, looking for a specific offender. I had heard my Dad on the phone with my sister-in-law Patrice (Jeffrey’s wife) weeks before; he had begged her to have Mark go to the Doctor. He would pay for it. A possible tumor near your heart is not something to take lightly. He would do this again for other sons, many times over. Tell him I will pay for it. Make him go. He went, and it was nothing. I am prodding that nothing now, a protruding part of his breast bone. “Is this it?” I ask. He smiles at me, “Yup.” And finally tickles.

This one is too big. This one is too red. What color will Dad want? Blue. Like Mark’s eyes.

We are driving in our van, Mom and Dad up front, Allan and Mark in the middle and me in the way back. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is playing on the radio, and I am singing along so loud I am almost shouting. I want my older brother to hear me, to think I’m talented. I am 12, already afraid my singing voice, my grades in school, my deep love for my family will never be enough to cover my multitude of failures. The van stops, and Mark climbs out. Then he leans back in, offering me his hand. “I’ll dance with you, Deb.” I grab onto him and dance into his arms.

My mom and I are reading Sympathy Greeting Cards, trying to pick one for my older siblings which will accompany the picture of Mark framed for each of them. Somehow, no card can touch on actual sympathy when read by those horrid fluorescent lights.

Mark comes to visit for his birthday, a short six days after my own. We go to the mall and movies (Mummy 2) and end up walking through Macy’s. I see a wicker purse plastered with huge, colorful flowers. I don’t have any money. My mom doesn’t care. Mark buys it for me. I carry it until the wicker bottom breaks, until it is a rag instead of a purse, and then store it carefully in my closet until I realize it will not bring him back.

We cremate what’s left of Mark’s body. Someone jokes that we should get a discount because we only have 75% of it. We all laugh. And when we are done laughing we are silent, for a moment or for hours, which is how everything feels this week and for weeks and months and years following.

Betty comes, but she stays in a hotel. She has already found every picture of Mark in her home, Mark as a baby, as a boy, as a man, and piled them into a locked drawer. At the memorial service she and Michael will hold each other for just a moment, knowing that deep underneath those years of resentment lies the only person in the world who knows what the other has lost.

Over a hundred people attend the memorial service, and I remember hardly anything of what is said. My Aunt Lisa asks me to sing. I can’t even make sound. I mumble something into the microphone and sit back down next to my Mom. One woman proselytizes about the hope Jesus offers. Even as a believer in Jesus, I am offended. Mark did not believe in Jesus. He always said he believed in the Force, which means he believed in either a powerful, benevolent wind driving all living things, or nothing. Michael’s cousins come dressed in black, and they stand out in the sea of flowers and colors. My eyes are drawn to them.

As the service ends, we move out onto the airfield. The three-plane V comes from the south. When they are over our heads one of the planes abruptly turns it trajectory west as the other planes fly northward. As Mark-in-flight moves into the horizon, I grasp for Allan. I wish I could confess to him what I did, wish he could exonerate me. But he is the wrong brother.

In March of 2001, Mark calls my dorm room. I’m in class, so he leaves a message. “Hey, Deb! It’s Mark, your brother. I thought since we’re so close, I’d come pick you up and take you to lunch. Give me a call. Love you.” I listen to it. I feel afraid. What will we talk about? What do we have in common? What if there is nothing to say? A week goes by, and I don’t call him back. A month goes by, and I don’t call him back. Two months. Three. The school year ends. The message gets deleted as my voicemail is reset. I stay with my sister for two weeks. I lie awake night after night in that terrible two-bedroom house. We move. Allan comes. Mark died.

Who?

I didn’t know life was short. I didn’t know about saying things you can’t take back. I didn’t know that a person could be wiped out, smeared across the desert like a moth under a rolled up magazine. I didn’t know that regret never ends, and that I would be 31 thinking of a one-word question I asked 12 years ago, feeling an ache in my chest so profound no time might have passed at all. I didn’t know I would someday count the one who died as the lucky one.

Six months later, in my dreams, he comes back. He says it was all a joke he was playing on us. We are so relieved. We hug. We cry. All of us. Paul, Adrienne, Jeffrey, Suppy, Caroline, Allan, and me. And Michael. Mark laughs, bright and free and so wonderfully alive. But I wake up. I creep out of my dorm room with my cell phone and onto the fire escape. The sun is just coming up, but I know he’s awake. He hasn’t really slept since the summer.

“Hello?” His voice is gravely, and he speaks quietly. My mom is still sleeping.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Deb! It’s so early.”

“I had a dream last night that Mark was still alive.” And then we cry.

“I didn’t call him back, Dad. He called, and I didn’t ever call him back.” I am surprised he can even understand me.

“It’s okay.” His voice comes out cracked, deep and worn down. It isn’t. Nothing is. It feels like nothing will be again. But because in this moment we both must cling to this untruth, he says it again, “It’s okay.”