Alligator Candy Page 3

  8

  I only have six memories before the day Jon disappeared, and they come in this order: (1) climbing out of my crib; (2) playing a McDonald’s game with Andy and Jon, who both laughed when I chose to be the villainous Hamburglar; (3) riding a Big Wheel down my sidewalk; (4) riding a Big Wheel at Mrs. Quinn’s day care; (5) playing with the pilot book with Jon; and (6) playing with the VertiBird with Jon. But beginning with my last conversation with Jon on the sidewalk, several more memories rapidly piled up that week.

  I am on the sidewalk talking with a police officer. He’s asking me to describe what Jon was wearing. “A brown muscle shirt,” I say. “Shorts.”

  A kind older woman, Marge Bernstein, takes me to buy Silly Putty. I return to find a lot of people at my house, including the police.

  I’m inside the house when the door opens to another police officer. He’s big and serious. He says something, and I run into Andy’s bedroom. Andy is sitting on the edge of his bed, forlorn. “They found him!” I shout. Andy looks up numbly. I follow him back to the foyer, where, overhearing the conversation, I realize they haven’t found Jon at all. They’ve found only his bike. I feel terrible for telling Andy they had found our brother instead. But if Jon isn’t in the woods, where is he?

  Sometime later, I’m in the kitchen, and the transistor radio is on. The person on the radio is talking about our family. My mom and Andy are sitting at the white round kitchen table, and Andy is comforting her, as she is crying. I say something about how at least our name was on the radio, as if that’s somehow cool and uplifting. I feel confused and terrible as my mom continues to cry, and Andy, his arm around her shoulder, helps her out of the room.

  At another point, I’m tossing the black flight book that Jon and I played with into an empty grave.

  Then my memories of that week stop.

  Part 2

  9

  I DON’T RECALL when or how I learned that Jon had been murdered. All I knew was that something very awful and very public had happened to my family, and that Jon wasn’t coming back. It felt like being cast in a Grimm’s fairy tale made real: a boy went into the woods where he met monsters and never returned. But pages of my book were torn and missing.

  Eventually a sketchy narrative lodged in my mind. While biking through the woods, Jon had been hit in the head with a lead pipe and abducted by two men. He suffocated in the trunk of their car. He was missing for a week before he was found dead.

  But, being so young, I struggled to process truth from fantasy, and lacked the courage or wherewithal to ask more questions. The full story of what happened to Jon remained a mystery. And it was a mystery that I had to resolve for myself. Along the way, I discovered something I didn’t know I was seeking; the answer to the question that almost everyone had for us when they heard our story. It was one that applies not only to our rare experience but also to anyone suffering a loss: How do you go on?

  My journey began at the spot where the future ended: on the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house. It was about thirty years after Jon had died. I was visiting from New York City, where I was working as a writer, and living with my wife and three-year-old daughter. On this sunny, warm winter morning, I had taken my daughter outside to ride a new tricycle for the first time. The bike was pink, and had pink and white streamers on the handlebars. I helped her guide it out of the garage, and down the small hill of the cracked concrete driveway. The Spanish-tiled roof had long since broken away and been replaced by flat shingles. The once barren yard had filled in with thick, lush green bushes and pink azaleas. The wild peacocks from nearby IDS had turned into multitudes, and now lazed around my parents’ lawn.

  We set the bike to rest at the first level spot on the sidewalk that ran to the end of the block at the street by the woods. A few homes had been built across the street years before, but many of the cypress trees remained, taller now, and dripping with long gray tangles of Spanish moss, like the beards of thin giants. In the years following Jon’s death, I never ventured into the woods. I didn’t have the courage or desire, and my parents didn’t want me going there anyway. But the woods remained a looming reminder of a shadowy past; its trees had borne witness to Jon pedaling over the palm fronds beneath them to the 7-Eleven on the other side.

  Standing there with my daughter, I saw the two moments overlaying, like film strips playing over each other to form double images. There was me as the little kid standing next to my brother on his bike, and me as the grown-up standing next to my daughter on hers. I thought about how much had changed, how the freedom that Jon had in his final moments seemed so endangered, if not extinct, for children now. The last free generation of kids had let their fears take away their kids’ freedom.

  As my daughter climbed eagerly onto her seat, I wondered what most parents wonder: How I would find the strength to give her the freedom she needed? How could I let her go into the world knowing that anything could happen? How could I survive if anything did? When I asked my parents how they did it, they said they always wanted me to get the most out of life. But now, as my daughter wiggled her feet on her pedals, I had no idea how they could have possibly endured. To find the answers, I had to venture into the woods of time and memory, where the mysteries remained.

  10

  THE PATH of a child is broken. The memories that pave the way come in fragments. I could look down on each block as if it were some kind of flickering screen, short loops of static and film from some other life. One by one, they would lead me through the shadows.

  The first one starts when Marge Bernstein, the woman who had tended to me the week my brother was missing, pulled into my driveway with me after taking me to buy a Slinky toy. My parents were standing in the doorway, and I ran eagerly up the sidewalk to show them what I got. I could feel them staring at me in a way I didn’t understand, the look of surprise on their faces. As I felt a soggy weight beneath my shoes, I realized why: the sidewalk to our house had just been poured with fresh concrete, and I had unwittingly stomped through it, leaving a trail of thick gray footprints behind me. Sometime later, Andy took a broken stick and scrawled letters and numbers in the wet cement. On the left side of the sidewalk, he wrote David K ’73, on the right, Andy K ’73. Jon’s name, I knew, would have been in the empty space in between.

  Next comes the memory at the Jewish Community Center in Tampa, where my preschool teacher, a family friend, is talking to us about Jon’s death not long after he died. We sit cross-legged on the thick multicolored rug where the other four-year-olds and I always gathered for story time, but this is a story I can’t understand. I don’t know how much she told us, or what we asked. But I remember the unsettling feeling that came with knowing this story was about my family. I felt transparent and exposed, a character in a story that the adults understood better than the kids did. It was a strange sense of celebrity that would linger for years; a spotlight that was warm with compassion but unwanted.

  On the ground of the woods is another flickering screen. It shows me in the office of a gentle man with kind eyes who gives me a shiny cold can of Sprite—an entire can to myself, which I’d never had before—and asks me to draw a picture of my house. This is Dr. Ball, the same psychologist who’d treated Jon. I take a crayon and begin drawing as he watches thoughtfully. I draw the square of the building. Two tiny windows with perpendicular lines. A door. A walkway. As I sit there on the brown leather couch, I watch him study the drawing in his hands, the way he tilts his head and appraises my work. I remember feeling skeptical and angry. What could he possibly learn about me from looking at that picture?

  Whatever details I’d been told about Jon’s death didn’t stick. This begged more questions: Who killed him? Why did they do it? How did he end up in a car? Where was he taken? What else happened? How was he found? Though, looking back now, I don’t know if those questions even entered my head at the time. I just remember lying on my bed’s fuzzy orange blanket, and kicking the wall that separated my room from Jon’s over and over a
gain as hard as I could while I screamed. I did that for what seemed like hours, and the tantrums became commonplace. The doctor prescribed tranquilizers.

  We were once a family in our own solar system, like any family, and then we were cast out of orbit, each of us drifting into our own time and space, occasionally feeling the gravity of one another’s pull. I can see my mother coming into my room after another tantrum of mine and rubbing my back, singing a lullaby to comfort me. I don’t see my father. I don’t see Andy. And before long, my mother isn’t there, and my room is silent and dark. Outside my room, there’s a windowless hallway with a yellow shag carpet. My parents are in their room at one end. Andy is in his at the other. Jon’s room is empty. The doors are shut.

  11

  ANDY’S DOOR, like each of ours, was pine colored with darker swirls of wood stain. The doorknob was mottled brass. In the middle of the knob was a thin slit that, I discovered, would pop open if I slid a butter knife inside it and twisted it to the right. Andy’s room was often locked, so I resorted to my own means.

  He was going through what he would later recall as his own private hell. He and Jon had a different relationship than Jon and I did. They knew each other longer. I was the last to the party. They’d played cowboy in Houston, dipped fried chicken in honey in the Arizona desert, poured their milk down the drain when my parents weren’t looking. They shared joyous times in Tampa, riding the log flume at Busch Gardens, playing basketball after school. But there were fights. Jealousies. The standard skirmishes over territory and love.

  But imagine being in the middle of a fight with your friend or sibling or whomever, and then all of a sudden the person vanishes. That’s what happened to Andy. Jon was there and then he was gone. Midday, midresolve. And Andy, being thirteen, was old enough to intellectualize this and process it. He could stand in the hallway outside Jon’s door and remember the conversations they had, the shouting, the storming off. And then nothing. An absence. A sinkhole that opened on a Sunday afternoon and swallowed Jon whole.

  Andy felt guilty. He thought about the time our cousin was coming over, and how he wanted to play with his red sailboat with Michael, just the two of them, and how disappointed he was when Jon came along. He felt terrible for having tried to ditch his brother. His belly still bore a little scar from when he’d fallen into the pond and Jon pulled him out—evidence of what his little brother had done for him.

  Andy felt nagged by magical thinking. Some notion that if he had just done something differently, Jon would still be alive. He replayed the moment from that morning when he and Jon stood at the window and pretended not to hear the doorbell when Andy’s ride came for the synagogue. It was a happy moment; they were playing. Later Andy saw Jon and me on the living room floor, laughing hysterically over something he couldn’t recall. Then he was off with my mother, who had to take him to synagogue, since he’d missed his ride.

  This shift in fate ate away at Andy. What if he hadn’t missed his ride? Then Mom would have been home that morning, and Jon, perhaps, would have been doing something with her instead of riding off into the woods. At first, when Andy came back from the synagogue, he didn’t make anything of Jon’s still not being home. Andy had gone off into those woods himself many times, just like most kids in the area. That afternoon, Andy had plans of his own. He grabbed his bike and headed off with his friend to a nearby mall. When he came back, he saw the police cars and crowds outside our home. “Jon’s missing,” my mother told him. “He didn’t come home.”

  Andy joined the search party with my dad. They went into the woods across the street, which was thick with fallen palm fronds and brush. Around him, he saw all kinds of people, both familiar and strange: professors, students, classmates, bikers, farmers, police. When we’d moved to Tampa, he felt wary of Southerners, but now, as these strangers searched beside him, he felt a connection that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  But he also felt tremendous fear. Andy had been through here so many times, but now it felt so foreboding. As urgent as he felt out there searching for Jon, the reality of finding Jon terrified him. By the time night fell that first evening, Andy felt sure that Jon had been kidnapped and killed. Though I remembered seeing him look hopeful when I told him, wrongly, that they’d found Jon that afternoon, Andy recalled later that he had long lost any hope at all. He could see in my face that I still had it, but for him it was gone, and he felt no surprise to learn they had found only Jon’s bike.

  The week unfolded like a nightmare for Andy. He would remember the phone calls to the house, each of which my dad had to answer in case it was a genuine lead. Many of the calls were pranks from vicious thrill seekers, either claiming they had information about Jon’s whereabouts or pretending to be Jon himself.

  He also would remember the psychic: a woman in a long, flowing robe who took one of Jon’s shoes and focused on it like some portal into his whereabouts. When she walked into Andy’s bedroom, she told him, “I sense hope in here.” He wanted to punch her.

  But while Andy endured the horror, he didn’t forget his feeling of responsibility to his other little brother: me. Jon had gone missing just three days before Halloween, after all, and the neighborhood was still decorated for the holiday. Andy hadn’t been back to school during the search, and had no idea who, if anyone, still planned on going trick-or-treating when a killer could be on the loose. But he was determined to give me a sense of normalcy in a reality that was anything but. So on Halloween, he helped me suit up into my costume, one that neither he nor I would remember, though probably one of those store-bought masks with a rubber band around the back. Maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost. Then he took me outside, and we went house to house as candy filled my bag.

  That night would prove too much of a blur for Andy to remember our neighbors’ reactions to seeing us at their doors. But one can only imagine the moment: two brothers trick-or-treating while the other is missing, and how sad and scary and poignant the whole thing must have been. Decades later, long after we had become the closest of brothers and friends, I told Andy how much I’d always love him and appreciate him for what he did for me that night.

  At some point, the blur of people and food and police gave way to Andy’s memory of being at his friend’s house when he got the call that he was going to be picked up. He knew in that moment that something horrible had been discovered. It had been eight days since Jon had vanished. He sat in the car with Dad and the psychologist, Espy Ball, the one who had treated Jon and, later, me. Dr. Ball told him that Jon was dead. That was it, no details for now, just: Jon, dead. Andy felt something inside him shut off, some wall slam down between him and the insanity of what he’d just heard, and, for some time, he stayed that way. When he would hear the knock of my little fist on his door in the weeks to come, I couldn’t understand why he was slow to answer.

  12

  AT THE opposite end of the hallway from Andy, I would find my parents’ door cracked open slightly. Sometimes I would push it cautiously and find my father lying in bed in the throes of a cluster headache. He wore a translucent oxygen mask, which was attached to a tube running to the large green oxygen tank that stood between his bed and a tall wooden dresser. His glasses rested on the bed beside him. Half of his face looked slackened and wet, as if molded poorly from clay.

  My father’s migraines weren’t new or stress related. But it was hard to see him like this, under siege, debilitated by some invisible dark force that I couldn’t understand. And when I follow the broken path of those days to my father, this is some of the only footage I see. The headaches. The oxygen tank. The mask. Other times I see him sitting on the patio in the backyard, looking off into the trees as he smoked a cigarette. At some point, I stood by the sliding glass doors and saw him sitting in a chair, a towel around his shoulders as he leaned back with his face to the sun while my mother trimmed his beard.

  On Friday nights, I saw him leading us in Shabbos. We were conservative Jews—more cultural than religious—but my f
ather loved the ritual and tradition of Judaism. He would stand at the head of the table and crack open his small green siddur, which he had received upon his bar mitzvah in the Bronx. I can’t recall if the Shabbos dinners subsided in the wake of Jon’s death. In my path, the footage plays every Friday night. My mother lighting the candles. My dad singing the prayers from his green siddur. Andy doing the blessing over the bread, me doing the wine. Then the four of us together singing the final prayers before eating roast chicken and matzo ball soup.

  But there were nights when during Shabbos my father would begin to cry. He would lower his prayer book, and my mother would reach for his hand. Andy might bow his head, waiting for the moment to pass. Nothing was said, as I recall, beyond perhaps my mother saying, “I know.” There was nothing to say. And there was silence. So much silence filling the house during all these vignettes. Some of the times when my father would begin to cry, I can see him walking off into his room to shut the door behind him. I didn’t sense that it was because he was ashamed of his emotions but, rather, that perhaps the emotions were too much for him to experience among us. I wondered if somehow he was protecting me from the things I didn’t know.

  And there were so many things I didn’t know about what he had experienced that week. I didn’t know that my mother had come home from carpooling Andy to ask him where Jon was, and for him to tell her he’d gone to the store and hadn’t returned yet. I didn’t know at what point this normal childhood excursion turned into panic and fear when Jon was away too long. I didn’t know when or how the police found out; or that my father had gone off into the woods with Andy to search; or that he endured the phone calls from strangers, the cranks, the concerned; or that he had given weary interviews to dogged reporters, and gone on the local TV news to plead for information about his missing son. I didn’t know how he reacted when Espy Ball and the sheriff came to tell him the news that Jon was dead.