Three Weeks With My Brother Read online

  “Yes, I lost almost all of them. My wife, my father, my mother. My grandparents. All my aunts and uncles.”

  “Did you have any siblings?”

  “Yes,” he said, “a younger brother.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the war. He was a member of the Khmer Rouge.”

  We traveled to the outskirts of Phnom Penh and turned toward the Killing Fields. On either side of the dirt road were run-down houses; halfway up the street was a garment factory, and dozens of women were clustered outside, sitting in the dirt eating lunch as we passed.

  Impossible to recognize unless you knew the location, the Killing Fields appeared as a ditch-strewn field, remarkably similar to the rest of the countryside we’d passed. It was far smaller than I imagined it would be—maybe a hundred yards to each side. In the center, the only recognizable feature was a memorial temple to honor the dead.

  Over the next hour, we were led from one spot to the next; this was where a hundred victims were discovered; in another spot two hundred victims were found, over here, four hundred. In another spot, we learned that the skeletons unearthed had been buried without their heads, so it was impossible to know how many had been unearthed. In this particular field, we learned that thousands had died; precise figures are impossible to know with any certainty.

  Micah and I simply wandered in silence, feeling sad and sickened. Eventually, we were led to the memorial temple and went inside.

  The temple, white in color, was ten feet to a side, and roughly forty feet high, making it look like a rectangular block stood on end. We didn’t know what to expect, but what we found left us paralyzed. Running up the back wall to the top of the temple were glass-enclosed shelves, stacked with thousands and thousands of skulls.

  On our way back to the bus, Micah summed up my own feelings in three simple words.

  “This was hell.”

  In the strangest juxtaposition of the entire tour, one that left me feeling off balance for the rest of the day, we went from the Killing Fields straight to the Russian Market for a few hours of frivolous shopping.

  Cambodia, like many Asian countries, has perfected the art of piracy, and the Russian Market was a building crowded with hundreds of vendors, selling everything from pirated DVDs to pirated clothing. DVDs cost three dollars, jeans supposedly from the Gap went for half that.

  The market was crowded; it seemed that every tourist visiting the country had heard about the place and had decided to visit at the same time. Despite the fact that most of our tour group had ample financial means and could afford the real items back home, most everyone left the market with a bagful of bargains.

  On our last night in Phnom Penh, there was no cocktail party, so we were encouraged to make reservations at one of the hotel restaurants, since our hotel boasted some of the best food in Cambodia. Micah and I, naturally, forgot to make them, and ended up eating at one of the casual dining spots in the hotel. It was nearly empty, and we finished our meal in half an hour.

  Although initially disappointed, we ended up being pleased by our meal. As fate would have it, everything went wrong in the kitchens that night. Everyone who’d made a reservation wound up having to wait hours for their meal. Ovens broke, cooks hadn’t shown up, meals came out wrong—Murphy’s law was in full force. Appetizers took an hour and a half to reach the table; the main course followed two hours later. While in some circumstances that wouldn’t have bothered people, we’d been on the road for thirteen days. People were tired and we had to rise early for our flight to Jaipur the following morning. On a night when everyone was looking forward to getting eight hours of sleep—as Micah and I did—most got less than five.

  In our room, Micah and I were watching the Croc Hunter again. Along with CNN, The Crocodile Hunter was the only English-language show we’d been able to find. Every time we’d turned on the television—no matter what country we were in—Croc Hunter was always on. By Cambodia, it had become something of a long-running joke—by our reckoning, it was the most widely watched show in the world.

  “Oh, isn’t this snake a beauuuuuty,” Steve Irwin, the ever enthusiastic Australian host, was saying. “Look at the colors. Oh, she’s magnificent, isn’t she? This little beauty is dangerous—one bite can kill a dozen men!”

  “The guy is nuts,” Micah commented.

  “He’s always nuts,” I said. “My kids love to watch him.”

  Micah was quiet for so long, I thought he’d begun to doze. When I glanced over at him, however, I saw he was staring at the ceiling.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  It was a long moment before he answered. “What we saw today. Earlier this morning. The museum, the Killing Fields.”

  “It was awful, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. When he spoke again, his voice was subdued. “It just made me feel sad. Sad for the people here, sad about the world. Sad about everything. And empty, too. It was all so pointless. Things like this shouldn’t happen.” He hesitated. “It reminded me of how I felt after mom died.”

  I glanced over at him, not altogether surprised at his comment. Whenever either of us were sad, our conversation always returned to the topic of our family.

  “Do you realize that almost everyone on this trip is older than she was when she died?” he asked. “I can’t believe it’s been over thirteen years. It doesn’t seem like it.”

  “No it doesn’t,” I agreed.

  “Do you realize that in less than ten years, we’ll be as old as mom was when she died? Peyton would only be eleven years old then.”

  I said nothing. Micah drew a long breath before going on.

  “And it’s strange. I mean, when I think about mom, it’s like she hasn’t aged. In my mind, I mean. When I think about her, I always picture the way she looked the last time I saw her. I can’t even imagine what she’d look like now . . .” He trailed off. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “You know what I regret?”

  I looked at him, waiting.

  “That I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. You and Cathy got to do that. When I left for Cancun, I was running late, and I didn’t even think to call her. And the next time I saw her, she didn’t look like mom anymore, and we were talking about donating her organs. It was just . . . unreal. And it breaks my heart to think that after sacrificing so much for us, she never got a chance to see or hold her grandkids, she never found out that you became an author, she never got to meet Christine or the kids. Mom would have been great as a grandma . . .”

  He trailed off, his gaze unfocused.

  “I miss her, too,” I said quietly.

  The months after my mom’s funeral were halting steps in search of some sort of normalcy. No one in the family seemed to know how to react or what to do. Micah, Dana, and I tried to support one another as well as our dad. It seemed that every time one of us began crying, the others would fall in line. Thus we each came to the independent conclusion that no one should cry anymore. And we didn’t, unless we were alone.

  Our mom was gone, yet strangely, there were times when it seemed as if she wasn’t. Everything in the house bore my mother’s imprint; the location of the spices in the cupboard, the placement of the photographs on the shelves, the color of the walls, her nightgown draped over the chair in her bedroom. Everywhere we looked, we were reminded of her, and there were moments when I’d be standing in the kitchen when I’d suddenly begin to feel as if my mom was standing behind me. At times like those, I would pray that I wasn’t imagining it. I looked for signs—movement from the corner of my eyes, perhaps, or limbs of trees swaying in the breeze. I ached for something to let me know her spirit was still with us. But there was nothing.

  Yet, if the house was a constant reminder of my mom, it also began to serve notice as to how empty it had come to feel. There was no energy in the house, no vivaciousness, and the sound of laughter no longer echoed off the walls. We sometimes wonder
ed whether we should rearrange the furniture or remove the more obvious signs of my mother’s presence. Her purse, for instance. For years, she’d placed it in a basket near the front door; months after her death, no one had summoned the will to put it in the closet or even open it, to see what was left behind. We knew what we’d find; pictures of the family, letters from her mother, her lipstick and personal trinkets. Those things were so personal, so . . . mom . . . that we couldn’t touch them for fear of somehow betraying her memory. We didn’t want to forget her, and in a way those were the only things we had left. The purse, it seemed, had become our silent entreaty for her return.

  That year, we didn’t celebrate Christmas at the house; it was the first time in our lives we spent the holiday with other relatives. And though the company was comforting, none of us could shake the empty feeling in our hearts. Mom was gone, and Christmas at home would never be the same again.

  Cat and I settled into our first year of marriage, while at the same time doing our best to take care of dad. We set aside every Thursday, and used that time to take my dad out to the movies or to dinner.

  Micah and Dana decided to rent an apartment together. It was only a couple of miles from the house, and like Cat and me, they thought it would be a good way to keep an eye on him. If the death had been hard on us kids, it had been far harder on my dad. While I can’t claim to understand their relationship, my mom and dad had spent twenty-seven years together, and his world was suddenly and completely altered now that she was gone.

  He seemed to live by instinct alone. After the funeral, he’d begun wearing black, and only black. At first, we thought it was a phase, but as the months passed, we began to realize how lost he was without her. He’d depended on my mom as we had. Because they’d been married at such a young age, my dad had no experience in being alone, or even what it was like to be an adult without her by his side. My dad lost his best friend, his lover, his confidante, and his wife. But if that wasn’t hard enough, he’d also lost the only life he’d known how to live. He had to learn to cook and how to clean the house, and had to do those things on his own. He lost a good portion of the family income, and had to learn how to budget. And he had to learn how to relate to his kids, who for the most part had been raised by his wife. We loved our dad and he loved us, but the truth was that he seemed to know as little about us as we did about him. In our own way, we each did our best to fill the void left in his life, and one by one we slowly became replacements for all that my mother had been to him.

  Micah became his confidant, the only one that dad would really talk to. My dad had always admired Micah in the same way that I had, and that feeling only grew stronger after my mother died. Micah, I think, embodied many of the things my dad always wanted to be: handsome and charismatic, confident and popular. In a strange way, I think he began to seek my brother’s approval. He took few actions without soliciting Micah’s opinion, and listened to Micah’s latest adventures with a proud twinkle in his eye. Cat became his buddy; he’d been fond of my wife since they’d first met, and whenever we’d stop by, they’d spend time together. They drank dessert wines and cooked together, they joked and laughed, and in sad times my dad turned to Cat when he needed a shoulder to cry on. And Cat responded by always saying or doing exactly what was needed. My dad also threw himself into taking care of my sister. He’d help with her bills, bought her a car, took care of her health insurance; eventually the two of them began taking care of the horses together. My dad, it seemed, was not only doing the things he thought my mom would do as a parent, but in taking care of Dana, found the strength to go on. I, too, began to play a role my mother had once had, but it was one that I would wish upon no one. With my intense schedule in high school, moving away for college, and starting a life with Cathy, I’d become the least dependent on my parents, and had been so since the age of sixteen. Maybe my dad realized this, too, for as the weeks and months wore on, I became the outlet for my dad’s anger and pain.

  In time, my dad began to act as if he despised me; if I asked if he needed help doing his budget, he accused me of trying to steal from him. If I cleaned up the house, he accused me of thinking he was not only helpless but a slob. If I dropped our cocker spaniel off at the house while I worked—something Cat and I had been doing since we got her—he accused me of taking advantage of him. When Cat and I visited, there were many evenings where he refused to talk to me at all; instead, he’d joke and laugh with my wife in the kitchen while I sat alone in the living room. This dynamic only grew worse over time.

  I knew he didn’t hate me, that he was hurting inside, struggling even more than we kids were. I knew that his anger and pain had to go somewhere, and that deep down he loved me despite the words he said and the way he’d begun to treat me. Yet even if I understood what was going on, I nonetheless sought comfort in Cathy’s arms, wondering aloud what I’d done to deserve his hostility.

  My brother and I did our best to continue our relationship with each other and our independent lives. Micah moved steadily forward in his real estate career; and my small business—I manufactured orthopedic wrist braces, primarily for carpal tunnel syndrome—was slowly getting off the ground. Like most young people, I thought I knew far more than I actually did about running a business, and soon accumulated credit card debts that greatly exceeded our combined annual income. Despite the fact that I had been working day and night for months, it was touch and go as to whether Cat and I could meet our obligations, and we wondered how we’d ever stay afloat. In our first year of marriage, we’d been tested in every way; Cat and I were lucky that it only served to bring us closer together.

  In the hardest moments—when I wondered how I’d be able to pay the rent or put food on the table—I turned to Micah. He would treat me to pizza and beer, and we’d talk. In the end, we decided to sell the two rental houses we’d purchased earlier. The profit on both was enough for Cat and me to climb out of debt, and I gradually began to turn the corner in making my small company profitable. However, I still had to wait tables and my wife had to work as well, simply to make ends meet.

  Micah, meanwhile, continued to make life seem easy. He dated, had fun on the weekends, and excelled at his job. When Cathy and I went out in the evenings with him, we would always wonder who he’d bring along this time. Most of the women barely knew him, yet they seemed as enamored of him as I was with Cathy. Yet, if he was doing well on the surface, he was struggling beneath the facade, weighed down by our dad. Dad was still having a hard time, and Micah had assumed the mantle of leadership in our family. Because dad talked to him more than to either Dana or me, Micah alone seemed to understand the depth of my father’s grief. One evening in the summer of 1990, when Micah and I were out together, I couldn’t help but notice that he seemed especially preoccupied.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’m worried about dad.”

  Though I was worried, too, I knew my reasons were different from his. With me, dad acted irrationally; with Micah, he seemed completely rational. Neither seemed normal.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because he’s not getting over mom. It’s been almost nine months, but he still cries himself to sleep at night. And he’s been getting edgier, too.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And then, you know he’s still wearing black, but it’s worse now. He got rid of his entire wardrobe and replaced it, so that everything he owns now is black. And he never leaves the house anymore, except to go to work. I know he misses mom, but we all do. And mom would want him to be happy, even without her. She’d want him to be strong.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want Cathy and me to try to talk to him?”

  Though I knew he wouldn’t listen to me, he was becoming more dependent on my wife’s company.

  “It won’t do any good. I’ve tried. I’ve invited him over, but he never comes. And he doesn’t want to go anywhere when
I visit him. Does he ever go over to see you and Cat at your apartment?”

  “No.”

  Micah shook his head. “He shouldn’t close himself off from the world. That’s only going to make it worse. It’s only going to make him feel more alone.”

  “Do you tell him that?”

  “All the time.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He says he’s doing fine.”

  As the anniversary of my mom’s death approached, my dad slowly began emerging from the self-imposed shell he’d constructed around himself. Though he still wore black, Micah, Dana, and I had talked him into joining us in learning country dancing, and the evenings out seemed to revive him. Slowly but surely, he became more like his old self; even with me, he no longer seemed nearly as bitter.

  Somehow, it seemed, we’d survived the first year without our mother.

  Later that autumn, Cathy and I learned that she was pregnant, and like all anxious parents-to-be, we began making preparations for the baby while we awaited the moment we could first see our baby on the ultrasound.

  Cathy threw herself into the pregnancy. She watched everything she ate, exercised, and learned to live with morning sickness before she went to work. Her skin began to take on the flushed glow of an expectant mother. We called our friends and family; everyone, including my dad, was thrilled with the news. In fact, dad was happier than we’d seen him in a long, long time.

  When Cat was twelve weeks along, we visited the medical clinic for the ultrasound. In the room, I held Cat’s hand as the technician applied the gel and ran the scope over my wife’s belly.

  “There it is,” the technician said quickly, and both Cathy and I stared at the screen in wonder.

  The image was tiny, of course, and looked nothing like a baby. A peanut, maybe, but not a baby. Still, it was our first glance, and Cathy squeezed my hand and smiled.