The Brother My Husband Hid Up North

When Hollis died, that first spring eleven years ago, you would think the wall would come down. It did not. It came down for one person only, and in the strangest way. At the funeral, Wes drove up to Bemidji the week after we buried his father, and he walked into that care home and he found Danny, and he started going back. That was the first summer he left. That was the trip. Every July, Wes drove north and spent two weeks near his brother. He had missed Danny’s entire adult life on his father’s orders, and the day the old man was in the ground, Wes started trying to make it up, two weeks a year, for as long as it took, which would be forever, because you cannot make up fifteen years in two-week pieces.

I sat in that hospital room with the peas in my lap and I could not breathe. Marion was crying and reaching for my hand and I was somewhere far away, eleven years deep, pulling every July back up out of the ground and looking at it in this new light. The man coming home thinner and quiet and old. Of course he was. The phone face down. The veterans’ fishing weekend lie, so clumsy, a man who could not even lie well because he had no practice at it except this one enormous lie. The fever summer, Colleen I have to go, I have to. He did have to. His brother was up there in a bed waiting for the one person who came, and if Wes did not come, no one came, because Hollis had trained the whole family out of coming.

I said to Marion, through my own crying, why. Why would he not tell me. Eleven years. I would have gone with him. I would have brought the children. Why.

And Marion said the thing I will hear for the rest of my life. She said, because his father taught him that love for Danny was a shameful thing that ruined a family, and he was afraid that if you knew, you would look at him the way Hollis looked at Danny. He was afraid you would see the boy who was driving. He would rather you think he was a bad husband than have you know he was the brother who wrecked the truck. That is what shame does, honey. It makes a good man choose the worse story about himself, because the worse story is the one he can stand to have you believe.

I drove home from Alexandria that night with the windows down and I do not remember a mile of it. I remember pulling into our yard and seeing the light in the garage, the one bulb, Wes standing under it doing nothing, which he did a lot, which I now understood was him being up there in his mind, two and a half hours north, in a room with his brother. I sat in the car and watched him through the garage window and I cried for every July I had spent hating a wall that a cruel dead man had built around a grieving boy.