Chapter Twenty-Four

 

When, less than twenty-four hours after Tilly left, Bryce was called out for another visit, it mystified him.

“Number three, Bryce.” The guard nodded toward the third booth where a tall man, casually dressed in pressed blue jeans and a gray, chambray short-sleeved shirt, stood on the other side of the Plexiglas wall. His graying, teak-colored hair was combed back from his high forehead and hung just over the collar of his shirt. A trimmed reddish beard, laced with gray, gave him the look of a country western singer.

For an instant, Bryce panicked, feared Kendra Palmer had been removed from his case and someone else assigned. But this man didn’t look like an attorney—his tanned skin was weathered like a man who worked in the sun. Their eyes met and held as Bryce took his seat, picked up the receiver, and turned on the amplifier. The man, following Bryce’s lead, pressed the phone against his ear, his pale blue eyes never leaving Bryce’s face.

“You don’t know who I am, do you, Cale?” The man swallowed as if he were nervous. The muscles in his throat tightened above his shirt collar.

No one had called him Cale since he left Wheatley, Utah. He started calling himself Bryce at the Institute—an attempt to forget the life that seemed to have forgotten him. Was this someone who knew him in Wheatley? As he stared into the face on the other side of the glass, Bryce rummaged through his memory for a name, but came up with none. Still, there was something vaguely familiar about the way his blue eyes caught the light and twinkled. “Should I know you?”

The man smiled, a sad closed-mouth grin. “Yes. Indeed you should. But if you suddenly appeared in front of me after all these years, I wouldn’t have the faintest notion who you were, either.”

“So, are you going to tell me?”

“I’m Jason,” he said. “Your big brother.”

For a moment, Bryce was too shocked to speak and kept shaking his head. “Holy shit,” he finally choked out. “Jason. I was six years old and you weren’t more than eighteen the last time I saw you. I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

Flooded with emotions and old memories, Bryce struggled to find the words to talk to this brother he hadn’t seen since childhood. With such an expanse of time between them, a kind of mourning rose inside him. It was something as tender and terrible as grief over the lost years and broken dreams. Jason had always been so kind to his little brother. But then, like everything else, Jason disappeared.

Bryce trembled, blinked away tears. “What in the hell are you doing here? How long has it been? How did you find me?” All the questions he’d saved up for years ran together in that first blush of fever at seeing Jason again.

“Whoa, Cale, one question at a time. I’m here to see you. Best I can remember, the last time I saw you was the day before you and Mom disappeared with her boyfriend. Dad shot himself the next morning—less than a week before I left for basic training. ”

“I begged the social worker to let me come home, but she told me Dad was dead and you’d joined the army.” Again, Bryce locked eyes with Jason. “Of course, he wasn’t really my father, was he?”

It was strange, but ever since he started talking to that psychiatrist and writing out things for Kendra, his entire life seemed like one enormous boil. And the pressure had finally reached the point where the only relief was to lance it, to drain away his own spiritual abscess through facing the truth.

“No, I don’t think he was...” Jason hesitated, stared at his brother as if seeking permission to go on, and to Bryce’s relief, he found it. “He told me the last time we went hunting together that Mom had an affair with some big shot from Kennecott Copper she met waitressing at Robertson’s Inn. She was a real looker then. Every man she met was a little bit in love with her. But especially Dad. Her leaving ate him alive. I figure that’s why he did it.”

“I was so young,” Bryce said. “I didn’t know what was going on half the time.”

Jason leaned forward. “I still miss him. Can you believe that? He’s been dead more than half my life. For years, I thought I was going crazy. When I was stationed in Germany, I’d see him walking down a street in Munich, kind of bent over like he was. Then when I believed I’d gotten over it, there he was again on a shopping mall escalator in Salt Lake.” Jason shook his head. “My wife, Katja, says it’s because I never saw him dead. It all happened so fast, there’s nothing for me to remember except that closed box sitting over a big hole in the ground.”

Bryce wanted to put his arm around Jason’s shoulder, tell him what a good son he’d been and how much Isaiah Bryce had cared about him. “He sure as hell hated my guts.” The hardness of his own words jolted Bryce, but shock didn’t silence him. “I couldn’t figure it out and I tried and tried to get him to love me.”

Jason was quiet for a few seconds, and then, his voice low, said, “Yeah, I know it must have seemed that way. You were a constant reminder, I guess, but I think it had more to do with his loving her than his really hating you. God knows why, but he did. Love’s a strange bird, little brother. No telling where it’s gonna fly.”

Bryce laughed. “I finally figured it out.”

“Figured love out?”

“No. I figured out the man who took Mom and me to that fancy hotel in Salt Lake was my birth father. I think I caught on that night, he was so nice to me. It’s just that I didn’t know what to do about it.”

Jason nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too, and I’m pretty sure he’s the one who flew off with Mom’s heart, but she never admitted it, at least not to me. After Dad died, I didn’t hear from her for years. Of course, I didn’t try to get in touch with her either. I blamed her for Dad’s suicide. Actually, I thought I hated her. Then one day I got a letter.”

Jason gestured with his right hand, turned the palm toward the ceiling. “The army’s pretty good about keeping track of its soldiers. Her letter found me. She wrote that she went to Alcoholics Anonymous because she wanted to make amends. I guess she stopped drinking, cold turkey, then got herself a job in a hospice.”

“Is she...I...I...mean...do you know if she’s still alive?”

“Yes, very much so,” Jason said. “She lives in Salt Lake.”

Bryce closed his eyes for a second, trying to imagine their mother now, then opened them again. “Do you ever see her?”

“Yeah, pretty often. She’s not more than five miles away from Katja and me. We have her over for dinner almost every week. Always on holidays. What she lacked in being a mother to us, she’s found with her grandkids. They adore her.”

Unlike Bryce, Jason had managed to move forward and forgive their mother. And that forgiveness somehow weaved itself around his brother and held the past in its place behind him.

“She got married again,” Jason said. “To a nice guy whose wife died of cancer. She met him in the hospice. Regrets have nearly eaten her up, especially about you. When I told her what happened, that I was flying to Oregon, she hid her face in her hands and sobbed.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t.” Jason's eyes widened. “Not really. I read about the case in the paper, saw a few news clips on television, but I thought it was just a coincidence, a man with the same name. I couldn’t imagine you in Oregon, and the mug shot, well, it didn’t exactly look like the six-year-old I remembered. And then a private investigator found me. He said he was working with Detective Radhauser and was hired by your attorney.”

“You’re kidding.” How could he repay Kendra Palmer for everything she’d done for him?

Jason continued. “The PI said you were in trouble and needed all the support you could get from family and friends. He’s a hell of a nice guy, even offered to send me the ticket. So here I am. It’s about time, don’t you think?”

Again, Bryce swallowed in a futile attempt to keep the tears from flowing. “Thanks for coming,” he whispered. “I’ve thought about you a million times.”

“I’m sorry, Cale. I should have tried harder to find you when you were a kid. I was told you were placed with a foster family. I guess I wanted to believe you were better off.”

“Maybe I was eventually,” Bryce said. “The school they put me in was a good one.”

Your attorney is convinced of your innocence, and if you want to talk, I'll be happy to listen. If you don’t, that’s all right, too. I just want to be here for you.”

“I spend every waking moment exhuming the past for my lawyer. And you’re right, she believes in my innocence, maybe even more than I do. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to hear about your life.”

Jason refused to talk about his tours in Vietnam, but told Bryce he married Katja while stationed in Germany. They had two children—a daughter, Brianna, and a son they’d named Caleb. For years, they’d moved from one post to another, but once the kids were in high school, Jason retired and opened a small landscape business in Salt Lake. Now, Brianna would graduate from high school next spring and Caleb was a freshman at the Southern Oregon University, right there in Ashland.

“When I left Utah, I didn’t think I’d ever go back,” Jason said. “But as I got older, it pulled me and I wanted to see Wheatley again.”

“Has it changed much?” Bryce asked.

Jason laughed. “Changed? Has it ever. I figured you heard—it’s under a hundred and fifty feet of water now. They dammed up the Provo River, call it the Jordanelle Reservoir.”

“Maybe it’s just as well. It’s not as if we have a lot of happy memories of the place. But…” Bryce shook his head. “I still can’t believe you named your son after me. Does that mean you actually liked your pesky little brother?”

“Yes,” Jason said, swallowing hard and dropping his gaze to his lap. “And I never stopped thinking about you, Cale.” He raised his watery eyes. “I always told people I had a little brother even when I wasn’t sure you were still alive.” Jason fiddled with the button on his shirt pocket, then removed a stack of snapshots of his family. He pressed them, one by one, against the Plexiglas wall.

A little blond girl with sparkling blue eyes stood on tiptoes and smiled up at Bryce from a ballet recital.

Then, slightly older, decked out in a bunny Halloween costume, long, pink ears flopping against her rosy cheeks.

Standing at home plate, a serious, thin-faced boy, maybe seven or eight, in a miniature Dodger’s uniform, a wooden bat slung casually across his thin shoulders. His namesake, Caleb.

A beautiful teenage girl in a prom dress.

A boy who looked to be about sixteen, heavier, with a wide grin and a line of pimples across his forehead.

Picture after picture.

One of a tall, slender woman sitting in front of a Christmas tree, a young boy and girl on the floor next to her, ripping off wrapping paper.

“Is this your wife?”

“No,” Jason said. “It’s Mom with my two kids, quite a few years ago. She looks a lot older now.”

Bryce stared at Jason, but said nothing. He tried, but couldn’t state why the photograph of his mother disturbed him so much. His breathing grew shallow, and he wiped at his eyes. His throat and nose seemed blocked. He’d had panic attacks before and tried to slow down his breathing so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.

After a few seconds, Jason flattened another photograph against the glass—one of the last photos of their father. Dressed in the dusty clothes and helmet he wore into the mines, Isaiah Bryce stood between eighteen-year-old Jason and six-year-old Bryce. One pale arm dangled at his side, the other draped over his elder son’s shoulders.

When the buzzer sounded to signify visiting hours had ended, Bryce was not ready to say goodbye to his brother or to his niece and nephew whose whole lives had spread out on the wall in front of him, like a picture book. A nephew, named for him, right under his nose in Ashland and he didn’t even know it. Perhaps they’d passed each other in the halls of the Modern Languages building where Bryce took a class, or on the tree-lined mall in front of the student union, or seated at a small desk by the windows in the library.

“I’ll be back,” Jason said.

“How long are you staying?”

“I leave tomorrow. But I’m coming back for the trial and will stay until it’s over. I’m gonna stop by my son’s dorm on my way back to the hotel.” Jason stood, the phone receiver still pressed against his ear. “He doesn’t know I’m here. Won’t he be surprised to see his old man? Hope I don’t catch him with his pants down.” He grinned, dropped the phone back into its cradle, and hustled from the room behind the other visitors.

* * *

Within an hour of returning to his cell, Bryce lay on his bunk, wondering if he imagined or dreamed his brother’s visit. They grew up in the same family, the same town. And, though he didn’t know it until recently, when he was taken away, he carried enormous hunks of Wheatley, Utah, Isaiah, Rachael, and Jason Bryce with him.

Jason had been the only person in his early childhood that Bryce could consistently depend upon. But as the years passed, all tangible traces of that family had disappeared except for the vivid memories Skyler’s death and Bryce’s incarceration had ironically released.

For days and nights on end, Bryce recalled things in the obsessive detail of someone who was finally disentangling himself from the past. And he came to the late conclusion that the details of his childhood, in some harrowing and illogical way, still mattered.

Nearly overwhelmed by it all, Bryce closed his eyes, and, without any desire to go, drifted into that place between sleep and waking where memory lived. Once there, outside of real time, the invisible clock in his body ran backwards once more, toward the early childhood he spent with Jason.

He began to think memory was a reward we received for each day’s death. It was the place we went to revise and reshape our lives. A way of giving ourselves another chance. And today, in the Jackson County Jail, of all places, Bryce got one with his brother.

* * *

The creak of the cell door opened Bryce’s eyes to the present as Kendra slipped inside. His attorney stood beside the bunk. One hand held her briefcase, the other rested on her hip. “It’s awful early to hit the sack, Bryce. Are you sick or something?”

“I’m recovering from a shock.” Bryce sat. “But then I guess you know my older brother was here today. I haven’t seen him for almost thirty years. I guess you know that, too.”

“Yes, to both guesses.” Kendra dropped her briefcase on the table. “He wanted me to give you these.” She handed Bryce the stack of photographs Jason had pressed against the visiting room glass.

Bryce stacked them on the shelf above his bed, wiped his eyes with his fists, then stood and stretched. “Did you and Radhauser hire someone to find him?”

“We did,” she said.

“Your budget allows for private investigators? No wonder us poor taxpayers are pissed off.” Bryce suspected Kendra paid the PI out of her own pocket, but didn’t want to risk another scene over money.

She smiled, opened her briefcase and laid out the evening’s work.

“I’ve had nothing to do but think since I was put in here,” he said. “And sometimes I think about you and the way you were brought up. Affluent, with highly educated parents. I’m assuming you must have had everything you needed or wanted. So, what makes a rich person like you happy?”

Kendra rubbed her jaw, and thought before answering. “First of all, I didn’t have a mother. She died when I was seven. And you’ll probably think this is strange, or worse yet, corny, but people like your neighbor, Tilly, make me happy. She hasn’t got an extra dime, a pot to piss in as you’d say, but that woman would gather soda cans and take in laundry to feed your cat and keep you from losing your house. You may not believe it, but to me that’s real wealth, Bryce, the kind that makes people happy. My father, with all his millions, doesn’t have a single friend like her.”

“That reminds me. Tilly gave me a photo of a reporter entering my house. I suspect that’s how they got the poem I wrote about my daughter. I think the reporter’s name is Wally Hartmueller. He’s at that tabloid called The Talent Tattler.”

“I’ll ask Radhauser to investigate,” she said. “If nothing else, we can scare the crap out of him with an arrest warrant.”

“Good,” Bryce said. “I’m sick to death of people walking all over me.”

Kendra smiled. “That’s what I want to hear. The guard told me Poncho is in solitary for a month. Hopefully he’ll learn how to keep his fists to himself.”

Tilly was right, Bryce thought, as they settled into the night’s work. No matter what Kendra’s real motivation for helping him, or what the future held, he’d lucked out when the state of Oregon assigned Kendra to his case.

It was after ten when she left.

Alone in his cell again, Bryce stretched out on the bunk. About a week ago, he had discovered pencil drawings and words written on the cinder block walls, hidden by the mattress. He lifted the thin foam, stared at the scribblings and sensed the spirits of nameless prisoners in this cell before him. Men who had lives, as aching and real to them as Bryce’s was now.

Today is Abby’s third birthday. She won’t remember me.

My father died yesterday, August second, 1997.

My wife got married to my brother. I hate them both.

Bryce felt the other men close by, thinking their thoughts, fearing their fates, and jotting private messages into circles with scalloped mythical wings surrounding them.

A moment later, Bryce stood, rummaged through the cardboard box of tablets and pencils for the tape Kendra had used to piece back together one of the lists he tore in half.

When he found it, he stuck Jason’s photographs on the wall and laid down again, staring up at his family until sleep finally pulled him away.