After Eli Read online

  It’s been over a year since I last heard from Isabelle.

  She sent me a postcard a couple months after she left, the way people do when they’re pretending they’re going to stay in touch, and I remember taking it out of our beat-up mailbox at the end of the road, and how the sight of her swoopy handwriting in red fountain pen made my heart beat faster for a minute. Isabelle always writes in red so that all her days will be red-letter days, and she uses a fountain pen because it’s elegant.

  Elegant was always one of Isabelle’s words.

  Today the mail was a couple of bills and a schoolteacher magazine for my mom and a flyer for a sale on fence posts at Tractor Supply, which looked like a good deal if you happened to want fence posts. Nothing from Isabelle.

  I still have that postcard though. It has a big full moon on the front, the picture side, with a bunch of little animals dancing in front of it. A couple of rabbits and a dog and a cat and a cow. On the back she wrote, “Looks like us, doesn’t it? Remember the Moon Elves!” with a couple of kisses that didn’t mean anything and then her name.

  Isabelle.

  I remember the Moon Elves.

  I remember everything about the summer Isabelle was here.

  My name wasn’t always Daniel (E.) Anderson. My real middle name, the one on the birth certificate in the fireproof box in the back of my mom’s closet, is James. I added the (E.) after my brother, Eli, died.

  There’s this tribe in Paraguay that whenever somebody dies, everybody changes their name so that the dead person’s ghost can’t come back and find them. But I put Eli’s name in mine as a way of keeping him around. Not that I would ever tell anybody that now, because it sounds dumb. It sounds like the sort of thing girls do when they run around wearing their boyfriends’ sweaters. But I was only a kid then and I didn’t know crap.

  I like to think that now that I’m older, I understand why Eli did what he did, which ended up getting him killed. Though I guess I’ll never really know, not all the way. Walter says that human motivations are complicated, and that when it comes right down to it, nobody knows all the reasons we do the things we do. Most of the time we don’t even know ourselves. But I didn’t know Walter then, and what I mostly felt about Eli, way deep down, was mad as hell. Dying was his own damn fault is what I thought, and now look at the life he’d stuck me with.

  I used to think Eli was like George Mallory, the mountain climber guy. I’ve seen these old pictures of Mallory on the Internet, and in a couple he even looks a little bit like Eli. Mallory got killed in 1924 climbing Mount Everest, which he set out to do because it was there. That’s what he actually said when people asked him why he wanted to climb the world’s tallest mountain. Walter, who reads everything, once told me that “because it’s there” are probably the three most famous words in the history of mountain climbing, which indicates to me that mountain-climbing history could sure use some better words.

  Anyway, that was the end of Mallory. His freeze-dried body was found on Everest’s north face in 1999 with a broken leg and a hole in the skull. Nobody knows if he died while he was still going up or while he was on the way back down, so he may never have made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain at all. Which would really suck.

  But face it, because it’s there is a dumb reason for getting killed. I wonder how Mallory’s wife and kids felt about him batting off to the Himalayas to climb some stupid mountain and leaving them on their own. When he left for India or Nepal or wherever, his oldest daughter, Clare, was only nine. That’s younger than I was when Eli died.

  Eli got killed in Iraq on April 16, 2004. The truck he was in ran over an Improvised Explosive Device, which is one of those bombs they bury along the side of the road. They sent him home in a coffin with a flag.

  I was eleven then, and I’d been waiting for Eli to come home so we could see The Return of the King. He’d taken me to see The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, but The Return of the King wasn’t being released until after his tour of duty in Iraq started. So we had a pact that we’d wait until we could see it together, even though by then it wouldn’t be in the theaters anymore and we’d have to watch it at home on DVD.

  All through the funeral and everything, I kept thinking how Eli was looking forward to that movie and how now he’d never see how it all came out in the end. Eli really liked those movies.

  Except for the elves. He thought the elves were dorks.

  Practically the whole town came to Eli’s funeral. Almost everybody from his old high-school class was there, and most of their parents, and all the teachers, and Mr. Bingham, the principal. Chuck Bowers, the football coach, was there, and all the guys on the Catamounts football team that Eli used to be captain of his senior year, dressed up in navy-blue Sunday suits that looked too tight around the collar. Even without their shoulder pads, they were way too big for the funeral parlor’s little folding metal chairs.

  Mr. Corrigan closed the hardware store for the afternoon, and he and all his employees came, because Eli used to work there part-time in the summers. And Bev and her husband, Roy, came, who own Bev’s Caf, the restaurant in town, where Eli’s picture is up on the wall. And then there were all the neighbors and a lot of relatives and Eli’s college buddies, and his girlfriend, Rachel Crowley, who cried so hard that you could hear her above the organist playing “Stairway to Heaven.”

  What I remember about that funeral is how my aunt Wendy made me wear a tie. Aunt Wendy was pretty much in charge at Eli’s funeral because my mom was stuffed full of sedatives and my dad was wandering around like a zombie. The slow, dumb kind of zombie, not the fast kind with the teeth. He was in shock, is what people said.

  “I don’t want to wear a tie,” I said.

  “Stand still, Daniel,” Aunt Wendy said, making a lunge for my throat.

  Aunt Wendy works for the U.S. Post Office. She is the size that women’s clothing stores call “queenly,” and Eli used to say that Aunt Wendy in her regulation blue Bermuda shorts was about as scary a sight as he’d ever seen, even counting the part in Alien where the monster jumps out of the guy’s chest.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  I kept thinking how Eli would have teased me about wearing a tie, poking me in the ribs and saying who did I think I was, Donald Trump? But Eli wasn’t there. All that was left of him was in a six-foot box. I didn’t want to think about what was in that box.

  “Eddie, please,” Aunt Wendy called, holding up the tie and waggling it in the air. “Just give me a minute over here. I can’t do a thing with him.”

  Eddie is my dad, but only Aunt Wendy calls him that.

  “Christ,” my dad said.

  He jerked the tie around my neck and tied it with a twist that reminded me how he and my aunt Wendy and uncle Al had been raised on a farm in Ohio, where they used to kill their own chickens.

  “Don’t make things harder for your mother than they already are,” my dad said.

  Though it seemed to me my mom was pretty much okay, being next to unconscious.

  “Go sit down and behave yourself,” my dad said, giving me a little shove.

  Right then I wished my dad had been the one to run over a bomb.

  Lots of people talked at Eli’s funeral. Mr. Bingham, the principal, called him “the best and the brightest,” and Coach Bowers said that they sure broke the mold when they made Eli. Pastor Jay, the minister from the Methodist church where Eli and I went to Sunday school, talked about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and Miss Myrna Walker, who was Eli’s favorite teacher back in high school, said a poem.

  “Nature’s first green is gold,

  Her hardest hue to hold.

  Her early leaf’s a flower;

  But only so an hour.

  Then leaf subsides to leaf.r />
  So Eden sank to grief,

  So dawn goes down to day.

  Nothing gold can stay.”

  Her voice cracked up a little when she came to that last line, and all of a sudden, even though I’ve always thought that poetry was pretty much crap, my eyes stung and my throat tightened up so that it hurt under that stupid tie.

  Then the pallbearers stood up — my uncle Al and Jim Pilcher, who was Eli’s best friend from high school, and Rachel Crowley’s brother Jason, and Coach Bowers, and a couple of the college guys. Coach Bowers gave Eli’s coffin a pat before he helped pick it up, and let his hand rest there a minute on Eli’s flag, gentle, like he did sometimes on a football player’s shoulder after he’d played a really good game.

  Then we drove to the cemetery in a long train of cars following the hearse, and they folded up the flag on the coffin and gave it to my mom, and that was the last of Eli.

  Afterward, people came back to our house and hung around downstairs eating all the lasagnas and macaroni casseroles and pies that neighbors had brought us, as if dying was something you could fix with carbs. I didn’t want to talk to anybody and I didn’t want any stupid macaroni casserole. So I left and went up to my room, that’s across the hall from the room that used to be Eli’s.

  Eli’s door was closed, so I could almost pretend that he was in there, reading or drawing or playing computer games or listening to music. There was a sign on his door that said KEEP OUT and underneath in red marker a P.S. that said DANNY YOU TWERP THIS MEANS YOU TOO! Though if I knocked, he pretty much always let me come in.

  I stood there holding my breath and wishing that this was all just a lousy dream and that any minute I’d wake up. I thought that maybe if I held my breath and wished hard enough and knocked, Eli would answer. But I didn’t knock, because there wasn’t any light under Eli’s door and I knew it wasn’t a dream.

  That’s when I started my Book of the Dead.

  I still have it, though I don’t write in it anymore. It’s in an old three-ring binder of Eli’s that he had his freshman year in college. There used to be a label on it that said Physics 01 Bates Bldg. Room 22, but I peeled that off.

  The real Book of the Dead is from ancient Egypt. It’s this collection of magic spells that are supposed to help a dead person make it safely from the world of the living to the afterlife, which wasn’t easy in ancient Egypt. You had to protect yourself from hostile entities and placate the gods and fight off supernatural crocodiles. Actually the ancient Egyptian death trip sounded a lot like Dungeons & Dragons.

  There was a final test right at the end. Thoth, the god of wisdom, weighed your heart on a pair of enormous scales, and if it was lighter than a feather, then you were free of sin and you got to go to Egyptian heaven. If it was heavier than the feather, you got eaten by a monster called the Gobbler that was part lion and part hippopotamus.

  I wondered what Eli’s heart would weigh. I thought Eli had a lot to answer for.

  Eli didn’t have to go to war. He volunteered. He did it on purpose. I thought how he probably didn’t even think about what it would do to us, to me and Mom and Dad and Rachel, if he got killed. He went because he wanted to is what I thought. Because it was there.

  So I knew how Clare Mallory felt back in 1924 about her dad, who went up Mount Everest and never came back down. A part of her loved him and missed him and would have done anything to have him back. But a part of her hated him for doing that to her. A part of her was really angry at him too.

  When I was four or five, I poked a fork into an electrical outlet. The next thing I knew there was a flash and a crack like somebody had whapped me over the head with a frying pan, and then I was lying on the floor with Eli bending over me yelling, “Jesus, Danny, wake up!”

  Which is when I knew I’d nearly fried my brains because Eli had taken the Lord’s name in vain, which he never did just then because of dating Bridget Babcock, who was a Baptist.

  After the fork incident, my mom went out and bought all these little plastic covers and plastered them over every electrical outlet in the house, and Eli got me this educational picture book called Safety with Mr. Electricity, which he used to scare the pants off me. Finally Mom made him stop because I was starting to have nightmares.

  In my nightmares Mr. Electricity looked pretty much like the little cartoon guy in the book, with his yellow T-shirt with the lightning bolt on it, except that he had glowy vampire eyes and pointy teeth. At night when the lights were off, he’d crawl out of the electrical outlets and slink around the house, trying to melt the eyeballs of helpless little kids and turn their brains into vegetable soup. Especially helpless little kids who’d poked at his butt with a fork.

  After spending my formative years with Eli and Mr. Electricity, it’s probably a miracle I can bring myself to charge my iPod.

  Anyway, I think it was that fork that gave Eli the idea for his Education Days. I needed them because I was a Darwin Award waiting to happen, is what he said. At first I thought that was a compliment.

  Then I found out that actually the Darwin Award is for people who have killed themselves in incredibly stupid ways, thus eliminating themselves from the gene pool. Such as Charles Stephens, who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel with an anvil tied to his feet for ballast. Afterward nothing was left of him but one arm. They knew it was his arm because of the tattoo.

  “I think Education Days is a crap idea,” I said. “I already go to school. I don’t need any more Education Days.”

  “Admitting you need help is the first step toward solving a problem,” Eli said. “This is your chance to benefit from my superior brains and experience. Don’t be a wuss.”

  This was how Eli always talked me into doing things. So far, so as not to be a wuss, I’d jumped off the high board at Marshall Lake, eaten a whole jalapeño pepper, run around the outside of the house naked, called a girl that Eli liked on the phone and pretended to be a computer dating service, and ridden a skateboard down Turkey Hill and into a ditch.

  “Forget it, Eli,” I said.

  “I’m not doing this for you, you twerp,” Eli said. “I’m doing this for me. When the zombies start crawling down the chimney, I don’t want you squealing around being short and useless. I want you out there competently defending me, with a cleaver.”

  Then he gave me this grin, and Eli always had a really great grin, even though it was sort of crooked. It went up higher on one side than the other. That grin always pretty much talked me into doing things too.

  Here’s some of the stuff Eli taught me on our Education Days:

  How to crack my toes.

  How to whistle.

  Which finger to give when you’re giving somebody the finger.

  All about bras.

  How to smoke a cigarette, even though he told me not to get in the habit because it would rot my lungs.

  How to drive a car, even though I could only go fifteen miles per hour up and down the dirt road in back of the barn.

  How to unlock a car door with a coat hanger after you’ve gotten out of the car and slammed the door and left it running with the keys inside it by mistake.

  How to shoot a BB gun, what not to shoot it at, and why “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was a stupid idea.

  The seven words that nobody is ever supposed to say and when you can say them anyway.

  How to light a barbecue grill in under thirty seconds, using a technique I had to swear never to reveal to Mom or in print.

  How to throw a football.

  What to do in a fight.

  He also told me where babies come from and how to make sure they don’t, which pretty much freaked me out at the time, but Eli said give it a few years and I’d realize that there was a lot of potential there.

  You’d think that some of this would be the sort of stuff a dad would do, but to tell the truth, a lot of the time our dad wasn’t around, and even when he was around, he still wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean. Walter say
s our dad’s absence created a vacuum, which is something that Nature abhors, and that Eli filled it up.

  Here is a typical conversation without my dad:

  Scene: The Anderson family kitchen. In the middle of the room is a large wooden table, on which the OLDER BROTHER once carved his name with a jackknife, which is why the YOUNGER BROTHER was never permitted to have one.

  The MOTHER (Ellen Anderson) is stirring a pot on the stove. The OLDER BROTHER (Eli Anderson, age 17) is sitting on the table with his feet on a chair, eating all the black olives out of the salad bowl. The FATHER (Edward Anderson) is thumping around outside in the garage.

  Enter the YOUNGER BROTHER (Danny Anderson, age 6), holding bizarre ceramic object.

  Me: Hey, look what I made in school.

  Mom (looking over shoulder while stirring): It’s lovely, darling.

  Eli (dropping olive and clapping hand to heart): That — is — so — awesome! Uh . . . what is it? An anteater?

  Me (modestly): It’s a dragon.

  Eli: And it’s pink. Way to go, kid. I detect the influence of Picasso and Henri Rousseau and maybe a touch of Captain Underpants.

  Me: It was going to be yellow, but Jane-Marie took all the yellow. She made a banana.

  Eli: Hey, pink is cool. Lots of good stuff is pink. Like bubble gum and the small intestine and Pamela Anderson’s . . .

  Mom: Eli!

  The FATHER (Edward Anderson) enters.

  Dad: Get off that table, Eli. It’s wobbly enough without you planting your butt on it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do than patch up the furniture all the time? What’s for supper?

  Mom: Spaghetti. Look, honey, Danny made a dragon.