I.
Will she go too?
I’m waiting here in the room my grandmother decorated, where she saw her sons laid out and, mercifully, still beautiful. I kick my shoes away, dig my toes into the thick carpet, and braid my fingers. The room has the silence of holy places or abandoned buildings. Even the German clock in the corner seems to make no sound, but has slipped its pulse inside of me. It throbs between each thought.
II.
When they moved into the pink house on the quiet street, my grandfather planted a dogwood in the front yard. His wife raised children, and he raised the tree, until the day his sons cut their own umbilical strings. They would sit under the tree and he would let them drink beer as long as they promised not to tell their mother. It made no difference: she could always smell it on their breath. She came to hate the smell of it when they spoke to her, and confused memories of their baby breath, sweet with milk and sleep, with their father’s, and sometimes while they all slept she would go outside and shake the young tree until its blossoms all fell down.
III.
Aaron is the only one I remember, the one I could never forget. He sat down here, on the other end of this sofa, and leaned his lovely head back. I’m tired, he said, and pulled me onto his lap, smiling without opening his eyes. When I looked at him I felt like I was the one watching amber light and leaf-shadows on the inside of my head. He slept for a long time and did not wake up when my mother screamed upstairs. For a long time I didn’t understand the significance of the pill bottle she gave to the men from the ambulance.
IV.
I met Matthew only once, when he bathed my head as an infant. There are photographs of him, tall like all of them but even darker. Only the white at his throat interrupted the sobriety in which he swathed himself. Six months after he touched my face with holy water, he baptized himself into a new life. The furniture in this room is still arranged just as it was during his wake; his body was laid out against the wall with the fireplace, the one you can see from the front door. The tree was flowering, and the window was open, and my mother says they were picking dogwood blossoms out of the upholstery for days.
V.
When Eli died, the sofa upon which I sit was against the far wall. He was laid out here under the window with the traffic scuttling by, unaware of its part in the assembly inside. Maybe, though, a boy walked by and looked in the window; maybe he wondered why such a beautiful young man was sleeping in the front window, and why his mother stood at his head with her eyes so hard and her mouth still. His was an October death. There were no flowers, but there was sunlight. In my family, funerals occur only on sunny days.
VI.
Leonard was even more beautiful than his brothers, and like Matthew, died with a high collar. I contort my spine, consider the tree, and decide that it would not have been tall enough to shade his quiet face. The sun would have shone honestly on that face, and on the stiff collar raised to hide the long red welt. I don’t know how I know his story—they never talk about it—but I do. The house must have soaked up his horror and whispered it to me during the summers and weekends I spent in my mother’s old room, the room in which she must have heard her brother gurgle and drop.
VII.
I look away from the walls, tiled with photographs of people who aren’t my uncles, and with a dip of my spoon break the soggy skin of sugar on top of my coffee. I can feel the summer heat moving on the back of my neck, interrupted occasionally by a branch’s shadow.
My grandmother comes in. “I need to get that damn tree trimmed. It’s ruining the view.”
“Of what?”
She waves a hand at the window to encompass the whole neighborhood, or maybe the whole world.
“Any news about Mom?”
She doesn’t wave a hand this time. She just leaves the room.
