Robbie
Lally walked through coach slowly, discreetly collecting trash from those few still awake and empty cans on lowered trays from passengers whose eyes were shut tight.
The flight had been smooth and the passengers remarkably quiet, a dream for her third flight in three days.
So much so that Lally was looking forward to a few minutes to herself in the galley to close her own eyes.
But three rows from the rear of the plane, she spotted a woman on the starboard aisle, head bowed, shoulders shaking. The woman was crying.
Flight attendants see this plenty. It might be something as simple as a book or a movie that sets a passenger off.
She’d delivered many a complimentary drink to someone who’d just finished a book where the dog dies (always when the dog dies), or a movie with a protracted goodbye.
But often it was more immediate, more personal.
People flew for all kinds of reasons. To attend funerals, to spread ashes, to start a new life after a divorce or breakup.
Oftentimes it was best to ignore someone quietly weeping.
It was their own business and not everyone appreciated a stranger who pried.
But something caused Lally to stop, crouch down, and reach for the woman’s hand—we were all going through something, we all had our private struggles; the woman gladly accepted.
They stayed like that for a good minute, just holding hands, only a single gentleman brushing past them on his way to the lavatory, before the woman reached for her napkin with her free hand and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized in little more than a whisper.
They were about the only words she could form.
Lally assured her there was no need. We’ve all been there. We always feel silly, embarrassed even, for being human.
Eventually the woman managed, “My sister.”
Lally judged the woman to be near her age, maybe a few years older, or maybe her eyes were just puffy from crying.
Either way, she saw herself reflected back at her and she, too, began to cry.
“My brother,” she said. But it was more than that.
It was two brothers. Her childhood. Her life turning out not at all how she wanted it to be.
There was just so much to mourn. And then both women started to laugh, laughter just another release.
In that moment she was grateful for a compatriot in grief.
Lally squeezed the woman’s hand twice before letting go.
“I’ll get us some napkins,” she said. She returned with napkins and a little bottle of wine.
And then Lally hid in the galley and thought about her brother.
Her other brother.
Robbie Alfano was a classic middle child, lacking Norman’s golden firstborn sheen, denied the attention Lally courted as the baby.
But Robbie was pure magic, at least to Lally, especially when she was young.
The age difference with Norman was a bridge too far to cross, but Robbie, the span between them, never failed to engage with her in a way that connected them both.
He was a boy’s boy who moved without fear of consequence, jumped in piles of leaves like shoulders could not be dislocated, built a ramp for his BMX bike like bones could not be broken; when anyone in the neighborhood put in a pool, he was the first kid to cannonball from the roof.
How did he get on the roof? No one ever really knew, that was just Robbie.
Turn your back for a second, and he was inside the giant display of rubber balls the grocery store assembled in spring.
He climbed things like Spider-Man; Lally would walk through a doorway, and somehow he was propping himself up at the top, ready to scare her and set her off in fits of delight.
Oh, how he made Lally laugh! No one was sillier, or more committed to a bit, willing to risk punishment from their exasperated parents just to evoke a response.
Norman always seemed mature, more serious, and not just because he was older.
Whatever Norman wasn’t, Robbie was. Whatever Robbie wasn’t, Norman was.
For a time, Lally thought it took both of them to equal a whole brother.
One to take her sledding down the steepest hills, and one to read to her when she needed a quiet moment on the couch.
It took her until she was eighteen to appreciate Norman for who he was, and after Robbie was gone, not blame him for who he wasn’t.
She regretted that, but grief is a strange and malleable thing, especially for children.
Less than a year after Robbie died, Norman left for college.
It wasn’t meant to be an act of abandonment, it was simply what eighteen-year-olds did.
Whatever grief he carried he packed in a footlocker with things he acquired for freshman year and took it with him.
Lally had two brothers, and then in less than a year she had none.
Therapists warned her parents that Lally might regress, slide back into old behaviors or develop new fears or problems at school.
But even at that young age, Lally seemed determined to defy expectations.
She jumped from six to sixteen overnight, becoming irritable and moody, and over the following years she isolated herself save for a close group of friends.
It was why she was somewhat of a loner even now.
Home was whichever city she was in for the night, whatever Courtyard Marriott put her up.
The apartment she kept in Los Angeles was merely a place to store her things; L.A.
was simply a city she moved to as soon as she was able to try to reconnect with Norman.
It was only much later that she understood that Norman had replaced Robbie with Jesse; Norman, of course, would deny this, but once she saw it, she could not unsee how the two were so much alike.
The age difference was the same; like Robbie, Jesse fell halfway in age between Lally and Norman.
He was likewise quick to laugh and would stick with a joke until it had been run into the ground—a trait that eventually won him an award.
In his youth he had been up for almost anything; fear only set in with age.
There were differences, sure. He was an only child and not a middle, but his father had died before he was born and like Robbie he longed for attention.
As a couple they had an undeniable gravitational pull on Lally.
It was her friend Stephanie who first pointed it out—after more than a decade without them, she had regained not one but both of her brothers.
Much later, when they asked her to be their egg donor, there was only one answer to give: She would do anything for them.
“Everything all right back here?”
Lally spun around to see Connie staring at her as she was elbow-deep reorganizing the galley cabinets. Lally had been lost in thought counting coffee filters. She turned away to hide her wet eyes. “Fine, just…fidgety.”
Connie understood. “The quiet flights make me nervous, too.” She rummaged through the beverage cart to take stock of the cans that were left. Then she paused and glanced up. “Say, are you okay?”
Lally laughed and dragged the back of her hand over her eyes. “I’m fine. 34C, that’s all. She lost her sister. It struck a little too close to home.”
Connie found the can of tomato juice she was looking for and stood. “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said.
“Brother,” Lally corrected. “Robbie.”
Connie nodded and patted her coworker on the arm. “Let me bring this to 14D and I’ll come back and help. With this.” She gestured at the mess Lally had made on the counter, having fully emptied two cabinets. Connie didn’t return to help, and for once Lally was grateful.
Lally was five and Norman seventeen when it happened.
The winter had been unseasonably cold with a record amount of snow.
The kind of season that felt personal, a vendetta.
Every time you thought it was over, it came roaring back.
Their Easter portraits that year were taken in front of a snowbank that dwarfed all but their dad.
She and Robbie had lost track of the number of snow days—there was so much school to make up, at this rate summer break would not come until July.
So instead they counted actual feet of precipitation that accumulated on the ground.
Robbie had been the one who taught her to count, starting with her index finger, never her thumb.
Thumbs were for something else, sucking for Lally, a habit her parents were desperately trying to break her of, spraying them with bitter concoctions before bed, while Robbie employed his like a Roman emperor deciding a gladiator’s fate.
So Lally grew up grouping things in fours.
No one, not even Norman himself, remembers his exact whereabouts that day, other than just out for a drive.
By that point he had a license and his own car.
He wasn’t allowed to drive it in winter (his clunker had those headlights that popped up from the hood when you turned them on, and more often than not they were iced over or frozen shut), but technically it was spring.
That left Robbie and Lally stuck at home with nothing to do, as their parents refused to get cable.
“Why don’t you take your sister outside?
” their mother suggested. It was April, after all, and despite the snow the sun was shining, and it was better than staying indoors.
She even helped bundle Lally up; Robbie never stood still and would just remove whatever he didn’t want to wear as soon as they were out of sight.
“It’s your grave,” their mother used to say in defeat, but no one ever heard her use that phrase again after that day.
Lally was instructed to keep every layer on and she did, not yet old enough to rebel.