‘Alligator Candy’

The death of his brother prompts a man to go back and investigate his memory of the events.

to process truth from fantasy and lacked the courage or wherewithal to ask more. While biking through the woods, he had been hit in the head with a lead pipe and taken by two men. He suffocated in the trunk of their car. He was missing for a week before he was found dead.

What happened to Jon remained a mystery. Like all mysteries, it was one that I had to answer for myself in order to go on. Along the way, I discovered something I didn’t know I was seeking, the answer to the question that almost everyone had for us when they heard our story. It was one that applies not only to our rare experience, to anyone suffering a loss: How do you go on?

I began seeking the answers at the spot where the future ended: on the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house. It was about 30 years after Jon had died. I was visiting from New York City, where I was working as a writer and living with my wife and 3-yearold daughter. On this sunny warm winter morning, I had taken my daughter outside to ride a new tricycle for the first time. The bike was pink, and had pink and white streamers on the handles. I helped her guide it out the garage, and down the small hill of the cracked concrete driveway. The Spanish tile roof had long since broken away and been replaced by flat shingles. The once barren yard had filled in with thick lush green bushes and pink azaleas.

We set the bike to rest at the first level spot on the sidewalk that ran to the end of the block at the street by the woods. A few homes had been built across the street years before, but many of the cypress trees remained, taller now, and dripping with long gray tangles of Spanish moss, like the beards of thin giants. In the years following Jon’s death, I never ventured into the woods. I didn’t have the courage or desire, and my parents didn’t want me going into there anyway. But the woods remained, looming reminders of a shadowy past, trees that had bore witness as Jon pedaled over the palm fronds beneath them to the 7Eleven on the other side.

Standing there with my daughter, I saw the two moments overlaying, like film strips playing over each other in double-images. There was me as the little kid standing next to my brother on his bike, and me grown up standing next to my daughter on her own. I thought about how much had changed, how the freedom that Jon had in his final moments seemed so endangered, if not extinct, in children now. The last free generation of kids had let their fears take away the freedom from the kids of their own.

As my daughter eagerly climbed onto her seat, I wondered what most parents wonder: How I would find the strength to give her the freedom she needed? How could I let her go into the world knowing that anything could happen? How could I survive if anything did? When I asked my parents how they did it, they said they always wanted me to the get the most out of life. But now, as my daughter wiggled her feet on her pedals I had no idea how they could possibly have endured. I had to venture into the woods of time and memory where the mysteries remained.

COURTESY DAVID KUSHNER Author David Kushner (above) and his brother Jon Kushner (right) with the bike he received for his birthday a month before he died.